It was at Sulzer Library in Lincoln Square, as a matter of fact, where local hipster guide Gaper's Block was sponsoring a roundtable discussion panel featuring local authors. And man, just look how impressive a line-up they put together: Kevin Smokler, Erin J Shea, Wendy McClure, Kevin Guilfoile and Claire Zulkey, all of whom are popular bloggers who have had books published within the last year. (In fact, that was the theme of the panel discussion - bloggers who get book deals, and what kinds of issues come with it all.)

Now, I guess I should start with the fact that I already knew two of these panelists before last night - Wendy, because of a mutual friend (who now hates my guts - yeah, I know, what a fuckin' surprise), and Guilfoile, again because of a mutual friend (John Warner, who Guilfoile often collaborates with for their McSweeney's pieces). And I also read Claire every day as well, although admittedly I read her business blog "Media Bistro" and not her personal site. (If you're a professional writer, by the way, you really should be reading Media Bistro; it is jam-packed each day with tips for pitching articles, finding literary agents, and all kinds of other business-related lit issues.) Erin and Smokler, on the other hand, were complete unknowns for me going into last night's event...which, of course, always makes for a more exciting event, when you're not sure exactly what the panelists are going to say.

And man, what a great discussion it ended up being! I mean, sure, granted, the panel mostly talked about things that I talk about here on a regular basis as well: the boundary between a public and private life when it comes to a blog; horror stories concerning clueless literary agents contacting them because of their blog; the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining a blog while trying to write a book at the same time. My point, though, is that these are issues you rarely hear discussed in the actual public arena, much less by five authors whose collective online audience has to be a million people or more, much less with the whole thing being sponsored by a quasi-mainstream publication.

Can I just say this? The more I hang out with Andrew Huff, the editor-in-chief of Gaper's Block, the more incredibly impressed I am by him. He's smart, he's dedicated, he's eternally enthusiastic, he gets along with people much better than I'll ever be able to, and he's truly dedicated to promoting the underground arts in Chicago. This city needs more people like him, I think, and with each event they sponsor my admiration for Gaper's Block just grows a little bit more. Which I guess is neither here nor there, really, but is something I've simply been meaning to say here for awhile. (Sorry - my brain's feeling a little scattered this morning.)

Anyway, like I said, the panel discussion was incredibly smart and interesting last night, despite it not holding too terribly many revelations for me in particular. Oh, but man, why have I not been an obsessive fan of Kevin Smokler before last night? He just had the most incredibly astute things to say about the clash of books and blogs, stuff that a lot more people need to hear in my opinion. And here's yet something else about Smokler I didn't know - that he's widely acknowledged as the inventor of the "virtual book tour" (where authors make guest visits to a different blog each day, instead of a different bookstore), which as regular readers will know is what I consider one of the smartest new online lit developments of the last two or three years. Man! So needless to say, starting today I am the newest obsessive fan of Kevin Smokler...and you should be too.

Anyway, after the show a bunch of us all ended up heading to the Daily Bar and Grill (near Lincoln and Lawrence) for beers and to shoot the shit, where I found out the following interesting bits of news:

1) That Wendy is not one of the people who hate me because of the fallling-out I had with our mutual friend a couple of years ago - which is nice to know, because I had been assuming this whole time that she was;

and 2) that Claire Zulkey knows who I am! Jesus, how did that happen? Oh, that's right - it turns out that she was in the audience during that "Uncle Fun" event I performed at a year or two ago (yet another Gaper's Block event). You remember that, right? Where all these famous bloggers were invited to perform from their blogs in front of a live audience? And I decided that I wanted to see if it's possible for a liberal urban artist to offend a roomful of fellow liberal urban artists, so pulled out pretty much the most offensive journal entry I've written in the seven years of maintaining this website? (Specifically, an entry of mine from 2000, about this friend of mine who got really trashed at a party one night and wanted to watch me pee, just to see if the rumors she had heard about my dick were true or not. So I let her, but first made her pee in front of me, just to even the score.) Yeah, that Uncle Fun show! And I guess I made quite the impression on Ms. Zulkey, because she actually recognized me from the audience last night, and remembered exactly who I was just by seeing my face. So that's...um, well, I hope it's nice, although admittedly it could also be a case of "Oh Lord, there's that freak who read that entry about girls watching him pee."

I also met a woman last night named Brandy Agerbeck, who has one of the more fascinating jobs I've ever heard of - she draws and illustrates real-time mind-maps for corporate clients, right during their conferences and meetings themselves, as an alternative to the company taking traditional notes. For those who don't know, "mind-mapping" is this intriguing concept that's actually been around since the early 1970s, but is just now starting to gain a lot of popularity - it's a little complicated, but it's basically a way to organize your thoughts in a non-linear format, which (the theory goes) helps us as humans to understand a plethora of information in a more intuitive way than traditional linear outlines can. (Mind-mapping is also one of the basic premises behind the "Getting Things Done" time-management system, which is another reason the term might sound so familiar to you.)

Anyway, what Brandy does then is gets hired to attend seminars and conferences, and she actually creates a full-color, professionally-illustrated mind-map as the event is taking place, right up on the stage on a giant 4 by 8 foot sheet of paper, which her client will then take digital photos of afterwards and send to everyone who attended the event. And so she and I got into this huge conversation last night about it all - how she came up with the idea in the first place (an old mentor in college); how much competition she has (almost none here in Chicago, although believe it or not there are over 200 people who do such professional mind-mapping in the San Francisco area); all the other things she does for a living (including making rubber stamps, which is going to send my mom into a tizzy when I tell her); the trials and tribulations of having a website called "Loosetooth.com" (including the semi-regular emails she now gets from dental sexual fetishists); and of course just a million other little questions I threw at her over the course of an hour, which I am wont to do when meeting someone I find really fascinating.

And that's it! Thanks again, Andrew, for putting on such an incredible event; here's hoping that Gaper's Block will sponsor a lot more of them in the future.