On Intelligence and the runaway bunny

S: Our little girl is inhering a big national deficit and climate change. (Pause). I hope she's smart.

Some other random quotes at the Jonathan Franzen reading of Freedom, a book that has engendered a lot of book love and debate amongst friends. (And my general take on this particular book, which I've read, is that it's a good, not a great book. But it's interesting to watch half of the literary establishment embrace it whole heartedly along with the public en masse, while the other half recoils, not entirely without merit, in what appear to be paroxysms of jealousy that someone is finally reading fiction and it is not theirs.

Audience member: What do you think about the topic of David Foster Wallace's soon to be posthumously published book? I mean, can you write a good book about boredom?

Franzen: (Pauses) I think that I could probably explain Dave's suicide in about twenty different ways. I think that one of those explanations is that he died of boredom. (At this point it is clear that Franzen is holding back tears and it became even more awkward to be sitting in an audience, with all that entails, asking a person, not a writer, about the death of a good friend. And once more I am struck by the oddity of human existence, particularly its twenty first century mode).

Other quotes, one of which made me exceedingly happy

H: I think being in book club has made me a bit of a snob about what I read :)

If I can turn one person a year into a book snob I'll feel pretty damn good about my book club. All are welcome. We are elitist; and we are proud of it!

Other quotes:

L: I just don't know whether I should tell you whether I read your blog or not?

M: Definitely. It shouldn't just be me spouting off into the ether. I think that all good literature is about conversation.

L: Wait a minute. Did you just say your blog is literature?

M: I think anything that engenders a good discussion is literature. I'm just pointing out that my blog is probably more edifying than a twitter post about a really great grilled cheese sandwich.

L: But by that rubric, wouldn't me commenting on your grilled cheese sandwich and saying, "that sounds good!" actually be turning that tweet into literature?

(At which point a longer conversation starts to take place, whose main point, I hope, is that it's really hard to be in a democracy because we have to decide both individually and collectively what is good and what is utter tripe. On a less macro scale, I think I trotted out the NBA and the Pen/Faulkner as examples of a literary society creating deciderer's because we can't read every damn book ourselves. And yes, on a macro level we have to decide whether grilled cheese sandwiches or universal health care, mind you we pay when people go the hospitals anyway, are more worth while to think about. Incidentally, I really do enjoy a good grilled cheese sandwich).

((Relatedly, through a bit of obvious slippage I did compare this blog to literature, which if I wasn't so lazy, I'd link to various other posts where I've complained, in a very meta type of way, that blogs, in general, and specifically mine, are not literary, and make me feel sort of guilty for having spent time on them when I could have been working on the next American masterpiece like Freedom or that collection of short stories I've been working on called "Sad People Staring out Windows at the rain."

I've included a picture of a pink elephant to make things all better.