Posted: 07 Feb 2014 - From The Stranger:
Every first Wednesday of the month
at 6:00 p.m., the Fireside Room at the Sorrento Hotel goes quiet and fills with
people—crazy-haired, soft-spoken, inscrutable, dorky, NPRish, punk, white,
black. The reading public. It fills right away, all these people who don’t know
each other, and they sit very closely, sometimes three strangers to a couch. By
7:00 p.m., you can’t get a seat.
The party spills into the
foyer—there’s a table for chess or whatever near the elevator, and two people
sitting there, staring into books. A reporter for the Shoreline Community
College newspaper showed up the last time to ask about the event, but it’s not
much of an event: Nothing happens. No one ever addresses the room. No one reads
anything at you through a microphone. You just sit and read and get waited on,
and leave whenever you feel like it. And Manhattans are on special—$5 until
9:00 pm.
. . . .
The insane thing about a party where
you’re not supposed to make small talk is that it makes you want to make small
talk. You almost can’t not do it. (But what a relief to not have to!) If you go
with friends, someone will quietly explode over what they’re reading and you
will want to know what it is, or they will interrupt your reading and hand you
their book and say, “Just read this—just this paragraph.” At the last reading
party, a man and a woman were sitting in leather wingback chairs in front of
the fireplace, and he was reading Joseph Campbell and she was, well, listening
to him whisper to her about Joseph Campbell. I unsuccessfully eavesdropped. I
could only make out “theological shifts,” “how we live,” “ethical.” Hearing
“ethical” sent me back a few pages (in Nabokov’s Pnin) to reread something I’d
just underlined: “Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel
cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its
tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but
unethically…” (I was happy to be reading Pnin and not Joseph Campbell. No offense to
Joseph Campbell.)
. . . .
The Shoreline Community College
newspaper reporter asked how it started: Annie Wagner (former Stranger staffer) and
Brendan Kiley (still a Stranger staffer)
and I used to read after work together at Brendan’s apartment. Brendan always
had tea and cheese and figs and tomatoes and dark chocolate and whiskey, and
lived in an apartment with lots of chairs and lamps. We were all going to be at
home alone reading otherwise; why not do it together? So civilized. So casual.
None of the pressures of talking! Mixed with intermittent talking, when you
couldn’t resist!
Thanks to author/friend Jules Older for bringing this to my attention
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