Chad Harbach Reading @ McNally Jackson Books
According to Harbach, my soul, composed of douchiness and tardiness, is both clean as a summer's eve and very often late
The night of Chad Harbach’s reading was to become for me a bizarre, painful evening, an evening whose anthropomorphic traits I, post-disaster, characterized with mildly self-flagellating images, such as nervous nose picking, mumbling, and shame. Oh, reliable old Shame! How the echoes of your approaching footfalls quicken my heart, send rivulets of battery acid to the welcoming lengths of my armpit hair, and call to standing attention on the base of my tongue the ghost of coffees past. It was an evening to remember for its inability to be forgotten.
Though anxiety and second thoughts were familiar feelings prior to asking strangers for insults, dark premonitions were not. For no particular reason I could see, I was suffering from the acute desire to skip the Q train to McNally Jackson and instead ride the L to domestic safety. But I’d humped the bricklike Art of Fielding up and down subway pee-ways and through the grimace of what was then my full-time job, so: dark thoughts circling my head or not, I set out to ask Mr. Harbach to look into my soul and laugh.
Harbach’s work on n+1 suggested he’d be happy to oblige. Happy insulters make for easy, rewarding nights. Add to that the apparent evidence that he was a fellow lover of America’s slowest, most unabashedly boringest game, and I just had to go. The Art of Fielding was a BASEBALL book, and how often can we self-identifying literati hold our heads up proudly in our favorite Brooklyn coffee shops with sports genre type books in our laps? It seemed that Harbach pulled a Chabon – genre subject, literary pedigree.
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Posted in Book Reviews, Insults, Read It.
Tagged all the literary young men, boot straps, chad harbach, douchetard, failure, insults, judas, keith gessen, novel, reading, the art of fielding, three months off
Adam Ross Reading Ladies & Gentlemen @ BookCourt
Sneaky, Adam. Very sneaky
Adam Ross has a bit of Mel Brooks in him (but which part? Ba-dum-pssh!). Shining eyes that look small, set underneath a gentle curling dollop of sandy blonde hair. His almost cocky smile says he’s thinking of a joke I’d probably not get, and he’s probably right. Read his books, however, and you start to imagine a David Lynch or John Carpenter. Maybe that makes sense, describing an author by way of pop culture filmmakers: humor and psychological horror, with a dash of humanity.
The author of Mr. Peanut and now Ladies & Gentlemen is no stranger to dark humor. Peanut is confounding and at times brilliant, a grim (or any of the other “dismal” synonyms various reviewers have used, like “bleak,” “dark,” or “ominous“) and often fucked-up-funny portrayal of love, marriage, and ownership set within a detective novel’s framework set within another detective novel’s framework. Or something like that. I finished Peanut thinking I’d “figured it out,” but further examination and discussion revealed that the story’s plot twists and multiple characters and even the way Ross played with the very tropes and language of murder mystery novels were often beyond my understanding. “Frustrating, but I’m probably not quick enough… very worthwhile!” would be my blurb. Plus, Adam wrote a hell of a book and was one of my first insults, back in the day, so I’m looking forward to dissecting a more manageable frog in short story form.
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Posted in Insults, Readings
Tagged adam ross, bookcourt, grim, insults, ladies & gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, mel brooks, mr peanut, performer, powerful publishing women, reading, ross, the word fuck, whiskey
Tao Lin Reading – Richard Yates
Tao Lin, darling of the sweatpants mafia
What the hell is going on when Tao Lin reads at the same type of corporate bookstore from which his “protagonist” steals books in his new novel, Richard Yates? Why does Lin’s muddled, muffled, painfully awkward high school sophomore-on-Xanax voice sometimes feel like an act, and Yates is his alibi? How is it that none of this matters, that Richard Yates might be an important comment on modern life, or it might be a hybrid cash-in novel based on a copy/paste transcript of a melodramatic Gmail relationship?
I’m stumped. There seems to be something going on here, but I’m not intelligent enough to suss it out. Three weeks I’ve struggled with this constipated idea and now I need to shit it out.
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Sit and spin, Tom!
Ed. note: Andrea, Bringer of Happiness and Provider of Sexytimes, has taken over the narrative for this post. Enjoy.
I was entrusted a few months ago with the weighty task of attending Tom McCarthy’s reading at McNally Jackson Books (had my delinquency in writing this post been known at the time, I am not sure I would have been given this opportunity). I’d been to one prior reading at this venue and found it to be civilized enough to provide a relaxed setting for a reading. However, The Insulted had advised me to turn away if it looked like Mr. McCarthy’s audience looked like a rowdy pack.
Quite the contrary – things were very orderly and although all of the seats were soon filled, everyone was polite. Per instructions received, I sat at the front right corner so as to be well-positioned for the reading. I felt like a bit of a fraud – I had no clue as to what his new book was about, nor did I know anything about the author himself and his oeuvre. The audience was quite diverse, so that didn’t give me any sense of what I was about to hear. I sat next to some tittering British art school students. There were also some journalistic types taking notes throughout the reading.
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As a self-effacing, wanna-be writer whose rapidly diminishing chances of ever becoming even a second-rate publishing author is paced only by his readiness to disarm his detractors by throwing his ego under the bus — to laugh at himself, his missed chances and self-inflicted miseries — I don’t particularly like people who take themselves too seriously.
Nicole Krauss apologizes for using the word “asshole” in front of a crowd who’ve already chuckled at its use. She pauses after reading a passage like she expects the audience to murmur in appreciation with sub-sonic “ohhs” and “oohs” that wouldn’t be audible unless it was released in a dead-quiet auditorium. She then waits just a beat too long before beginning again, as if she, too, needed a moment to recover from that Sad Truth despite being the author of said Sad Truth and having read the same passage dozens of times in the last month.
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Rosencrans Baldwin Reading Review – You Lost Me There
Someone isn't a fan of corn
The turnout at McNally Jackson was surprising. I’d not heard or read any of the hype buffeting Mr. Baldwin’s first novel, You Lost Me There, so the kind of flitty buzzing of low voices that comes from an expectant crowd came as a shock. The attendance dwarfed A.L. Kennedy’s (a week or so before) and Tom McCarthy’s (the next day). Neither got this kind of elbow-to-elbow attention from pastel sweaters and thick black plastic glasses. I jittered out a few vicarious shivers and grit my teeth through a brief belly-cut of jealousy. Brief because he looked more surprised about the crowd than I, and spoke like a man appropriately appreciative of the strong attendance. Christ. You can’t help but like the guy.
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Jonathan Safran Foer Reading – Eating Animals
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.
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Posted in Insults, Readings
Tagged asshole, eating animals, foer, idol, insults, jerk, jonathan safran foer, non-fiction, novel, reading, sad
Joshua Ferris Reading – The Unnamed
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!)
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Posted in Insults, Readings
Tagged book, ferris, fucking beard, joshua ferris, neckbeard, reading, strand, the end, the strand, the unnamed, then we came to the end