Reading! Lunchtime! Midtown! TODAY!

For Underwater New York:

Wednesday, June 30

12:30 – 1:45 pm

Bryant Park – 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues

An afternoon with Underwater New York

Featuring

Music for Underwater Things by Michael Hearst;

Readings of original underwater stories by

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Ed Park, Personal Days: A Novel

Nelly Reifler, See Through: Stories

Said Sayrafiezadeh, When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir

Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation;

And an underwater letter-writing activity from

Ben Greenman, What He’s Poised to Do: Stories

King Kullin'

"You are young," said the palaces and the temples and the shrines, "but we are old. The world was wild with youth when we were reared. You and your tribe shall pass, but we are invincible, indestructible. We towered above a strange world, ere Atlantis and Lemuria rose from the sea; we still shall reign when the green waters sigh for many a restless fathom above the spires of Lemuria and the green hills of Atlantis and when the isles of the Western Men are the mountains of a strange land.

"How many kings have we watched ride down these streets before Kull of Atlantis was even a dream in the mind of Ka, the bird of Creation? Ride on, Kull of Atlantis; greater shall follow you; greater came before you. They are dust; they are forgotten; we stand; we know; we are. Ride, ride on, Kull of Atlantis; Kull the king, Kull the fool!"

—Robert E. Howard, "The Shadow Kingdom" (1929)

(Via Grognardia)

* * *

Speaking of Atlantis, I'll be reading next Wednesday (!) at 12:30 as part of the "Word for Word" series at the Bryant Park Reading Room. It's outside, free! It's Underwater New York day; the other readers are Deb Olin Unferth, Nelly Reifler, Said Sayrafiezadeh, and—new addition—Jennifer Egan! Plus Ben Greenman with a letter-writing activity and music from Michael Hearst.

A reading!

NEWS BLAST——————————

Ed Park will be making a rare public post-baby appearance on June 30 at Bryant Park!

He, rather I, will be reading something aquatic (maybe this?) as part of the Word for Word series (Underwater New York edition), along with Deb Olin Unferth*, Nelly Reifler, Said Sayrafriezadeh, and a "special guest"...

These readings are at noon—a good way to spend your lunch hour!




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*With this reading, Deb and I will have read together four times—a record?

Underwater New York/From the Parkives: "An Oral History of Atlantis"

These private oracles served as a fix, but I passed my days in a benthic haze: I wanted to swim again, to be by my blowhole familiar. Unable to resist, abject as any addict, I finally made a return visit uptown, but the entire district had been rezoned; the mayor, linking Metaphor to vice, had decreed that only pizza parlors could operate there now. They’d renamed it MUNGO, for Municipality near North Grosvenor and Orange, as if that would make people forget...

—"An Oral History of Atlantis"

An introduction.
In November of last year, Nicole Haroutunian asked if I had any stories that might be suited for Underwater New York, an online lit and art anthology that she co-edits. A few months had to pass before I remembered this story. "An Oral History of Atlantis" was written in the early summer of 2001, for a reading at the old Galapagos in Brooklyn. It was a beautiful evening; I remember we ate delicious corn outdoors at Veracruz afterward. The reading was for a San Francisco–based journal called 6,500 (long defunct), guest-edited by my friend Paul La Farge. (6,500 had just run a different story by me; when I can, I still like to write original pieces for readings, mostly as a way to get myself writing anything at all.)

Later that summer I gave the story to Manuel Gonzales at Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art; he published it in the 35th issue, circa late 2002. "An Oral History of Atlantis" is thus both a pre-9/11 story (it was fun to imagine my city falling apart), and a post-9/11 one (I stopped writing like this for a while).

I believe this was my fourth published story. Indeed, this story is so old that the version on my computer can't be read by two out of three people I've sent it to. (Old hard drives, old word-processing programs might constitute the secret Atlantis of our time.) So I'm very happy to see it resurface, after nearly a decade, at the perfectly named Underwater New York; it's also a nice surprise to be teamed up with my friend and New-York Ghost photographer Adrian Kinloch, himself a frequent contributor to Underwater NYC.

You can read "An Oral History of Atlantis" in full here. The only other thing I'll say is that I've always liked the title.