(no subject)
Today I started to really throw myself into the study on diaries I'm doing for Dean's Book. I sat in Rao's Coffee for a few hours reading & taking notes & drinking Ceylon & listening to the Iron & Wine albums they were playing.
The Jonathan Safran Foer talk last week was really good. He was gracious, funny, and (I thought) very unpretentious. He was eager to spend as much time as possible answering questions instead of doing a reading or talking at great length about His Work. The non-question-answering portion involved him telling a very funny story about buttons, then giving some introductory remarks to the questions. The remarks were, basically, disclaimers about being a writer, & I loved everything he said. He read & elaborated on five quotes which he felt were relevant, and it was, ultimately, a little discussion of the nature of writing & art-making. The first quote was "a bird is not an ornithologist," the point being that just because you do something doesn't mean you know how or why you do it. I thought it was a very clever way to allow himself to (honestly) answer "I don't know" to a question about why he did something or what he meant by so-and-so. He went on to quote Vonnegut: "a reader is to a book as an orchestra is to sheet music." And so on.
Afterwards we waited in the (relatively short) line and I got both my books signed.
Yesterday we went apple picking. I really, really like the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Happy birthday. <3
The Jonathan Safran Foer talk last week was really good. He was gracious, funny, and (I thought) very unpretentious. He was eager to spend as much time as possible answering questions instead of doing a reading or talking at great length about His Work. The non-question-answering portion involved him telling a very funny story about buttons, then giving some introductory remarks to the questions. The remarks were, basically, disclaimers about being a writer, & I loved everything he said. He read & elaborated on five quotes which he felt were relevant, and it was, ultimately, a little discussion of the nature of writing & art-making. The first quote was "a bird is not an ornithologist," the point being that just because you do something doesn't mean you know how or why you do it. I thought it was a very clever way to allow himself to (honestly) answer "I don't know" to a question about why he did something or what he meant by so-and-so. He went on to quote Vonnegut: "a reader is to a book as an orchestra is to sheet music." And so on.
Afterwards we waited in the (relatively short) line and I got both my books signed.
Yesterday we went apple picking. I really, really like the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Happy birthday. <3