Mixing music and stories

Reading is private, mostly, so is writing. But McSweeney’s, the quarterly magazine/website/publishing house, edited in the US by Dave Eggers, aims to make them a communal enterprise — and this big night out is just one of the ways Eggers and his muckers are trying to make literature funky.

It’s a game of two halves. First come straightforward readings of stories from a lectern, with a few strumming sound effects. After the break, Brooklyn-based art rockers They Might Be Giants turn up the volume for an hour.

The band are smart, the writers played kooky, they met in the middle. A bit. It
was a sort of student’s heaven, though there was never any question which part of the mix would be presented first, the medicine or the juice. Loud wins every time.

For McSweeney’s first show in Britain, two homegrown supporters of the magazine’s ethic, Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith, turned up. John K Hodgman Jr, a “former professional literary agent” now reformed into a comedian, made a droll compere, once he’d got past some whimsy about werewolves and badgers.

Arthur Bradford read an extract from his wacky novel Dogwalker — a miniature
man, disguised as a muskrat, is killed by a dog, his sibling (don’t ask), accompanying himself on the guitar, which he trashed Pete Townshend-style.

A sub-Arlo Guthrie talking blues song about Britain and America, and how much better it would be to drop books than bombs on our enemies, followed.

Smith (high heels, slinky red dress) read an ornamental story called The Girl with Bangs, about falling for another girl, just for her hair and slutty sexuality, standing in men’s shoes, too, being a gift. More teen sex followed,
the subject holding the attention, it is believed.

Eggers relished the fantasies of a 13-year-old lusting after his employer, Mrs Gundren, 50 at least. Hornby did Otherwise Pandemonium, the story he has contributed to McSweeney’s just published Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.

A 15-year-old learns from his future-revealing VCR that nuclear armageddon is imminent; on hearing this, his girlfriend puts out, But the boy, pure north London, was said to be in Berkeley, California.

The evening was cheery, not without longueurs. Weren’t the Liverpool Poets and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band trying this a lifetime ago?