Today was great for reaffirming the fact that there are still all sorts of people out there who actually read books, love books, and will go out of their way to support authors. The woman in line behind me was getting choked up, teary-eyed snuffling, really just succumbing to the whole nine yards of gushing fandom as we approached.
This was my first book signing, Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, in the upper level of our local library; not a bad little line of people looking to exchange a few quick words, get a signature. I don’t go in for the cult of celebrity all that much; but it’s hard not to watch the smallish frame of the man who wrote the incredible book you’re holding in your hands as he interacts with the local contingent of his fan-base. I don’t have any stunning revelations to report, I didn’t see him perform any miracles, he neither kissed nor spit on any babies in my presence, who he really is as a man is almost as much a mystery to me now as it was before, and that’s just fine by me. What I can do is quote the first part of the very short conversation I had with the man…
“Finite Jester huh? I like that.” he said when presented with my slightly worn and stained copy of The Things They Carried.
My response doesn’t bear inclusion, as it was deeply stupid, but that’s alright. I thanked him for the autograph and for writing the book. I don’t know why I had him inscribe it to my pseudonym, maybe part of me was hoping to be more memorable than the troops of ‘Dave’s’ and ‘Steve’s’ who have pushed identical copies of that identical book under his pen, maybe I just wanted O’Brien to acknowledge the jester and make him that much more real.
And there was my brush with celebrity, after the book-signing I made myself some lentils, and hiked across town to listen to the man talk.
I love walking in the bracing wind, and since I had no clear plotted path to follow, I left an hour early to allow myself the leisure of getting lost. I didn’t, I keep trying to get myself lost in this town and sadly, don’t think it’s possible. I was amazed at the turn-out, and when I’m faced with an enormous crowd I find the cracks and move swiftly through them, scraping along walls and the sudden intersections of slowly milling humans. I took a seat in the very last row of the auditorium; the balcony above the tier, the vertigo heights, where you can shade your eyes and dream of flying.
The introductions went on longer than Tim O’Brien spoke, but I can’t hold that against anybody; our town is proud of our reading programs, proud of our library, and people need to toot each other’s horns from time to time. I only wish that the Vietnamese man who’d served in the South Vietnamese Army had been slightly more intelligible, because there was a wealth of emotion under everything he said, and I think I got most of it.
O’Brien himself did not disappoint, he opened with a set of humorous remarks, some salient points directed at the aspiring writers, I had a good number of belly laughs at any rate. He read “Ambush” from The Things They Carried and hammered home time and again the importance and power of stories. He closed with a letter he’d written to his infant son, who is still an infant, and on that stage, this man revealed something of his humanity; something small and fragile, yet more powerful than any war.
If you’re waiting for a moral or a point, you’re going to have to keep waiting, because that’s it. If something honest was transmitted; it was transmitted in a moment of voice and light, and does not bear retelling. That’s it, the end- fragmentary recollections of a brush with celebrity.
-finite jester
March 22nd, 2006 at 12:58 am
How true what you and O’Brien say about the importance and power of stories. As I see it, human beings (and maybe all other beings) need meaning as much as they need food, clothing, and shelter. What else but story can lend meaning to what otherwise would be a meaningless string of symbols? Birdsong or infant’s coo; scratches on a cave wall or crayon marks on an apartment wall; patterns on a butterfly’s wing or butterflies in a stomach; the movements of a loving hand or of a poet’s pen or of an arm or an army with an idee fixe; the smells outside your front door on a spring morning; a mathematician’s equations, a pixie’s laugh, or pixels on a screen.
Apparently there are many ways of understanding the world and its things, but only story enables them to be understood at all. It kind of makes you wonder where meaning resides – where it’s located. But I guess that’s another story?
As for the symbol strings of Finite Jester and Talking Plant and, yes, even Tom Fullery - I’d like to say about them what Emerson said about Whitman’s:
“I am very happy in reading it….I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.”