[APPLAUSE]
I don't know about you guys, but I'm
content to leave it at that.
[LAUGHTER]
It's good for me.
Thank you so much.
They just give you free cocktails
before, so it's kind of a--
I'm going to have some water.
[LAUGHTER]
This is really exciting.
I've always wanted to do this, and I'm really
grateful to be here.
And I'll just share quickly that this morning, I
had some anxiety dreams about this day, and one of them
involved looking on the computer to see where the essay that I
was going to read was going to be
and not finding it and not finding the password.
And I came up with the solution to make a salad with salmon
and field baby greens and cream cheese and mix it up,
and I thought, oh my god, they'll totally get that.
So I'm glad that I found a way to print this.
So here we are.
I'm going to read something I wrote recently.
Helicopters.
This is called "Ocean Park No.
6."
And I was sort of--
I knew it would be annoying to ask
to do something multimedia at the last minute,
so I didn't ask.
But I thought it'd be kind of fun
to have Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series behind me
as I was reading because that's what this is about.
"So Ocean Park No.
6."
"In Remarks on Colour, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes,
'There is no such thing as luminous gray.'
This seems like the best way to explain the paintings
of Richard Diebenkorn.
Even the gray glows.
When Juliet first saw his Ocean Park series,
she says she fell in.
In Blue Nights, Joan Didion remembers her daughter
as a child, crooning the words, do you want to dance?
The phrase is a refrain throughout the text.
Blue Nights is about the death of her daughter.
When I read those words, I hear the Bette Midler version
of the song, a nostalgic, drawn-out plea.
Years before her daughter died, in The White Album,
Didion writes about the summer of 1968.
'I remember walking all day on the worn hardwood
floors of that house, and I remember
"Do You Wanna Dance?" on the record player,
"Do You Wanna Dance?"
and "Visions of Johanna" and a song called "Midnight
Confessions,"' the name of the song a refrain even then.
In the next line, she writes, 'I remember a babysitter telling
me that she saw death in my aura.'
Juliet was buying Garanimals for her son
when she bumped into a woman she knew from work.
The five-year-old's face was more beautiful
than I can possibly conjure.
Though marked, the woman would point out
by a blue line between his eye bones and his nose.
Raman was one of the first people I knew who died.
Bette Midler's voice reminds me of the film Beaches,
which reminds me of my mother's relationship
to Juliet, two women who have been
through everything together, laughing on the beach, one
of them dying.
When I started this essay, Juliet
thought that she only had months to live.
She invited my mother and me into her guest room
to listen to the song she wanted played at her funeral.
I'll save it for you here, she said, bookmarking the web page.
When I was in high school, I wrote
about a room near the beach, bleached
white with either a painting on the wall or a window
facing the ocean, a return to some Santa Monica
from my childhood.
Richard Diebenkorn painted from a studio just off Main Street.
I don't ever remember seeing Untitled--
View from Studio, Ocean Park, 1969, but the scene I wrote
took place there.
In another work on paper created between 1974 and 1975 composed
of acrylic, charcoal, graphite, and pasted paper on paper,
there's a diagonal line stretching from one part
of the painting to another.
I wonder what would happen if you used his paintings
as a map, walked down those lines
like streets, what threshold they'd carry you toward.
When the painter visited Albuquerque,
he flew on a civilian plane.
Everything about his approach to painting
seemed to change after the moment
when he looked out the window.
He saw the landscape from above.
I was on my way to find his studio when I heard on the news
that a man had used an automatic weapon to open fire
at Santa Monica College not far from an intersection
I'd turned down the day before.
The shooter had set fire to his family's home, then ordered
a motorist to drive him to the school.
She was sure he was going to shoot her in the head,
but he didn't.
A man with an accent like Werner Herzog's
described the moment when the man in black
looked him in the eye before shooting
through his windshield.
Critics warn us not to read his Ocean Park
series as landscapes, but it's hard not to wonder.
Did the four dots on Plate 79 demarcate the places
where the bodies would one day fall?
Some lines have been erased or painted over.
Some lines are a blue line."