[Atwood told her audience in the Duke Family Performance Hall that she would speak about something she’d never spoken about before: “influences you didn’t know were influences while you were having them.”The first such influence she mentioned was her 11th grade English teacher. Although this teacher, when asked about her former pupil’s early promise, had replied, “She showed no particular talent,” Atwood remembered her fondly. She was mesmerized by this woman, who had long, thin, floating hair and would recite Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” with her eyes shut and arms outstretched.
She included the poem in “The Blind Assassin” (2000) as a kind of tribute to her teacher, Atwood said.
Unafraid to poke fun at her younger self, Atwood shared her early life plan: to churn out money-making stories during the day and devote her evenings to crafting works of staggering genius.
She tried her hand at writing True Romance stories. She described the typical True Romance cover: a woman crying, and in the background, another woman in the arms of a man.
The plots were “not difficult to devise,” she said. One man might work in a shoestore while “the other rides a motorcycle.” The woman makes the wrong choice and then “something happens on the sofa.” ”It was done with dots,” Atwood said. “‘And then we were one, dot dot dot …’”“I could do the plots,” Atwood said, “but I could not do the dots.”
After that, she decided she wanted to be a journalist, but her parents “dredged up a real journalist,” a distant family member, who told her that she’d be relegated to writing “ladies pages” and obituaries.
She decided to get a degree and teach English. After that, her plan was to run away to France, “become an absinthe drinker,” get tuberculosis and die young like Keats, having written works of staggering genius in a garret.]
Some of my traveling companions have been “training” for this, which we will do up in Kingston, NY this weekend. I have not. I’m counting on my Scottish background to put me in close proximity to the luck that will apparently be overflowing from every extra-cold tap in the area.
[video]
“L’Air Fooding” - a diet for budding Baudelaires and Futurists and French people. “The rules are simple: eat nothing, except for the water and salt soup.”
Who else cannot wait for the National Air Eating Championships? Someone is totally going to shred on some lettuce.
“A Dan Rather Reports producer needs immediate assistance translating Kinyarwanda to English for a television news piece currently in production. This is a paid assignment. If you are fluent in Kinyarwanda and English - or know some who is - please contact [retracted] ASAP!”
Upon investigation into a job I’ll never have, I am finding that Kinyarwanda is a stellar language. Bananas is said “imineke”, hot chili is “urusenda,” and When Will the Food Be Ready? is “Bigeze he?” I’m starting with only essential words first.
CORRECTION!: Before, I wrote that “I believe this is the exact origin of the breakdown in the middle of “All Night Long (All Night),” which was wrong, as “Jambo” is indeed a Rwandan phrase BUT Lionel Richie apparently just made the damn thing up. According to my certified fact-checker M, Richie has said this: “I called the UN and said ‘I need something African for the breakdown in this song I’m writing.’ They informed me that there are thousands of different African dialects. I couldn’t believe it. One region doesn’t have any idea what the other is taking about. So, ‘Tambo liteh sette mo-jah!’? I made it up on the spot. Now I think that ‘Jambo’ might have a meaning in Swahili (it does- “hello”), but you gotta be careful because it might mean ‘welcome’ in one dialect and you might get your head cut off for saying it in another.”
Not great, Lionel.
“Early on I tried fiction, but I wasn’t very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a drawer somewhere. I was a schoolteacher, I taught seventh and eighth grade and I tried to write fiction on the side. I tried a few grad school programs because I didn’t know how to make it … Eventually, I was desperate for a job and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington D.C. called The Hill. Even though my interest in politics wasn’t huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.” — The Lost City of Z author and New Yorker contributor David Grann’s audio tales of early floundering in the world of letters is about as encouraging as anything else on the Internets at this minute. It is certainly quicker than 1) reading Po Bronson’s entire website; 2) tracking down a dog-eared copy of “What Color is Your Parachute?” at the Strand; 3) napping.
Amy Morton and Tracy Letts to Play George and Martha in Virginia Woolf for Steppenwolf -
THIS IS A REALLY SERIOUS REASON TO TRAVEL TO CHICAGO HOW CAN I GET A TICKET OH MY GOOD LORD.
[video]
[video]
[video]