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Sex, Supposedly

by K Hank Jost | Sep 28, 2023 2:00 pm

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Brooklyn writer series aims to revive literature's heartbeat.

Red-Light Fiction Reading Series
EZ LVR
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Sept. 23, 2023

“The fuck are you shushing me for?” Audible through the door. 

All of us are leaning forward, trying to catch the finer details of our host’s opening remarks. She’s giving a rundown of why this sort of reading is so necessary right now.

“It’s fucking Saturday night, I don’t give a shit that there’s a fucking poetry reading going on!” the voice out in the hall yells. He’s shouting at someone we all assume is his partner.

His voice isn’t the only thing interrupting our enterprise here at the latest edition of the Red-Light author series. The music from the bar can still be heard, felt through the walls.

This sort of bombardment surely isn’t the sort of pushback that the organizers of this reading thought they’d have to deal with. We’re all gathered here to challenge the tastes of the publishing institutions, not the fist-pumping, bro-down, rage-all-night illiterati…

Long gone are the days of Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and Kathy Acker. The only true transgressives that remain have been swallowed up by institutions, castrated by their canonization, or are being revived in reprint after their output has long ceased. It would seem, for the young writer today, that should one wish to write about things unwelcome at the dinner table it would have been better to be born in more repressed times, when paper was cheap and the anthem played at midnight…

This tragedy is exactly what the Red-Light Reading Series stands to address. Organized by Shelby Wardlaw, a Columbia grad and professor at Rutgers, and Nifath Chowdhury, a Columbia grad and writer, the Red-Light Series ambitions to bring sex back into literature. So every two months, they hang a red-neon sign on the red brick wall in EZ LVR’s backroom and assemble a line-up of writers to take up the task.

This night’s four readers were Andrew K. Spaulding, Gabriela Safa, Sola Saar, and Molly McGhee. Spaulding — a musician, poet, and writer of fiction. Safa — a writer, actress, model, etc. with an MFA from Columbia. Saar — a writer whose most recent work was a finalist for a prize awarded by New Directions Press with an MFA from Columbia. McGhee — author of a soon-to-be-published novel, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, with an MFA from Columbia.

The crowd was the usual staid and respectful audience that is expected at readings. They tittered at the funny bits and cackled at the few moments of true vulgarity.

If they were deeply moved, they didn’t show it. If they were offended, one would never know. Beyond the titter and cackle the audience the placcid and the evening passes largely with hands in laps.” 

Memorable moments of what was read, in no particular order and leaving further assignations aside: A man’s member made vine and the conjugal act itself rendered an ecstatic blooming. Evocations of body parts by their most vulgar monikers, a laugh from the crowd every time. The first-person pronoun. Red-Scare adjacent, LES cool kid, hyper-irony. Invented lovers. Laconic readings style that, once again and as always, had myself as an audience member wondering if I was welcome or if the readers wanted to be reading. A meandering introduction longer than the text to be read. Dumb horny guy/cold older female cliché. A narrative centering on a masturbating child learning the magical properties of their vagina. Unironic use of the word ​“ju-ju.” Pedophilic older men. Flat prose without a single metaphor or image to hold onto…

If I had pearls to clutch, they’d rest upon my clavicle unbothered.

Watch a sample of Safa’s reading in the following video:

“My vagina is magical,” declared her story’s narrator. ​“It has superpowers. It’s a super vagina.”

The pieces read were far from scandalous — which isn’t a problem in and of itself. Sex need not be scandal, it need not be made dirty or written with shame. That said, it does need to be written honestly, encompassing and synthesizing the negative with the positive. It can, and ought to be, both glittering and gross if it is to speak the truth of the real thing.

Only two of the stories included sex of any real kind (which is to say, the interactions of the physical body with feelings of desire and the consequences thereof), and in the case of the story about masturbation we’re only talking about sex as a matter of degree… Sex is difficult to write, this is true. But so is anything worth writing about. It would seem, for whatever reason, that the two easiest options are a) to write about its absence or b) to pornographize. That well-founded fear of pornographizing leads most often to taking the approach of writing sex as life’s shadow and not as fundamental to its substance. This is a non-starter of a problem, all the greats have solved it…

Explanations abound for why our current writing world has become so limp — whether it be the seep of reportage into the narrative craft (which has been a complaint since Hemingway at the latest), or social media and the effects of its boiled-down anti-jargon, or the outsized influence of a glut of MFA programs which run their writer’s through several expensive years of public humiliation rituals called ​‘workshops’ wherein the young craftspeople learn not to write artful truths, convincing contradictions, or gorgeous metaphors to stitch the world back whole but instead to write pablum unworthy of serious engagement to save themselves the embarrassment of having been too honest.

So the mission of the Red-Light Reading Series is a noble one. I’m all for it. But if one is to build a project against the current publishing milieu, one must, in good faith and keen, active search, look outside the institutions from which that milieu plucks its elect. One must look for writing which is louder than the drum-and-bass, which would serve to silence our illiterati who’d keep poetry away from their Saturdays.