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.