So this is a question for Elena.
Have there been any developments about any of the animals
that you've been thinking about--
[LAUGHTER]
That you want to bring us up to date on?
Yeah.
That's my-- I'm talking to the students
tomorrow about reading your work aloud.
And one tip is plant a possible question for the Q and A
that somebody can ask first and then it gets asked in the room
this morning.
[LAUGHTER]
Something like that.
Yes.
So my-- I have an essay on deextinction in the book
and this process of taking these cellular materials,
animals that aren't around anymore and trying to revive
them through--
used of cloning and now kind of hybrid cell technology.
And I-- one of the--
and yes, he also talks about endlings.
So when there's a last member of the species
it's called an endling.
There's one of the endlings who has died.
So now there's a species in my book that says--
the book says it's alive, and no it's not alive anymore.
RIP Toughie the tree frog.
But there's another species that has long
been considered extinct that just two weeks ago people
have spotted.
Scientists say that the reported sightings are credible rumors,
whatever that means.
[LAUGHTER]
When you're thinking about de-extinction it's kind
of hard--
you kind of want to push away this kind
of the sort of charisma idea that we can clone a mammoth
or something like that.
You kind of want to push it away and sort think
more about science--
the cloning cells and things like that.
And I tried really hard when I was writing the essay not
to get too caught up in the idea of bringing back the passenger
pigeon.
And some people are so obsessed with it.
There's one animal that I was really into,
the Tasmanian Tiger.
Do you guys ever-- have you ever seen the Thylacine?
It's this kind of strange marsupial
that we just kind of just shot out of existence.
Australian people who kind of immigrated to Tasmania
in Australia did.
And they were great.
They didn't do anything wrong.
And just two weeks ago there are some incredible sightings there
might-- we might not need to de-extinct Thylacines
because Tasmanian Tigers might still--
Benjamin the endling Tasmanian Tiger
might actually have been just a member of the species that
still continue.
So if you find some wood tonight--
[KNOCKING] if there are still Thylacines
we'll probably do something terrible to them
and put them on American Idol or something.
But--
[LAUGHTER]
--my fingers crossed, I really hope that--
I really hope the book is wrong in that respect.
Did you really plant that question over here?
I know it felt like a plant.
Well, I just said something at the very top of my thing
that I had like [INAUDIBLE].
Right.
I got you.
Elizabeth.
Well, I'd be curious to know who else you read
in the middle of the night?
Who else you read in the middle of the night for the--
I could feel that question coming to because I feel
like even as I said I actually don't read Salinger that much
anymore.
[INAUDIBLE]
But who are the writers I love that are those writers,
which may not be exactly my favorite writers,
but I think that's-- a few come to mind.
I'm a huge, huge fan of Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries.
Is that a book people know.
He was a relatively mid-late British playwright
during the '50s, and '60s, and '70s.
And then in his late career blooming,
he kept a diary, a four volume diaries,
which he called The Smoking Diaries of sort
of very much like Rembrandt like self-portraits.
He's just thinking very, very hard about himself.
His friends basically die.
And it's an amazing, amazing book, right?
It's also full of just wonderfully malicious gossip,
and great jokes, and celebrity sightings.
But it's an amazing book.
I can't recommend it highly enough.
It's hard to get in the US.
It's sort of semi available here but you can easily
can find it in sort of a similar four-book set.
I love David Markson's last four books.
Is Markson a writer that people know.
That he too interestingly was kind of a mid-late novelist.
He wrote this sort of detective novels.
He wrote a book on Malcolm Lowry.
And then again, kind of--
I mean, again, the apparent theme, as Elena said, that when
we're looking at the bear that we're
looking at ourselves of course.
And this must be a theme of interest to me.
But Markson's last four books, This
Is Not a Novel, The Last Novel, Vanishing Point,
and Reader's Block are these amazing books
of sort of curated quotations of him
thinking very hard about the books that he's read.
And each book is a remarkable meditation
on a particular theme.
The book of his, Vanishing Point,
is the best book I know about post 9/11 America.
And it barely mentions 9/11.
So I'll count those eight books as eight.
And I feel like I've answered Elizabeth's question
more than half way.
Well, that's more than-- oh, OK.
One more.
[CHUCKLES]
About Jumbo II-- you know this, but for the benefit
of the crowd.
It's a chapter about the arrival of electricity and elephants
in the United States in the late 19th century.
And combining them doesn't really
seem intuitive but in your telling
it's like mixing oxygen and gasoline,
and it just explodes into fire.
[LAUGHTER]
My question was, was there a moment
in your research when the two connected?
Yeah.
There was.
And you guys can hear me, right?
So the moment was I discovered I was
sort of going down those kind of procrastination research
wormholes.
That you go down when you're not ready to start writing yet
and you're like, oh no, I need to watch
this fourth documentary about beavers.
And you're not even writing about beavers.
[LAUGHTER]
Found-- found the newsletter blotter for the World's Fair
in Buffalo where they--
Jumbo II is completely unrelated to Jumbo
I and wasn't nearly as famous or as exciting.
But he does bear the distinction of being the first elephant
that we tried to electrocute unsuccessfully.
Hope I didn't give anything away there.
Actually, I think you're probably
more likely to read the essay knowing the elephant's OK.
[LAUGHTER]
Is it OK.
But-- so he was electrocuted at this fair.
And-- so I was researching this Buffalo Fair.
It's also the fair where President McKinley was
assassinated and his killer was electrocuted during--
over the course of the fair.
And I found this just maybe 80,000 word daily, sometimes
bi-daily, twice daily newsletter of the things that
happened over the course of this World's Fair, which was
about four months in length.
Tesla had a part in it.
And it had these collage moments in it where it would be like--
the Ladies' Oratory Society of Philadelphia
showed up with their triangle collection.
Someone was run over by a streetcar
would be the next paragraph.
Calamity Jane, who at the time must have been like 90
passed out drunk in front of the Wild Bill Hickok Show.
Oh yeah, the president got murdered.
The flower show was very successful.
[LAUGHTER]
It was this kind of awful, and wonderful,
and I was feeling-- not nostalgia,
but I was feeling this sort of kind of old timey glee
at some of the details of the piece.
And also this kind of horror.
The way that people were moving on and this sort of pastiche.
The pasting together of it all just really-- it
galvanized for me the idea that people were first
electrocuted in Buffalo.
An elephant-- the circus elephant sort of craze was huge
in these--
at this big fairs.
And electricity was born in Buffalo, New York.
And the first person that we ever electrocuted
was in Buffalo, New York.
So both the fair and the way that the fair
was reported in this document was the kind
of like the aha moment.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Thanks.
That was a great question.
Thank you for asking.
Great.
Thank you both so much.
More time for more questions [INAUDIBLE]..
[APPLAUSE]