Due to our globe trotting, we missed Lawrence Weschler's recent L.A. appearances. Fortunately, our Anonymous Roving Correspondent (ARC) has come to our rescue once again and offered this account.
On Easter Sunday Lawrence Weschler spoke at The Mountain, a bar in Chinatown, in connection with the release of a new issue of the New Review of Literature, a magazine published by the creative writing program at the Otis College of Art & Design.The Mountain is located on Gin Ling Way, which is a pedestrian street in Chinatown. A Chinese-American girl with a mohawk pointed it out to me. The bar is big with enormous ceilings and I was overwhelmed by its redness. There are all these colored tiles down which red lacquer has been dripped and there are literally thousands of them so it feels like a house of blood, a giant red membrane with plasma pulsing through the walls. I can't really explain the lights, but they were beautifully complex, a series of triangles barnacling one on top of the other like giant glowing everlasting gobstoppers. There was some kind of snafu and the event started an hour later than advertised, but it didn't matter. There was no TV, no music, just people talking.
Lawrence Weschler is a former New Yorker staff writer, author of numerous books, and the director of NYU's Institute for the Humanities, where he occasionally teaches a class on the fiction of nonfiction. Although he was exceptionally well-prepared, the tenor of his lecture felt spontaneous, vital, keen.
"Every narrative voice," he read, "but especially every nonfiction voice -- is itself a fiction, and the world of writing and reading is divided between those who know this and those who either don't or else deny it, which is roughly contiguous with the division between writing that is worth reading and writing that's not."
He read poems, he invoked Borges (you have the reality of the world and reality of language, and Borges believes the latter is the model for the former and not the other way around), Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Barry Unsworth's novel of the slave trade, Ian Frazier's Canal Street, Vermeer ("the intoxicating majesty of the peripheral,") etc. He read an account of a man watching a ship being built as a metaphor for writing: how it passes "from notion to form" and looks its ugliest when it's close to being finished, and that only after the last elements are introduced to "guard her purpose" does the ship start to look like something that can be considered beautiful. He talked about how he has a lot of building blocks at home and plays with them all the time, particularly when he's not writing. On why he likes McSweeney's: "because it is aimed precisely at the twentysomethings who were said not to have an attention span." And on and on and on. My notebook filled up with the names of writers and titles of books and works of art that I now needed to investigate. Weschler was this egoless fountain of knowledge, and even though he used lots of personal anecdotes, he seemed barely there at all.
I asked Weschler to sign my copy of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder and he asked me if I wanted the book personalized. I said yes, wish me luck, and this is what he wrote: "Luck? Who needs luck! Marvel is all."
Watch for more goodies from ARC during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Deep Throat's got nothing on him ...
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