in case of emergency | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: in case of emergency

In Case of Emergency…

It was a well-travelled audience that left City Winery on Monday night after the House of SpeakEasy’s latest literary cabaret, In Case of Emergency. From Sierra Leone to Delhi via 1930s New York and a near-miss with the Mob went writer-performer-stars Daniel Bergner, Maggie Shipstead, Leonard Lopate, J.D. McClatchy and Amor Towles. It was Seriously Entertaining stuff. Daniel Bergner kicked off with a great tale of magic and medicine in Sierra Leone. Taking up the story of Michael Josiah, who appears in his 2003 book In the Land of Magic Soldiers, Bergner spoke about his “two lives, two minds”. Josiah was always determined to become a doctor, and studied (western) medicine so enthusiastically that he would continue to do so by candlelight long into the night. But when disrupted, as he often was, by the irruption of fighting in Sierra Leone’s civil war, he would join up with the Kamajors, a group of warriors purported to possess magical powers, the potential to cure cancer, and the ability to dodge bullets. Bergner described several occasions when he was invited to watch the Kamajors’ miracles in person. Slathered in a sacred liquid, the soldiers would become apparently impervious to injury. Indeed, Josiah encouraged him […]

Curtain Call: In Case of Emergency

A state of emergency is declared. You fly tonight. What do you take with you? Clothes? Thermos? Hatchet? Naaah: books, of course. Fortunately you know of a safehouse nearby. A safehouse by the name of SpeakEasy. That’s right, comrades, there’s a Seriously Entertaining way out of this crisis. Between our six guests next week, we have everything you need to survive In Case of Emergency. Don’t have your ticket yet? Fear not, there’s still a few left here. Your checklist: 1. Amor Towles. Author of the marvellous Manhattan merry-go-round Rules of Civility, which we reviewed a few weeks back, and its ebook follow-up Eve in Hollywood. Here’s Towles talking about the great American photographer Walker Evans and the genesis of his debut novel: 2. Evie Wyld‘s new book, All the Birds, Singing, was just published in the US. When it came out in the UK last year, the Guardian said that it “should enhance her reputation as one of our most gifted novelists”. We took a look at her debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, earlier this week. In this clip, Wyld reads the opening to All the Birds, Singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bn4sDbm3k8 3. J.D. McClatchy‘s new collection Plundered Hearts just came out to ecstatic reviews — the […]

After the Fire, a Brilliant Debut Novel

“There’s some of us, yourself included I’m sure, have seen and borne witness to a number of terrible things. And as you’ll know, those things haunt a man.” — Klyde in After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld Evie Wyld is the award-winning author of All the Birds, Singing, published by Pantheon earlier this month. Ahead of her appearance at next week’s Seriously Entertaining show, we returned to the past and her harsh, mysterious, brilliant first novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (Pantheon, 2009). Mild spoilers lie herein. The novel’s title refers to a divine misunderstanding in 1 Kings. The prophet Elijah is camping out on Mount Horeb, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. He complains to God that he’s the last of the faithful. God suggests he go outside onto the mountain, where he stages a meteorological spectacular for Elijah: strong wind; an earthquake; “after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice”. And the voice says to him, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” The prophet repeats his gripe, betraying how little he has learned from this moment of revelation. It’s an appropriate touchstone, for Wyld’s tale is […]

Maggie Shipstead’s “Seating Arrangements”

A wedding was always an aphrodisiac, full of temporary pairings driven by vicarious hope. Love was in the air, weak and snappy as static electricity. – Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf, 2012) Maggie Shipstead‘s debut novel, Seating Arrangements (Knopf, 2012), is a witty social comedy with an exploding whale at its heart. Set largely over the course of two days preceding a wedding on New England island Waskeke, it assumes the perspectives of a series of characters, mostly control-freak father-of-the-bride Winn Van Meter and jilted younger daughter Livia, as it reveals the emotions that coalesce around the lives of the uptight well-to-do as they come together and fall apart. It’s funny and sharp and unpleasant and relentlessly well observed. Winn is a vigorous fifty-nine, a man for whom “each day was a platform for accomplishment”. Heavily governed by social mores — he thinks somewhat reproachfully of his daughter Daphne as “a pregnant bride, no point in pretending otherwise” — he spends most of the book obsessing over his prospective entry into a posh golf club called the Pequod. (Appropriately, perhaps, his quarry is somewhat elusive.) He’s a patriarch of the old school, imagining and favouring male offspring: “His son would join the […]

Plundered Hearts: The Poetry of J.D. McClatchy

Honouring J.D. McClatchy in 1991, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters stated, “It may be that no more eloquent poet will emerge in his American generation.” Since then, his reputation has grown as exponentially as his output. A poet, essayist, librettist — and Professor of English at Yale — McClatchy is certainly one of the hardest-working poets in America. Knopf has kindly published a new collection of his work, Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems, providing readers with a perfect introduction to his world. One of the new poems, “Prelude, Delay, and Epitaph”, is as good a way in as any: A finger is cut from a rubber glove And cinched as a tourniquet around my toe. The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed. The shots supposed to have pricked and burned The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice. The toe, as I watch, slowly turns a bluish Gray, the color of flesh on a slab, the size Of a fetus floating on the toilet’s Styx, But lumpen, the blunt hull of a tug slowly Nosing the huge, clumsy vessel into port. McClatchy continues; this is just the “prelude”. But there is much even in this […]

How can it be wrong when it feels so right? Daniel Bergner’s “The Other Side of Desire”

Tragedy is full of forbidden desires: the love of Phaedra for her stepson Hippolytus; of the dying Aschenbach for the beautiful Tadzio; of Martin Gray for his goat in Albee’s play. In tragedy, so in life. Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (HarperCollins, 2009) describes a series of intense, unorthodox and in some cases forbidden lusts, many of which have the stamp of the tragic. There’s Roy, who couldn’t resist his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. Jacob, for whom women’s feet “were the breasts, the legs, the buttocks, the genitals”. The Baroness, an East Village dominatrix who once literally spit-roasted a man for three and a half hours. Ron, an advertising artist drawn erotically to amputees. In the course of his sexual odyssey across America, in which he meets a Kinseyan gallery of fetishists, sadists, masochists, psychiatrists and sex offenders, Bergner explores possible answers to big questions: How do we come to have the particular desires that drive us, how do we become who we are sexually, whether our lusts are common or improbable? How much are we born with and how much do we learn from all that surrounds us, how much can […]

Manhattan Follies: Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility

“It is a lovely oddity of human nature,” observes our heroine, Katey Kontent, “that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance.” Commuting readers of Amor Towles’s debut novel, Rules of Civility, will certainly find themselves grateful for this lovely oddity as they immerse themselves in Katey’s world. The story, which concerns the good and not-so-good decisions made by Katey and her friends over the course of a single year (1938), is told from the perspective of her older self. Her memory is stirred by “Many Are Called”, an exhibition of photos Walker Evans surreptitiously took of regular Americans on the subway during the 1930s. In it, she sees two photos of a man she had known briefly very well, Tinker Grey, but had fallen out of touch with. The photos take her right back to the last day of 1937, when she and her friend Eve Ross first set eyes on Tinker… The Rules of Civility are the hundred and ten precepts a young George Washington jotted down in a writing exercise as a schoolboy in Virginia (see the full list here). […]