I’m going to a book reading tonight and it will be a welcome relief from my ongoing flip flops on the impending AI apocalypse (or the “bounty” of AI, such as it might be).
From the website:
RECOMMENDED IF YOU LIKE is a novel built from the recorded cassette tape monologues of Anderson Humphrey, a music obsessive and aspiring snob known curiously as The Christian Humper in a vast but isolated underground scene in the 1990s. The stories are oral but recall zine culture at its photocopied peak, when music was still a total identity machine.
(check out and order the book in the Little Engines shop while it’s $0.00, as in free)
Tonight, in one of the best rooms in the Twin Cities, its going to be a room of people that are committed to the written word, to stories that come out of the heads of humans. People who like books and what books can do for us.
it’s a live event. There will be a shared experience in that room, a one time thing that will be unique to that room, this night, those people. There might be a couple moments where we listeners will think, “oh my, that’s amazing. I might want to try to write something that good.”
Or, perhaps, we’ll just appreciate how much effort and love and commitment the writers put into their work and feel a little inspiration in our own work.
Given what is happening in the world today1, is there anything more “punk” than getting together early (so we can get to bed at a reasonable time) in a dark room to listen to a guy read us the book he made with his own hands? To celebrate creators and human creativity?
Punk, or at least the kind I had growing up in small town Wisconsin, was proof that anyone could make some music. We could all be musicians, we could all put on a show. You didn’t have to be great or even good. You just had to mean it, to put some kind of love - for your friends, for the music, for the audience, for the reaction - into it.
Often the music was great, but that seemed to be secondary to the experience of being in the room, together, to listen. Readings can do that too, especially when the writer is thinking about the audience first.
Publishing House = Record Label
Adam Voith, the author of R.I.Y.L and the founder of the publishing house Little Engines is running his publishing “show” like a small record label, where the reader and the books comes first. If you are of a certain age, you might remember Discord, SST, Twin Tone, Sub pop, Merge, etc. You knew you could trust the roster of artists because of the taste of the label owners. The punk labels were the epitome of this approach. You can see it with Anti, today. It’s been really interesting (and inspiring) to see how much committment his team is putting into building a sense of connection between them and the readers.
I’m pretty sure there won’t be a pit at this show, though).
Do I need to articulate it? War, a potential post-democractic America, the rise of AI, the decline of reading, hyper-consumerism, etc.
Sounds like it will be a great time at a great venue. Only now am I coming to appreciate--really appreciate, I guess, as many of us are--the value of community insofar as creating for one another in contrast, if not opposition, to generative or generated blah blah for the masses.