"I play it. Words and Guitar." - Sleater-Kinney, Words and Guitar
There was a line. Like around the corner and on to the little Sunset bridge line. A 60 person deep line. A sold out music show style line. But it was 6:30pm. The sun was still up. For how cool most folks in this line were, this clearly wasn't for the indie rock concerts that most often make it on the stage at The Echo. The woman behind us, in her 50s or 60s, was a travel writer. She wrote about river rafting and adventure travel but this was her first time venturing into Echo Park from the Valley and she, too, was shocked by the line.
This isn't how literary events in LA go.
And yet, here we were, 20 minutes to get in the door to see 11 authors read for 8 minutes at a time and determine who was our favorite — "A F**king Read-Off" just as the flyer promised. And read they did.The obvious winner was Dennis Danziger, whose deadpan delivery of his excerpt from A Short History of A Tall Jew was uproariously funny. Katie Arnoldi's opening trio of shorts and Allison Burnett's sneak peek at his next novel were also memorable. For some reason, however, I was most interested in James Greer's The Failure. He read it quirkily, removing his glasses and bringing the book all the way up to his face, and then tossed the worn copy of his novel into the crowd, vowing that it was the last time he would read from it. I didn't catch the tome as it flew threw the air but it seemed a perfect first purchase for the nook app I just installed on my iPad.
You see, Lit Crawl 2 wasn't the only wordy nerdy thing of the weekend. Friday involved a trip to House of Secrets for a comic book party with discussions of the new Wonder Woman and my on-going obsession with 100 Bullets (currently on volume 9). The evening ended with a trip to Barnes & Noble, an in-depth explanation of the awesomeness of the Nook with one of their salesmen and a feeble attempt to get Miss Martini to buy Glenn Beck's Fiction Thriller. We needed that trip to Barnes & Noble, though, because that Cadillac Margarita I had with dinner was knocking me on my ass.
Oh, lest you think this weekend was just about me reading things, it has also been about me drinking things. That aforementioned margarita; a Colt 45 in the back of Stories while DJs spun real live records and inanimate objects stared at me; well-poured cocktails at Little Joy while we chair danced at the bar to the delight of all those around us.
You didn't know word nerds got down like that?
We do. We did.
Indubitably.
Look it up.
