I am not always the best listener and I do not always enjoy readings. Oftentimes there are the agitated shoulders, glancing eyes, and requisite hands-holding-drinks-while-pointing gestures of some sort of edgy literary scene. Authors tend to swallow their words or make too much of a self-conscious mess of themselves to be heard clearly. For some reason, I usually feel a need to urinate and spend the reading vaguely uncomfortable and distracted. Last night's Housing Works reading, with Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, and Deb Olin Unferth, was a distinct and delightful departure.

I have to give some credit to Housing Works, an organization that uses all proceeds to help people living with HIV/AIDS. Its bookstore and café are incredibly inviting: tall shelves, plenty of dark wood moldings, thin windows that stretch above the bookcases beside them. It is utterly unpretentious while maintaining a lot of class.

The most credit, however, has to do with how well our three authors read. My love for each of the night's readers is a matter of public record; cf. my posts about The Flame Alphabet and Vicky Swanky is a Beauty. But it had been a long time since I really felt pleasure from hearing a text rather than simply being alone with it. For the most part, I prefer reading alone and am often jarred when an author’s voice doesn’t align with the voice I’ve conjured in my head. And while none of the three authors read in the voice I had imagined, each brought to the text something I hadn’t heard before.

I don’t know how this happens. Surely, our three authors are not amateurs and experience has to have something to do with it. But there was something in their voices, in their presence while reading, that surpassed a person reciting text. They weren’t mere vehicles for words, but they weren’t actors either; there wasn’t an insincere sense of performance. I think what mattered was a sincere investment in the words themselves. A desire, firstly, to bring the sentences forth.

Maybe it was only that Deb Olin Unferth has an adorably high, authoritative voice and then Ben got up there with a really deep voice and spoke measurably slow but bitingly, and then Diane spoke in unpredictable cadences and with grace and movement. Maybe they used these devious tricks in order to delight me. And it worked. 

So let's get off our computers. Stop texting or tweeting or scanning or browsing. Go listen.

Image: housingworks.org

I was lucky enough to attend last Wednesday's National Book Critics Circle Finalists’ Reading. Held at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium, free and open to the public, the true intrigue of the night was how the hell they were going to have twenty finalists read without us all killing ourselves or each other. As it turned out, the answer was quite simple: three minute time restraints.

The award ceremony itself was held Thursday, so the winners have been announced, the National Book Critics Circle failing, inevitably, to chose who I considered to be the winners. (Although I don't have a great history for picking winners.) I was, however, duly impressed by a number of finalists who read that night, in addition to not even killing myself. Turns out, having twenty readers read for three minutes, from works in six different categories, is actually kind of great.

John Jeremiah Sullivan (a finalist in nonfiction) has gotten some press for his collection of essays, Pulphead, but I didn’t expect to be reading 217 pages of it in one sitting this afternoon. He was the first reader of the evening and it was a fantastic start. I sat up straighter listening to his prose. I’m only taking a break from it to write this, which I do so reluctantly, because I’d like to go back to reading Pulphead.

My favorite in the criticism category was Dubravka Ugresic, who is Croatian and therefore my automatic favorite because I love all Eastern Europeans and Russians and Polacks—really anyone remotely Slavic. I concede to them all authority in terms of the truth about the human soul. This woman was talking about masking death with karaoke. Winner.

My impression of biography was that I didn’t think it was all that kosher to claim an omniscient narrator as a biographer, but I guess biographers just go ahead and say their subject’s thoughts and feelings all the time.

Autobiography was great: Luis J. Rodriguez got up and read for three minutes about his failing, pedophile father, and then Deb Olin Unferthhad to get up on stage right after him and be funny—and she did it!

I can’t talk about the poetry or fiction finalists because I am very personal friends with the clear winners in those—more important—categories.

The best prize that I took home that evening (besides my friend leaving behind his copy of Pulphead at the bar, thereby allowing me to take it home and spend my whole day reading it) was hearing so many different kinds of writing all in one place, all being celebrated. Yes, three minute intervals, but everyone. Even biography.

images: iopoetry.org and danaspiotta.com