Get Lit

L.A.'s literary salons: club-hopping for bookworms

Comments (0) By Steven Kotler Wednesday, May 3 2006

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Teach the Children

In 2000, with the megasuccess of his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers suddenly found himself with a serious cash influx. Much of that money has been funneled into the creation of a nonprofit elementary- and high-school student-tutoring project called 826, after the first center’s San Francisco address, 826 Valencia St. Now there are six centers, including 826LA, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary. “The whole point of these centers,” says CAA’s Sally Wilcox, who, alongside other industry denizens including E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison, sits on the board at 826LA, “is to engage kids with the notion and possibility of a writer’s life.” But since tutoring is free of charge and all of the centers are self-supporting, each 826 hosts regular literary evenings.

(Austrian Archives/Corbis)

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Not too long ago, on a Saturday night at 826LA, John Doe, L.A. punk pioneer and co-founder of the band X, and author Rick Moody (Ice Storm, Demonology) crooned a duet of Doe’s See How We Are to an audience of some 50 people packed into the main tutoring room — essentially a classroom complete with crayon drawings on the wall and origami animals hung from the ceiling. The rendition was amazing, made more so by the fact that Moody hasn’t quite mastered the idea of singing in public, so he was instead quietly plucking two or three chords on his guitar while softly mumbling the words. This was a bit beyond what Moody signed on for. The evening was originally billed as a discussion, moderated by author and music critic Josh Kun, between Moody and Doe (who met his X co-founder Exene Cervenka at a poetry workshop at L.A.’s longest-running literary gathering spot, Beyond Baroque) about the impact of writing on music and vice versa, but salons being what salons are, a little improvisational entertainment is never beyond the realm of possibility.

“I think people come out for evenings like this for just this reason,” says former 826LA executive director Pilar Perez, “because anything can happen. There’s a real sense of the unexpected, and that’s not something you can find at most places in L.A.”

Dinner and a Reading

Since 1996, actress and author Delauné Michel has run “Spoken Interludes, ” a now bicoastal dinner party where the meal is accompanied by a reading, and the reading followed by a discussion. Since average Spoken Interludes readers include the likes of Aimee Bender, Alice Sebold, Arianna Huffington, Harry Shearer and Bruce Wagner, it’s a level of discussion rarely found in L.A. “It’s almost like theater,” says Michel, “but in a party environment. People are encouraged to talk to strangers. They’re encouraged to talk about the writing and the ideas and their reverberations — which is kind of rare in a town where ‘listen to my great pitch’ is the expected topic of most conversations.”

No wonder so many people are starting to pay attention. Spoken Interludes(914) 422-1869, www.spokeninterludes.com

Smart Gals/SpeakeasyMt. Hollywood Underground, 4607 Prospect Ave., Los Feliz, www.smartgals.org

WordTheatre www.wordtheatre.com

The World Explained http://mcsweeneys.net/links/events/theworldexplained.html

826LA685 Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 305-8418,www.826la.com