Dear Shaded Viewers,
Do you know the work of Joseph Keckler? He is a magician, a vagabond of the outer boroughs with an eye for the unorthodox, irregular, anomalous and uncanny. By turns mordant and melancholy, decadent and delirious. His first book comes out next month, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World and has twenty mesmerizing tales. The book is published by Turtle Point Press. The stories range between different periods of his life written over the last ten years. Keckler leads us through corners of downtown New York and the Midwest. He introduces us to his mentors and muses, odd jobs and odder employers. He tells us what it is like to work for a blind man who runs an art gallery, or for an aging club kid who administers a university classics department. Art gets turned into a religion and the characters make a spectacle out of daily life. Some strive to be the at center stage while others struggle just to be seen, but all the characters are in the margins. In this world you may find yourself boarding a familiar bus or train or in some shady netherworld or skipping past midnight on New Year’s Eve. Sounds like good reading and …there is sex with ghosts which maybe is not all that strange. The incessant GPS voice mosks the last moments of a longtimelove.
Joseph Keckler is a captivating raconteur, with a delicious ability to transform scenes of dread into comedic triumph. His deadpan delivery contrasts brilliantly with his virtuoso appetite for moody glissandi and hectic staccati. I marvel at the social incongruities—the faux pas, the accidental couplings, the identity slippages—that he narratively dishes out as if they were artisanal pizzas, seasoned with a hilarity and drama that add up to box office boffo.
—Wayne Koestenbau
7PM Sunday November 19, 2017 Free
Reading and Book Signing
Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
6 East First Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue)
New York, NY 10003
917-475-1294
Gallery Hours: Wed–Sun, 11 AM–6 PM
