The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News October 1, 2004

Reading for votes

By Josh Keating

It’s not every night that Led Zeppelin, the ghost of Raymond Carver and explosive diarrhea come together in the name of American democracy, but everybody’s getting in the act this season. On Wednesday, seven writers read their work at Warner Concert Hall as part of a get-out-the-vote tour called Operation: Ohio.

Operation: Ohio is the brainchild of novelist Stephen Elliot, author of the novels Happy Baby and A Life Without Consequences. The project attempts to get major contemporary literary figures involved in turning out the youth vote in key swing states.

Students who sign a list will receive a call from an author on the morning of Election Day reminding them to vote. In addition to the seven authors who read, dozens of other writers are involved in the project including Tobias Wolff, ZZ Packer, Michael Chabon and Dave Eggers.

Elliot is no stranger to politics. He recently released a nonfiction work titled Looking Forward To It which takes fear and loathing on the campaign trail into a new generation as the author recounts his time covering the 2004 Democratic primary in exuberant and hyperactive prose.

“The only thing worse than waking up with a hangover is waking up with a hangover on the morning that Al Gore endorses Howard Dean,” read one passage that Elliot recited.

Elliot said that he was “sitting around with nothing to do” after the book came out and “really wanted the war to end” so he began working on putting the project together.

The reading was officially a non-partisan event but on several occasions Elliot made sarcastic reference to the liberal politics of the writers involved. In Looking Forward To It he predicted that if Bush was reelected the country could be in for a period of marshal law.“It may be the first time they imposed marshal law and no one noticed,” he said.Most of the authors were not as explicit in expressing their political point of view as Elliot. Julie Orringer, the author of the short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, chose not to share her own work at all and instead read from a collection of letters to President Bush written by eighth graders in her sister’s class.“The time you have spent in office has not been spent well,” read one. “Your vocabulary is limited. You use the same words over and over.”“Seriously get out of that business,” read another. “Nobody likes you.”Jim Shepard took a look inside the mind of John Ashcroft in an interior monologue written from the attorney general’s point of view. The monologue was written in the form of an orderly, bullet-pointed presentation in which the protagonist recounted some well-known public actions, including his attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and “abortionist judges” as well as some bizarre private moments involving his wife and a giant tarantula.Vendela Vida, the editor of the cultural journal The Believer read two entries from a work titled The Future Dictionary of America in which authors created dictionary entries for a utopian future in which America’s current political turmoil is a distant memory. The entries she read were “Tallahassee Memory Bank” which is a library of horrifying war memories that future leaders will have to consult before declaring war and “Blowkay,” which describes the insignificance of a politician’s sexual peccadilloes compared with the damage done by politicians who send troops to die in unnecessary wars.The other authors steered clear of politics altogether. Ryan Harty read from a story called “Crossroads” from his collection Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, telling the tale of two rural American brothers on the road to a Led Zeppelin concert in the early 70s. Oberlin Creative Writing Chair Dan Chaon, author of the recently published novel You Remind Me of Me, received an enthusiastic welcome from the hometown crowd for a brief and vivid story in which the author describes an encounter with the late short story writer Raymond Carver in a dive bar. The story was both a parody and tribute to the sparse and direct style of description that made Carver famous. To end the evening, author and standup comedian Jonathan Ames, who at one point described himself as the “George Plimton of the colon,” read a nonfiction piece called “I Shit My Pants in the South of France,” which told the story of exactly that.“I was going to read a piece a wrote a few years ago called Bald, Impotent and Depressed but it turned out to be too prophetic,” he said.Elliot said that the tour had been very successful so far. “We’ve gotten a lot of publicity,” he said. “A lot of students who read about this tour are signing up for the reminder service on the internet.”The Oberlin event was the second of three Ohio readings. The first was on Tuesday at Ohio State University and the last was at Cleveland State University on Thursday.
 
 

   

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