Elevate Me Later, you bastard
I’m a fairly nice guy with a sometimes tenuous grasp on reality. I’ve broken the windshield of a hit-and-not-run car with my bare fist and ended up hiding in a church until the police came. I recently screamed nonsense at a scalper in front of MSG for shouting me down when I tried to give away my extra ticket. I tend to do things without thinking and only afterwards realize potential dangers.
Mr. Ferris cuts right to the heart of my fragile ego
Joshua Ferris struck me as someone who isn’t used to drawing a crowd. I’d assumed he’d have the poise after he was named amongst The New Yorker’s Best Writers Under 40, or Best Young Writers, or whatever they’re calling it. I would’ve assumed he’d have collected a residue of schmaltz after his first novel collected all the attention and accolades. Instead, he was refreshing unguarded and genuine, seemed glad to be there, rosy cheeks and all, in front of a surprisingly smallish crowd of about 60 or so, with empty seats, with ill-prepared questions (sorry!) fired off by people who hadn’t read his new book yet (sorry, again!)
A.L. Kennedy, neck-and-neck with Dave Mitchell for best burn
A.L. Kennedy is both stand-up comedian and novelist. It’s hard to see where one stops and the other starts, especially at last night’s reading at McNally Jackson Books in Soho, where she gave a sometimes funny, sometimes slightly awkward, always entertaining reading/performance/signing.
When she first came out to give a “pre-show talk” — the event had been “promoted strangely,” so that some people came expecting a stand-up performance, while others came for a reading — I had premonitions of regret and boredom. What little I knew about Kennedy I knew from an appearance in Granta Magazine’s “Best Young British Novelist. Consider me pleasantly impressed.
Read this. Now.
When and if I finally convince a significant other that my manly sperm is a viable partner for her exacting ova and we raise a couple of screaming brats, I’ll sit him or her down on my knee after distracting it to silence with promises of sweets long enough to tell it a life lesson: learn to love to read because your heroes will (mostly) be approachable. And not in the stalker way. Necessarily.
Then I’ll order up some future beer with which to get space-loaded and continue berating the child for all my life’s failures.
