WEBVTT

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So this is a question for Elena.

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Have there been any developments
about any of the animals

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that you've been--

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[LAUGHING]

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--thinking about that you want
to bring us up to date on.

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Yeah, I'm talking
to the students

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tomorrow about reading
your work aloud.

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And one tip is plant a possible
question for the Q and A

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that somebody can ask first.

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And then it gets asked
in the room this morning.

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[LAUGHTER]

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[INAUDIBLE] Yeah,
so I have an essay

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on de-extinction in the book
and this process of taking

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this cellular material of
animals that aren't around

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anymore and trying
to revive them

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through-- it used to
be cloning and now

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kind of hybrid cell technology.

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And yes, it also
talks about endlings.

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So when there's a last
member of the species,

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it's called an endling.

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One of the endlings has died.

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So now there's a species
in my book that says--

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the book says it's alive.

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And it's not alive anymore.

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RIP Toughie the tree frog.

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But there's another
species that has long

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been considered extinct that
just two weeks ago people

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have spotted.

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Scientists say that
the reported sightings

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are "credible rumors,"
whatever that means.

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When you're thinking
of a de-extinction,

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it's kind of hard.

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You want to push away
the charisma idea

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that we can clone a mammoth
or something like that.

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You want to push it
away and think more

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about cloning cells
and things like that.

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And I tried really hard when
I was writing the essay not

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to get too caught up in the idea
of bringing back the passenger

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pigeon.

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And some people are
so obsessed with it.

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But there's one animal
that I was really

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into-- the Tasmanian Tiger.

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Have you ever seen
the thylacine?

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It's this kind of
striped marsupial

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that we just shot
out of existence;

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people who emigrated to
Tasmania and Australia did.

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And they were great.

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They didn't do anything wrong.

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And just two weeks ago, there
are some incredible sightings

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that we might not need
to de-extinct thylacines

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because Tasmanian
Tigers might still--

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Benjamin, the endling
Tasmanian Tiger,

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might actually have been just
a member of the species that

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still continues.

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So if you find
some wood tonight--

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[KNOCKS]

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Or if there are
still thylacines,

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we'll probably do
something terrible to them,

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like put them on American
Idol or something.

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But--

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[LAUGHTER]

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Cross your fingers
because I really

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hope the book is
wrong in that respect.

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Did you really plant that
question [INAUDIBLE] or no?

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It felt like a plant.

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Well, I just said something
at the very top of my thing,

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yeah, that I had a--

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[INTERPOSING VOICES]

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Oh, right, right, right, right.

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I gotcha.

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Elizabeth?

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Well, I'd be curious
to know of who else

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you read in the
middle of the night.

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Who else you read in the middle
of the night for the take.

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I could feel that
question coming, too,

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because I feel like,
even as I said,

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I actually don't read
Salinger that much anymore.

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[LAUGHS]

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[INAUDIBLE]

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But who are the
writers I love that are

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those writers which may not be
exactly my favorite writers?

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But I think a few come to mind.

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I'm a huge, huge fan of
Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries.

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Is that a book people know?

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He was a relatively
mid-late British playwright

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during the '50s
and '60s and '70s.

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And then in this
late career bloom,

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he kept a diary, a
four-volume diaries which

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he called The Smoking Diaries
of very much like Rembrandt's

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late self-portrait, is he's
just thinking very, very

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hard about himself, his
friends, basically dying.

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And it's an amazing,
amazing book.

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It's also full of just
wonderfully malicious gossip

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and great jokes and
celebrity sightings.

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But it's an amazing book.

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I can't recommend
it highly enough.

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It's hard to get in the US.

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It's sort of
semi-available here.

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But you easily can find it.

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And sort of a similar
four-book set,

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I love David Markson's
last four books.

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Is Markson a writer
that people know?

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He, too, interestingly was
kind of a mid-late novelist.

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He wrote these detective novels.

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He wrote a book
on Malcolm Lowry.

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And then again, there's an
apparent theme, as Elena said,

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that when we're
looking at the bear,

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that we're looking at
ourselves of course.

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And it must be a theme
of interest to me.

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But Markson's last
four books, This

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Is Not A Novel, The Last Novel,
Vanishing Point, and Reader's

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Block, are these
amazing books of sort

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of curated quotations
of him thinking

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very hard about the
books that he's read.

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And each book is a
remarkable meditation

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on a particular theme.

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A book of his, Vanishing Point,
is the best book I know about

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post-9/11 America.

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And it barely mentions 9/11.

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So I'll count those
eight books as eight.

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And I feel like I've answered
Elizabeth's question more than

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halfway.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Well, that's more than--

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OK.

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One more.

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About Jumbo II-- you know this.

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But for the benefit
of the crowd,

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it's a chapter about the arrival
of electricity and elephants

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in the United States in
the late 19th century.

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And combining them doesn't
really seem intuitive.

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But in your telling
it, it's like mixing

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oxygen and gasoline.

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And it just explodes into fire.

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[LAUGHTER]

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My question was,
was there a moment

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in your research when
the two connected?

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Yeah, there was.

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You guys can hear me, right?

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So the moment was I
discovered I was going down

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those procrastination
research wormholes

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that you go down when you're
not ready to start writing yet.

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And you're like, oh,
no, I need to watch

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this fourth documentary
about beavers

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and you're not even
writing about beavers.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I found the newsletter blotter
for the World's Fair in Buffalo

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where Jumbo II is completely
unrelated to Jumbo

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I and wasn't nearly as
famous or as exciting.

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But he does bear the distinction
of being the first elephant

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that we tried to
electrocute unsuccessfully.

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Hope I didn't give
anything away there.

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Actually, I think
you're probably

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more likely to read the essay
knowing the elephant's OK.

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But he was electrocuted
at this fair.

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And so I was researching
this Buffalo fair.

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It's also the fair
where President McKinley

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was assassinated.

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And his killer was electrocuted
over the course of the fair.

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And I found this just
maybe 80,000-word daily,

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sometimes bi-daily--
twice daily--

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newsletter of the things
that happened over

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the course of this
World's Fair, which was

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about four months in length.

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Tesla had a part in it.

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And it had these collage moments
in it where it would be like,

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'The Ladies' Oratory society
of Philadelphia showed up with

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their triangle collection.'

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'Someone was run
over by a streetcar'

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would be the next paragraph.

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And then 'Calamity Jane'--

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who at the time must
have been, like, 90--

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'passed out drunk in front of
the Wild Bill Hickok show.'

00:07:51.420 --> 00:07:54.510 align:middle line:84%
'Oh, yeah, the president got
murdered.' 'The flower show was

00:07:54.510 --> 00:07:55.680 align:middle line:90%
very successful.'

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[LAUGHTER]

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It was this kind of
awful and wonderful--

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and I was feeling not nostalgia.

00:08:03.930 --> 00:08:06.420 align:middle line:84%
But I was feeling this
sort of old-timey glee

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at some of the
details of the piece

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and also this kind
of horror at the way

00:08:09.900 --> 00:08:11.430 align:middle line:90%
that people were moving on.

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And the sort of pastiche,
the pasting together of it

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all just really
galvanized for me

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the idea that people were
first electrocuted in Buffalo.

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The circus, elephant craze
was huge in these big fairs.

00:08:26.370 --> 00:08:28.530 align:middle line:84%
And electricity was born
in Buffalo, New York.

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And the first person
that we ever electrocuted

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was in Buffalo, New York.

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So both the fair and
the way that the fair

00:08:34.950 --> 00:08:38.649 align:middle line:84%
was reported in this
document was the aha moment.

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Does that make sense?

00:08:39.524 --> 00:08:40.350 align:middle line:90%
Thank you.

00:08:40.350 --> 00:08:41.767 align:middle line:84%
Thanks, that was
a great question.

00:08:41.767 --> 00:08:44.260 align:middle line:90%
Thank you for asking.

00:08:44.260 --> 00:08:44.950 align:middle line:90%
Great.

00:08:44.950 --> 00:08:46.150 align:middle line:90%
Thank you both so much.

00:08:46.150 --> 00:08:47.817 align:middle line:84%
More time for more
questions [INAUDIBLE]

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[APPLAUSE]