If I had any reason to be celebrating Valentine's Day in New York, and I don't that I know of, I'd be going to the New Yorker Speakeasy to be held in Brooklyn. "Love is strange" is the theme, and tickets are likely long gone. Not only is the magazine's fiction editor hosting the night, but among those speaking are Jeffrey Eugenides and Karen Russell.

More on Russell, whom you may remember, in a future post.

Eugenides is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex (both of which I should probably read) as well as one of my favorite NYer fiction pieces of '08, "Great Experiment," and a friend of Eggers' 826 Chicago kids writing non-profit. He's speaking in his role as editor of My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro and new to my bookshelf. As the reviews can tell you, most of the stories define love by its opposites. From the intro:

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name . . . .

It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.

With a Catullus line for a title, how can I go wrong? And not just any line. We get the line that defines him, spilling over with passion, where the cultural and the political can't even be considered without relation and blood-pumping establishment of the personal. Rock and roll, to the 20-something Catullus, is never just a song on the radio.

In his main work, the first poem is a dedication and the second poem is about this girl. Catullus is crazy about her, but she's crazy about her pet sparrow. The sparrow nips at her finger, and he's jealous. He's got this "bright-eyed desire" for a girl who loves a bird. In the next poem, the sparrow's dead. Now the girl's a mess and looks it. That's the last we really hear of the sparrow, but that's enough. All he wants to do is be crazy for her, and all he gets is a broken, never-sprung heart.

But everyone's got a story. You have to figure whatever poem she'd write about him — or not about him — would be pretty good too.

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