[APPLAUSE]
Thank you for that kind introduction.
My head is a little bit larger than when I came in.
And thanks to all of you for coming out tonight.
I know what a seductive mistress television can be.
So I'm going to read two screeds from my new book.
I like to read the screeds because they
don't require context.
Let's see a disclaimer before I begin because I've
seen very frightened faces on some
of the gentlemen in the audience when I've
read this first one recently.
So I want to--
yeah-- issue a disclaimer that the views and opinions
expressed in the commentaries in this novel not necessarily
endorsed by Lydia Millet, or her affiliates,
or many subsidiaries.
So this is the very beginning of this particular book,
Magnificence.
"It was a stricken love but still love.
It was the kind of love that gazed up
at you from the bare white flood of your headlights.
A wide eyed love with a meekness of grass eaters.
Soft fur, pink tongue.
And if he got too close, a whiff of mulch on the breath.
This was the love she cherished for her husband.
The love had other moments.
Of course, it did.
But its everyday form was vegetarian.
She suspected it was the love of most wives for their husbands
after some time had passed, not for the newlyweds.
That was the nature of the condition.
But for the season, the ones who had seniority.
When she thought of conjugal love,
she saw a field of husbands stretched out
in front of her, a broad wide field, possibly a rice paddy.
They were bent over hoeing.
Did you hoe rice?
Well, whatever.
The way she saw them, the husbands
had a Chinese thing going on.
They toiled like billions of peasants.
Technically and historically in this very moment
in most of the world it was the wives who toiled.
The wives toiled for their livelihoods,
for the husbands, and the little children.
Sure those were the facts.
It was the wives historically and factually
in that limited historical factual sense that
were the beast of burden.
Even in the richer places, it was the women
who shortened their life expectancy
by marrying whereas the husbands lived
longer than their freewheeling bachelor counterparts.
Still, there was something about the essence of husbands
that made them seem like sturdy toilers, husband housebound.
It might be the wives who were bound
to the houses materially speaking,
but the husbands were bound to them.
This was because of the narrow focus of most men,
how they tended to have few intimates in emotional terms.
They left the social bonding to the wives,
so they were bound to them.
And she was ready to tell him all the details
if that was what he wanted.
She was prepared to come clean.
But a toiler could so easily be hurt.
The toiler was chronically exhausted
from his long days of labor.
What labor you might ask.
The labor of being a man, of course.
It was hard to be a man.
The men were all insane basically due to testosterone.
You could see it in them roiling under the surface.
A few exceptions prove the rule.
And the smart men were big enough to admit it.
For instance, steroids made you more of a man chemically
and also not a coincidence made you insane.
Should read that autism was thought
by scientists to be an exaggerated form of maleness.
So there was that.
The latent madness and retardation of men
was compounded by the fact that most of them
didn't get to kill their own prey anymore.
Stop living things and slay them in a savage bloodletting.
The men even when they didn't know it
were frustrated by this.
They were unfit to live in civilized society.
Of course, women were also subject to hormonal madness
famously so the estrogen or whatever,
so-called premenstrual syndrome, the chemicals that
in excess made them into caricatures of women.
Hysteria, for instance, as Freud had called it,
neurosis that time of the month.
Of course, Freud had been largely discredited.
He had been a philosopher more than a scientist,
and Americans did not trust philosophers.
Far from it, also, he did cocaine.
And still no question the fairer sex was more changeable
than the unfair one.
In practice, this meant that the women's madness sometimes
receded but with the men it was constant.
When it came to insanity, women were
indecisive whilst men never let up.
Oddly, the chronic insanity of men
was often referred to as stability.
The men being permanent sociopaths
got credit for consistency whereas the women
being mere part time neurotics were typecast as flighty.
Essentially, the female bouts of sanity
were used as weapons against them.
Sociopaths versus neurotics.
It was a non-trivial distinction since many men took
the thing a bit too far frankly becoming serial killers, wife
beaters, dirty cops, or boy soldiers, and roving gangs,
war criminals tyrants, and demagogues.
Not so much the women.
In one sense, though, she didn't blame the men.
That would be blaming the victim.
They were hobbled by their repressed rage and Asperger
syndrome, variations on which were lavishly
spread throughout the male population, but so what?
Far from blaming them, she had always loved them,
loved them for their sad flaws.
The men were tragic heroes.
To be a tragic hero, all that was needed was manhood.
She loved them.
Yes, she did.
Casey was driving her to the airport, down La Cienega,
at rush hour.
There was a comfortable silence between them.
Susan gazed out the window at traffic.
The traffic was full of men, most of whom were tragic.
The tragic men sat in their cars driving.
Some played with radio dials.
Others picked their noses while staring glassily at nothing,
in many cases completely unaware of their tragic identity.
Women were also driving, of course,
her own daughter for one.
Casey enjoyed driving and drove with speed
and a certain measure of abandon,
and yet these women, including Casey who was in a wheelchair,
were less tragic per se than the men.
The women might be unfortunate, take Casey, for instance.
But few of them were Ophelia.
No, when it came to tragedy, the men
had slyly cornered the market.
Driving gave Casey a feeling of mastery
she didn't have in the chair since she
was higher up when she drove.
In the driver's seat, she was on the same plane
with everyone else.
The playing field was level.
She was excited, now drumming her fingers on the wheel.
And Susan felt exhilarated herself.
Her husband and her employer both returning
from the tropics.
It was a homecoming, a hero's welcome.
Though, come to think of it.
The hero like tragedy, was unfairly
readily available to men.
When she herself stepped off an airplane,
no one would ever shriek enjoy, jump up and down,
and hurl themselves into her arms.
Neither she nor Casey usually smoked,
but impulsively they had bummed Marlboro Reds off a burly biker
at a bar, a guy covered in colorful tattoos
with eagles feathering his biceps.
The only reason they hadn't progressed
to hard liquor in a further festive gesture
was the hour wasn't advanced.
If Susan drank before sunset, she tended to nod off.
Her middle age began to show.
They would wait, Casey had said, and have their drinks
with Hal and T. They would meet the two men at the airport
and take them out to celebrate (Boring dialogue, boring
dialogue.)
Anyway, she would tell him whatever he wanted to know.
He had the right to such knowledge, her husband.
But all in all, it would be far better for him
if he never asked.
Of course, she would never describe the exact dimensions
of her affection to him.
Those microscopic inclinations were best
kept secret out of protectiveness
for the other more than anything,
a secret she kept to herself.
As everyone guarded their shameful,
shrugged in shadings of instinct,
no one told the smallest increments of their feelings
to their daily beloveds.
No one revealed the minute singularities,
the slack of an ass say and how it caused disgust.
The response was involuntary.
There might be those on second thought
who did reveal such things in times of anger,
but mostly those people were not women.
She would keep them hurting elements
to herself, those subtle insults to a man's self-worth.
In certain moments, for instance, his sex
could seem a forlorn pugnacious servant,
a servant that bowed its head and had a humble comic quality.
Anyway, you could pity something.
Pity it is a brute and still want to use it,
a brute part of a half child, half ape, their handle,
their use, their eagerness, the panting hound.
The metaphor was mixed.
She knew that.
Her love for husbands was like-- it was like a love of deer.
But then, the men themselves were other animals--
half apes.
And finally, their sexes were dog like.
Quite the menagerie all told She condescended
to the sexes of men, but it wasn't personal.
Clearly, they also kind of send it to hers.
They had their own opinions about the sex of a woman,
and those opinions were not all positive.
That much was obvious from say pornography, which
almost every man love, from the purest young boy
to the jaded defiler.
In other words, small secrets were also held against her,
and she did not need to know them.
Pornography she thought, degradation and debasement.
A man like to degrade a woman in pornography.
It made perfect sense.
If she were male, she'd like it too
because a man might not know he was tragic,
but he often suspected it.
On a subconscious level, a man suspected himself of pathos.
A man walked around bearing that half aware weary load.
It was more stressful to suspect than to know for certain women
were oppressed from the outside via the patriarchy.
Girls raped in various African cultures,
for instance, then put to death for their trouble.
But men were oppressed from inside their own skin.
She saw it this way.
The testosterone was a constant barrage
not unlike an artillery shelling.
They had doubtless needed it and say pre-history
to run around spearing meat, build-up muscles that impressed
the breeding age females, et cetera, much as baboons
made their loud "wahoo" calls or sported shocking pink anuses.
But now that the men were deprived
of the endorphins of the chase and the butchering,
the hormones were called with no response, a ceaseless useless
siege upon the male psyche.
Naturally, the men held hostage in bunkers of flesh,
sought refuge in pornography and violence.
It was just self-expression."
I'll stop for a moment.