Monthly Archives: February 2009

All About Him and Me

Posted on by
31

It probably comes as no surprise to many of you that I am married, although I am rarely allowed to mention any details about this alliance because my husband thinks it’s weird for me to write about him.  He’s not really into the whole web-revelation thing.  In fact, he had a Facebook account for about thirty seconds, but then people like his ex-girlfriend and those he went to high school with began to ask him to be friends and he couldn’t keep up with the whole dizzying whirl that those four friend requests seemed to him to represent, so he shut the whole thing down.  (I am still on Facebook:  and yes, I would LOVE to be your friend.)  

But I asked him nicely if I could tell people his middle name is John because I would like to participate in the “about our marriage” thing that has swept through the blogworld, and which requires that you reveal your middle name, for starters.  He said yes, which means he can’t say no to anything else I ask him for the next half hour as he heats up the black bean soup I made earlier today.  Me?   My middle name is Fay.  Through much of my childhood I was referred to as Lily Fay, but only by members of my family, and not now, ever, so don’t even think about trying it or I’ll un-Friend you.  

How long have you been together?

Oh god.  Forever, basically.  Since 1986.  

How long did you know each other before you began dating?

We met in 1984 when he jump started my car, which is one reason why I married him.  (That I married him seven years after we met is another story altogether.)  For two years, every time I saw him, I thought he was very attractive and quite interesting, but not at all my type because he was, well… nice.  At the time, I liked men who were dark, and mean to me.  My husband is honest, smart, tall, blond, handsome, nordic, sporty and a former Eagle scout.  He is a truly fine man.  At some point, he declared his interest — my memory is that he did it in a letter he wrote to me while I was living in New Orleans and about to leave the country for a trip to Spain.  At the time my brother was living with him and I think maybe he wanted to let me know that, when I came back (if I ever did), it would be more fun if I spent time at his house instead of my brother.  (He likes my brother.  But he likes me more.)  

Who asked whom out?

I’m thinking he did, via the aforementioned letter.  I mean, we had lots of dinners and outings as friends, but our first romantic moment was his idea. And then he broke up with me immediately afterwards, because he thought the whole thing was too serious.  That lasted for about four months and then he stopped worrying about whether things were too serious.  As it turned out, we lived together for a very long time and it wasn’t until 1991 that we got married.  

How old are you?

Oh, pretty old.  You can probably work that out.  He is two years older than I am.  That gave him time to acquire the jumper cables that led me to love him.    

Whose siblings do you see the most?

His.  They live closer than mine.  But my siblings like him a lot.  They view him as a total miracle and all of them, including my parents, are even now — years and years later — relieved as hell I did not marry any of the many unreliable men I dated before him.

Which situation is hardest on you as a couple?

Because we are utterly opposite in most ways, most situations were hard for us in the beginning of our marriage.  But we have discovered what matters most to each of us and even though we think the other person is a lunatic for caring so much about that particular thing, we tend to respect these areas (which means, basically, give in on them) — the net result being that we don’t argue as much as you’d think.  

Did you go to the same school?

No.  We did both go to very bad public high schools (his was in Lake Tahoe, mine a suburb of Tacoma, Washington).  And then we went to ivy league colleges — he to Dartmouth, where all the nordic, blond skiers go.  And I went to Yale, where they seemed to be interested in badly educated girls from the Pacific Northwest.    

Are you from the same home town?

He grew up in California.  I grew up in Europe and in the wet, dreary Pacific Northwest.  We met here, in the Bay Area.  We both love living in Berkeley, something we have never, ever argued about.  

Who is smarter?

His answer:  ”I know what you think, but I disagree.  I have more of an aptitude for science and math.  You’re good at everything else.”  In other words, I am smarter and he knows his times tables. He can also make the car start just by giving it a stern look and mouthing the words “I own jumper cables and I know how to use them.”  

Who is the most sensitive?

I appear to be but, in fact, he feels things quite deeply.  You’d just never know it, under that nordic calm.

Where do you eat out most as a couple?

Please.  We don’t eat out.  Unless you count Gordo Tacqueria, the burrito place where the guys glare at you when you get to the front of the line to order five totally distinct burritos, because no one in our family ever eats the same thing.  

Where is the furthest you have traveled together as a couple?

Nice.  A lovely trip.    Wait!  We went to Italy on our honeymoon.  Rome is further from California than Nice, I’m pretty sure.  My husband would probably know.  We once went on a bike trip through the Dordogne, before we were married, and every night he would take out our map and measure carefully, using dental floss (perfectly clean, unused floss I would like to add) to trace the lines of our routes, so he could announce, with admirable precision, the number of miles we had covered that day on our bicycles.  I could always guess it was far.  He could always tell you just how far.  

Who has the craziest exes?

Neither one of us.  We’ve been together so long that the exes have basically disappeared from memory, except for the vaguest of impressions (dark, not always nice to me: my exes.  little, cute: his exes).  Facebook saw a small resurgence of exes, but they weren’t crazy.  Just friendly. 

Who has the worst temper?

According to him, I do.  According to me, I do.  He has no temper at all.  When he gets mad it’s just funny because it’s so lame.

Who does the most cooking?

We both cook.  He was out front early in this area of competence because he knew how to grill really well, but then I discovered that if you read enough cookbooks and follow the directions, you can leave a competent griller in the dust of the lovely sprinkling of powdered sugar with which you are annointing the madeleines you learned how to make from reading Patricia Wells’ book on Paris food, which contains an incredibly delicious recipe for madeleines.  

Who is the most stubborn?

That would be both of us.  Fortunately, we are stubborn about different things.  

Who hogs the bed most?

He does.  He takes all the pillows and pulls the covers over himself and, basically, is a rude, rude bed partner.

Who does the laundry?

One of the triumphs of our marriage is our joint decision to hire someone to do our laundry.  How do you think I manage to write novels, work as a lawyer, raise my children and answer questions about my still-intact marriage while wearing clean clothes?  

Who’s better with the computer?

I am.  In fact, my computer expertise is legendary — mystical, even.  This comes from the simple fact that I — and I alone — read the directions before I plug anything in.  Thus, almost everything I try to fix or install computer-wise works beautifully.  For the rest of them, things work about half the time, maybe a little bit more if they sacrifice a small goat and pray really hard.  

Who drives when you are together?

50-50.  Well, now that I have glasses that let me drive at night, totally 50-50.  And this is a good question to end on because that’s what our marriage is:  a partnership of people who are equal, most of the time, except when it comes to jump starting the car (him), grilling (him), installing software (me) and yelling about basically inconsequential things (me).

Author, Author: Deborah Freedman

Posted on by
12
cover1
  

I think it’s appropriate that the last writer in the author-author series is the writer I’ve known the longest and who has most inspired me to be serious about writing — Deborah Freedman.  I met Debbie when we were both 18.  It was immediately clear to me, even through the fog of sleeplessness and hangovers that has mostly obscured our first year in college, that she was a deeply creative person, the sort of person who was always making something:  sweaters, boxes that told stories, observations that made me laugh.

I can also clearly remember the day, one spring (while we were hanging around waiting for whatever you wait for when you’re 18), when Debbie showed me A Hole is To Dig and told me how much she loved the  language and the pictures.  It was an unusual experience, and one I have never forgotten because it was one of the first genuine brushes I had as a young woman with authentic delight, which, as I now know, is not bounded or defined by what other people are thinking or doing.  At the time, I was concerned with getting on in an adult world that seemed serious, weighty and not all that fun.  (I mean, when I wasn’t otherwise occupied with doomed and foolish love affairs or avoiding my not-so-interesting work.)  Ruth Krauss’s brilliant First Book of First Definitions made me think that maybe there was room for writing stories, and maybe adult life could  be serious and weighty, in the best senses of those words, but those things could also be leavened with the delight of creative work.  Along the way, it’s been inspiring and helpful to watch Debbie go about building a career as a picture book writer.

Debbie trained to be an architect, but, as it turns out, what she loves to do most is build worlds in books. Her first picture books were tiny ones, written and illustrated almost twenty years ago for her own young children. Debbie became especially inspired when her girls grew old enough to draw, after they began to create recognizable and fantastic beings with endearing back-stories. She started to play with their pictures by photocopying them and doodling around them, developing ideas that became, many years later, her first picture book, SCRIBBLE.

scribble16_17small2

SCRIBBLE (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) was a Children’s Book Sense Pick, and was recently selected as a finalist for the 2008 Connecticut Book Award.

You can visit www.deborahfreedman.net to learn more about Debbie and her work. It’s a terrific, interesting site — there are book recommendations and things for children to do and a lot of really wonderful drawings, among other things.  

How’s your work coming along these days?  What have you recently sent out into the world?

These days? I’m a bit manic.  I’ve had terrible insomnia for the past few nights which means things are good. Good, because I’m awake and using the mini flashlight that my husband bought for me so that, at 3:00 a.m., I can write things down on the notecards I keep by the bed and hopefully not bother him too much. The only problem with insomnia is, well, the lack of sleep. Once I get tired enough, I will certainly cycle back into a string of days when those ideas, that seemed so fresh and clever and brilliant in the middle of the night, are now clearly insipid or just plain idiotic.

Rapunzel

Rapunzel

People love to hear how writers overcome difficulties- the long slog of getting from a brilliant idea to the end of a work, the strings of rejection so long they could circumnavigate the globe, the mean reviews, the weird reactions of loved ones to your work, the moment you see your book on the remainder pile. Can you talk about the dark nights of the soul and how you kept going, even though the lights seemed to be out?

Well, I try to be philosophical about all of that. I’ve finally figured out that rejection has actually been a good thing for me and that all of those years it took to produce something publishable were necessary. They have given me a proper amount of humility: I know that I will always have something to learn. I also deal with difficulties by trying to remember that overnight successes don’t necessarily know more than the rest of us, and even $500,000 advances don’t protect an author from getting Kirkussed. I also whine a lot, preferably to someone who will cook my supper. And I visit schools once in a while  (where the children have been told by some delusional person that I’m a “famous” author), because kids make me smile and when they give love it’s honest. I try to always remember that THEY are my audience.

The business of being a writer – finding an agent, placing stories and poems in literary journals, getting a publisher to buy your stuff – can be difficult to navigate.  What do you wish you’d known starting out?

I’ve always worked alone; I treasure solitude. And for years no one except for my husband and children even knew that I wrote, which I got away with for a while because Ben happens to be an amazing critic. While his support is essential and dear to me, what I’ve learned is that I also need at least one other friend who loves my writing, and loves me enough to say when my work is, um, wanting. And who knows when to share the 70% cacao Scharffen Berger and doesn’t hoard their champagne. Having lots of friends like that is even better.

How do you balance the rest of your life with your writing life?

I am working on saying no more often, and convincing myself that this is actually as good for the no-ees as it is for me, the no-er. At least when the no-ees are my children.

Talk about the books you’ve loved.

One of the books that inspires me, and bucks me up when I need it, is called Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (edited by Leonard Marcus). Nordstrom was an editor of children’s books, of many of the books we now consider classics. Her letters are brilliant, nurturing, funny, and inspiring to read. Among my favorite letters are those she wrote to the writer Ruth Krauss, who did lots of wonderful collaborations with Maurice Sendak that I love, like A Very Special House and I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue. In a letter about Krauss, Nordstrom said, “…grownups and children together with a Ruth Krauss book can be closer than they can be without a Ruth Krauss book”. Isn’t that great? I want to be Ruth Krauss.

How did you come to write picture books?

I just love the picture book form, being allowed to write with both words and pictures, the little cha cha that I get to have them dance. I love being allowed to tell my story with every inch of the book, that wonderful object, from cover to cover – including the endpapers, title page – everything, even the colophon. Pages can be full and active, or empty and silent. Page turns become part of the rhythm, acting like giant commas.

Picture books are much more challenging to write than most people realize, or maybe I should say that they are harder to do WELL than most people who have been on the cover of Vanity Fair realize (do I sound bitter?). They have to be very tight – authors are generally only allowed thirty-two pages and word counts in the low hundreds to get character, story, and theme across. And of course picture books are usually read aloud, so the text really needs to sing. I really can’t imagine not making them! They’ve become the prism through which I see the world.

geese

Geese ... Gum ... Giraffes


The Unacceptable Retailer

Posted on by
16

I love my job.  Where else could I discover, while drinking a cup of tea and listening to the sound of the rain, that the maker of fancy jeans (in this case, Citizens of Humanity) cannot sue Costco just because they don’t like the fact that an unclassy place like Costco has managed to get its hands on their jeans and is selling them to people who don’t look like the ideal Citizens of Humanity customer.  (How does this customer look?  Mostly, it doesn’t matter how she looks, it just matters that she does her shopping in a hushed boutique on Sacramento Street in San Francisco rather than in Costco in San Leandro, which, whatever it is, is not hushed.) 

How do I know this?  Because every day, without fail, I get something called the Daily Appellate Report, a little newspaper of all the cases that are decided by the appellate courts in California, and in the federal court that covers California and even in the United States Supreme Court.

Most of the time these cases are eye glazingly dull, and I know better than to share the details of them with anyone in his or her right mind.  But I live for moments when I learn something like how there is a whole legal rule that covers the situation of the Unacceptable Retailer.  You know, Costco.  I also live for the moment when I see a criminal case and the defendant is named Lenin Freud Perez-Torres.  This is what keeps me reading the Daily Appellate Report.

Anyway, the interesting thing about the Unacceptable Retailer is this:  how did a not-so-classy establishment like Costco get the fancy jeans they are selling in their unacceptable retail space in the first place?   The case I read does not answer this question, but I am going to hazard a guess, which is what I do when I read things and the most interesting questions are not answered.  My guess is that, although Citizens of  Humanity is too good to sell their jeans to Costco, there happen to be Acceptable Retailers, retailers Citizens of Humanities happily sells to, who have no such compunction.  And small wonder. 

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have very tight, very expensive jeans on my shopping list this year.  (I never did, but let’s ignore that for a moment.  I’m going to guess that there actually ARE many shoppers who have interlineated this item right off their shopping lists.)  So, there you are in your hushed store on Sacramento Street, staring at the stacks and stacks of unsold Citizens of Humanity jeans.  You look around and realize your store is hushed because no one is visiting it, not because it is such a quiet temple to beautiful fashion that no one ever talks inside it.  You find yourself wishing your store was a little noisier, like … Costco!   After that, it is the work of a moment to bundle up all those jeans (indeed, you might even place an extra large order for them), and take them over to Costco.  There, in between sampling biscotti and vegetarian lasagne, you sell these pants to the Unacceptable Guy at Costco Who Buys Luxury Items and Resells Them at Acceptable Prices. 

This proves several things.  First, it shows that lurking inside the apparently chilly heart of the Acceptable Retailer who looks at you cross-eyed when you walk in the door, is the Unacceptable Retailer.  It also proves that the Unacceptable Retailer is not someone we should look askance at, because they generally charge Acceptable Prices.  And, in the case of Costco, they also pay decent wages and provide health care.  Third, in case you are wondering, Citizens of Humanity cannot actually win in a lawsuit against Costco if Costco got the pants without stealing them or doing some other bad thing to get its hands on them.   

Fourth, it proves that on a day when it is raining really, really hard (there were actual “thunderstorm warnings” on the radio this morning which made me totally laugh because it just proves what weather wimps we are here in northern California) and I see a lot of homeless people on my way in to work and think about how many people are hungry and cold, the idea of Acceptable and Unacceptable Retailers, really bugs me.  What I think today is that it’s unacceptable that it’s hard to find a job and easy to lose one, and that people are hungry and cold.  And I see too that this case (which began in 2006 and is still going strong) is a leftover from another age, a time when many people plunked down their credit cards, walked away with $200 jeans, and thought maybe that would make them happy.  How and why all that occurred is beyond me today, but I will say that it is heartening that for more and more people the Acceptable Retail Experience involves going to Costco and buying food for the food bank, which is all to the good, in my view.

Looking Back

Posted on by
19

happyLate last night, I downloaded onto our new computer photographs from several years ago, photos taken shortly before my cancer diagnosis and shortly after.   And I found myself thinking, over and over, as I looked at the pictures of our life before my diagnosis, you did not know, back then, how frightened all of you would shortly be.  But otherwise, the photographs are of an exuberant bunch of children — before and after.  They are still that way.  You don’t recover from something like this, if recover means go back to the way you were, before you knew that it was possible to get news like that.  But it doesn’t alter the essential things about you.  If you’re lucky, though, it deepens what’s essentially good.  That’s what I hope happened to us.  You don’t need a cancer diagnosis for that, you just need to remember to love every good thing in your life, no matter how small.      

Happy Valentine’s Day to you and to everyone you love.

White Space

Posted on by
7

The other day, through means and for reasons utterly unknown to me, WordPress wiped out every single paragraph space in one of the pages up there in my header thing.  That meant that the rambling, obsessive tale of my submission efforts was now one impenetrable block of information.  Even I — who actually LIKE the stuff I write up there — found it impossible, after a little while, to go through it and restore the paragraph breaks, so badly did my head hurt from trying to read through the textual equivalent of a granite slab.   

So, today, I want to praise white space.  

White space is the stuff between paragraphs that lets you rest for a minute and think about how much you really like what you’ve just read.  White space is like the friend who speaks clearly and then gives you a minute to say something back — or catch your breath.  Big blocks of text, on the other hand, can feel like the person who assaults you with a story that goes on forever and makes you feel like maybe it would be better just to end your life now rather than wait for the story to do you in.  

White space is particularly important when you’re writing text that’s read almost exclusively on the computer monitor, such as a blog post or an e-mail.  I don’t always do this, but after being trapped in my own block of run-on-forever text, I’m going to pay more attention to it from now on.

Womanizer

Posted on by
16

Lately, whenever I turn on the radio, there’s Britney Spears, singing, in her weird techno-baby voice, about how  thoroughly she has repudiated the charming womanizer she spends an awful lot of time cooing over in that song, which is, of course named after him:  Womanizer. 

Ah, but if she had ever met Tomas, the womanizer at the center of Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, well, she’d obviously be singing a different tune.  But for that to happen she would have to become someone she is not, which is to say, a character in a twentieth century European novel of ideas, one of the few places I can imagine Tomas existing and not getting roundly punished for his philandering ways.  

Say what you like, but I love novels in which people behave in ways that are conventionally seen as bad (I don’t mean murderers or rapists, I mean people who don’t behave according to more workaday social norms), and yet they don’t end up being punished. Instead,  they’re seen as interesting.  They aren’t always happy, and they don’t always make other people happy.  Bad things happen to them, mostly because they return to Prague from Geneva and get kicked out of their medical practice and are crushed by communism.  But you get no sense that what happens to Tomas happens because he is a bad man who sleeps around. 

This is not the moral world of most novels.  I thought it might be interesting at this point to give you a catalogue of all the ways writers do women in after they decide to take lovers, or appear to have taken lovers:  they are run over by trains; they poison themselves (quite a few end this way, for some reason), they drown, they are choked to death and they lose their children.  And that is off the top of my  head in thirty seconds. 

Obviously, when women take lots of lovers they get punished.  But that’s not always true.  Mary Wesley for example,  never does that judgmental  punishment thing.  For her, as for Kundera, the interesting questions about promiscuity (I can’t think of a better word for it at the moment), have nothing to do with conventional morality, but more to do with how we love, how long love must last, and whether love and sex always must go together. 

And so what you discover about Tomas is that he takes lover after lover because he’s interested in what’s unique about women and sex is how he discovers that.  This behavior is painful and damaging to the woman he really does love, although she puts up with it without seeming like an idiot.  And, in the end, Tomas and Tereza seem to find some way to get beyond all the sex. 

There’s a lot more to this novel than sex — it’s about the Prague spring, and its aftermath, for one thing, and there are also other, very interesting lovers.  But today, I only have time for the womanizing part and my observation that there’s something refreshing about a book that can look at this stock character, the Womanizer, and see something different and quite complex, a vision that’s only possible when you write to understand rather than to judge, as Kundera so beautifully does.

Rejuvenating the Blog

Posted on by
38

It’s been a wonderful weekend, mainly because I’ve been spending a lot of it figuring out why I’ve slowed down in my posting, why I seem to avoid my blog, and what can be done about it.  What I figured out is that quite possibly the reason I’ve become a little alienated by blogging is that I’ve lost touch with the people who READ what I post.  Blogging is a two-way activity.  Or at least, the kind of blogging I’ve enjoyed over the last three years is.  I like people.  I like to hear what they’re doing.  It energizes me to think that maybe Becca or Archie or Emily or Gail or Diana will be coming over here and reading something I’ve written.  I can hear their voices as I try to think up what  might entertain them, amuse them, get them going.  

This year has been a sadly one-way year.  I’d put up posts, and people looking for things like “love is stupid” (I never said that!) would sneak over and then retreat, probably shocked to learn that I mostly think books are wonderful, writing well is hard, and it’s important to be good to people.  For those who stuck with me when I was largely absent in their blogs, I can only say you are incredibly kind people. 

Anyway, I am mostly powered by what’s fun, and I had a lot of fun figuring out how to use the google feed reader, and then feeding it incredibly delicious bits of blogs  – and then I visited all the many people who have come here recently or in the past, not seeking to learn about the idiocy of love, but about whatever thing I happened to have on my mind.  

And it was great!  It used to be that I’d visit people sort of randomly, by clicking on the links on my sidebar, and I’d feel like it was just a huge amount of work, finding where people were in their lives.  But now, all I have to do is check that “feeds” bookmark I created and I can see whatever someone has most recently written.  I feel more connected — and it’s only been a day.    

I was so enthused, I actually posted over at my moribund blog about lunch food, which has  morphed into a blog basically about the stuff I eat.  And I took pictures!  I commented on blogs!  I thought of  how I could compare Brittney Spears to Milan Kundera!    

I’m awake again.  

And now, you should go over to Archie’s blog and give something to help the many people in Australia who are reeling from floods and fires.  Because as  much as we blog to amuse ourselves, we also do it because it we all like being part of a community.  And when some of us are hurting, the rest of us must help.

Totally Free

Posted on by
19

In honor of California Furlough Day, which sounds suspiciously like an event in which the felon population of California is set free, but is actually the day when state workers stay home because the state cannot pay them, I am going to make a list of things you can do on your day off that do not cost a single cent, and might actually do you some good.

Why am I doing this?  Because I think that one of the few silver linings in this cloud of economic bad news is that many of us now have more time than we used to have.  We have less money, but we all know that the best things in life are…, well, you get the idea. 

This list contains only two items, but they are my two favorite free things, so I’m going with them.

1. This is something I cannot actually believe is free.  You do have to have access to a computer, and it is helpful if you have something on which you can download it, but then you probably do, because during the period of huge economic expansion, fueled largely by the purchase of houses too big for the people who lived in them and the ipods they discovered they needed to keep them sane during their lengthy commutes, you probably still have, at least, the ipod, even though you might have had to turn the house back  in. 

This free thing I am alluding to is a series of monthly short fiction podcasts moderated by the New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Triesman.  They can be found on itunes and at the New Yorker’s snazzy website.  In these podcasts, a person who has published fiction in the New Yorker chooses a piece of short fiction they love.  And then they read it.  Fiction writers turn out to be remarkably good readers — I think it has to do with their enthusiasm for fiction.  After the reading, there is a short discussion about the piece.  These discussions are fun and interesting. 

The great thing is that these podcasts have been going on for several years, so there are a lot to choose from.  One of my favorites is Aleksandar Hemon reading Bernard Malamud’s “A Summer’s Reading.”  It’s a great story, and he’s a wonderful reader. 

2.  Get out there and go for a walk.  I cannot emphasize enough how good it is to get outside and take a walk.  If you have a dog, all the better.  Obviously, a walk is good for the body, but it also does hugely good things for the soul.  In fact, one of my favorite writers, Wallace Stevens, a man who was no stranger to snow and ice, walked every day from his office in downtown Hartford to his house in a neighborhood about two miles away.  (Here is a link to that route.)  In fact, if you happen to live in or near Hartford, you can follow his walk, and read the thirteen markers that give you all the ways you can look at a blackbird.  (True, they might be covered with snow, but brush them off, okay?)  Stevens composed poems while he walked, one of which, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction reflects the distance you can cover when you are on a walk:

Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,

A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain and

A wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence

As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which

We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.

So happy furlough day, whether you are in California or not.  I wish you moments of awakening and times of inherent excellence and the experience of beauty – all without spending a single cent.

Hanging Out With George Saunders

Posted on by
7

Truth be told, I did not actually hang out with George Saunders, if by that phrase you mean sit and have a beer at a bar with a guy who’s a very fine short story writer and essayist.  But Monday night at Stanford, when George Saunders was the Lane Lecturer and read an essay and a story and then answered some questions (including, “where does all this come from?”), I really did feel like I had hung out with him even though I was just one of a lot of people cracking up at every other sentence out of his mouth.

Laughter does that.  (I also hang out with David Sedaris, Richard Russo and Mark Twain.)  A guy who makes fun of all that is pompous in the world is your friend, without question.  He knows how much that pomposity has bummed you out in the past, because it used to hurt him too before he figured out he could just make fun of it.  Plus, Saunders also has things to say about redemption and compassion.  And he doesn’t like big companies very much.

I’ve been to hear other Lane Lectures at Stanford — last year I heard Colm Toibin and Ian McEwan read.  But Monday night’s was by far the best attended.  The guy doesn’t even write novels, so the turn-out amazed me.  But then he read his two pieces and I could see why so many Stanford undergraduates had foregone their usual five mile run to hear him.  He’s funny and crazy and something about that really draws you in.

If you don’t know his work, it can be found online here.  An interview is here.  And the first thing I ever read that he’d written — a passionate defense of literary journals — can be found here. 

Oh, and the answer to “where does all this come from?” is “I just start writing about some small thing and before I know it crazy things happen.”