 I wanted, first, for our members to hear some sad news. One of our most important members, over all these years, right in the New Plyst die a couple of days ago. And this organization would not be what it is without the contributions that she's made over the last 15 years. So, I just want you to know about that and we'll have some information for you about them and all the other stuff that's coming up. In addition to being on the program committee for many years, I do also help to start a refreshment idea. She was a part of everything that we did. And she was a model for me, and I took over some of these roles. I was special leader. I'm glad for the chance to have to say that, but I'm happy to have to say that it's time. In terms of regular business, this is our last talking lecture for this semester. The next three programs, which we'll finish out the semester, are films at the Savoy, and they're a 12th, 3rd Wednesdays. So, these three films are connected by the introductions of Rick Winston, who always puts these together as a series. They are films all by the Dards Den, who are from Belgium, and we will see how their career developed over the last three films. The one next week is called La Promesse. A father who traffics and exploits illegal immigrants comes into conflict with his teenage son. That was a film from 1996. Then we'll see a film that they made in 2005. Then we'll see a film that they made in 2016. So we're happy to do that. And this is also my last chance to thank the Senior Center for giving us this lovely space for this semester. We'll be here again when we start up again sometime in January. And now I'll introduce Peter. There he is. Hi, I'm Peter Romanier and what a great way to end the lecture series here is to have it on a snowy day. So we really appreciate your coming out today. Before introducing our great speakers today, I want to remind you of the Village Project Survey of Aging in Place. For those who are 50 and living in Montpilder, there is a survey box out there where you can write up a survey and put it in there. So please do that if you're so inclined. We want to hear from you. Today we have the pleasure of communing with a native of Baltimore who has spent substantially his entire life in New England. 25 odd years in Maine and then about 20 years ago coming to Vermont. Baron Wolfer has been his entire life a writer, a teacher of writing, a poet and a server. He continues to write and I'm excited about telling you about a book he just published which I got the other day called Legends of the Slow Explosion. One of the books that Baron will be able to sell to you here. This is an extraordinary view of luminaries in our lives whether it's Rosa Parks or Hannah Orange or Philip Berrigan to live through them using Baron's imagination. An extraordinary way of looking at history. Baron's a modest fellow. He will share with you what he's been writing about recently and in the past. I'll leave it to him to just introduce it to us more carefully. But at this moment Baron, thank you very much. Thank you Peter. Thank you. Thank you for turning out this story afternoon. I appreciate it. I'm going to, my talk and reading focuses on biography, writing about people. You know on a mass sometimes what do you write about? My answer is pretty simple. I write about people. Of course that doesn't really say much of anything because it's such an enormous, enormous topic. I was thinking about sort of where I come from today to explain a bit about where I've welled up in this book, Legends. And when I was a boy growing up in Baltimore, I frequented the library there, Bratch Library of the Enoch Pratt Free Public Library in Baltimore. And I must have read my way through, who knows how many biographies when I was a boy. So I could see these books, some of them right in front of me. I can remember some of the publishers, who of course have since passed into whatever, publishing oblivion, Dodd Meade, Bob Zameral, Random House is still around, Landmark Books. Anyway, I read just every biography I get my hands on. So I can't tell you a lot off the top of my head, say, about Luther Burbank. But I read about Luther Burbank. George Washington Carver. And then a few ladies, right? Joan of Arc. Anyway, I read a ton of these books when I was a kid. So instinctively, I was interested. And there's interesting books because there's dialogue in those books. Nobody knows what George Washington Carver was really saying to someone to give a day. But that's kind of part of what I'm talking about today, really, and what Peter alluded to is this whole issue of imagination, when you write about people. So that's, I think, one component that went into what I've been doing over a lifetime. And then another one is Shakespeare. I think it was in the eighth grade, Mr. Velder, that I first read Shakespeare. And I'm pretty sure we read Julius Caesar and Macbeth. And I just remember sort of feeling, wow, what is this? This is thought like the Bob's Meryl biographies of Florence Nightingale. Something else is going on here. And of course, what was going on was drama and even tragedy. Very different from the comedies. Right away, when you look at Shakespeare, you think, wow, they're all named after people. They're all names. Macbeth, Julius Caesar, a fellow. They're all people. You think, well, the comedies are situations, as you like it, twelfth. So there's a real difference going on there. So that came in there, too. And then another sort of big aspect, which is where I'm going to begin today with you, is poetry. I'm one of those people who, poetry is really my natural language, not prose. So it's staked from me. My head works associatively, I think, in terms of images and metaphors. And so I've been writing about people in poems for sort of forever. And reading other poets forever who write about people. So I'm going to begin today with a few poems to sort of give you a feeling. Now, of course, the differences are enormous. Obviously, I was just talking with a friend who just read the recent biography of Ulysses Grant. It's about a thousand pages. That's a lot of pages. Whereas a poem is, what, 20, 30 lines? So, you know, I always tell my brethren, my colleagues, where I teach, in half time, that a poem is really the equal of a biography or a novel. They're not really excited to hear that, you know? Because you look at a poem and it's like, how long did it take you to write that, you know? In fact, it could take quite a while. But a poem, of course, is what? A poem is about essence. That's what a poem is. It's about essence. So I'm going to read you a couple today about people. And then I'm going to read you one of the pieces from Legends. Talk a little bit about that and then read. So I'm going to begin with my most recent book on identified sighing objects. Far be it from me to resist a pun. And I'm going to begin with a poem about an artist. This is about the great photographer Diane Arbus, Deanne, to her mom. When she was, you know, a kid, an early adolescent, you know, you know how adults ask you, what do you want to be when you grow up? And her answer was, I want to be a great, sad artist. Which right away, you know, my kind of person, you know? And I wonder if I've always adored her. So this is about Diane Arbus. And it's called Ode to the Great Sad Artist, Diane Arbus. Look, look, look around her neck. The noose of the camera. Implacable, indifferent, dull, magical. Like a porter at a gate, interceding. She stands at a gate. She carries the world on her back. A pack of unwholesome toys. The porter smiles, sneezes, sneers, take this. She says, see that? The porter yawns. What is beautiful is awful. What is awful is beautiful. Perhaps good to have said that. And a teacher told her. She holds the camera to her chest. Can it hear her? A cheap, omnipresence. How does she dare to cramp the unholy world to usher existence into a pew to tailor the measurements of infinite space? Hush, she says. Hush. The tall man, the thin man, the fat woman, the short woman, the bearded woman, the elevator man, the flower woman, the human wreck, the human pin cushion, the human map, the seal boy, the wolf girl, the chicken man, the bear woman, the woman who is a man, the man who is a woman. Everyone walks down a street. Everyone goes home at day's end and lights something against the night. While the great sad artist welcomes the absence of clarity, inserts a flash bulb in her apparatus, sits at the kitchen table and broods over the dreams of strangers, the grief that tunnels under the skin, the smooth mask of perturbation, the bodily home that is no home. She will find everyone out. She will hold a moment. Who has done that? Achilles, Hector, Gilgamesh, Roland. Who has held a moment and not let go? She can be her own myth, but she cries and puts her head down on the table. There is no one to cheer her up, except the machine that makes everything worse, that piles woe upon a droid woe. While she scrambles up the side of a building, a bridge, a face, a cloud, fearful but alert, not Achilles, Hector, Gilgamesh, Roland, but a woman in a dress. Click, click, click. Everything must be lost. All this careful finding must be lost. Only that makes the great, sad artist smile. Only that. Okay, so that's obviously a lot that's getting put in. And, you know, when you write about someone, one of the crucial questions is, where do you begin, right? And there's no answer to that question, right? I mean, so many biographies that I read again as a boy begin with George Washington Carver was born in Yadda Dada. Well, yeah, but no. Because of why? Because there's so much what? There's so much backstory, right? And that's what I faced in writing these biographies in this book. I'll read you one more poem. Now, this will be from another book. And this will be, again, I'll read one about a poet on the spell Walt Whitman. In the Civil War, as probably some of you know, Walt Whitman was a sort of nurse companion to soldiers in Washington who were wounded and often were really not much more than boys. You know, 16, 17 years old, farm boys had never been away from home. And some of them, you know, were dying. So Whitman came into the hospital in Washington and both Confederate and Union soldiers, of course, he sat by both of them and was with them. So this is about that. So it's about, you know, again, you know, the question I've been asking my whole life as a writer, which poets particularly ask is, what is that? You know, it's the child's question, right? You know, you're around children. They're always asking what is that and you're supposed to answer that, you know? For his part, Walt Whitman, 1863, the soldiers in the hospital asked Walt Whitman to tell them the story that would make the hurt go away. The story about trust and reward. They knew he knew the story. He was a poet and perforce, as poets once put it, belonged to the tribe of the availing Odysseus, a voyager in every weather of the soul. For all his love, he winced. He knew the words they wanted and sought to avoid those words. He had been another singer, one from the earth. The sky was empty and distant. There was no human home there. It pained him to have to speak that story. He touched a forehead placed a quiet kiss on a pale cheek and murmured simple words that caress the honor of their pain, the sweetness of the most mangled flesh. Perhaps they believed the poet. Perhaps, for a time, the sky bowed to the earth. Wings became legs. Words became more than earnest sounds. The poet, for his part, never turned away. He saw his poems in the saddest eyes and the briefest, most hopeless smiles. The poet voyaged to the edge of human warmth and held the hand as it turned cold. That was the poem the poet had always known and from which he never turned away. Okay, so that's about essences. So when I started writing these biographies that went into this book, I knew I still wanted to get at essences, but I wanted to write prose. I wanted to do something more extended. So I sort of took what I learned, so to speak, over the course of these decades of writing poetry and, you know, I started writing these prose pieces. And they're about really, as Peter said, they're about really, really different people. But they're all the lives, and that's why the book's called Legends, all the lives have sort of an imaginative story to tell us about who the person was, okay? Which is easy to lose in the world, you know, of facts and news. It's easy to sort of lose a sense of, well, what was that life about, you know? So that's why I wrote about these different people. I wrote about these different people, too, because I've been obsessed one way or another with these different people over the course of my life. So I'm going to read one this afternoon, and then we can talk some about the piece and just generally about writing biography or other things on your mind. But this was, I read this one to you for a lot of reasons. But one, the biographies are about people from the second half of the 20th century. It was plain to me, if you're writing about the world after World War II, more or less, you've got to write about the world of the movies. You've got to write about an actor or a director, someone, because it's just an extraordinary world. It wasn't there that each of us takes for granted, basically. So I was always fascinated with Audrey Hepburn. And that's what I'm going to read you. But you'll see where this one begins. It doesn't begin with, you know, Audrey was born so and so. There is a story. A princess comes to Rome. She is tired of being a princess, which is so terribly official and so terribly boring, which could turn a vibrant young woman into a mannequin. She escapes from her entourage and falls asleep, much like a princess near the Colosseum. A journalist finds her there and allows her to spend the night in his place. Soon he recognizes who the woman sleeping in his apartment really is. The next day he and a crony take her around Rome. At last she feels free to gallivant, getting her hair cut, eating ice cream, and racing around on a motor scooter. The princess and the journalist fall in love that day. But it is only for a day. They must return to their lives and their obligations, and they do. There is a story. A woman is about to divorce her husband. She returns to her home in Paris to find that bear stripped of every possession. Furthermore, her husband is dead. He was tossed off a moving train, happily or strangely or coincidentally, or all the above. The woman has met a man who shows up and says he will help her. Who is this man? This is where you all say, Carrie Grant, he has many names. Meanwhile, the woman learns that her husband filched a fortune and that others believe she has that fortune. They are willing to kill to retrieve that fortune. But she doesn't know where it is. Over and over she protests that she doesn't know where it is. She isn't lying. She seems incapable of lying. And there is a story. Two filthy rich brothers live in a mansion on Long Island. They are so rich they have a chauffeur. The chauffeur has a daughter who has recently returned from Paris. Everything important in the world of emotion emanates from Paris, not from Long Island. The young woman is beautiful, scintillating, and full of the most marvelous life. Which brother will end up with her? But more to the point, is she interested in either of them? She has been to Paris. They are used to looking down. Now they have to look up. These are stories that compose the plots of movies. But they are the stuff of fairy tales too. Princeses, fortunes, wishes, and mistaken identities. They could not have happened, but on the screen they do. That sense of impossibility coming true is the most delicious fabrication for above all movies purvey romance. There must be something heady and swooning and yet difficult that informs falling in love. There must be something magical because love is magical. No one knows where it comes from or how long it will last or whether both people will feel it. Love is the last incalculable. Lust is boorish and sweaty. Romance burns with a cool heat. It inspires wit. It fences with feelings. It is a prelude that may somehow become a full-blown lifelong symphony every day shot through with deep kisses or it may fizzle into indifference or contempt or revulsion. The swelling lyrical strings on the soundtrack only lasts so long. That however is the beauty of movies. They don't have to tell the whole story because no one really wants the whole story. People sit there in the dark to inhabit the part of the story where the princess wakes up or the treasure is found or the brothers weep for love. The whole story is tedious. That's why there are artists to find the magic part of the story. I have a student at the moment who actually is involved in scriptwriting and directing and he said when he pitches his next movie he's going to quote that sentence. There are endless competing stories like the young girl who hid in an attic and could fight at her feelings to a diary. Like the princess or the young woman who returned from Paris, she was full of life. It was all wrong that she had to hide but there was no fairytale within her story. Her story occurred in the bloody shrieking maw of history. She was 15 when she died. No one even knew how many were murdered nor could numbers have told you what it was like to hold your breath when you heard footsteps on the stairs or wish you could go outside to feel the wind in your hair or be shepherded to your pointless death. What are people supposed to make of that story? Are they supposed to continue with their daily tasks or are they supposed to say this must not happen again anywhere? Or are they supposed to forget as if the story of the girl with glasses and dark hair never happened? Or are the stories of wars and killings too much for the person who pushes some money forward and announces to the ticket seller? One, please. One mere person, when the Hollywood moguls insisted on a happy ending, they knew that one life could only support so much bleak weight. They knew that this was another beauty of the movies. They were weightless. They occurred on a screen suspended in darkness in midair. Even when they portrayed the eventual murder of a 15-year-old girl, there was something weightless present. The movies were another realm. They organized contrivance in ways that exceeded every known art. They possessed an inherent magic, a blend of machine and spirit no one had imagined before. No one would ever improve on that magic because like a mask or mummery, it was unique. Audrey did not grow up at the movies. She was born in the same year as Anne Frank, and she lived during the war in the same country. Their faces show the same delicate, irrepressible vitality. So again as I read through this, one thing you might think about is when you're doing this, and again it's like poetry, it's a bit like a recipe. You're putting in different ingredients basically to try to make a whole. It was brutally cold. There was no heat. They were rounding up people. There was no more food. You could hear rifle shots. It was the middle of the 20th century and people were eating grass. They tried to make bread out of grass. The children cried and cried. People got very sick and died. Some people were taken from their homes and executed. Many homes were set fire to. People trudged along on roads though they didn't know where to go. They had only their lives. They tried to hold on but it felt that there was nothing to hold on to. Every lasting stay had fallen away. Every story had crumpled. If you have the emptiness of war in your stomach you might save out a bit of food or maybe if you have food you will gorge until you pass out. Either way the emptiness will have consumed you. Audrey wanted to dance. There was that letting go and that spirited grace. This is how the body speaks one of her teachers said. The poise came naturally to her amid the large and small tragedies war and her father leaving when she was a little girl something in her grasp how precious balance was. The ballet poses emanated from classical attitudes the joy of a rigor. But what underlay those poses was the tenuous arc between the bearable and the unbearable. Great feeling was bound to wobble. Audrey was too tall to be a ballerina and the war left her behind those who had continued to study. Still she could dance. She was filled with springy boisterous energy and yet unlike the century she was born into she didn't believe in the genius of restlessness. For the 20th century people could be merely harmless old-fashioned and even a bit charmed in the way that peasants once considered a tree or a star or a donkey to be charmed. For the 20th century there had to be vandguards moving ever forwards and vandguards in front of vandguards. Death to Baba Yaga death to Sibyl Hans death to fairies and sprites and elves fancy the Midsummer Night's talent for turning nothing into something was one of the centuries first casualties. One of the wonders of this mere girl-woman was her ability to stick out her tongue and make a face. If you can't make fun of what is important you can't have fun. Children know that it's part of how they survive but adults too often prefer the future to the now. They have sworn sacred oaths they have consecrated tasks they have class enemies ethnic enemies, tribal enemies religious enemies they are powerful words that could both summon and unleash loathing. A child and two-its are this wretched seriousness that adults their wretched faces and tight words. In her plucky way the child mattered much more than the men on podiums haranguing crowds and commanding armies. They can murder her of course the way they murdered Anne Frank but though they can try they can't murder everyone. One of the wonders of Audrey was her ability to make fun of herself. She could let her ego pass by between who she was and who at any given time she might become. There was a movable distance that nurtured and settled her. She could play a princess or daughter of a chauffeur with equal ardor. She possessed within her narrow body great latitude. When in a hotel in Monte Carlo, Colette you know the great French writer recognized Audrey as the perfect Gigi for a forthcoming Broadway version a total, utterly unpredictable happenstance it made perfect sense. Audrey was waiting but not waiting she was simply present. Colette wrote that Audrey was pecan't. More than once Colette had stuck out her sly tongue she knew what she was looking for. Audrey protested she had never acted on the stage. She had been a corine and bit player in a few not very good movies. Doubt and honesty made a tandem out of Audrey for a lifetime. Colette who would have not been a bad choice as a role model for a female deity reassured her. In her worldly way Colette understood how the 20th century needed female deities desperately. Pecan was part of the description so were graceful, resilient, candid and marvelously vital a pure spark of the life force. Sometimes the word worship was used to defy the adoration a movie star like Audrey could elicit. An embarrassing word but an understandable one not because the screen was famously larger than life but because the camera showed people in a way people had never before been shown. Audrey's face with its delicacy and seeming guilelessness was meant for close ups. It wasn't that she had extraordinary dramatic range so much as an ability to convey tiny moment by moment shifts in her being. There was no great rage or pity in her. There was however a talent for being herself even as she was being someone else. A deity can't do that. A deity is stuck cursed with omnipotence. People can believe or disbelieve but a god to say nothing of the monotheistic god is timeless. If modern times were bereft of greater certainties the shifts of actors on screens offered an uncanny degree of recompense. Two or so hours of agreeable oblivion did not equal salvation but Audrey had seen what the Nazis did to prayers. She was patient as she went through take after take with fussy directors like William Weiler but she had no patience for male sanctimony. When as often happened in her movies a man began to lecture her. You knew she was waiting beneath a smile or pal to dish it back to him. You didn't trust in the world that men had made. If as an actress no one asked her for an opinion beyond clothes and what is Gregory Peck really like that only showed the poverty of thought that surrounded her. Her pretty head was much more than pretty. Truman Capote wasn't the right actress for breakfast at Tiffany's but Truman Capote liked to complain. It was one way he knew he was alive. Peck was his oxygen. Supposedly Audrey played a call girl on the story but there was little to no hint of in the movie made from of sex in the movie made from Capote's book. A few years ago Lightly's modus operandi was to duck out to the ladies room after taking 50 bucks from the guy and not come out. It wasn't a great way to spend your life but it didn't seem to particularly matter to her. She lived in her imagination as much as she lived in New York City. The important human race was a romantic which was to say a person who honored her feelings in a world that didn't honor feelings. There is nothing especially realistic in how Holly go Lightly is portrayed. We don't see pissed off guys stave in the ladies room door or haggle about the specifics of her services. She is charming and thus a droid at keeping the world at bay. That seems part of Audrey's core. The world will violate you one way or another. What happens after romance is the tedium of getting along with another person. In that sense movies that delved into marriage had to be comedies of the sort the other that burned often started. One weighty stupid confused day must collide with another. Yet somehow or other the wires of romance must be reattached. I'll read for about five minutes more and then we can talk some so I may get to the end and I may not. Holly go Lightly is not one for marriage. Her comedy is about isolation. It's pleasures and pitfalls. Holly must be safe from that state no matter that she seemed quite okay staring in Tiffany's window all by herself and that the love interest was George Papard who managed to be both preening and wooden at the same time. Not a great actor George Papard. Sorry. The two of them must kiss in the rain at the end of the movie to affirm romance even though the beauty of Holly is that she doesn't give a rat's ass for the lower forms of romance. It isn't that she is hard. Audrey could never have portrayed someone who was hard. Holly's eye is set on a higher prize. Tiffany symbolizes that prize but a viewer feels that more is going on with Holly and with Audrey than standing outside in the early morning and looking at jewelry. Holly believes in beauty and style and Audrey as Holly embodies that. The notion of Holly as merely a call girl someone to fuck is ludicrous. It isn't that Audrey isn't sexy in her coy, breathless way. She is very sexy. A fellow Korean who danced with Audrey at the beginning of Audrey's career lamented that although she, the Korean had and I quote the biggest tits on the stage everyone's eyes were on Audrey. The ravishing truth was that Holly wasn't merely anything. She might portray a call girl or a nun or a princess but all those roles partook of what a fellow actor called her and I quote spiritual beauty. Right there in front of the camera Audrey's role was happening but something else was happening too something rare amid the celebration of the external that movies of necessity indulge there was some internal spirit that was animating the call girl or the nun or the princess that not only would not equivocate but could not equivocate. Spirit always steps in from another world we don't know what that world is because all we have to go on are intimations. There was Audrey's childhood and the pall of abandonment that attended her a sort of luminous shadow there was her native Elan there was the feeling that she intuited more than ever could be put into language and so her facial expressions formed a higher language. There was her voice which at times was so girlish it might have floated away there was the stark suffering of someone who miscarried a number of times who literally has lost life and been transfigured by grief there was an edge that came from being treated roughly by human unkind there was the awareness that emotion can't stop tanks and bullets and awareness likely to breed a degree of both despair and hard-headed honesty. There was her physical presence how at any moment she was in touch with the gestures of dance each movement could be precious and there was something indomitable at once tender and powerful and blind she famously played a blind woman in the terrifying wait until dark her feel for the role of someone who refused to be powerless yet was achingly vulnerable was flawless one more paragraph Audrey kept the press at bay she lived most of the time in Switzerland far from the picture snapping crowd she didn't want to be in that emptiest and silliest of categories a star like any serious person faced with the helter-skelter of modern circumstances she wanted to find out who she was though it was a long home being in front of the camera helter So that's most of the way through Audrey a couple more pages there I hope that gives you a sense of what I'm trying to do in this book the people as I say are very different from one another but basically the question that I began with still pertains which is that person who is Audrey Hepburn who is Rosa Parks and again thinking about the imaginative quality of the person's life I'll open it up but I'm working on a book now about one of the great imaginers of our era Bob Dylan and it's based on a sentence from Bob Dylan and a lot of what Bob Dylan says in interviews is just how to say elaborate making fun of the person asking the question but this one I think really came from inside him pretty deep and the sentence is imagination was what there was and really all you had and I think that sentence is what I'm writing about in here if we stop and think a sentence that has a lot to do for each of us with how we live, who we are and what we're doing here so I will open it up now if you have any questions or thoughts or anything you want to bring up about my nominal topic of the day writing about people maybe you just read the 960 pages about Ulysses S. Grant I want to talk about him so I'll open it up to questions if you have questions sure who is that person right do you think that you approach that I don't want to say objectively no I don't what are you sure of course yeah well we know that objectivity is a myth the scientists have told us that one so inevitably there's a subjective element which is a billion things conditioned to who the biographer is historical circumstance go read a biography of Thomas Jefferson from 30 years ago then go read one where they found out what was going on in back of the mansion going to be a little different take Thomas Jefferson so history enters into that historical circumstance for me it's basically what are your values as a writer really so obviously if you're a professional historian then your values are what to you is a professional historian my values are empathy and imagination those are my values I'm happy to stand and fall with that do I know what Rosa Parks was thinking of course not how could I possibly and by willing to try absolutely so that's the short answer to a big question good question Peter tell us a little bit about the research you do in preparation for yeah I read a lot of books but I didn't read all the books and basically I already had feelings about all these people I wouldn't have written these pieces if I didn't have feelings to begin with so that's where it started and then I just read enough to feel that I had a hook an insight into where I wanted to go with it because I know I wanted to write about as I say essences I'm not telling the whole story I'm not interested in the whole story so I just read enough to give me a feeling and that varied honestly and I mean some of the some of the stuff I mean one of these is about James Jesus Angleton I don't know if that name rings that he bells with the audience Angleton Angleton was head of counterintelligence for the CIA in the 50s and 60s so I mean you could read about Angleton but there is no truth we don't know you know we'll never know you know so it raises all kinds of issues that way right away right out of the gate in terms of I mean I read books about Angleton but I mean the keeper of the secrets so I read books I did read questions five minutes more questions sure sure all right good good sure sure sure yeah well good that's all the prose books I've written that's where I'm always trying to go thank you the nature of memory and what we can't play from the years in which we lived so many artists are doing retrospectives on the 20th century certainly there are so many things being written about both of the great wars about the McCarthy so and the new criticism that has evolved in the last 30-40 years tells us the point you were making that reality is a construct and each of us constructs ours right so what are the boundaries what are the ethical boundaries about constructing reality and one little thing I went to a play a Portland stage company that was based upon the lives of the right brothers but it in no way respected any of the conventional rules about biography and it invented a wife that the two brothers shared and I found myself sitting in the audience and I was just furious it was the first time I came up against that emotion in myself how dare you take reality and shape it just to suit you or just to play so are there rules or are there boundaries where are we that's the beginning of a week long symposium very very very briefly okay that's a great question one of my one of my writer friends who is non-fiction writer he draws a line between truth and truthful truth is if you checked into a rehab facility there should be a record that you checked into a rehab facility if you write a memoir that you checked into a rehab facility and you tell people the name of it and you check the records and you weren't there that's untruthful now if you are telling people it's a memoir and you were there you are lying on the other hand if you are writing about something and you couldn't you weren't there but you have a strong feeling based on reading and intuition and empathy you are being truthful okay but you are not saying this is swearing on a bible now the issue you raise is a big one in terms of how is it presented basically in other words my book is called legends of the slow explosion I'm telling you in the preface these are quotes legends so I'm not offering this as whatever biographical gospel but there's another huge issue that you bring up which basically is how wide of a screen do you want to show when you are writing about someone okay and that's where things get really really interesting right because a good example is in most of the screens in terms of writing about history in particular well for starters there are no women in the screen well what was with that you know and there were no minority groups so I'm saying that that's a big one is how and then people start to think well actually the real story isn't the so called real story it's over there with someone on the margin you know so it's a great question but a really complex that's a very brief answer right same terrain no question for better and worse right audience you do you just say if you spend your life as a poet in America you don't spend your life thinking about a quotes audience so so no that would not not pertain to me honestly okay well 230 was lovely to be with you this afternoon I do have some books for sale which you like to part with your hard-earned money so thank you again