This week, the Village Voice is running a great feature on the life and times of independent reggae producer and basement-dweller Victor Axelrod, written by conference participant and my pal Matt Scheiner, who certainly knows a lot about this sort of thing. Here’s a snippet from the article, which you can find in this week’s music section:

At one point, Symeonn’s sweet vocals throw the drummer into a trance, and Axelrod has to remind everyone not to “zone out” during the performance, bringing a dose of structure to the historically mind-bending abstractions of dub music. Although Axelrod says he doesn’t subscribe to the romantic notion that legendary reggae studios like Studio One and Channel One relied on spontaneous jam sessions sparked by random people who just happened to be hanging out there, he may not realize he’s creating that very same vibe at Don’t Trip. But it all starts with him. In addition to his Antibalas tenure, he was an original member of retro-soul titans Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, and did production work on Easy Star Records’ Dub Side of the Moon, the NYC label’s highly successful reggae tribute to Pink Floyd.

So read it online, or if you’re a New Yorker (which is like 85% of the conference partcipants) pick it up on your street corner. Either way, make sure to leave some love for Matt in the comments.

“Studio Two,” The Village Voice

At the end of this month, two of the conference participants, Christian McLean and Sally Jane Kerschen-Sheppard, will be contributing to Dancer for Money, a series of ten minute plays in Manhattan that promises to “explore the various ways we will do or say or be just about anything,” which sounds like an excellent night out.

The event will be at the Sargent Theatre at the American Theatre of Actors from October 25-28, and tickets are fifteen bucks. Sally Jane’s slice of the pie is entitled Chemistry, a play that “humorously shows what happens when two lonely people come together for all the wrong reasons.” Christian wrote the title piece, which “holds up an uncomfortable mirror to the underbelly of modern capitalistic society,” and — contrary to rumors — is not a stage-set re-imagining of the following piece of arthouse film:

So if you’re in NYC, go support Sally Jane and Christian. Go here to buy tickets, and here’s a map to the place, which is pretty close to a bunch of main train lines, so you have no excuse for not showing up. If anyone’s interested in helping SJ and CM spread the word, you can download the postcard after the jump.

Best of luck guys, and make sure to send an update on how everything goes.

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So: it’s been a while. I’m not even sure if anyone still reads this thing, but here’s a little news to those who still dial in to Don’t Date to keep track of the tumbleweeds. This week’s New York Times Book Review featured both a review of Ursula Hegi’s new novel, The Worst Thing I’ve Done, and well as an excerpt of the first chapter, which should be a nice walk down memory lane for conference participants.

We all know how we feel about the work Hegi read at the conference, but the reviewer, Jennifer Gilmore, seems even-handed but ultimately negative on the novel as a whole, unfortunately. Though she praises Hegi by noting that her “writing about the resilient natural world, a mirror for the resilience of these grief-stricken characters, feels utterly genuine,” Gilmore can’t seem to get past what she calls “unbelievable plotting” and “soap-opera dialogue” that tends to “veer toward melodrama.”

Ah, what the hell. We say buy the book, give it a read anyway. If you like it, leave some love and praise for UH here in the comments.

As I settled down in the front row for the Meg Wolitzer/Ursula Hegi reading, I had mixed emotions about what to expect. I had read and enjoyed Meg’s The Wife, but had never heard of Ursula’s work. With the way readings had been going, one never knew if it would be a hit or a miss.

Meg broke the ice by introducing her new novel, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, causing brief fits of squirming and reaching from Harry-starved writers in the audience. This small distraction made me miss the title of the piece she was reading from, but there were parts (or, more accurately, one part) of this story that were impossible to miss.

Rise slowly the saffron sister trees. Oh child! Oh humanity! This recurring phrase hung in the air over the whole reading. The rest of the story fell through the cracks for me, something about an adopted kid, repeating this phrase, worried mother and on, on, on. However, Meg hooked the audience into this and this is what kept the audience hooked throughout the reading. What I got from the reading, though, was the beginning and the end; one curiously deep, the other explosively funny. Rice A Roni, the San Francisco Treat, has got to be one of the best last lines I have heard in a reading. But without the title and the meat of the story, perhaps Meg outdid herself with the word games, though I say keep them coming.

The tone changed completely with Ursula’s reading. Hearing an accent while listening to a reading is a little off-putting for some, especially if you have already read a piece and have your own character constructions, voices, etc. Reading from The Worst Thing I’ve Done, Hegi’s accent fixed itself into the story immediately. Her tone and pace of voice for Drs. Francine and Virginia fit perfectly with my imagination of those characters. If you have ever heard one of those radio shows, it was hilarious.

The story was well-crafted, if a bit slow at times, and I did find myself scanning the front row, watching Bob Reeves tap his foot and the people on the balcony whisper to each other. Hegi let the radio personas steal the show to some extent, but the intertwining of dialogue and reflection by Annie made the story intriguing enough that I would want to find out where it goes. But this is about the reading, not necessarily the story. Basically, I thought Hegi did a commendable job. Her voice fit the story well, and she was adept at altering the pitch, tweaking the volume, and pausing in particularly haunting places throughout.

Neither author really hooked me into reading the rest of their novels (I don’t even know the title for Meg’s, so when you comment, please remind me). However, this was one of the better readings because of the mix of humor and tragedy in the stories and the mix of very different, but effective, reading styles. Thoughts?

Donald Antrim’s piece “A Man in the Kitchen” appeared in the September 3rd, 2007 issue of The New Yorker. Here’s a snippet:

When I was a boy, it was said in my family that my mother, an otherwise respectable cook, had prepared for my father, during the first days of their marriage, a very bad dish. The dish was a hot tuna-and-mayonnaise casserole with potato chips as a decorative garnish. It was this tuna casserole that had, as it were, driven my father to teach himself to cook. Over time, the story of the tuna casserole took on the status and weight of Received History; it became my father’s explanation and alibi—“Baked mayonnaise! I had to take action!”—for his dominion over our kitchen. Looking back, I can see that the story also functioned as an origin narrative; it united us—my mother, my father, my sister, and me—in lighthearted understanding of the triumph of bluegrass gentility over whatever in our natures could be seen as vulgar and Appalachian. (My father’s people were from Virginia, my mother’s from East Tennessee.)

You can find the essay here.

Just when you thought it was safe to eat out, St. George reminds us that people who carry food for a living hate us all with a passion:

RESTAURANT EMPLOYEE’S FANTASY

Before returning to work,
I’ll be sure to wash my hands

In the toilet, rinse them
in the urinal, and dry them

With paper towels
from the waste basket.

Originally from Jersey City, George Searles holds a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. He has published many poems–most recently in The Coe Review, HazMat Review, and Main Street Rag–along with three volumes of literary criticism from university presses and three editions of a writing textbook used at more than 100 colleges nationwide. He teaches at Mohawk Valley Community College and at Pratt Institute’s upstate campus in Utica. In 2002 the Carnegie Foundation named him New York State’s “Professor of the Year.”

The newly released Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School, by Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley hit No. 1 on the Boston Globe’s bestseller list this week. For those of you keeping score at home, that means Virgins has sold more copies this week than The Secret. Yes, miracles do happen. Kudos to Jones and Miley for striking back in the name of real books!

And if you’re maybe not from Boston and prefer to know what the “paper of record” thinks of Virgins, well, it thinks it’s pretty damn good. Virgins is currently No. 23 on the New York Times bestseller list. Yes, that’s right. 23, with a bullet. Congrats, Abigail. While I can’t speak for the all 110 or so participants of the Southampton Writer’s Conference ‘07, you definitely have the love and support of these three editors of this humble, little blog.

-Michael Z.

P.S. If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, you can do it here.

Each week we will be ranking, from worst to first, the guest readings at the conference. It’s important to say that these are simply rankings of the reading performances themselves, and in no way try to cast judgment on each author’s body of work. Each reader is an exceptional author, and we of course greatly appreciate and totally respect their contributions to the modern literary canon. But how they read from that work during the conference: that’s another story. So if you agree/disagree with our rankings, feel free to leave gripes/additions in the comments. Here goes.

Lifting the conference’s ban on “baroque introductions,” Roger Rosenblatt presented Joyce Carol Oates to a room full of travel-weary participants with the mild explanation that the sweetness of her name does not do justice, and cannot prepare the reader for the graphic content of her fiction.

“Joyce, rejoice,” Roger said. “Carol, like singing. Oates, you think of breakfast.”

Joyce then read from her newest piece of fiction, her 34th published novel, The Gravedigger’s Daughter. Sitting in the front row in the first major assembly of the conference, it was neither the prostitution scenes, nor the shotgun suicide, that provoked me. Rather, what dominated the reading was a promise I made to myself that, no matter what, I would not fall asleep while Joyce was reading. My determination was so thorough that I resorted to biting several fingers of my hand for a jolt of pain, and more importantly, adrenaline.

Initially, I was a bit embarrassed at my inability to stay awake through a reading by one the most prolific and renowned authors alive on Earth, but when I shared this difficulty with my fellow participants, many of them shared the same sentiments.

“Not a great speaker,” said one. “Yeah, I was almost out like a light myself,” said another. “That close,” said a third, in reference to how close he was to his nightly dosage of unconscious activity. That an author could read from their work and effectively put the crowd to sleep should not be taken as an indictment of the quality of neither their talents, nor of the respective work being read. Certainly, many of us would likewise be tempted to sleep through most passages of Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter, or for that matter, comedic works, such as Catch-22 or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

What then, makes someone a good reader?

I asked a voice-over agent I work with, and she said that doing voice-overs isn’t just about the quality of your voice. Many, many people do have voices for the radio. And many, many pretty young ladies have faces for the picture shows, she said to me, but what makes someone good at voice-overs is that they’re actors first, and voices second. It seemed to me that Joyce put us to sleep not because the quality of her fiction was poor at all. But because the quality of her acting was. Her writing was probably lovely, but because she couldn’t bring an actor’s sensibility to her work, I couldn’t tell.

Joyce certainly seems to have “written” a good book in Gravedigger, but she certainly didn’t “read” a good book.

The difference between the written and spoken word is a significant one. Creative use of punctuation is lost in speech; tone of voice cannot be captured on paper. And in terms of Joyce, who read mostly in a monotone drawl, not particularly conscious to the change of tone among characters in her story, an extended reading from her work was to many in the audience, like the droning of a helicopter blade. Certainly, powerful. Absolutely, fearsome. But then again, kind of boring. The lesson here, to writers who intend to read their work aloud to any sort of dedicated audience, is that your words, without your help, do not speak for themselves.

Joyce did engage the audience in a thorough and enlightening Q&A section, so I do not mean to suggest that it was a wasted effort. I certainly loved learning that the point of writing fiction is knowing where you’re going with it from the beginning, and not doing something so silly as hopping in a car without knowing where your final destination would be.

-MZ

Usually, the game plan is to show photos on Fridays, but as a thanks for those who’ve sent some in — namely Lauren Tamraz and Kathleen Ryan — we’re going to post some a few days early.

Kathleen was wise enough to not only grab a nice group shot of the playwrights following their cooperative tour de force on reading day, but also, as you can see some great shots of Arnold Vinnick and Adelaide Mestre sharing some nervous moments with a glass of water. Here’s a link to Kathleen’s pics.

Lauren’s photos are brief, but 100% welcome. Some showcase mugs that belong to the editors of this here blog, but there’s also a nice beach shot tucked in there, too. Take a look.

Thanks for the photos, guys. Hope to see more soon from everyone.

For any of you in or around the NYC area this weekend looking for a good, Southampton-bred show, our own Mike Niederman has just the thing.

Mike’s pieces will be part of the “Who is Boris R. Tower” evening of short plays (put on by Mike’s own writer’s group, Boris Tower). Mike will be directing “The Downtown Daylight Project” (written by Dan McCoy) and putting on one of his own creations, “A Lecture on Important Topics By John A. Karpowski, Expert”.

The performances are September 6-8 at the Red Room in Manhattan.  The address: 85 East 84th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.  8pm every night.  Be there if you can.