In the Front Row, On the Dole - Jan. 25 /Lou’s copy

Around the time Bear Stearns went bust in early 2008, I got fired from my job writing about mergers. I started going to a lot of readings.

Fiction, non-fiction, sometimes even poetry, it didn't matter. Eventually, the readings became my new beat. It wasn't that corporations buying each other was dull, but no speaker at a mergers event ever breast-fed her child during her speech. Nor did any mergers expert present their material on the "L" train as novelist John Wray did.

I haven't missed going to mergers conferences and seeing two hundred guys in the same blue blazers and khaki pants. I'm not against blazers. I might even get one some day. But not a blue one.

Covering mergers gave me a salary, health benefits and a 401k. Writing about readings gave me a lot of stories about writers reading their work. Stories about writers reading their work may sound about as interesting as stories about watching paint dry. But I can say with some authority that my stories about readings are more interesting than stories about watching paint dry because before I wrote about mergers, I wrote about paint. My contributions to Coatings Monthly about evaporation rates are much duller than my stories about authors reading their work even when they didn't undress or commandeer subway trains.

If you're going to write autobiographical stories, you are stuck with what you've been doing. It's true that a story about a man who lost his job in the 2008 recession and started going to readings isn't as dramatic as getting captured by the Taliban. Still, these stories are as much adventure stories as if I'd climbed, with no breathing apparatus or Sherpas, Mt. Antarctica. Sometimes I had to pay for my own drinks. The air got thin, but I didn't turn back.

I spent the years from 2008 to 2011 going to readings and collecting unemployment, while it lasted. I used to tell people I met on the readings circuit that I'd gotten a grant that allowed me to stay home during the day and go to readings at night. They would make some kind of appreciative response and I'd follow up with the punchline, "it's one of those New York State Unemployment kind of grants." About two years into my going to readings project, a woman asked me what I had to show for it. I answered her truthfully, if incompletely. Because many of the readings were held in bars, I told her I about one thing I definitely developed from going to so many readings: a paunch.

It might seem that my strategy of going to a ton of readings in order to achieve career success as a writer is not the most direct way to approach this goal. But they do sometimes serve free drinks.

Many New York City literary readings are intimate affairs. Even well-known writers often attract only a small audience. Early in my readings odyssey, I started to sit in the front row because I hoped some pixie dust might drift down from the author's side of the podium and land on me.

Obviously, the closer you sit to the author, the stronger the dose of pixie dust you get. Anyone who gets doused with enough pixie dust can become an author himself.

The way it works is the combination of the author's pixie dust with whatever pixie dust has lain dormant, has been bottled up, inside the audience member wise enough to sit in the front row is like the meeting of a sperm and an egg. It can create a new child, a new book. I plan to call Junior "In the Front Row, On the Dole."

What people who go to readings want is to participate in the process of having written and to believe that even though they are audience members, they are also authors if only by being part of the audience for that one night. As the writer Eileen Myles put it, "A reading makes the distant familiar, the act of writing a book for a moment becomes local. If anyone can read a book, then anyone can write one. The willful abdication of "craft" and throwing a book open for the night is the most democratic moment we've got. It's simply everyone's."

I wasn't able to kick the readings habit immediately when my benefits ended, and no wonder with the social opportunities, the occasional free drinks and the chance to hear new work. Like the authors behind the podiums, I am looking for an audience.

Everybody else just writes their first book and gets on with it. My subject is the stories I've gathered while I was listening to parts of everybody elses' new books.

Well-meaning writers and editors that I've meet during my readings project sometimes told me to concentrate on my own work and not to worry about what everyone else is doing. One problem with heeding this advice is that I'm a big, nosy gossip. My best friend in journalism school used to call me "AP Wire."

The other problem I have with this is I'm still a reporter. I'm as interested in the power structure of my new beat, the live performance part of the publishing industry, as I was about the organizational structure of the mergers world or who was really running things in paint.

I'm the opposite of the guy who writer Nick Flynn told a story about when he read at the 92nd Street Y. Flynn said he told a friend of his who lived in Pennsylvania that he was really excited because he was going to read at the 92nd St. Y. His pal said that he was happy for him, but maybe he shouldn't get too excited to just be appearing at a Y.

I got a lot of things from my "In the Front Row, On the Dole" project besides fatter. I made some friends. I heard some thrilling live performances. I learned things like if someone says there is only time for one more question, and the author has recognized you, don't wait for the mike.

But there are broader issues beneath my story of a boomer following his bliss. I started going to readings because I lost my job. My readings project took place at a time when there has been huge wealth destruction, when long-term unemployment has ravaged many of us older workers, among others. I saw the best 401ks of my generation (including my own) destroyed by the economic crisis that was triggered by the subprime mortgage meltdown

As I trekked from reading to reading, I avoided thinking about the fact that for many of us older workers, the middle class jobs we lost, we' ll never get back.

I'm working as a part-time security guard now. Maybe following one's bliss is overrated at any time, but to chase it during this Depression must be evidence of some kind of naiveté or perhaps a self-destructive, other-worldliness on my part.

"In the Front Row, On the Dole" isn't sociology. It is an adventure story, but I'd be blind not to see that whatever fruits come of it, I'll be lucky if it turns out I don't share the same diminished economic fate of many of us older, displaced workers.

There is a certain thrill, underlined with pathos, of course, but let's not dwell on that just now, to still be going for it when you're old. I just want a few NPR gigs and a Dwight Garner review. Anyway, since the middle class job world seems closed off, maybe I should have shut up and worn the damm blue blazer, the long shot that my creative efforts will work, is my only hope. It's preferable to waiting for my guard service to bump me up to full-time, though then I would get the whole uniform, no danger of blue blazers here, instead of having to walk around with just a baseball cap that says "Security."

But if I can't manage to emerge soon, I'll run out of time. For many authors, death signals the end of their creative aspirations, their dreams of writing new books, but now, with all the advances in medicine and technology, need that still be so? For authors that have books out, death can be a great marketing opportunity. For someone like me, struggling to emerge at a late date, why should death be the end of things? I claim that my right to reinvent myself, to emerge as an artist, as an American and as a boomer, shall not, need not, perish from this earth, just because I have.

Maybe my stories about going to readings will find an audience. Maybe they are a call that will have a response. Possibly, no matter how much of an adventure story I make them into, what I did while I was collecting unemployment will come up short in the pixie dust distribution department. Then, how fucked will I be?

All that other stuff, the blowjobs under the dining room table from the city's most beautiful women writers at the publisher-writer Jimmie Atlas' pad on Central Park West during Thanksgiving dinner with the parade floats down below and the echoes of Broadway Danny Rose and the Fellini movies that inspired it, you didn't think I was serious about that, did you?

Becoming friends with Lou and Chris from KGB is one highlight of "In the Front Row, On the Dole." And let's not forget my night of triumph when the writer Jonathan Ames bought me a beer there. Again, let's call it a triumph and not think about the pathos implicit in my being so excited that an author bought me a $6 Baltika No. 3 because I know I'm skating close to the edge of this memoir being the story of a lit groupie suck-up. And if this story of my readings project turns out to resemble the rock groupie memoir "I'm With The Band," I'm in trouble. However, if the pixie dust I absorbed along with all the beer and wine does its work, if it gets fertilized properly, these stories will find an audience.

I just want to be behind the podium, between hard covers. I just want you people to listen. I've got pixie dust of my own, so fill up the front row, because it's too late for this geezer ingenue to stop now.

A Note on Venues:

While I was doing "In the Front Row, On the Dole," I went to readings all over the two boroughs, that is, Manhattan and Brooklyn. The fact that most readings are free and can be reached by the means of the transportation options available to me, walking, biking and the subway, were a key part of my project. I'm sure there are occasional readings in the other three boroughs and within reach of the PATH train in New Jersey, for that matter, but exciting odyssey that "In the Front Row, On the Dole" was, I stuck to Manhattan and Brooklyn. So I went to "author events," the book industry's term for readings and signings, at places as diverse as a synagogue on the Upper West Side for its "Scribblers on the Roof" series and the Greenwood Cemetery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

But two spots that I went to over and over were the McNally Jackson bookstore on Prince Street and the KGB Bar on East 4th Street. These two stages were where I saw most of the performances, I'll be describing. I'd go to see almost any writer if they were appearing at these spots. Further afield, I'd get more selective. Ease of bike access was also important and for this, and in every other way, despite being a hike, many of the best readings and other bookish events I attended took place at Word Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

One way to look at my readings project is that a few years before Occupy Wall Street set up camp not far from the big office building I used to work in, I started my readings project fueled by some of the same motivations that continue to drive protests against the excesses of Wall Street. They occupied Zuccotti Park, I occupied McNally Jackson during readings.


A Deft Insertion --

Date: March 15, 2009
Author: Joanna Smith Rakoff
Venue: McNally Jackson bookstore
Neighborhood: Soho
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- 783542

Smith Rakoff read from her first novel "A Fortunate Age," which uses Mary McCarthy's "The Group" as a model. About five minutes into her reading, she was interrupted by her infant son's crying. She stopped reading and instructed her nanny, who was standing in the back and holding the child, to bring the baby to her. She did something with her shirt and put the child's mouth on the nipple of her left breast, quite discreetly, somehow. It was a deft insertion.
Possibly Smith Rakoff was known in her new mothers' group for being the least noticeable breast feeder. Maybe she has had a lot of experience doing it in parks and playgrounds where modesty is desirable. Or perhaps she just rose to challenge of having to do it in public.
In any case, there wasn't much breast visible. After her child started feeding, she resumed her performance. It is safe to say that a New York audience, full of liberals, at a literary reading in 2009 is not going to object to an author breast-feeding. But probably a Tea Party audience wouldn't, either.
Smith Rakoff finished reading the passage from her novel and then took questions while her baby continued to feed. Most of the questions concerned the reaction from her fellow Oberlin grads about her portrayals of them in "A Fortunate Age."
She made breast-feeding look like the most natural thing in the world, which it is, if rarely performed behind a podium with a 50-person audience. The thing about public breast feeding is that nobody objects to it while it's going on. But if you ask people whether it's appropriate in the abstract, you get more get more negative responses.
I told the story about Smith Rakoff's performance to another author, Andre Aciman. He said that breast-feeding while doing a reading didn't appeal to him. Smith Rakoff and Aciman have the same agent, Tina Bennett. Probably a discussion about the etiquette of breast feeding while doing one's readings is career advice that Bennett doesn't have to weigh in with often.
But now, Bennett must face the fact that my readings project has uncovered: There's a difference of opinion among her authors on the suitability of breast-feeding while doing a reading. Maybe in the future writers will be advised to make sure that their beliefs on this subject are in line with their potential representatives before signing on.
In any case, there's no denying that Rakoff Smith is the Emma Goldman of that combination of aesthetic and personal sustenance, the breast-feeding reading.

Nutcracker, Yes, Sodomy No!

Date: February 9, 2010
Author: Tony Bentley
Venue: KGB bar
Neighborhood: East Village
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- 1245673

On the way to Toni Bentley's reading at KGB, I stopped at the McNally Jackson bookstore to buy a book of hers for my daughter's sixteenth birthday. Nicole, my daughter, is a ballerina.
I was looking for Bentley's first book, "Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal." It is an account of Bentley's time as a dancer with the New York City Ballet. I told the clerk I needed a copy of "Winter Season" for my daughter's sixteenth birthday. He looked it up and then said, they didn't have "Winter Season," but perhaps I'd like to substitute another book of Bentley's called "The Surrender." The subtitle of this book is "A Erotic Memoir," but maybe that didn't come up on the clerk's screen. What I knew, but that he presumably didn't, was that "The Surrender" is a book-length paean to the pleasures of anal sex.
After the clerks's suggestion, I did an impromptu routine at the bookstore's counter for the employees and a few customers behind me in the cash register line on the inappropriateness of buying a book about the pleasures of anal sex for my daughter on her sixteenth birthday.
Then I went to KGB. When Bentley finished reading from a collection of her more recent work, I told her the story. She laughed and said it might not be too long before my daughter might be interested in "The Surrender" as well as "Winter Season." Maybe so, but the less I know about that, the better. In the meantime, I found a copy of "Winter Season" for Nicole's birthday present at another independent bookstore.


"A Good Reader"

Date: March 15 and March 28, 2009
Author: Lore Segal
Venues: Melville House publishers' office
McNally Jackson bookstore,
Neighborhoods: Dumbo, Soho, respectively
Free Drinks -- Dumbo, yes, Soho, no
Q & A -- yes, both readings
Book purchased -- yes
Book signed -- twice
UE Check Numbers -- 567489 and 567476

Lore Segal gave two readings in March 2009. She is the only author who signed her book twice for me. She had to because after her first appearance, my wife ripped out the first few pages of her book.
That initial reading was at her publisher's offices in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
I didn't always buy the books at the readings I went to. And even when I did, I didn't always get them signed. Getting the author's book signed, besides requiring the purchase of the book, meant waiting in a line with people who had attended the reading.
As I relate these stories that grew out of my readings project, I may seem to be an outgoing man with enough social skills to chat with strangers at a book event. When I managed to pull that off, those were the nights I got stories. But there were many other nights when, because I am so desperate to talk to people in the readings world, I frequently ended up unlocking my bike as soon as the reading ended and riding away quickly so no one would know I was both dying to talk to people at the reading, but also scared to.
On those nights, I went to readings like first timers go to an AA meeting, timorously, speaking to no one, and waiting for the question, "Who is here for the first time," which is another way of asking, "Are you in need of the fellowship that is available at this gathering." But unlike AA meetings, no one asks a question like that at readings, and often, almost before I knew it, I was on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore unlocking my bike and looking in at the post-reading mingling going on. That socializing is a small scale replica of what I imagine to be the life of authors, who know each other and publish and get invited to book parties instead of sitting alone at the end of the KGB bar for years drinking one disgusting Baltika after another. (No. 3 is the less toxic, No. 6 tastes like soy sauce, but they are cheap.)
Oh, if only I bought the book earlier in the day, I could be in the line waiting to get it signed. And maybe while waiting in the line, I could have struck up a conversation with another bookish soul.
But on the nights when I didn't bolt and either bought or had earlier acquired a copy of the author's book, I faced another problem.
Since the author is usually sitting at a table while signing books and the audience member is standing in front of him, gravity doesn't facilitate the transmission of the pixie dust the way it does when the author is standing and the audience is sitting.
But I hadn't formulated this theory when Segal read at Melville House. Plus, Luchinella only cost $13. When my turn came for her to sign it, Segal, seated, asked me who to make it out to. I said my mother-in-law because I knew she likes to read fiction. Plus, I thought she might be interested in Segal's work because they are both refuges from Hitler. So Segal wrote something like "Best Wishes, To Miriam" on the title page.
Later, I gave it to my wife to give to her mother. But when she heard what I'd done, my wife tore out the signed page and a few others at the front. She was mad, not at anything Segal wrote, but at me because she thought that after avoiding her mother, I had no business getting her a book.
But it worked out OK because my wife's attack on "Luchinella" gave me the opportunity to have Segal sign it again a few weeks later when she read at McNally Jackson. I usually hadn't read the author's book when I heard them read, but by the time of Segal's second reading, I had read "Luchinella." So I had a chance to chat with her about her novella. I complimented Segal on the way she was able to satirize Lucinella through most of the book, but when Lucinella dies, we feel actual sorrow. She said that if I'd picked up on that, I was a good reader.
I told her what happened to the page that she had previously signed and asked her to sign the book again. After a raised eyebrow moment at this peek inside my marriage, she signed the book a second time. This time she wrote "For Brent: A Good Reader."
I later read a story about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath that featured a wife's attack on a book, though in that case Plath's motivation was sexual jealousy, which trumps the mere lack of sufficient mother-in-law regard.
Apparently, Plath had ripped up Hughes' edition of Shakespeare. Some months later, the couple was on the verge of getting back together when Plath noticed that the book had been mended. Then she saw an inscription in the book from one of Hughes' lovers, who had put it back together. That was the end of their rapprochement.

Me and Jumpha Down At the Greenlight Bookstore

Date: July 13, 2010
Authors: Carin Clevidence
Venue: Greenlight Bookstore
Neighborhood: Ft. Greene, Brooklyn
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- 786543

Sometimes my readings project put me in proximity to a well-known writer even when it wasn't her reading. This happened when Jumpha Lahiri, the Indian-American writer, was helping to launch a friend's book at the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Carin Clevidence, Lahiri's pal, was reading from her new novel, "The House on Salt Hay Road."
I'd taken my usual seat in the front row. The reading was about to begin. Lipari sat down in an empty seat right next to me. I took this to be a slight, albeit unconscious, endorsement of my front row strategy.
Talk about pixie dust transmission. I literally rubbed arms with Lahiri. Luckily, she is a few inches taller than me so that even though she wasn't standing up, the important principle of verticality for pixie dust transmission was present, plus I was closer to her than I ever was to any author behind a podium.
Unfortunately, I was too awestruck to talk to her. Instead, I continued reading a small, literary magazine I'd picked up as we waited for the reading to start. I'd chosen that magazine because I knew it had a story by my friend Aditi, a young, Indian-American woman I knew from a writing class.
It occurred to me that as I sat brushing shoulders with Lahari and reading my former classmate's story that my body was serving as a connection between two generations of talented, Indian-American women writers. Yes, a rather mundane connection, not as exciting as if I'd kissed either or both of the women, and for it to be a connection, I'd have to kiss both.
Well, if the combination of acquired and native pixie dust does its work, maybe in the future I can kiss both women. There are all kinds of kisses and here I'm thinking of the ceremonial kind, each woman kissing one side of my face at the same time, as they do for the winners of the stages of the Tour de France. The stage winner also gets a bouquet, but I'd say to Jumpha and Aditi, and any other ladies from my readings project, flowers aren't necessary and I think we're clear on the ceremonial nature of any schmooching that may ensue.
When I told Aditi about my brush with Jumpha, she laughed. Amusing women writers and audience members was one kind of marker for the success of my readings project. I needed to gain the confidence that my own pixie dust was strong enough to do that because that is one way you can judge your success at joining a professional community.
Fine, you want to be a heart surgeon and you managed to sneak into one of their conferences, but if you're not getting any laughs at the luncheon, just think how grim the operations will be, if you even get that far.

Emma Goldman was a Party Animal!

Date: March 15, 2010
Author: Vivian Gornick
Venue: KGB
Neighborhood: East Village
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- 890765

One author who graduated from being an audience member at one reading, the Lore Segal launch at Melville House, to presiding over the podium at another, was Vivian Gornick.
For her KGB reading, I positioned myself at the top of the stairs, the bar is on the second floor, so I could intercept her before she walked into the bar. I rather grandly welcomed her to KGB on behalf of, and here I was ready to launch into some dopey speech, but I merely said "Myself."
Then I made a joke about how odd it was to see such a big deal writer showing up for reading without an entourage. Even though I am in awe of authors like Gornick, I was sometimes able to fake a bit of bravado in my conversations with them.
The reading was run by two young women and the audience consisted largely of their friends and co-workers. It was an audience where everyone would have had an opinion about the writer - actress Miranda July. Gornick was brought in like Chuck Berry at a rock show, a star from a previous generation.
During the question and answer period after her reading, people asked Gornick about her early days in the feminist movement of the seventies. I asked her about the impact of "Our Bodies, Our Selves," an influential book on womens' health that was published in 1976. I love the time capsule quality of quotes from it such as "learning about our bodies in this way really turned us on."
Of course, learning about womens' bodies was really turning me on, too, in the period Gornick was describing. Any mention of "Our Bodies, Our Selves", a presence along with "Slaugherhouse-Five," and the Whole Earth Catalogue in the bedrooms of any woman I slept with during the Seventies, sets off my sexual reveries as forcefully as does that era's other prime erotic image, the blue plastic diaphragm cover, also ubiquitous in dorm rooms and off-campus apartments.
Gornick and I, practically alone in the small bar-room, were the only veterans of the fight for womens' equality during the Nixon administration. True, my contribution to the struggle consisted of trying to sleep with as many young feminists, many of them wearing those drab, green T-shirts that were popular, as I could, while Gornick was an activist on their behalf.
That's kind of the same thing, right? Didn't that make me practically Gloria Steinhem to her, well, to her Vivian Gornick?
Another symbol of Seventies feminism is the vaginal speculum. I'm sure Gornick like me is no speculum virgin. A lot of Seventies memoirists cite the drugs and the music, but there was also a vogue for that bit of homemade gynogolocial exploration that occurred when friends used a clear, plastic speculum to examine friends. Don't even bother bragging about your Woodstock or Fillmore East or West exploits, if you never looked up a vaginal speculum. To have been young in the Seventies and to have missed out on that would be like going to a scenic overlook and not using one of those mounted telescopes.
When I approached Gornick after the reading, I asked what she'd been working on lately. She said she'd just finished a biography of the anarchist activist, Emma Goldman. She asked me if I knew who Emma Goldman was. I said that indeed I did and for some reason added that Goldman must really have been a party animal. I was hoping to amuse Gornick and I think that line did.
My increasing ability to amuse women writers, and male writers, too, but the dynamic isn't the same, was one way I could trace how the combination of absorbed and native pixie dust was germinating an author inside me.
After my short chat with Gornick, I went back to the bar and sat down. I sighed for all that I'd suffered to gather the pixie dust I'd gathered so far, both that night and in all the other nights of my readings project and for all the years that my own pixie dust has been bottled up, not dropping down on readers or audience members.
I also sighed because as all the years passed with my pixie dust piling up inside me, somehow, I'd become old, old enough to be moved by remembering images from the movie of my youthful sexuality, now as dated as if I were remembering flappers and bathtub gin instead of green t-shirts and blue plastic diaphragm covers.


My Crime Against the Seward Park Branch Library!

Date: March 15, 2010
Author: David Rakoff
Venue: KGB
Neighborhood: East Village
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- yes
UE Check Number -- 890765

Four years is a long time to not have a salary. Unemployment is only supposed to last 99 weeks, but because of some waiting periods for extensions mine lasted from February 2008 to March 2011.
As my readings project went on, I got more and more broke. In 2008 when I was still relatively flush, I sometimes bought authors' hardcover books. I couldn't get them all because I was going to three or four readings a week, but sometimes, I splurged. When I did buy a hardcover, I sometimes got the author to sign it.
The main reason for readings from a commercial viewpoint is to sell books. A unique inducement for a readings audience is that they can get the author to sign the book. You can't do that on Amazon, at least not yet.
As my reading project stretched on, and my re-entry into the job market didn't happen, I switched to buying galleys. Galleys are like pre-books that publishers put out in advance of the real book's publication so reviewers and others can sample them and ideally get some word of mouth buzz going.
Galleys fit nicely with my readings project because their distribution and readings are both usually part of a book's launch. I found that by knowing which authors were scheduled to read at local venues, I could often pick up their galleys at the Housing Works bookstore or the Strand in advance of their readings.
One funny thing about galleys is that it says on the front of most of them, that it's illegal to sell them. Yet they do sell them at Housing Works and at the Strand. Word bookstore gives them away.
I suppose you could complain about the Strand's policy of selling them, but good luck making a fuss about the apparently illegality of the Housing Works Bookstore selling them. Housing Works is a charity that benefits Aids patients. A campaign against their sales of galleys, most of which they get from McNally Jackson, which doesn't sell them, would be about as popular as launching an investigation into Holocaust survivors who cheat the German government on their reparations.
At first I was a little hesitant about asking authors to sign their galleys. An author could look at it like I'd gypped them out of some of their income by buying a three-dollar galley instead of a full-price hardback. One author, Brando Skyhorse, who I'd gotten to know a little, signed the galley of his brilliant book "The Madonnas of Echo Park" "To Brent, quit being a cheap bastard." I think he was joking.
Another author, Teddy Wayne, signed the galley of his novel "Kapitoil," "To Brent, first galley I've signed." He wasn't annoyed, just struck by the novelty. Only one author really complained, noting how much work he and his wife had put into the book and how disappointed they were that somebody would show up at a reading with a galley. But this guy, David Scarry, is a scam artist, anyway. I'd hoped my sign-my-galley move would piss him off, and it did.

It was one thing to go from buying new, hardcover books to galleys, and asking authors to sign them, but what I did next with David Rakoff really pushed the boundaries of author-event propriety. I have to thank David for his generous response because I asked him to sign a libary copy of his latest book.

I wish I'd thought of trying it with Scarry, he'd have gone apoplectic. But David Rakoff couldn't have been more gracious in response to my request that he sign my New York Public Library copy of his essay collection, the Thurber Prize winning "Half-Empty."

I saw the copy of "Half-Empty" in the Seward Park branch on the day I was planning to go to Rakoff's reading. I checked it out. As I did, I thought that unless I chickened out, I could ask him to sign the library copy.

That night at KGB, Rakoff read an essay from the book about the musical "Rent" and criticized the play for not presenting an accurate picture of downtown bohemia. This led me to think that a request for him to sign my library book could seen as a novel expression of this downtown bohemia.

It always amazes me how much chance and the layout of a room can affect who you meet at readings. I had the Seward Park branch's copy of "Half-Empty" with me, but if somebody other than Sarah had been sitting next to me, I might not have pulled off the sign the libary book scam. Sarah, affectionately nicknamed "Blind Justice," at the bar because she is legally blind and is an lawyer, was sitting to my right at the bar during Rakoff's reading. After he finished, she told me she was a big fan of his and said she'd love to meet him. By saying this, she gave me an excuse to do for her what I'd been hoping to do for myself.
I remember Calvin Trillin writing someplace that the ideal newspaper reporter was someone who was shy, but curious, because having to write a story about something gives him an excuse to stick his nose into things he might otherwise have been too timid to pursue. Well, I am a reporter, just call me "AP Wire," and readings were my beat. Sarah's desire to meet Rakoff was like an assignment from an editor.
I said, "Oh, I'll introduce you to him."
As we made our way through the crowd toward Rakoff, she asked me, "Do you know him?"
I said, "Well, not personally."
Fortunately, and again this is the kind of thing that depends totally on chance, Rakoff was between well-wishers when we reached him. After double checking that Sarah's name was Sarah, I introduced her to Rakoff. Then I introduced myself. I might have been chicken to thrust myself on Rakoff alone, but under the guise of doing Sarah a favor, it worked.
Toward the end of our conversation with Rakoff, I told him that I wanted to make a slight addition to literary history by having him sign a library copy of his book. He hesitated and said, "But won't you get in trouble?" I said, "No, it will be OK, because I've taped an index card into the front of the book. I'll just take it out when I return it."
Rakoff was game and he signed my copy of his book, adding, "Good Luck. Brent." I took the book back when it was due after I peeled the index card out of it. You can find it in the Seward Park library to this day. The scotch tape I used to attach the index card left a tiny mark.
When I talked to Rakoff about this at a later reading he had played a small role in, the main act was his friend Patricia Marx who was launching her new book, "Starting From Happy", he said he didn't remember anything that happened the night he read at KGB because he'd had an MRI earlier that day. Apparently, they'd given him a drug that caused him to not be able to remember what happened the evening of the procedure.
But after I filled him in on the scam he had been kind enough to participate in , he said the whole defacing of library books thing sounded like familiar. He asked me if I knew who Joe Orton was?
I replied, "The British playwright?" He said, "Yeah," and told me that Orton and his lover had gotten a first brush of notoritiey when they were arrested for defacing library books.
I wouldn't mind supplementing my scheme of collecting all this authorial pixe dust with a visit from the library cops or even a little news story detailing my arrest, but it can be hard to get arrested in New York just like it can be hard to go from writing about mergers to writing memoirs. You have to mix the right portions of hard work, luck, talent and native and acquired in the front row pixie dust in sufficient quantities to turn an unemployed former trade press hack, mergers division, into an author behind a podium, worrying about the mike and asking "Can you hear me in the back?" and saying "Thank you all for coming out on such a hot, cold or temperate night."

"No Pitch, Nothing Relevant"

Date: March 26, 2008
Authors: Elise Alpert
Venue: 92nd St. Y Tribeca
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- no
Check Number : 9877688

The night that novelist and short story writer Elise Albert read at the 92nd St. Y's Tribeca branch was a second night in my readings project when scribbling on printed matter that I'd borrowed from a library became the evening's motif.
Albert read from her book "Stories from Dalila." In one of them she offers herself sexually to Philip Roth supplying reasons why he might care to participate and suggesting some workarounds for any difficulties his age might create.
The week before I'd held two books in my hand in the 92nd St. "Y's" library. One was the novel "Atmospheric Disturbances" by Rivka Galchen and the other was Albert's collection. I had to choose one book to take out and I chose Albert's.
I wouldn't say the hand of God was at work that afternoon in the library, but choosing Albert's book came in handy when I saw she was reading at the 92nd St. Y's downtown branch.
I went to the reading and brought my library copy of her book with me. It was a night when they had an open-mike session that preceded Alpert, who was the headliner.
I read a story to the small audience about watching TV in the actor-writer Eric Bogosian's house at 100 Hudson Street. The joke was I watched his TV from my house at 90 Hudson. I think this story is a funny take on celebrity and the way we're all crowded together here in New York. It was kind of a benign, "King of Comedy" riff. Bogoasian would probably be horrified if he knew some neighbor was watching his TV from the other side of Leonard Street.
When I finished my short reading, I held up my library copy of "Stories from Dahlia" and told everybody in the small audience that they should run out and buy it. It was a gesture that I hoped would turn out to be prophetic in that it would somehow lead to me standing behind a podium, not an open mike one, finishing a reading and holding up my own book and asking people to buy it, or at least, to meet me at KGB right after the reading to celebrate its existence.
One author-friend I made during my readings project said that when my book came out, he would come to my reading and act like such an asshole he'd get kicked out of the bookstore or bar. I'm holding you to this, Brando.
When the open mike part of the reading ended, Alpert read from "Stories for Daliah," and took some questions. After she read, Alpert and I ended up talking. You might think that I sought her out like a heat-seeking missile, but somehow when I started talking to her I didn't realize that she was the young woman who had just read.
Once I made sure she hadn't minded me using her book as a prop, though I had done so in a respectful way, we chatted about other things including how ridiculously easy it is to get a cab there at the "Y," at Hudson and Canal streets.
When we were talking I said I needed a writing teacher and asked her if she know of anyone who might be interested in the job. I explained to her my plan was to pay my instructor with tennis lessons so it wouldn't work with just anyone. She said her husband, the writer Ed Swartzkopf, might be interested. I checked his credentials by asking her if he had any books out. When she said he did, that was good enough for me.
I told her I'd give her one of my business cards so that her husband could call me if he was interested.
I could have just handed Alpert my card, which was pretty bare bones with just my name, contact information and "freelance writer." But I thought that since the whole idea was to maybe get myself a writing mentor, I might as well make the package I would give her to pass on to her husband as artful as possible.
So I took out the index-like card that had been in the pocket in the back of Albert's book. It had the author's name and the title and the various due dates that applied to earlier borrowers of the book. I was sure I wouldn't get in trouble with the library if I returned the book without this card. I borrowed some scotch tape from the Y's front desk and taped my business card to this due date card and gave it to Alpert. I liked the artiness of presenting her husband with my card taped to the due-date card of his wife's first book.
I never heard from Albert or her husband, but that was understandable because it was a weird proposal I'd made, and in addition, they had a important due-date of their own approaching. They were about to become parents.
Still, as I imagined my scotch-taped assemblage landing in the garbage can of their apartment in Brooklyn, it seemed like such a forlorn image that it gave me an idea.
Looked at from one perspective, my whole readings project was a long string of tossed business cards and unanswered email. I even made the mistake of sending Granta editor John Freeman an email commenting on a few things he had said at a reading. I think this was just before Freeman published a book about how horrible email is. Actually, his book may be a bit more nuanced than that, but my practice of sending emails to people I didn't know, sometimes because I'd been too shy to talk to them at a reading, rarely worked.
But sometimes, early in my readings project, I did send these unsolicited emails, as I did with Freeman, just to try to start some kind of professional or personal relationship with a writer.
I did this with author and downtown readings impresario Amanda Stern. She is arguably the biggest readings organizer in lower Manhattan. Since I was the most frequent attendee of readings, I thought we should meet. But Stern, sometimes called Demanda by wags, wasn't amused by my unsolicited email. But at least she replied.
"Thanks for getting in touch. Sadly, this kind of email never goes over quite as well as you imagine. Program directors get hundreds of emails a day and we create submission guidelines precisely so our time isn't spent reading through lengthy emails trying to find the relevant pitch. And in yours, there is no pitch and nothing relevant."
But the episode with Albert did inspire me to have my next batch of business cards printed with the following disclaimer on the back:

Warning: if this card is disposed of carelessly it will burst into flame within five minutes of it landing in the garbage. For safe disposal log onto www.blogspot.brentshearer.

When people, both of them, did log onto the site, they saw and can still see, this:

First-time Visitors: Thank you for your interest in brentshearer@blogspot.com.
By logging onto this site you have generated a deactification signal. You may now throw away my business card or even shred it.
I do think that when I give out my business card it should be treated with reverence. It should be as if the recipient were an early Christian, and my card contains a fragment of the True Cross.

Not everybody believes in the role played by fragments from the True Cross in the oral performance part of the publishing world in our post-2008 recession era. Some readers may find the commingling of pixie dust theory far-fetched though I think everybody realizes that blue blazers are evil.

Ladies in my audience will giggle at different spots in any given night's performance as will gentlemen, thought the dynamic is different, but if there's two things I've become convinced of as I've followed the stations of the cross of my readings project, they are: I am the geezer ingenue and it's too late to stop now.

And if I'm going to borrow this last phrase, associated as it is with the singer Van Morrison, let me also say to another author who I'd hoped to have some kind of personal contact with at a reading, Greil Marcus, author of, among many others, a book about Morrison, I wish I'd given you my seat that night at KGB when you couldn't find a place to sit. But it was a night when I didn't have either an image of a fragment of the True Cross or a lady like Blind Justice to guide me through the steps I needed to take, to paraphrase Kafka, to make my stupid, going to readings project into the book that will be the axe for the frozen sea inside me.

So, again, it its too late for this geezer ingneue to stop now. Lacking an actual axe, I’m counting on the pixie dust working like the salt they spread on the roads during a snowstorm to melt the ice.

Thanks to Brando, to Lou, and to Chris and to use the title of a book whose author also didn't reply to my unsolicited emails, the melting season is here.