| Thursday, April 26, 2007 3:36PM | | | | Town Hall Readings: Writing Home | Posted By: Aaron Hamburger
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| Tags: Writing Home, Salman Rushdie, Gordimer, Gaiman, Desai, Youssef, tostaya, DeLillo, Tafdrup, Martin | The prospect of sitting through an evening of ten--count ‘em, ten--readings in one evening was a bit daunting, even given the impressive array of talent on display last night at Town Hall.
Thankfully, introductions were dispensed with. Each writer merely appeared onstage one after the other, and if there was any question as to who they were, you simply referred to the program guides handed out by ushers as you walked in.
First up was Steve Martin, reading from his to-be published memoir of his beginnings as a stand-up comic. True to form, Martin was his funny, self-deprecating self. Also, as a writer closer to the beginning of his career than the end of it, I was reassured to hear that even Steve Martin had to start out somewhere, in this case a trashy dive in San Francisco with an audience member in the front row who shot ping pong balls at bad comics.
Next came a poet from Denmark, Pia Tafdrup, whose work about her parents made a deep impression on the crowd, though not me. I was glad to hear her read one poem in Danish, however. This may be the only venue in America at which a poet reading an ode to her father in Danish would get a standing ovation instead of a rotten egg in her face.
Don DeLillo read from a harrowing passage from his new novel Falling Man, which described 9/11 New York in vivid apocalyptic tones that brought me right back to that awful day. DeLillo was so successful at that old creative writing dictum, to “make the familiar strange,” that at first as I was listening, I thought he was writing a science fiction novel set some time in the future. One of the most vivid passages went something like, “The dead were everywhere, on the rooftops, drizzled on the windows, in the air we breathed, in the clothes we wore.”
Apocalyptic themes continued with Tatyana Tolstaya, who read from The Slynx, a novel about a Moscow of the future, after a “big explosion” in which the city becomes a small village lost in the woods. She was followed by an Iraqi-British poet Saadi Youssef, who kept turning aside from the mike as if to take all the hundreds of people in the audience into his confidence. His language was very abstract and I had trouble following what he was trying to say, something to do with the intersection of vertical and horizontal lines, which is the location of writers in exile, who need deeper roots at the point of intersection, but not in the soil.
At this point, I checked my list of readers. Five more to go. An interesting evening so far, but would I be able to make it until the end? I was seated at the back, and it would have been easy to sneak out. Yet from the moment Kiran Desai walked on stage, I had no doubts. I was here to stay. “I’m going to try to keep to my time and not be the stereotype of an Indian behind the microphone,” she announced, to a well-earned round of laughter. She then launched into an ironic passage from her novel The Inheritance of Loss that was at once bitter, wise, and deeply moving, as if she were channeling the spirit of E. M. Forster up there. My favorite bit, besides the Indian delivery man for a Chinese restaurant who stuffs scallion pancakes in his clothes to keep warm during the New York winter, was about some college students who go to a protest of gentrification, even though they “hoped to be gentry, but were still in the student stage of supporting the poor people who wanted them gone.” I’ll say it again: that’s a line E. M. Forster might have written had he lived in our time.
Desai’s magical performance was followed by Congo-American poet Alain Mabanckou who spoke very good English but explained that he felt shy about reading his work aloud in that language, so he read his poem beautifully in French. His “new friend, not my bodyguard” Joe read the poem in English. It was an enchanting evocation of longing for one’s home country, which Mabanckou compared to “dancing on one foot, sleeping with one eye open…” (Apologies for Mabanckou if my notes fail to do his work justice.) Only one poem, but just the right poem. Readers everywhere ought to take note.
Neil Gaiman read a piece of prose and then an amusing poem about “what to do if you find yourself in a fairy tale.” Among the don’t’s: don’t eat or take anything in a strange house, and don’t trust the youngest of the three princesses in the castle. Among the do’s: feed hungry creatures and pick the strawberries in winter.
Nadine Gordimer earned a round of applause before she began reading a masterful story about refugees in Africa, “The Ultimate Safari.” Forget about me, the old woman,” Gordimer said before she began, “it’s being narrated by an eleven-year old girl.” She needn’t have warned us. The voice was powerful and unmistakable. The packed house at Town Hall fell to a hush in order to hear it.
Salman Rushdie capped off the evening with a selection from The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in which he pointed out that disorientation meant loss of the east, because as any sailor will tell you, east is what you sail by. I also liked his line “the world’s head laundry is pretty good at washing brains.” Though to tell you the truth, by this point in the evening, I was starting to lose focus, and if it had been any writer of a caliber less than Rushdie’s up there, I might have zoned out entirely.
An hour and a half later, and I was still alive. More than alive, actually, inspired, thrilled, and eager to read, as well as to write. Though, admittedly, also a little tired. Thank you to all the writers above for appearing, and please accept my apologies for bastardized anyone’s writing in my mad scramble to take notes while listening to you perform.
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| 4-26-07 5:12PM: Jane Ciabattari said...
Hey Aaron, I see what you mean! IT was a great night...Jane
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