Monday Evening

Matt’s lecture

Matt started by telling us stories of authors who did detail like religion. Schliemann hunted for the city of Troy, based on the descriptions in Homer. This, Matt said, is similar to Bill Gates hunting Atlantis or Zuckerberg’s grandson looking for platform 9 ¾. James Joyce decided to do the same thing with Dublin, but he was exiled from Dublin, and he didn’t have Google, so he wrote letters home asking his brothers to count this many cobblestones or this many corners or figure out whether you can smell the sea here. Some people decided to fact check a particular chapter, in which lots of people cross paths, one guy drops something in the river, and someone else picks it up out downstream later. Each one was assigned a character and given a stopwatch, and set out over the various paths of the city. They crossed paths exactly when and where the book said they would.

(Matt gave us a quote sheet.) “Ich habe es ja gesagt,” ~Heinrich Schliemann, maybe. It roughly translates to, “I told you so” and literally translates to something like “It is as I said.”

If writers care about getting the little stuff right, said Matt, they’ll care about getting the big stuff right, too.

“Precision is born from infatuation” ~?

“I discovered in myself an inexplicable and nearly endless capacity for watching figure skating.” ~ Matt

Then he talked about defamiliarization, which is both making the familiar seem unfamiliar, and making the unfamiliar sound familiar. He used two examples of the former, which are of getting drunk and watching figure skating respectively:

“I reached up and turned on a floor lamp beside the chair, and the room jumped on me.” ~Alice Munro, “An Ounce of Cure”

“A man in a very tight suit (so tight that it made his private parts stand out on display) and a woman in a skirt that did not even cover her bottom gripped each other as an invisible force hurtled them across an oval arena. The people in the audience clapped their hands together and then stopped. By some magic they all stopped at exactly the same time. The couple broke apart. They fled from each other and no sooner had they fled than they sought each other out. Every move they made was urgent, intense, a declaration. The woman raised one leg and rested her boot (Nazneen saw the thin blade for the first time) on the other thigh, making a triangular flag of her legs, and spun around until she would surely fall but didn’t. She did not slow down. She stopped dead and flung her arms above her head with a look so triumphant that you knew she had conquered everything: her body, the laws of nature, and the heart of the tight-suited man who slid over on his knees, vowing to lay down his life for her.” ~Monica Ali, Brick Lane

He also provided an example of the latter:

“Futon came out of 6 Weehawken scanning the street, eating Cheetos and holding a big jar of Gummi Bears, bobbing his head in time to whatever was coming in over his aqua-blue headphones.” ~Richard Price, Clockers

The trick is that Futon is a drug dealer, and the Gummi Bears have a false bottom hiding cocaine vials. But we feel like we know Futon with his Cheetos and his music, especially when he explains that he has the Cheetos because he doesn’t like Gummi Bears. Also, the secret bonds us to the characters.

“They’re both called defamiliarization, which is weird.” ~Matt

Matt defamiliarizes his police stories by filling them with office politics, which most of us get even if we don’t get police officers.

He tells us to stare at a thing until it surprises you. For example, you can put cotton balls up a pay phone so the quarters get stuck, and then you come back and get all the quarters.

“I’ve walked past pay phones my entire life, and I had no idea there was this secret world inside of pay phones that could be manipulated in this way.” ~Matt

The guy next to me tells a story. He’s an emergency physician, and his son is watching ER while he’s about ready to head off to work. George Clooney is about to do a trachea tube, and the guy happens to look over and see this, and says, “That tube’s too small.” Right then, George Clooney turns around and says, “This tube’s too small.” His son turns around and says, “Dad, how did you know that?”

I’ve heard of Joyce’s adventure before, it’s in Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. But I’d never made the connection before now to the way I researched Haverford’s class schedule. I’m not going to put in enough place markers to lead a reader around Bryn Mawr, but the fact that a student could read it and say, yeah, that class is actually at that time, and yes, that rumor is real, and so on, makes me happy. Most people can read the story and not have any idea whether I’m making all of this up, but students will know. So, does that mean I won’t compromise on the big stuff? I hope not. As for defamiliarization, I don’t think I have to do much making the familiar unfamiliar—this entire book is full of stuff unfamiliar to us, and I’m kind of doing that anyway by linking the trans and Spanish concepts. But making the unfamiliar familiar—that tells me I need to make all my trans characters absolutely normal, relatable, not difficult to understand at all. 

Liz and Jerry’s readings

Liz is a poet, which means I picked up little from her reading. There was one poem that had to do with a quote: “We’re mortal creatures so we’re already dead” ~Marcus Aurelius

There was a poem called “Ruin” about the Virginia earthquake of a little while ago. Liz was in the upstairs of her house, which swayed, and she didn’t know what was going on. Her now-ex-husband slept through it on the couch. It used corpse imagery, which was interesting.

“reasonable hope of schooling the soul” ~Liz

“What if the sun gets caught, can’t make it through today, can’t make day?” ~Liz

She had a couple mentioning her heart valve—literally--and a series on Mt. Etna, which she approaches from lots of different angles. Volcanos, according to Liz, have voices. She describes the volcano tearing down buildings and the villagers rebuilding them in the same place. There were three about the ups and downs of a relationship.

“Madness looked all right so I went with it” ~Liz

“That we all hoped in his body was a soul.” ~Liz

Then Jerry was introduced. The introducer called his book Let It Go.

Jerry: “The Let Go.”

Announcer: Right. Let It Go is a frozen song. I feel like John Travolta.

The announcer went on to call Jerry the Conference Overlord or perhaps Conference Firefighter, and tell him a rap Matt wrote for him. Then we got to Jerry’s reading.

It’s about four people attempting to boat across a river because there’s a price on Pa’s head. They go looking for Pa in the woods because he’s taking too long about peeing, and find that he’s in his blue uniform, only one of the sleeves is sewn up so he looks like an amputee. The guy who controls the boat ominously suggests he switch uniforms, but rows them across, and decides to take the boat up for repairs when Pa slips him extra cash.

I liked Liz’s way of covering a subject from multiple angles, something I do a lot in my own poetry. I also liked the way she wasn’t afraid to write really short poems. I can’t concentrate on poetry, for all I try—all it takes is to lose one line and the whole meaning can be lost. So I don’t much enjoy listening to it as a general thing. Jerry’s story was interesting. I wanted to know who was after Pa and why.