Odds & Ends

Book Affair '76, at Memorial Hall and Sanders Theater, May 7, 8, 9. Admission is free for Harvard students.

Boston's second annual Book Affair for small publishers is taking place at Harvard this year, and spare space may be the most non-controversial explanation for this location. The event is commercial but no one involved seems to expect a lot of sales, just attention and piquant exchange.

The Affair represents a kind of grassroots movement among the sprawl of literary people who tend to be neglected by established publishers, book stores, manazines and newspapers. They're up against, say, The New York Times Book Review, which they all read and despise for its pre-eminence, and are out to show that the alternative establishment, like the Real Paper and the Phoenix, that journalists aren't the only writers around. Members of the project's organizing board assured me that you can churn good copy out of garages, on the run or, as somebody's voice kept hissing, off of a porch. The problem is how to distribute.

So the main speakers at this week's Book Affair are people who have mastered the knack of spreading their names. Whether this has to do with their skill with words is a moot point. In any case, once they've lured you over to Mem Hall, you're bound to notice a few of the 180-odd small publications from around the country on display.

Alexander Theroux and John Batke, who teach creative writing here, will read from their work on Friday. Saturday, the Yale poet and Pulitzer prize winner Alan Dugan is scheduled along with Penelope Mortimer. If Mortimer's name sounds familiar, no doubt you've got the requisite subscription to the New Yorker. It's encouraging to see a student, George Colt '76, on the last day's list of speakers, and I guess Rita Mae Brown, who's associated with a kind of lesbian consciousness, its into the subterranean theme.

At least at Harvard, I sense a kind of dichotomy between writing and academic communities. So it will be intriguing to see what happens when everyone gets together this weekend--flirting and scratching, that kind of thing. The Affair's board seems to have mixed feelings about its relationship to academe. Bill Corbett, of Fire Exit magazine, offered a mock-charitable smile that it's "lovely of Harvard University to promote this thing," while Jane Barnes of Dark Horse sounded relieved by its freedom from scholarly "corruption." On the other hand, Stratis Haviaras, who takes care of Lamont's Poetry Room, claims that when there's "an increase in literary activity in a community, you'll find it reflected at Harvard." Ploughshare's DeWitt Henry would rather skip the university connection altogether and suggested you could think of the event as "a moveable feast."

Anyway, now's your chance to try figuring out what writing is all about for yourself. You could decide to trade in your New Yorker for a broadsheet. Or the part of the exhibit they call "dregs alley" might be enough to convince you to stay in the English department.