Comment on Readings by Shakar, Levine, Wycoff

Tonight I went to a reading at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Avenue, a relatively new bookstore, only three years old. As expected, since it's a Monday night, it's a small, independent, neighborhood bookstore, and all writers are still young and relatively unknown, though the star of Alex Shakar seems on the rise. The audience consisted of a handful of people. This was my first visit to this bookstore, and it's quite an impressive store: the elegance of the black, tall bookshelves, the coffee-wine-beer seating area.

What in the world am I doing there? Well, I work from home, and it begins to get on your nerves and makes you feel isolated and lonely, so I make a point of going out in the evenings. Also, I hadn't been to a reading for a while, and I'd stopped going to my regular Monday night figure drawing class.

Let me begin by saying that the second reader, Alex Shakar, entertained me most of all, dazzling me with his long, periodic sentences, brimming with humorous observation and word play, from his novel in progress about a feckless business man who turns to religion and out of body experiences for solace and stability in his life. I’m looking forward to reading it when it is published.

Shakar seems to be in his early or mid-thirties, looked stylishly scruffy, letting his brown beard grow out a bit, and his most striking features are his large eyes. He read with some verve and animation, more so than the other two readers, but their prose didn't lend itself to such a reading tone.

Shakar has a novel and a collection of short stories to his credit, and I ordered his novel in hardcover, The Savage Girl (2001), for 1 cent online plus the shipping fee $3.49 through Amazon. The new paperback edition was there on sale, which is a sign of success, but its print size is so small and compressed that I balked at the notion of reading it. For, in principal, unless no other edition is available, I've stopped reading small print books without much space between the lines and small margins. That's the way most books used to be published in the former Soviet Union with hardly enough room to even make a check mark, much less fit a readable phrase in the margin.

Lest my reader assume I'm a stingy and impoverished bookworm, let me add that I did by copies of the books by Stacey Levine, Frances Johnson (a novel) in a small, striking paperback copy printed by Clearcut Press and Corrina Wycoff ‘s O Street: Stories published by the college sponsored journal Other Voices.

Levine hails from Seattle, Washington; she has fair skin and short red hair. Levine read from her novel comic passages about a family that is too clutching and possessive of its newlyweds and already planning their grandchild's life. This sounds all too familiar and close to comfort for me: I lived longer with my parents than I should have, and could have stayed longer and have even been invited back so that I could save money by not paying them rent. But I'd pay heavily in frayed nerves and stunted personal development.

Corrina Wycoff lives near Seattle and studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I studied English and Slavic literature. She has a fine, sculpted cheekbones and chin, framed in wavy, short hair style. Wycoff read a passage from her stories; again the tone was comedic, though dark, about a narrator's recollections of childhood, describing tragic incidents from a child who has become inured to such incidents that surround her.

Well, my fiction reading is cut out for me. Eventually, though not in the too distant future, I would like to finish reading all three authors books and comment on them briefly.

For more about the reading see my comment.