So any requests from the students out there
who were forced to read my book?
[LAUGHING]
Forced.
Any requests?
"A Remembrance for David Wong Louie."
Oh, yes.
Did you know David?
Oh, jeez.
Yeah.
Yeah, we lost so many important people.
So yesterday we talked about the Hebrew bible,
about Whitman and Ginsberg and the long line exultant
prayer, the long line poem.
And so I wrote this remembrance for our friend David Wong
Louie, a fiction writer who died three years ago.
OK.
Blessed are thy children Jules and Sogna,
possessors of the past, heralds of the future.
Blessed thy true love, thy soulmate Jackie,
and her eternal beauty, fragrant black hair of compassion,
red lips of merciful sacrifice.
Blessed our cozy home, our dream palace of light.
Blessed are thy sister and brothers.
Blessed Father's Long Island laundromat and Mother's
Chinatown Confucius Plaza of moribund rectitude.
Blessed are Zsa Zsa and Genius, piebald
creatures, bold and hirsute, rabidly
democratic and ridiculous.
Blessed be thy art, by lushness, thy silences, grueling walls
that terrorized the mind.
Blessed that we shall finally write the great American epic
to shame Homer and Proust, humiliate Aristophanes,
troll Roth, and tickle Hemingway.
We shall frolic with the fearless Queequeg
and conquer the elusive great white whale in the afterlife.
Blessed are the UCLA food trucks steaming
with greasy street tacos, frowzy tamales, and halo-halo.
Blessed is JR Seafood, waxing and waning
between boiled sacred beef and tepid spirit lobster,
godless geoduck, salty, smelly fish on reluctant pork paddies
from the ancients.
Blessed are capons stuffed with frankincense and myrrh
and transmigrating black bean sauce uber-mensch souls.
Blessed, the narrow roads of Venice--
fake, redacted canals of quiet desperation,
of curated miniature jungles, manicured curs and mastiffs,
Gondola Teslas, tiny houses that shout transient opulence.
Blessed are the unfinished bamboo floors,
decomposing kitchens, malignant architects,
carpenter ants who praise the Lord whilst tunneling corridors
toward purgatory.
Blessed, the tall tales, the university,
the hierarchical splendor and interior squalor.
Blessed, thy students, blossoming with cumulonimbus
[LAUGHS] purple adjectives.
I can't even pronounce that one.
[LAUGHTER]
Blessed, thy friends, black, brown, pink, yellow, whitish,
with eternal tans, furred, balding, fitfully unencumbered,
narcissistic, and mad.
Blessed are the hypocrites, liars, sour-faced poets,
littering along the River Niranjana.
Blessed are the solipsistic fat chefs.
That means you, Guy Fieri.
Why are you so famous?
[LAUGHTER]
Blessed the haters to whom we send a thousand
cuts of good fortune, a thousand drums of cheap Beaujolais.
Bottoms up, fools and ignoramooses.
For David has slayeth Goliath and has finally
achieved transcendence.
Blessed are thy past loves, apologies, and a gut laugh.
[LAUGHTER]
Blessed are the voice boxes that cannot speak,
tongues that cannot taste, loins that cannot blossom,
limbs that cannot embrace.
Blessed be our body ravaged by disambiguated joy.
Blessed that interstitial loneliness,
our ultimate surrender.
NA MO PU GUANG FO.
Blessed be the Universal Light Buddha.
NA MO PU JING FO.
Blessed be the Universal Purity Buddha.
NA MO DUO MO LUO... something, something.
[LAUGHS] Blessed the Aromatic Cassia Sandalwood Buddha.
NA MO DA BEI GUANG FO.
Blessed be the Great Compassionate Buddha of light.
[APPLAUSE]
I have to practice that one.
It's-- yeah, those polysyllabics, yeah.