K.M. Soehnlein

All the Books You Haven't Read

Two things have been on my mind this week. One is that Friday, July 10th is Proust’s birthday. The other is that Newsweek published a Top 100 Books list.

Neither of these things is particularly urgent. It’s 131 years since Marcel Proust was born—not exactly a milestone anniversary. Likewise, the Newsweek list doesn’t represent any particular breakthrough in scholarship or pop culture; it’s a “meta-list”—compiled from ten already existing best-books lists—and in fact when you read the methodology, it seems a little random. Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (a.k.a. In Search of Lost Time) shows up on Newsweek’s list at #65, but that's not why I've put these two things together. I've put them together because they both seem to be part of the conversation that I have with myself all the time about reading—about what I have read, what I’m reading now and most importantly, and most confusingly of all, what I should read next, out of all the books I haven't read.

I teach in a creative writing program, which means I put reading lists together for my students. I’m expected to know a lot about literature. I’m expected to read widely. Last year, I read 47 books. (Yes, I keep count.) Some of these were books I read for the first time. Many were books I re-read because I put them on a syllabus and needed to re-familiarize myself. A few of them of them were book-length manuscripts written by students or by friends that I’d been asked to read, to give advice, to give a blurb. Some of them I read purely for pleasure—these were the ones on my nightstand, the ones I read before I fell asleep every night. Some of these were pretty light or pretty thin. It worked out to almost one book a week. That seems like a lot to me; at any rate, it was what my brain could absorb.

And yet it always seems like I haven’t read enough. When I went through Newsweek’s 100 books, I saw that I'd read fewer than a third of them. It actually makes me nervous to admit this. In the world of writers and professors that I spend a lot of time in, admitting that you haven't read something you're supposed to have read is one of the great unspeakables.

Of course, you can’t read everything. No one can. But there’s this attitude that gets passed around, where if you admit, “I haven’t read [fill in the Great Book]” you may hear your words repeated back to you incredulously, “You haven’t read [fill in the Great Book]??” I think writers take pleasure in shaming each other on this subject, and so  we sometimes lie about what we’ve read—or if not out and out lie, at least perform a vague nodding of the head, in reference to whatever book is being discussed at the moment, as a way of not admitting that you haven’t read it. I know I've done that in the past.

So I'm going to come clean here, at least a little. War and Peace, ranked number one on Newsweek's meta-list: never read it. Ulysses, ranked number three: read parts of it, but never got through the whole thing. Number 8 is both The Iliad and The Odyssey: I remember reading some piece of that in high school, but it’s a fuzzy memory at best. Number 9, Pride and Prejudice—nope, and I've lied about that one in the past. Number 10, The Divine Comedy: nope, though I admitted that to my students last year. Add to that Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch, most of Faulkner, all of Pynchon. That's just a few of them.

Which brings me back to Proust. A few years ago, my colleague Aaron Shurin told me, "Once you read In Search of Lost Time, your life will become divided into before-you-read-Proust and after-you-read-Proust." That was a grand enough statement to get me interested. Then this year I taught a gay literature class, and I wanted to fill in a few gaps in the gay-lit canon. On top of that, I had a trip to Paris planned, and I wanted to get ready for the trip by reading a French novel. And so, I started to read Swann’s Way, translated by Lydia Davis, the first volume of the seven volumes that make up Proust's masterwork.

I’d tried to read it before and had put it down after a dozen or so pages. His sentences are long and multi-clausal and often without helpful commas where you want them—you can literally lose track of what the sentence is about before you get to the end of it. You can’t skim; if your mind wanders, you have to start over. But something happened this time around. I think the moment I knew I’d stick with it came after I read, appropriately enough, the passage when the young narrator talks about the joys of reading. Specifically, about the power of a novelist’s “creatures” to take hold of a reader’s soul:

… we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all the possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them… (p. 87)

And I thought, after I re-read it a couple of times, that’s exactly right. It’s an elaborate but nonetheless accurate way of talking about the power of a novel over a reader, and also demonstrating that power in the sentences themselves. It’s mesmerizing, if you surrender to it. I surrendered to it. It took me three months, but I finished Swann's Way. I'm not sure it changed my life, but then there are still six more volumes to go...

I wish I could read more. I wish everyone did. Which is why when I finally get around to reading something I’ve wanted to read for a long time, there’s a very sweet satisfaction involved. It’s the pleasure of feeling like you’re conquering that big mountain of knowledge and experience one volume at a time. But more importantly, it's the pleasure of the book itself, which casts us inside its dream, "a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer."

Bon Anniversaire, Monsieur Proust. Thanks for the pleasure.

The Angry Writer

Something is going on right now with writers. Writers are getting angry. Angry about bad reviews. More to the point: writers are venting their anger against their critics in a public way. In the past week, a writer I know used her Twitter account to vent (her word) against a New Yorker reviewer by posting "may she rot in hell"—and two relatively high-profile incidents of writers mouthing off about their reviewers have rippled out across the inter-twitter-web. "Mouthing off" isn't quite right; these writers see themselves as striking back. Writer-versus-reviewer is not particularly novel. But what seems notable to me about these latest incidents is that writers are simply fed up with people talking smack about them. Writers understand the consequences of a bad review; frankly, it's pissing folks off, and they're using technology to respond in self-defense.

Incident number one: Alice Hoffman. The New York Times reported last week on Hoffman's "Twitter outburst" over a Boston Globe review of her novel The Story Sisters:

Reviewing the book for The Boston Globe on Sunday, Roberta Silman wrote: “This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

By Monday, Ms. Hoffman had evidently deleted her Twitter account. “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion,” Ms. Hoffman said in a statement forwarded by her publisher...

Incident number two: Alain de Botton. After critic Caleb Crain pointed readers of his blog to a review he wrote of de Botton's Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, a review that accused de Botton, among other things, of "mean-spiritedness," the reviewed author found a forum for his strike-back: not Twitter, but Crain's own blog. In the comments section, de Botton wrote:

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon - so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

"I will hate you till the day I die." "She's a moron." "May she rot in hell." Wow. One can only marvel at this kind of venom, being unveiled in such a public way, and with so much sanctimoniousness. De Botton does himself no favors by claiming that he is backed up by "all those who have read [his book] with anything like impartiality," as if he is the judge of who has or hasn't read his work with "impartiality." The irony is that to the outsider, Crain's write-up of de Botton's book reads like the kind of classy old-school review that every author hopes for; if such a review turns out to be negative, you're supposed to just suck it up as par for the course. In reality, the classy old-school review is a doomed species. So every review one manages to score carries that much more proportional weight.

In the end, de Botton, like Hoffman, recanted. Sort of. De Botton claimed, on another website, that he mistook his posting for "private" correspondence, saying metaphorically that it had been "inadvertently broadcast" to a wider audience than he had imagined.

I suspect that "outbursts" like Hoffman's and "naive" responses like de Botton's are the signs of a larger frustration most writers are feeling, not only about mainstream criticism, but with the at-large and ad-hoc culture of criticism that we all live with now. Writers are more beleaguered than ever, not least because we are more at the mercy of opinion than ever -- so many motherfucking opinions! The rant-and-post reviewer, on Amazon, on a blog, in a tweet, invests nothing more than a few minutes of his or her time, and the writer, who has put in a lot of time, has to live with the spleen. What writer can't relate to de Botton's plaintive wail: "that's two years of work down the drain"?  And what writer didn't feel for Alice Hoffman when in the end she retracted, with this bit of humble pie: "Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing"?

This is a dilemma that strikes me close to home. I got a shitty review from Robert Julian in the Bay Area Reporter for my second novel, You Can Say You Knew Me When, one that appeared early in the book's life and thus (as I saw it), managed to poison the climate for the novel's release. But I didn't—I couldn't—go on the offensive against Julian, no matter how much I thought his reading of my book was shallow and off-mark; because Robert Julian was the very critic whose enthusiastic review of my first novel, The World of Normal Boys, was among the earliest and strongest boosts I'd received. How could the same guy who loved my first book so much hate my second to the same degree? I didn't understand it; neither could I attack him for meanspiritedness or anything else. It seemed best to simply ignore him, and what he'd written about me, but it wasn't easy, knowing that the review was out there, casting its influence. Once the sting of his slam wore off, I came away with the understanding that a review, good or bad, is no more the "truth" than any other single opinion. But you still have to live with it.

The ability for the single opinion to find a platform, and an audience, is what writers are so pissed off about. Every opinion gets heard today, whether on Amazon or Twitter or someone's Facebook page or some random blog. Opinions get dashed off all the time, and writers suffer for them, and people like Alice Hoffman and Alain de Botton—and my writer friend who used her Twitter account to wish her reviewer a hellish afterlife—all seem to be saying at the very same moment: You're entitled to your opinion. And I'm entitled to offer, in response, a very loud Fuck You.

The Michael Jackson Generation

My first reaction to Michael Jackson’s death was a kind of ironic detachment. I called my friend Gary, and we immediately went into deconstruct-mode, trying to predict how the media narrative would play out. He foresaw the outpouring of mass grief for one of the most beloved pop stars ever, on the level of what happened after Princess Diana’s death; I anticipated a “Behind the Music” tabloid treatment: the King of Pop falls from the heights, becomes an inscrutable, unfathomable recluse hounded by lawsuits, permanently tainted by charges of child molestation, entirely irrelevant as a music maker. Pure tragedy: he’d gone from being a celebrity artist who touched everybody to being a public leper, gruesome, isolated, untouchable.

But soon I was combing the internet for his music videos and footage of his live performances, wanting to push aside the Michael of the last twenty years in favor of the Michael who ruled the twenty years before that. My initial detachment revealed itself to be a kind of shock and I realized that I was, against my own sense of rationality, deeply affected by the end of his life. Suddenly I was weeping over his astonishing performance of "Billie Jean" at the 25th Anniversary of Motown -- the event that introduced the world to the moonwalk. I was posting links to articles and texting friends for their reactions. Turned out my behavior was like a lot of other people’s, so much so that within hours more than one friend was complaining on Facebook about the flood of posts concerning Jackson’s death; some were using the crisis in Iran as a point of comparison: why is Michael Jackson’s death more important that what’s going on in the world? But of course it wasn’t more important, just different.

For two weeks, I’d watched in outraged horror the government assaults upon civilians in Iran, including the footage of one young woman, an innocent bystander named Neda, dying on camera after being slain by a police bullet. In comparison, grieving the death of a wealthy, famous person is a kind of indulgence, somewhat unseemly, and probably an example of herd mentality. Intellectually, I understand such complaints, but they do nothing to explain the way we actually go through life, attaching emotional significance to the music that accompanies our memories. We are all part of the herd, and we don’t always know what connects us until we realize it is gone. Put another way: Neda’s death in Iran is a shocking outrage against humanity; Michael’s death is a loss felt personally.

It’s not that much of a stretch to say that I came into consciousness as a 5-year old listening to The Jackson 5 on the radio singing "A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3" -- it’s a song that’s always been with me. It’s not a stretch to say that puberty was firmly anchored by MJ’s Off The Wall album, released the summer between middle school and high school, which I played on vinyl repeatedly with the girls in my neighborhood, practicing our dance moves to "Rock With You" and turning ourselves into teenagers. Or that Thriller was the soundtrack to my entire senior year of high school, and how even then we knew it was a big deal to be eighteen and alive and dancing to this music, which everybody seemed to love.

Nor is it a stretch to say that what happened to Michael Jackson in the eighties was a kind of horror show that felt like a betrayal. How was the boy who recorded the happy soundtrack to my generation's childhood replaced by the scary, ghostly figure whose music seemed to get sappier even as he became more frightening to behold? (I think the first time I ever heard the expression “a parody of himself” was in reference to Michael Jackson.) How did the yearning in his voice and the astonishing self-possession of his dance moves become the primal scream and bloated spectacle of his world tour concerts? More to the point: Why would this beautiful young man slice his nose off his face and bleach his skin? Did he want us to look away?

There were plenty of ways to try to pop-psychologize — his lost childhood, the likely abuse, the way our adoration pushed him into the very void we now saw so abhorrently, to say nothing of the complexity of race and skin color, which I couldn’t even pretend to truly understand. Like many people of my age, in adulthood I stopped paying attention, letting the so-called King of Pop do whatever it was he was going to do, like buy a ridiculously oversized, child’s fantasy mansion and hide away in it. Like marry a woman who was the daughter of the previous King of Pop, a union that seemed both preposterous and sad, a blatant bearding for Michael’s unmistakably queer energy -- his sensitive feminine voice held in balance with masculine fury and powers of seduction. By the time he was dangling his baby out a hotel window in front of reporters and parading his children around in public wearing what looked like burqas, he seemed just too fucking crazy to waste any thought on. Unreachable.

Now he’s dead, probably from too much prescription medication administered in his elite isolation, and we’re all fixated on him again. We can look again, not just at the nightmare Michael but at the life as a whole. Part of what makes this very public death feel like a private loss is that what seemed like a betrayal all those years ago was really just someone else's sad story, but there was no way to grieve. His death contains the recognition of that past loss -- of the talented kid who shepherded me and my friends through the '70s and early '80s, who fell apart before our eyes.

But mixed in with this is the unexpected joy of returning to the music, which never really went away. Last night, spontaneous MJ dance parties broke out all over the world. I experienced that communal outpouring at a gay bar in the Tenderloin, when the DJ slipped into Rock With You, and the dance floor immediately filled up, and we all busted out our best moves again, still carrying inside of us our younger selves, who learned to dance to that song all those years ago, before we grew up and forgot who taught us how it was done.

Lit for Pride

Few things put a smile on my face more than walking into my favorite bookstore and finding my novel on special display, complete with a Staff Favorite card attached. I snapped this pic at Books Inc. in the Castro, where their LGBT Pride Month rack gave a top-shelf slot to You Can Say You Knew Me When.

Most gay writers seem to object to the "gay writer" designation to some degree -- David Sedaris just put his ambivalence on record, saying that yes, he is a gay writer, but please don't shelve his books in "the ghetto" -- though you can't deny that this kind of prominence puts you right in the face of potential readers. (In San Francisco, June is a big month for queer tourists, some of whom are going to wander into a store like Books Inc. and buy something the staff recommends.) No writer wants his or her audience limited, but not everyone has Sedaris's platform or visibility.

Indeed, invisibility is an ongoing issue for books by queer writers, as yesterday's infuriating column in the Washington Post Book World makes clear. Asked by a reader to recommend a "new gay book," editor Dennis Drabelle responds, "not many of these are being published anymore," then goes on to recommend a single British novel many years out of print. As awesome queer website Band of Thebes observed of Drabelle's idiocy,

A more helpful answer might have steered readers toward the annual Lambda Literary Awards, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the ALA gay book prize, and the revamped Alyson Books.

I was at the Lambda Awards last month, and I can assure you that many, many queer-themed books are being published. (Check out the gathered GLBTerati from that night on Homo-Neurotic.com ... I was there in a chartreuse ascot, and posed for this pic with short story writer Justin Torres.) Band of Thebes offers a list of authors whose "new gay books" might have made for a better answer from Drabelle. A couple of current suggestions from my own shelf: Rakesh Satyal's Blue Boy, a beautifully composed tale of a grade school baby-gay who finds transcendence through voyeurism, the Hindu god Krishna and early-90s-era Whitney Houston; Vestal McIntyre's Lake Overturn, which weaves together many stories of the residents (both gay and not) of one Idaho town; Drew Ferguson's The Totally Screwed Up Life of Charlie the Second, a funny, sexy first-person teen romp; and Trebor Healey's A Perfect Scar and Other Stories, just re-released , which includes a heartbreaking favorite, "The Mercy Seat." And those are just by the boys.

Seems to me that Dennis Drabelle and The Washington Post Book World ought to print an apology. And how about reviewing a couple of new queer titles while you're at it?

Meanwhile, if anyone needs any evidence that those who hate queers understand the power of gay-themed books, check out this story about Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, first posted on Salon and then covered on the Advocate. A wingnut "Christian" group has not only attempted to ban this book from a library's shelves -- they actually WANT TO BURN IT.

Freedom from Religion

I've been mesmerized by the events in Iran since the election "results" that came in this past Friday, results that favored the ruling president -- Holocaust denier, artist censor and homo-hater Ahmadinejad -- over the opposition candidate, Mousavi -- symbol of hope for reform for many of Iran's youthful population, including young women. The supposed victory was announced implausibly fast and by such a wide and obviously fraudulent margin that millions of Iranians immediately took to the street [photos], and have returned every day since, a spontaneous populist expression of outrage at the top-down control by the ruling mullahs over so many aspects of day to day Iranian life. Cries of "coup" and "dictatorship" have risen up in a country where freedom of speech is not a given, and speech is often punished.

Having opened my Twitter account only a few days prior, I found most of my news there, tagged #iranelection, a feed of comments from folks inside the country and around the world that continues to renew itself at a shockingly fast rate, far outpacing reporting by traditional news outlets. (The failure of the mainstream media to pick up on what was happening on the streets has itself become a story within the larger story of the events.) With websites and radio shut down inside Iran and foreign reporters arrested and beaten, these dispatches from everyday Iranians marked a new means to bear witness, demand accountability and seek aid at a time of heightened crisis. There are signs that the pressure is working -- Iran's s0-called Supreme Leader has been forced to dial back his original dismissive rhetoric and now says election results will be investigated. What happens next is at this writing frighteningly uncertain. There are reports that the mullahs are feeling the heat, both from the the massive display of popular outrage as well as criticism from governments worldwide, though other reports warn that we might be seeing a Tiananmen Square-level crackdown against protesters, or a civil war.

I know no more about Iran's political workings than any other U.S. amateur news junkie, but I do know that the Islamic Republic of Iran has never been a place where personal freedom has had much of a foothold, and so whether Ahmadinejad keeps his chokehold on power or Mousavi's popular support edges him toward the center, we're still looking at a country run by religious fundamentalists. Even the vision of hope revealed by the past few days of mass protest, largely by young people -- Iran is a country where a third of the population is under 30 years old -- can't erase the fact that the protest generation has  been raised in a country where anti-Semitism is official policy, where homosexuals are executed in public for having sex (there exists an underground railroad for queers who want to leave the country), and where women struggle for any measure of political influence. Beliefs and attitudes must be resisted as surely as individual politicians. Mousavi, a former hardliner, has only recently been a voice of liberation; could he possibly provide the kind of change that would bring true freedom to the people of Iran? Would a queer man or woman living in Tehran, or an artist, or an atheist, experience some measure of freedom under a new regime?

If there is anything that has sparked my interest in the past few days' astounding political display, it is not the hope  for one candidate, or even, really, for "all the votes to be counted," but for the people of this vibrant and storied nation to create for themselves the possibility of freedom. Separate church and state: that is my real wish for this new Iranian revolution. Only then will real change take root.

Literary Death Match and other balancing acts

That thing on my head is a crown, not a dunce cap, though I do feel a bit duncey today after publicly displaying my complete lack of knowledge of pi... But I'm getting ahead of myself. The crown was what I got, along with the medal around my neck -- which, if you could see it, would show a fist-bump comin' at ya -- for winning Literary Death Match. The event at the Elbo Room was packed; I wasn't really sure who was in the crowd because I was pretty much blinded by the spotlights. (Seriously, how do performers ever get used to that?)

I read a heavily-edited-for-time version of "Harmony Moore Has To Die," one of the autobiographical stories I've been writing over the past few years about the years I spent in New York in the late 80s-early 90s and was involved in ACT UP. I was right out of college, and I thrust myself into the world of social-change-through-civil-disobedience in a big way, and so went from being a barely out of the closet student to a more or less full time queer activist. "Harmony Moore" is about a character named Eliot, a fictional composite of two different friends, both of them now dead: Luis Salazar, a very sweet boy who I spent a night in jail with in Albany, New York, after we were arrested at a "die-in" outside the state legislature, and Bradley Ball, a larger than life figure who once threw a birthday party at which he invited all his friends to bring a cake, and then, over the course of the night, threw every last cake out the window of his midtown Manhattan apartment. In the story, Eliot comes out in drag as Harmony, wearing "a platinum wig that had seen better days," and for the hell of it, I pulled from my pocket a wig of that description and wore it for part of the reading. It helps to have a husband who's both peformed in drag and directed theater if you're going to try that outside of your home.

The crowd, and the judges -- Josh Kornbluth, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb and Ayelet Waldman -- all responded strongly to what I wrote, but in a very hilarious Death Match style, which meant jokes about prison sex, points deducted for cliches ("sunken cheeks" was kind of lame, I admit) and observations about how the spotlight shining through my ears turned them a distracting transparent pink. Public comments about the way my ears stick out...jeesh, it's like I was back in middle school...but that's the nature of Literary Death Match, a fine balance between public glory and public humiliation. They picked me as the winner of my round over a very droll Jim Nelson, who read a funny, sexually explicit and somewhat cringe-inducing story about an awkward threeway in a hotel room.

For the finale, I was up against Katharine Noel, who, along with her husband, Eric Puchner, won the second round with their completely charming essay about being writers in a relationship; Eric's text was frequently intercut with Katharine's "footnotes," as she was quick to correct his version of things, usually declaring them "total exaggerations." They also ran down a "scorecard" that tallied which of them had more Amazon reader reviews, translations, prizes and so forth. (This seemed to horrify Ayelet Waldman, whose husband is the super- successful Michael Chabon, and who for her own peace of mind is clearly not keeping that kind of scorecard.) Eric and Katherine had been selected over Michelle Richmond, who read a really enjoyable piece called "Turndown Service" written from the point of view of her husband, Kevin, a man no one in the literary community is sure even exists, because he never shows up at any of her readings. Michelle, you've only deepened the mystery!

Our lovely and sadistic hosts Todd Zuniga and Alana Conner forced Katherine and I to step into garbage bags, then hop across the stage and write on a posterboard "ten different digits that are part of mathematical pi" (a trick, since there are of course only ten digits, right? But I still got totally flustered and wrote somethign that began with 2.14....Oy!). Then each of us had to balance a copy of David Foster Wallace's big, fat novel Infinite Jest on our heads, and walk back and forth across the stage. I hit the finish line first without dropping the book -- all those years of practicing my supermodel posture paid off -- though I'm told that Katherine, who was in the lead up until then, had waited for me before she started the final leg, so maybe I only won by a gift? Oh, well, what's winning anyway, when you look so darn ridiculous in your paper crown?

By far the best boost of the night for me was the praise I got for my story, which has given me the push I needed to get back into this material. With "Robin and Ruby" already in production, I've been feeling around for my next big writing project. I'm pretty sure that these ACT UP stories are what I need to be writing. Over a post-Match dinner at Corner, Kevin went out of his way to convince me that it's time to finally commit to this. I've been reluctant, I think, because that time was so important to me, and important to history, too -- ACT UP was instrumental in changing the way AIDS drugs were tested, and the way AIDS was talked about in the media and viewed by the government. How to translate something so big into what is essentially a rather modest form, a series of short stories, linked together by the point of view of one unformed young man? Talk about a balancing act.

UPDATED: Changed the original pic to this one, taken on the street outside.

Read to the Death

I haven't been this excited (or terrified) about a reading for a long, long time (probably since I had to read an Armistead Maupin story at an Armistead Maupin tribute, with Armistead himself in the house). I'm talking about Friday night's Literary Death Match, sponsored by Opium Magazine, at which I'll be one of four writers competing (or five, since two are teamed up together, which seems like an unfair advantage). It works like this: two writers read and are judged by a panel seated on stage, usually with drinks in their hands. Then two more read, and then the winners of each round compete in a "death match" that has nothing to do with writing -- stuff like laser tag, shooting hoops with Nerf balls, or a staring contest. (If I make it to the final round on Friday, please, please, please no sports-like activities. A staring contest, now that I can handle. Bring it on.)

The LDM phenomenon has been one of the best things to happen to the writing world in a long time -- the competitive aspect is pretty good-natured and mostly provides an entertaining frame around the well-written fiction that gets read. The couple times I've been to LDM the crowds were big, much larger than most of the bookstore readings I've been to, but usually as respectful. I say "usually" because there was the time a very drunk heckler stood up and tried to shut down Wesley Stace, shouting "No, you're doing it wrong!" Of course, if you can handle your heckler in style, you'll likely score some points with the judges.

LDMs have been held in New York, Boston, Chicago, and as far away as Beijing. I hear there's one planned for Rio de Janeiro. Hats off to globe-trotting organizer Todd Zuniga, who'll be c0-hosting Friday in San Francisco:

Literary Death Match
When: Friday, June 12; Doors at 6:30, show at 7:15 p.m. (sharp)
Where: Elbo Room, SF
647 Valencia St., (415) 552-7788
Cost: $10 (and an issue of Opium8--$2 off the cover price!)
With: K.M. Soehnlein, Jim Nelson, Michelle Richmond and Eric Puchner / Katharine Noel