30th Birthday Bash
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

This is so how the party ended up. So funny. So raunchy.

I’ve got a reading coming up with some brilliant writers I’ve known for years. If you can make it, it’ll definitely be worth your while. Hi-larity shall ensue.
—

Flashers: Sudden Fiction Exposed. A Reading by New York Writers

*YUM – A THREE COURSE MEAL!
The order of the night’s readers:
-DELICIOUS APPETIZERS-
Tom Hopkins
Olivia Birdsall
Cleyvis Natera
*break*
-HEARTY DISHES-
Maaza Mengiste
Ryan Sloan
Buzz Poole
*break*
-SWEET DESSERTS-
Rebekah Anderson
Garth Hallberg
Joel Elmore
Ethan Bernard

Saturday, May 6th, 2006, 7:00pm
FREE

KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Ave
Subway: F at Second Ave.; 6 at Astor Pl.
www.kgbbar.com
www.ecstaticmonkey.com/quickies.html

Stormking Detail
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

Massive art for one’s birthday… Stormking thrills.

So it’s the day before my 30th birthday and the unflappable Todd Zuniga of Opium Magazine informs me I’ve got another story up. It’s the one I read/performed at the Opium reading a month ago… and it is also a hyperbolic seed of the screenplay I’m halfway through writing.

You can read it here — http://www.opiummagazine.com/storysloanspy041906.html — also, I think a podcast version is in the offing soon as well.

Brothers on the Brooklyn Bridge, Mar 06
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

Back in New York a day and a half later, with my visiting brother, wondering where the warm weather went.

Wreck of the Antilla
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

This is what it looks like below the surface.

Aruban Red Sail
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

The sail of the boat that took me to the Antilla, the second-largest shipwreck in the Caribbean – a WWII German freighter scuttled in shallow waters, now a vast and impossibly eerie reef.

Aruba
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

This is what it looked like a week ago from my window.

So every year I assign this extra Aciman piece to my writing class, after they’ve read his essay “Arbitrage” from Out of Egypt. In light of my students’ fascination with OprahFrey (because of my own, just maybe) it’s interesting that this ending has always been there:
—

“Perhaps this is why all memoirists lie. We alter the truth on paper so as to alter it in fact; we lie about our past and invent surrogate memories the better to make sense of our lives and live the life we know was truly ours. We write about our life, not to see it as it was, but to see it as we wish others might see it, so we may borrow their gaze and begin to see our life through their eyes, not ours.

“Only then, perhaps, would we begin to understand our life story, or to tolerate it and ultimately, perhaps, to find it beautiful; not that any life is ever beautiful, but the measure of a beautiful life is perhaps one that sees its blemishes, knows they can’t be forgiven and, for all that, learns each day to look the other way.”

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/082800aciman-writing.html

Downtown Traffic
Originally uploaded by Paulo C.

Brooklyn buzzing with late night light.