At the last Shadow Art Fair fellow zinester and all-around good person Linette Lao mentioned that she is teaching a class a EMU this semester, and that she wanted to use a couple issues of Late Night Thinking in the class. She contacted me a while ago to get the zines and also to suggest that I stop by and meet with the class.
The class session was today, and it was a good experience. I always worry when I do things like this that I'm going to go too far off into old guy telling rambling stories mode, but I think I managed to hold that in check well enough. I also think I have a tendancy when talking, especially when talking about myself or things I'm doing to start to break eye contact and start speaking quietly or weirdly, and I think I managed to hold that back as well. The class seemed on par with what I would expect, a couple people fairly interested, a handful of people mildly interested, and a few that seemed to fade into the background, but on the whole there seemed to be a decent number of good questions, although there were some times when Linette had to ask me some questions to get the conversation started again.
It was incredibly weird, though, to see a room full of people pull out copies of stuff I've written, like it was a textbook or something. I quipped in the class that they probably represented about thirty to forty percent of my purchasers. And the amusement the students registered when I mentioned that I did the zine layout in LaTeX, a mathematical typsetting language, brought a smile to my face.
It was, on the whole, a fun experience, sweetened by Linette, her husband Mark and their daughter taking me out to dinner at the Sidetrack, where I continued by longstanding tradition of always ordering the Tempeh Philly. There were fried pickles, as well, which combined with the random craving (and the making of one lone fried pickle Monday night) I fear may re-launch my desire for fried pickles.