I went to an amazing reading last night.  Derek White, who runs Calamari Press, returned from Nairobi and organized this reading at Word Books in Greenpoint, featuring three writers he’s publishing.  It was great to meet Blake Butler, who read from his beautifully disturbing Ever (whose praises I’ve sung here).  Even without voice distortion, his reading was unsettling, and even funny – he brought something new and light (in Calvino’s understanding of the term, not the marshmallow fluff definition) to the text in his presentation.  Blake’s introducer described Ever well when he said that he read the book on the subway and it made him feel “physically ill – in a good way.” (Blake’s got a bunch of readings coming up.  If you live in a town he’s in, don’t decide to stay in the night he’s reading; that’d be a mistake.)

Gary Lutz also read.  Which was a big deal for me.  Stories in the Worst Way is one of those handful of books that sits on top of brain every time I write or draw. The first time I read it, it totally destroyed my idea of narrative.  The piece that Lutz read last night shows that he’s still tearing stories apart – it was this wonderful series of tangents  built around the narrator’s meditation on his marriage (I think). Lutz’s story was an appropriate follow-up to the first reader Robert Lopez’s story, which included several retellings of a domestic scene including a man, a wife, and an erection presented in various states.  Lopez’s work is new to me, but I’m interested to read more.  The trope that drove his story is similar to the one that Steve Dixon uses in Interstate or I., and he employed it hilariously (which is not a word that would apply to those particular works by Steve).

Oh, and Derek showed me a copy of his new reissue of Stories in the Worst Way.  It looks awesome. It’s has that compact size that most of the Calamari books have and there’s something about the containment in a book that size that seems right for Lutz’s stories.  (The book was previously published by 3rd Bed, the back catalogue of which Derek has thankfully bought and saved. Why did 3rd Bed have to die?) It includes one of Derek’s amazing collages, so it’s worth getting just for that, even if you have the original edition.