My goodness.
Thank you so much for those really beautiful words, Dorian.
And those were very thoughtful, difficult acts to follow.
Elena, Ander, Dorian.
Elena was my student at Bread Loaf many years ago.
I'd like to go back and take a course from her now.
She's an amazing writer, amazing writer.
And I've had the difficult fate in Tucson to follow people
with incredible voices.
I was at the Tucson book festival.
And I was on a panel with Benjamin Percy.
Do you know Benjamin with that god-like stentorian voice.
And now I'm reading after Elena who's some kind of mad mash
up of Meryl Streep and Robin Williams, so--
[LAUGHTER]
--where as my voice is sort of closer
in register to Richard Simmons.
So I'll try and do my best despite that disability.
But anyway, it's great to be back here
thanks to Ander, the Arizona Poetry Center, the U of A.
I'm going to read from this new book, Other People: Takes
And Mistakes.
And--
[COUGHS]
Excuse me.
The best way of describing the book
is to say that the book grew out of a long passage of Philip
Roth.
This is from his book.
I think it's from American Pastoral.
And it's the epigraph of the book.
And the book is how we all, as Dorian
said, that we all make sure that we get ourselves
and everyone else wrong.
And I thought I would read--
it's rather a long-- it's like 250 words.
But I thought I'd read the Roth passage to give you
a sense of what the book's about.
And then I'll read several short essays
that try to explore the connotations of Roth's
statement.
[COUGHS]
I'm going to take off this little cover.
You fight your super--
you fight your superficiality, your shallowness,
so as to try to come at people with unreal expectations
without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance
as untank like as you can be, sans, cannon, and machine
guns and steel plating half a foot thick.
You come at them on menacingly on your own 10 toes and stare
instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads.
Take them on with an open mind as equals, man to man,
as we used to say.
And yet, you never fail to get them wrong.
You might as well have the brain of a tank.
You get them wrong before you meet them while you're
anticipating meeting them.
You get them wrong while you're with them.
And then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting
and you get them all wrong again.
Since the same generally goes for them with you,
the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion,
empty of all perception, an astonishing farce
of misperception.
And yet, what are we to do about this terribly significant
business of other people, which gets bled of the significance
we think it has and takes on instead a significance that
is ludicrous?
So ill equipped are we all to envision
one another's interior workings and invisible aims.
Is everyone to go off and lock the door
and sit secluded like the lonely riders do in a soundproof cell
summoning people out of words and then
proposing that these word people are
closer to the real thing than the real people
that we mangle with our ignorance every day.
The fact remains that getting people
right is not what living is all about anyway.
It's getting them wrong that is living.
Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong
and then on careful reconsideration
getting them wrong again.
That's how we know we're alive.
We're wrong.
Maybe the best thing would be to forget
being right or wrong about people
and just go along for the ride.
But if you can do that well, lucky you.
That's awfully beautiful passage of Philip.
I'm not a very big Philip Roth fan at all,
but that's an awfully good piece of writing.
And in a way I can just sit down now.
That's pretty much the book.