Germ Books, at 205 Frankford Avenue in Fishown, will be hosting a reading by authors from the Underground Literary Alliance tonight at 7 p.m.

The book store is located just across the street from the Rocket Cat Cafe.

There will be some music as well.


Here is an article the appeared in the Star newspapers.

The Star serves Port Richmond, Northern Liberties, Fishtown, Kensington, and Bridesburg.
If you do not receive the Star, but would like to, call the circulation department at 215 354 3150.

Underground Writers Converge at Germ

Despite the persistent presence of oddballs attracted to Germ Books, there are a few nice things that Fishtown residents get for having the weirdo bookstore in their neighborhood.

For one thing, they have an active storefront along Frankford Avenue, as opposed to the vastly abandoned stretches of the street farther north that tend to draw blight and crime. It’s also an intimate place to buy decent books by authors who might make it onto a high school reading list now and then.

Then there is the owner, David Williams, who, though a bit of an oddball himself, is a great guy who owns and maintains a good-size house in the neighborhood.

But every once in a while, the little bookstore draws in something really great — something so off the wall and bizarre that it could only happen at a place like Germ.

That’ll be the case next Wednesday. Converging on the newly christened and expanded store will be a group of firebrand writers known as the Underground Literary Alliance.

Now in its seventh year, the ULA coalition has grown from a cluster of cranky and dejected writers who got their kicks by ruffling the feathers of the literary elite to a contingent of cranky and dejected writers with an operational book press. The intended goal of that book press is not so much to perturb the literary elite, represented by booksellers like Barnes & Noble and the publishers that populate their shelves, but to make such establishments obsolete.

The main gripe of ULA writers is that the publishing industry has been come too profit-oriented, too upper class — and in effect — too far removed from the kind of writing that appeals to most Americans. Books today, they say, aren’t judged so much by what’s between the covers, but by how much cash they think they can make from an author.
They also have a beef with the top echelons of New York City’s literary society, which the ULA sees as the primary hijackers of American literature. For those who pull the strings that dictate what eventually reaches the nation’s bookshelves, who you know carries more clout than how you write, ULA writers say.

One ULA member even said he made the move to Philadelphia so that he could be “closer to the heart of the beast.”

By setting up their own book press and heading out on book tours like the one that will stop at Germ on Wednesday, the ULA hopes to give book fans a taste of writing that hasn’t gone through the filter of the modern publishing industry. They also hope to inspire and attract a new breed of writers who don’t want to pander to the market just to get printed.
In the words of King Wenclas, one of ULA’s founders, the movement seeks to reinvigorate a literary tradition that can appeal to the Jerry Springer demographic while still retaining deep-seated meaning.

So far, ULA has published books by three authors, Fred Wright, “Crazy” Carl Robinson and James Nowlan. Next week’s event will see Wright and Robinson reading from their books, with other performances by ULA poet and Philadelphia resident Frank Walsh and local musician Eric Broomfield, best known on the streets as Jellyboy the Clown. David Talento, a local experimental musician of the electronic vein, will provide background music for the readings.

Wright, who scribed his novel The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus under the pen name Wred Fright, said the reading at Germ Books is just part of ULA’s drive to make reading and writing books a more grassroots experience.
“People might call us crude, but so be it,” said Wright. “It’s time for writing to get real.”

In Emus, Wright takes readers through the experiences of a college rock band in a raw and highly comical manner. Written from the view of each band member, the chapters are broken down into first-person perspectives that read more like diary entries than flowery prose.
The effect of the untraditional narrative is to make you feel like you are actually talking to or inside the head of the band members.
It is, as Wright suggests, very real.

And while listening to the ramblings of college-would-be rockers may seem like a topic unworthy of a book, the scattered dialogue in Emus somehow manages to paint a complex picture of the ambitions and obstacles faced by the youngsters.

Wright started the book as a “zine,” or a short home-made publication that straddles the border between a book and magazine.
Zines, Wright explains, are by their nature hard to pin down, but they are almost always cheaply produced and geared toward fringe subjects.

In the case of Emus, Wright spent two years releasing various chunks of the book, both online and in printout segments that he would mail to fans. Before ULA publisher Jeff Potter decided to pick up Emus last year, the book had been printed only on Wright’s home computer.
The experiences related within came from the decade he spent flirting with the idea of making it in the music business. But the idea to put it all down in writing came from his dissatisfaction with the current state of rock-lit.

“Every time I read a book about a band, it was about a famous rock star who had already made it big and had everything he wanted,” said Wright. “The experience of reading those books left me feeling flat, so I gravitated toward writing the zine.”

The story that he felt was missing was the more common one, the story of the band that doesn’t make it.

Wright’s friend and co-reader on the tour, Carl Robinson, will be reading from his short novel, titled Fat on the Vine.
Robinson’s style is quite a bit darker than Wright’s, but he too maintains a grimy sense of humor in the tradition of no-frills mastermind Charles Bukowski.

Like Wright, Robinson tackles a down-to-earth subject matter, this one surrounding an overweight drunkard in search of lost love.
Wright and Robinson’s penchant for telling stories in a straightforward manner that a broader scope of the public can relate to is what the ULA is all about, explains Philadelphia poet Frank Walsh, who is known in the movement as the “Masked Perfesser.”

Walsh said the reading at Germ on Wednesday should appeal to people who feel out of touch with the current world of literature summed up on the New York Times Best Seller List.
It should also draw in those who want to relate to others in a way that makes sense.

“We want to give people back the desire to read,” said Walsh. “This literature is the literature of the people, and it’ll remind them where they came from. It is going to be a really great happening, and a great mix of people.” ••

The Underground Literary Alliance book tour will take place at Germ Books, 2005 Frankford Ave., on Wednesday, July 18, at 7 p.m. The event is free.

Reporter Brian Rademaekers can be reached at 215-354-3039 or brademaekers@phillynews.com

A correction from the above post: Germ is not "right across the street from Rocket Cat," but a building or two up the street, on the same side.

Last night's performance was pretty good, with the best bit coming from Jellyboy the Clown, a local writer/side show artist/ musician. A girl from the crowd also finished the evening nicely with a prank call for the audience.