I’m back in KC for the week, getting in touch with my past and a few interesting new bits of my present. (The ConductMom has a new feller, and I got to meet him!) Anyway, I got to be on KCUR’s legendary Walt Bodine show yesterday. Here’s the podcast.

I’m going to be participating in the opening of Petco’s new boutique store, “Unleashed,” next Thursday (June 17) from 6-8 pm at the new Wellesley store at 165 Linden Street. Here’s what the press release has to say:

Unleashed by PETCO, a community pet store iintroduced by leading pet specialty retailer PETCO, invites Boston dogs and their owners to join the Animal Rescue League of Boston for a special benefit and celebration of the human animal bond kicking off June 17, 6 – 8 pm at the Wellesley, MA store. Complete with a green carpet and “pawparrazi”, the VIP event for pets will launch a four-day fundraiser and adoption event …

Open to all Boston-area pet owners, pets will receive star treatment during the June 17 fundraiser launch event with “pawparazzi” photos of dogs strutting the green carpet, pet swag bags, bartenders serving treat bar snacks, a pet-friendly ice cream social, and giveaways. Pet owners will also be treated to hors d’oeuvres and refreshments, such as the “Cat’s Meow” and “Hair of the Dog” fizzes. In addition, the Animal Rescue League of Boston will bring over 30 adoptable pets via the Mobile Animal Transport (MAT) to meet with potential new parents and will host adoption and education events at select Boston-area locations throughout the weekend.

I’ll be doing a brief reading from the pets chapter of Mind over Manners, answering your questions on “petiquette,” and introducing some of those adorable dogs up for adoption. And yes, Mr. Improbable is really, really hoping I don’t come home with one.

I hope to see some of my fellow dog-loving readers there! (You won’t get to meet Milo, alas. He is not quite ready for prime time.)

Some exciting news for booksy folk, local and elsewhere:

I will be doing a reading and signing for Mind over Manners this Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Watertown Public Library, 123 Main Street in Watertown (directions here). I hope to meet some of you there!

The Rock Bottom Remainders are doing a four-city tour this week, finishing at Boston’s Club Royale (formerly the Roxy) on April 24! As all good book nerds know, the RBRs is comprised of famous writers who nonetheless harbor dreams of rock stardom. All proceeds from the concert (priced at a reasonable $30) go to relief efforts in Haiti.

Louisiana State University Press is having a great big sale, illustrated by an awesome online flier. (C’mon, you’re cool, you know who that drawing is of.) Enter the code 04ANNIVER when you check out to get the 35% discount. My friend Alisa Plant is an editor there, and you can e-mail her at aplant@lsu.edu to ask about particular areas of interest. They’ve got lots of stuff, and are particularly excellent in Southern culture and history.

This just came in, from a rabbi at a greater Boston area synagogue:

Don’t know if you recall, but in one of our previous email conversations you mentioned that you do (like to do?) speaking engagements – and even more, that you are “reasonable”. Since I already know you are reasonable from your column, I take it that you mean reasonable in fee.

The rabbinic mind in action! Love it.

I’ll be doing a reading from Mind over Manners next Wednesday, April 21, at 7 p.m. at the Watertown Public Library. I hope to see some of you there and put some faces to handles. Please introduce yourself, if you come!

Here’s a nice article about moi in a Boston University alumni magazine. Lots of good pictures, especially of Milo! (It’s relevant: he’s a terrier. I thought it was so funny when I was accepted to BU that I would be going to a school with a terrier mascot. All my life, I’ve loved dogs — except for terriers. The one type I couldn’t tolerate, the one sort of dog I’d never own, never … never say never, eh?) And, featuring an appearance by the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan!

Notice, too, the clever bit of design where it looks like I’m holding the headline with my chopsticks.

Next Thursday, October 15, I’ll be doing a special reading and signing for “Community Night” for Actors’ Shakespeare Project in conjunction with their production of “The Taming of the Shrew.”

From 5:45 until 7:15, I’ll be doing a reception, reading (from the relationships chapter, I think!), discussion of the play, and book-selling and signing at Upstairs on the Square. (In the Zebra Room, and do I have a fabulous zebra dress to go with it!) The play begins at 7:30 in The Garage, which is about a block away.

Tickets are a special price of $25, and can be gotten by calling Joanna at 617-776-2200 x 225. If you can only come to my (free!) segment, but not to the play, please call anyway so they can get a good head count. You will still be able to get the special Community Night price for any of the 3:00 pm matinees 10/24, 10/31, or 11/7. (Regular tickets are $47 and $38, so this is a good deal!)

I hope to see you there!

(This post will run at the top for the rest of the week. New content below.)

A couple of fun interviews I did last month have now surfaced online. KRUU-FM is a non-profit radio station in Fairfield, Iowa, that runs a food show called “Great Taste.” Here‘s my guest appearance. Usually I don’t mind doing radio interviews from home, but I would really have liked to be in the studio where that fried cheese was being prepared.

And here is an interview I did for a woman who writes for military newspapers and publications, on the topic of “bad compliments.” What a great idea for an article, eh? It’s a good one, too.

What’s the most awkward/backhanded compliment you’ve ever received?

In advance of my Kansas City reading tonight, I got some good publicity–a bit on the Fox WDAF morning show here, and a radio interview on the legendary Walt Bodine Show on KCUR, the local NPR affiliate. I used to be a theater publicist in KC, so it was great fun to go on the shows that I used to book people on myself!

Guess where I’ll be this weekend? Readercon!

You either know what that is and are thinking that I am even cooler than you had suspected, or you don’t know what it is and that vague feeling of pity you’ve been having for me lately is growing.

No worries. Readercon is a science fiction convention here in the greater Boston area–Burlington, to be exact. From the website:

Readercon is, depending on your point of view, either an annual literary conference (except it’s infinitely more fun than that) or an annual science fiction convention (except we’ve stripped away virtually everything except talking about and buying books).

I think this sounds absolutely terrific, and not just because 1) I look like Spock and 2) SF fans are unlikely to judge the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan. (Of course I’ll need it. The convention’s at the Burlington Marriott. Have you ever been to a summertime convention at a Marriott that wasn’t freezing?) But also because the program sounds fascinating. Check out this talk, for example:

Minds differ, and nothing reflects those differences more directly than the use of language. When a story’s first-person narrator has a mind significantly outside the norm, their altered diction provides a (sometimes purposefully cloudy) window into their altered thought processes. What are the protocols and challenges of reading a text where the narrator is autistic (Peter Watts’s Blindsight or Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark), insane (Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit”), mentally slow (Flowers for Algernon), impossibly brilliant (Camp Concentration), or unclassifiably damaged (Liz Hand’s Winterlong)? How do we infer the mental states from the altered and often unfamiliar diction? And what does that tell us about the relationship of mind to language?

Or this one:

Is Darwinism Too Good For SF? This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

This is exactly the kind of thing my friends and I like to talk about!

And, well (blush), I’m doing panels too! One on my PhD research, which was on the psychology of storytelling:

Narrative Psychology and Science Fiction If a character gets shot, it’s a mystery story. If a character gets shot with a phaser, it’s science fiction. But are there elements to science fiction that go deeper than the surface tropes? Psychologist and writer Robin Abrahams discusses what cognitive psychology and her own research say about mental models of literary genres — including science fiction, fantasy, and horror — and what personality factors correlate with a liking of different kinds of stories.

… and one based on Mind Over Manners:

IDIC for the Pre-Federation World: Coping with Diversity (Robin Abrahams). The Vulcans allegedly had a slogan “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,” which is pretty big talk for an entire race of people who all have the same haircut. In the 21st century, however, diversity is increasing — and increasingly hard to deal with. Robin Abrahams, writer of the Globe’s “Miss Conduct” social advice column and the new book Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners, discusses diversity of values, priorities, and experiences. Can we really say that nothing human is alien to us? How do we cope with the “other”? And how can we use science fiction to help us address contemporary social dilemmas?

If you like to read science fiction too, I hope to see you there!