Any tardigrade fans?
No.
No?
A couple?
OK.
All right.
Well, this is also known as water bear.
This passage starts out with "The weakest and shallowest
is deathless with me."
And the reason I went with this is
because we're talking about a very humble little creature
that's about a millimeter long.
But this humble little creature that lives in moss, wet moss,
I should say, can take 100 times the amount of radiation
a human being can.
It can take complete vacuum of space and the cold of space
and it can go dormant for decades
before it's reanimated by a single drop of water.
So that's why so there are little things like that.
So--
Does it have seven legs?
One, two, three, four, five.
Well, there's an eighth one.
You just got to use your imagination.
[LAUGHING]
Yeah.
All right.
But maybe he had an accident.
I don't know.
Maybe he went to shop class one day, was making a napkin
caddie for his mom.
I don't know.
[LAUGHING]
I don't know.
I don't know any tardigrades, I just draw them.
[LAUGHING]
So this was the last day.
July 10th, 2013.
I had eggs that morning.
Anyway.
But I remember it very well because it
was the last damn day of this.
But again, I tried to do this.
The momentum really started picking up.
I could barely sleep the last week because I was done,
I'm almost done.
Oh, my God.
So by this point, I knew that this
was the day I was going to get the interior finished.
So when I put the pen down--
[SIGHS]
I felt like, OK.
Now I can get hit by a bus or something.
The work is done.
Yeah.
So those are the print outs.
I'm actually a lot happier than I look here.
[LAUGHING]
I'm just tired.
Yeah.
So I had to do all the ancillary bits in here, too.
I had to do the frontispiece.
I had to do the forward, which I had to write all out by hand.
Some people think it's a typeface.
It's not.
The entire book is written out and drawn by hand.
The entire thing with the exception of the bar code.
But I had to do this in my bathroom mirror in my shorts,
like some sort of serial killer or something.
[LAUGHING]
Was ridiculous.
Yeah.
And all throughout this project, Tin
House, the guys at Tin House, Diane Chonette,
who is the Art Director and my editor
Tony Perez, such great people who work with.
Tin House has been such a fantastic, supportive publisher
with this.
I can't say enough about them.
This is where they really, I mean,
throughout the entire book they just let me go crazy.
They just let me do my thing.
This is where we kind of did the back and forth with the cover.
And I'm glad that they voiced their concerns
and their opinions of it.
Because otherwise the front of it
would look like Zeus rather than Walt Whitman and that's
not good.
[LAUGHING]
But I knew that we wanted some sort of foil treatment
with a linen hardcover with some sort of paper belly
band around the front.
My thinking was eventually what would happen
is that the belly band would eventually kind of slough off
in 20 years and then what you're left with was just Walt's face.
Almost like a Bible or something, you know?
So like all the exuberance is inside.
It looks like pretty plain on it and then
when you crack it open, it's just the universe inside.
Kind of like a geode or something.
OK.
So this is the revised sketch.
I don't know why Walt is pouting.
But he is.
I had to bring that down a little bit.
Maybe he wanted a cookie.
[LAUGHING]
And I was saying last night, they kind of,
when you put them together like this,
they actually kind of look like Campbell's Soup cans,
don't they.
[LAUGHING]
You know?
I didn't even think about that at the time.
But we had to tone down the red a little bit
because originally we had like this Chinese firecracker red
and it just was kind of, it was just calling too much attention
to itself.
It was competing too much with the green and the blue.
And we had to kind of bring it down to like a Cherokee red,
like a clay red.
And I'm really glad we did because it
was much more in keeping with the theme of the book.
And so I had to get rid-- and then
the real work started, which is basically
start to do your dog and pony show, getting out there
and start getting out there with the banners in the bookstores.
And I've done these flash tours where I just
go through all the independent bookstores in Brooklyn,
just drop in, sign their copies, and I leave little drawings
for the folks there.
Just to show my appreciation.
Because book selling is getting tougher and tougher every year
and these guys are on the front lines.
And whether or not your book does well
depends on their goodwill.
And it's just the decent thing to do
and it's also good business.
And there's my buddy Bill.
[LAUGHING] We're at the BEA festival.
And Bill lives across town from me.
I live in Mount Holly, New Jersey,
which is a little Quaker town.
Bill, like the ursine fellow that he is,
he lives in this trapezoidal pine
cone of a little house on the outskirts of town,
which is heavily wooded and there's a creek there.
And he just grew out his beard one winter.
I said, listen.
Around Christmas.
I said, can you just grow out your beard?
I got a plan for you.
He said, why would I do that?
I said, just do it.
Just do it.
So then I had to get-- they flew me out to Portland
and we should-- do we have any of these posters
here tonight by any chance?
Or no?
We may or may not.
Anyway.
But yeah, they're all available for sale now.
We got all those suckers done.
And that's the-- oh.
I have one more thing to show you guys.
Hang on here.
All right.
Let me get rid of that little bugger.
I guess I'll save.
I don't know what I changed.
All right.
Anyway.
OK.
Here we go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is the trailer.
[LAUGHING]
[SCRAPING SOUND]
[PASSING TRAFFIC]
[LAUGHING]
[SEAGULLS]
[LAUGHING]
[COUGHING]
Excuse me.
[COUGHING]
Sorry about that.
So that's my dog and pony show, guys.
I'm not selling any cough medicine tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
[COUGHING]
The video was made by my friend David Kessler.
He and I are doing a feature film right now,
or I should rather say, I'm helping
David do a feature film about the New Jersey Pine Barrens
right now called Pine Barrens.
If you put in pinebarrensfilm.com,
you'll be able to see some clips of that particular film.
It's really beautiful stuff.
My friend Ben Warfield provided the music.
We all help each other with our pet projects and our passion
projects.
We're fortunate enough to have a community of friends
in Philadelphia who are all artists who
will pitch in like this.
Kind of like, I get that sense about Tucson too.
Whereas in New York, it's dog-eat-dog.
With Philly, we're all in it together.
You know?
And so that too is a Whitman, Whitmanian virtue,
I should say.