Reading to Strangers: The Best of All Possible Worlds
2015 - present
Performance
3.5 hours
Cabrillo Point National Monument / Ship in the Woods
One in a series of marathon public performances in which I read to small or incidental audiences in taco shops, parks, trolleys and bars. These interventions bear a closer resemblance to the intimate tradition of reading to a child at bedtime than events in lecture halls or bookstores. Voltaire’s novel Candide was read to tourists contemplating the moment of initial contact between Europe and the Americas. (More recently Salvador, Joan Didion’s 1983 evocation of El Salvador in conflict against a backdrop of Reagan-era U.S. Central America policy was read in the back booth of a cocktail lounge.)
