As I noted last week, I’ll be ripping a short set as part of this month’s edition of Patio, Bronwen Lam and David Dufour’s reading series at T.J. Byrne’s. If (and only if) it’s Tuesday, May 13, 2025 as you are reading this, then the event is tonight and you should come; otherwise, the above information is useless to you, except in that it’s the first of a couple of NY readings I’ve got on the books for the summer season. In both cases, I’ll be psyched to share new stuff and participate in that classic genre wherein you publicly and ritualistically exhibit a bunch of privately written work.
I tend to feel sorta trollish--or, slightly more charitably, like I’m just dumb as hell--when I talk about how I find readings, as a performance format, particularly tough to get a handle on. I go to a lot nowadays, and I get a lot out of doing so, but the operation is not some clean 1:1. My sense is I’m still trying to figure out how the tech works.
It’s not as if there’s some intrinsic loss to transmitting writing as speech, or at least not one that makes it worth bailing on the attempt: I have been an audiobook person for a long time, and obviously, there are some really sick ones. I’ve also got plenty of accumulated evidence of spoken word stuff being wielded extremely effectively in the musical/performance settings of Ye Olde Undergrounde and Experimental Scene, past and present (the ones that leapt quickest to mind are Russian Tsarlag and Intersystems, but there are lots, and I tried to do it too). As for how all this relates to my trolled-out project of “understanding readings,” I think there’s probably something going on with the idea of the accumulated attention of a roomful of people being trained on one person, and that person’s obligation to hold (or, like, occasionally charm) that attention, all without the benefit of the spectacle that a larger performance might offer. Which is to say: playing music is pretty humiliating, but at least there are loud sounds and instrument cables to hide among. When the material that is on offer is just, like, a piece of paper with some semi-experimental fiction on it, the prop comedy possibilities are severely curtailed.
Anyway: this week, I’m linking to some video documentation of my participation in a prior NYC reading, one mounted as part of the “Bring the Flowers to the Theatre” series that the homie Nick Klein booked at Sara’s in March 2023. I hopped on the (characteristically crossgenre) bill, which also featured V. Manuscript, Early Shinada, Katy Mongeau, and Noise Nomads. It was a great show, and a key data point in the ongoing experimental investigation of the reading as an art form. Below, I read a section from my long-story-in-progress “Brinkmann 2000” (a different chunk of which was previously posted here), as well as a short excerpt from my novel manuscript. It’s the same novel I’ll be reading from at Patio tonight, during which I will also be looking for any and all prop comedy opportunities. The food at T.J. Byrne’s is already sorta funny, so the odds for a successful gag are honestly pretty decent. Come through.
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