This Week in the Mercury
Friday, February 12, 2010
Books Literary Mix Tape
Posted by Jacob Schraer on Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 2:00 PM
Last night a drunkenly respectful crowd gathered at Valentine's for the inaugural night of the Literary Mix Tape series. The three readers, Matthew Korfhage, Eric Bader, and Pete Swanson, treated us to letters, poems, short stories, and excerpts for a breezy hour and a half of bookish stimulation.
Matthew Korfhage started out the night with some wry letters from E.B. White. Most famous for writing Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, White also co-wrote the keystone of all modern style guides, The Elements of Style, and contributed heavily to The New Yorker's Talk of the Town column with observations of life in New York City. The letters Korfhage shared demonstrated White's often hilarious demeanor with his friends and fans, including his explanation for the famously open-ended Stuart Little, telling the hopefully perceptive correspondent that he found life to be inconclusive, and so his stories followed suit.
White's letters were probably the highlight of the evening for the faint of heart. The night quickly became a series of voice stories, some of them bitterly romantic, some abstract and tragic. Leonard Michaels and Donald Barthelme made multiple appearances in stories that were in turn disturbing and hilarious. Pete Swanson of the band Yellow Swans read poems by Graham Lankin in a booming, intense mutter. Eric Bader treated us to perhaps the best story of the evening, a piece by Barry Hannah, one of the writers famously edited by Gordon Lish (who supposedly mangled Raymond Carver but seems to have had pretty good taste).
The crowd was rapt, responsive and polite, staring at the stage, applauding, and glancing surreptitiously around the room like kids in class to look at a girl, or a boy, or maybe me. Couldn't tell. Either way I'm looking forward to the next reading in the series which could be in a month, or six weeks, the organizers weren't sure. But you can check dailymiltonian.wordpress.com for further news on the event.
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