Face-melter
I'm still in shock from the Lorrie Moore reading that finished an hour ago. Moore is a bit of a recluse and hasn't made an appearance in Chicago that I know of since I became aware of her in '98, even though she teaches creative writing a short distance away at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her collection of short stories, Birds of America, was published that year and ever since I've had a literary infatuation with her. (As have many others. A friend told me Moore had a stalker problem, which might help explain her reclusiveness. The woman who introduced her tonight mentioned that Dave Eggers said Moore was his first "literary infatuation." "First" suggests he's moved on, whereas Moore is a thousand times the writer Eggers will ever be.) Moore hasn't put out a book since, a long time given Birds of America's critical success, but she has done some reviews for the New York Review of Books.

Moore read from a novel she's working on and ... it was indescribably mind-blowing. The only description or analogy that even approaches conveying how powerfully good it was is that it was a face-melter. In the film School of Rock, Jack Black's character uses the term to describe an exceptional guitar solo a la Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Jimmy Hendrix, etc. He's referencing, of course, the scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Nazis open the Pandora's Box-like Ark, thereby unleashing furious bursts of spiritual energy which wreak havoc on the troops and which melt the faces of the officers standing nearby. Yeah, it was that good.

Moore appeared with novelist Jane Hamilton who had the unenviable job of going second.

You could tell she knew what a shitty spot she was in; it was a capacity crowd in a giant ballroom of a fancy downtown hotel. Everyone in the place had to be thinking the same thing: "How do you follow that?"

However, her situation was one that a character in a story by either of them could easily find themselves. They both subject their characters to humorously awful situations and, more in the case of Moore I think, their characters deal with adversity with gallows humor. This probably worked to Hamilton's advantage and she appeared to be chuckling in disbelief as she approached the podium.

She began by gushing a little over Moore's reading and called it "dazzling." Not a bad start. She then went into an anecdote about how she had read what she was reading tonight at a previous event as if she was reassuring the audience - and herself? - that, you know, it's just like riding a bicycle. She's done it a million times before. And she did hold her own, fortunately. She read a bit from Disobedience and then a hilarious short nonfiction piece about a piano recital she gave as a kid. Young Hamilton dreaded giving the recital, imagined different schemes for getting out of it, and finally ended up turning what should have been a seven-minute long performance into a forty-seven minute long butchering.

I wish I could remember what Moore read but it was so fucking funny, so fucking powerful, so fucking original that I can't other than it had to do with a naive, young woman who was taking a creative writing class at a Midwestern college.