OK, it looks like I won't finish "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" in time for author Junot Diaz's 7 Days of Opening Nights appearance. But based solely on his salty, rambling, funny interviews (which he did not grant the Democrat for some reason) I'm looking forward to hearing him talk tonight. I'm not even 100 pages in, and I'm already convinced that Diaz is some kind of genius. (Duh. The book won a Pulitzer.) A few choice lines:
"You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma Mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest."
"Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years."
"For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened."
For the first time since I moved to Tallahassee, I am genuinely excited about the 7 Days of Opening Nights lineup — especially David Sedaris on April 16. I mean, I couldn't pretend I was interested in seeing Art Garfunkel last year or Kris Kristofferson the year before that. It seems like there's a little something for everybody this time, not just the boomers.
Anyway, I'll take notes tonight and try to cobble together a coherent report.
No comments:
Post a Comment