The PEN Festival Keeps On Trucking
So many festivals, so little time. All offer a taste of the profound, a refreshing window to the world beyond New York, perhaps a chance to escape our manic days, if only for a few hours.
At least that's what we told Gawker Special Correspondent K. Eric Walters to convince him to return to the bowels of Modern Literature, this time at an event sponsored by PEN, McSweeney's and the New School. (A nefarious trinity, to be sure.) What did he see? Jonathan Ames humping a tree, for starters.
After the jump, a shift to the first-person pronoun and a journey into, um, something.
The moment I stepped into the auditorium on West 12th Street I knew a horrible mistake had been made. Those pricks at Gawker said I'd be going to THE FESTIVAL, and I had immediately started dreaming about eating sushi with Robert Deniro and cutting lines of cocaine on Jane Rosenthal's chest with an American Express card. I should have read the email closer.
Here I was, knee deep in a lecture hall full of book freaks at a show called The Believers. The flyers said the event had a running time of 79 Min. 37 sec, but I suspected Irony was at work. For the most part, the names were recognizable: Ames, Lipsyte, Moody, Roth (Patrick, not Phillip.)
Jonathan Ames performs the transexual mating call, a ritual he knows all too well.
"My name is Jonathan and I'm an alcoholic," joked Ames, the emcee of evening. (The party for his new book about transexuals was the previous night. I didn't go, nor was I invited.) "This is not an AA meeting. If this was, you'd all say "Hi Jonathan!" The 200 hundred plus crowd answered: "HI JONATHAN. " Funny stuff. I mumbled the serenity prayer to myself, thanking a higher power for six hours sober come midnight.
Ames then channeled Spalding Gray, taking center stage to tell a ten-minute story about language and his New Jersey elementary school in the 70's. He riffed, he jerked his arms, he thrust his hips. He concluded: "I humped the tree and I lost the girl. That's the story of the hairy call." [Ed: Maybe you should explain this? -JC Trust me, no. -KEW]
Lipsyte isn't paranoid. He doesn't know what you're talking about, okay? Just back off.
Sam Lipsyte, billed as the Special Guest, grabbed the mic next to read from his novel Homeland. Transforming to alter ego Lewis Miner, he left the crowd laughing and slightly stunned, bringing the venom of the jilted Catamount alum upon our heads. (A sample: "Bathing at knife point in the phlegm of the dead.) A McSweeney's kid, Salvador Plascencia, performed after him, rattling on about mock gang hand signals. My guard went down. This was a pretty good show. I was enjoying myself.
Last time I ever make that mistake.
Rick Moody swaddles himself in J.Crew's finest bouclé while Jonathan Ames looks on in envy.
"I'm a little worried we're not going to be as funny as the rest of this thing," said Rick Moody after leading a panel of seven essentially foreign writers onto the stage. Where was his fancy black hat? I'd seen it on him a few days earlier at KGB, and had heard rumors about him wearing it since. Hatless, I didn't know what the fuck he was capable of. This was a man who had Tobey McGuire ponder date rape in The Ice Storm, after all.
Moody's questions had a whiff of the profound what are the "rules of cross-cultural appropriation"? How does "globalization and corporate uber-culture" impact what we read? Of the 20,000 books published a year in the U.S., less than 5 percent are texts from foreign languages translated into English, he said. What the hell is literature anyway, and why won't anyone make a movie out the Black Veil?
The panelists from Yoko Tawada to Tsitsi Dangarembga answered fiercely in a mix of German, Japanese, and the occasional English. All dialects and accents were tinged with far left sympathies. The highlight: Tsitsi kept reminding the audience she was from Zimbabwe, and speculated that Americans hate themselves now as much as the Nazi Germans did following World War II. The crowd seemed to find this a reasonable thing to say. The evening basically ended for me there. You have only two days left to experience the festival for yourself. Remember: 125 authors, 45 countries.
