Week in and week out, we suggest readings in our (usually) daily To-Do lists. However, it hadn't occurred to us that these events might, well, suck.

Art Forum writer Andrew Hultkrans (whose Gen-X columns from Mondo 2000 we shamelessly plundered for our high school newspaper column back in the last century) lays out just what fresh hell these readings are:

A word about readings: Unless the author is a close friend, I avoid them like the Meatpacking district on Saturday night. The tawdry, awkward venues, the injurious scholastic chairs, the fake solemnity, the nervous laughs, the tucked-in torpor of the audience: The whole scene generally strikes me as less a promotion of the writer's work than a cheap dramatization of the debasement of literature in contemporary America, a Spinal Tap for poets, if you will.

But Hultkrans isn't one of those "see the world as it is and ask why" types. He actually offers a solution to the readings problem, and it's very, very simple: "Another word about readings: Alcohol."
Bottoms Up [Art Forum]

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