 Hello. I see a lot of faces from before and now, and converging, I'm having a Norbachov moment. You know, writing memoirs is all about dealing with memory, and memory is a tricky thing. And I'm looking at you, you know, Jini, and these guys. These are my boys I'm talking about. They came here with the guitar and they just, we spent many, many hours out there having great fun. And Dr. Fine, very fine, fine, fine. And all of you, and there are people who are actually visiting for future potential mentee. You know, to talk about Norbachov, I'm getting really nervous because I really respect him so much. He's tremendous. I mean, tremendous is not even a word. He's the coolest dude by far. And I have read him, read him, and I hate him, and I left him, and I go again and then I go back to his writing. His writing has a power of his novels and his memoir has such a hypnotic power on me. A grip beyond I could certainly describe. This is Guy Norbachov and guys like Jack London and James Michener. All those guys that truly feed me with all those nutritional necessities that urge me to continue to write. And you know that the reason why these guys were so good was because they love words. They really, really do, and especially this cool dude, you know. And a very perverse guy, and yet brilliant, or at the same time. I just love how he's more of a philosopher than a writer. In one of the novels he said that life is nothing but sorrow. And history of humanity is the history of pain. What? And sorrow he said in the end is the only thing that we possess. Really? Not the real estate, not Donald Trump's and all that stuff, you know. So it's stuff like that that really hits you hard. And we only have an hour or so to discuss things. And our focus today is we're going to talk about memoir writing but using this book particularly. Speak memory as an example, as a very, very fine example. I came to this memoir very, very late in my wanting to become a writer journey. If I hadn't known this book and read this book first, I don't think I would be able to write anything. Because it would just stop you right there. Like Buddy, you can't go anywhere from here. But the great thing about Nabokov is there are people who you read. There are two types of great masters. There's a type at home you read, Saul Barrow, you know. You read him and you say, oh my God, I don't want to get up anymore. I can write like him. But Nabokov is the guy who you read and you said this guy is a maestro and you want to get up and write. Saul Barrow stopped you right there. I read Saul Barrow's book and I said this guy is too freaking brilliant. I can't deal with him anymore. And there's no point in me writing at all because he's just so brilliant, extremely brilliant. But Nabokov somehow, his brilliance inspires you so much that you want to write and you write a lot better, have a lot better because he helps you to see a lot more clearer than other guys. So look for the authors who can inspire you more. Jack Lantern certainly does inspire me to write better, but not William Styrum, especially his Sophie's Choice, which is one of the masterpieces, one of the best finest American novels. And in terms of the style, I just see these three guys as a huge stylist. There's Nabokov, there's London and nobody talks about London anymore. There's only this Chinese guy who's talking about London. Because I share something very similar with him. He is a guy who can work in the back of an Oakland hotel, washing laundries for 18 hours. And then he left the job and then he'd go on to write for four hours. That's sort of like me. As a kid I was a laborer on the farm, so it resonates with me. He's a laborer, he's not a scholar intellectual, but he just is all passion and from which beauty oozes out. And then there was Styrum. You have to read these guys to understand how these guys use words and how beautifully their sentences are parallel if they can do with two. They will do with two because two is always better than one. So Speak Memory is a, to me, there are a lot of Russian memoirs. And right after that there are a lot of Chinese memoirs. But Speak Memory is the most exquisite, one of the most exquisite literary memoirs of all time. And a lot of critics use this book to compare when they review memoirs. And that's not very fair because you are now, this is Michael Jordan. And I'm like dribbling here in an elementary school basketball court. So a lot of very snobby critics would say, read Speak Memory. But there's only one guy who can only write one book about that and it's not fair to do that. But we can learn a lot from it. I think the most interesting thing you can learn is sometimes all my memoirs, two of them, and a lot of the memoirs that have been published nowadays is sort of a quest story. Straight, you know, somebody gets taken down and he or she stands up overcoming all the obstacles to get to an end. That's a straightforward quest story. And that's like 99% I would say. You know, somebody get divorced and then eventually, you know, find a mate online and they have a fabulous life somewhere he drink and pray, you know. And man and woman and, you know, it's beautiful. But Norbachov doesn't write this way. And so I'm going to show you another way. If you don't have those gigantic, you know, heroic quest kind of story, don't worry. You still have stuff to write. And even if you have that quest story, right, it got taken down and now you have to stand up. And eventually you succeed and went all the way to the summit of your imagination, to the extremity of your desire, I could go on. But you can still feel the pocket of your memoir. I mean, these big plus things are just skeletal things. But how do you feel the other things? There's bones, there's muscles. How do you feel other parts to make this a whole human being, a whole book, richness. And it's all about richness. Everybody can, you can meet somebody in a bar and they can tell you many stories about survival. You know, I had this, I lost my job and eventually, you know, I went to Florida and bought up all the, you know, real estates at the right time. And now I'm a zillionaire and that sort of thing. But not all those stories will translate into a good book. And here, Norbachov in this book used very little. It seems like a lot, but it is, it's all broken pieces. There's no kind of a thematic linkage to form a quest story. I don't think you can make a movie out of this book at all because it's all observation on a very, such a detailed observation of things. And he actually used a method that is called symbolism. Symbolism is a symbolistic movement. Symbolist movement was something that was started in 1860s and 1880s in France. These guys are a bunch of poets. It is a sort of anti-movement against realism and naturalism. Realism, naturalism, to put it simply, is to depict the things as it is and to have it nothing. A cup is a cup. It's a cup. It doesn't mean that, you know, anything else beyond this. And then calm came the symbolism people. And they began to pay really attention to spirituality. And we talk about the word spirituality a lot, like spiritual and all that. But what does it mean? What does it mean anyway? Literally speaking, it means the mental aspects of a thing or of an event, vis-à-vis the material aspects of it. That's what it is. And in a day every day vernacular, what I say, when I say he's very spiritual or she is very spiritual person, I actually don't mean that so-and-so is very religious or so-and-so practices Zen and Tai Chi and it's just organic roots and stuff that doesn't taste very good. And I actually mean that that person is super charged with acute awareness of his connection with all elements around him or her. And that person has a super acute sense of empathy. Whatever you feel, I feel for you. Bill Clinton? I feel your pain. He's been spiritual when he does that. I feel your pain. So that to me is spirituality. And so this symbolism, simplest movement believe in spirituality, imagination and dreams. So they get into the voodoo kind of area where literature use, the realist will not go into. And the American practitioner of that would be Edgar Allen Hall. So he was, and definitely in music is Debussy. You know, you listen to his music. It's all hugely imaginative. And he gives you the whole world, you know, in a few notes and Wagner, definitely. But so, and this stuff is perfect for Norbach of the years because he doesn't have a really complete childhood. I mean, he came from a very wealthy family. I couldn't even figure out where they got the money to live like that. His government is in and out. There's a German government is and there is a English government is and French government is. And I think his grandfather was a minister of justice. And then his father was some sort of a parliament member. And then I could be wrong. But his father was actually, at one point was against the Tsar regime. And he was put in jail and all that. So he, Norbach's life was all, his family's life was all very closely involved in the whirlwind. That was the red October 1912, 1911 Russian Revolution. And that's where the his tragedy began. Hello, Chris Belding everybody. Another guitar man. So, and then, so he also spent from his writing. You sense he spent a lot of his childhood time outside the country. They went to France. They went to the beach, you know, southern France town, seaside village of cities and also that sort of thing. So his his childhood isn't in any way representative of a Russian child like Gorgys would be in a very chaotic era of Russia. He represents only, that's why in a quote he said that my family, I think his loss of his childhood was even more dramatic because his family was the kind that was extinct, never going to be again. And so this method of metaphors and symbols and dreams and imagination and spirituality works really well for him. And he, there are two ways of, I mean, modern theories on our attitudes towards memory is two-fold. One school of thought is Hegelian. We say that it's a voluntary active memory seeking. That's one school of thought. The memory is something that you can go and retrieve and actively put them into a narrative of meaning. Think, think hard, try to recall what happened and then write it down. And another theory is Prussian. Prussian is a Proust, the French maestro who spent, I think, like 40 pages writing about getting up, getting out of bed, you know. So Proust, he believes in something else. He's a sort of pleasure associative kind of a method. His attitudes towards memory is passive. The memory that you leave yourself open in a form of a reverie, you just sort of out, you know. And memory will come rushing to you and you let yourself embrace that. And Novakov uses both. I discovered that sometimes, so that is an active one, and then now sometimes I discover that by means of intense concentration, reverie, the neutral smudge might be forced to come into beautiful focus so that the sudden view could be identified and another servant named. So he uses both to combine, to retrieve the memory, to do that. And the thing about symbolism is it's basically through the method of metaphor which endows images and natural objects with meaning. And that is very different from allegory which represents, say, all this book represents knowledge, that's allegory. But symbolism believes that you use images and objects to invoke a state of mind. That's all Novakov is doing. And you see, you know, the unifying symbol is butterfly. The guy is, you know, so into a butterfly that is sitting, you know. Keep talking about butterfly, butterfly. But he, in that regard, he uses a butterfly. Butterfly is beautiful. To me, it represents beauty, it represents flight. But more importantly, you know, flight has all sorts of connotations, right, escape and fear for it. All that, and all freedom, you know, whatever you can give the meaning to. And it's extremely beautiful. Butterfly is one of the most magical creatures you ever see. And he was so famous, he actually called a field that was named after him. It's really crazy. And he was a butterfly kind of framer or cataloger at Harbour's at some point before he became famous or writing seriously. But he was always writing seriously. Before he had a real job teaching English, he was actually cataloging in a dusty corner of Harbour's natural museum. And he, so, but he used a butterfly as a, and also, but more importantly, as the metamorphosis of butterflies is what exemplifies his life perfectly. And to some, to a great extent, he equates what butterfly stands for with the creative process. It comes from hugely ugly, you know, crecelers, you know, and then the cocoon. And then in due course, caterpillar becomes beautiful butterfly from ugly duckling to princess. And that is our creative process as well. We were very hot, sweaty, you know, you don't want to see me writing because I'm all sweating. And in California backyard, I have no shirt on because it's so hot. And so that creative process, to me, it's always grungy and sweaty and oily and that sort of thing. And yet, in the end, when I see my words printed on a beautiful, you know, well-typed set within a two beautiful hot cover, as I can't believe, you know, that sweaty stuff gets here. That people actually pay $25.99 to buy it. Just the sweaty men wearing shirtless. And so, this idea of, this movement fits him. I mean, this movement came to be, symbolism, came to be before Novakov was able to walk. He wasn't even born. So, but it fits him really well for another purpose. That is, he's a real artist of words. And this thing believes in all thought, all sake. That's where it came from. Which is trying to make this writing as exquisite as it can painfully be. I do not care whether you like it or not. I'm just going to make it real pretty. It's good. And to me, it beautifies me when I write. I want to write beautifully. And we can write beautifully. In my writing, I try to be, and my inclination is always try to write beautiful rather than write more realistically. That's just my choice. Other faculty here would say, let's smack Da Cheng around. He's totally wrong. But that's just me. I represent, I like pro-style. And I love words, even though English is my second language. But I love this language. I love every syllable of it. I love the vastness of this language. Because it has taken all its nutrients from all so many other languages. And it's open to be able to do though. In Chinese language, we wouldn't do that. We wouldn't include words like assassin and pizza into our vocabulary. Because it's not Chinese enough. But English language encompasses, embraces everything into its bosom. And therefore in reaching it, language is on language tremendously. So you could try this. Try to be exquisite as possible. And after all, I rule number one of aesthetic is the word beauty. Aesthetic is the study of beauty. And art is about beauty. I was talking to my friend, a painter. He spent his time in a huge garage, painting. Again, shirtless. With overall. And I said, what are you doing? What is the process of painting? He said, it's pretty simple. I make a mess of it and make a mess beautiful. And don't ask me what it means. I have no idea. It's for the critics from New York Times to tell me what it means. And I said, maybe you're right. So beauty, even in those impressionist or modern art, you have to create something that's palatable. That is edible to our eye. So people will buy like, it's beautiful. I don't know what it means, but it coons stuff. All those just square. But if you study that square, that pink, the texture of it. I mean, every inch moves a little bit. And you begin to be fascinated by like, oh my goodness. I thought I could just throw a block of paint onto it. But I can't because it's very subtle if you study coons stuff. Then soon this color begins to shift. And you feel like you're writing on some sort of a fireball. It's amazing. And suddenly the distance between you and that painting disappears. You go inside it. Or the painting goes to you. So be beautiful if you can. Be beautiful. And the poets in this class, you all write beautifully already. But I would urge the prose writers to sell. In order to sell, what we can do is beauty. I mean, if you've seen a recent movie, Danish girl, oh my goodness. Tom Hopper of Hooper. What is his name? The director starring Eddie Remain. And Alicia Vaikunder. Exquisite. He, in a present day movie making trend, I have to give a lot of credit for him. Because every frame is a masterpiece painting. Every frame. Just blow you away, beauty. And I will, I did pay $13 to see it. And I will probably see it again. Because you could sit there and soak in great beauty. Universe. Physical universe. Simplism believes that physical universe is just a language. Which few privileged can choose to decipher it. So all the objects that we see are merely your tools. With which you can write your own book. You give meaning to them. And to write is to depict not the thing, but the effect it produces. And that's metaphor. Now I want to show you a passage where this man can transform. In our memoir writing, our novel writing, whatever writing we do, we are creating a myth. When you write about your life, we are creating a myth. We make these little things huge. You know, just like Walt Whitman says that to a, I'm quoting clumsily possibly. But simply he says that to any real poet, there is no pettiness or triviality. Once he breathes into it, it dilates into grandeur. And then the things thought before as small become gigantic. So that's what you do. That's what we do. You know, breathing life into a petty little thing. And let's read a paragraph here. Do you all have some books? There is on page 73, very here to show that. Nobakov said that he basically is so stuck with this notion of loss. So much so that loss became he called a robust reality. That is more present than the present. So it is loss that he writes about. It's not the tangible objects or events he's describing. So everything is going to have this ephemeral kind of an evanescent spirit to it. But on page 73, this quote says quite a bit about his attempt here. He said that my contempt for the immigrant who hates the rats because they stole his money and land is complete. Nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood. Not sorrow for lost banknotes. And this is incredibly sad. And he is sad enough for the things that you would think that is. But he is just so unnerved by... I feel that you could never make this man whole ever again. Ever, ever again. The loss becomes a robust reality. But that's pretty sad. And that spiritual deprivation of his homeland almost become mythological in this paragraph. Page 36 for those who you have it. If I could read it to you. He made this into a myth. And we should try to do that. Listen to this. Sometimes in our St. Petersburg house from a secret compartment in a wall of her dressing room and my birth room. My mother would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then. And those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior. In mystery and enchantment to the elimination in a city during imperial fates. When in the padded stillness of a frosty night. Giant monograms, crowns and other armory designs made of coloured electric bulbs. Sapphire, Emeril, Ruby glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above the snow-lined cornices of housefronts along residential streets. Just the cornices of all those things. It's enchanting. There's sounds, sights and all that in there. It's about nothing. The nothingness itself becomes hauntingly beautiful. And you almost feel that he has this eye of the sucking butterfly. That he is dashing back and forth, capturing this moment and that moment. Iridescent illuminations here and there. There's another episode, another one here on page 24. And I'm going to read it. He said that the recollection of my crib with its lateral nets of fluffy cotton cords brings back to the pleasure of handling a certain beautiful delightfully solid garnet dark crystal egg left over from some unremembered Easter. I used to chew a corner of the bed sheet until it was thoroughly soaked and then wrap the egg in it tightly so as to admire and relic the warm, rudy glitter of the snugly enveloped facets that came seeping through with miraculous completeness of glow and colour. But that was not yet the closest I got to feeding upon beauty. What a pervert, anyway. You see this little baby man doing the nasty things already. This is the eye of a butterfly. And butterflies is everywhere. He is the butterfly. And sometimes you sense that he's the butterfly waiting for metamorphosis. And in this page 173, I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it takes of innate harmonies. When gathering to its fault the suspended and wandering tonalities of past. I like to imagine in consummation and resolution of those jangling cords, sometimes as enduring in retrospect. As the long table that on summer birthdays and name days used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving and fabulous foliage. Through a tremendous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and families, familiar, mute, lips serenely moving in forgotten speech. I see the steam of the chocolate and the place of blueberry tarts. In the places where my current tutor sits, there is a change for image, a succession of fades in and fades out. The pulsation of my thought mingles with that of the leaf shadows and turns order into max and max into Lansky's dog's names. And Lansky into school master and the whole array of trembling transformations is repeated. You know, it's metamorphosis. The next passage on page 226 is heartbreaking because he came to be at the time of tremendous chaos and the war was going on. And he just discovered that he's a poet. And how sad because suddenly this cocoon has to be punctured and spilled into this hostile world. The purity of a poet's heart getting tested and dirtied and tainted. And you sense that this passage is on 226. My nerves were on edge because of the darkness of the earth, which I had not noticed muffling itself up. And the nakedness of the firmament, the disrobing of which I had not noticed either. Overhead between the formless trees bordering my dissolving path, the night sky was pale with stars. In those years, the marvelous mass of constellations nebulae in stellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic. As if I were hanging from the earth upside down on the brink of infinite space with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the hills but about to release me any moment. And he's unhinged but he doesn't tell you what's going on. He says the world is darkened and it's muffling the nakedness and he is hanging upside down. There's no incident where he could say, oh, I'm writing poetry and boom, the bullets go through the window. There will be a realistic depiction of a tragic ruining of one's budding poetic inclination. But he didn't do that. He's the guy who can make something out of nothing and you wish to learn how to be able to do that. And you can. You have enough objects and stuff in your life to be able to make something out of nothing. And I think when you try that magic could really happen. That's when you are really writing. When you are just writing the things that you know. That's the basis of everything. But the things you digest, that's even better. But the things you crystallized, that's gold. And this man can do that. And you read that, you say, oh, I can't write this. He's so good. But you can. And then he goes on to, anyway. So he, I mean, all over this book you could see he uses, I mean, the remaining years of his life he just devoted to sort of a, to look for, look for the golden nuggets of the broken memory. I mean, you see him digging on the beaches chasing butterflies and peeping through. The saddest thing is he always peep through the window, train windows. And the glimpse, the birches, the fur that he seizes. And all this, if you go to 249 and 250, there was a very heartbreaking passage where he so beautifully used earthy symbol objects to represent the loss. I'm going to read it to you. To represent loss of Russia, basically. Very big Tamara. The guy falls in love at age nine. Tamara is his first love. Tamara is his second one, but there's a collet, the first one. So he's like a love boy through and through. And all this becomes the prototype for Lolita actually later on. You can see in his memoir, Lolita exists right here on these pages. Again, he got stuck there because his loss was so profound that he could have brought himself up from that conundrum. So in this passage he said, Tamara. Tamara, Tamara, Tamara. Tamara, Tamara, Tamara, Tamara. Tamara, Tamara, Tamara, Tamara, Tamara, Tamara, Tamara, Tamara. Northern birches and firs, the sight of my mother getting down on her hands and knees to kiss the earth every time we came back to the country from home, from town for the summer. These are things that fate one day bundled up pale metal and tossed into the sea, completely severing me from my boyhood. It's heartbreaking, but also he not just used that, all those images to represent and to evoke and all that, but he also tried to, the most fascinating thing in Ruthen's book is how he built into relationships among images and things back and forth, space, time. He is at ease being the commander-in-chief of all the things within his orbit and he can whip back and forth. For example, and in the page 81, I'm just read. I would often be read too in English by my mother. Before turning the page, she would place upon it her hand with his familiar pigeon blood ruby and diamond ring within the limpid facets of which had I been a better crystal-gazer, I might have seen a room, people, lights, trees in the rain, a whole period of immigrate life for which that ring was to pay. So he's a little boy sleeping in bed, mother reading to him that memory and then he saw in Butterfly's eye the ring and then he thinks, whoop, Harry Potter fly back to the present time. It's really sad to read that, like, oh my god, I mean we would have tried to put it there, like, oh yeah, this is childhood, let's keep this memory beautiful. I did that, in my memoirs. I wasn't skillful enough to do that, but he did that and he's like stabbing into your heart with the dagger, like, oh my god, how sad. We should do that. Learn to observe the things in your objects, in your life and build a relationship among them. It's fascinating. That is the artifice of our act of writing memoir. If you don't have that powerful, you know, quest story, you know, you're gonna be the first astronaut of something, something, then do that. Meaning of your life is everywhere. There's another passage at page 142 and 43. It's a trouble case and that's being handed down from to him. He said, at a collapsible table, my mother and I played a card called, DRUCKY. There's a Russian expert right here, although it was still broad daylight. Our cards and a glass and on a different plane, the locks of a suitcase were reflected in the window. It was a long, very long game on this gray winter morning in a looking glass of my bright hotel room. I see shining the same, the very same locks of that now 70-year-old ballast. A highish, heavy-ish re... Necessoid voyage of a pigskin necessity of travel, I guess, with H. N. elaborately into a woven in a thick silver under a similar chronette, which had been bought in 1897 for my mother's wedding trip to Florence. In 1917, it transported from St. Petersburg to the Crimea and then to London, a handful of jewels. Around 1930, it lost to a palm broker, its expensive receptacles of crystal and silver, leaving empty the cunningly contrived leaven holders on the inside of the lid. But that loss has been amply recouped. During the 30 years, it then traveled with me from Prague to Paris, from St. Nazare to New York, and then through the mirrors of more than 200 motel rooms and rented houses. In 46 states, the fact that our... The fact that of our Russian heritage, the hardest survivor proved to be a traveling bag is both logical and emblematic. Really sad. You think a very, very simple object. I relate to it because the lack of excel and loss of that kind of family. It sounds like my father's lighter. He also can transform a very simple image into a supernatural, almost supernatural proportion. For example, in this... The guy is writing about toilet, okay? Page 84 and 85. The toilets were separate from the bathrooms and the oldest among them was a rather sumptuous but gloomy affair with some fine panel work and a tasseled rope of red velvet which, when pulled, produced a beautifully modulated, discreetly muffled gurgle and gulp. Just a toilet, come on, you know. From that corner of the house, one could see Hesperus and hear the Nightingales. And it was there that later, I used to compose my youthful verse dedicated to unembraced beauties. Morosely surveyed in a dimly eliminated mirror the immediate erection of a strange castle in an unknown Spain. I know what you're thinking when you see the word erection. It's Norbachov. Anything can happen, yeah. But magical, enchanted, supernatural. Can we do that? We can. Must we do that? We must. To make your memoir, your fiction writing richer. This is what it's meant by literary, you know. When we saw his small literary, that's what it is. You're making beauty out of beauty making and bringing meaning out of it. You could, to a child's eye, anything can be majestic. And we bought a lot of expensive toys for our son, but his favorite childhood toy was turning over a tin can and beat the hell out of it. That's his everything. Well, I mean I can go on forever, but the most important thing is, but I just want to close by this one little passage that I think nails it all on page 251. He said that a sense of leaving Russia was totally eclipsed by the agonizing thought that reds or not no reds, letters from the Tamara would be still coming miraculously and needlessly to Southern Crimea and would search there for a fugitive addressee and weekly flap about like bewildered butterflies. Set loose in an alien zone at wrong altitude among unfamiliar flora. Isn't that just delicious? Now it comes to whole circle. Butterfly again. It's always butterfly. He is the butterfly. Let loose in a forever, butterfly forever until he came to America. And later on, he became successful right in Lolita and then he returns to Europe. That's where he passed away. So I think we can do that. I just really appreciate the opportunity to share this and read this book and many, many, many books, but learn to, I mean I'm learning every day, you know, it's in Chinese. There was a two C, there was a rub and then there was a there was a subtlety in my newness and we should be able to learn to be able to do both. And life is pregnant with meaning and you have to be the person to be the mother. Give him birth to eat all and I'll shut up now.