NYC: A recommendation, and a caveat

Anne Enright is reading at KGB Bar tomorrow; her book THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ was one of my favorite books of last year and I'm hoping to catch her this time around. She's reading in a series sponsored by the NYU MFA program, just like the Chad Harbach reading I went to last week.

I hadn't realized when I arrived that some of the MFA students would be reading before the main event, as opening bands to the headliner, but it didn't bother me. Two of them were very good, including one woman whose novel excerpt made me wish I had taken her name down, and one was all right. The fourth student reader aired out a poem dedicated to a poet who had recently visited his class for a guest lecture, the first line of which was: "Meghan O'Rourke equals hot." Forget tying sonnets to trees; apparently it's now too much to ask for a decent analogy in the first line of a poem. Suddenly being alone forever doesn't seem so bad!

But my point is, public-service announcement, if you are student-reading averse for whatever reason, don't get there too early; and if you can't get out of work in time, you might not be too late.