I told Ben before he delivered the introduction that I just
wrote a rather absurd short story called
When Introducing Rick Moody.
That's a list of all the things that no introducer should ever
do.
And then I told him I'd give it to him
after he gave his introduction.
[LAUGHTER]
Number eight on the list is that it's
your job to create in the audience
the need to have sex with me.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to read--
I was-- since the whole second half of the book
is set in Tucson.
I had this idea that I was going to prove how much I
knew about your town.
And then somewhere during dinner I
decided that was probably silly and that you knew plenty
about your town and you didn't need me to tell you so.
Instead I've been reading three sections from the book recently
that are quite short and they have
only as a kind of binding agent, the fact that I think they're
the best sections of the book.
So the first is from the very beginning,
which is to say the introduction by Montese Crandall, who's
the narrator of the framed story in the book.
So this is in his voice.
"People often ask me where I get my ideas.
Or on one occasion back in 2024 I was asked,
this was at a reading and an old fashioned used media outlet
right here in town.
The store called Arachnids Incorporated.
The audience consisted of five intrepid and stalwart folks.
Four out of the five, no doubt intent on surfing aimlessly at
consoles.
Or perhaps they intended to leave the store
when instead they were herded into a cluster
of uncomfortable petrochemical multi-use furniture modules
by Noel Stroup, the hard drinking owner operator
of the shop in question.
I've been pestering Noel about a reading for some time, months.
Despite the fact that Arachnids was not
celebrated for its calendar of arts related programming.
To be honest, the reason for this pestering
had most to do with my wife who'd spend her remaining
time on Earth counseling me on just how to boost my product.
"Ask Noel," my wife said, her eyes
full of implacable purpose.
We used to see Noel at the flea market, which by now took up
more than a dozen city blocks.
There were more flea markets than licensed taxpaying Emporia
in Rio Blanco.
I had a booth there where on weekends I
hawked old baseball cards and other sports memorabilia.
This therefore is my business.
It was here at the flea market, according
to my wife's plans, that I screwed up
my non-existent courage one Sunday and said
to Noel Stroop, who is busy selling software modules.
Something called the compact disk and e-book files.
"Hey, Noel, what does a guy like me,
a literary innovator have to do in this town
to get some respect."
Perhaps you're wondering what I've
done to merit such a high opinion of my legacy.
What is the nature of the Montese Crandall
literary innovation.
I'm going to take the remainder of this brief introduction
to explicate fully my response to this question.
Let me then throw down the gauntlet
and remark that I, Montese Crandall, MFA,
write very short, very condensed literary pieces.
And by short I mean very, very short.
Shorter than you've probably read in your reading life.
More than one word, usually.
Because one word is too easy but quite a bit more modest
than five score.
The 350 pages of a novel, according
to the argument I am want to advance,
are a tedious elaboration.
As I understand it, death, war, and adultery
are the major novelistic themes and these
were all dispensed with well before Christ got
nailed to his block of wood.
The 19th century novel you opine.
Well, the 19th century novel does have it all.
Attic dwelling harridans, uncanny coincidences,
advantageous marriages to strong silent landowners,
orphans, revolutions, whaling.
You can't go wrong with the 19th century novel.
But much that has been written since amounts to imitation
barely warmed over by writers with strange grammatical
inclinations.
Lovelorn women of Canada.
Incest on the Southern plantation.
Drug using editorial assistants.
The usual stuff.
Yours truly, Montese Crandall, living out his Pacific middle
age in a college town next door over to nowhere at all,
is unwilling to add more roughage to this rich diet.
One thing the late 20th century was
good at besides mass marketing, paring away.
Omitting needless words.
Alluding without overstating.
Dust bunny under radiator.
Cockroach on window blind.
Heartbreak in the food court.
Impotence, subdivisions, melanoma, muffler problems.
On the advent of the digital age as you know,
writers who went on and on just didn't last.
You couldn't read all that nonsense on a screen.
Fragmentation became the one true way.
Fragmentation offered a point and click interface.
Additionally, this strategic reduction
blurred the line between poetry and prose,
which is where I, Montese Crandall, come into the story.
I, Montese Crandall, rely heavily on such strategies
as alliteration, condensation, the strange ghostly echo
of metrical feet, iambs and dactyls,
spondees and amphibrachs.
For example, here's a pair of amphibrachs, unstressed,
stressed, unstressed, that might very well summarize
my entire output.
Romantic.
Objective.
The phrase does have a fine euphony.
My first groundbreaking and innovative one sentence story
occurred in the following way.
I had been working on a 45 page erotic novella that was loosely
based on my boundless physical desire for my wife, Tara,
Schott Crandall.
The sequence in which I performed
a certain advanced delight upon her delicately canted pelvis
ran well over 20 pages.
And her muse and snorts of transport,
as described in the text, would pierce the waxy consciousnesses
of neighbors up and down the block.
Her cries of delight as described therein
were likened to the coyote howling
on the mesa, the kettle shrilling on the stove top,
sopranos in local opera companies
would hang their heads for they knew
that when Tara Schott Crandall climaxed,
they were out of a job.
I am afraid.
I cut the entire passage.
The erotic part.
And not only that, then I cut the opening and the ending.
I cut a lot of the middle.
I cut the part where we were poised post-coital sharing
a glass of Van Ordinaire.
Next, I cut the astoundingly tender moment in the story
where in snappy dialogue, Tara and I revisited
our assignations past.
The time in the back of the minivan.
The time in the woods when we got poison Ivy.
The time in the press box at the basketball game.
For a while, a single scene remained
in which the Tara character sent me
out after lovemaking for eggs.
Eggs.
So beautiful.
So fecund.
Likely to balance on their oblong points
during the equinoxes.
Symbols of fertility.
Available in multiple sizes, including jumbo.
I couldn't let go of this scene for a while.
You know how this is.
And yet, after three months of wrestling with that story
I cut the entire tangle of misbegotten sentences.
The whole sprawling mess or almost all of it,
leaving none at last but the following.
Go get some eggs you dwarf.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't expect everyone reading this introduction
to see immediately the merit in this sentence.
And yet the awakening, the unfolding
that occurred to me after a relaxed consideration
of the six words that remained of this longer work.
This unfolding located itself in the fact
that the more I read and reread the sentence above the better
I liked it.
I printed it out in various fonts.
I pulled my few remaining hairs out trying to decide
whether to cut the word "go."
I pronounced the entirety of the story
aloud to myself while walking from our ramshackle subdivision
to the shipping offices where I then occasionally pulled
a shift.
I would entone the sentence while going past the shuttered
health and beauty aids purveyor on 22nd and Mountain.
I would say it while taking my number at the woebegone post
office on 6th.
I shouted it at the beckoning doors
of the gay bars on 4th Avenue.
I said it to myself at the food co-op.
As if the eggs in question were part of an actual shopping
agenda.
I can't tell you how long it took me
in my ecstatically creative state
to realize that, in fact, there needn't be an exclamation
point at the end.
My wife whose health situation had
taken a rather unsettling turn never
approved of the long version of the story.
Though she generally supported whatever wind
blew me along in my compositional hobbies
as long as I took seriously the post compositional portion
of the writer's life and got out there to sell, sell, sell.
She did however, enjoy "Go get some eggs, you dwarf."
Where my wife inquired was I going to publish this story.
Was I going to pit against one another some nationally
recognized periodicals?
And what about book publication had I considered
a run of hard covers.
In fact, I had secured an agreement
with a little web periodical called
Mud Hut, where my story got an entire page by itself.
No title.
No byline.
Not six months later, fresh from the victory just described.
I came up with what I like to think of as the second finest
narrative I've ever composed.
And yet, before I type out for you
that magnificence I should describe what I look like.
Because it bears on the interpretation
of this second effort.
I am, you should know, in my late 40s or thereabouts.
And it is simply being honest to note that my metabolism, which
was doing wind sprints and stomach
crunches throughout the dark ages of my 20s
has lately taken an ill advised nap.
I am now the site of an unmistakable sag,
as if some avalanche stirred at the crest of my solar plexus
and sent all the flab in my northern latitudes
down toward my once noble pubic swell.
With fancy holographic belt buckles
do I attempt to restrain the stampeding softness in vain.
Additionally, my hair is thinning and my skin,
which once had the virtue of being free from the blemishes
that trouble the young is now mottled and flaky.
Burst blood vessels lead the eye of any observer
astray around my nose.
I am yoked to bifocals for my ocular needs.
I have fallen arches hammer toes.
My only virtues as a physical specimen
are my sideburns, which are like the pelts of rare Woodland
animals.
My sideburns are not to be ignored.
No one, let it be said, would mistake me for a pugilist.
For a law and order type.
For a person drawn to physical conflicts.
For a militarist.
I do not carry a taser or other weapon, loaded or unloaded.
Though this is legal and even encouraged in my state.
However, I could easily write at least five pages
about these sorts of weapons.
The Gatling, the ArmaLite, the Glock, the proton disruptor.
Revealing a complex and deeply seeded
need for a pertinence of male power and phallic supremacy.
Even as I disdain these common places in my everyday life
and incline in an era of Islamist saber
rattling toward a foreign policy of tolerance
and non-intervention.
And yet, as you will have surmised at this point,
the five pages of such a story would sooner or later
be stripped of elaborations.
Adjectives, adverbs, similes, astute geopolitical views
until what remained was only.
We went with the stealth bomber.
This was a sentence of such limpid beauty and durability
that it was very difficult to follow up
not notwithstanding an unprecedented second
publication on the mud hut site.
So affecting was the sentence, in fact,
that there was a danger in having composed it.
Namely, that I would retreat to the reliable paycheck
of some day job becoming for example, an exclusive buyer
and seller of baseball cards without composing again.
I don't know how many months went by.
During this time my argument was simply, why bother.
Have I not already proven myself.
Have I not written a timeless epic from the front lines
of the military industrial complex, which
in the third decade of the new Millennium
we now know to be not only a complex but more or less
the whole shebang.
The answer was Yes.
There was no longer a need to prove my dominance
in the writing field.
In fact, what I craved instead here at the top of my game
was domesticity.
The ability to control a little narrow patch of scorpion
and tarantula infested dry land around a single story
house in a town where it never rained.
Yet professionalism being what it is, in due course,
a suite of stories in the first person followed.
Apparently I could not stop.
In general, I much prefer a narration
from the third person point of view.
The first person is tiresome and confining.
It is the voice of narcissists and borderline personalities.
Still my wife whose problem was a respiratory problem
was getting worse.
She was fast approaching her double lung transplant.
And while it would have been easy just
to wait until her name came up on the International organ
lottery, while it would have been easy to collect
the meager government funds disbursed
to her as a citizen with a chronic genetic condition,
I did in fact need some avenue of self-expression.
Along came the idea for my masterful trilogy.
If you like-- if it helps you to understand
the kinds of influences that resulted
in the literary coming of age of Montese Crandall,
you may think of these next three stories
as related thematically to the three volume compositions
of the 19th century.
Not unlike a door stopper by a Thackeray or a trollop.
Well, on advice of counsel, and in order
to avoid violating my own copyright with regard
to a future collected works of Montese Crandall,
now being discussed at one of the larger presses,
I'm obligated to forego quotation of these works
from the middle period.
I'm sure you understand.
Years had passed in my writerly biography.
Years of dreams and ambitions.
Years of seeing other less equipped
artists finding publication, even renown,
in web publishing venues or even small press publication
while I had as yet, only five publishable sentences.
Notwithstanding my education at a state school in the Northeast
and a master of Fine Arts degree from an online program
in the Rust Belt.
As a result, I was in no position to suppress my trilogy
or to recall publication, which constituted
a full 60% of my output.
Not every work by a writer is his best,
especially when he's preoccupied with more homely
responsibilities.
One of these being the resale of baseball cards obtained
from the disgruntled mothers of the world who has you know,
have forged an international conspiracy
to throw out the baseball cards in order to drive up prices.
My other activity consisted of lugging oxygen tanks
around my house.
There was also the vigorous pounding
on the back of my wife Tara, which
was occasionally necessary in the mornings
so that she could take advantage of life.
I loved my wife.
I comforted her when she needed comforting.
My wife, understand, was going to die, and she knew it,
and I knew it, and now you know it too.
When the breeze blew up across the waterless tundra
of my state, I often thought if only I could just
harness some of that breeze and give it to Tara,
our problems would be resolved.
There are no sailboats in my part of the country that
need the breezes.
The jet pilots would be happy to encounter less clear air
turbulence.
The state officials have resisted wind farms
at every turn.
And the atmosphere that shrink wraps
the globe offers a rich supply of oxygen.
Why couldn't my wife have a bit of it in her bloodstream.
What made her so undeserving.
With this going on, you see, I sometimes
didn't feel much like writing."
So that's Montese.
That's the beginning.
Much later there's a trip to Mars.
[LAUGHTER]
And that's narrated by Jed Richards.
And somewhere in the middle of it
while he's thinking about flesh eating streptococcus,
he has a reverie that is as follows.
"And somehow the situation on Earth reminds
me of those last 300 whooping cranes.
Those birds that someone has been forcibly migrating
back and forth from Florida for the past 20 odd years
with the aid of an ultralight.
This small population of birds is not
a sustainable population, the experts all say.
Because with the right outbreak of avian flu,
which we already know can knock out a couple million
people in an overcrowded ecosystem,
the entire whooping crane population could collapse.
One germ and extinction follows.
A beautiful thing though, a whooping crane.
And in the not so distant future there
will only be a couple of them left and they'll
have only one wing apiece.
And they will idle on some lawn, like the lawn
near Cape Canaveral.
One of this non mating pair will die of old age.
And then there will be one last whooping crane
and it'll eat moldy popcorn from underneath the NASA reviewing
stand, and it'll have delusional thoughts,
mothballed memories in which it was part of a flock.
And this flock followed an ultralight down
to Brazil for the winter and then back again.
What does our whooping crane think?
The last whooping crane of planet Earth.
It thinks that the currents of air are a marvel
and it conceives of them in colors, spectra.
As we think of sunsets, just so does the last whooping crane
despite the fact that the only--
that only the one wing works--
think of these air currents.
It remembers treetops, which were like sofas
to the whooping crane.
Back when it still had two wings it could land in any treetop
and put its head under its wing.
And the whooping crane remembers or believes
it remembers certain kinds of fish that
are particularly savory.
And maybe a certain level of freshness
in the matter of seafood is what a whooping crane most prizes.
And it remembers mating because back when it was young
it was picky in the mating department.
And like many whooping cranes, it
was not, despite its lanky beauty,
terribly kind to the girls.
Moreover, there was always the danger
of infighting among the whooping cranes
and this last crane remembers all of these.
And because the crane cannot speak of it,
the memories are that much more painful.
And now in his loneliness, there is no other bird
who protects that past of cranes,
that long history of the most beautiful bird
in this part of the country.
And so the only other account of these events,
after those others fade, is the memory
of the guy who flew the ultralight.
A balding guy with a not very good sense of humor.
A guy who told the worst jokes.
Not that the whooping crane understood the jokes.
But rather the whooping crane recognized
the timbre of this man's voice.
A kind of ragged baritone that shaded into the tenor
range but with outbreaks of alto when he got nervous.
And this was the call of the ultralight
as far as the whooping crane is concerned,
this guy's rather humorous voice.
It was not the cry of the whooping crane
which is a majestic sound.
It was the cry of some bald guy who never much expected
to be piloting birds.
He probably believed he'd have a career in civil aviation
or maybe he thought he'd be an astronaut or something.
And in fact, this is what he decides
to do because the day comes when this pilot can no longer fly
the ultralight because there are not enough cranes anymore.
There's only the one crane and he is crushed.
Well, come on, everyone is crushed.
Life crushes you.
And this is just one more story to stomp up and down
on your crushed heart.
This balding fellow going to visit the last crane sometimes
over where he thinks the crane might still
be living in some cage for injured birds.
And he and the crane recognize each other, indeed,
though they have no common language in which
to speak of their recognition.
There's no way for the crane to speak of the man
as a man speaks of a crane.
And it would all go fine if the man could speak in the tongue
of cranes, but he can't.
While he's visiting the crane there
is in the distance a lift off.
One of the last space shuttle missions and you
can see it from almost 20 miles away.
The conditions are that favorable in South Florida
that day.
And the guy, the balding pilot, the one with the bad jokes,
and the not reliable timbre to his voice,
thinks that maybe the only reasonable thing
to pursue after the experience of flying the ultralight
is the experience of going up into space as soon as he can.
And he sits on a bench by the one winged whooping crane
for a while and then he notices that he's
talking to the whooping crane.
And he's saying, "Well, I don't exactly
want to leave you here like this.
I can't really think of anything worse.
And I have left some people behind in my life.
Who hasn't.
Even some people I loved.
But none of that is as bad as thinking that I won't see you
here again.
And no one who comes to see you here
will know what I know about you.
And you won't recognize these people.
Nothing could be worse.
But still a man has to move on sometimes
and I just can't stay here doing this.
And so I'm wondering, would you think it was OK for me
to go ahead and undertake to become an astronaut.
Do you think that you could possibly
give me your blessing?"
He knows that the whooping crane can't answer him.
That's obvious enough.
But he feels he owes a reasonable explanation
to the whooping crane, even more of an explanation
than he owes his wife or his parents.
And the crane can't see how bad the pilot feels,
how broken up he is, when the man thinks that he won't be
able to visit the crane again.
When the crane is a thing of the past, when
the crane is nothing more than the fertilizer for creatures
to come.
The pilot will only learn of it online because he'll
be off pursuing his ambition, flying his test missions,
sleeping in the barracks, all so that he
might get the hell off the planet that slew
the whooping crane."
So this last little section is very short.
And like many things in the second half of the book,
it's meant as a love letter to this place that you live.
"Night fell over the desert and Monaco 37 streaked past again.
And the stars were like the future perfect
of an uncommon verb.
Or the stars were the filaments of discarded human aspirations.
Or the stars in the night sky were
the innumerable preschoolers of September
afraid to climb onto the bus in order
to have their liberty abridged.
Or the stars in the night sky were like so many holes
into which our heads were to be stuck.
Or the stars in the night sky were
the innumerable computations of some frail and overburdened
supercomputer come to the logical end
of its computations.
Or the stars in the night sky were the total sum
of responsibilities, grievances, loves of a certain nation
listing to the end of empire.
Or the stars in the night sky were an example
of every possible color in the spectrum of all colors,
but the beauty of the spectrum was so overwhelming
that an unaided eye could no longer discern it.
Or the stars in the night sky were the number
of words required to correctly describe the stars as a whole.
Or the stars in the night sky represented the number of times
that a certain recalcitrant boy was reminded
to observe the natural world.
Or the stars in the night sky were ghosts of all the
dead known and unknown to this boy and others.
Or the stars in the night sky were pocket lighters flicked on
during the encore of the stadium rock show
back when there were still pocket lighters and still
rock shows.
Or the stars in the night sky were a painterly representation
of the idea of insignificance.
Or the stars in the night sky where the manifest eruption
of something from nothing.
Or the stars hinted at a conflagration happening
on the other side of a wall of dark substances
through which these tiny holes have been poked.
Or the stars in the night sky where a soup of possibility.
A broth of what might have been and what might come to pass.
The stars in the night sky were a grinding down
of all the mineralia of planet Earth
into infinitesimal grains, which grains
were in turn bits of gas and debris cast off by the stars
themselves.
The stars in the night sky indicated the natural end
of our 24 hour day.
And that was why they were greeted with such astonishment
and relief.
The turning away of the sun was relief and impertinence.
The stars in the night sky were the light show
for the desert itself.
A ratification of its disuse.
The stars and the night sky could only
be appreciated in silence.
The stars in the night sky could only
be experienced in motionlessness.
The stars in the night sky had a cumulative effect
and the longer you looked at them,
the more you wanted to as if the stars were somehow addictive.
The stars in the night sky were addictive and when used
improperly they crowded out other activities, particularly
social activities.
Unless these activities were organized around the night
sky itself.
The stars in the night sky cohered
with certain harmonic principles cycles per second.
But they did not accord with musical principles
that affirmed tonality.
But rather a more random sequences
of assonances and dissonances of such long duration
that most human beings would perceive the musical principles
of the stars as having a dull endless sameness.
A dissonant merciless.
The stars in the night sky were prolix,
show offey, because they meant to make
a mockery of the mathematical ideas of infinity
just by being here.
They were finite but limitless.
The stars in the night sky had to be
seen in the desert and eventually the desert lured
out all stargazers, even people who were
busy with many other things.
Special education, identity theft,
the making of low budget pornography films,
day trading in Central Asian markets.
They all found that when they saw the stars in the desert
they put aside childish things.
And thus in the desert there was the Very Large Array.
And then the Very, Very Large Array.
And then there was the International Sonoran Array,
which was so large that you had to fly
from one end of the field of radio dishes to the other
to bear witness to the entirety of the stargazing
apparatus of the desert.
Whole cities sprang up inside the International Sonoran
Array.
It had a complex of universities and think tanks,
mostly now concentrated on the other side of the border
since that was where the venture capital was located.
Where there was less fallout from the immigration problem.
People came to the desert because the stars were
in the desert and the stars had yet
to be corrupted by man though man
had managed to corrupt so much else,
and there was no fee involved.
In fact, the stars it seemed would crush a man
in a scenic gravitational panorama
before man would ever corrupt the stars
and that was why men mostly neglected them or attempted
to surpass the stars, gauzing over the night
sky with his sugary glaze in the pursuit of making the night
sky less seductive and more like the screen of a monitor
switched to the off position.
Thanks a lot.
[APPLAUSE]