On Guest Lecturers

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of attending a special guest lecture for the Fall 2009 Hopwoods Awards ceremony. I have a habit of unabashedly attending these ceremonies regardless of whether or not I have won an award myself, and I would surely recommend to others to consider attending one in the future as it surely will not disappoint. The Hopwood program is known not only for giving away pretty sums of money to aspiring writers in the UM community, but also for inviting quite wonderful characters in the literary world to speak on a topic related to the art of writing every few months after the contest is administered (for more information click here). I recall a moment last year when I had shyly approached the speaker for last year’s fall ceremony, Tobias Wolff, with his short novel ‘Old School’ clutched in shaky hands, asking if he would so kindly, please, perhaps, sign the inside cover. He smiled warmly at me and took out his pen in flourish, writing quite an inspirational little message in a string of black ink, and after allowing the words to settle dry, handed the book back to me. I did not read it until I left the auditorium. It is a strange feeling that overwhelms me when I meet a writer in person, and I imagine it is something like the emotions that come over someone who meets their favorite athlete, their favorite band, or the President of the United States. In fact, Tobias Wolff touched upon the subject himself in that very book he had signed for me, ‘Old School’:

“We cared. And I cared as much as anyone, because I not only read writers, I read about writers. I knew that Maupasant, whose stories I loved, had been taken up when young by Flaubert and Turgenev; Faulkner by Sherwood Anderson; Hemingway by Fitzgerald and Pound and Gertrude Stein. All these writers were welcome by other writers. It seemed to follow that you needed such a welcome, yet before this could happen you somehow, anyhow, had to meet the writer who was to welcome you. My idea of how this worked wasn’t low or even practical. I never thought about making connections. My aspirations were mystical. I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems, hands that had touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed.”

Thus, the timing had been much too appropriate that year and I had left feeling much inspired and filled with the courage to write.

The man invited this year was the British, literary critic, James Wood who, although I had not read, imparted quite a bit of useful wisdom to writers of the upcoming generation. His speech revolved around the idea of Serious Noticing. That is, paraphrased from his lecture “seeing the world closely and carefully, opening the pores of sense to feel the world and thus transform it”. What I found incredibly interesting and worth reproducing here is his statement of how succeeding generations are much more inclined to fall into the hole of Unserious Not-noticing, with no rebuke or blame placed on their shoulders for this seemingly trendy attention deficit. Their fall could be attributed not to a personal character flaw, but the changing world dynamics. With the world becoming increasingly electronic and pixilated, it’s difficult to see the beauty or the horror in the real world when an LCD screen divides the spectator and the object, the moment of interest. Although allowing the network of the world to become increasingly well connected, Facebook and Twitter have their repercussions. The world, in sum, is becoming increasingly ADD. Wood worried about his children not being able to have such a rich, environment to grow up, a world that had fed his own capability and desire to write. It takes serious noticing of the human condition, of the aesthetic and the metaphysical to become, perhaps, not only a good writer but also to have a fulfilling livelihood. It takes serious noticing to capture human contradiction, to color in motives of characters, and to hold two opposing ideas level as one.

After leaving the auditorium and the reception later with a brownie in hand, I bumped into James Wood coming out of a pair of doors. I stood there again, for a moment, brownie in hand, feeling quite small and overwhelmed with the Hopwood’s selected speaker.