Thank you.
I'm going to kind of rummage around tonight
in a book I wrote last spring.
Since I'm here in the desert, I thought
it would be appropriate.
It's a book called The Desert Rose.
It came about quite accidentally.
A movie studio, Universal Studios,
asked me to go to Las Vegas and write
a movie about the real life of a showgirl.
For some reason, I had the notion
that this would be a joyous and entertaining movie.
And I went to Las Vegas.
And I wrote a novel about the real life of a showgirl.
I think this novel came about because I was extremely bored
with the book that I had been laboring on for a long time.
One of the problems of being a middle-aged writer
is that you've been writing for a long time,
and writing entails reading yourself every day
for a great number of years.
And it's unnatural to read any one writer every day
for a great number of years, even yourself.
And I think this is a common problem
with middle-aged writers.
They may not be-- they may not articulate it,
or they may not quite realize it.
But they get bored with reading themselves.
And I find the only way that I can work now
is to have about three books going,
so that when I get intolerably bored with one,
I sort of switch off to another.
And for the last several years, I've
been writing intermittently on an extremely long book
about the 19th century West, The Trail Driving book, which has
climbed to enormous length now.
And is only about a third done.
And this spring, this little trip to Las Vegas
sprung me out of my boredom with my cowboy book.
And I wrote this novel, The Desert Rose, in about a month.
It's one of those lucky things that you may not regard
as lucky when you hear it.
But it's one of those lucky things that can sometimes
happen to you in a long writing career, when you suddenly--
a sudden change makes everything seem fresher
than it has seemed.
The Desert Rose is a novel about an aging
showgirl named Harmony and her daughter, whose name is Pepper.
It's really a mother-daughter novel.
As it happens, Harmony is on her way out.
She's 39 years old.
And she has been a showgirl.
That is to say she has been simply a beautiful woman who
stands around partially nude in a lot of feathers
and gorgeous costumes.
She doesn't dance.
She isn't supposed to do anything except exhibit
herself.
Her daughter, whom you're not going to hear much of.
I can't illustrate a whole novel very well.
And I personally am fonder of the mother
than I am of the daughter.
So I'm going to read you mainly passages
having to do with the mother, whose name is Harmony.
I'm just going to skip around.
But I'm going to start at the beginning and end at the end.
I Hope you like it.
Choose between seeing you and seeing my pages now.