For many of you, Manuel Muñoz needs no introduction.
So I had a lot of bad ideas for what
to do with this introduction.
The thing about bad ideas, though,
is that I'm convinced if you push on them hard
and long enough, they sometimes become good ideas.
Maybe they stay bad ideas.
We'll find out.
My first inclination was to play you the video for the memorable
if not seminal 1996 Mark Morrison
song, "Return of the Mack," and maybe do
some freestyling over it.
Always reasonable Aurelie Sheehan
talked me down from this idea, but it stayed stuck in my head.
I rested it for a week on the bench.
I put it in a bathtub of ice.
Pinkly, it still kicked and asserted itself, said, try me.
So perhaps you remember the song.
The lyrics were indecipherable aside
from the refrain of, "You lied to me."
Like Manuel's new novel, What You See in the Dark,
Morrison's song builds on another, absent text.
It samples the rhythm line from the Tom Tom Club classic,
"Genius of Love," which you need to check out
if you haven't listened to.
It's got a good video, too.
Though What You See in the Dark never name
checks or samples Psycho, Janet Leigh, or Alfred Hitchcock,
the novel intersects with the filming
of the film in surprising and delicious ways
that I won't spoil for those of you who haven't read the novel.
You will after seeing him read tonight, I'm sure.
What You See in the Dark is about the seemingly
unbridgeable spaces between Bakersfield and Hollywood.
Or you might as well call Bakersfield
the small town where you're from and Hollywood
any place that seems like it matters more, has stories.
The book is in part about, and this is a quote from Manuel,
"the way people in a place they consider nowhere
think outside of themselves through dreaming
and imagination and fantasy, like that moment you look
at people or US Weekly and read about celebrities whose lives
and stories seem more exciting than your own," end quote.
It is also about the seemingly endless spaces
within and between our public and private identities,
the boundaries of our worlds and our desires,
and what happens when they rupture.
Manuel's work has always been careful,
attentive to the salient details of the lives of the silent,
or if not silent, those who aren't often written about
and might not believe that they have a story to tell.
It turns out that they do, that we do.
You might see the seeds of What You
See in the Dark in his first collection, Zigzagger.
Take any story.
For instance, "The Unimportant Lila Parr."
Like the later novel, this early story
is structured primarily around three characters
and how their lives are intersected,
how they're observed and gossiped
about by the community, and how they come together and are
split apart by sex, love, work, jealousy, race, domesticity,
a violent death, and a betrayal.
Sounds pretty noir, doesn't it?
Also noir in many ways, in obvious ways,
is What You See in the Dark, which takes some of these ideas
and maxes them out, goes filmic, panoramic,
lights them up on a big screen.
On the screen, these stories are not minimized.
But like objects close into a light source,
the shadows they project are writ larger, darker,
something to see.
Paying attention to Manuel's fiction
and how the stories and the novel see their characters
means that you start to see the current swirling
under everything, your own life, your home, your silences,
your darknesses, your town where nothing really ever happens
except when something does.
Consider some more instructive parallels between Manuel Muñoz
and Mark Morrison.
Both have names adorned by pairs of alliterative M's.
The two are nearly the same age.
Like Morrison, Manuel Muñoz dresses sharply and sports
an impeccably smooth flow.
Both nearly achieved a number-one single in America
in 1996, but were stymied by the success of Hanson's
tenacious song, "MMMBop."
Both were peripherally involved in the Tottenham
riots in England last month.
Seriously, check Wikipedia right after this.
And as any of the lucky students of either Morris or Muñoz can
tell you, Manuel is indeed the Mack and a fine friend
and human and writer.
And he has indeed returned.
So please welcome Manuel Muñoz.
[APPLAUSE]