Literary Chicago

There are basically two kinds of authors whose readings I attend. The ones I love and admire and the ones I think I may end up someday loving and admiring. In either case, I like to disappear into an audience and observe in complete anonymity. This is because I don’t want the writers whose books already line my shelves to see me swoon like an idiot—I don’t have pride enough to keep from swooning, but I have pride enough to keep them from seeing me swoon—and because I don’t want the newer writers to notice me sniffing them out, sizing them up, and wondering whether or not I should be swooning for them, too. Of course, it’s harder to disappear into an audience when you’re going to see a newer writer because, obviously, their audiences are smaller.

I know there will be no hiding at tonight’s event. Stephen Markley reads from his first published book, Publish This Book, at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square. On normal nights, I would call the bookstore cozy and charming. Tonight it’s microscopic. Before others begin showing up, I wonder if it would be weird for me to set up camp behind a bookcase, just out of sight, so that I could listen to the reading in secret. That way, I wouldn’t feel like I was either sitting in judgment, all smug and superior, or like I was a phony, a fake fan, smiling and nodding and feigning laughter. The whole business always makes me feel like I did when I sometimes only pretended to play my clarinet in the high school band. (Mr. Thompson could always tell, damn it! Could the authors tell when I’m faking it?) Unfortunately, my options are severely limited by the fact that I brought Pop Sabio along. He’s as big as a lumberjack and, at times, as loud as a jackhammer, which is peculiar given his bookishness, and he’s also unreasonably proud of his girls. He would make a huge nobody-puts-Baby-in-the-corner scene if I tried to hide. That’s just his way. So I sit at a table near the exit and hope for a full house.

At 7pm, when the event is scheduled to begin, there are only a handful of people in the shop who don’t work there. I am worried at first, as I imagine Markley must be. I text Skiddle and tell her it’s like on Flight of the Concords. (She LOLs and calls me Mel, making me fear that Sabio and I would have to compensate by playing ridiculous, die-hard groupies.) Of course, at about a quarter after seven, people start trickling into the store, ordering drinks, and making small talk. I should have known that someone who seems to project the quintessential slacker image would draw a crowd of latecomers.

While waiting for the reading to start, I keep thinking to myself please, please, please don’t let Stephen Markley be the one with the harsh, machine-gun laughter who’s introducing himself to everyone individually because that might somehow confirm my suspicion that he’s one of those obnoxious, drunk, smelly, in-your-face, loudmouth Cubs fans that can make a ride on the “L” so unpleasant. (For the record, I do know some nice Cubs fans.) The machine-gun laughter guy turns out to be a representative from the Literary Writers Network, a Chicago “organization dedicated to literary excellence through the advancement and promotion of emerging fiction and creative non-fiction writers” (http://www.literarywritersnetwork.org/). Go figure. It just goes to show that you can’t always judge someone based on the way they laugh.

Even more than the machine-gun laughter guy, Markley himself turns out to be something of a testament to why snap judgments should be avoided. I first encountered him in this winter’s fiction issue of the Chicago Reader, where he published a short story called “I Think the Company I’m Temping for May Be Masterminding a Plot for Global Domination” (http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/fiction-issue-2009-i-think-the-company-im-temping-for-may-be-masterminding-a-plot-for-global-domination-by-stephen-markley/Content?oid=1280508). It’s hilarious. Like one of Judd Apatow’s slacker characters, its protagonist is gross, lazy, profane, lecherous, and somehow endearing, and the reader gets a real sense of intimacy and immediacy through the story’s string-of-Facebook-messages structure. Unfortunately, a great deal of experimental writing runs the risk of seeming “gimmicky” and when I heard that Markley had also written a self-referential book about writing a book that hadn’t yet been written, I couldn’t help but think that he was just a guy with a big bag of tricks. Oh, how pomo. This was my snap judgment. It didn’t help to find out that he’s a regular contributor to the RedEye. (I don’t know where I got the Cubs fan thing.)

You can see why I am tempted to hide behind a bookcase even more than usual tonight. I rode in on a high horse and am silently daring this poor guy to knock me off.

He does.

Markley himself is clearly aware and only tongue-in-cheek apologetic of the gimmicks he employs. During tonight’s reading, for example, he shares the reaction a friend has to his project, saying, “He sends me this email, which is too true to not include . . . Markley, you might be the first person ever to be publishing a book about his life as a writer before having ever actually published anything as a writer. That’s like running for president based on the executive experience you’ll have after your term is over.”

His acknowledgement of the gimmickry may to some extent excuse him from it, while at the same time making him seem clever and funny, but it may be his “fire” that ultimately makes him worthwhile. That’s his word, not mine. Again reading from Publish This Book, he says, “Jill [an ex-girlfriend] once wrote to me on a birthday card that she had never met anyone as passionate as me, but she wasn’t talking about romance. Rather, she was talking about the Fire, and she was the first person to ever point this out. Admittedly, this was in the throes of our unrequited love phase, when saying such things likely substituted for mauling each other in stairwells and alleys and other inappropriate places. That birthday card was bad news: as much as what she said touched me, how can anyone live up to that?”

Now, it may sound conceited of him to mention this so-called fire in his “premature memoir,” even though he qualifies the comment with a healthy dose of doubt. But you do get some sense of what Jill is talking about when you listen to the urgency with which he talks about needing to escape from the “soul-sucking” work at a staffing agency, the great adventure this memoir turned out to be, and the way his journey went from “dicking around” to becoming more genuinely “introspective.”

From my comfortable vantage point of not-behind-a-bookcase, I am also able to pick up on a quality one doesn’t typically associate with fire or with the kind of bravado it takes to “narrate your life as it unfolds”: modesty. Aside from the humorous self-deprecating remarks one might expect from any of today’s memoirists, Markley stumbles as he reads certain obscene passages, turning red and at one point, saying, “I get really embarrassed saying this stuff out loud, by the way.” (Maybe he sometimes wants to hide behind bookcases, too!) He talks reverently about Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson and says that the book that changed his life and made him see the world in a new way is Black Boy by Richard Wright.

I’m not swooning quite yet. But I’m buying his book.

And look—Sabio’s having him sign it!

EVENT: STEPHEN MARKLEY READING AND SIGNING | FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 2010 AT 7PM | BOOK CELLAR