Before Monday night, just the name “Literary Death Match” to me connoted a bloodthirsty audience in a fist-shaking circle, shouting lines of Keats and encouraging violence like some kind of snobtastic, Fight Club bastard child. While the truth might not be quite that extravagant (or illegal), it is still a pretty good time, and Philadelphia was lucky enough to host its second Literary Death Match (the first was May 26th at Ladder 15) Upstairs at the World Café Live this past Monday, November 7th.
Walking past the entrance, the crowd seemed like every other World Café audience I’d ever seen, although generally a little older looking and, from the sound of their conversation, more successful ( “Yeah, my last literary agent wanted $5 million, but I told him he could only take $3.”) In addition to the tables and bar, two extra lines of chairs were set up in the front of the room right by the stage as if to say that the World Cafe Live was taking the event pretty seriously. That’s not to say everyone there was somber.
Todd Zuniga, creator of the Literary Death Match and the Emcee for the evening, sported a snazzy tuxedo jacket with pink and blue dragons so hypnotizing I couldn’t listen to a thing he said for the first five full minutes of his introduction, despite his apparently effortless charm. I’m pretty sure, though, that he was laying down how the Literary Death Match works, which to the uninitiated goes something like this: there are four competitors, with two competing against each other at a time. After the first two have performed (each for seven minutes or less), the judges would give their criticism, choose the winner, take an intermission, and then the second two would go on similarly. Once the two finalists are chosen, they would then compete in a random/non-reading related competition to determine the ultimate Literary Death Match Champion.
Once Todd explained the rules and encouraged everyone to tweet @Litdeathmatch about not being at the Eagles game (someone knew their crowd embarrassingly well), the audience was introduced to the judges: Karina Kacala judging “Literary Merit,” Jonathan Valania judging “Performance,” and Cyrille Taillandier judging “Intangibles.”
In a stunning display of orderly efficiency, Courtney K. Bambrick, poetry editor and representative of Philadelphia Stories, was the evening’s first performer as decided by a series of coin-tosses and paper-throwing at the audience (Todd threw paper at your humble author, but I was too busy taking frantic notes to notice—oops).
In her 14-section poem, she invited listeners to imagine a world without just about everything. Some of the things, like numbers, didn’t seem so bad; however, the judges got caught up on a particular line that suggested “in a world without hands we would masturbate less,” quite the troubling concept indeed.
Her competitor (representing Murphy Writing Seminars) was Sean Finucane Toner, who insisted that he had “never sweated this much in [his] life” before launching into a poem and two, seven-line stories, one of which was one of the 15 finalists for an Opium Magazine writing contest, or, as he “prefer[s] to call it, the winner.”
Although he made sure to crack jokes, Sean’s stories centered strongly around disability (Sean himself is visually impaired) and had several “oh man” moments, including one line that particularly struck me: “There’s just so much you miss out on when you can see.” Depth and sincerity aside, Jonathan noted that Sean’s cane and dark glasses looked quite “debonaire,” and after some discussion amongst the judges, Karina announced Sean as the winner for the first round of the competition.
After what seemed like a pointlessly long intermission (I was ready for more throwing down at this point), Todd was back up on the stage for more coin-toss. This time, Michael O’Hara for Apiary Magazine was the first to perform—and perform he did. In a series of gestures that was alternatively disturbingly violent (finally!) and engaging, it was cool to see someone conversing with the slam-poetry format which the Literary Death Match set-up seemed so well-suited for.
Maybe I just had good seats, but I was so engaged with watching the spit fly out of his mouth that I barely noticed what he was saying amidst the frantic yelling and dramatic pauses. But after his three minutes and 52 seconds were up (two seconds shorter than the briefest performance in Literary Death Match history), Karina managed to mention something about Marx and Office Space before Jonathan said what was really on everyone else’s mind: “That was a performance worthy of a restraining order, my friend.”
Jamie-Lee Josselyn, representing The Kelly Writers House at Penn, was the final contestant of the evening and read her short piece entitled, “The Bright Spot,” chronicling an across-the-country cycling adventure with her boyfriend—“we’re still together for now,” she added. Filled with funny one-liners about cowboys talking to rattlesnakes and rage at a preacher cyclist as part of her daily “full-on meltdown,” the climax of her story had to have been the Rocky Mountain Oysters (read: sheep’s testicles) that “were sliced in delicate, glittering chips.” The judges were quick to point out the epic feel of the piece– Karina said it reminded her of either This American Life or “like a story slam with less poop.” After a long huddle, though, it seemed like even Jamie-Lee’s marathon narrative couldn’t compete with one simple fact, which Cyrille explained in these terms: “We picked Michael because we were afraid of him.”
So with Sean and Michael as the final contestants, Todd once again took the stage to explain their challenge—they had to duel it out in a spelling bee of difficult writers names, with the opportunity to “phone a friend” (aka ask an audience member to spell it) or switch to another author once each. Both received a mixed bag of impossibilities, with Sean struggling over Palahnuik but surviving Kerouac, while Michael failed Pynchon and Ondaatje but pushing past (at least one version of) Dostoyevsky.
Still, my own personal highlight was Sean’s fight to spell Paul Theroux’s name, at which point he exchanged it for another author (Eugenides) because he couldn’t call Paul Theroux himself to ask how to spell his name. Todd laughed, saying he doubted that Sean could get his number, at which point a man sitting two seats down from me whipped out his iPhone and pointed—and I am totally serious about this—to Paul Theroux’s phone number, written down, in his cellphone. In case you wanted to know what kind of crowd was attending this show…I was probably the bottom of the barrel.
Although Michael ultimately was crowned the champion of Literary Death Match, he was seen post-show hugging it out with the other contestants, which was definitely charming and a way nicer ending than I would have anticipated to something with “Death” and “Literary” in the title. That being said, the best thing about the Match seemed to be the fact—and Todd alluded to this during one of his speeches—that we were all there supporting writing rather than glued to a television on a Monday night. In other words, The Literary Death Match, although maybe not so gruesome, is a reminder that not every writing event needs to be tears and a monologue about some sad girl’s ex-boyfriend (although there’s probably a place for that).
So it’s official—I’m definitely a convert, a Twitter follower, and a person eagerly awaiting the next tour. And if all the reading and performance and humor wasn’t good enough, I’ll take a Death Match that you can dress up for any day of the week.
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Ann "James" Hoelscher
