It is my honor, this year end Prose Series night,
to introduce David Shields.
A writer who contains, well, something of everyone
we've heard before.
And then some.
A writer finale.
That may sound like effusive praise.
Just the pre-game trumpeting we want to cover our ears against.
But I mean it in the quieter spirit of this reading series.
Prose, the dictionary says, is all talk.
Plain words, nothing more.
Ordinary, non-poetry.
as Michel de Montaigne-- perhaps our consummate prose stylist--
put it, everyone has, within themselves,
the whole human condition.
And so, for a writer to be something of everyone
is to be something for everyone, too.
The new Shields book is 369 pages.
My numerology tells me the three digits
represent the branching out of society, the rooting
down of home, and the transcendence of the universal,
respectively.
And though I have little faith in the occult,
I can't help but read into these last pages of Shields.
All our secrets are the same, the concluding piece is called.
On the surface, a confession of harsh criticism for his prior
works.
The piece wonders whether bad reviews might, quote,
"tell you something unexpected about yourself."
Though, in service of portraying what Shields calls
a representative human being.
A tube boob, one reviewer called him.
A pathetically guilty white liberal, another.
Or, as Shields prefers, my shtick.
I mean for David Shields, David Shields
writes, to be a highly stylized figure
through whom cultural energies and all manner
of mad human needs flow.
And therein lies the impossible.
Still impossible 500 years after Montaigne.
How on Earth to style the universal.
How many ways Shields has tried.
Why, not a month ago on this very campus--
in what felt like one simultaneous happening--
Shields held us at the Tucson Festival of Books.
And giving a lecture, sitting on a panel,
running a creative nonfiction workshop,
taking questions on the screening of his recent film.
And reading and signing his new book, Other People.
Found in the Library of Congress under biography
and autobiography, personal memoir, literary collection,
essays, literary collection, American, general.
And finally, simply, perhaps most accurately, other.
The country's oldest federal institution
and the world's largest library would
seem to agree with the author.
There's something universal about otherness.
That, or somehow-- in a catalog of over 164 million items--
there's no obvious place for David Shields.
His many honors and awards notwithstanding.
Guggenheim and NEA fellowships.
A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
20 books and counting, translated into 20 languages.
Then I ran out of space in the margin.
There were a few other things that I didn't include.
In Zen Buddhism, we say that sitting in meditation
with a cone can be like creating a wound in perfectly
healthy flesh.
We were getting by just fine without you, wisdom.
[LAUGHING]
Thanks.
[LAUGHING]
I wonder if a Shields book right there on the title--
Other People, Reality Hunger, The Thing
About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead--
shouldn't come with a hazard sign.
Caution, this gate will lock behind you.
At this year's festival, someone asked Shields,
if we can't ever really know other people,
why don't we just kill ourselves?
[LAUGHING]
I don't remember what his answer was.
[LAUGHING]
But I do know that David Shields is one to whom we
want to pose the question.
I is another.
This book ends, just as it begins, with the words
of other people.
Please join me in welcoming David Shields.
[CLAPPING]