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If you're anything like us, you avoided taking advantage of any "New York City Cultural Events" this bright and sunny weekend. (Unless wandering around Economy Candy for munchies counts as a cultural event.) Specifically, we dodged the first two days of a certain week-long literary extravaganza, informally referred to as The PEN Festival of International Literature You Only Pretend to Have Read.

Feel guilty no longer. Hell, start pretending that you went to the festival, too. (You'll thank us later.) Gawker Special Correspondent K. Eric Walters reports his mind-numbing experience from the KGB Bar, where Rick Moody arrived late, Margaret Atwood (pictured) passed out, and a crazy award-winning Chinese poet went all Kung-Fu while screaming about giant sea turtles.

Still with us? The poetic, oppressive, rundown after the jump.

Before last night, it was hard to imagine anything more painful than sitting through a two-hour literary reading sober. But at KBG, I uncovered the unimaginable: standing sober through a two-hour reading of authors reading the works of other authors. Advertised as "Banned Voices," I was praying that perhaps the works I'd be hearing had been banned for their explicit sexual content. I was mistaken.

Fuck me.

Apparently arriving on time wasn't good enough for this event. KGB was packed, with people flowing out the door. The average age was a crotchety 47.3 years. A helpful staff member told us we would have to listen from the stairwell, pressed up against each other like wetbacks in an eighteen wheeler. Only the tall among us had a view of the mostly unpronounceable panel - Margaret Atwood, Antoine Audouard, Wole Soyinka, Anouar Benmalek, Shahrnush Parsipur, etc. The bar seemed very far away.

Shoving started from behind.

"Excuse me, excuse me, I'm one of the readers," a man whispered. "Excuse me, excuse me! I'm one the readers!" I didn't believe him, assuming he was just trying to sneak in and wishing I had thought of that lie. Only later did I realize it had been Rick Moody, the writer responsible for electrocuting Elijah Wood in The Ice Storm.

Atwood, author of The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale, read first. She said something about Geoffrey Chaucer being murdered and "a long tradition of murdering writers." (Most in the room seemed hip to the fact that they'd never write anything good enough to be killed over.) She then launched into a snooze-worthy essay by Nawal el Sadaawi, a woman apparently in jail in Egypt. Egypt, btw, is near Iraq.

The next few readers went by in a blur: the general idea was that writers were imprisoned all around the world and it's really too bad they can't be here hanging out with us in the East Village. The crowd started to clear out. The heat was too much for some, and the droning prose was as oppressive as the police states it described. I inched closer to the bar.

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All Canadian writers are angels, especially when they're sleeping. Click to enlarge.

Not even Atwood could take it. She started to doze off around the 45 minute mark. She had my sympathy. Only when Huang Xiang, a poet banned from his native China, got on the microphone did Atwood perk up. He read four poems in Chinese, screaming wildly and making hostile Tai-Chi and Kung-Fu like gestures. After he finished, another guy translated what he said: "I AM A WILD BEAST HUNTED DOWN I AM WILD BEAST CHINA IS A GIANT DOCILE SEA TURTLE." Crazy shit.

I made it to the bar in time to hear Rick Moody read a letter from exiled Cuban writer Raul Rivero who, said Moody, wanted to "express his thanks to Rick Moody." I noticed I only had three dollars, and I couldn't convince the Barnard girl next to me to buy me a drink. Moody finished the evening by reading a Rivero story about a man trying get asylum at Guantanamo Bay. (Gitmo is nice this time of year, I'm told.) The reading was over.

Or so I thought. As I stumbled numbly towards the exit, a wild-eyed Polish man grabbed the microphone. He claimed to be running an international literary circus in Berlin and told the crowd to watch out for some conspiracy involving Castro, the European Union and Stalin. There are four days of the festival left. A word of advice: arrive early and drunk.