The Book-Length Reading at the Scream: Sheila Heti reads Ticknor

I have a ton of photos from the Scream events of the past week; I think I'll start with Sheila Heti's full-length reading of Ticknor at Grano on Friday.

Early last week, advance ticket sales for this reading were weak enough that the organizers were starting to worry. The solution they and Sheila came up with was classic Scream, and a perfect example of what happens when you set brilliant and completely impractical people to work on a practical problem: They decided that, in order to make the event more appealing, they would hire a man to eat a pie for the entire duration of the reading. Thus, actor Ed Fielding -- visible to the left in the above photo -- was brought on board, along with Rob Clutton, centre, who provided incidental musical accompaniment on upright bass.

The resulting performance was, I thought, stunning. Many of us were mesmerized from the beginning by the remarkable discipline, precision and deliberation of Ed's pie-eating. (He never broke character, remaining perfectly immobile at his desk during breaks.) It soon became apparent that he, Rob and Sheila were functioning as a perfectly orchestrated group: when Sheila reached an emotional peak in the narrative, the bass would speed up, and the look of deep abstraction on Ed's face would be replaced by one of bottomless sorrow, or wistful nostalgia, in keeping with the text. A sound recording was made of Sheila's reading; Carl was sorry they hadn't thought to make a video of Ed as well. A four-hour video of a man slowly eating a pie, with Sheila's reading as voice-over: it would have been like a Victorian Andy Warhol film.

As it turned out, the room at Grano was filled nearly to capacity, and it was really heartening to see how many Torontonians (plus a few out-of-town visitors) were happy to listen for four hours to the reading of an entire novel.



I'd read Ticknor a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it a lot; I think my familiarity with the text helped me get more out of the reading. You hear such different aspects of a work when it's read aloud; for one thing, it always seems much funnier live. More reading and listening photos on flickr.