The Gentrification of the Mind: A Talk with Sarah Schulman at St. Mark’s Bookshop

1. Schulman telling us how very different the village was then from how it is now. 2. The crowd listening, rapt.

I came for the inspiration and stayed for the revelations. Sound like church? Yes indeed! An East Village kind of church: the St. Mark’s Bookshop.

The place was just as I remembered it from my childhood: full of fascinating books about REAL people, new avant-garde magazines, and the pervasive sense of safety. The safety, the coziness of St. Mark’s, is provided by its championing of the underground, leftist, bohemian village world of old—the last vestiges of which are disappearing day by day.

“A 7-Eleven has opened up on St. Marks Place,” said Sarah Schulman, opening up her talk. “That is what we are here to talk about today.”

It felt just like an organizing meeting, and indeed– Sarah Schulman’s new book walks hand-in-hand with activism. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination brings to light the effects of one of New York’s deliberately ignored tragedies: the AIDS crisis.

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BETRAYED! at Franklin Park

1. Diego Ongaro, Filmmaker, Roasted Pig Delivery Dude, and Hubby to Courtney Maum, fiction writer, humourist and Outlet contributor, with Michelle Legro, Online Editor to Lapham’s Quarterly. Kielbasa Dogs not named. 2. Penina Roth, Founder and Curator of the Franklin Park Reading Series and professional podium raver. We have the same Smiths cassette. Yay!

 

It felt like summer last night in Brooklyn, and Franklin Park‘s big front yard seemed like the perfect place to round out the particularly gorgeous day. Inside, a crowd of literary lovers was ready to get back stabbed, cheated on, and psychically attacked. Or, in other words: It was Betrayal night at this month’s installment of Franklin Park Reading Series. Joseph Riippi, Leah Umansky, Fiona Maazel, Toure, & Heidi Julavits were the writers who would share their sordid tales.

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HAPPY DEATHDAY! Literary Death Match’s 6th Birthday at The Back Room

1. Aryn Kyle, reppin’ for Housing Works and adolescence. 2. Dean Haspiel reading comix from an iPad, while Todd Zuniga does something weird with his iPhone. 3. Taylor Negron, talking about sluts and cunts.

  

The Back Room is a bar on the Lower East Side that’s underground and far off the street. It’s dark and plush and serves its drinks out of coffee mugs and teacups. It was also home to the very first Literary Death Match, which happened exactly six years ago. Last night, the international series returned to the scene of the crime, and featured Darin Strauss, Aryn Kyle, Dean Haspiel, and Kim Dana Kupperman as contestants, with Jon Scieszka, Taylor Negron, and Sara Benincasa as judges.

One thing that happens when a series grows (there’s been 201 episodes in 39 different cities around the world) and builds a reputation over six years: People notice. And when people notice, then people come out to such events. And when people come out to such events, shit gets crowded. Yeah, last night was crowded. Like, sitting on the ground crowded, standing awkwardly in the corner crowded. Like, my photographer was trying to take some photos, and this inspired a cranky couple behind him to say, “Can you move?!” To which he said, “Uh, not really.” Because he couldn’t — there wasn’t anywhere for him to go. But their response? “WELL, TRY.” At least I get to blog about such things later, like the evolved person I am.

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Wandering with A Public Space

1. Crowd cold chillin’.

It’s been busy for Cobble Hill’s BookCourt recently: the store hosted the dumpling extravaganza that was Adam Wilson’s launch party for Flatscreen (read Julia’s interview here), a launch party for the new literary journal The Bad Version, and last night they had the issue launch for the 15th issue of A Public Space. In this issue, writers of fiction, poetry and essay comment on the issue’s theme of wandering. APS invited poet Timothy Donnelly (The Cloud Corporation; most recently awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) and fiction writer/essayist Leslie Jamison (The Gin Closet) to read their contributions.

I got there a little early, which is both a good and bad thing. If I have cash on me and I’m in a book store, it’s hard to keep it in my wallet. Thankfully, BookCourt also has an amazing bargain section downstairs. I nabbed old issues of UNSAID and The Literary Review for a $1 each, and then glued myself in my seat with the new APS. I covered the last issue’s launch at BookCourt, which looked at the similar theme of the solitary walker. While I flipped through the issue, I thought about APS’ approach: the inclusion of different genres to communicate a theme is comprehensive and allows for a nuanced aesthetic that, even though two issues can hunt out similar narratives, generates a singular dialogue. In short, APS is legit.

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From P-Town… Forget about Band Camp

1. Mission Theater is on a fairly busy street near a Thai place and a coffee shop. I parked in front of a place that sells bathroom fixtures. 2. Jennie and Betony always come to Mortified. They said it unearths your own memories.

Mortified readers Sheila Ashdown, Kelly Fry, Julie Sparling, Ariel Wilsey-Gopp, Lori Ferraro, and Sam Paul shared personal journals and letters, co-edited by Egan Danehy and his team of producers, to a sold-out crowd at the Mission Theater on Valentine’s Day.
There is a cult following. I know this because they ask newbies to applaud. I did not applaud, even though this was my first show.
A few thoughts crossed my mind as I scanned the crowd. Do these people also go to lit events? Probably not, but maybe sometimes. What is the difference between an author reading and someone sharing their adolescent journals or letters? I guess we expect better writing craft, but you can’t fake the intensity and surprise of writing meant to explore, understand and document personal experience.

You get about 200% of intensity and surprise at a Mortified show, plus the crowd’s expectation that something someone reads will trigger a similar personal experience which they forgot or repressed or whatever.

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Meanwhile, in California… Infested With Vermin

I had the pleasure of attending, reading, and showcasing my vast fake journalism skills  at Vermin on the Mount, “a night of irreverent readings,” on February 11th. The show is typically done in Chinatown up in Los Angeles, but on this evening, San Diego was the place where the (black) magic happened. The venue, 3rd Space, is a creative club and my first impression went like this: “DAMN, THIS PLACE IS FANCY. I’M GLAD I SHOWERED”. No, this was not said out loud. Yes, I do speak to myself in all CAPS.

Our host, Jim Ruland, author of The Big Lonesome, was handing out raffle tickets and greeting the literature enthusiasts as they arrived. I really liked his outfit and was excited that the evening had prize-winning potential. I asked Ruland to sum up Vermin in three words: “Filthy, fun, and contagious.” I asked if the shows come with any free testing and he let me know that they were working on the funding.

Stories From the LES, Stories from Brooklyn: Vol.1 Brooklyn @ RAC

1. J.E. Reich’s story, her beer, and Franzen-as-coaster. Sorry, Franzen. 2. Julia Bartz, Wisconsin, the man named Fernando. 3. Bryant Musgrove and the word “recockulous.”

  

I like Vol. 1 Brooklyn a lot. It reminds me of California. Besides being really smart, Vol. 1’s daily content includes regular appearances by punk rock, hand-aggregated literary links, and reviews of some of my favorite authors, delivered to me in a hang-out-on-the-couch voice that makes me want to eat tacos and read all day in patterned pajamas. Last night the blog had their first-ever event in Manhattan at RAC in the LES, with the apropos theme of “Stories from the LES.” It was a laid-back, mellow event that felt less like a proper reading than Vol. 1 inviting a bunch of lit peeps over to read to each other. Sweet.

 

From P-Town… A Salon Grows in Portland

1. A smoker’s view of SE Mall Street around 7:45pm. 2. The kitchen meets the dining room at the intersection of Dunbar and Coffelt.

 

On Friday, If Not for Kidnap, a living room poetry series curated by Donald Dunbar and Jamalieh Haley, brought Kevin Sampsell, Edward Mullany, Chloe Caldwell, Bryan Coffelt and The We Shared Milk to Dunbar’s house in Southeast Portland. Only one of the above is a poet, unless you count the band.

SE Mall Street is not well-lit compared to the glare of an iPhone’s Google Map in the hands of my passenger; however, we obtained a visual of what appeared to be several band members carrying amps and equipment headed towards a large house. After initiating pursuit we were led straight to Dunbar, who was greeting guests from his porch in front of a one-smoker audience. I was unable to get a usable picture of Dunbar at this point and waded through the people who like to stand in the kitchen towards a table with cold beer and book donations for Crow Arts Manor to get a better look at the crowd.

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Hot Sauce

Shoplifting_1(from Conversations over Stolen Food)

Between December 2006 and January 2007, we recorded forty-five-minute conversations for thirty straight days throughout New York City. Half of these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store which we call “W.F.” Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park and a Tribeca parking garage. This piece comes from the first conversation.

7:43 p.m. Friday, December 29

Union Square W.F.

A: I’ve got a final question for you. If we eat things before we exit can no one call…catch us? There’s habeas corpus but there’s something else. Body of evidence? Doesn’t physical evidence need to exist of the event? So long as we consume all evidence perhaps nothing can be done to us.

J: Yeah, I guess we’ve created a body of evidence, but only we ourselves will listen to this tape, and, what’s more, I’ve become friends with the security guards. They know me by first name, as I know them by first name. Today I spoke to…

A: Don’t. You don’t want to get them in trouble.

J: Tonight we shared reintroductions. Tonight’s my first time in the this store for several months and I shook a lot of hands. It felt warm. It’s nice to be welcomed back.

A: Now could you explain what happened in Providence?

J: You mean…

A: Inside its W.F.?

J: Well I have to admit: the desire to keep my living expenses low became reckless. I would carry into the store a bag, a plastic bag from W.F., and I’d place it in the cart and, as I’d shop, I’d place things in the bag, and I’d place of course many many groceries outside the bag, but there were certain items, certain expensive items, that I’d place in the bag—such as sirloin steaks and blueberries (for a while they cost 5.99 a carton). I’d drink an expensive ginseng tea. There was this hot sauce I’d steal, pure extravagance of course and I knew I had turned sloppy, yet I knew…

A: You know the thief’s main virtue is modesty? A modest thief never…

J: That’s right.

A: I’m guessing. I’m guessing.

J: You’re right. And I was modest tonight in stealing my my steamed broccoli and shredded carrots and brown rice, which tastes unnecessarily salted, and that explains why I keep drinking water. You’d think a place committed to health wouldn’t salt foods so excessively.

A: So what happened? So?

J: So just as I left the store an undercover guard blocked my passage. He said Excuse me; I’d like to speak with you inside. And I looked at him and said I don’t know what you’re talking about. And he said Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about? I said No I don’t. And he said You left the store with unpaid merchandise. And I said What? And he pointed to the bag containing my wrapped sirloin, which cost twenty dollars, and said I’ve worked in this business six years—get inside. The manager stood waiting for me, totally baffled, since we were likewise on a first-name basis, and after previous episodes of stealing (in an effort to keep expenses down) I would treat him with lots of affection: shaking his hands, wishing him a good night, telling him I’d see him real soon. He led me into an office, where he did not press charges. He firmly believed I was confused. That became the story; I’d got confused. I said I’d started talking with the cashier about her necklace. She wore this charm made of imitation gold which spelled her name in cursive and…

A: Hmm, I saw one on this woman sweeping. If you can read the name I’m curious. It looked very long, like Florestan.

J: Florestan, is that right?

A: But the necklace hangs backwards, so you’ll have to read backwards. But sorry go ahead.

J: Yes. I said I got confused: I’d asked about a girl’s necklace. I said I’ll pack my groceries apart from my roommate’s since she’s vegetarian. I said I myself used to be a vegetarian, and know what it’s like. I said I’d just started eating meat again and just got confused. And the manager kept nodding with a blank expression, neither agreeing nor disagreeing while the undercover processed the paperwork. I said Can’t we talk about this? The guard said No. He snapped my photo and said If you ever step into another W.F. you could be arrested on the spot. I started thinking of this project, not wanting to jeopardize it, yet of course didn’t say anything. It’s not like I could have said Oh but sir, come two months from now I’ve planned conversations over stolen food with my friend Andy. Please don’t stand between me and this project.

A: Today’s Times contained pieces on shoplifting. One gave the undercover… [Tape ends]

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch just completed Conversations over Stolen Food. Their book Ten Walks/Two Talks is due out in December from Ugly Duckling Presse. Other publications include Animal Shelter, Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Everyday Genius, LIT, n+1 and UbuWeb.