Last night, The Rumpus’s “Summer Shakedown” event at Brooklyn’s Death by Audio space (which comedian Michael Showalter described as, if we remember correctly, a “blown-out former dentist’s office,”) was everything we told you it would be and more—but also a little bit less. We saw Neal Pollack read about his adventures in yoga and then do the “alligator” pose onstage. We saw Sara Marcus read from her new history of Riot Grrrl, Girls to the Front, and actually sing some of the passages. We saw Nick Flynn read a chapter from his memoir The Ticking is the Bomb about Rumpus honcho and emcee Stephen Elliott (which involved a dominatrix), and joke about the venue’s very dusty fan that was precariously attached to the ceiling by very dusty bungee cords. And we witnessed an intense spoken-word performance by Corrina Bain. But we did not see Hilton Als, at least not before we left. It appeared, as far as we could tell, that he did not show up.