Friends of the Happy Booker (FotHB) are everywhere. And they love to send emails about all the cool literary goings on in their neighborhoods. We enjoy their notes so much that we have decided to run them as a regular feature. Today’s installment of the FotHB Report comes from Christy Zink, our pal in the city, who writes to remind us about what we’re missing by living in our hermetically sealed suburban pleasuredome. In our defense, we would like to note that we also get cool author readings way out here. In fact, just last month Goldie Hawn read at our local Books-A-Million.
In Praise of Bookstore Readings and Michael Cunningham, by Christy Zink
While the Happy Booker was off gallivanting in Manhattan, I had Michael Cunningham all to myself. Relatively. (Is there nothing worse than a straight, married girl chasing after a beautiful gay man?) Still, I’m officially agog, as I am every time I hear him read. Cunningham read at Chapters Bookstore here in DC last week and reminded me just why book readings matter and what they continue to open up in this town that can so easily shut up on top of its political self.
In case you live in the District and haven’t been to the Chapters since it moved off of the notoriously lawyer-heavy K Street, you’ll find the digs in the Penn Quarter equally intimate as the old store and stocked with literary books that dare ask you to think. Wander the shelves; see how so many books are faced out to give writers an unexpected chance and to beckon readers over for a second look. This is part of the experience, isn’t it? The unexpected discovery, simple, but slightly guided to be right before your eyes.
Cunningham hopped up on the front of the reading table, telling us that he’d feel “too much like a high school principal” reading behind the desk. He read sections of his novel Specimen Days insistently, poetically, alternately quietly and forcefully, sounds both sweet and misbegotten—the urge, urge, always the procreant urge of the world—in a way that would certainly make Walt Whitman, who ghosts the whole of this “trilogy of novellas” and its language, proud. This celebrated author, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his lyric meditation The Hours, hardly needs words from me about why he’s worth trekking out to hear. But trust me: he’s worth every penny and then some.
And yet, there are no pennies, at least from the audience’s point of view. (Full disclosure: I bought the book immediately for 2500 pennies plus tax.) As writers—and increasingly, as readers—we keep hearing how publishing is a business, how a good writer worth her salt has to be market-driven and industry-savvy and economically minded. But there’s something going on here that complicates such rules that rises up through this eccentric, sudden community that meets in a café or university classroom or bookstore for an hour or so. Bookstore readings are warmly and unabashedly public. Most don’t require an invitation. You don’t have to be in the know or have kissed the ass of just the right person or be sleeping with the bouncer or be wearing shoes that cost more than most people’s weekly paychecks. Maybe my love affair with book readings is all delusion. But readings, I fiercely believe, will always take you as you are.
Of course the writer wants to sell books. Of course a reading always requires a performance of sorts. Yes, there can be the know-it-all crank in the back row who makes noise about the historical accuracy of the length of sideburns in the time of General Sherman, even if the book is set in 2020.
But for readers in the audience, these events invoke not the accountant’s or the huckster’s or even the actor’s work, but the writer’s. There’s something about hearing an author’s written words in his or her own voice that always teaches you, that brings you closer to the work. That lets you in just a little bit more. What we hear there is the way the writer hears his own words, how she sounds to herself. And that intimacy is sacred; it allows you to lay secret claim, in the precise way of all readers who fall in love with a writer.
In these moments, I’m not just in love with Michael Cunningham, but also the woman in the straw hat who leans forward in the squeaky folding chair to hear him just a little better. The man in the splashy tie next to me who quits his squirming for a minute—something I get a pretty good idea isn’t at all easy for him—and sips in a breath at a worrying turn of the story. I still hate, however, the cellphone, whose idiot ringtone inevitably goes off at just the wrong time, almost breaking the spell.
I haven’t just grown increasingly tolerant of the question-and-answer session lately, but started to fall for it and its very public nature and how I then carry that into my experience of the author’s book. I adore the woman in the smart glasses who talks to him about how she inhabited his characters in The Hours—Clarissa and Virginia and Laura—to different degrees; I’m drawn to the one whose face I do not see, because I sat behind her, but who asks about his love for the city of New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and how the writing community is just now beginning, really, to respond. I love the journalist-style girl who asks how he responds to criticisms of literary parasitism. I love, too, Cunningham’s graciously pointed answer that he rejects the notion outright. How he jokes that “Every writer should pray that some living hack will take on” his stories, and how he goes on to speak with tribute to the “potency” of the writers he puts himself in conversation with in this coupling of books, from the intellectual Ms. Woolf to that “dervish of the modern age”—as Cunningham calls him—Mr. Whitman.
What I will always love, then, is this exchange that happens nowhere else: that dumbfounding notion that readers come so much wanting to believe the invented world the writer creates and how that faith reveals itself a little differently each and every time I’ve gone to see a writer. It’s the way Cunningham chooses the hard phrase to counteract the easy lyric, how Walt teaches him to celebrate the beauty of the world in the dirty alcove through his new words, his own and no other. This writer—in person. This live voice—its invitation and promise, that says, I wrote these words and give them to the world because it’s what I do. I share them in good faith. They now belong, at least partly, to you. Is that not, after all, what the heart of reading is?
Thanks for sharing Christy's thoughts with us, Wendy! She made me feel as if I was there, and wish I had been there - all at once.
I once heard Michael Cunningham say in an interview that he has the students in his writing classes write out (long hand) the first paragraph of a great novel, so that they have the experience of writing something that's truly remarkable. It's a beautiful exercize that engages the mind and the hand with words. I think every writer should try it at least once.
Posted by: ami | June 19, 2005 at 11:10 PM