Dewey V.S. The World!

Yesterday's jam-packed schedule began with Chapters 11: The Bankruptcy Walking Tour. We meandered through the Annex, dropping flowers, getting stared at for dressing mournful and listening to the sad words of bookstores past. Thanks to Carey Toane for leading the tour and Maggie Helwig for punctuating it with her final reading from the Book of Prayers.

Stet: Redacting the Redacted packed Mercer Union and provided more than a few fireworks. After much drum-rolling the poet and fiction writers were revealed: Ken Babstock read his original poem and talked about some of the edits he made; Gil Adamson talked openly about her fiction work and her struggles with the three pronged editing approach. Thanks to all the participants (especially the editors!) for being so intelligent and open about what is admittedly a relatively personal (and mysterious) process.

We ended the night with 233° Centigrade: A Screening of Fahrenheit 451 at the Trash Palace. The readings that proceeded the show were excellent: Katherine Parrish gave a walk-through the F-451 role-playing game; Chris Puima chopped up and recombined the opening sentences of the text in a wildly rhythmic performance; Stephen Cain gave his best coffeehouse poet treatment of book torture. And all this before bad flying firemen and overacting. Thanks to Gregg and the Trash Palace for making the night so much fun.

But enough living in the past! Today we start things early at 2 PM at This Ain't the Rosedale Library with Sounds from Beyond: The Marclay Project Salon. Shuffle (by Christan Marclay) is a series of photographs of musical scores – from a few notes on a door to four whole staffs of music – found in the urban wild. Selecting randomly from a deck of 72 index cards inscribed with scraps of music, Anthony Easton will create a score to be played by musician Sundar Subramanian over the course of an hour, creating an aleatory performance unlikely to be repeated.

Later this evening, come join us and a plethora of performers for Incidental Reading: Melvil Dewey fights back. The event begins at 7 PM at the Yorkville library. The library becomes a theatre space as the Scream commandeers the stacks. Following Martha Baillie’s tale of library transgressions — The Incident Report (Pedlar Press, 2009) — readers will take their places in the Dewey Decimal System for live performances. The readings themselves become incidents to be catalogued by library patrons in their own reports. Featured readers include Martha Baillie, fiction and poetry writer Stuart Ross (Buying Cigarettes for the Dog), poet Jacob McArthur Mooney (The New Layman’s Almanac), poet Kate Eichhorn (Fond), essayist Marc Glassman (founder of Pages Bookstore), actor and script writer Mitch Smolkin (A Song is Born), new media artist Vera Frenkel, and singer Theo Heras (What Will We Do with the Baby-O?).