When Christy Zink, our pal in the city, filed her first FotHB report for us, it was to cover Michael Cunningham's dignified bookstore reading. My how things have changed. Tonight, Christy sends over her account of literary karaoke, DC-style. Many thanks to Christy for taking a karaoke for us. We'll get your back next time, girlfriend. Promise. We're already working on our stirring "Me and Bobby McGee" rendition for next year.
Literary Karaoke, by Christy Zink
The first thing you should know is that I do not sing in public. Never. Ever. No amount of alcohol, not even under the thrall of the Big Hunt’s abundant beer list, can persuade me. So I was plenty happy to sit back and listen to the noise unfold at the Literary Karaoke event held in DC this Saturday in the Dupont Circle bar The Washington Post once referred to as “a safari gone bad.”
The second things is that there are plenty of writers who should not sing. When you sobered up on Sunday, I bet you knew who you were. (Note to crowd: earnest is hard to pull off unless you can really sing or have a wicked sense of kitsch. Karaoke singers the world over have learned that loud and shameless is usually the way to go.)
But the third and most important thing to know is that some writers do have some damn fine pipes and made some righteous noise to support DC’s writing scene and the literary journals that contribute to it.
The Big Hunt is one of DC’s better known bars, decorated with fake rib bones on the walls and a holdover of the Joe Englert, theme-bar empire—the Insect Club and the Andalusian Dog having met their demise many years ago. It’s a true bar’s bar: it smells like beer and smoke, and everything—the floors, the booths, the tables, the barstools—is just a little bit sticky. It’s also been known to have one of the best jukeboxes around, but this night was purely writers’ choice when it came to the music.
The “Barrelhouse Boys”—named after the newish literary magazine they edit (and whose business meetings take place, it turns out, in this very bar)—got the night started in the with their rendition of “Jessie’s Girl.” The Cure, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, and Journey also got karaoke coverage alongside new poems and fiction excerpts. Writers took to the microphone to call out work about religious fanatics in political office, car wrecks and screws in the legs, dire marriage proposals, wanting Nina Simone instead of the wedding march, and the glorious misspellings of spam e-mail. The night’s emcee Michael Neff (of Web Del Sol) kept things hopping, threatening to sing yet again unless someone got up and took the mike away from him. Writers were happy to oblige.
Read a poem; sing a song: It’s an interesting concept—one in a line of recent inventions to make readings less stolid and up the entertainment ante of literary events. Still, there are some kinks to be worked out—how do you allow conversation that seems perfectly fine when someone’s warbling through a bad 80s tune while still getting folks to pay concerted attention when writers are reading their own work? What kind of writing can really work in this environment? (Fiction’s likely got to be quick, funny, and slightly snarky, I’d wager, to keep people’s attention here.) And how can anything lyric compete with “The U.S. Open of Competitive Eating” flashing from the bar TV screens, in which eaters moved through watermelon, pasta, and Italian salad at dangerous speeds?
But from talks with an editor at Barrelhouse about the accomplishment of making it to Issue #2 in an unforgiving business to discussions with novelist Leslie Pietrzyk about the hard work of drafting her novel #3 this summer, it’s clear that the event sparked any number of welcome meetings between people from all different parts of the District’s literary community.
And while it might seem hard to believe that a conversation with Gargoyle editor and poet-in-his-own-right Richard Peabody about the trauma of current American politics and the terrors of contemporary publishing could be inspiring, it was exactly that. To know that his literary magazine has just released its 50th issue and that his Paycock Press, alongside the other evening’s sponsors, offers space for writers to meet the world and be not just heard, but read, is something certainly worth a raised glass and maybe, even, a raucous karaoke song.
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