GUEST BLOG: The Brooklyn Bridge...and now this!

By world-weary literary immortal, Walt Walkman.

Walt Walkman: deep thinker, head bopper.

I’ve been around a long time, and seen a lot of change in this broken land of Brooklyn. First they built a bridge and joined us with New York, then a whole bunch of people moved in, even more left, and some tried to burn it down.  Now we’re coming back around.  One of the biggest changes was the pink safety bars for the Williamsburg Bridge.  Those were nice.  Then the borough president, an enthusiastic little man, teamed up with a former indie rocker-cum-book publisher to set up one of the finest literary festivals known to man.  That was in 2006, and the Brooklyn Book Festival has only gotten better.  It’s become a seasonal marker; a touchstone for the fall; a clarion of cool breezes, new books, old lovers, early mornings and long walks.  It’s also the kind of festival where diversity among participants is exciting and organic.

This year, my favorite part was hanging out in the back of St. Anne’s Cathedral on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, around the corner from the courthouse and Columbus Park where the journals and publishers yearly hawk their stuff, and watching Deborah Eisenberg, Fran Lebowitz, and Wallace Shawn talk about our current moment and why it sucks. 

Elka heroes Fran Lebowitz and Deborah Eisenberg flank "devastating" writer, Wallace Shawn

According to Lebowitz, a well-known pro-smoking leftist and cousin of Judd Hirsch (the father from Running on Empty), the United States has become one giant mega church and meth lab, squeezed together by New York and LA.  This is obviously not true, except for the occasional lonely sections where you might hit a starving prarie dog on the freeway.  But she’s one of those people who can make a whole room full of people cheer and feel bad about themselves at the same time, which highlights the entertainment value of her polemics.  She’s just as plugged in now as she was in her days with Warhol and Interview magazine, and you can watch her peek out from the Grand Central clock in Scorcese’s documentary.  Deborah Eisenberg was softer in sound, but just as tough when the knowledge dropped.  She claimed, or admitted, to be nostalgic for our national self-delusion, for a time when we as a people at least thought we were good, even if we actually weren’t.  Now, she says, we’re proud to be bad.  Wallace Shawn pointed to Reagan as the one who taught Americans to rise from sentimental ignorance to proud destruction, since Reagan was warm and fuzzy and crazy at the same time.  I don’t know why this panel was my favorite part of the festival; everything else was uplifting and life-affirming and sure to help with my writing and literary career, which isn’t as cemented as you might think.

Here are the highlights from the rest.  All of these writers were and are totally amazing:

Sam Lipsyte, Chuck Klosterman, and Tiphanie Yanique on characters who can’t deal with the world.  This was tragically hard to hear because I was stuck in the back, but I caught some good nuggets about process.

Steve Stern, Emma Straub, Steven Millhauser and the National Book Foundation guy (Harold Augenbraum) on why fantasy is reality and the fantastic is a genre tag.  Ms. Straub was charmingly excited to be seated next to Milhauser, who jokingly denied that her reading made him laugh.  Stern, who explained how his use of mythical characters from Jewish folklore expands rather than violates the boundaries of reality, said he took a lot of drugs when he was younger.

Karen Russell, Jim Shepard, Elissa Schappell, and Rob Spillman on funny feelings.  After hearing Ms. Schappell’s reading of “The Joy of Cooking” for the second time of the weekend, I was reminded about the virtue of podiums.  Without being distracted by the sexy outfit she wore at Powerhouse’s Tin House/Electric Literature party, I was able to fully follow the story.

Edmund White, Tyari Jones, Lynne Tillman and Felicia Pride on cities and how/why they wrote about them.  This panel was particularly strong; there were several gasps and exclamations of awe from people in the audience, and you got that rare feeling from all the panelists, after they made their points, that they really meant what they said and found it satisfying and enjoyable to do so.  Their looks said yes, I really mean this, and it was good.

Other moments:

1) Watching Aaron Cometbus get into an elevator with Edmund White. 

2) Being photographed by author photographer Miriam Berkely.

3) Waiting to resume a conversation at New Directions while a woman tries to sell her father’s memoir.  

4) Seeing Ted Hamm of the Brooklyn Rail sporting a big white beard, and having a four-year-old boy try to sell us his father’s memoir.

5) Seeing that people still read the Brooklyn Eagle (people meaning one guy, though he was reading it).

6) Leaving with a bag full of free books, discounted books, free magazines, bookmarks, and many friendly feelings about Brooklyn and the coming year.

Elka takes in the air of Maine...

And so, alas, I am afraid you will have to attend this week's events sans moi. In the meantime I will be hard at work, fulfilling the command of this sprightly street artist from Bar Harbor:

Special thanks to guerrilla photographer Jeremy Faro for the photo.

Elka visits a whore whose name also happens to be Elka

Elka reads. Isn't she lovely?

If a cool breeze from the East River set your ears a-tingling last weekend, it must have been the poetry coming in from Governor's Island. The first annual New York Poetry Festival went far to prove that in the city that inspired Crane and Whitman and Ginsberg and Lorca among so many others, the spirit of poetry continues to move New Yorkers to take thoughtfully to their pens. And Elka, for one, could not be happier about it.

"You don't get paid and you're not a celebrity."

I believe, though I can't be sure, but it is my understanding that there was a time in New York City when a person who moved in certain circles needed to have not only a personality, but a persona. Such a person could have a name, for example, that had nothing to do with parents or origins and everything to do with aspiration. He/she might have a face and a wardrobe and a manner of speaking that were consciously cultivated; self-made or, more aptly, self-created, out of art and ambitions of glamor. One can get to know such people in the work of Pamela DesBarres and the photography of Nan Goldin and in the many artifacts of the Factory years and the punk scene and in Patrick McMullan and in Lou Reed's lyrics and on the wikipedia page for the Chelsea Hotel and at the Limelight and PS122 and etc.  So imagine my surprise, dear readership, when I found such a person at a reading at the most surprising of venues, BookCourt in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Lillian Heehs (left) with Ali Lukens (center) and Unknown Gentleman

Watching football, writing crime.

On Wednesday I had the great pleasure of attending an Akashic Books reading at The Mysterious Bookshop in Tribeca with Sterling Watson and famed crime writer, Dennis Lehane. But before I discuss that great event, a word on the Raccoon Saloon.

Inside the Raccoon Saloon

In a previous iteration of my life, I'd spent an afternoon or two shopping for apartments in Tribeca with a wealthy employer, and found the neighborhood ranging from stodgy to soulless, depending on the block and the weather. So imagine my surprise when, having arrived at Mysterious with an hour to spare, I came upon a place that was so authentically bar-like, it might've come right from the pages of one of Dennis Lehane's stories—if, for example, rather than chewing on delivery pizza and singing along to the Soul Asylum on the sound system, the woman at the end of the bar was spending her afternoon planning a good and surprising murder.

"Tommorrow Gay Pride Parade...Suck to be Straight!"

The title is a quote from José, a tiny Mexican gay and former general manager of the long-gone Mashed Potato Club in Chicago, where a young Elka Depierre spent a summer forgetting peoples' orders, delivering incorrect drinks, and participating in drag karaoke. During that long-ago pride weekend, while our president explored the nether regions of a Jewish girl's mouth, homos were not allowed to shoot people overseas, and nobody with the same parts could marry in America.

And though little has changed, everything has changed. And so, to the boys of Chelsea and the girls of Park Slope, the power lesbians, the piano bar old bar, the bears and otters and tops and bottoms, to the trans-nation, the leather queens, the hipster gays, to the nonprofit dykes, and to our queer unemancipated youth, I toast to you and your victory, knowing that it belongs to everyone.

And since we are lit lovers here, at Elka Reads, some of my favorite literary homos.

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. "One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner."

Love Connection, Conección de amor.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending two events. First, Natasha Wimmer, famed translator of Roberto Bolaño, spoke in conversation with The Nation's literary editor John Palattella at McNally Jackson. Afterwards, we walked over to Crosby street for "I like your glasses too", a singles mixer for book lovers at Housing Works Bookstore. One of my game companions remarked that the two events had nothing in common, and thinking back on the evening, sweet, peace-loving Elka DePierre does politely, if firmly, disagree. Because what is translation really, but a relationship between two writers? It is a kind of soul connection, much like the one the imbibing love-lost were seeking down the street.

Natasha Wimmer