 Welcome to Bear Pond Books for the reading with local author Baron Wormser. He will read and talk about his second novel, Tom of Vietnam. This is a different kind of novel that blends the craft of storytelling with history and war and love of the English language. I found it's like the language of Shakespeare pulls the story out of Tom, or Tom uses the story of King Lear to make sense of the story of Vietnam. And I'd love to share a little passage that I found just from the beginning of the novel, which I think kind of explains the premise of the book quite nicely. When we were doing nothing and going nowhere, the guys would ask me, hey college, tell us a story. I told them about Lear. How would you like it if you had two daughters who take what you give them, a lot of land and a big house, and then they treat you like squat? How would you like that? Mr. Twice, I extended the situation as in you could have nation problems. You're a big nation who goes to help some little nation that's getting pushed around, but maybe it's not as simple as getting pushed around. There's a civil war. There's a small mountain of barbed history. There's some thoughts called ideology. Idea what? What you say? Speak American. He let his daughters fuck with him. Do deserve it. Man's gotta be a man. Die elements below. Where is this daughter? Like in a play we talked back. No script beyond what we were making up, but we talked back. It meant we were still alive. The storm hadn't come for us yet. We had no shelter, no hovel, but the storm that waited for each of us hadn't come yet. So I'm sure he's gonna do a better job than just reading, but if you haven't picked up this gorgeous book already, I urge you to buy a copy. We have them up front and some right here. You can get your book signed tonight, and you can support a favorite author and a favorite bookstore. Tonight's reading will be about an hour, including time for talking and Q&A from the audience. And I'd like to remind everyone at this time to please mute or turn off your cell phones. And I'd like to let you know that we do lock the front door during the reading, and we'll open it after the reading. If you need to exit at any time, the back door is open. There's also a bathroom toward the back of the store. It's to the right of the back door. And I'd like to thank Orca Media for filming tonight's event. If you'd like to see this video, we send it out in our e-newsletter, and you can sign up here in the passing round. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter at Bear Pond Books. And I'd like to let you know about our next event, which is this Friday, February 2nd. It's part of the Montpelier Art Walk. We have Martin Phillip coming. He's the head bread baker at Norwich, at King Arthur Flower in Norwich. And he's coming to talk about his cookbook, Breaking Bread, a baker's journey home in 75 recipes. And that'll be from 5 to 7 p.m. this Friday. And by signing up for the newsletter, you'll learn about events like that. Oh, and he'll have fresh baked bread samples. Of course. Save the date for that. We do also have refreshments tonight. Please help yourself. But more importantly, we have here Baron Wormser, whose books include Scattered Chapters, New Inselected Poems, The Road Washes Out in Spring, A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, Unidentified Sighing Objects, and the Poetry Life Ten Stories. Baron has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005, he was the state poet laureate of Maine. He has taught many dozens of workshops across the United States, workshops in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. And he teaches in the Fairfield University MFA program. He lives right here in Montpelier. We're so very lucky to have him. Please help me welcome Baron Wormser. Thank you, Samantha. Thank you all for turning out on this cold evening. Much appreciated. I have the honor this evening, which I don't think has occurred during the course of doing these readings over decades to have my daughter, my wife, and my sister in the audience tonight. So, okay, a few things. I'm going to read from a section. This is a road novel. I'm going to pick it up a little past the halfway point. Tom is going on a series of bus rides from Santa Fe to Washington, D.C. There are a few things that you need to know about Tom. Tom's emotional distress manifests itself in crying. So he weeps, as they used to say. King Lear, which is Tom's Bible, the book Tom carries around with him, is full of images of tears of crying. Tom's situation, his distress, stems from in the war he was drafted. He is in a firefight in a village, and he shoots a girl, and he's not sure what she has in her hand. He's not sure if it's a grenade or a doll, and that troubles him. Now another thing. Tom wears a jacket, and the jacket is a homemade of Tom's design and provenance. On the front of the jacket, there is a broken purple heart and a flag of the Republic of South Vietnam. On the back of his jacket, he is written, freedom is hell. And he wears his jacket all the time. So we're going to pick this up on the bus. No one gets on in Lima, but Dayton is full of people heading east. A number of them eye the seat beside me, but head down the aisle in search of more amenable pastors. Let poor folk pass. I have been known to be ill-disposed, fragments inside me, trying to get out. Anyone claim this seat? It's a teenage girl, maybe around 16. She's clutching a small backpack to her chest. Her voice is breathy, maybe a little scared. Claim? What script is this? I wave a welcoming hand, and she sits down, but rigidly, holding onto the backpack for what my mother habitually called dear life. To whomever it may concern, and I hope it concerns someone, I am writing to tell you that I am not dead yet, said Knightley, dictating to Tom. Knightley is Tom's mentor in the war. He's an African-American fellow soldier. Headed all the way through, I ask. She turns her head. She wasn't expecting a question. Maybe that's why she sat here, thinking I was the silent type. To wheeling, she says, I have a cousin there I'm going to visit. But my parents don't know I'm going. So I'm sort of running away. She lets go of the backpack enough to start twirling a piece of her long, dark hair. She really is a cousin. It's not like when you tell the guidance counselor that a friend of yours is pregnant, which means that you're pregnant. Know what I mean? She stops the twirling and looks at me. Brown eyes, flecked with green. She has a widow's peak, too, that little V of hair at the top of her forehead. I know what you mean. I need to say something more. She's looking at me to say something. It's best I say if we own what we say. What crap. She wants more than platitudes. But Edgar tends to platitude, doesn't he? When he finally tells, this is in King Lear. When he finally tells his father who he is, his father dies. Maybe he should have kept quiet. The weight of this sad time we must obey, he says at the end. No one has obeyed much of anything throughout the whole play. Everyone keeps challenging everything, and Edgar preaches obedience. He barely has anyone to speak to. Practically everyone's dead. There's been a war in the background and a war in the foreground. The war of the family, the enmity compounded a familiar strife. Maybe at the end he's numb, a human ruin. Maybe it's amazing he can talk at all. I don't get along at home, she says. It's not one big thing, but a lot of little things. Hassles trying to keep me from growing up. Always telling me what to do and what to watch out for. I guess they mean well, but I need some time out. She puts the backpack, which has been sitting in her lap, onto the bus floor and pulls out a book to catch her in the rye. She shows me the book and opens it and then looks at me, and all of a sudden she's crying real loud and almost hysterical. And other people on the bus start craning their necks and then she leans her head into my side so the sound is lessened, but she's still crying. I guess I attract it, a walking soap opera. All the tears held back in the play fall on me. Is something wrong, a woman behind those ass? There usually is when people cry, I say. The woman snorts a fuck you, Jack Snort. Did you ever, another woman says? The girl stops heaving, this all doesn't take long, but feels like those war moments when time got lost, when the moments were much bigger than you. It was like drowning. What time is it? It's the wrong time. That's what time it is, said Knightley. She raises her head, wipes at her nose with the cuff of her jacket, then sweeps her hair back. Sorry, she says. I, it's all worse than I said. You knew that, right? I, but I don't want you to help me. You understand? I didn't sit down next to you so you could help me. I have to do these things for myself. Being away is something I'm doing for myself. She takes another wipe with her cuff. I'm so embarrassed making a scene like that, like I'm a little cry baby or something. It would be a better world if more people cried in public. There's too much business and not enough crying. Be your tears wet. You're good with crying? I mean, do you cry? You've got that jacket on and you cry? Too much and not enough. That's like something Holden might say. Did you read this when you were my age? But and another cuff wipe to her nose. What's the book you've got there? It looks pretty beat up, King Lear. I like beat up books. It's like love, the kind where you can't let go. I've been in love twice. It sucks. I know who Shakespeare is. I read Julius Caesar last year. I can't say I was crazy about it. It didn't have much to do with me living in Dayton. King Lear doesn't just have something to do with me. It is me. What's that you're saying? For many miles about, there's scarce a bush. I got a reason. It's a rifle, said Knightley. Sometimes there's no space between you and the book. Maybe the catcher is a little like that for you. A little. Holden's a guy, so there's that. He sort of lays it on too thick. The way guys lay it on too thick. He sees shit, though. She puts her hand over her mouth. Whoops, I said a swear. I don't know what help I could give you anyway. I look down at Lear, which is the conflated text. I like that word. You don't see it much. Rhymes with elated, misstated, praded. The words are always there in the background, chiming away the supporting cast. You already have helped, Mr. Tom. Mr. Tom. Maybe you'll tell me about the play. People wander around. People do bad things to other people. People suffer. No one really knows what's happening, but everyone keeps talking. Sometimes the talk is like lightning in the night. Sometimes it's silly. Sometimes it's mean, very mean. Sometimes you have to put the book down. Or if you were watching the play, you'd have to close your eyes. Things go really wrong. That seems kind of chicken to close your eyes. Maybe it would be like if you told me the worst thing and then something happened to you that was even worse. Even worse, I am only sorry. He had no other deathsmen. We should let this stuff go. It's been good to meet you. Your name is Lisa. She declares in a forthright front-of-the-stage voice. You're right. I have to think about what I'm going to do next. I mean, after I talk to my cousin, Cordelia, what comes into my head again is Cordelia. How old was she? Did she have a widow's peak? I've told Doreen, that's his lover, about Cordelia. She's read the play more than once, but it's more than reading the play. There's a sense of how Cordelia is telling us something, but it's not just in her words. It's her being, the way the war is in my being. There's something in her being. I can call it goodness, but it's not the right word. It has to do with her being alive and being charged with love. And it's a charge, like a command, but it's natural too, like a flower or a horse, but not sentimental, too hearted. I look over at Lisa, who's writing in what looks like a diary. Cordelia has to die. That's the crux. Is her love impossible? Is that why she has to die? Or maybe she's practical and honest. Like when she talks about how she's going to love her husband, not only her father. But why does she have to die then? Is it like when everything starts to go to hell so there's no other place to wind up but hell? You can't expect to pull sunshine out of hell. Myself could else out frown, false fortunes frown. You got your share of worrisome thoughts there, Tom. Not doing you much good, though, said nightly. Rockets coming when it's coming. Take heed, this blunted world's a heedless place. Lisa looks up from her writing. It's a journal. I've been keeping it since I was 12. It's the one thing I have that's mine. But I'm wondering, Mr. Tom, where are you headed? DC, I'm going to see a girlfriend, spend some time with one of my sisters, check out an old buddy, maybe do a little sightseeing. Take in a few memorials. Sort of a vacation? Or are you sort of always on vacation? Well, no, actually. Lisa waves a hand that still has her pen in it. So you probably figured out I'm on this bus because my parents are both drunks. Not just one of them, but both of them. My dad works in an office and comes home and drinks one after another, so he's blotto by nine o'clock. My mom's at it all day, so she's semi-coherent when my dad comes home. And they act as though we're a family, and then she's out of it by nine o'clock too. And I guess that's when I come to life. I guess I'm a night person who has to go to school all day and raise her hand and gossip about which boy you'd like to bone you. And where did you get those shoes? She points to the journal. I filled a bunch of these things. Well, don't feel sorry for me, Mr. Tom. I've got life in front of me, right? That's what I tell myself. I've got some nicks in me, but that's okay. You're wise, Lisa, beyond your years. You could be in this play and I'd point to the book. There's a sort of wisdom here, not the spume of rhetoric or a drizzling wit or self-satisfied shibboleths, but intelligence that's born from the travails of experience, confusion, betrayal, pride. You talk a little funny, Mr. Tom. Do you know that? Where do you come from? I'll look no more lest my brain turn and the deficient sight topple down headlong. Uncle Sam Lant, it's due west of Dover. Lisa ducks her head. I've got to write more. By now, I met this strange guy in a funny jacket on the bus. Ohio passes by in that one November light that suits Ohio. Lisa looks up. Did you see people get killed? She looks steadily at me, but with a child's look. She might as well be asking if I have an apple in my pocket. I did. It's only two little words, but they sound husky. The feeling comes on like that. And did you kill people? A lot of people are shooting all at once. It can be hard to tell. It can be impossible to tell. You're so out of your mind while trying to stay in your mind that you aren't the world's most reliable observer. It's not like hit the balloon with the BB gun at the county fair. Do I see the girl coming toward me? I see the girl. I'm sorry, Mr. Tom. I'm really sorry. Now her voice has cracks in it, then she reaches a handout and touches my hand. I'm sorry too. I say, here is a pocket full of sorry. Hold out thy hands, except this nothing. More Ohio, and then Wheeling, and Lisa's getting up, and I do too. Time to stretch my bust-bound legs. We shake hands at the station. There's no one there to meet her, but she goes to a phone and makes a call while I try not to hover nearby. But I keep an eye out, as if I could do something for her. She talks some and then hangs up and gives me a little wave, and she's out the door. Holden lives. No one told Shakespeare these stories on a bus. He read them and this or that book and then made a lot up. It's nothing against my story or Lisa's story or the guy in front of me at the station's ancient newsstand who's buying the local paper and a payday candy bar. It's that there are larger stories, and he told them. Our stories are small, and they press in on us. You cross off the days behind you, not the days before you. Doing this, being here. You need the right arithmetic, said Knightley. I buy a payday and then call up Paula. Paula is his third sister who's visiting in DC. It's, I know my brother's voice. Where are you? Paula is smart. She tries to make life smart, too. On the heath, I say. The weather's sunshine and rain. Don't start in with the play, Tom. Let's just be in America now. Maybe you're in Cumberland, Maryland, Wheeling, West Virginia. I wasn't too far off. And you are arriving when? I don't know. I'd guess around six. There are these things called schedules. Buses run on them. Six, I say. It seems a truthful number. I'll see you then, she says. I'm looking forward to catching up. Bye. She's not one to spout the word love. When we were growing up, she was the explainer in the family. It's a big job. It's not that she's cold. It's that she has a hard time waiting for the world to catch up with her. I walk up and down the sidewalk outside the station while I eat my candy bar. I think of Lisa knocking on some door and wondering if the door will open. I think of Paula shaking her head after she puts the receiver down. I think of Doreen and then Knightley. I don't know where Knightley lives. The address I have, which is who knows how many years old is where his mother lives. Maybe he lives there. A guy goes to the other side of the world to fight a war and winds up living with his mother. I deposit the candy wrapper in a trash bin on whose side is written, don't litter. My arm extends this far but no further. My steps go this far to the verge but no further. Come, sit thou here, most learned justice. And what about those on that other side of the world who were there before we came? What about the people we were there to help and to whom we never really spoke, whose country we inhabited as we chased the enemy who also were people who were there before us? How could we transport one reality and set it down in another so that there was no reality but a bizarreness in which there was no up or down, right or wrong, day or night? Where did we get off doing that? American know-how, American not know-how. Everything greased by machines and money, headed everywhere in a hurry, capable of going anywhere and wanting to make them into us. Even as we said, we weren't interested in making them into us. No sirree, no way, Jack. Let them be Vietnam, often pronounced as two syllables, as in the nam, long e and wrenched nasal a. Just let it be our democratic Vietnam. Dennis the Menace, Bob Hope, President Nixon, Dallas Cowboys, all the tense jostled messianic joy of the last best hope. Let us do it, whatever it is. We can win, joke, do good and kill at the same time. Welcome to the Wheel of Fire. Did the President call while I was taking a dump ass nightly? Good question to ask tonight. I need another candy bar, probably a Coke too, to further ruin my insights. Eastbound bus leaving in five minutes. I look around for Lisa to appear. I touch my face. Have I been talking to myself again? I lack a proper stage. I wait until the last 30 seconds, but she's gone into her beckoning life. My copy of King Lear has reserved my seat for me, no sitting or lying down where tragedy lurks. Could be harmful to your soul's health, cause distressing dreams, and generally make you doubt the purposeful drift of your fibrous existence. Yes, madam or mister, your life is a miracle, but a miracle that proceeds from day to day is no longer a miracle, but rather a spectacle. And then after many days, no longer that, but a shapeless, colorless rag that you wear without a second thought because it is yours, your life, the once ravishing hole diminished to a possessive pronoun. No one sits beside me. There's enough room on this bus for everyone to have an area to him or herself. No need to accommodate oneself to some other self, however briefly or formally. Pleasantly the vast passing spaces of the continent echo inside us, a sort of metaphysical hum, long distance bus travel, being a relatively cheap tranquilizer. I finish my payday, salted peanuts and caramel, you can't beat it. Then I start at the beginning. I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. Businessmen commenting on another businessman, no women in sight and nothing actual, nothing but a thought on the part of Kent, not a tree or a pair or a kiss, but a thought that's bound to make more thoughts because that's what thoughts do. They're like the amoebas they taught us about in high school proliferating at blinding speed, heady and there's the specter of favoritism. If someone wins, someone loses. If someone is raised up, someone is cast down. It sounds biblical, but we know what's bound to happen. Division creates division. The equal parts are never equal. I down my coke, my stomach gurgles in protest. I see the dukes and the king as statesmen, secretaries of state and advisors, the guys who move the pawns around on the big board, the guys who are a galaxy away from the real pawns with their uniforms and dog tags and 30 second haircuts. They're the guys who show up and take a quick look and decide everything is okay because for them it is okay because they're not witnessing a war. They're witnessing their own thoughts. They live back home safe in their offices with their thoughts. But the guys in Shakespeare aren't safe, are they? They're in for some serious hell. Some of them are going to buy it. Those walls of words that our guys have aren't there for them. Would you turn that noise down? Someone who's two seats behind me is asking someone three seats behind me. The kid has headphones on, but there's some leakage. A sort of metal thud I can hear where I am as if Odin had a drum kit. You could scream that the apocalypse is coming in five minutes and the kid wouldn't hear you. The guy who has made the request stands up and mimes taking off the headphones. I've turned around to watch because I like theater and it's funny, isn't it? How after Canton Gloucester done talking about kingdom dividing, Gloucester starts talking about sex. What could be more natural? I bet Nixon and his henchmen did it all the time. Here's Vietnam and here's a smutty joke. Can you tell the difference? The kid with the headphones, who is draftable age, gangly, Big Adam's apple, takes off the headphones, but the music is still roaring. AC DC, he announces. He smiles, part truculent and part goofy. Look, says the other guy who's older, but not by a whole lot, maybe his late 20s. I have papers to go through and he waves a few manila folders with blue tabs on them. Please turn it down. Highway to hell, the kid says and looks around the bus as if searching for other AC DC fans. I don't care what it is, just turn it down. Okay, the kid says, I can do that. And he turns the volume down on his little machine. Highway to hell, he says one more time and puts the headphones back on. His smile is gone. He's a serious kid. His song matters. Thanks, the older guy says and sits back down to resume his share of America's never-ending work. A lady further back says she never heard of that song. She says she's a Liberace fan. A musical discussion ensues. I cannot conceive you, says Kent. The puns are relentless. I tried to explain it more than once tonightly who had more verbal sense than me who could have been some kind of professor but thought it was bullshit. Hard life takes the play out of you. I could use another payday. I could use Doreen's head on my shoulder. I could use sitting in Nightly's kitchen or his mother's kitchen and drinking a cup of coffee and not reminiscing but being in whatever present moment we could fashion for ourselves. I could use a headphone set myself. I keep meaning to make up a list of things I could use. I turn to the end of the play. Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms. There you have it. More words are spoken so that the unbearable becomes more unbearable. But that vision of Lear holding his dead daughter is not going away. The dead girl in the vision shouldn't go away but she shouldn't be everything because no one thing is everything. All the people on all these buses are telling me that and I'm trying to listen. And if it chokes me up and will always choke me up when I read the end of the play, it takes me to this exhausted place where human beings have done too much and talked too much and seen too much, then that's okay. For me, King Lear is like one of those necklaces, some guy's war to keep off the bad, death-dealing spirits. The play is full of bad spirits, terrible spirits. That comforts me. I'm not alone in this. The unbearable welcomes me. For a white boy, you got some crazy shit in you, Tom, said nightly. Thanks. So now we can do a little Q&A if you have any questions about this curious book. Sure. Do you name a date in this story? Pardon? Do you name a date when this takes place? This takes place in the fall of 1982. November, late October, beginning November, yeah. Talk about how you formulated this idea about King Lear and this character. How long was this going on? Doesn't everybody walk around thinking of King Lear? There are a few people in this room, probably you do actually, but we won't ask them to identify themselves. As many, some people in this room, the war has been with me my whole life. This book is dedicated to those who served and those who marched. It's been with me my whole life. I've carried that around. What happened there and what happened here? And that'll be with me. But then I've also been reading King Lear my whole life. And somehow where this book came from is an image which was of a guy on a bus with a copy of King Lear. And that image is what made the book happen. I could see this guy. Little disheveled with the book and clutching the book and that the book is his Bible. Because as the passage I just added with, the question the book asked, the question to be King Lear asks for a big one for us as human beings is, how do we bear what seems unbearable? And King Lear seemed the natural place to go. When the play, Tom is the fool. Right. And are you setting this Tom up as a fool? He's not right, he acts foolishly. He acts mad, is the mad, right? He's not the fool in terms of the role, right? Yeah, I am setting it up for him to be outside, basically of how to say standard behaviors because what's happened to him is put him outside of standard behavior. So his, let's say his view of American political life, for instance, is rather skewed, okay? Given what he's been through. So yeah, so he's in that place of being mad. So he has been, how do they say, unable to adapt. And but he, part of it is too, perhaps part of his madness is his love of Shakespeare. That the words, as he said, there's no space between him and the book. So yeah. You show that in the set up, the printing of the book, there's no space between his remarks, other people's remarks is a, I won't call it a want-of, but an absence of punctuation. And I guess that's a, the punctuation sometimes helps clarify who's speaking. It does. And the book, by the way, not with rapture, but graphically, I was RPT as I read it. I gradually got the swing of the different voices speaking. You've got to, especially at the beginning, you've got to sort things out and you wish a little bit for that, a little quotation mark. I'm sorry, Jules. I realize that's not your way. And I, you know, authorize you taking that license. And I got used to it. And, you know, to the end, there would be a little question of, come to the next line. Is that Shakespeare? Or is that? Worms are. And you pretty quickly, after page 10, after page 20, you sort things out. But I'm simply remarking for people who haven't read the book that there's occasionally a challenge because you abjure ordinary punk, what's become ordinary punk. I think there's not a quotation mark in the whole book, although there are different voices really coming back. And you get the hang of it. But would it have been to smudge things up to do your manuscript if you feel to? I'm not saying you'd use quotation marks. Because you get along well. On one bicep, you can't see it. I have William Faulkner written. And on the other bicep, Virginia Woolf. So both fiction writers, no quotation mark. So you're really in the swing of things. That's right. I'm 100 years late, Jules, but I'm kind of swinging with things. I'm not talking postmodern. This is just modernist, right? Yeah. Yes, Robbie? I'm interested to hear you talk a little bit about the sisters, about Tom's sisters in the book and the daughters in King Lear. Right. Right, yeah. Well, I didn't, how to say, I wanted to give Tom good sisters, okay? So I did not want to go to the place where Lear goes, okay? On the other hand, a big part of what the book is about is the effects of war on the women at home who have to deal with people who come back from the wars. So I knew right off that the three daughters were going to become three sisters and he was gonna visit the three sisters. So really, that's the main connection. It wasn't, I mean, I fool around, so to speak, with puns that are probably mercifully unknown to most people who haven't read King Lear a dozen times with the sisters. Well, mostly I just wanted the female perspective in there dealing, trying to deal with Tom and that's why he winds up eventually with his lover, Doreen, at the end of the book. So really, it's more the number that I took than who they are. Obviously, Cordelia is the one who weighs on him and the scene. I mean, someone reviewed the book in a newspaper in Maine where we lived for a long time and the way reviewers do, some reviewers, not all Robbie, some, he wrote about himself for the first half of the review. But one thing he said was that actually he was one of those people who watched King Lear every year on tape, but he said he can't do it anymore. He cannot watch the last act of King Lear anymore. He just can't do it. Did you take any bus trips to the course of this writing? No, I passed on that experience, right, but... You caught it well, though, by long-gone memories of writing a trail ways in 1980s, something. Yeah, yeah, it has a certain ambience, yeah. Yeah, yes, below. And did you have any feeling from the current affairs for writing this book? Yeah, of course. I mean, one of the epigraphs from the book in the book is from Martin Luther King Jr.'s Riverside Church Speech, which should be read by everybody in the School of the United States. And in that speech, he said, if America's soul becomes totally poisoned part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. And I think it's in the same speech. He talked about the three giants in this society which are racism, excessive materialism and militarism. And clearly, nothing's changed, that's where we are. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you may have covered this before, so if you have, I'll press the extinguisher button. So do you see the apparent... Is it in our DNA? Is war in our DNA? Is there any part of your analysis or thinking that sees any hope for us to escape? No. Where's it been in advance, sir? No. Oh. Far be it from me to offer hope. I mean, I'm no wonder, yeah, it's came here. King Lear is what? It's called a tragedy, right? Things turn out badly. So, incidentally along the way, we're here and it's wonderful and beautiful, but many things have turned out badly. So, Janet and I had a Buddhist teacher once who used to say, human beings, number one bad animal. Was that at the beginning or the end of meditation? After, yeah, that's after. Anymore, Jan Backel. I'm sorry, it's fun to that because in her whole surprise speech, Annie Prue said that we all keep hoping for, we believe in good endings, and we keep hoping for good endings and that's what keeps us alive. Doesn't keep me alive, I'm just happy here. Really, I mean, just, no. To counter Annie Prue, there's a proverb from Poland which is, hope is the mother of the stupid. The variant is from Bulgaria, hope was born stupid. So, different strokes for different folks. She has a right at the ending. All right, indeed, yeah, there you go. I have to say though, I think the protagonist at the end of the book doesn't seem to be entirely without the hopeful plans and the possibility of- Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. This book is not tragic in that way and that's part of what I think Tom learns in the book. It's what he says, it's not just one thing, it's many things, yeah, I agree. Actually, it is a hopeful book in that way. Helen. I think there's a process that he goes through and it doesn't end up with his being more, or the end is more hopeful than the beginning. At the beginning, he's, you know- Pretty down there. Yeah, and you could see him, you know, he's not been able to really hold a job or live with people and you see that beginning to change by the end. Well, let's face it, I mean, part of it, that to go back to it is, you know, the point you raised is war is terrifically hard stuff and I correspond with a guy in the Nevada State penitentiary, I've been writing to him for years. He said, as many people in our penitentiaries of war veteran of the Iraq war, and he is hanging on, you know, hanging on in prison, you know, but he wrote me about six months ago, he had met a guy who came in who also was an Iraqi war vet, you know, and that guy committed suicide. You chose King Lear as the background, that's the motif that keeps running through and by the war, that's very successful, it's kind of charming, it's almost aphorisms that keep popping up straight out of King Lear and your eyes sort of goggle a little bit until you realize, you know, after the second word, oh yes, this is Shakespeare again, but to come to the point of my question, do you think, looking at yourself, that you chose King Lear of all Shakespeare's work because it, like Vietnam, was sufficiently tragic, it was the most tragic thing you could drag out of Shakespeare to bring more focus into your tale about Tom, King Lear had to do it, and were you obsessed with, excuse me, were with King Lear way, way before, has that always been your dominating Shakespeare? Yeah, I mean, yeah, we'll all get together another night and pick our dominating Shakespearean tragedy, but yeah, mine would be King Lear. That happens to be mine too. Okay. I'm gonna do it. Okay, it's almost time, one more. Five, one more. Yes, yes, have you had any reaction from the Shakespeare academic community? Yeah, zero. I don't know, about a dozen advanced copies. What's it to him? So, I mean, honestly, so. How about the veteran community? Yeah, I definitely have heard from veterans and that's been really good to hear. People who are there, people in the other wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, yeah, yep. Baron, who did the cover design, the illustration? A designer out in the state of Minnesota. Y'all. You like it? No. Okay. In that note, we will call it an evening. Thank you all for coming out.