[APPLAUSE]
OK, if you spend time among literary people--
down?
Is that good?
OK, if you spend time among literary people, writers,
writers in training, culture vultures of every feather,
the Amazon users who post all those book reviews--
God bless them.
If you spend some time among these people,
you'll eventually notice, on the subject
of Denis Johnson's writing, a rare convergence of feeling.
Get together readers who won't budge on,
who would never admit the merits of certain other writers.
And bring up Denis Johnson.
And you'll witness a kind of melting.
Occasionally, it's a grudging melting.
But unmistakably, it is a melting.
This is because so many of us find something to connect to
in Denis Johnson's work.
And the simple thing I'm trying to say
is that his writing means a whole lot
to a whole lot of people.
Now why that is, here I should only speak for myself.
First of all, there's that voice.
Oh my gosh, that voice, strange and necessarily cruel
but beautiful, forgiving, unforgiving
in its terrible understanding of human nature.
Some of my favorite poetry is Denis Johnson prose.
And I know a number of you would say the same.
Denis's voice is actually a multiplicity of voices.
And this is the cause of much of the delight
and satisfaction one feels when reading his work.
Recently, someone sent me the text of a speech by the French
author Jean-Marie le Clézio, which ends with a definition
or maybe just a description of literature.
He says literature is something simple and true,
a charm, sometimes a ruse, a grating dance for long spells
of silence.
The language of mockery, of interjections,
of curses, and then immediately afterwards,
the language of paradise.
That sounds like a Denis Johnson story to me.
Another thing is, no matter what kind of brutal mess
Denis's characters have gotten into, no matter how carelessly
they're chewing through their lives,
there's the desire in them to discover, in the world
if not in themselves, something redeeming and good.
They go looking for it in the unlikeliest corners.
I guess, because sometimes, those
are the only corners available to us.
This hopefulness, this light craving--
which is a word that the author George Saunders made up--
may not be obvious at first glance.
But I think it's always there.
It's like this.
Card sharks have different ways of marking the backs of cards
for cheating purposes.
In the early days, they used to put bends and folds in cards.
And later when cards began to be produced with designs
on the adverse side, they altered the designs
by filling in or scratching out little bits.
But these are old tricks.
Now there are new high tech inks and other treatments,
which, after you apply them to the card,
can only be seen with special lenses or video filters.
One of these technologies is called luminous shade marking.
And cards marked this way are called luminous marked.
I think Denis's stories are luminous marked.
If you look at them the right way,
you'll see, under the chaos and suffering,
this persistent desire for what is
good and meaningful and beautiful, plain as day.
Denis Johnson has written novels, short stories, plays,
nonfiction and poetry.
His books include The Incognito Lounge, Angels,
Jesus' Son, and Tree of Smoke, for which he
won the 2007 National Book Award for fiction.
Denis, thank you so much for coming to Tucson.
Your writing means a whole lot to a whole lot of us.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Denis Johnson.