Ithaca

October, 18: reading with Rebecca Wolf in the SOON reading series, at No Radio Records, 312 East Seneca Street, Ithaca, NY.

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Finally writing after traveling up to lovely (and freezing!) Ithaca last Saturday night to read with Rebecca Wolff at No Radio Records. I started off the journey by training it up to Athens, New York (they gouge you on Fridays--$60 instead of the usual $30 or so), where Rebecca (editor of Fence) and her husband, the novelist Ira Sher, had prepared a wonderful salmon and spinach dinner. We had wine, talked about the pathetic state of book sales, and (even in spite of sorry state of book sales and the overcrowded market) the continued wonderfulness of the creative life (oh how we all like our writing—cf Avital Ronnel’s Crack Wars, for an account of that).

The next morning, me, Rebecca, Ira, and their two lovely children Asher and Margot, drove about 5 hours upstate, through just-peaking beautiful foliage, to a Holiday Inn. By the end of things, we were dry.

Here are the two lovely children (Asher was furious he couldn’t use my iPhone):



And the road:



Ira was left in the hotel room with the kids while Rebecca and I moseyed on over to the reading. Here is Ira—wine was invented for such occasions:



Me doing a Narcissus sort of thing:



A decent crowd showed up at the venue itself—maybe twenty people—a nice mix of folks from both the Cornell and local communities. Fred Muratori, whom I hadn’t met before but with whom I had corresponded back when I was still editing Explosive Magazine, gave me a very thoughtful and wonderful introduction. Seth Perlow did a great job arranging the entire event. Ron Henry designed beautiful broadsides for the both of us.

Here are Rebecca and Seth:



The audience (and ambience):



More audience:



Part of the audience including nice Fred Muratori:



At the end of things, after a great dinner and great glass of wine (Red Truck), I felt a bit like I was coming down with a cold, so repaired to the hotel early. Rebecca walked with me. We discussed accessibility—I remarked that I would likely never write anything quite so accessible as my new book again (and certainly would never have such incredible timing on a publication). Rebecca remarked that I would (generally) "never be Dana Goodyear” because of the emotional remove in my work. Made me think, of course, about the emotional remove of my self—and perhaps the emotional remove of all “experimental” writings, all experimental selves. A certain "not-in-the-moment" quality because many of us are aware—at this disgraceful moment in history—that the way things are, the way we are, is untenable. Does one really want to inhabit this moment? “You must change your life,” Rilke wrote at the end of a poem about a classical statue with a disappeared head.