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The first installment of Chapters, the Girls Write Now reading series I’m curating, will feature the talented Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of the new novel Wench.

She’ll be introduced by my friend and fellow board member Tayari Jones. After Dolen’s guest reading, several of the girls will share their own work. The event is this Friday at the Center for Fiction, 6 p.m., and we’d love to see you there.

Below, in the spirit of the evening, Perkins-Valdez reminisces about books she read in her youth. You can also listen to her discussing

I grew up in a world that predated mega-bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. We did not spend our weekends exploring the library or checking out the new releases shelf.

As a result, when I am asked about books I read growing up, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I never read any classics of children’s literature. Black Beauty? No. Little Women? No. But the one place I did go every week was the supermarket.

My mother spent many hours shopping for the family each week, and she did not mind if I threw a book in the cart. So I grew up reading all kinds of trashy fiction. I devoured the books voraciously, sometimes in a single night. Through them, I developed a love of reading.
 

Later, I moved on to Terry McMillan, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. That is why when people ask me what I think about “urban fiction” versus “serious fiction,” I hesitate to feed the hierarchical distinction. I know from experience that any kind of fiction can act as a “gateway drug” to another kind. I believe the important thing is that young people read!

I want to introduce my daughter to all kinds of fiction, and through the exposure, let her discover that which speaks to her most.

Many thanks to artist Michael Fusco for the striking Chapters flyer.

Every time I pass this Carnegie Hall ad campaign, I think these happy people are praising God at an Oral Roberts revival.

Last night my pal Terry Teachout read from Pops, his smart, engaging, and widely-praised new biography of Louis Armstrong, and showed some footage.

While answering questions afterward, Terry recommended that everyone listen to this week’s New Yorker podcast, which includes an audio clip of Armstrong trying to cajole his wife into bed in the wee hours. His horn has to come first, Armstrong says, and now it’s time for her to help keep his heart pumping.

She notices that the recorder is running and tells him to turn the tape off and “erase off some of that shit.” (Armstrong refused, apparently. The recording, he said, was for posterity. And now here we are, listening just like he knew we would.)
 

On the way out, my friend Tracy and I ran into critic Garnette Cadogan and jazz singer Mary Foster Conklin, and we all rode the 1 train downtown together.

Garnette and I spent most of the journey commiserating about the cold weather and short days, and about writing. He’s been working on a book about Bob Marley, and you know what I’m doing; we agreed that it’s important for writers to be able to delude themselves at the start of a project about how long it’s going to take, which is usually about ten times longer than expected.

I’m pretty sure Terry, who toiled on his biography of H.L. Mencken for a decade, would agree. He speaks at the Los Angeles Public Library tonight.

Apparently someone forgot to inform my neighborhood that reading is dying. On my way home tonight, I came upon a small crowd that had assembled to dig through the library’s recycling.

“Are those novels?” the woman walking next to me asked, her voice rising excitedly, as she stopped to pick through the books herself.

Now I’m sitting in my apartment, looking at stacks and stacks of unread galleys — about two hundred arrive in the mail every month nowadays — and wondering if the people are still out there on the sidewalk, searching for something to read.

The current issue of Granta includes contributions from Kenzaburo Oe, Mary Gaitskill, Javier Marías, Will Self, Mahmoud Darwish, Lionel Shriver, William T. Vollmann, and more, and I’m looking forward to reading them, but when the package arrived yesterday I (of course) turned immediately to the (excellent) excerpt from Rupert Thomson’s forthcoming memoir.

The piece, “Call Me By My Proper Name,” ostensibly focuses on Thomson’s smart but difficult uncle, Cedric, whom the author meets for the first and only time at a refuge for older homeless men. More subtly it’s about one of my favorite topics: madness in families. During the visit, Thomson learns that “in the late Fifties, not long after I was born, my grandmother and two of my uncles were inmates of the same mental home — and then there was my mother, Wendy, with her so-called ‘high spirits.’”

A prior excerpt, about Thomson’s reunion with his half-brother, was published in The Guardian last year. In 2007 he told me that he expected the book to be about the avoidance of grief. I can’t wait to see how it all fits together.

You can pick up a copy of Issue 107 at tonight’s launch party at Three Lives & Co. (pictured).

Good news: massive proposed budget cuts for all three area library systems have been taken off the table, at least for the moment. A friend writes:

Expect to see some smiling librarians today. You will notice a gleeful glint in our cateye glasses, and some cardigans may be thrown open in celebration.

Due to a $46.5 million budget restoration, there will not be layoffs in our city libraries. Thank you to everyone who got involved in the fight and helped to keep us working. Because you have been so nice, we will answer any and all questions you pose to us and provide you with free computer access, and lots of books, videos, and training. If you didn’t support the libraries, we will still give you all of that, but secretly hope that you choke on it.

It’s a great day for New York City libraries. Thank you, our patrons, for making it possible.

Next Thursday night I’ll be drinking sangria, eating sorbet, and interviewing Kate Christensen — first idol, now friend — about Trouble, at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, at 7:30 p.m. She calls this novel, her fifth, her beach book.

That’s not her photo on the cover, by the way, although if you’ve met Kate you can see why even her mother was confused.

In other Christensen news: last night she appeared on All Things Considered to discuss her guilty reading pleasures.

The recession is already overwhelming the city libraries. Patrons are searching for jobs and borrowing vastly more books and videos. Sometimes, now that they’re out of work and no prospective employers are calling, they’re just looking for a place to hang out.

At the Mid-Manhattan branch a couple weeks ago, the check-out line was three times as long as I’ve ever seen it, and every chair was filled.
 

Something like a quarter of the city’s librarians — some of them friends of mine — are going to lose their jobs in the next few months unless the budget is restored. Service hours will be cut way back; vastly fewer books will be purchased; after-school programs for kids may be in jeopardy.

I know the city is strapped, but these are the kind of funding decisions that really affect neighborhoods. When desperate people can’t be in the libraries, they’ll be on the streets. For details about the proposed cuts and the overwhelming uptick in library usage, see the Open Letter from a New York City Librarian I posted last month.
 

It’ll be another week before the numbers are set in stone. If you haven’t yet, please contact your City Council members and the Mayor — follow the directions here and here, and sign here.

I’m in the Pioneer Valley until next Tuesday, and will post as time permits.

Meanwhile, here’s a (blurry) photo of the Kindle ads that are invading the New York City subway.

I’ve praised Greg Ames’ short story “Physical Discipline” so many times, with so little specificity, it’s become embarrassing. Even more embarrassing: the fact that his first novel, Buffalo Lockjaw is out, and I have yet to read it (unlike Aimee Bender and Sam Lipsyte, whose quotes appear on the back cover).

Ames is featured tomorrow night at Beatrice editor Ron Hogan’s Mercantile Library Center for
Fiction series, alongside Emily St. John Mandel. I’ll be away, but please go if you’re free: 5/13, 17 E. 47th St., 7 p.m.

Below Hogan talks briefly with Ames about, among other things, Buffalo, Iris Murdoch, and oral histories.

Greg Ames’s Buffalo Lockjaw is an emotionally riveting story — a young man goes home for a holiday weekend, wrestling with his conscience about whether to perform an “assisted suicide” on his mother, whose dementia is already in a severely advanced state — but the author doesn’t jack up the drama with artificial tension. His protagonist, James, muddles his way through the situation the way a real twenty-something male fumbling towards maturity might be expected to; when the family can’t dance around the subject any longer, what happens isn’t TV-movie bombast (raised voices, wild gestures, slammed doors) but a series of quiet, awkward conversations… after which James retreats right back into himself.

All of this takes place in a Buffalo where the landscape and the residents, like the Icelandic capital in the film 101 Reykjavík, become an extension of the main character’s psychological state while still maintaining their own vibrancy.
 

You’ve been living in New York City for about a decade now, but in addition to this novel, several of your stories have been set in Buffalo. How has the distance of time and space affected your memories and your imagined version of the city?

I still write about Buffalo, I think, because I’m lazy and don’t want to do any research. It’s my hometown and I know the streets, but I think that “Buffalo” is just a word that comforts me. I’m never trying to be factually accurate. Anybody who reads my work for an idea of what Buffalo is like will be sorely disappointed. To be honest, I don’t really care much about place in fiction. A city name is just a word to me. I know that’s odd. But I never read a novel to “see” New York City or Paris or London. As a reader, I’m far more interested in character than place. I am only speaking for myself here. Like, say, when I read James Agee’s Death in the Family, there’s that gorgeous, bravura opening about Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s great, great writing, but personally I don’t care any more for Knoxville than I care for Chattanooga, Tennessee, or Boulder, Colorado. As a reader, I mean.

Agee’s sentences are so poetic and perfect and true — you can just eat the language — and in some ways I think the setting, the place, is just an excuse for Agee to riff and show off his skills. The word “Knoxville” is a pi&numl;ata that the writer smashes open and all the goodies fall out. I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore, so I’m going to stop there.
 

At one point, James tells us that “Iris Murdoch’s the greatest writer in the world when you’re in the mood.” When he says that, he isn’t actually in the mood, but can you tell us about when you were in the right place to make that discovery?

Maybe he’s overstating the case a little, but I do think Murdoch’s a much better writer than she’s often given credit for. I mean, Under the Net is a delight, and even though she never does that again, never just lets you off the hook with a pure entertainment, she’s definitely a much more playful writer than most critics allow. She’s dark, brainy and playful, everything I want out of a writer. But James says he is not in the mood to read her at that moment because timing can be all-important when approaching a book. In my own life I can think of a number of times when I tried to read a novel and couldn’t get into it, and then years later I came back to it and found an entirely different book waiting for me. The first time that happened was with A Confederacy of Dunces. Everybody told me it was hilarious and perfect for me. Twice I tried to read it and — nothing. It just didn’t do it for me. I tried a third time a few years ago and it blew me away. I was finally ready for it. Recently I had the same experience with Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. I couldn’t penetrate it the first time I tried. It kept evicting me. Now I think it’s one of the tightest, most heartbreaking and perfect books I’ve read.

Anyway, unlike some of my friends, I feel no guilt in abandoning a book, even one that’s considered great. The book is fine; the problem is I’m not ready for it. I understand this. And rather than soldier through something without joy, I dump it and pick up another book. I won’t read something out of a sense of duty or obligation. There’s too much at stake. I don’t have as much free time anymore. If I’m slogging my way through some piece of shit because I’m “supposed” to, I’m not doing anybody any favors. So I put it down and move on. There is always another book calling my name. After all, the abandoned book will survive with or without me; it’s not going anywhere. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for myself. I’m in a greater hurry. Every time I open a novel I hope it will rip the top of my head off. I want to become ecstatic.

Where do the oral histories that James listens to on his car stereo fit in the timeline of Buffalo Lockjaw’s development? And how many more “tapes” are there that didn’t make it into the final version of the novel?

I inserted the oral histories after my agent agreed to represent the novel. I felt that Buffalo Lockjaw was somehow incomplete, and I was excited when I came up with that idea. I think there are a few extra “tapes,” but I didn’t like them as much as the ones you see in the book.

Oral histories are so much fun to read. Studs Terkel’s Working and Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me are two books that I re-read with pleasure. You get a sense of a person very quickly in an oral history. I wanted to try to do that with fictional characters. I had never seen a novel with an oral history component, so I was under the impression that I was doing something unique, even though I know that nothing is unique. Buffalo Lockjaw can get a little heavy at times, if you consider musing on matricide heavy, so I thought of the oral histories as palate cleansers, like: Here’s a little sorbet for you, reader.
 

In a recent interview, you discuss how novel writing has “taken over my imagination in the same way the short story did for much of my 20s and early 30s.” How are things progressing in that vein these days?

Pretty good. I’m writing the second novel now, and I think it’s the best work I’ve ever done. I mean, it’s kicking my ass and there’s a part of it that I still can’t solve, but I’ve never had so much fun writing anything before. I might not end up where I think I want to go, but I am heading in the right direction. Anyway, I’m lucky that I even get to try to do this. I’ve always wanted to write books and it’s happening for me. I appreciate my good fortune. A lot of my friends don’t seem to have a guiding passion in life and it frustrates them. Every morning I know exactly what will bring me joy. That’s not bad.

When the economy goes south people visit the library more; it is a fact of the profession.

They check out materials to save money, take classes to get new skills, and pay more attention to our free cultural events. Some children’s librarians I know have seen a definite uptick in “drop offs,” where children are left alone in the library by parents desperate for short-term child care. Many people have been coming in looking for resources to start their own businesses or for finance and budgeting advice.

We are the base of operations for many job seekers, a place where they can search employment listings, type a resume, and, frankly, find a little camaraderie and hope. Obama got help like this back in the day too.
 

But there are a lot of scared librarians in the city today. All three public library systems (Brooklyn, New York, and Queens) are facing massive budget cuts. Each system is scrambling and though each is trying to handle the shortfalls as best it can the talk in the trenches is getting shrill. We keep telling each other that we’ll all be fine, hoping to convince ourselves through repetition if nothing else.

Thank God for the union. We got a raise in the last contract negotiation, although we haven’t seen it yet and so far nobody is really pushing either for it or the back pay we are owed. A colleague put it best when she said “I’m a lot more worried about next week’s pay than last week’s.” Management, in coordination with the union, has restructured vacation time and designed new voluntary part-time positions, and is offering early retirement. We’ve had our book budgets cut, travel money for conferences eliminated, and funds for programming slashed.

Will this be enough? We are worried that, at the end of the day, it will not. Presently the libraries are in a hiring freeze, which is unnerving for new MLS graduates, but there are a lot of working librarians who fear that they are on the block as well. Librarians with less than two years’ seniority (which incidentally includes myself) are potentially at risk. Ultimately our job losses would be passed on to the patrons through limited hours and, though we’ll fight it clawing and screaming all the way, a reduction of services.
 

Dark though the situation may appear, the struggle is far from lost. Final cuts have yet to be made and large group layoffs haven’t happened (though some non-union librarians have been let go). We live to serve the public but right now we really need the public’s help. Concerned citizens can support their local library through any (or better yet, all) of the organizations below.

Save Queens Library

Brooklyn Public Library: Support Our Shelves

Support the NYPL

Brooklyn Vanguard

We are here working for you, New York City. Come in and use the library, check out books, get on the computers, tell everyone how great it is and how much you love the institution, but make sure you tell your politicians that this is an important issue for you — and excuse us if our smiles are a little bit tight.
 

Image of the Flushing, Queens library branch, the nation’s largest by circulation, taken from the New York Times.