(Philip Gerard, Rebecca Lee, Phillip Lopate, Cynthia Ozick) Sponsored by The University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Readings by Cynthia Ozick and Phillip Lopate. Introductions by Philip Gerard and Rebecca Lee.

Published Date: September 28, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in New York on February 2nd, 2008. The recording features Rebecca Lee, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Lopate. Now you'll hear Rebecca Lee provide introductions.

Rebecca Lee:

Hi, it's an honor for me to introduce Cynthia Ozick tonight. I'm a longtime fan. Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City before moving with her family to the Bronx where she grew up. She has written numerous books and has won the Rea Short Story Award and been nominated for the Booker and the National Book Award. As well, her stories have been anthologized widely, including many times in best American short stories and the O. Henry Award. In my experience, a reader remembers forever the first time the encounter, a Cynthia Ozick piece of art. The sheer personality of the prose. The ability to be actually present on the page, what she describes herself as breathing in a blaze of words. Her work is also beloved for its moral conviction and subtlety, the great intellectual and emotional demands it makes on the reader.

And perhaps most of all, for those incredible heroines that walk right off the pages, the very sad and brave and indomitable Rosa from the Shawl and the brilliant incomparable Puttermesser who has lived in my mind for years with I hope some of the same intensity with which she originally lived in the writer's mind. And as all readers know, this is the ultimate gift a writer can give. So please join me in welcoming Cynthia Ozick.

Cynthia Ozick:

I should say I'm feeling very guilty because Philip, the esteemed Philip Lopate and I are reading together and we both wanted to go first, sort of to get it over with and we tossed a coin and I won. So I feel guilty, so I'm so happy to be here. I noticed that AWP, if you put a Y in front of it becomes Yawp, which immediately reminds us of Whitman's barbaric Yawp. So that is not what I'm going to do, no barbaric Yawps. I'm going to read a story for maybe 25 minutes or maybe 20 minutes or maybe 27 minutes and then, I may have to stop in the middle of the word because the story is longer than that. So that leads me to suggest that if you want to know how it ends.

There's a book containing it coming out in the spring called Dictation: A Quartet, which contains its four novellas and this is one of the four. Also, I should say this story has been published invisibly in The Atlantic. As you know, The Atlantic has stopped publishing stories every month but hasn't abandoned the short story because The Atlantic now publishes a summer fiction issue, which however is not in the subscription, so if you subscribe, you will never see it and has to be found on a newsstand, which makes it pretty invisible. So I tell you all this to explain why this story is never before heard.

So it's called What Happened to the Baby. When I was a child, I was often taken to meetings of my Uncle Simon's society, the League for Unified Humanity. These meetings, my mother admitted, were not suitable for a 10-year-old, but what was she to do with me? I could not be left alone at night and my father, who was a detail man for a pharmaceutical company, was often away from home. He had recently been assigned to the Southwest. We would not see him for weeks at a time. To our ears, places like Arizona and New Mexico might as well have been far off planets. Yet Uncle Simon, my mother told me proudly, had been to even stranger regions.

Sometimes a neighbor would be called in to look after me, while my mother went off alone to one of Uncle Simon's meetings. It was important to go, she explained, if only to supply another body. The hall was likely to be half empty. Like all geniuses, uncle Simon was so far, she emphasized, unappreciated. Uncle Simon was not really my uncle. He was my mother's first cousin, but out of respect and because he belonged to an older generation, I was made to call him uncle. My mother revered him. Uncle Simon she said, is the smartest man you'll ever know. He was an inventor, though not of mundane things like machines, and it was he who had founded the league for a unified humanity.

When Uncle Simon had ... what Uncle Simon had invented and was apparently still inventing since it was by nature an infinite task, was a wholly new language. One that could be spoken and understood by everyone alive. He had named it Gnu. Now this is spelled G-N-U and I suppose to remind you of that I could keep saying Gnu and maybe I will and maybe I won't. He had named it Gnu. After the African antelope that sports two curved horns, each one turned toward the other as if striving to close a circle. He had traveled all over the world picking up roots and discarding the less common vowels. He had gone to Turkey and China and many countries in South America where he interviewed Indians and wrote down in his cryptic homemade notation the sounds, they spoke.

In Africa in a tiny Xhosa village that might be Xhosa, not sure, in a tiny village, nestled in the wild. He was inspired by observing an actual yellow horned gnu and still with all this elevated foreign experience, he lived just as we did in a six-story walk-up in the East Bronx in a neighborhood of small stores, many of them vacant. In the autumn, the windows of one of these stores would all at once be shrouded in dense curtains. Gypsies had come to settle in for the winter. My mother said it was the times that had emptied the stores. My father said it was the depression. I understood it was the depression that made him work for a firm cruel enough to send him away from my mother and me.

Unlike my mother, my father did not admire Uncle Simon. "That panhandler," he said. "God only knows where he finds these suckers to put the touch on." They're cultured Park Avenue people, my mother protested. They've always felt it a privilege to fund Simon's expeditions. "Simon's expeditions in the last 15 years, he's never gotten any farther than down the street to the public library to poke his nose in the National Geographic." "Anyhow," my mother said, "It's not Simon who runs after the money, it's her." Her I knew was Uncle Simon's wife Essie. I was not required to call her aunt. "She dresses up to beat the band and flatters their heads off," my mother went on. "Well, someone's got to ask, and Simon is not the one for that sort of thing. Who's going to pay for the hall not to mention his research?"

"Research," my father mucked. "What are you calling research, collecting old noises in order to scramble them into new noises? Why doesn't he go out and get a regular job? Come to think of it, why doesn't she, a pair of parasites, those two zealots? No, I've got that wrong, he's the zealot and she's the fawning ignoramus. Those idiot jingles, not another penny, Lily, I'm warning you. You are not one of those park avenues suckers with money to burn." It's only for the annual dues. The league for scrambling noises, 10 bucks down the sewer he put on his brown, felt fedora, patted his vest pocket to check for his train ticket and left us.

"Look how he goes away angry," my mother said, "And all in front of a child. Vivian, dear, you have to understand, Uncle Simon is ahead of his time and not everyone can recognize that. Daddy doesn't now, but someday he surely will. In the meantime, if we don't want him to come home angry, let's not tell that we've been to a meeting." Uncle Simon's meetings always began the same way with Uncle Simon proposing a newly minted syllable explaining its derivation from two or three alien roots and the membership calling out their opinions. Mostly these were contentious and there were loud arguments over whether it was possible for the syllable in question to serve as a verb without a different syllable attached to its tail.

Even my mother looked bored during these sessions. She took off her wool gloves and then pulled them on again. The hall was unheated and my feet and their galoshes were growing numb. All around us, a storm of furious fingers holding lit cigarettes stirred up halos of pale smoke and it seemed to me that these irritable shouting men, they were mostly men, detested Uncle Simon almost as much as my father did. How could Uncle Simon be ahead of his time if even his own league people quarreled with him? My mother whispered, "You don't have to be upset dear. It's really all right. It's just their enthusiasm. It's what they have to do to decide the way scientists do experiments."

"Try and try again. We're sitting right in the middle of Uncle Simon's laboratory. You'll see in the end they'll all agree." It struck me that they would never all agree, but after a while, the yelling ebb to a kind of low communal grumbling, the smoke darkened and the next part of the meeting, the part I liked best or disliked least commenced. At the front of the hall, at the side, was a little platform broad enough to accommodate one person. Two steps led up to it and Uncle Simon's wife mounted them and positioned herself. "The opera star," my mother said into my ear. Essie was all in yellow silk with a yellow silk rose at her collarbone and a yellow silk rose in her graying hair.

She had sewn this dress herself from a tissue paper pattern bought at Kresge's. She was a short, plump, flat-nosed woman whose side often. Her blackly gleaming pumps with their thin pedestals made her look, I thought like Minnie Mouse. Her speaking voice too was mouse-like, too soft to carry well and there was no microphone. Sunshine beams, she announced. I will first deliver my poem in English and then, I will render it in the lovely idiom of Gnu, the future language of all mankind. As translated by Mr. Simon Greenfeld, it was immediately plain that Essie had designed her gown to reflect her recitation. Sunshine beams, if in your most radiant dreams you see the yellow of sunshine beams then know, oh, human race all that you have heard the call of humanity unified.

So see me wear yellow with pride for it means that the horns of the gnu are meeting at last and the realm of unity has come to pass. "Yellowhorn, yellowhorn. Each one toward his fellow horn," was the refrain, repeated twice. "The opera star and the poetess," my mother muttered. Then, something eerie happened as he began to sing and the words which even I could tell were silly, were transmuted into read like streams of unearthly sounds. I felt shivery all over and not from the cold. I was not unused to the hubbub of foreign languages. A Greek-speaking family lived across the street, the green grocer on the corner was Lebanese and our own building vibrated with Neapolitan and Yiddish exuberance.

Yet what we were hearing now was something altogether alien. It had no affinity with anything recognizable. It might just as well have issued from the mouths of mermaids at the bottom of the sea. "Well," my mother said, "How beautiful, didn't I tell you Even when it comes out of her." The song ended in a pastel sheen, like the slow decline of a sunset. Uncle Simon held up his hand against the applause. His voice was hoarse and high-pitched and ready for battle. "For our next meeting," he said, "The program will feature a Gnu rendition by yours truly of Shelley's, 'To a Skylark,' to be said to music by our own songbird, Esther Rhoda Greenfeld, so please everyone be sure to mark the date," but the hall was in commotion.

A rocking boom was all at once erupting from the mostly empty rear rows, drowning Uncle Simon out. Three men and two women were standing on their chairs and stamping their feet drumming faster and faster. This was, I knew, no more unexpected than Essie singing in Uncle Simon's proclamations. It burst out at the close of nearly every meeting and Uncle Simon reveled in the clamor. These were his enemies and rivals, "But no, he had no rivals," my mother informed me afterward and he took it as a compliment that those invaders, those savages turned up at all and that they waited until after Essie had finished.

They waited in order to ridicule her, but what was their ridicule, if not envy? They were shrieking out some foolish Garbo, speaking in tongues, pretending a parody of Gnu and when they went off into their customary chanting, wasn't that the truest sign of their defeat, of their envy? "Zemanhof, Zemanhof." Uncle Simon's enemies were howling. They jumped off their seats and ran down the aisle toward the podium, bawling right into Uncle Simon's reddening face. "Esperanto, Esperanto. Zemanhof." "We better leave," my mother said before things get rough." She hurried me out of the hall without stopping to say goodnight to Uncle Simon.

I saw that this would have been impossible anyhow. He had his fists up and I wondered if his enemies were going to knock him down. He was a small man and his nearsighted eyes were small and frail behind their fat lenses. Only his ridged black hair looked robust, scallop like the sand when the tide has run out. Though I had witnessed this scene many times in my childhood, it was years before I truly fathomed its meaning. By then, my father had, according to my mother, gone native. He had fallen in love with the southwest and was bringing back handwoven baskets from New Mexico for my mother's rubber plants and toy donkeys made of layers of colored crate paper for me.

I was in my late teens when he persuaded my mother to move to Arizona. "Ludicrous," she complained, "I'll be a fish out of water out there. I'll be cut off from everything." She worried especially about what would happen to Uncle Simon who was now living alone downtown in a room with an icebox and a two burner stove hidden behind a curtain. "That Essie, a divorce. It was a scandal and all of it, Essie's doing. No one in our family had ever before succumbed to such shame." She had accused Uncle Simon of philandering. "What a viper that woman is," my mother said, "And all on top of what she did to the baby. She was filling a big steamer trunk with linens and quilts. As far as I'm concerned, I might just as well be a greenhorn. God knows what those people out there are like."

"To them, I'll be like somebody just off the boat, but daddy says he's up for a raise if he sticks to the territory." I had heard about the baby nearly all my life. Uncle Simon and Essie had not always been childless. Their little girl, 11 months old and already walking had died before I was born. Her name was Henrietta. They had gone to South America on one of Uncle Simon's expeditions. In those days, Essie went everywhere with him. "She never used to let him out of her sight." My mother recounted. "She was always jealous, suspicious. She expected Simon to be no better than she was, that's the truth, you know she was already pregnant at the wedding, so she was grateful to him for marrying her, as well she should be considering that."

"Who knows whose baby it was. Maybe Simon's, maybe not. If you ask me, not. She'd had a boyfriend who had hair just like Simon's, black and wiry. The baby had a head full of black curls. The poor little thing caught one of those diseases they have down there in Peru or Bolivia, one of those places. Leave it to Essie. Would any normal mother drag a baby through a tropical swamp?" "A swamp?" I asked. "The last time you told about the baby it was a desert." "Desert or swamp. What's the difference? It was something you don't come down with in the Bronx. The point is Essie killed that child." I was happy that the move to the Southwest did not include me. I had agitated to attend college locally, chiefly to escape Arizona.

My father had paid for years tuition at NYU and also for half the rent of a walk-up on Avenue A that I shared with another freshman, Annette Sorenson. The toilet was primitive. It had an old-fashioned pool chain and a crack in the overhead tank that leaked brown sludge. The bathtub was scored with reddish stains that could not be scrubbed away, though Annette went at it with steel wool and bleach. She cried nearly every night, not from homesickness but from exasperation. She had come from Briar Basin to NYU, she confided, because it was located in Greenwich Village. Briar Basin, Minnesota, she said. She didn't expect me to know that.

She was on the lookout for Bohemia and had most of Edna St. Vincent Millay's verse by heart. She claimed she had discovered exactly which classroom Thomas Wolfe had once taught in. She explored the nearby bars, but legend eluded her. Her yearnings were commonplace in that neighborhood. She wanted to act someday and in the meantime, she intended to inhale the atmosphere. She was blonde and large all over. Her shoulder blades were a foot and a half apart and her wrist bones jutted like crab apples. I thought of her as a kind of Valkyrie. She boasted operatically that she wasn't a virgin. I took Annette with me to visit Simon. I had long ago dropped the uncle. I was too old for that.

My mother's letters were reminding me not to neglect him. A $20 bill was sometimes enclosed meant for delivery to Simon. I knew my father believed the money was for me. Now and then, he would add an admonitory line. Essie was still living in the old apartment in the Bronx supporting herself well enough. She had a job in a men's clothing store and sat all day in a back room doing alterations, letting out seams and shortening sleeves. I suspected that Simon was on the dole. It seemed unlikely after all this time that he was still being shored up by his Park Avenue idealist, "Is your uncle some sort of writer," Annette asked as we climb the stairs.

The wooden steps creak tunefully. The ancient layers of paint on the banisters were thickly wrinkled. I had told her that Simon was crazy about words. I mean really crazy, I said. Simon was sitting at a bridge table lit by a gooseneck lamp. A tower of dictionaries was at his left. A piece of questionable looking cheese lay in a saucer on his right. In between was a bottle of ink, he was filling his fountain pen. My mother sends her love, I said and handed Simon an envelope with a $20 bill folded into a page torn from my modern history text except for a photograph of a Zeppelin, it was blank. My father's warning about how not to be robbed in broad daylight was always to keep your cash well-swaddled.

Otherwise, those village freaks down there will surely shoot and nab it, he wrote at the bottom of my mother's letter, but I had wrapped the money mostly to postpone Simon's humiliation. Maybe if only for a moment he would think I was once again bringing him one of my mother's snapshots of cactus and dunes, she had lately acquired a box camera in order not to be taken for a greenhorn, she was behaving like a tourist. At that time, I had not yet recognized that an occasional donation might not humiliate Simon. He screwed the cap back on the ink bottle and looked Annette over. "Who's this?" "My roommate? Annette Sorenson." "A great big girl. How about that, Viking stock."

"You may be interested to know that I've included a certain uncommon Scandinavian diphthong in my work. Zamenhof didn't dare. He looked the other way. He didn't have the nerve." Behind his glasses, Simon was grinning, "Any friend of my niece, Vivian, I intend to like, but never an Espirantes. You are not an Espirantes, are you." This or something like it was his usual opening, I had by now determined that Essie was right, Simon was a flirt and something more he went for the girls. Once he even went for me, he put out a hand and cupped my breast. Then he thought better of it. He had after all known me from childhood, he desisted or else, since it was January and anyhow, I was wearing a heavy wool overcoat, there wasn't much of interest worth cupping.

From my part, I ignored it. I was 18 with eyes in my head beginning to know a thing or two. I had what you might call an insight. Simon coveted more than the advancement of Gnu. On my mother's instructions. I opened his icebox, a rancid smell rushed out. There was a shapeless object green at the edges, the other half of the cheese and his saucer. The milk was sour, so I poured it down the toilet. Simon was all the while busy with his spiel, lecturing Annette on the evil history of Esperanto and its ignominious creator and champion, Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof of Bialystok Poland. There they spoke four languages. Imagine that, four languages and this is what inspires him, four languages.

Did he ever go beyond European roots? Never. The man lived inside a puddle and never stepped out of it. Circumscribed, narrow, small. I'll be right back, I called out from the doorway and went down to the grocery on the corner to replenish Simon's meager larder. I had heard this grandiose history too many times, how Simon alone had ventured into the genuinely universal. How he had roamed far beyond Zamenhof's poultry horizons into the vast tides of human speech, drawing from these, a true synthesis, a compact common language, unsurpassed in harmony and strength, yet tragically eclipsed. Eclipsed by Zamenhof's disciples. Those diluted believers. Those adorers of a false messiah.

An eye doctor, that charlatan and look how he blinds all his followers, Germanic roots, romance roots and then, he stops as if there's no India, no China, no Russia, no Arabia, no Aleutian Islanders. Why didn't the fellow just stick to the polyglot Yiddish he was born into and let it go at that? Did he ever set foot 20 miles out of Warsaw? No. Then why didn't he stick to Polish, an eye doctor who couldn't see past his own nose? Hamlet in Esperanto, did you ever hear of such chutzpah and so on? Esperanto, a fake, a sham, an injustice. As I was coming up the stairs, carrying bread and milk and eggs in the straw handled Indian bag, my mother had sent us a present for Simon.

I heard Annette say, "But I never knew Esperanto even existed," and I saw that Simon had Annette's hand in his. He was circling her little finger with a coarse thumb that curved backward, like a twisted spoon. She didn't seem to mind. "You shouldn't call him crazy," she protested. "He's only disappointed." By then, we were already in the street. She looked up at Simon's fourth floor window. It flashed back at her like a signal. It had caught the late sun. I noticed that she was holding a white square of paper with writing on it. What's that? A word he gave me, a brand new word that no one's ever used before. He wants me to learn it. "Oh my God," I said. It means enchanted maiden. Isn't that something? Not if maiden supposed to be the same as virgin.

"Cut it out, Vivian, just stop it. He thinks I can help." "You, how?" "I could recruit. He says I could get young people interested." "I'm young people," I said. "I've never been interested and I've had to listen to Simon's stuff all my life. He bores me silly." "Well, he told me, you take after your father, whatever that means. A prophet is without honor in his own family. That's what he said." "Simon isn't a prophet, he's a crank." "I don't care what he is. You don't get to meet someone like that in Minnesota and he even wears sandals." It seemed she had found her Bohemian at last. So that's it. Thank you.

Rebecca Lee:

Philip Lopate was born in Brooklyn and received his BA from Columbia as well as a doctorate from Union Graduate School. He currently teaches at Hofstra University and also in the MFA programs at Columbia, the new school in Bennington. He has written two novels, two books of poetry, many nonfiction books including the memoir, Portrait of My Body, which the San Francisco Chronicle called as shrewd and as brave and exploration of what it is to be a person, as anything in print today. And he's also written the essay collection Against Joie de Vivre, which is in fact a deeply curious and joyful book about the writer's intense interest in life.

He is also the author of a very influential anthology, the Art of the Personal Essay and is celebrated as not only a writer of enormous talent himself, but one of those rare writers who is considered a trailblazer of the genre, who expands the territory for the writers that come behind him and we are grateful. So Philip Lopate.

Phillip Lopate:

Well, it's wonderful to listen to Cynthia Ozick who's a writer I really revere. Not always wonderful to follow her however. I shall soldier on. I'm going to read four pieces. The first is an older piece and then three short newer ones. This is the first piece, Confessions of a Shusher. I am a shusher, which is to say a self-appointed sergeant at arms who tells noisemakers in the theater to be quiet. You take your life in your hands when you're shush a stranger, since he may turn out to be a touchy psychopath who was reminded of an admonishing school teacher he detested, but having been in the past a grade school teacher, I cannot shake the idea that I'm somehow responsible for the correction of these breakdowns in the assembly.

My usual procedure is to start with a glare at the offender. Glares are unfortunately quite ineffective when the noisemakers sit in front of you. Even if they're to the side or behind, a glare may be misinterpreted as rubbernecking. I then proceed to clear my throat hoping that this signal of civilized discomfort will be understood as a reproach. It almost never is. I then usually undergo an internal struggle asking myself, who am I to set myself up as a policer of public behavior? Can't I simply ignore the nuisance? Is it really worth it to omit an ugly sound which grates on my ears as well, which may distract others from the movie and may draw on my head some physical retaliation against which I'm ill-prepared to defend myself or else some unpleasant curse?

These questions are merely a way of biting my time in the hope that the problem will disappear by itself. If it doesn't, I'm compelled to graduate to stage two, a good hearty "Shh." Much as I might want to soften the aggressiveness of this shusheration, experience has taught me that a tentative shush is a waste of time, too easily mistaken for some private sigh, but then even a lusty shush is frequently ignored. Perhaps it is too comic-sounding, has too much of the sneeze about it, the hyperactive radiator or the ready kettle. In any event, a shush does not obligate its target to recognize that he or she has been addressed, the way normal speech does.

What shushes do have in their favor is that being such a universal signal, they make the reprimand seem less a personal confrontation and more the bubbling up of a communal superego. However, if the offenders continue to talk after several shushes, perhaps even issuing some derisive, mimicking shush of their own as a witty repost, then there is no choice but to come out from behind the anonymity of the shush and heart and mouth escalate to a crisp verbal, "Please stop talking." This is sometimes followed by, "You're not in your living room, you know." If one is feeling pedagogically self-righteous.

Whatever statement one makes is likely to produce a furious twisting in the chair by the chief gabbler to see what puritanical nerd has said the temerity to question his freedom of speech. It is necessary to return the fellow's look with a cool frowning stare of one's own. Sometimes a shush senses a small ripple of curiosity among those nearby like schoolchildren drawn to a playground fight. Their lack of support for law and order is not the least irritating facet of the situation. Since you had thought you were intervening at least partly for everyone's sake and now realize that to them, you're merely one more lunatic releasing commands into the indifferent dark.

By now the movie spell has been broken. I sit boiling, feeling helplessly, angry and at the same time, frightened of the offender's potential rage. If he falls into a resentful silence, I can call my heartbeat and tell myself that I've struck a blow for moviegoers everywhere. The problem is that the request to shut up is often taken rather personally. It seems to touch a sore spot and the request to ease dignity. Particularly I've noticed if the chief talk is showing off for his date or his group of buddies, he may continue to draw all night as a point of machismo, so that when it started out as unconscious rudeness graduates via shushing to defy in policy. At such turns I composed speeches to myself along the lines of we did not pay good money to listen to your asinine conversation or how can we expect to have a democracy if ...

I usually spare them the civics lesson because by this point, I decide to write these people off as hopeless morons. I sweep up my coat and belongings ignoring the victorious hoots and allow myself a slow censorious abandonment of the row. Perhaps a grain of guilt, I tell myself will lodge itself in their subconscious and come to ripening next time. It would be agreeable to report that the problem ends there, but many times my newly chosen section is also contaminated with talkers so that I may be forced to move three times in the course of a feature film. In doing so, I incur the risk of being mistaken for a restless flasher.

It is a small price to pay for cinematic peace of mind. The crux of the problem is that I want to watch movies in movie theaters as they were designed to be seen and I like having the company of other bodies, other spectators around me, but at the same time, I have become pretty naturally sensitive during years of devoted film-going to distractions not just to the conversationalists but to the foot-kickers or those who nervously cross and uncross their legs behind me each time pressing into the back of my seat. The latecomer who compounds the first fault by making what seems like a deliberately elaborate coming to rest, removing her coat slowly and rearranging her department store bags.

The doting parent who keeps feeding his child sour ball candy, wrapped in maximally crackling cellophane. I don't even like to sit behind baldheaded men because their domes reflect too much light and detract from the screen's luminescence. The fact that my own hairline has receded at a rapid pace makes me hope that others are not so pathologically picky. The truth is I can live with the kickers, the candy and wrappers, the baldies, et cetera, but I draw the line at prattlers. Is it just my luck to attract them or have today's movie audiences declined across the board and their capacity to keep silent? We can always blame television for altering movie viewing habits. A good many people who attend movies today do seem convinced that they're sitting on the couch at home.

Others must believe they're in the bedroom as they snore or make love. You would expect that young people who are grown up in the channel-hopping, short attention span era would be the worst offenders, but the noisiest from my observation are elderly couples who keep comparing notes on what is happening and why. Maybe hearing loss makes them talk louder, but it is also as if submission to the film experience were a threat to their dyadic bond and in the end, they choose togetherness over immersion. Audiences of the 1920s and 30s were famous. Indeed, they were often criticized by intellectuals for their mass somnambulism as the lights dimmed. Today's audiences are patients hard to hypnotize.

They resist Yorneric plunge accustomed to seeing modest sized images and the convivial lamp lit around a family life, they do not fully participate in the ritual of a sudden engulfing nightfall and today's theater owners further dilute the darkness by letting inconsiderably more ambient light, usually for security reasons and scaling down the grandeur with smaller multiplex screens. The result is an uneasy suspension above the film narrative, the equivalent of a light sleep. Audience chatter has also been affected by a shifting perception of when a movie actually begins. I was sitting in a movie house recently, waiting for the show to start. I like to get there early to absorb the atmosphere and compose myself for the descent.

And in front of me, were two women having a discussion about apples. Granny Smith versus McIntosh. Fresh versus bait. It was one of those tedious conversations you cannot help but eavesdropping on. The light is lowered, the coming attraction started, the women chatted on. Now, they were discussing which restaurant they would go to after the show. Coming attractions can be fascinating cultural artifacts, and in any case, I have a fondness for their tantalizing promise, but I recognize that they're in a sense, only advertisements and so the audience has a right to talk through them, resisting their solicitations with skeptical remarks such as, "They couldn't pay me to see that one."

However, the titles of the feature film started to appear and the women continued conversing. Should they go to a French bistro or eat Chinese? You'll say it was only during the titles, only the titles? I'm curious who was in the cast, who wrote the screenplay, produced it, and even if I were not, I would still think the labor of these collaborators deserved a respectful silence as their names passed before my eyes. Then there's a choice of typeface, no small matter. Above all, the title sequence often introduces the key visual and musical elite motif in the film. One school of French criticism even argues that the title sequence is a miniature model, encoded of course, of the movie to follow.

All right, I see. I haven't convinced you about the significance of the title sequence, but surely, you'll agree that the first shot of the film is highly important in arousing our expectations, as important say, as the first sentence of a novel. Yet the women kept talking. This particular opening shot panned across the rooftops of a Sicilian city, huddled in the landscape, establishing the drama's largest social context while at the same time expressing certain aesthetic choices, camera movement, angle, lighting, that allowed us to sense the tempo at which fate would be distributed to the characters. It was a particularly engrossing, well-composed, mood-setting shot, undermined by the chatter of my neighbors.

And I felt I had no option but to shush. One of the women replied, nothing's happening yet. Mood, location, this was nothing. It was only during the first dialogue sequence that they decided something was happening and finally, fell silence. I want to make a distinction here between what I regard as justifiable audience noise and the kind of chatter I have been describing. I do not expect utter silence in a theater, nor do I necessarily want it. Comedies obviously gain from being seen in a packed roaring house. If I'm in a horror movie and during a frightening sequence, some teenagers start yelling, "Watch out" or "Oh gross."

It's in the spirit of the occasion. If my fellow moviegoers rejoice at a chainsaw dismemberment or at so-called street sly and being blown away and Death Wish IX, I may fear for their souls and their politics, but I do not fault them for improper audience behavior. They're still reacting as a public to the events on screen or swept up in the drama. What I cannot accept is the selfishness of private conversation, even when nothing is audible from a nearby tête-à-tête, but a whispering buzz, the mere knowledge that my neighbors are not watching with their full attention dilutes and spoils my own concentration. For all that when is still a crowd member, movie going is essentially a solitary process.

To refuse that solitude is to violate the social contract that should be written on each ticket stub. If indeed movie audiences of today chat are more during films than they used to, I can only surmise that it is something to do with, on the one hand, a spreading free of solitude and on the other, an erosion of what it means to be a member of the public. There have been times over the years when my roles as cinephile and Swain have come into conflict, I have had to make it clear to my date, however much I may have doted on her that I actually did want to watch the movie. I have made it clear to the gabblers around us as well.

Although one woman who was a perfect lady and to whom I was especially devoted, hated my shushing, which she found an embarrassment and a breach of manners. One time I went so far as to shush her when she was talking to a friend who had come with us to the movies and afterwards she let me know with uncharacteristic directness that if I ever did that to her again, she would break my arm. She was right of course, or at least I pretended she was right because I knew that if I attempted to defend my quixotic position, it would only make things worse. Nobody loves the shusher. Now this next piece came about because I was asked to write something for an anthology to help save Darfur, and since I had nothing to help save Darfur, previously, I decided that it was time to roll up my sleeves.

What they asked me to do was to write a piece about the risks I had taken as a writer and I thought that that was rather an invitation for self-congratulation, so I wrote this piece called Real Risks and sent it in. Every time I momentarily lose a sense of orientation like asking myself in the midst of some domestic family squabble, what I am doing here or who I am, such moment of vagueness do not decrease with aging, I think back to the last piece I wrote and tell myself, "Aha, I am the author of ..." It could be a lengthy tome or a book review or a semi hack article I wrote last week. It doesn't matter.

The point is that I experienced an instantaneous congealing of self-confidence. Sometimes I walk about the streets of Brooklyn and tell myself like a parent reassuring a child that I am the author of a whole shelf of books. It was always my dream to take up a shelf in the library and I'm almost at that point having written maybe a dozen titles, edited a half dozen more and contributed 10 more introductions to picture books or other authors reassured texts that get my name put on the cover or the spine of the volume. You would think that anyone who had already generated so prolific a corpus, we will defer a question of quality for the moment or indefinitely, you would think such a person would be mature enough not to need to have to resort to such petty incantations, but such is not the case.

I need to pat myself on the back constantly because without this reminder of my literary output, I fear I would vaporize. The negative corollary of this phenomenon is that every time I finish a book, I become very morbid and think I'm going to die soon. It is as though having cleared the decks, I no longer have an excuse to live. Actually even before finishing a book when I'm still in the final stages, I begin to have the hit by a truck fantasy. Walking through the streets of Brooklyn, I asked myself if my manuscript has reached a point sufficiently far along that were I hit by a truck and killed instantly. It could still be published, with a short note of course by my widow or agent or editor, explaining the circumstances.

I brewed about where I left my manuscript and if it is in an overt enough place on my desk or the piles of papers beside the desk, so that my wife could find it after she has gone through the necessary grief and burial period or so that she could locate it on my computer and initiate the search for publisher. Assuming she liked it enough not to suppress it, one can never be sure about such things. Then the day comes when I have definitely finished a manuscript for better or worse, and it is a book or potential book. I take it to the photocopy shop and have three copies made. I give one to a friend and another to my agent. The third I leave with my wife and I began to think of death.

Sometimes she thoughts take the form of fantasizing approaching some friend and asking him to become my literary executor. This fantasy of the chosen friend is shot through with Hawthorne-Melville unconsummated homoeroticism, except the brunt of this romanticized turn in the relationship will start. From the moment I die, necrophiliacly so to speak, who will love me enough once I become a ghost to put up with the bother of being my executor. First, I have to go through a rigorous analysis of all my friendships and ask which one of them I trust the most. Many have let me down in the past. These are easily eliminated, but I must also cross off a list those dependable friends who are older than myself, and I might not be around long enough to agitate to keep my books in print or even more improbably, get the outer print ones reissued.

There was also a large stack of my uncollected work, journalistic articles, film and book reviews of femoral essays, poem, juvenilia which are really alert, industrious, literary trustee might find a way to see into print how to locate all that material? I have made the problem easier by tossing new pieces as I write them into a folder which I keep on the ledge of my bookcase, but the process is very unsystematic and to compile a full dossier of my unpublished work, the chosen literary executor would have to borrow into my files a process that could easily take half a year. In any case, if the friend is successful, he will have added to my library shelf, which is all I care about.

The irony is that I have still not gotten around to making a will, though my wife and my mother-in-law regularly tell me, it's my responsibility to do so. They're quite reasonable in nagging me to make out a will, but this step would entail envisioning my extinction and while I'm happy to do so in terms of settling my literary remains or as an act of gothic imagination, I am less drawn to the idea of making life easier for those who will survive me, let them suffer. I'm sure in due course I will make out a will, but the prime motivation for it will be to settle this question of my literary executor. When I finish a book, I am dead, empty. It is at such junctures that I wish I had a knack for living.

E.M. Cioran once wrote a book with a beautiful title, The Temptation to Exist. I too frequently have been tempted to exist, but I am no good at it, and so I applaud through the hours of ordinary life with a pretense of graceful acceptance and participation, which does not fool for a second those closest to me, my wife and daughter. And I wait impatiently for the next opportunity to sit at my desk and write anything for it is only when writing that I begin to exist. In that sense, I take no risk by writing. Intensely honest self exposures come easily to me. The most provocative positions that go against the grain of conventional morality are a breeze. Complex researchers and ambitious structural challenges are finally child's play next to the difficulty of getting through daily life.

Trying to love one's family members on a consistent basis, despite the lack of respect they show me compared to the literary community at large. Listening to the neighbor's small talk and deciding which telephone company provides the best service package. Thank you. I was asked by Lee Gutkind of creative nonfiction to write a piece about what publishing will be like in the year 2025, and I'm not very good at predicting, but I thought that I would do it by setting the piece far beyond 2025, like 2075, and looking back nostalgically at the year 2025. So this is it, looking back at publishing history to the year 2025, we can see it as a particularly exciting transitional period for our industry.

To quote the English novelist Charles Dickens, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Contrary to much dire speculation, the traditional book as object continued to exist even to hold its own commercially, alongside the much improved electronic book, and most readers resorted to both formats alternating without a due as a task or text required. In terms of the actual material substance of the book, object 2025 was a period of rapid if somewhat primitive experimentation. The floating book was developed about that time in response to the rising water levels at our coasts. The impulse book, which was instantly soluble and could be tossed in the river at completion without environmental damage, was in its first stages of production.

Still far in the future was the book lozenger, which dissolved novella sized works on the tongue. Not to mention the book injection, devised for cultivated diabetics who requested literary dose with their daily shots. It was above all a period of incessantly refined niche marketing. Publishers relied on sophisticated demographic and shopping pattern data to bombard potential readers with individualized ads. The demise of newspapers opened up a vastly widened range of soliciting media. For instance, a man might be brushing his teeth and suddenly the bathroom mirror would light up with a message about a book that would conceivably appeal to him based on a recent purchase.

The science of barcodes was brought to a level of precision, previously unimagined. Books on demand could be cobbled together and distributed for the smallest cross demographic groupings such as transsexual dyslexics of Latvian extraction. The infamous readings where books were projected for free onto billboards or by hologram in city parks as backdrop for crowds, inviting illegal drugs also became popular for a while. The other major technological advances of the time occurred in combined merchandising, the book CD format, the DVD book CD format, the iPod book format and so on. Books were fine. Nothing wrong with books, industry pundits kept declaring, but they needed to be incorporated synergistically into other devices that is into larger information and entertainment delivery systems.

The phenomenal popularity of graphic books led directly to that glamorous annual event, the Global Book Awards or the Spiegelman's, which has gradually replaced the Oscars. This star studded gala was telecast worldwide. 2025 was a banner year attended by no less than President Judith Regan, the first ex-publisher to occupy the White House. It was also the first year that James Bayer Award for mixed genres was presented. The event was marred only by a pathetic counter demonstration outside the hall by three geezer belles-lettres, Lee Gutkind, Michael Steinberg and Philip Lopate, who insisted that essay writing be given some sort of award recognition.

A suggestion whose irrelevance was accorded the dignified silence it deserved. We cannot recall nostalgically the year 2025 without touching on that painful affair known as the last writer's strike. The industry was expanding and with growing pains came conflict. An upsurge of greed provoked the writer's union to demand a bigger share of cyber residuals. The real sticking point was fear of that new technology, then in its infancy, namely thought transfer or ESP publishing, which threatened to cut the authors out of their share of the publishing pie. We see in retrospect that these fears were largely unfounded. In any case, the Writer's Union Council of Elders controlled by the three Jonathans, troika, also known as the Alte Kaker Adolescents.

So-called because of the lifelong skillful mining of material about the trauma of teenage years called for a strike. Eventually, the union split apart when these elders were challenged by the Young Turks led by Edgar Mailer, Tama Updike, and several other grandchildren of famous writers whose parents had made it. The Young Turks questioned the whole idea of individual authorship and hence regarded residuals as communal property. On a happier note, the first group of recently deceased authors designated for cryonics, immortality was chosen by distinguished panel of editors and agents.

Still in the pipeline were those stem cell clothing techniques involving DNA, bone scraping that would lead to the resurrection of famous authors from earlier centuries such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Somerset Maugham, Louisa May Alcott, Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner. It is too early to judge whether these second chance careers will yield further literary masterpieces. So far, it must be said the resurrected authors have produced nothing but a series of crabby autobiographical texts filled with Vituperative complaint and poisoned regret. That is a discussion for another year as we are gathered here to pay tribute to the year 2025 in publishing and not to gaze speculatively into the future.

And my last piece is a short one called The Bullet Stopper. Most men have certain ideal notions of femaleness derived from movies they saw in their youth. No matter how cockeyed some of these archetypes are, and no matter how manfully I struggle to assimilate the truth that women are as variable and complex as men are, a part of me continues to want to match up the living women in my life with the celluloid, temptresses and sacrificial saints in my imagination, I grew up in the generation of dangerous brunettes and redheads like Yvonne De Carlo, Rita Hayworth, Jane Greer and Gene Simmons, who could no sooner look at a Robert Mitchum or Glenn Ford than they would begin to seduce him and stab him in the back.

Double crossing came as naturally to these femme fatales as smoking a cigarette. Yet you had to sympathize with this survival tactic of what was we were told the frailer sex. It was a mystery to me how the supposed frailer sex could rise not only to a torturously complicated duplicity, but also to a level of selfless heroism that seemed outside the compass of masculine experience. I am particularly fascinated with one convention of older melodramatic films that seems to have disappeared. The woman who stops a bullet for her man. She was usually in classic triangle terms, the redundant woman say the native mistress of a man stationed in the Orient. A rival of the newly met, supposedly more suitable white lady. The mistress is beautiful. She's faithful and good. She loves her man and she has a deep understanding of life than the white lady.

So the audience wonders restlessly, how can the hero reject her? Because her love for her man is so deep, it transcends self-preservation as maternal love is sometimes said to do. Maybe such romantic devotion exists only in the backwaters of western civilization, among colonial or underworld women who have gone beyond the ladylike. Did I mention that sometimes vice takes the place of race. A gangster's moll or a bar girl with a tarnished past, an idle Latino or Gloria Graham type may also administer the reproachful lesson about how far a woman's love may go for her man.

In stopping a bullet, she not only solves the triangular disequilibrium, but also reinforces a fundamental economy of screen romance that a supporting player, a sidekick, must die near the end to seal the tentative lover's commitment to Eros. Now, just try to imagine a love so powerful that it would cause a woman to hurl herself in front of gunshots when most of us would hit the ground. Such love no longer exists you say. We live in a more calculating age or to put the matter progressively at an age in which women are more independent, less masochistic. Am I sorry to see the convention disappear? To be frank, I don't know whether to pray for such a love or be terrified by it.

I try to imagine a man pointing a gun at me. As he starts to pull the trigger, my Chinese girlfriend blankets me with her body. She takes the bullet. As grateful as I am, I cannot help feeling there's a certain presumption in someone stealing the death that was meant for me. I am so stunned by her act that I forget to knock the gun from the killer's hands. Now he's pointing it at me again and she has already given her life for me. Would it be cowardly to prop her in front of me or would that be a way to honor her original intention? In any case, how will I shove her limp body forward at the moment the gun is fired.

My respect for this woman is growing not only because stopping the bullet was a noble thing to do, but also because it required incredible athletic timing, like a basketball player is leaping to block a shot. My own reflexes are rustier. Even if I was quick enough to stop the next two bullets with her as a shield, the gunman, assuming he had six bullets to begin with, might get angry at this waste of ammunition. He might change his tactics, rush behind me and shoot me in the back. How awful to be shot in the back. Why doesn't my other girlfriend arrive? Isn't she supposed to bring the policemen who will knock on the door and save me?

All my life I have trusted and the eternal feminine to save me from disasters. At the same time, I have suspected that all women are betrayers. So it is inevitable that I start to think that my fiance, my other girlfriend, may be in league with a killer, but why does she want me dead? I would bowed out if she had asked me. It dawns on me that she's an avenger and that I'm about to be punished for my unfaithfulness to the good woman she who gave her life for me. Of course, it is idiotic to expect women to die for me. The very idea must be a ghostly remnant, I suppose, of a child's wholly unrealistic expectation that his mother will love him unconditionally and always no matter how meanly he tests her, or sadly disappoints her.

And yet, when I look over at my wife, playing with her orange Abyssinian Newman on the couch, I can't help wondering to what lane she would go to protect me in a fuselage. I hope she would have the good sense to duck. Nevertheless, these movie fantasies of Oriental mistresses die hard. I now begin to understand why I gave her from a recent trip to China, a red silk brocade robe with dragon couchant and why I keep pestering her to wear it. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

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