"I Ride An Old Paint"

Dispatch From The East Fourth Street Crypto-Cowboy Jubilee


Date: March 15, 2012
Authors: Nick Dybek, Claire Vaye Watkins
Venue: KGB
Agents and other Lit. Celebs: Julie Barer, Colson Whitehead
Neighborhood: East Village
Free Drinks -- Depends on Lou's Mood
Q & A -- no
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- benefits expired

When Colson Whitehead walked into the bar, early, for the reading, I thought that guy looks like the novelist Colson Whitehead. But then I thought, nah, what are the chances? When I saw agent Julie Barer come in and sit down with him, I thought, “Oh, pretty good.”
Still, just to make sure I was going to embarrass myself with the right people, I asked a woman who I'd seen chatting with Julie if her friend was the well-known agent. She said she was. Then I said, "Oh, so who's that guy she's sitting with? It was already kind of crowded and noisy in the bar so the only part of my informant's answer I heard was "white." I replied, "No, the black guy."
A little later, I did go over and introduce myself to Colson and Julie and I think I made the conversation brief enough so that I didn't embarrass myself.
I didn't mention that I wrote a play "Mr. Charlie is Down With the Wu Tang Clam" based on Colson's N.Y. Times op-ed that came out right after Obama's election. Colson's story was a tongue-in-cheek take on the post-racial America that some commentators said Obama's inauguration ushered in. The whole concept of a post- racial America, which I riff off in my play, has gotten a lot less funny with the death of Trayvon Martin.
Of course, the main subject of this blog is who I met and what we talked about at readings, but I do want to mention the writers from last night.
I've always imagined a show-down, battle of the bands kind of reading between the two gifted Nevada novelists I knew about before last night. You'd have Charles Bock, the author of "Beautiful Children," representing Las Vegas against Willy Vlautin representing Reno.
What Hannah Tinti said about Willy's work is absolutely true: he breaks your heart. (I know I've been promising my reader the "My Date With Hannah Tinti post. Don't worry it's upcoming and will include Row, Dole’s first poem.)
But now that I’ve heard last night’s first reader, Claire Vaye Watkins, I realize there’s another gifted Nevada novelist. She read a piece whose title might have been "Razor Blade Baby" that really was kind of like Denis Johnson and sounded brilliant.
The second reader, Nick Dybek, Julie’s client, also rocked the house, reading a short and dramatic section from his new novel “When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man.”
Sometimes I think if I've only heard a story once and not read it, it shouldn't be the sole critical foundation to judge a writer by. Maybe so, but last night at KGB, both writers gave great performances and easily accomplished one thing that a reading is supposed to do, make the listener seek out the book.
Continuing the night's Southwestern motif, filmmaker Bernadine Santistevan sat down at my table between Claire and Nick’s readings. We talked for a while after the reading was over.
Bernadine is from a tiny town in northern New Mexico. Her family are descendants of Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition in Spain and moved to Mexico. But then the Inquisition crossed over to Mexico and they moved to what is today northern New Mexico. They hid their Jewishness and spoke some kind of Ladino-inflected Spanish. Fast forward four hundred years and now when Bernadine goes to Mexico or Spain, people have trouble understanding her Spanish.
I love these stories about largely forgotten linguistic pockets like the survival of 18-century English usage in hidden corners of Appalachia.
Bernadine told me a story about how us poor authors are always trying to gauge the effect of our work on readers.
When Bernadine went to the KGB ladies'’ room last night after the reading had ended, she ran into Claire. The author asked the filmmaker how she liked the performances. But Bernadine arrived after Claire had read, so she could only say that Nick’s stuff had been great.
But even if she had heard “Razor Blade Baby,” Bernadine would know what Claire looked like. The best kind of feedback for an author would be if she could ask the question and be unseen. I don’t know the layout of the ladies’ room at KGB, but if it had adjoining stalls, an author could use them as a confessional of sorts and solicit the reaction of somebody who just heard them read without the audience member knowing she was talking to the author.
You could do this in the mens room by sitting down on the sole toilet, closing the western-style swinging doors and asking the pissers standing at the urinals, “How’d you guys like my, I mean, that dude, who just read, how’d you like his stuff?”