Local bookstores on the whole stop scheduling author readings and booksignings for December because they need “all hands on deck” to handle the Christmas crowds, and because, as Diane Everman of Barnes & Noble told me earlier this month, it’s difficult to schedule authors in December when most people are busy with their Christmas schedules. As Everman states, to schedule authors and then not have people able to show up is not fair to the authors who, of course, want audiences at their events. At about the same time that I spoke to her I came upon an article covering the topic of author events in The New York Times, “On Getting and Spending; Reading and Listening,” by Kennedy Fraser, author of Ornament and Silence. In the article, Fraser mentions a phone call she received from Jamaica Kincaid, whose most recent title is My Brother, a memoir about her brother’s death from AIDS in Antigua. Fraser writes, “The phone rang, and in my ear I heard what for me is a familiar voice: Jamaica Kincaid…
Ms. Kincaid sounded tired. For weeks, she had been crisscrossing the country, promoting and reading from her new book…
The previous evening, her stamina had been tested by attending the National Book Awards dinner, with its great commercial roar of editors, publicists, sales people and agents. Her character had been tested by the experience of being selected as a finalist for an award and then very publicly observed as she failed to win it. She seemed to have survived, with the humor, irritation and resilience that are characteristic of her, this most peculiar and unliterary trial by fire. Later that day she was scheduled to talk and read from her work at the Center for the Humanities at the 42nd Street library. I said I would go to hear her. She reads often, to large audiences and in distinguished places; she has enormous stage presence. I think, whenever I hear her read, of an editor who once explained the enduring popularity of hearing the spoken word: `It’s like being read to by your mother.’ Ms. Kincaid and I got talking about literary readings. Like everything else, they are in a state of flux. Three Lives, a bookstore in Greenwich Village, was (along with the sadly defunct Books & Co.) one of the earliest establishments to invite writers to read to customers back in the late 1970s. `We thought it would be thrilling to put solitary people who sit in a room and write for months and years together with their readers,’ says Jill Dunbar, the store’s co-owner…
Ms. Kincaid remarked that she wasn’t generally interested in going to readings. `I suppose I might turn out to see Charlotte Bronte,’ she said, laughing.”
Pining for Pasha
But Thom the World Poet has scheduled an event at Quackenbush’s on Saturday, December 20, 3pm, to help benefit Pasha, another literary being who has an enormous stage presence, and who’s published the chapbook Shepherding Moons and is set to release a poetry CD in the future. Pasha has been associated with the Blue Plate Poets and Friendly Fire. The reading is free, but donations will be collected to help fund costs of remitting Pasha’s cancers. Thom, John Hawk, and Jeff Knight, among others, will read. If you can’t make that date, on Tuesday, December 30 at Ruta Maya, 6:30pm, Pasha will read again with Thom but also with Albert Huffstickler. Best wishes to Pasha in his recovery process.
This article appears in December 19 • 1997 and December 19 • 1997 (Cover).