Sometimes Dennis Loy Johnson and I are thinking much the same thing. So close, in fact, it’s spooky.

But never fear, we are still easy to distinguish. He remains far taller than me.

Driving into Tucson I used the roadtrip-enabling device (iPhone) to find a place to stay. The Hotel Congress was built in 1919 across from the train depot. It doesn’t have TVs in the rooms; instead it has crackly vintage radios which match the vintage furniture well. The entertainment (if you’re not reading) comes in the form of two bars downstairs: the bar-bar, pictured from its patio, and the rock-club-bar, which had 80s night dancing that night (I passed on that — I was reading).

Not long after I got back to LA I was talking to a total stranger about Tucson and told him I stayed in the Hotel Congress. He was thrilled — did I go to the cafe? And yes, I had. The hotel also has a cafe, and it has a big wide lobby with chairs and another bar and wifi, all of which I guess count as more entertainment. Anyway, the Cup Cafe’s breakfast was delicious. Did I notice the floor? Why yes I had: layers of pennies below a hard clear surface. Did I know how many pennies were there, he asked?

Um, no.

Something like 180,000.

Apparently they were counted before being embedded in the floor.

Tonight Howe Gelb is performing in the cafe with Wolvenhand. Howe Gelb was (is?) the main guy behind Giant Sand. Wolvenhand is David Eugene Edwards, who was the lead singer of 16 Horsepower.

Really wish they’d been on the bill when I was crashing upstairs.

But I guess I’ll just have to go back to Arizona (especially now that they have Martin Luther King Day, I can do so without guilt).

The only bad thing about putting together a weekly list of book events for Jacket Copy is that I know what it is I’m missing. Like Jim Shepard was at the Hammer tonight. Sure, I’ve got deadlines, responsibilites, ongoing sleep deficit. All good reasons for staying home and working.

But I missed Jim Shepard.

Darn.

If you pick up the February issue of Marie Claire, the one with Renee Zellweger on the cover in pink, and you flip to page 77, you’ll be in the middle of a story about women who made big career changes. One woman had a baby. Another got sent to Russia. Me, I’m the MFA in creative writing chick.

There is a teeny thumbnail of a beautiful photo taken by Andrew Takeuchi and a tale of my old foundation job and the new world of being a writing student. I guess the post-student stories (read: loans! yikes!) weren’t quite as interesting. But I have, in fact, graduated.

Yes, it says I’m finishing my novel. Therefore, I am finishing my novel.

And scoring an invite is very, very difficult.

You are, however, encouraged to host one of your own.

When I showed up, there were bookstacks on one table and snacks on another. I divested myself of two enormous bags of books, found a beer and hid by the food. I didn’t want to be in book-acquiring range.

I spent an hour going through my stacks of in-progress books to cull those that I’d brought. It’s the privilege of writing about books that I often have a bounty, a genuine surplus. Of those that I decided I could let go, I’d read a bunch; some were duplicates; a few were old books that I’ve had for so long without reading that I decided I had to let them go, like a long-unworn dress. I was clearing space for more new good books.

Soon, of course, the baby carrots lost their allure as the far table filled with more and more books. I had to look at what everyone else had brought. At first, when I hit a thick vein of theater books and plays, I thought I’d be safe. Because I have enough books, don’t I? These are just the books that I decided I had to keep close at hand:

These are just my books-to-be-read. And it’s not even all of them. I SO DON’T NEED ANY MORE BOOKS.

That’s what I tried to tell myself.

But I caved. I have poor impulse control. I’m a collector, a victim of my own desires. Call it what you will, I could not leave the book swap without bringing books home with me.  And these are what put me over the edge:

Drowned Hopes by Donald Westlake. He just died, I haven’t read him, and here was a lovely hardcover looking for a home. It was the book that broke my resolve.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth. Isn’t it time I read Roth again?

Generation X by Douglas Coupland. I read this way back when, but didn’t deign to own it. It was the book that spawned the label for my generation. Now I’m curious: will I find slightly off the mark as I did in 1991?

DeMille: A Man and His Pictures by Gabe Essoe and Raymond Lee. God, I’m a sucker for silent film histories.

Why am I typing? I should be reading.

Cool Hand Luke it is.

After being misguided by googlemaps past the gigantic, shift-getting-out Halliburton complex on the outskirts of Lafayette, Louisiana, after circling and circling a dark and lonesome area that lacked the connecting streets the map showed it to have, after steering past a set of signs meant to block traffic and then, finally, reaching my destination only to find it was not a restaurant hiding in a trailer park but really just a trailer park — after that and then, eventually making my way to the elusive proper rendevous, being cheerful and having a cvilized dinner and then crashing in a vastly overpriced hotel room featuring, unfathomably, a really big fat pillar in its center — what I wanted the next morning, what I really really wanted, was a large plate of flabby, room-temperature boiled eggs.

Oh, no wait, it wasn’t.

With vision of Hud dancing in my head, I did my best to beat it out of Lafayette, Louisiana.

It took almost an hour.

Picked up a car in Florida and am bringing it back to LA. Will post more soon, but for now, I’ve uploaded a few pictures to Flickr.

Currently in New Orleans, which, as usual, is all kinds of wonderful. Currently sitting on the porch of an affordable B&B in Faubourg Marigny, where I can’t get out of the front gate until someone with a key comes by. The jasmine is scenting, the laptop is charging, the guys across the way are re-roofing. Not bad at all.

Now, if I could just get some espresso before this deadline….

That would be Salvatore Scibona’s “The End,” which reviewed last week for the LA Times. It was hard, in a relatively brief review, to describe the book’s complex strucure without getting overly bogged down by it.