(Amy Hempel, Gary Shtengart) Sponsored by The George Washington University. Amy Hempel is a recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Artists Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. Her Collected Stories was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times, and won the Ambassador Book Award for best fiction of the year. She teaches at Harvard University and Bennington College. Gary Shteyngart's first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was a national bestseller. He was named to both Granta's Best Young American Novelists and the New Yorker's Top 20 Writers Under 40 in 2010. Following the reading, the authors will participate in a live conversation with novelist and critic Thomas Mallon.

Published Date: June 15, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Washington D.C. on February 5th, 2011. The recording features Thomas Mallon, Amy Hempel and Gary Shteyngart. Now you will hear Thomas Mallon of George Washington University provide introductions.

Thomas Mallon:

When I mentioned to a couple of people that tonight I was supposed to moderate an event featuring Amy Hempel and Gary Shtengart, nobody said, "Oh sure, those two make sense together." In fact, the look on one friend's face was a little reminiscent of people's expressions when they first heard about Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley getting together. Here after all, we would be pairing the spare queen of minimalism with the cascading, compound adjectival compound everything, super funny, overstuffed it, boy of maximalism. Here is the woman you would most love to introduce your dog to and perhaps the man you would least likely ever ask to cat sit. Whatever could they talk about? We'll see. We're going to have a conversation, the three of us after they both read, but first we're going to listen to them one by one, although I'm going to introduce them both at once.

Amy Hempel was born in Chicago but came of age in the California of the late '60s and early '70s. She has said that she wanted to become a veterinarian but slipped up when she hit organic chemistry. As it is, the stories she went on to write have probably done more than anyone since ESOPS to connect our imaginations to the minds and feelings of animals. The clean way a dog enlists your heart. I can recall first reading that phrase in TypeScript back in my days as an editor when Amy sent me a story containing it called Sportsman. I remember thinking, perfect, perfect. A phrase one often utters while reading this author who has said that all writing finally comes down to the sentences. She has been influenced by her early work in journalism, her study with Gordon Lish, by standup comedy. Yes, these two do have some things in common and by such masters as Grace Paley.

Over the past quarter-century, Amy Hempel has made an enormous impact on the American short story, even though her collected works when issued together in 2006, total just about 400 pages. Her brilliant 1997 novella Tumble Home at 70 pages is probably her war and peace, which brings us to Tolstoy, who of course brings us to Gary Shteyngart. Born in 1972 in Leningrad, Shteyngart moved with his family to Queens, New York when he was seven years old. Wikipedia says that he lost his accent when he was 14, a fact that as Wikipedia facts go prove surprisingly verifiable unless you listen very closely. He is the author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story, three books which combine satiric hilarity and a tenderness in a way that no writer I can think of besides him would dare to do, could manage to do, or would get away with doing.

He has said that novelists now have the brand-new problem, that there is no present left. We're all living in the future constantly. His books are brilliantly alert to every bit of the cultural static in which we are all now drowning, and yet they're curiously consoling too, full as they are of unabashed full out feeling. Also, and most important of all, at least to a gathering of writers like this one, Gary Shteyngart is the auteur of the most famous promotional video in publishing history. Amy has agreed to read first and once Gary has followed her, the two of them will converse and reveal to us I'm sure a wealth of unexpected affinities. Would you please welcome Amy Hempel?

Amy Hempel:

Very grateful to be here and to read with Gary, my goodness, and then talk with Gary and Tom. Wonderful, wonderful treat. I'm going to read three stories and if you know me, you know that I'm still going to come in at around 15 minutes, 20 tops.

I'm going to start with a super short true love story called The Orphan Lamb. He carved the coat off the dead winter Lamb, wiped her blood on his pants to keep a grip, circling first the hooves and cutting straight up each leg, then punching the skin loose from muscle and bone. He tied the skin with twine over the body of the orphaned lamb, so the grieving ewe would know the scent and let the orphaned lamb nurse or so he said. This was seduction. This was the story he told of all the farm boys' stories he might've told. He chose the one where brutality saves a life. He wanted me to feel when he fitted his body over mine that this was how I would be known. This was how I would live.

One more super short. It's one of the two things I've been interested in doing for a chunk of time now. The next one you'll see is maybe more poem-like, I flatter myself, but I love that borderline between short-short and prose poem.

This is called Sing to It. At the end he said, "No metaphors, nothing's like anything else." Except he said to me before he said that, "Make your hands a hammock for me." So, there was one he said, "Not even the rain," he quoted the poem, "not even the rain has such small hands." So, there was another. At the end I wanted to comfort him, but what I said was, "Sing to it." The Arabian proverb, when danger approaches sing to it. I said, "No metaphors. No one is like anyone else." And he said, "Please." So, at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him. My arms, the trees.

This next one, this is a little bit longer. And audience made up of writers in large part will know how I'm feeling right now because this is not only not a story I haven't read before, it's a story I finished on Thursday. Certainly, thought about it for a long time, but I really just finished it two days or three days ago. It's an elegy and a furious prayer, I suppose. The one thing I need to say, since you're hearing it, instead of seeing it on the page, there's a term that comes up youth list, and that's not youth as in young people. That's E-U-T-H for euthanasia. This is called A Full-Service Shelter. And it has an epigraph from that wonderful Leonard Michaels story in the '50s. I'm sure most of you here know it. There is a line in that list story of everything the author did in the '50s. In the story he's talking about that he had personal relationships with all of these research primates and then comes this line and this is the epigraph.

They knew me as one who shot wreaking crap from cages with a hose. They knew me as one who shot wreaking crap from cages with a hose and liked it and would rather do that than go to a movie or have dinner with a friend. They knew me as one who came two nights a week, who came at four and stayed till after 10, and knew it was not enough because there was no such thing as enough at the animal shelter in Spanish Harlem that was run by the city that kept cutting the funds. They knew us as the ones who checked each day's euth list for the names of the dogs who were scheduled to be killed the next morning. One or two of us there every night who came to take the death row dogs for long walks, they were mostly pit bulls, brought them good dinners, hosed out their kennels and made their beds with beach towels and bathmats and torn sheets and Scooby-Doo fleece blankets still warm from industrial dryers.

They knew me as one who made their beds less neatly at the end of a difficult evening, who thought of the artist whose young daughter came to visit his studio pointed to the painting she liked and asked, "Why didn't you make them all good?" They knew us as the ones who put a pig ear on their pillow like a chocolate in a good hotel. They knew us as vegetarians who brought them cooked meat, roast turkey, rare roast beef and honey glazed ham to top off the canned food we supplied that was still better than dry, which was what they were fed there. They knew us as the ones who fed them when they were awake instead of waking them at 2:00 AM for feeding the way that staff had been ordered by a director who felt the overnight kennel staff did not have enough to do.

They knew me as one who spoke no Spanish could only say si, si when someone said about a dog I was walking, galindo. And when a thuggish guy approached too fast then said, "That's a handsome dude." Look how a stereotype exploded in a neighborhood recovering from itself. They knew us as the ones who had no time for the argument that caring about animals means you don't also care about people. One of us does. Evelyn, a pediatrician who treats abused children. They knew us as the ones who got rabies shots. Still a series but no longer given in the stomach and who closed the bites and gashes on our arms with crazy glue, not the medical grade, but the kind you find at hardware stores instead of going to the ER for stitches where we would've had to report the dog who would then be put to death. They knew us as the ones who argued the names assigned at intake saying, "Who will adopt a dog named Nixon?"

And when Nixon's name was changed, changed to Dahmer, we ragged on them again and just let it go. And the final name assigned was OG, original gangster. There was always a baby on one of the wards so that staff could write on the kennel card, no one puts baby in the corner. They finally stopped using Precious after the senior kennel worker said of a noble aged Roddy, "I fucking hate this name, but this is a good dog." Though often they did get it right. They named the cowboy colored, Pocket Pit, who thought he was a big stud, man, man. They knew us as the ones who did not bother wearing latex gloves or gauzy scrubs to handle the dogs in sick ward who only wore the gloves when a dog had swallowed his rabies tag and we had to feel for it in feces. They knew me as one who gave a pit bull a raw hide, chew stick, swirled in peanut butter. Then after he spit it up and wanted it back, cleaned it off and gave it to him so he could have closure.

They knew us as the ones who put our fingers and mouths to retrieve a watch, a cell phone, a red bicycle reflector that a dog sucked on like a lozenge. They knew us as the ones who shot wreaking crap from cages with a hose who scoured metal walls and perforated metal floors with trifectant, the syruppy yellow chemical wash that foamed into the mess and then towel dried the kennel and liked the tangible improvement, like mowing a lawn or ironing a shirt that reduced the dog's discomfort by even that much. They knew me as one who early on went to tell the on-duty vet the good news that three dogs had been rescued from that morning's list of 12, to which the vet said, "That blows, I already filled 12 syringes."

They knew us as the ones who repeatedly thanked the vet tech who was reprimanded for refusing to kill Charlie, the pit bull who licked his hand when the tech went to inject him. And Charlie was adopted in less than 24 hours by a family who sent us photos of their five-year-old daughter asleep atop Charlie, the whole story like a children's book, maybe a German children's book. And we kept thanking the vet tech until he was fired for killing two of the wrong dogs. Their six-digit ID numbers, one digit off, he didn't catch the mistake, but neither did the kennel worker who brought him the wrong dogs and who still has his job. They knew us as those who found the magnificent with their wide spaced eyes and powerfully muscled bodies, their sense of humor and spirit the way they were still first to the dance and last to leave even in a house of horrors, the way stillness would take them over as they pushed their massive heads into our stomachs while lying in our laps.

They knew us as those whose enthusiasm for them was palpable. Rebecca falling in love with them at first sight, second sight, third sight. And Yolanda tending to them with broken fingers still in a cast, and Jeff and Daniella and Stephanie and Gina, Emily, Laurie and Carolina and Sabrina. They knew us as volunteers who felt that an hour stroking a blanket wrapped dog whose head never left your lap and who was killed the next morning was time well spent. They knew me as the least knowledgeable one there whose mistakes were witnessed by those who knew better. They knew me as one who liked to apply the phrase, the ideal version of, as in cure Chanel's mange and you'll see the ideal version of herself but did not like the term comfort zone and thought one should try to move beyond it.

They knew me as one who was unsure of small dogs having grown up with large breeds and knowing how to read them, but still afraid of the Presa Canarios, the molossers bred and the Canary Islands with their dark, bulk and enormous square heads and bloodshot bedroom eyes, since I'd lived in San Francisco when a pair of them loose in a Tony apartment house had killed a friend of mine who had stopped to get her mail and could not get her door unlocked before the attack began. They knew me as one who called one of their number a dick when he knocked me over and I slammed into a steel bolt that left me bleeding from just above an eye. They knew me as one who guided them to step over the piled-up patio hose in the packed garage, which was being used weekly by the head of the board of directors to wash his car the city paid for. He never went inside the building.

They knew us as the ones who attached a life-sized plastic horse's head to a tree in the junkyard backyard, fenced in where the dogs could be taken to run off leash one at a time and to sniff the horse's head before lifting a leg against it. They knew us as those who circulated photos of two pit litter mates dive-bombing each other under the blankets in a bed to get closer to the large-hearted woman who adopted them both. They knew us as the ones who took them out, those rated no concern and mild, also moderate and even severe, though never the red stamped caution dogs. Although some of the sweetest dogs were the ones rated moderate, which was puzzling until we realized that behavior testing was done when a stray was brought in by police or dog surrendered by his owner when they were most scared. Fearful is the new moderate. How do you think a starving dog will score on resources guarding when you try to take away a bowl of food?

They knew me as one who never handled the questionable dogs because that meant they could turn on you in an instant. You wouldn't know what was coming and some of us got enough of that outside the shelter. They knew me as one who Tyrone had it in for, the kennel worker who asked me to take out 150-pound cane corso. And when I said, "Isn't he severe?" Said, "No, he is a good boy and when I looked up his card, he was not only severe, he was D-O-H-H-B hold, department of health hold for human bite. He had bitten his owner. They knew me as one who forgave Tyrone when he slipped on the newly installed floor while subduing a frightened mastiff, fell and collapsed along. After voting $45,000 to replace the facilities floor, the board then had to allocate funds to bring in a crew with sanders to rough up the pricey new floor. The allocated funds were diverted from supplies, so kennel staff had to ask us, the volunteers, for food when they ran out because feeding the dogs had not factored in the board's decision.

They knew me as one who held the scarred muzzle of a long-nosed mutt in sick ward and sang, there is a nose in Spanish Harlem, until he slept. They knew us as the ones who refused to lock the padlocks on their kennels. The locks a new requirement after someone stole a puppy from small dog adoptions and which guarantee the dogs will die in the event the place catches fire. They knew me as one who asked them stupid questions, "How did you get so cute?" And answered the questions stupidly saying on behalf of the giddy dog, "I was born cute and kept getting cuter."

They knew me as one who talked baby, talked to the babies and spoke in a normal voice about current events to those who enjoyed this sort of discourse during their one-on-ones. I told an elderly pity about a World War II hero who died in his 90s this year in a Florida hospital after having been subdued while in emotional distress by the use of a metal cage that was fixed in place over his bed. The Posey cage had been outlawed in Eastern Europe yet was still somehow available in Florida. Caged in the space of his bed, "He died like a dog," people said. They knew us as the ones who wrote Congress in support of laws made necessary by human cruelty and named for canine victims, Oreo's Law, Nitro's Law, the law for the hero dog from Afghanistan. And that's just this year.

They knew us as the ones who loved in them what we recoiled from in people, the patent need, the clinging, the appetite. They knew us as the ones who saw their souls in their faces, who had never seen eyes more expressive than theirs and colors of clover honey, root beer, riverbed and the tricolor cracked glass eyes of a rare catahoula, rare to find up north. They knew us as the ones who wrote their biographies to post to rescue groups campaigning for the rescue of dogs that we likened to Cleopatra, the Lone Ranger or Charlie Chaplin's little Tramp to John Wayne, Johnny Depp, and of course Brad Pitt, asking each other if we'd gone overboard or gone soft like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. They knew us as the ones who tried to gauge what they had been through as when Lori said of a dog with shunts draining wounds on his head, "He looks exhausted even when he's asleep."

They knew us as the ones who wrote letters to the mayor pointing out that the department of health vastly underestimated the number of dogs in the city to clear themselves of charges of misconduct for failing to license more. The political term for this is inflating their compliance record. They knew the governor helped boost the state budget by helping himself to funds set aside to subsidize spay neuter services throughout the state. They knew that. They seem to know that just as they seem to enjoy Jeff's attempt to make a new worker understand that staff had not forgotten to write down the times they'd walked certain dogs, that the blank space under dates on the log sheets three days in a row meant that those dogs had not been walked in three days, "When the budget was cut by a million and a half," Jeff began, but the new worker did not believe him.

They knew us as the ones who decoded reasons for surrender and knew that not having time for an elderly ill dog meant the owner had been hit hard by the ruined economy and could not afford veterinary bills. They knew us as the ones who doted on throwaway moms, lactating dogs left tied to a post in the Bronx after the owner sold their puppies. And the terrified young bait dogs, we would do anything for them. Their heads and bodies crossed with scars like unlucky lifelines in a human hand, yet whose tails still wagged when we reached to pet them. They knew me as one who changed her mind about presa canarios when I found one wearing an e-color that kept him from reaching his food, I had to hold his bowl right up to his mouth inside the plastic cone for him to eat. I lost my fear of Presas.

They knew us as the ones who had Bully Project on speed dial, who knew that owning more than five dogs in Connecticut was legally hoarding, who regularly fake pulled a much loved dog when we found that dog on the list, pretending to be a rescue group so that in the 24 hours it took for the shelter manager to learn it was fake, the dog would have that time to be sprung for real. They knew me as one who got jacked up on rage until a dog dug out a ball from the corner of his kennel and brought it to my side as if to ask, have you thought of this?

They knew me as one who learned a phrase in Spanish, [foreign language 00:24:27], I am so sorry, and used it often in the lobby when handed over a dog by owners who faced eviction by the New York City Housing Authority if they didn't surrender their pit. They knew me as one who walked them past the homeless man on East 110th who said, "You want to rescue somebody? Rescue me." We sent out nightly pleas for the dogs on each night's list. One night I fell for a blue nose pit named Storm. I gave her the special treatment. She was inexpressively dear. I wrote a persuasive plea, sent it to rescue groups, I left for the night. Turned out, there were two dogs named Storm in the shelter that day. I had not checked the ID number. I had written up the wrong dog and without a plea, the other storm was killed before I woke up the next day. So, this is not about heroism, it's about an impossible task.

They knew me as one who joined them in filth and fear and had to leave them there. They knew me as one who saw through the window panel in a closed ward door, a dog lift, first one front paw and then the other offering a paw to shake though there was no one there, doing a trick he had once been taught and praised for. A dog not yet damaged but desperate. They knew me as one who decoded the civic boast of a full-service shelter that it means the place kills animals that the full-service offered is death. They knew me as one who learned that the funds allocated for the dangerous new floor had also been taken from medical. That the board had determined as non-essential, the first injection, the sedative before the injection of phenobarbital that kills them.

Since it will take up to 15 seconds for the phenobarb to work, the dogs are then made to walk across the room to join the stack of bodies only some of which are bagged. This will be the dog's last image of life on earth. My fantasy has them waking to find themselves paddling with full stomachs in the warm Caribbean, treading the clearest water over rippled white sand until they find themselves refreshed, farther out in cooler water in the deep blue reef scarred sea. They knew me as one who asked another volunteer if she would mind holding creamsicle, a two-month-old vanilla and orange pup while I cleaned his soiled kennel and made his bed at the end of a night.

I knew that Daniella would leave the shelter to go to the hospital nearby where her father was about to die. She rocked the sleepy pup in her arms. She said, "You are working too fast." She kissed the pup and said to me, "You should take your time." So, I did. And we were all sleepy and took turns holding the pup against our hearts. They saw this, they knew this. They knew me as one whose nights and days are illuminated because I knew them as they knew me. Thank you very much.

Gary Shteyngart:

Hi there. It's such a great pleasure and an honor to share a stage with Amy Hempel. She is as nice to human beings as she is to animals, and that's saying quite a lot. Maybe one more round of applause for her. I'll read from my new book, Super Sad True Love story. The best thing about it is the cover, which tested very well with youths. We showed the cover to youths and they liked it. If you have a dachshund, they can play a twister on the thing, which I do, so very helpful. A couple of things to know about this novel is set slightly in the future when a completely illiterate America is about to fall apart. Next Tuesday or something, right? There's a ruling party which is called the Bipartisan Party, which is nice, and is under the leadership of Defense Secretary Rubenstein, my first Jewish strong man, I feel very proud.

Everyone wears a device called the aparat in this future and it's worn as a pendant and what it does is it immediately ranks everyone's wealth, attractiveness and personality. I walk into a bar and I'm immediately the 17th ugliest man in the room, but I'm the fourth-best credit rating or something like that. And the main characters in this section are the Russian American, Lenny Abramov. He's approaching his 40s, which is a big no-no in this society, and he works for a company called Post-Human Services, which is hoping to find a cure for death. He has a younger Korean American girlfriend named Eunice Park. And the last thing you need to know about Lenny is that he reads books which nobody else does, younger people finding them very smelly in this society.

The next day, Eunice and I took the Long Island Railroad to Westbury Long Island to meet my parents, the Abramovs. The love I felt for Eunice on that train ride had a capital in provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons. It was systemic and it was complete. Eunice was nervous almost to the point of quaking. Her outfit was conservative for the occasion. A sky-blue blouse with a Peter Pan collar and white buttons, pleated wool skirt reaching down below the knee, a black ribbon tied around the neck. From certain angles she looked like one of the Orthodox Jewish women who have overrun my co-op building. There she was, sweating so handsomely in her orange pleather LIRR seat. Her elder worship and elder fear brought out a strange immigrant pride in me. There was something else too. It was on the Long Island Railroad some 20 years ago that I had had my first crush on a Korean girl.

I had been a freshman at a prestigious math and science high school in Tribeca. Most of the other kids were Asian. Although technically you had to live within New York City to go to the school, there were more than a few of us who faked our residency and commuted from various parcels of Long Island. For me, the long ride to Westbury amidst dozens of fellow nerd students was a particularly difficult one because it was public knowledge at the science high school that my weighted average was a dismal 86.894 while at least 91.553 had been recommended for entry into Cornell or the University of Pennsylvania, the weakest of the Ivy League schools.

As immigrant children from high performing nations, we knew our parents would slap us across the mouth for anything less than Cornell. Several of the Korean and Chinese boys who took the railroad with me, their spiky hair still hunts my most literal dreams, would dance around me singing my average, 86.894, 86.894. "You won't even get into Oberlin with that," they said. Have fun at NYU, Abramov. See you at the University of Chicago, it's the teacher of teachers.

Ouch, sorry, Chicago grads there.

But there was one girl, another Eunice of Eunice Choi to be exact, a tall, quiet beauty who would pride the boys away from me while shouting, "It's not Lenny's fault he can't do well in school. Remember what Reverend Sung says, 'We're all different. We all have different abilities. Remember the fall of man, we're all falling creatures'" And then she'd sit down with me and unbidden help me with my impossible chemistry homework, moving the strange letters and numbers around my notebook until the equations were for some reason deemed balanced. While I, utterly unbalanced by the magical girl next to me, her skin glowing beneath her summer gym shorts in orange Princeton jersey, tried to catch a brief smell of her hair or a brush of her hard elbow. It was the first time a woman had risen up to defend me, had given me the idea that I actually should be defended, that I wasn't a bad person, just not as skilled at life as some others.

At Westbury, Eunice and I disembarked before an armored personnel carrier sitting by the squat station house, it's 50-caliber browning gun bouncing up and down. National guardsmen were surveying the diverse crowds, Salvadorans and Irish and South Asians and Jews and whoever else had chosen to make this corner of central Long Island, the rich, smelly tapestry it had now become. The troops appeared angrier and more sunburned than usual. Perhaps they had just been rotated out of Venezuela.

We're fighting in Venezuela at this point. It's not going well.

Beside the armored personnel carrier a sign read, it is forbidden to acknowledge the existence of this armored personnel carrier, the object. By reading the sign, you have denied existence of the object and implied consent. We took a cab to the corner of Washington Avenue, admiring the most important corner of my life. I could already see my parents' brownish half brick, half stucco cape, the golden mailbox out in front, the faux 19th century lamp beside it, the cheap lawn chairs stacked on the island of cement that was supposed to be the front porch and the gigantic flags of the United States of America and Israel billowing from two flagpoles. I felt a little embarrassed because I knew that Eunice's parents were much better off than mine. At the door, my mother appeared in her usual household outfit, white bra and panties.

She was about to throw her arms around my neck when she noticed Eunice, let out some Russian garble of amazement and retreated inside the house, leaving me with the visuals of her thick breasts and white little round of belly. My father, shirtless, soon took her place also gasped at Eunice, ran his hand against his naked muscular breasts, said, "Oh." Then hugged me. There was hair against my new dress shirt. The gray carpet of hair that my father wore with an odd touch of class as if he were a royal in some tropical country country. He kissed me on both cheeks and I did the same, feeling the instruction, the code of Russian father son relations. Father means I have to love him, have to listen to him, can't offend him, can't hurt him, can't bring him to task for past wrongs. He's an old man now, defenseless.

My mother reappeared in shorts and a wife beater. "Little son," she shouted, "look who's come to us, our favorite." She shook Eunice's hand, hand, and both of my parents swiftly evaluated her, affirmed that she was like her predecessor, not Jewish, but quietly approved to the fact that she was thin and attractive with a healthy black mane of hair. My mother unwrapped her own precious blonde locks from the green handkerchief that kept him safe from the American sun and smiled prettily at Eunice. She began talking in her brave post-retirement English about how glad she was to have a potential daughter-in-law, filling in the contours of her loneliness with rapid fire questions about my mysterious life in faraway New York. "Does Lenny keep clean house, does he vacuum? Once I come to college dormitorium, awful such smell. Dead ficus tree, old cheese on table socks hanging in windows."

Eunice smiled and spoke in my favor. "He's very good, Mrs. Abramov," she said. "He's like very clean." I looked at her with love. Somewhere beneath the bright suburban skies, I felt the presence of a 50 caliber browning gun swiveling toward an incoming Long Island railroad train, but here I was surrounded by the people who loved me. "I brought Tagamet from the discount pharmacy, I said to my father, taking five boxes out of the bag I brought. "Thank you, little one," my father said, taking hold of his beloved drug. "It's peptic ulcer," he said to Eunice, pointing at the depth of his tortured stomach. My mother had already grabbed hold of the back of my head and was madly stroking my hair, "So gray," she said, "so old, he gets almost 40. Leonard, what is happening to you too much stress? Also losing hair. Oh my God."

"You are named Eunice," my father said, "Do you know where it comes from, such name?" "My parents," Eunice [inaudible 00:37:27] began. "No, not parents, it's from the Greek, Eunikê, meaning victorious." He laughed. Happy to demonstrate that before he was forced to be a janitor in America, he had served as a quasi-intellectual and minor dandy on Moscow's Arbat Street. "So, I hope," he said, "that in life you'll be victorious also." "Who cares about Greek, Boris?" My mother said, "Look at how she's beautiful." The fact that my parents admired Eunice's looks and capacity for victory brightened me quite a bit all these years and I still craved approval, still long for the carrot and stick of their 19th century child-rearing. I instructed myself to lower the heat of my emotions to think without the family blood bursting at my temples, but I was 12 years old as soon as I passed the Mezuzah at the front door.

My father began to lead me to the living room couch for our usual heart-to-heart talk. My mother rushed over to the couch with a garbage bag, which she draped over the place where I was about to sit in my compromised Manhattan outerwear. She took Eunice to the kitchen chatting gaily to her potential daughter-in-law about how guys can be so dirty you know, how she had just built a new storage device for her many mops. On the couch, my father draped his arm around my shoulders and said, "So, tell me." I breathed in the same breath as he did, as if we were connected. I felt his age seep into mine as if he were the forward guard of my own mortality. I spoke in English with the tantalizing hints of Russian. I studied haphazardly at NYU, the foreign words like raisins shining out of a loaf. I spoke about work, about my assets, about the most recent fairly positive valuation of my 740 square foot Manhattan apartment, about all the monetary things that kept us fearful and connected.

He held up the new aparat pendent I wore around my neck, "How much?" He said, turning the thing over, colorful data and rankings pouring over his hairy fingers. When I explained the device was given to me at work for free, he made a happy snort and said in English, "Aha, learn new technology for free. It's good, it's good." The floor beneath my feet was clean, immigrant clean, clean enough so that you understood that some woman had done her best. My father had two old-fashioned television screens stapled to the walls above my mother's fanatically waxed mantel piece.

Oh, in this future, there's only two channels left of Fox Liberty Prime and Fox Liberty Ultra.

One TV was set to a fox liberty prime stream, which was showing the growing tent city of homeless people in Central Park now spreading from the backyard of the Metropolitan Museum over Hillandale all the way down to the Sheep's Meadow. On the other screen, Fox Liberty Ultra was viciously broadcasting the arrival of the Chinese central banker at Andrews Air Force base, our president and his pretty wife trying not to shiver in the bleak Maryland downpour.

I felt my father's breath against my cheek for 20 minutes as he talked about his complex political life. Then excused myself, unwound from his humid embrace and went to the upstairs bathroom as my mother shouted to me from the kitchen, "Lenny don't take shoes off an upstairs bathroom, papa has athlete's foot." In the contaminated bathroom, I admired the strange blob of plastic with wooden spokes that kept my mother's serious mop collection in ready to access mode. Although my parents never had a good word to say about the country now called Holy Petrol Russia, the hallways were hung with framed sepia toned postcards of red square and the Kremlin, the snow dusted equestrian statue of Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy, founder of Moscow and the gothic Stalin era skyscraper of prestigious Moscow State University, which neither of my parents had attended because to hear them tell it, Jews were not allowed in back then.

As for me, I have never been to Russia. I have not had the chance to learn to love it and hate it like my parents. I have my own dying empire to contend with, this one, and I do not wish for any other. My bedroom was nearly empty. All the traces of my habitation, the posters and little bits of crap for my travels were gone. I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house, that half floor that forces you to duck to feel small and naive again. I cannot begin to tell you how much the purchase of this house of each tiny bedroom had meant to me and my family. I still remember the signing at the real estate lawyer's office, the three of us mentally forgiving each other for a decade and a half worth of sins.

The youthful beatings administered by my father, my mother's anxieties and manias, my own teenage sullenness because the janitor and his wife had done something right at last and it would all be okay now. There was no turning back from this glorious fortune we had been granted in the middle of Long Island from the carefully clipped bushes by the mailbox, our bushes, Abramov of bushes, to the often-mentioned Californian possibility of an above ground swimming pool in the tiny backyard. Out in the hallway, I caught sight of a frame memento, an essay my father had written in English for the newsletter of the Long Island Scientific Laboratory where he worked and which I as an undergraduate, NYU English major had helped to proofread and refine.

The Joys of Playing Basketball by Boris Abramov. Sometimes life is difficult and one wishes to relieve oneself of the pressures and the worries of life. Some people see a shrink, others jump in a cold lake or travel around the world, but I find nothing more joyful than playing basketball. At the laboratory, we have many men and even women who like to play basketball. They come from all over the world, from Europe, Latin America, and everywhere else. I cannot say I am the best player. I am not so young anymore. My knees hurt and I'm also pretty short and this is a handicap. But I take the game very seriously and when a big problem comes up in my life and I feel like I do not want to live, I sometimes like to picture myself on the court trying to throw a ball from a great distance or maneuvering against an agile opponent. I try to play in a smart way.

As a result, I find that I'm often victorious even against a much taller or faster player from Africa or Brazil, let's say. But win or lose. What's important is the spirit of this beautiful game. So, if you have an hour on Tuesday or Thursday at lunchtime 12:30, please join me and your colleagues for a good healthy time in the physical education center. You'll feel better about yourself and the worries of life will, as they say, melt away. Boris Abramov is a custodian in the buildings and grounds division.

Down in the dining room with the shiny Romanian furniture, the Abramovs had imported from their Moscow apartment, the table was laid out in the hospitable Russian manner with everything from four different kinds of salami to a plate of chewy tongue to every little fish that had ever inhabited the Baltic Sea, not to mention the sacred little dash of black caviar. Eunice sat Queen Esther-like in her orthodox getup at the ceremonial end of the table upon a fluped up Passover pillow, frowning at the attention, unsure of how to deal with the strange currents of love and its opposite that's circulated in the fish smelling air. My father proposed a seasonal toast in English, "To the creator, who created America land of free and who gives us now defense Secretary Rubenstein who kills Arab. And to love, which is blooming in such time between my son and Eunikê, who, big wink to Eunice, will be victorious like Sparta over Athens. And the summer, which is considered the most conducive season to love. Although some may say spring."

While he went on in his booming voice, a shot glass shaking in his troubled hands, my mother bored out of her mind, leaned over to me and said, "By the way, your Eunice has very pretty teeth, maybe you will marry her." I could see Eunice's minds mind absorbing the basics of my father's speech. Arabs, bad, Jews, good, Chinese central banker, possibly okay, America always number one in his heart, while she gauged the intent on my mother's face as she spoke to me in Russian Eunice's mind moved quite quickly through feelings and ideas, but the fear in her face reflected a life rushing by faster than she could make sense of it. The toast finally complete, we dove into the food without reservation. All of us from countries historically strangled by starvation, none of us strangers to salt and brine. "Eunice," my mother said, "perhaps you can answer for me this question, okay? Who is Lenny by profession? I never can figure out. He went to NYU business school, so he is what, businessman?" "Mom," I said, "Please, not now. Not now." "I am talking to Eunice," my mother said, "You know, girls talk."

I'd never seen Eunice's face so serious, even as the tail end of a Baltic sardine disappeared between her glossy lips. "Lenny does very important work," she told my mother, "I think like medicine. He helps people live forever." My father's fist slammed the dining table. "Impossible," he cried, "it breaks every law of physics and biology for one. For two, it's immoral against God. I would not want such thing." "Work is work," my mother said, "if stupid rich American wants to live forever and Lenny makes money, why do you care?" She waved her hand at my father, "Stupid," she said. "Yes, but how Lenny knows about medicine?" My father lit up brandishing a four cap by a marinated mushroom, "He never studied in high school. What is his weighted average? 86.894."

My mother waved him off again and turned to Eunice, "So, you met Lenny in Italy" she said, "Lenny tells us you speak perfect Italian." Eunice blushed some more, "No," she said lowering her eyes and cupping her knees. I'm forgetting everything like the irregular verbs. "Lenny spends one year in Italy," my father said, "we come to visit him. He speaks nothing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." He moved his body to imitate my walking through the Roman streets while trying to talk to the natives. "You are liar, Boris," my mother said casually, "he brought us beautiful tomato in market. He brought down price, three euro." "But tomatoes so simple," my father said, "in Russian pomidor, in Italian pomodoro, even I know such thing. If he maybe negotiates for us, cucumbers, squash." "Shut up already, Boris," my mother said.

She readjusted her summer blouse and bored her eyes into mine. "Lenny," she said, "We see you appear on aparat stream, 101 people we need to feel sorry for. Why do you do it? Your colleague, he makes fun of you. He says you are fat and stupid and old. You don't eat good food and you do not have profession and your fuckability ranking is very low. Also, he says you've been demoted at the company you work. Papa and I are very sad about your fuckability." My father looked away in some shame while I curled and uncurled my toes beneath the table. I told them so many times not to look at any aparat streams or data about me. I was a private person with my own little world. Why couldn't they find a better use for their retirement years than this painful scrutiny of their only child? Why did they stalk me with their tomatoes and high school averages and who are you by profession logic?

And then I heard Eunice speak, her straightforward California English ringing against the smallness of our house, "I told him not to appear in it too," she said, "And he won't anymore. You won't, right, Lenny? You're so good and smart, why do you need to do it?" "Exactly," my mother said, "exactly, Eunice." I did not say anything. I leaned back and watched the two women in my life look across a glossy Romanian table groaning beneath a plastic cover and 20 gallons of mayonnaise and canned fish. They were eyeing each other with a placid understanding. Sometimes mothers and girlfriends compete against one another, but that has never been my experience. It is quite easy for two smart women, no matter what the gap in their age and background to come to a complete agreement about me. This child, they seemed to be saying to each other, this child still needs to be brought up. Thank you.

Thomas Mallon:

I guess I'll start with Gary. If you were carrying an aparat, aside from your hotness quotient, what live thoughts would it be streaming now?

Gary Shteyngart:

Self-conscious about eyebrows, self-conscious about eyebrows. That's been the leitmotif of my life, and I'm not even sure what leitmotif means. Leitmotif? I can't read.

Thomas Mallon:

How did you come up with this device and why was it so central to the book?

Gary Shteyngart:

I noticed as I was growing older that people were using this itelephone and this facebookering device, facebookering. So, I hired a young man to explain the intertube to me. And the things he told me blew my mind even more so than the acid I had already taken. Over the course of the next few years, I developed this book, Super Sad True Love Story, to see if it could penetrate the youth's market. So far, so good and thanks to you youth that you're doing it. Thank you. I love you. Go youths.

Thomas Mallon:

I'm wondering if I could get each of you to say something about the other's work. Are you as disparate a pair of writers as some people might think, as I hinted in my introduction?

Amy Hempel:

Me, not entirely. I'm proud to say that though I can compete with having been born in Russia. All of my grandparents were born in Russia, so it's sort of a theme night here. So, we have that in common.

Gary Shteyngart:

We have that in common. Maybe we're cousins in [inaudible 00:52:11].

Amy Hempel:

Maybe we are. Obviously, we love to laugh. Humor is a, we put premium on it. And my riotously funny story that I read tonight. But ordinarily, it's something of the highest importance to me and what I try and do. It's certainly one of the things I love in Gary's work.

Thomas Mallon:

Do you think at that remove, your Russianess is still discernible somewhere within you, within your work?

Amy Hempel:

I hope so. I may be the only one thinking that, but it has to do with [inaudible 00:52:51] of things that you respond to.

Thomas Mallon:

Does she strike you as Russian?

Gary Shteyngart:

Well, a story with that kind of pessimism could only come from a Russian progeny, so I think so. I find myself laughing out loud whenever I read Amy's work, so there's no question she's a funny writer. But what I admire is, I was talking about she's good to animals and humans, I think Chekhov is somewhere in the background there in terms of Russian connection because there's this empathy, this unbelievable way that Amy condenses entire worlds into very brief containers that contain both the joy of exploring something you've never thought about, but at the same time this very deep humanity. I don't write short stories because I don't know how I would do that. I need to frolic across a large landscape, so I always admire somebody who can pull off a short story, and as concise a short story is Amy and is brilliantly so.

Amy Hempel:

Thank you. Gary has this long view and large scale that works so well. And still within that it's some of the little perfectly observed details that just send me. And one of my favorites in Super Sad True Love Story is in this not so far in the future way we're living, somebody waits to be picked up in their Hyundai town car.

Gary Shteyngart:

If the Korean auto industry can save the town car, more power to them.

Amy Hempel:

Yeah.

Gary Shteyngart:

The Hyundai.

Thomas Mallon:

To stay with humor for a little bit, it's the obvious life's blood in Gary's work, but it is also very much present in your work, even at very small moments in the story you read tonight.

Amy Hempel:

That's what gets you through something horrific.

Thomas Mallon:

Your narrators tend not to know how funny they are or pretend not to know how funny they are. There is this deadpan delivery. Whereas yours quite consciously love to repeat jokes or quote from something funny, quote a malapropism, quote some T-shirt that was seen. It usually has to do with the material. I remember one of your narrators saying my favorite joke, "Do you know what Pollyanna's epitaph is? I'm glad I'm dead." Eventually, the reader perceives the connection to the theme that it's a kind of underlining... But it also has a life in and of itself. I was wondering if you could... Aside from the role it plays in life, getting one through, the role that plays in your work, sometimes in otherwise quite dark material.

Amy Hempel:

It's just what do you prize? What drives the thing you do? But for me, it always does come back to what gets you through not even an awful situation, but just what do you think back on at the end of a day, a day here. One can dwell on all the smoldering gaffes you've made, but after a while you want to leave that aside. It's just what matters to me in a large way.

Thomas Mallon:

Does it even get you through a story in some ways?

Amy Hempel:

Yeah.

Thomas Mallon:

Does it propel the story in a-

Amy Hempel:

Sometimes.

Thomas Mallon:

... way that it wouldn't go otherwise?

Amy Hempel:

Yes, but with a caution, clever isn't enough in a piece of fiction. It's fun, but it's not enough. It's got to serve something else as we well know.

Gary Shteyngart:

Clever is not enough. I so agree. That's one of my problems with contemporary fiction, often it's clever, but I guess it's always been clever. A person wants to show off a little, but you want to go a little step beyond that. Is there a question? What's wrong with me?

Thomas Mallon:

You are categorized as a comic writer by many, specifically a satirist, but a comic writer essentially, whereas that would be a kind of secondary incidental label to Amy. But something about the way we make literary hierarchies, consciously and unconsciously, we tend to elevate, I think the dark and the serious over the humorous, certainly since the grim 20th century. Do you think the fact that you are so funny sometimes actually keeps people from seeing how profound much of what you say is?

Gary Shteyngart:

Yeah, I think so. Gary is serious man. They say clown. Growing up as a Soviet Ashkenazi pessimist, SAP in the industry, huge chunks of my family obviously wiped out by Hitler, Stalin. Probably pull pot at this point, I don't know if they ever wandered south, but they're all funny. My parents are funny people and they can talk about the most horrific... Russian history is not a good history. There's a restaurant in St. Petersburg called 1913, and I always ask the owner, "Why 1913?" And she said, "It's the only good year in Russian history." Despite all that, they have a smile on their face even as they're stabbing each other.

Thomas Mallon:

As a literary label, does it ever bother you that it seems somehow to be a second-tier category?

Gary Shteyngart:

Yeah, no, I'm not allowed to win certain awards, for example. Often when serious writers appear on a stage, I have to carry the water bottles for them. But I do it in this kind of rollicking fashion, oh, it's okay. I am okay. Good.

Amy Hempel:

Which is strange when you think of it because it's really hard to write funny.

Gary Shteyngart:

Shit, yeah [inaudible 00:59:16].

Amy Hempel:

So, you should get more awards.

Gary Shteyngart:

Thank you, or one. One would be nice. Do you guys have an award?

Thomas Mallon:

Is this a distinction we make now, and made for some time, that was not made in the past? For instance, if you read Shakespeare, does anybody seriously argue that you learn more from the tragedies, at least about how to live, than you learn from the comedies?

Amy Hempel:

Like I read that, Shakespeare. No, I was quoting it. It's a private joke. I never heard that [inaudible 00:59:51].

Thomas Mallon:

If I push it way back that far to past literature, this sense that this divide didn't quite exist as much, but the great comic novels say, Dickens-

Gary Shteyngart:

You want to know Fred in Leviticus is hilarious and yet millions of people take it very seriously for some reason. It's all in the eyes of the beholder or the shellfish eater or whatever.

Thomas Mallon:

While we're talking about categories and labels, or while I'm talking about them anyway, the term minimalist still attaches to Amy's work. And I'm wondering, just to your work, I'm not sure, a futuristic species of what now often gets called hysterical realism, the old James Wood term. Are these terms of any use to you? Are they of any use to readers?

Amy Hempel:

I think sometimes they're of use to reviewers because it's a short handing. It's a shortcut, maybe. I don't know what it means. These terms mean always to other people. I've said before, for minimalism, I much prefer a term that Ray Carver came up with, which was that we were precisionists. And I thought that was a glorious way to look at a certain way of thinking about it. What about [inaudible 01:01:27]?

Gary Shteyngart:

My only criteria is I look for signs of life inside a story or inside a novel. I see it in your stories no matter how short they are. It's screaming with life, whether it's about human beings, animals, it's there. And I see it in more Maximalist works as well. Joshua Farris comes to mind, or Solomon Rushdie or Mary Gaitskill somewhere in between there. I look for that cognizant... That sign that someone is thinking from the point of view of a real human being. And then I don't care if it's funny, it's sad. I don't care what it is, it's got me and I'm going to follow it wherever it goes.

Thomas Mallon:

Someone once said, about Amy's stories, said this to you, I think about your stories, you leave out all the right things. And-

Amy Hempel:

[inaudible 01:02:17].

Thomas Mallon:

... anybody who's read your work knows exactly what it means, when you hear that remark, what things do you leave out?

Gary Shteyngart:

Nothing.

Thomas Mallon:

Is there anything? Is there any subject you would avoid in fiction? Is there any kind of narrative scene you would avoid?

Gary Shteyngart:

No, it's all in there and what doesn't get used ends up on my Facebook page as a photo, as a dachshund photo or something like that. Well, it's a good question. I want to write a novel from the point of view of a non-Soviet Jew. In this book, there's a Korean American woman, Eunice, and that took a lot of work on my part to get that character going. But immigrants I know very well because surrounded by immigrants in New York, we don't have any native-born people, but I'd love to write something from a native-born person's perspective and it's very hard for me to do. And that's something I would like to try and that may require a different tenor than the sort of Maximalist Russian tenor. I don't know how to do that, but I'd like to try.

Philip Roth, writer I greatly admired, has written so much about Jewish life in Newark and he wrote just one book, Letting Go, his second book, which was from the point of view of a non-Jewish woman in the Midwest. And that's not a novel that he's very well known for. Being pigeonholed as a minimalist, and also as a Russian or as an immigrant, it's very hard to break out of these kinds of classifications, but I wouldn't mind trying.

Amy Hempel:

You probably don't think about it when you're writing.

Gary Shteyngart:

That's the thing. You don't consciously say, I'm going to do this. It just comes out of you like bad borscht.

Amy Hempel:

It does.

Thomas Mallon:

Do you ever have moments when you're drawn toward the form of the novel?

Amy Hempel:

No, I like to say I'm drawn to shorter and more concise forms. I mentioned liking the prose poem and poetry when I need to get revved up to write. Although I'm writing fiction, I more often than not read poetry. If I could, I'd be going in that direction and not the novel. It's just not something that I feel is in me.

Thomas Mallon:

You almost be more you than you are now, more in your own [inaudible 01:04:35]. Any shorter forms, different forms?

Gary Shteyngart:

Nonfiction I think is my next stab at work will be nonfiction because going back to what I was saying about writing from a different perspective, I feel like I need to get all this immigrant anatomy by writing a lot of nonfiction about my childhood. I think once that's over, maybe something new will emerge. But I don't like standing still. I feel like in my three books, obviously there's a similar character in the sense that there's a Russian American aspect, but I don't like standing still. This isn't exactly science fiction, but I've always loved science fiction, I wanted to play within that genre. Something new is always waiting for one. You just have to keep exploring and not doing the same thing.

Thomas Mallon:

Do you have a nonfiction subject?

Gary Shteyngart:

Me and my granny. I had a grandma who asked me to write a novel when I was four or five years old in Russia, and she paid me in little slices of cheese for each page I wrote, Soviet cheese. I loved Lenin. There was a huge statue of Lennon. I would always hug his pedestal. So, I wrote a novel about Lenin and this magical goose invading Finland and trying to start a socialist revolution. And grandma loved me for it and that's how I became a writer.

Thomas Mallon:

So, memoir.

Gary Shteyngart:

Memoir, whatever sells.

Thomas Mallon:

I was thinking about this and I think you actually do have a few things in common when it comes to form. As peculiar as that may sound, one of them is a tendency toward first person narrators. Another is the use, in very different ways, of a collage narration. Gary puts in everything from texts to phone messages. We even a snippet of Boris's article there to carry the narrative. Amy is really a master at using white space, leaving those things out, leaving things unsaid between brief portions of text, not with a lot of connective tissue in the narrative. I was wondering if you could tell us if you think narrative is going to grow ever more segmented like that, that these collage forms, which were once a kind of variation on regular narrative it's staple now, or do you see things going some other way?

Amy Hempel:

I think there's still going to be everything, but as a teacher of writing, I teach fiction workshops [inaudible 01:07:09], I see more and more of that and I tend to like it, more of the segmentation. It seems very true to experience, certainly the experience of a conference. And I want to take this moment to apologize to all the people who said hello to me and I said hello and then said, oh, and hi. It's fragmenting in a kind of extreme way here, but just in life it's that. I don't experience life in this arc. I don't know, I'm not making a lot of sense, but it just seems true-

Thomas Mallon:

You experience it in moments and you want to render it in moments.

Amy Hempel:

It seems accurate to me and appealing for that reason.

Gary Shteyngart:

I think a more fragmented kind of novel or short story better captures the time in which we live. Our attention spans are stretched to the breaking point by so many different devices. When I started writing this book, at first I wanted to write in the usual way I write, write, but getting the itelephone changed things quite a lot because from one dropped call, AT&T thank you, to another, it was this endless journey of constantly worrying about this damn thing. When I write, that kind of staccato feeling began to appear in my own writing. Things start and then they stop. Things start, and then they stop and there's no... And literature to me is an attempt to slow things down for myself and enter the... What it does is you get to live inside the mind of another human being. No other art form really allows you to do that. And what it requires is this empathy that, who knows, maybe we'll disappear at some point because our sense seems to be that everyone should quickly update our facebooker and our twitterer and all this stuff because everyone should self-express all the time.

But what's needed is a time not to do that and to power down and to actually access another person's mind. And that could be the most beautiful experience. And to do that, I go to upstate New York where the itelephone doesn't work. There's simply no connectivity.

Thomas Mallon:

It doesn't work in midtown.

Gary Shteyngart:

It doesn't work in midtown, right, but I live downtown. And I go beneath the tree and I sit there.

Thomas Mallon:

This does bring me to a question I wanted to put to both of you. Aside from the paper book, one other thing that Super Sad True Love Story sees as coming to an end really is privacy. The [inaudible 01:09:38] really about all that. If that really happens, if we really do go in that direction, as it seems to be happening in all the obvious Facebook-ish kinds of ways, can fiction survive? Because isn't so much a fiction about this disjunction on the one hand between what characters think and feel and on the other what they have to say and do when they're with other people? If that disappears, the private life of the mind, aside from the changes that it would make in life, does it make fiction itself impossible?

Gary Shteyngart:

I think the need for storytelling will always exist. But beyond that, will there be the habit of mind developed to say, I'm just going to go inside the private recesses of another person's soul. And the other thing is, will I go within the private recesses of my own soul? Will I probe that far when everything around me is blinking and screaming for my attention and everything is digital and nothing is real? I don't know. The book obviously has a very pessimistic answer, but jeez, look at all these people, still reading and writing are still strong in our culture. I don't know what the answer is, but it's interesting. When I was writing this book, 1984 was a model. In 1984, big brother watches everything you do. He takes away your privacy, the government takes away your privacy. But what this new idea is that we all collectively give up our privacy. We're doing it to ourselves. I'm doing it to myself with every picture on the facebooker of me and the dog.

Amy Hempel:

My dog has an eye bone.

Thomas Mallon:

Your dog has an eye bone? It that...

Amy Hempel:

They make it. They really make it. No, they didn't make it [inaudible 01:11:25].

Thomas Mallon:

Do these things preoccupy you in any of that way? No?

Amy Hempel:

No, but I'm not good at technology. I don't know how to get on Facebook. It's probably just as well. I'm bad with equipment and st