Northern California Older Book Awards

Went last night to the Northern California Book Awards, an annual event sponsored by that venerable local institution Poetry Flash.

I am loath to criticize people who are, first of all, volunteers, and second of all, my elders in every way. They have kept a literary community going in the Bay Area and in Northern California as a whole for decades. And the event was reasonably well-organized and held in a pretty auditorium in the nearly-new San Francisco Public Library.

But I do have to say that the event was somewhat lacking in energy. First of all, in each category there was at least one nominee, sometimes two, who was not present. This became an even bigger drag when the absent nominee won -- which was most of the time. So picture several people getting up on stage, and then none of them win, because the catagory is won by someone not there.

As the evening wore on, the excuses for not being there seemed to get more and more lame. For the fiction winner, William T. Vollmann, it was hard not to feel that the event simply paled in comparison to anything else he had to do; he was said to be in Toronto. Rebecca Solnit, one of the few people present who were under 50 years old, read a page or two from Europe Central that made the book sound almost incomprehensible. For the translation winner, he was said to be in Monterrey welcoming a dozen students from overseas. The nonfiction winner was absent as well.

And as I said, the whole crowd was reasonably elderly. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- these people are teachers, bookstore owners, writers. They were the literary community for the last 40 years. But I had to wonder: where are all the young people who crowd Writers With Drinks every month? Where are the hundreds of young people who packed the LitCrawl readings last October? They weren't in that auditorium.

There's something wrong there. Why does there have to be such a gap between the old scene and the new scene?

Poetry Flash, Northern California Book Awards, William T. Vollmann