I just read this article in the Times about “literary deal-breakers.” At least one of the interviewees made me sick in my mouth:

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

I will say this on public record: James Collins, you are a dickweed, and anyone who likes you deserves you. If we were seven and we were on the playground together, I would throw sand in your face and give you a wedgie. You and your ilk are the reason nobody cares about literary fiction. That’s right, it’s all your fault.

Anyone this judgmental about literature is intellectually incurious, by far too preoccupied with the way others see their class standing to genuinely care about something as banal as literature itself. Guess what? The more you use taste as a wedge to position yourself above others, the more people will hate you. Well, people meaning me, because you couldn’t be more obvious. That’s right, I said dickweed.

Oh, and I’m so sure you totally didn’t sleep with that girl in college because she liked Kundera! Yeah! You’re that discerning! I believe you!

Date: Sunday, March 30, 2008
Time: 7:00 p.m., $5
Location: Hideout (1354 W. Wabansia)
Participants: Susannah Felts, author of This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record; Eileen Favorite, author of The Heroines; Patrick Somerville, author of Trouble: Stories and the forthcoming novel The Cradle; J Adams Oaks, author of the forthcoming novel Why I Fight

Full disclosure: This event is a book release for Susannah Felts, teacher, writer, and editor extraordinaire, (and contributor to this site). (More disclosure: I am finishing the book this eve and am happy to report it’s even better than I thought it’d be.) Her new novel This Will Go Down in Your Permanent Record (Featherproof Books), is the coming of age-ish story of two teenage girls in Nashville in the late 80s. Here, Felts, (also a Nashville native) responds eloquently to those inevitable “is it you?” questions in this interview, and the book–which nicely straddles the line between YA and adult fiction–is reviewed on a teen book review site, here. Issues of jealousy, competition, boys, sexuality, drugs, and y’know, the whole “figuring out one’s identity” are explored. Dying for more info before you head to this sure-to-be-killer-party at the Hideout with local faves Pat Somerville, Eileen Favorite, and J. Adams Oaks? Check her blog for exposition about the book and more.

Date: Friday, March 28, 2008
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: SAIC Ballroom (112 S. Michigan Avenue)
Participants: Answer Tag Home Press, Cracked Slab Books, Dancing Girl Press, Featherproof, Books, Fractal Edge Press, March Abrazo Press, Puddin’ Head Press, Switchback Books

“Pyromaniac” by Yoshitomo Nara

Unfortunately for the as-yet-unannounced readers, this event simply cannot be as lively as the discussion about National Small Press Month on the Time Out Chicago blog. What did we learn from the comments on this post? We learned that there is a Chicago literary scene, but it only consists of writers feeding each others’ cats. We learned that some people hate corporations, but others do not. We learned that people seem to enjoy introducing themselves by title as much as they enjoy addressing others formally. We also learned that we are the snobbiest newcomers ever to attempt to capitalize on the sweat of legitimate writers. I can’t wait to see what I learn on Friday — I’ll be the one wearing a construction helmet.

We’re really not paid to link back to the Time Out blog, we swear, but this post is really hilarious. So hilarious, in fact, that Crain’s took this article (from the April Fool’s issue) at face value and reported that Donald Trump had bought TOC and was using it as a mouthpiece for his toupeeims (get it? toupee + aims = “toupeeims”). Via the Phil Rosenthal.

Date: Thursday, March 20, 2008
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Metro (3830 N. Clark)
Participants: Junot Diaz, ZZ Packer, Colin Channer, Hillary Carlip, Mucca Pazza

The awesome Z.Z. Packer

Poochie

This year’s Columbia College event at Metro gives Sun-Times writer Kevin Nance the opportunity to write a fluff piece that offended the heck out of my sensibilites and made me shed my second tear this week for Chicago cultural journalism. The angle of his article in Friday’s paper seems to be that Columbia’s decision to host a reading at Metro is bold and anti-establishment. Behold:

So you know all about literary readings, do you? Writers droning on from a podium in some stuffy auditorium, everybody in the room upright, uptight and dying for something wet to wash down all those words?

Is Nance unaware that Columbia has done this for a number of years? Does he know that zillions of other readings take place in bars? Why was he paid to write the above sentence? Is his editor Poochie? Where’s Martha Bayne when you need her? I’m not buying that the general audience at whom Nance directs the article would be alienated by a piece that acknowledges non-stuffy readings happen all the time to great fanfare (or doesn’t characterize the people who attend regular literary readings as passive victims of boring writers). Is Nance’s article isolated dumbassery of the lazy variety, or is it representative dumbassery? I really can’t decide.

I would be remiss not to mention the fact that I am counting the days until The Thousands, Z.Z. Packer’s debut novel, is finally published, and that the best time I ever had at one of these Columbia events was dancing with Nigel Gillet as Irvine Welsh DJ’d “This Charming Man,” or that you can read a great discussion about literary allusions in rock songs here.

Date: Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Harold Washington Library

Don’t let the press Literary Rock ‘n’ Roll is getting overshadow Aimee Bender. I have a couple fun facts about Aimee Bender that I will share upon the occasion of her visit. FUN FACT #1: She’s the favorite author of the woman who does The Black Apple. FUN FACT #2: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt used to be Jeb Gleason Allured’s favorite book. FUN (half-remembered, possibly fabricated) FACT #3: In an interview in chickfactor from the late 90s, she said that she wrote with her desk half-inside the closet of her small L.A. apartment. Could this possibly be right? In the spirit of Bender’s whimsical writing style, I am opting not to research this tidbit, not even to find out if she lived in L.A. FUN FACT #4: The 1990’s were the decade of books with “girl” in the title. See The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Girl With Curious Hair, Girl, Interrupted, Girl, A Novel, etc.

Kate Christensen has won the PEN/Faulkner for The Great Man, proving once again that literary awards are very, very subjective. I was supposed to review The Great Man, but I felt so guilty about how much I disliked it that I opted out. I can get behind the book’s message that women are overlooked in the art world, but its endless descriptions of food and explicit depictions of eldersex (”Harold and Maude” notwithstanding, do we really want to know?) grated. Plus, I found its prose style a little too uninventive to buoy such a high-concept plot.

Anyway, a story in today’s Guardian reminds us that Christensen’s work was once marketed as chick lit. This fact makes me feel even more guilty, since I would be bereft if I discovered that the reason I disliked this novel was because of some deeply-ingrained self-hatred (but I suspect it was just a middling book). The Guardian also reminds us of how unfair Christensen’s categorization as a chick lit writer was. Christensen’s other novels are wonderful, entertaining, and multi-dimensional, especially The Epicure’s Lament, and they certainly don’t belong in the chick lit ghetto. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad she got out. I’m just sad I didn’t like her latest more than I did.

Date: Monday March 17, 2008
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Cindy Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Public Library

Columbia College’s Story Week encountered a last minute glitch when Joyce Carol Oates (their original headliner) canceled due to the death of her husband. Her replacement is Indian-American author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who will talk with super-wonderful-interviewer Donna Seaman of Open Books and Booklist, about her book, In the Palace of Illusions. In this interview, Divakaruni talks about her affinity to mysticism, much as Salman Rushdie did when HE was the Story Week keynote speaker last year? Coincidence? Or are the Story Week programmers a bunch of mystics?
“But I’ve always been interested in alternate realities and believe that we live in a world where many realities are nestled one within the other—if only we have the sensitivity to experience them.”

Also, if you care, here’s an an (unsentimental! yay!) essay about what her kids have taught her.

To add to the annals of the new and not readily comprehensible: the Strand Bookstore in NYC now offers streaming video of its author events on their website. Frankly, the appeal of this seems rather limited, but it’s still pretty cool.

Michael Robins and Kate Greenstreet
Columbia College, Music Center Concert Hall
March 5, 2008

Two surefire ways to light up a literary reading: give out candy, or play to your audience. The benefit to the first is obvious (liquorice!); the second is that everyone will have a better time. As Olena Kalytiak Davis told Cranky magazine, “A reading is usually a first reaction . . . You fall very quickly away from being a ‘poet,’ like maybe a day or two after you’ve written something, and if you’re not a poet, what the hell are you doing up there in front of an audience?” This is especially true when your pockets are without candy.

Luckily, poets Michael Robins and Kate Greenstreet are from Davis’ home planet, and read dynamically and daringly. Robins, author of The Next Settlement (University of North Texas), went first. His delivery is a bit mechanical, but fits the work, which is precisely sad and prismatically beautiful. It’s the sort of thing you replay like a favorite record, and understand differently each time (“A summer better known for storm chasers, / some recalled home as the shape of corn”). Robins also read a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, (billed to read but stuck in a Buffalo snowstorm), plus bits from a new manuscript featuring circuses and the letter ‘Q.’

(After Robins’s last poem, a student towards the front started scratching his head. Backlit by stagelights, his hand and hair looked like a peacock, or else that shadow puppet kids make where the snake eats all the branches from the tree. Anyway.)

Next read Kate Greenstreet, in a charmingly chewy voice that you can hear here. Greenstreet treats poems like crazy friends or still-evolving things, stopping often to give context or crack jokes. When reading from “Great Women of Science,” the first cycle in case sensitive (Ahsahta Press), Greensteet tripped on a line about a fortune teller wearing hot pink. It reminded her of a friend in the audience, and afterwards, she said so. There’s a double-art there: one in writing a good poem, and another in performing it well, then gauging the response. Right then, I ducked into the lobby to buy Greenstreet’s book, which has water on the cover and other cycles inside, cycles on love, the body, and salt. It hasn’t left my bedside since.

Finally, someone in the audience asked Proverbial Question #3: “What poems do you like?” Both poets rattled off quick lists and a few caveats, then talked about structure. “What I really like,” Robins said, “are poems where the whole thing is in past tense, then suddenly one line switches to the present.” It’s a lovely metaphor, and works for process and product both (Davis too). At this point, the audience was so engaged that they clearly didn’t mind the lack of sweets.

Mairead Case writes for, and curates, Fabulous Color. She lives in Pilsen.