Yawn Story

Friday night was the One Story reading. Kind of lame going to a reading without my trusty sidekick, but you know, when you make your living blagging about literature, science, and social anthropology, you can’t miss an event like this just because you have PMS (still somewhat unexplained by science) and an aversion to going into Pianos by yourself.

The reader was Dani Shapiro. I was under the impression that she was a solid good writer but hadn’t read anything by her. Now I don’t have to!

The excerpt she read…

…was written from the point-of-view of a four-year-old girl (yuck! Can’t this stop RIGHT NOW?) in the PRESENT TENSE.

…included the phrase: beads of sweat appear on his forehead like drops of condensation; and, to refer to lipstick on a pale face: her mouth is a slash of red.

…had the kind of polished, pretty-precious sentences that despite (or because of?) their preciousness create a feeling of suffocation. I wanted TO DIE just listening to it. I’ll take a bunch of non-grammatical tone deaf SHIT over this kind of midlist mediocrity any fucking day.

Not only that, but the place was a HEN PARTY. Not that the average reading is a sausage fest but what are you supposed to do with your eyes when you go to a reading?

Cluck cluck cluck. I don’t mean to be a hater, but contemporary novels just make me scurry deeper into the literature of bygone eras. Everything today turns out to be over-hyped crap. Who do we have now? What the hell do we have?

[edited to add: I just remembered what we have. Television. That’s where the shit is really going down.]

by Left Hook | 7 May 2007 | reading, personal hells | Comments