Last night we joined more than 50 fellow L.A. literati for the much-vaunted Dust-Up reading at Book Soup. Fair warning: The coverage that follows represents a considerably higher than usual dose of TEV snark, so if you’re feeling at all Julavits-y today, best to proceed directly to the next entry.
Are we sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.
We knew that we were in trouble when we overhead a woman in the book shop enthusing to her friends over the imminent “MFA reunion” (her expression, and one we utter in the same tones as “traffic school” and “colonoscopy.”) Nevertheless, we struggled to keep an open mind as we thumbed through a copy of Dust-Up, a yellow hardbound anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, whose website describes as “literature and some other stuff bound between two hard covers for people to read.”
Before we could read too far we were herded into the hot, cramped Annex next door. A friendly suggestion to the proprietors of Book Soup: Buy more chairs. A scant dozen chairs or so were available to the overflow crowd. As the crowd thickened, the doors were opened and street noise filtered in during the course of the reading. This being Los Angeles, the 7:00 reading managed to start at a fashionably late 7:20. Herewith, an overview of the presenters and their material.
Aimee Bender led off reading a small portion of her story Deathwatch. The piece was amusing but too arch and self-conscious for our taste. We took the brief reading as an encouraging sign for the evening as a whole but as the other readers went on to read their entire stories, Bender must have felt a bit cheated. It’s a shame because hers was the most interesting piece of the night. As the evening wore on, Bender looked decidedly bored but that may just be her listening face.
She was followed by Glen David Gold who read from a memoir called Anatomy Lesson, which recalls his youthful love for a cancer victim named Emily. The piece was affecting and poignant and Gold is a lively, personable reader but as the piece went on, the decision to publish it in a literary journal seemed less clear. Confessional, chatty, it seemed more the stuff of an upscale men’s magazine. But Dust-Up seems more in exercise in Friends Publishing Friends than in the Next Big Literary Thing.
Phil Hay followed with a story of his own called Whizz Bang and here we do confess that this prompted perhaps an unnaturally high level of irritation on our part. But editors publishing their own fiction always seems to lend an air of Vanity Project to the proceedings. The story itself, the tale of a ‘50s town in which the young men perpetually crash in the Pontiacs, Chevys, and the rest, was often quite funny but too frantic and amped up – ultimately failing to add up to very much. We couldn’t help recall James Wood’s infamous hysterical realism essay: “It is all shiny externality, a caricature.”
Poet Jeff McDaniel followed with a pair of poems, the first – an amusing ditty about God - better than the second – a ponderously political affair. As we’ve said before, we’re poetic nitwits, so feel free to discount our thoughts here but we were underwhelmed, disappointed. Perhaps it’s a Peck-like moment we’re having, experiencing undue anger at unfulfilled potential, but a moment in the second poem underscores the problems of his work. We do not have a copy of the published poem before us but there’s an excellent and loaded line, wherein he says (approximately) “Nobody pays attention to first straws.” The line is powerful and effective on its own but he proceeds to then follow it explaining that it’s last straws that get the attention, and thus the audience is bludgeoned with the point. And that’s a shame.
Alice Sebold – who rather rudely admonished TEV for taking her photograph (we gotcher Lovely Bones right here, sister) – read a short story called After the War, which fits a mold we’ve previously called the WeCSoW – the “Well-Crafted So What” – the polished, quietly New Yorker-ish story that essentially fades from view within the first five paragraphs, and a staple of MFA programs and writing workshops from Berkeley to Brooklyn.
Our dissatisfaction notwithstanding, it should be noted that the acolytes in the room lapped this all up, following the readings in their freshly purchased copy of Dust-Up. It was a cozy MFA lovefest to be sure, and although we theoretically support any upstart literary venture here in L.A., we’re unlikely to continue to follow the progress of Dust-Up, if this evening of alternatingly flat and excessively arch work is any indicator of what’s to come. There are interesting, exciting voices out there but Dust-Up appears to have resolved to steer clear, presenting the Same Old Folks telling the Same Old Stories.
And some of our best friends are MFAs. So there.
I love it when your panties get all wadded.
Posted by: Jimmy Beck, MFA | July 20, 2004 at 08:41 AM
I told you.
Posted by: ARC | July 20, 2004 at 08:54 AM
i don't know what mr. mcdaniel read, but he has got some good stuff.
course, i like john engman, too, so what do i know.
Posted by: red clay | July 20, 2004 at 11:33 PM
Thanks for covering this event. I was going to order a few copies, but now have second thoughts. Family emergencies aside, I would have been there and it sounds like I would have been disappointed too.
Posted by: Aldo | July 21, 2004 at 09:54 AM