Thursday, May 19, 2005

Eric Bogosian

I went to Booksmith last night to see Eric Bogosian. He has a new book out, "Wasted Beauty", about a small town girl that gets caught up in all the dangers of the big city. He read from a book of one of his solo shows a couple of years ago. He had the whole room clutching their bellies, laughing out loud. The piece was great and what I loved best was that he didn't plan out his reading. He pulled out the book and took about 2-3 minutes figuring out what he would read. He then moved on to his first novel and then Wasted Beauty. I would have left if I wasn't sitting in the front row right under his nose. It was horrible, yawn inducing! But afterwards I figured out what the problem was. It wasn't that his novels were poorly written or boring. It was that the novel was meant to be read off the page not out loud. The first bit was a performance piece and was meant to be performed, read out loud. I'm not sure I've ever seen that so clearly before. I think I've always thought if something was good it will be good spoken aloud or read on paper. On another note: Eric is short, who knew?

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