Lit Crawl 2010…!

So we were running late, and only caught the tail end of our first event of Lit Crawl NYC, which was Soft Skull Night at Solas. Julia did manage to hear enough of Richard Poplak’s piece to know that it was about Kazakhstan and Borat, which was weird considering she’d been watching it the night before.

1. SWAP NYC contingent gathered at the Yippie Cafe, before we moved on to the street. 2. Writer & editor of The Rumpus Stephen Elliott, reading under a tree, accompanied by the sound of motorcycles.

Next was the Yippie Museum Cafe for “Welcome to the Jungle: Urban Lives Revealed.” Jerry Garcia was manning the front, and he told us it was $5 to get in, which seemed odd because Lit Crawl is advertised as a free event. The cafe was dark, smelled strongly of cat piss, and had all the prerequisite pot leaves on the wall. The ‘misunderstanding’ over the cover charge was resolved by moving the reading onto the street.

1. Stephen Elliott & poet Corrina Bain. 2. Emily, Karen, & Andrew, who are all former interns of The Paris Review. “They were the best years of my life,” says Emily. “Months,” says Karen. “It was three months.”

It was, as Stephen Elliott said, “weirdly perfect” out there, the stripped-down quality of it all: a writer, reading on the street, to a small crowd listening intently over the din of the city — and it was especially fitting with the content of the writing. Jack Boulware (author of Gimme Something Better) read after Elliott, with a true story about the Dallas Cowboys. Henry Chang followed up with a selection from Chinatown Beat, a noir detective novel. Poet Corrina Bain ended the show with two short pieces, reminding us how refreshing — and moving — poetry can be, especially next to all that fiction.

1. Katy & Daisy, current interns for PR. We don’t know if these pictures are doing them justice, but apparently you have to be adorable to intern at PR. 2. PR Editor Lorin Stein, playing Juliette to our Romeo.

The Paris Review’s preview of Lorin Stein’s inaugural issue drew a crowd which only grew larger, as Fontana’s, the location of the preview, was also the location of the Lit Crawl after party. “Who here isn’t a Paris Review subscriber,” Stein asked of the standing-room-only swarm of us, directing the PR interns, “This is your market.”

1. Sam Lipsyte & the band The Hippy Nuts. 2. Poet Dorothea Lasky & PR Poetry Editor Robyn Cressman. Dorothea says she looks so sad in the pic, but she’s not.

We heard short & energetic reads from Dorothea Lasky, J.D. Daniels, and Sam Lipsyte. Those of us with fall issues in hand were entered into a raffle. The prize: The PR containing David Foster Wallace’s first appearance in the magazine [never had much luck with DFW-related raffles (a metaphor for something?)]. We closed our Lit Crawl adventure by posing for a photo with the Lou Reed mural in the back of Fontana’s, where talk was already beginning about the panels of today’s Bookfest.

Julia Jackson, a regular Electric Dish Contributor, and Anna Prushinskaya, The Outlet’s Editor, conspired in writing this piece.