[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I did not realize I was going to be introduced.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm just the introducer.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm going to be giving, hopefully,
four of these over the next month, month and a half or so.
So thank you so much for coming out.
This is going to be a great reading.
And I've been looking forward to this for about five years.
[LAUGHTER]
So I think these introductions are all pitched a little bit
as short lessons in hybridity.
This is Volume One, Lia Purpura.
I'd like to thank, also, Cybele Knowles, who
is crucial in putting this series together this year.
And since Tyler didn't mention it and Lia might--
I mean, she's very much a writer of attention.
And she would remind us that our attention is valuable.
And so please turn your cell phones off.
This is an opportunity for attention.
And I hope that we'll practice that.
So a hybrid is a thing that is also
another thing, a double thing, or a thing that first appears
as two, but resolves into one.
Or, it's a thing that under intense pressure,
such as an hour spent reading alone or a weekend
without speaking yields a doubleness.
Well, perhaps we are rushing things.
All of us at our best, like the beasts we love,
are multiple things, are capable of multiple things,
of becoming more than just the one we hope.
Otherwise, how boring.
We should fear too much unity.
Only those who live in fear should be troubled
by a hybrid's doubleness.
Yes, a horse with wings, a gleaming thing part eagle
and part lion, two truths lying down with fiction
and fogging up the windows.
Some interspecies dalliances generate a lot
of heat, and sometimes shame--
[LAUGHTER]
So says the lonely Minotaur deep inside the labyrinth
where he's kept.
Even if they're fun, these dalliances,
they arise from need.
We wouldn't still be growing citrus in this country
if someone hadn't thought to remix it.
The roots of the tree that should, in nature,
grow the sweet oranges that most of us enjoy eating or juicing
are susceptible to a bark-destroying virus.
The roots of the sour orange tree resist the virus.
So top one with the other and you
get a growing, thriving, brilliant thing--
a tree with rings that do not always
match from stump to branch.
Or match.com a bison with a domestic cow
at a nice night like tonight, a little Teddy Pendergrass,
and boom a beefalo.
[LAUGHTER]
By the time you're seeing two Lia Purpuras
there are at least three or four and probably a whole lot more.
They're everywhere.
Teach Lia Purpura in a class and you recruit another pair.
You can use her as a dowsing rod to predict
your favorite students.
[LAUGHTER]
One suspects that a Lia Purpura is simply faster
than the eye can track.
And that her capabilities exceed our descriptive grasp.
That is, we lack the language to say what it is she does
or even specify where she was when we last caught her out
of the corner of our eyes.
My Monster Manual lists Purpura as a kind of displacer beast,
which, as you may know, but not admit,
is a vaguely Puma-like creature with a pair
of dead, black tentacles.
[LAUGHTER]
From the Monster Manual, the molecular vibrations
of the displacer beast are such that it always
appears to be three feet from its actual location.
[LAUGHTER]
They are very hard to fight and hate all life,
but particularly blink dogs.
[LAUGHTER]
And if you played enough Dungeons and Dragons maybe
you know what a blink dog is.
[LAUGHTER]
If not, you should go a googling and have a nice time--
after the reading.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, this Purpura is somewhat the opposite.
Her work exults all life--
even the blinky parts, the ones we skip, the undersung,
as in her "I'm coming back as a buzzard," an essay--
the first essay in her great new collection--
in which she celebrates-- and this is quoting her.
"Plump entrails crusting with sage and dirt
tightening in sun.
Piercing that is an undersung moment, filled with a tender
resistance--
a sweetness, slick curves, and tangles
to dip into, tear, stretch, snap, and swallow."
Well, that's quite a sentence.
[LAUGHTER]
So much so that it's not a sentence, but a time stop tool.
As a critic noted of her work, Purpura
puts readers into a state of aesthetic arrest.
Yes, everything is an opportunity
for attention, an afternoon for a dalliance, for a convergence.
Here she is from the last essay, "In rough likeness."
"I believe our best work on Earth
is in service of likeness.
I don't know what to call it-- moments of interpenetration?
To feel the exchange across borders.
Bravo to these moments.
Bravo to that exchange."
Ladies and gentlemen, hybrids and others,
please welcome Lia Purpura.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]