 I just wanted to welcome everybody to the library, into the talking in the library program that's co-sponsored by the Friends of Rogers Free Library and my bachelor's in university. We're so happy to see everybody here tonight. How many are here because they want to be and how many are here because they require you. Don't raise your hands. But do feel free to get up and help yourself to refreshments. There's water, Milano cookies, and you're welcome to help yourself if you find yourself getting hungry in the middle of the presentation that Mr. Moody is going to give us this evening. Again, welcome everybody, and we hope you enjoy the program. Adam? Alright, thank you, John. Just to give some context tonight is part of the fifth annual Vermont fellowship at Roger Williams, a program endowed by an alumnus that brings a distinguished visiting writer to the campus community for two days, both to give a workshop to students who have been selected through a blind submissions process and to give a public reading. In addition to the generosity of the Vermont family, there are two other partners, actually three that are important to mention, Kathy Quinn and the Anthony Quinn Foundation who serve generously host the workshop at her home. The RW libraries, my home, Mary Teft White Endowments, during Teft White Endowments talking the library series, and lastly, Roger's Free Library who is part of the Jane Baudel Endowment is our partner in being able to bring this public reading onto the streets of Bristol. Tonight, and I will be brief, it really is a pleasure and an honor to have Rick Moody here. One of the perks of being part of a literary community is that you often get the opportunity to meet and get to know people whose work you've admired on the page, and sometimes they even become your friends, such as the case with Rick, who I first met almost a dozen years ago. In terms of writing, I've learned so much from Rick about form, structure, honesty, and risk, and through his friendship, I've learned much about compassion, generosity, and humility. And in reading Rick's work, I think anyone would see all of the above, most recently in his latest book, Hotels of North America, in which Rick collects the blog reviews of a one Reginald Amos. Throughout all of these hotel reviews, collected, I'm sorry, throughout all of these hotel reviews, collected, arranged, and structured in an order that ultimately tells the story of life is a pure form of humor whose foundation we ultimately realize is a fear of emptiness, loss, and sadness. And while I can't speak to this with any authority nor with any certainty, I am fairly certain that I once saw Reginald Amos at a Hampton Inn near New Haven during the free breakfast. He was sitting alone, dipping the corner of a red cloth napkin into a glass of water, and then dabbing at a stain near the crotch of his pants before he'd spilled something of an oily nature. At that time, Morse was watching the room particularly intrigued, it seems, by how the staff dumped link sausages into the chafing dishes. On a regular basis, he would check his phone, and from his expression, the lack of any communication was clear, and for him, very distressing. And even when he kept dabbing at the stain, and it only seemed to widen and grow, and even when our eyes met when a kitchen worker came out with a new tray of links, lifted the lid and was momentarily ghosted by the steam, regretfully, I never said anything, so moved was I by the combination of his desperation and confidence, and so moved was I by a kind of love for him. But again, I say all that without any true authority. For that, I turn to Morse's chronicler and archivist, Rick Moode. Thank you so much. Well, I'm really happy to see you all here. Very honored to be here. Very grateful to Adam for inviting me and to Kathy for showing us her home yesterday and getting to see the incredible legacy of Anthony Quinn and his work was deeply moving. I'm going to sort of do a little buffet tonight. This is an old book called The Four Fingers of Death. It's a gigantic, sci-fi-ish, rybald comedy, and I'm going to read just a tiny bit of this that I used to read back when it came out quite a bit, and I haven't done it in many years. And then I'm going to read an especially scurrilous passage of Hotels of North America and then cap it off with a deeply depressing section. So that's the plan. And hopefully you won't mind a little depressing along with the scurrilous part in the middle. So Four Fingers of Death, the whole first part takes place on a trip to Mars. It's set in 2025, so they go to Mars. Awful things happen. Bad idea. Don't go to Mars. But while they're on the way, one of the astronauts has this whole kind of reverie recollection about a guy he knew when he was in the NASA training program, and that's what this passage is about. Somehow the whole situation reminds me of those last 300 whooping cranes. Those birds that someone has been forcibly migrating back and forth from Florida for the past 20-odd years with the aid of an ultralight. This small population of birds is not a sustainable population, the experts all say. Because with the right outbreak of avian flu, which we already know can knock out a couple million people in an overcrowded ecosystem, the entire whooping crane population could collapse. One germ and extinction follows. A beautiful thing though, a whooping crane. And in the not so distant future, there will be only a couple left. And they will only have one wing apiece, and they will idle on some lawn like the lawn near Cape Canaveral. One of this non-mating pair will die of old age, and then there will be one last whooping crane, and it'll eat popcorn from underneath the NASA reviewing stand, and it will have delusional thoughts. Moth-balled memories in which it was part of a flock, and this flock followed an ultralight down to Brazil for the winter, and then back again. What does our whooping crane think, the last of planet Earth? It thinks that the currents of air are a marvel, and it conceives of them in colors spectra as we think of sunsets. Just so does the last whooping crane think, despite the fact that only the one wing works. It remembers tree tops, which were like sofas to the whooping crane back when it had two wings. It could land in any tree top and put its head under its wing, and the whooping crane remembers or believes it remembers certain kinds of fish that were particularly savory. Maybe a certain level of freshness in the matter of seafood is what a whooping crane most prizes. It not remembers mating, because back when it was young, it was picky in the mating department, and like many whooping cranes, it was not, despite its lanky beauty, terribly kind to the girls. Moreover, there was always the danger of infighting among whooping cranes, and this last crane remembers all of this. And because the crane cannot speak of it, the memories are that much more painful. And now, in his loneliness, there is no other bird who protects that past of cranes, that long history of the most beautiful bird in this part of the country. And so the only other account of these events, after others fade, is the memory of the guy who flew the ultralight. A balding guy with a not very good sense of humor, a guy who told the worst jokes. Not that the whooping crane understood the jokes, but rather the whooping crane recognized the timbre of this man's voice. A kind of ragged baritone that shaded into the tenor range, but with outbreaks of alto when he got nervous. And this was the call of the ultralight. As far as the last whooping crane is concerned, this guy's rather humorous voice. It was not the cry of the whooping crane, which is a majestic sound. It was the cry of some bald guy who never much expected to be piloting birds. He probably believed he'd have a career in civil aviation, or maybe he thought he'd be an astronaut. And in fact, that is what he decides to do, because the day comes when this pilot can no longer fly the ultralight. There are not enough cranes anymore. There's only the one crane, and he is crushed. Well, come on. Everybody's crushed. Life crushes you. And this is just one more story to stomp up and down on your crushed heart. This balding fellow going to visit the last crane sometimes over where he thinks the crane might still be living in a cage for injured birds. And he and the crane recognize this, recognize each other. Indeed, though they have no common language in which to speak of their recognition, there is no way for a crane to speak of the man as a man speaks of a crane. It would all go fine if the man could speak in the crane's tone, but he can't. While he's visiting with the crane there is in the distance a liftoff, one of the last space shuttle missions. And you can see it from almost 20 miles away. The conditions are that favorable in South Florida that day. And the guy, the balding pilot, the one with the bad jokes and the not terribly reliable timbre to his voice, thinks that maybe the only reasonable thing to pursue after the experience of flying the ultralight is the experience of space as soon as he can get there. And he sits on a bench by the one winged crane for a while, and then he notices that he's talking to the whooping crane. And he says, well, I don't exactly want to leave you here like this. I can't really think of anything worse. And I have left some people behind in my life who hasn't, even some people I loved. But none of that's as bad as thinking that I won't see you here again. And no one who comes here to see you will know what I know about you. And he won't recognize these people. Nothing could be worse. But still a man has to move on. I can't just stay here doing this. And so I'm wondering, would you think it was okay for me to go ahead and become an astronaut? Do you think you could possibly give me your blessing? He knows that the whooping crane can't answer him. That's obvious enough. But he feels he owes a reasonable explanation to the whooping crane, even more of an explanation than he owes his wife or his parents. And the crane can't see how bad the pilot feels, how broken up he is when the man thinks that he won't visit again. When the crane is a thing of the past, when the crane is nothing more but fertilizer for creatures to come, the pilot will only learn of it online because he'll be off pursuing his ambition, flying his test missions, sleeping in the barracks, all so that he might get the hell off the planet that slew the whooping crane. Alright, now I promise jokes. Viking Motel, 1236 North Detroit Avenue, Eugene, Oregon, August 15th to 19th, 2011. My cousin Dennis asked me if I would consider officiating at his nuptial event. And I agreed and therefore needed to find a way to get myself ordained fast. Now it occurred to me that officiating at weddings was a sideline, a moonlighting gig, not at all dissimilar to my primary business line of motivational speaking. What kind of wedding-related oratory after all is not motivational at its core? Just about everything that comes out of your mouth in the nuptial theater inspires and transports. It seemed just and right that I should apply to the Infinite Love Church, which is one of those seminaries that asks of you only $18 that will thereafter enable you to carry out the sacred rites associated with marriage. The Infinite Love Church requests that you read a few rather sugary pamphlets about their ecumenical views, and then they send you an email confirming that you are in law ordained, after which you're advised to contact the county clerk wherever you are intending to serve to ascertain that online ordination is valid in that state. In this case, the affianced parties were Dennis and is bribed to be Olga of the Ukrainian origin. Olga had been in this country since she was seven and had no trace of an accent. She favored brightly colored athletic gear, a little on the baggy side, as though she were trying to hide a third breast. She had read a lot of Dostoevsky. I learned all of this at a meeting I had with Dennis and Olga, which seemed like something that I ought to do before conducting the nuptial ceremony. If you're officiating and you're trying to seem like you're an intercessor, then you would best meet with the parties concerned. Olga and Dennis came by the motel where I was staying while in town, the Viking Motel. About the women loitering in the parking lot, let me just say, that's youth culture. It's a college town. And let me say too that Dennis did not deserve the long interval he served in the federal penitentiary for transporting copies of stolen material across state lines. And if anyone was capable of being rehabilitated in the penitentiary, it was Dennis who met Olga while he was there. It was an epistolary romance permitted and facilitated by Dennis's job in the prison library. Dennis was a trembling, nervous person with an island of hair on the front of his forehead, a saddle horn, if you will, with not much anywhere else around it. He was thin and hunched and resembled one of those dogs that you see in public squares in Eastern European countries. Dennis had not found a way to be comfortable in the world. He seemed as though he were habitually preparing himself for something awful. And this was justified because many awful things had happened to him. He said it was because he wore that necklace with the human tooth on it that his father had given him. At the Viking Motel there was a sign on the front of the vinyl sided cottage that served as a reception and that sign said, back later, see James in housekeeping. I never did see that sign removed. When James in housekeeping finally did turn up after Olga and Dennis stood in the parking lot watching women in detachable skirts marching past, James sheepishly admitted that he had blood he needed to clean up and the proprietor never appeared at all, which was why Dennis had trouble finding me, neither he nor Olga having sufficient funds for a cell phone. After I had drunk several bottles of beer or more, awaiting their appearance, this behavior is sometimes called a relapse in certain circles, staring at myself in a mirror on the wall by the bathroom. That was so large I began to believe that I could walk into it. There was a knock at the door. Oh, mirror on the wall. Who has the beginnings of an irremediable paniculus associated with middle age that no amount of dieting can affect? Who has more body hair than a bonobo? I was wearing only boxer shorts in purple when the knock came. The hip waiters on the cabinet housing the television were a planned fishing trip in the Cascades area and I was unwilling to dislodge them to get corduroys out of my drawer. I, therefore, donned the hip waiters. I could see when I opened the door that Olga was surprised by the outfit and I begged her to understand that I was an unsurpassed angler and had a suit at the green dry cleaner up the block as well as a tie with a naked woman on the reverse side. Dennis knew me well enough not to be surprised, however, and soon the two of them were sitting on the bed somewhat uncomfortably. I poured them pop with some ice from the dispensary out by vending and then sat in the lone chair by the window still wearing the hip waiters which were not suspended properly on my shoulders. I asked them first of all if their resolve with regard to marriage was earnest and true and characterized by profundities of desire and mutual support. I told them that marriage as I had understood it during my own union come to an end just a couple of years prior was a sacred trust in that many people married because they thought they were supposed to marry or because society expected it of them or because one of them was with child or simply because they were bored and did not know what else to do with their lives. But I observed it was possible to do better than this. It was possible to be changed by the revealing light of marriage in proportion to one's development in marriage, in proportion to the amassing of age related epiphanic moments in the habit of love that is marriage. It was possible I said for the beloved to become more ravishing, more perfect as when ascending into the concentric rings of paradise and that in marriage we come to find the flaws of the beloved less irksome and instead more delightful and endearing like that weird spitting noise that the beloved sometimes makes when hocking up reserves of toothpaste or that tendency the beloved has to nervously scratch her ankle over and over again or how about her wearing two pairs of socks all the time. However as I was saying these things I happened to look down and to notice that because of the odd layering of my own garments that is to say the boxer shorts and the hip waders whose strap had fallen from one shoulder completely resulting in a sort of bagging of the waiters on one side of me and a riding up of boxers on the other one portion of the intimate area of my own person was bulging out of the side of my shorts a sack portion of my private self and while some men have modestly sized containers there I was not one of those men it was not unknown to me previously the occasion that the pouch somehow became visible it was an ongoing problem and as indeed this was the case now I quickly looked up hoping that Olga and Dennis had not glimpsed the bit of me extruded from the shorts via the falling down and bunching of hip waiters believe me when I say it was one of those wardrobe malfunctions that only chance can bring about if I could consciously maintain eye contact throughout the discussion perhaps I could imperceptibly move the shorts a bit or the waiters through some isometric hip exercise so that a bit of fabric would flap over the testicle and its colony of white hairs I was driven to ever greater heights of rhetorical fancy in order to assure myself that Olga in particular continued to make eye contact with me and did not look down I smiled like a mad person any false move or attempt to excuse myself could easily draw her eyes that way I began looking around the room myself in the hope that my darting eyes alighting here on the extra large mirror there on the stain on the stuccoed ceiling would likewise seduce away her gaze I asked Olga if the marital relations were satisfactory if she could assure me that these relations were characterized by gentleness and intimacy and proper frequency and there was a surging of in-breath from Olga which at first I worried was because she had witnessed my little semi-balled protuberance but in fact I think the in-breath was owing to the question being a probing and challenging one and she thought for a while and then said she believed that the intimate relations were intimate and she said as I recall it Dennis is a very sensitive man who loves the bodies of women and I am lucky to have a man like Dennis then I asked Dennis if the relations were sufficient from his point of view and he said in the time I was inside the penitentiary I came to believe that I might never again get to touch the body of a woman and so our love is a holy kind of thing and here the two of them smiled at each other bashful smiles of the confederates of love next I asked them about money I said it was the lot of some people in the world never to figure out the money problem and there was no shame in this because love endured beyond money and in each of them understand this and was each willing to do the working part the money making part if the other was unable physically or was for some other reason unemployed whether because of felony conviction or ADHD Olga opined that she had known poverty in Ukraine when it was under the control of the Soviets and her father had for many years a job as a machinist in which he did nothing at all he simply showed up at a certain factory and then came home and spent what literally had in Latvian vodka and she certainly hoped that the land of opportunity would have more monetary reward than that but as long as Dennis loved her and took her to the movies twice per quarter then it would be okay after which Dennis said that he had seen the light about trying to make money by transporting stolen goods across state lines and now he simply wanted to be as he said legit and if that meant the loading dock and the loading dock it was and again they looked at each other and smiled in the middle of the smile it occurred to me that I could simply swipe the ice container off the tiny lacquered side table by my chair and dash it to the floor the ensuing mess would direct attention away from the testicle stretching itself languidly on plein air and I could then rush into the bathroom and perhaps straight myself up a bit or at least throw a thin white mildew inflected towel over my midsection this I did and I'm sure the swiping motion in which all the ice went flying toward the door did not look terribly realistic and you can only imagine how distressed Dennis and Olga must have been to think that the man officiating at their service was a hip waiters at night kind of guy but there was not time to dwell on this because the ice was everywhere and I got down on all fours and began trying to clean it up and soon Olga was beside me and I could smell her perfume which she had probably put on just for this evening in our shame we were close together she and I we were investigators of shame trying to make the most of the moment and maybe she never saw the testicle at all nor the slight varicose vein on the bottom of the testicle maybe she hadn't seen it at all and I don't know I don't know why this motel is called the Viking motel and it leads one to wonder many things about Vikings they did not last long on this continent because of starvation and disease they quickly headed back to Iceland and Denmark in their spiritual devastation where they could feud with one another and hack one another with axes called head splitter and tree foe what the Vikings had to do with the Pacific Northwest I cannot say as it is my impression that no Viking ever lived in the Pacific Northwest two stars so there's this one last little short section I'm going to read it sort of a little prose Pomi guy it's in the next to last review in the book which is of a real divey joint called the Capri Whitestone 555 Hutchison River Parkway North Bronx New York March 7th through 22nd 2014 what is it we really want from a hotel life we want the closest thing that we can get to home we want a reminder that home exists that place you can come back to after a long, inadvisable journey where they are in theory happy to see you a place where the pillow awaits the impression of your head a place where when you step in out of the rain you breathe a sigh of relief a place where everything broken was broken by you or people you care about a place where you could close your eyes and more or less make your way around just fine a place at the end of a road you know well a place where should you suddenly become afflicted with a total absence of memory it's reasonable to suppose that you would be returned home the place your enemies wish to avoid home the place your former lovers are troubled by home where you can sit at the quiet table in the morning home the place you sometimes hate that you also love the second you leave it home any address that causes you to tear up home near the metal box that has your surname on it home where almost all the postcards you have ever received have been delivered home where the government of your nation believes you live home where your mother or your father brought you the second you no longer lived in a hospital home where you first sang whatever it is you first sang what welcome means this you first learned at home along with the word home home is where your bedroom was in the past and is now and home is where you sleep more days than you sleep anywhere else because if it were otherwise you would renegotiate the word home is where there's almost always a beverage that you like home is where if you wait long enough it's likely that you will be fed a dessert even if it's not the best thing for you to eat home is where you're able to watch your favorite programs home is where people will try to find you when they need to find you home is the address you will sneak out of to kiss the first person you ever kiss who is not a member of your family and it's the place to which you'll return afterward knowing about that kiss home is where you will first learn about disappointment and it is where you will learn that it's okay to feel disappointed home is the place that is almost always indicated with a final major chord home when you are older is where you will watch your children grow and in fact no other way of describing home is as valuable and meaningful as this and when you are near death the impossible sweetness of life will adhere first and foremost to the home where you watched your child or your children or where you watched other neighborhood children grow watched them rise up from the carpet and sorry it's because my son is here with me watched them rise up from the carpet and stab at something with their little paws before attempting to stick it into their mouths this will be your home home may also be the place where they have where they have called you an asshole more than any other place home is where you will paint your masterpiece that's what you'll describe in your masterpiece either home or the leaving of home if you say you have no home on earth then what you mean is that there was trouble at your home home is where you go right before dark home is where you go when you are recovered when work becomes impossible long for home it is possible that in your life you will have multiple homes, a sequence of homes and that each of these has required a transition for example when you were in a car that carried you from a house where both of your parents had lived together to a house where only one lived even during that ride there was the idea of home that catch in your throat that is the feeling that you will never be known that feeling evaporates in the presence of home fires and while no substitute is adequate there is the sense in the finest hotels that you are not far from that home when you embark on your journey when you set aside this notion of home as if launching onto a white capped sea certain that you are sturdy enough to let go of home or to relinquish the familiar but it is only because you know that you can return to home again and it is the job of the hotel, the inn, the motel the furnished room to suggest the possibility of home or to serve as a way station for home preparing you for that return lightening the load as long as you must be away this is the great romance of life the losing of home temporarily is when upon that same storm tossed sea you lost the horizon line the hotel helps you to see the horizon even if there's no land to be witnessed there thank you I am told to take a question if there is a question or two anyone have any? I'm just getting warmed up yes sir I'm curious at the beginning of my book release it's given a chronological order of the reviews of the hotels I'm curious if someone would take the reviews and put them in that order and read it how would you change the story? it's funny there's someone who did that he's a book review sort of book genius in LA called Michael Silverblatt he's got a great radio show about books and he told me he read it in the order that it's given and then he reordered according to the graph and read those and he said it's more depressing so that's all I know I didn't read them that way myself but apparently that's the skinny so if you want more jokes read it in the order that it's written it's a new way of writing a book how did you come up with it? what was the end of it? this is actually a pretty good story so let me try and recreate it in 2009 I set out to write a normal orderly well-behaved book I was looking around and I saw these other people getting by with their well-behaved books and I thought I would try to write one so I set out to write it here's the plot the NPR radio producer guy goes to Baghdad at the end of our time in Baghdad accidentally is blinded by a roadside bombing comes back to Washington to put his life together sounds great so I wrote 200 pages of it and I was totally bored and I kept thinking why am I so bored other people think this is a really good way to make books why can't I just get in line and I was thinking about it and I thought that consciousness and sort of human psychology have changed in a way because of this thing called the internet and if literature now fails to take into account this new period that we're in in some way it's not fully describing where we are there's a sort of famous comment by this writer of my vintage who said realism is not realism if no one in the novel ever watches TV but they never do there's no book that you open that describes people watching TV and yet they do so how realistic are the books so I had the same thought in some way deal with this internet phenomenon I felt that I wasn't describing where we are and yet I didn't know what I wanted to do at all so then it happened that my wife who's a visual artist was in a show in Bergen, Norway and we went to Norway and the museum in Norway put us in the worst hotel a horrible horrible it was one step up from a hostel is what it was and every bad horrible thing that you could imagine from the European hotel is true of this particular place and we just kept thinking how can we stay, how can we be here and do this perform our professional obligation and finally my wife said well we should just review it and I had never really thought of writing a hotel review before I didn't read TripAdvisor or any of these websites but I thought hey that sounds like fun so I sort of stayed up one night after she had gone to sleep and I wrote this incredibly mean spirited review about the P Hotel of Bergen Norway that's the actual name and I'm just not even going to make the obvious joke I'm just going to move on so I wrote the review and I thoroughly enjoyed it and then the light bulb went off over my head why shouldn't I try to make the novel out of these and it fulfilled the obligation to try to sort of bounce off of the internet in some way and then also I could write in the style that I had written this hotel review and it would be more freewheeling and unbuttoned than a good orderly traditional novel that was the idea this is a beautiful town so beautiful I was at Roger Williams I believe in 2003 but I think that it was in do the reading and get out kind of thing so this time I got to stay in town and I've been delighted yeah yeah he's been enjoying it yeah no other questions Adam asked me a question I'm just getting warmed up I'll ask a question I was waiting for the students so in reading it and in discussing it in the class we were talking about are all these hotels real are they real but are you fictionalizing give us an insight into that about all of these crazy hotels I mean the vast majority of them are actual hotels but I removed from their real addresses so as not to libel anyone at a certain point the legal department took an interest in this manuscript and I was giving a bunch of pointers on how to avoid libeling anyone and that's why I have this probably some of you overlooked this but there's a really great on the copyright page a really great little bit which I will now read North America is a work of fiction persons in place in the book are either fictional or are used fictionally in particular the opinions about hotels contained in hotels of North America do not represent the opinion of the author or the publisher at all but are rather the opinions of a desperate disgruntled and wholly fictional hotel reviewer named Reginald E. Morse there's no evidence whatever that he strode the earth harrowing hotel employees with his unrestrained and tragicomic invective I got to write that disclaimer myself it was really fun so most of the hotels are actual hotels but as I told you at dinner I did not stay in all of them some of them were just drive-by visits and then I made up the interiors yeah yes well that's that I've been in that IKEA many times yeah it was an extrapolation of personal experience but I did not stay the entire night yeah I did however stay on the lawn by the train station in New London Connecticut in college I stayed over night on the lawn train station so that one is true another one we talked about someone pointed out in class that in the hard cover it says a novel but in the soft cover it does not oh that's news to me oh okay that's good I like that kind of I wonder if some of you have read his approach as a kind of a humor writing more so than a form of you know a literary novel what have you heard from people who have read it and appreciated it this whole theory that am I wrong or right it doesn't say novel well you know it's going to say it on the title page yeah the title page is always just they just shoot the same art that they use for the hard cover it's probably the same print run but I have this theory about genre that genre is a bookstore problem a literature problem and as a result I'm always looking for ways to kind of try to sit partway between a couple of genres that makes me really happy and and I love sort of changing the expectations about the book in midstream so I will say that the British paperback of Hotels of North America has 30 deleted pages that I cut out of the hard cover and the Americans refused to have this appendix so I just gave it to the British so now there are different versions if you want to read extra episodes order the British I get a royalty from them too buy several copies yeah yes yeah that was on purpose although I was very worried that if I for example did a radio interview in Canada someone was going to bring that up and in fact I did a radio interview in Canada and the whole time I was worried she was going to say why isn't there a Canadian hotel maybe in the sequel but the whole point was to for the book to be flawed in certain ways not an effective publication if you were pretending that it were genuine I had to just to finish the genre thought I wrote a memoir called Blackfail that came out in 2003 2002 and I did that with that book too I took the genre designation off of it and a big influence on that book is a book you probably know The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Zabald the German writer loves Zabald and apparently the story is they asked Zabald at the time of publication what genre he wanted The Rings of Saturn to have on the jacket and his reply was all of them and they said you're only allowed to have three so he said fiction non-fiction and travel and that's sort of how I've been thinking like how can I get several genres on this jacket anyone else sir no that's correct I'm monkey with it a lot I was pretty early on that I decided it would not be chronological because I felt the chronological was too easy sort of and I kind of wanted his character to emerge over the course of the book and so I created a kind of a superstructure that I thought would humanize him progressively another way of saying it is that I knew or I worried at the outset that he would seem a little astringent and opinionated and so I kind of seated the middle of the book with humanism hoping that for example the past about the child the middle of the book would be a sort of focal point through which when you passed you would be on his side a little bit so the order involved carving away things that were too much hotel and not enough Reginald and then allowing Reginald to begin to be more vulnerable and open about his life progressively as the book went on yes so what would you say is your biggest inspiration because I don't know if you had talked about how the idea of talking about listening was a personal view so would you say that real life happens to our big influence in the books a little bit I mean I find that books feel more real when you use the texture of everyday life the stuff you know that you write with authority if you are familiar with the details and textures but that doesn't mean that you have to be confessional about it this is not a confessional book it's not about me it has a bunch of places that I have been and that enabled me to write with authority about you know the chocolate chip cookies at reception or what the elevator was like or the smell of the swimming pool that's a real detail of a real hotel that I was in so I would say that having the texture of real life is different from saying that you are writing autobiographically and for me with this book as with most things now it's as if the language calls the shots and I follow the language so I'm thinking about paragraph construction and I'm thinking about rhythm and the sounds of certain kinds of sentences and how, where I want the epiphanies to be where the laugh lines might be and about those craft issues more than I'm thinking I have some obligation to sort of describe my own life make sense yes I mean part of it is because I hate purity so if there's just one idea and I'm just going to do this one idea and here it is, it's hotel reviews you know without any context and they're just free floating and it's up to you to put it together whether this guy lived or didn't live or what have you it's sort of, it's formalist purity it's too perfect I mean part of it is because I hate purity so if there's just one idea of purity it's too perfect so I sort of felt like I wanted to have some context with respect to this question I should tell you now that there was no preface when I handed it in and in fact the publishers asked me to write the preface and their argument was it's too weird, the structure is too weird and we want to make people comfortable a little bit I sort of thought the afterward was going to do the making comfortable but the the fun part for me about the afterward is the Rick Moody in the afterward is nothing like me he doesn't write like me, I write these long tangled sentences he writes little short sentences his life story is completely different from mine, it's not Rick Moody it's a totally made up Rick Moody so the thrilling part was to try to just deepen the mystery of Reginald Morris in this way the frothy and artificial has to be just a little punctuation mark at the end of the book I thought about cutting it and there would be an argument for cutting it but I think in certain environments in which the book is already a real juggling act and people are thinking you're crazy I'm not going to read an entire book of hotel reviews, I sort of wanted some even though artificial text at the end anything else? it's an hour, alright thank you what's that? of course, I have no pen however I do thanks thank you