Caleb wrote that excellent recent piece on the Mass-Observation movement that also inspired an observational haiku. Haiku has become awfully trendy again, it seems, what with the stacks of Craigslist box poetry. So I’m glad to see that Caleb will be speaking, in either free verse (the event is free) or in form in two weeks, along with two other writers I’m excited to see in person:

The Educational Alliance is pleased to announce that Caleb Crain, Melissa Plaut, and Brandon Stosuy will be appearing on Tuesday, October 17 at 7:00 pm as part of our series, Writers at the Alliance. The Educational Alliance is located at 197 East Broadway (F train to East Broadway, walk two blocks to Jefferson). Readings take place in the Mazer Theater. This is a free event. For further information, contact Liz Brown at readings@killfee.net or call the Educational Alliance at (212) 780-2300, ext. 378.

HERE IS NEW YORK: THEN AND NOW
Tuesday, October 17
7:00 pm

In his foreword to “Here is New York,” written in 1948, E.B. White asserted that “it is the reader’s, not the author’s, duty to bring New York down to date.” The Alliance has enlisted three very different writers with that task, beginning with Caleb Crain who chronicles the extravagances and vanities of New York’s upper class in the nineteenth
century. Next, Brandon Stosuy delves into the downtown music scene of the 1970s and continues through to 2006, noting outerborough shifts along the way. Finally, Melissa Plaut, a blogging cab driver, keeps us “down to date” with her present-day account of life behind the wheel in New York City.

CALEB CRAIN has written essays and criticism for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (Yale, 2001), and is at work on a history of the divorce of the nineteenth-century theatrical couple Edwin and Catharine Forrest.

MELISSA PLAUT was born in 1975 and grew up in the suburbs of New York City. After college, she held a series of office jobs until, at the age of 29, she began driving a yellow cab. A year later she started writing “New York Hack,” a blog about her experiences behind the wheel. Within a few months, the blog was receiving several thousand hits a day. She is currently working on a book based on “New York Hack” to be published in 2007 by Villard.

BRANDON STOSUY, a staff writer and columnist at Pitchfork, contributes regularly to The Believer and The Village Voice and has written for Arthur, BlackBook, Bookforum, LA Weekly, Seattle Weekly, and Slate, among other publications. His Danzig-heavy meditation on Sue de Beer appears in her EMERGE monograph (Downtown Arts Projects, 2005) and an essay he co-authored with Lawrence Brose is collected in Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper (FDU Press, 2006). He’s currently curating The Believer’s 2007 Music Issue Compilation CD while finishing a discussion with Matthew Barney and essays on Wayne Koestenbaum and Gordon Lish, also for The Believer. Up Is Up, But So Is Down, his anthology of Downtown New York literature, will be published in October by NYU Press.