aloud
The two shows at the Oregon Convention Center this weekend were the Hoilday Food & Gift Fair and Wordstock. I was surprised to find that at the entrance, I couldn’t tell who was headed for which event.I wasn’t planning to go to Wordstock. Its name makes me think of the literary gathering in Wonderboys – selfserious and cliquey and narrated by a weary Michael Douglas. But on Saturday morning I was talking to an old friend about my breakup, and she said it was for the best. You like to do things, she reminded me. You need to date someone who makes time for concerts and readings. And I realized I haven’t been to a reading in a very long time.
So Saturday I heard John Hodgman and Sunday I heard Alison Bechdel and Selden Edwards and Rachael King. I forget Portland is such a literary place, because it’s not a community I’m part of, and because I still carry around my inner East Coast Arts Snob. Like, Oh, people create things outside of New York?
And Rachel King described how she started writing like this: I realized if I was going to be the writer I always knew I was going to be, I had to actually write something. I like that.
And then I heard William Least Heat Moon, who wrote Blue Highways in 1980 when his marriage dissolved and he headed out in a van around the country. He just completed a second book, twenty five years later, while traveling with his second wife. An audience member asked whether he preferred traveling alone or with a partner. If I’d traveled with somebody for Blue Highways there would have been no book, he said, because back then I didn’t know how to pay attention with somebody else present.
I used to believe I had to choose between paying attention – to what was around me, to what I wanted to do and get done – and having somebody else present. And usually I would choose the former, and occasionally I would choose the latter. And only recently, like maybe yesterday, did it occur to me that just because I don’t yet know how to do both at the same time doesn’t mean it’s not an option.
In my relationship with Operaman, we both felt like we had to choose. He chose paying attention, and I chose him. In choosing, we both chose poorly. Now I remember why I used to go to readings.
posted by tortaluga @ 10:08 AM
1 Comments:
"I realized if I was going to be the writer I always knew I was going to be, I had to actually write something."
Oh, I'm keeping that one for a while...
Post a Comment
<< Home