NEW CRAZE ERUPTS FOR LISTENING TO WRITERS READ THEIR WRITINGS
Legitimacy of recently dissolved 'scene' contested
NEW YORK CITY—Recently Manhattan’s literati as well as other people here who happen to enjoy reading—or at least the idea of it—have been flocking to a new hot spot for culture: Noble & Barnes. “This place is great,” said Jane Crabtree, a marketing director and recent denizen of the venerable corporate bookseller. “I can get a coffee with whipped cream on top and it only costs seven dollars and fifty cents! Plus the caffeine helps me stay awake during the reading, which can be hard for me, like school.”
“I like these readings because everybody leaves immediately afterward,” said Duane Hansen, another regular and a dealer in second-hand merchandise, “and you don’t feel under pressure to talk to the other people. I mostly come to purchase signed books I would never read myself in order to resell them on the internet, and since they have the authors sign the books in advance, you don’t even have to stand in line and risk having an awkward interaction with the writers, who are really not the type of people I want to be in close proximity to.”
“When I first arrived in New York,” said Pat Remsen, a property manager, “every place I was taken to was so dirty and smelly. I like places that are clean and fresh and have a mild pastel color scheme. One thing they could do here is tone down the green a little bit. It’s too forest-y. It should look more like a muted algae color.”
Some attendees, who were often staring into their phones, stressed the appeal of the impersonal nature of the readings and expressed hope that a higher degree of impersonality might be reached in the future. “I only started coming here when the zoom events I had become accustomed to for years became less common,” said John Pettus, an insurance copywriter. “It would be really cool if they had readings done by robots of texts written by artificial intelligence. Anything that decreases the human factor I’m in favor of. People are too messy.”
“I like the feeling that something is official,” Remsen added. “Like if it’s been purchased by an international conglomerate and has a big marketing campaign behind it—that makes me feel warm inside. I don’t wanna waste my time on nobodies. I’d rather be watching television. To be honest, I’d always rather be watching television. I’m gonna go home right now and watch television.”
***
Ha, ha, ha, I’m kidding. I had the pleasure of reading four times at Beckett’s over the past year, as well as performing in three plays at the space. I read an old Short Cuts column from the LRB; I read a few Internal Memo columns from my Observer days; Bob Laine and I did a semi-dramatic staging of my Harper’s report on the publishing antitrust trial; and a couple weeks ago I read my polemic against adverbs. Beckett and I are buddies. It’s been fun hanging out with him the past year. He’s become one of my best friends.
The simple explanation for the scene at Beckett’s is that there was some energy around, and he let it flow into a room that he didn’t own but he has the keys to until the bank or whatever takes them away. If there were more places like this that were unregulated and unlicensed and the overhead was minimal, there would be more culture like this, culture that’s not professionalized, that’s undertaken without the prospect of remuneration, that’s ready to fall on its face and fail if that’s the way it goes. There are lots of indie readings series in New York City. I love KGB and have read there, and I’ve always had a good time at the Franklin Park reading series. My friend Jonah Howell was joking when he said you had to have a National Book Award to read there. He told me this this afternoon when he came by the loft where I’m currently crashing, before moving for the summer to Albania, for rehearsal of a new play he’s acting in. On behalf of Beckett’s crowd, we apologize that those remarks were taken without the intended levity. They let me onstage at KGB without so much as a Pushcart nomination.
