9-14-08 Brooklyn Book Festival

Today my boyfriend and I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival. It was a hot, muggy, and sweaty. We got to the festival at four o’clock and spent an hour or so walking around checking out the different booths and areas where people were reading. It was all outside and there were multiple stages where you could sit down and listen or leave as you pleased. I’m super sensitive to physical sensations and my environment so it was hard for me to experience the readers; too many people, bodies, smells, sounds, people smoking cigarettes, faces…It was overwhelming.
What we did see was the readings by Esmeralda Santiago, Dagoberta Glib and Jessica Hagedorn. They were on the Main stage, which sat people on the steps of Borough hall. I enjoyed all the pieces they read to the extent I could pay attention. After their reading was Chuck Klosterman who I would have liked to see becuase I am ambivalent towards his work. I think some of his pieces are hysterical, like the story about his bizarre experience with Val Kilmer and his essay on Saved by the Bell, but I find some of his other work sexist, arrogant, and ignorant. Unfortunately we had to meet my sister at a restaurant so we did not have time to hear him.
The whole book festival experience was, to be truthful, awful. I know the goal of the assignment was to experience a community of writers, to spark an interest in something new, to possibly find someone for the VWS, and I am sure that for the majority of students it will be just this. But the way I relate to books is in the dark, in the air-conditioning, by myself. Reading is something I do alone like showering or singing in the car. If my anxiety is low I can usually handle a class discussion. But put me outside where I feel hot, and fat, and uncomfortable, and my shirt is clingy, and I’m sweating, and eww that person just touched me, and this stone is too hard to sit on. If Jesus Christ came back to answer some quick questions I don’t think I could listen. I feel like running to a cold dark empty starbucks, snuggling into a plush chair to write an intelligent poem about how superior I am to these frauds of the book show. No REAL writer could handle so many other humans with their faces and sounds and stories congesting ones mind. I, Gabrielle Reed, am obviously the only true artist who appeared at the book festival today. I am kidding. I enjoyed the book festival it was just a little too much stimuli for my fragile self. But still I get it, I get why people go to readings why their good and why someone without social anxiety disorder would have had a wonderful time.