Late again, but not so late, though I had to shovel my way out of the driveway in order to get there. Unimaginable snow yesterday and last night, way too early for this sort of thing.

J.B. talk, but decided to go to DeNeen Brown's, instead. Very glad I did. She uses words in an elegant way, even in teaching, beautiful.

Then Tom French, interesting journalist from Florida. He speaks the syntax and the language of the now. His examples are from film and television and comic books. He uses "The Right Stuff" to illustrate slowing down to show small details. I'd forgotten how great that film is.

Someone asks "How do you know which detail is *the* telling detail?," and I think it's good to know other people have the same questions, and that I'm on the right track.

Lunch - Entree: Left Over Sandwiches served with Lay's, different candy, no apples, in same Attractive White Paper Sacks. Must get name of sack maker for next party.

Lunch readings: Jay Allison with the Harley story - he chokes me up with the lines about rescuing the guy from the waves "It's okay baby, it's alright baby," this to a big, bearded fat guy he's pulling out of the water, saving from drowning.

Then Jacqui's story, it's good, but I don't remember it now, kicking myself for not making notes on everyone. DeNeen's words are like perfect round marbles in her mouth, rolling around, savoring their roundness, their beauty, the beauty in her combinations. Lane is funny, a story about a guy who hangs in a bar, Tom Haines does travel stories, interesting, but I don't connect to them, for some reason. Louise Kiernan, then Adrian LeBlanc, whom I really like, but again, fail to take notes. Victor Merina with a wonderful personal essay about talking to his son about being dark-skinned, then funny Rick Meyer about a guy who catapults everything, Chip reading "something he made up," and I stopped listening to, Barry with a wonderful crime scene thing about a guy who let his two year old son wander off in the woods while he's deer hunting, "Under My Care," I think it's called. Then Patricia Williams makes me wish I'd gone to her talk.

After, with Elaine, I go to Hilton Als talk on writing fiction, but all he does is read his own writing, so we get up and leave. She heads home, and I go to the tail-end of the Finding the Narrative Core lecture, and wish I'd been there all along. Hard to know who'll be a great teacher, and who will not.

Then Susan Orlean keynote talk about writing with and about passion. Mostly, she reads a LOT of her work about people with passions, and even though I'm now a bit biased against her self-involvement, I find myself liking her talk just the same. It was good, and the readings were quite good.

Then it was over.

General day three impressions: Asses, large. Journalists need to get out of their chairs more. Shifting the ass from side to side, as if to minimize its appearance, if it's constantly in motion.

Overheard: " They said, 'Nah, we'll hotbox it.' They were smoking weed in the igloos."

NY Times writers are too precious by half.

One thousand journalists from all over the world equals trillions of alien germs. In Hilton Als "class," Elaine and I come in late, and I squeeze in next to a young woman in a white sweater. Her upper arm is way over into the air space of my chair, and we touch. I remark about how close together the chairs are, but she makes no move to move her arm. I'm resigned to having a close encounter.

Then, just as I breathe out, she sneezes. Why do they always wait until I breathe out? Then I have to hold my breath. I feel the puff of germ-laden air shoot out the side of the fist she uses to "cover" her mouth. Some of the mist lands on my face and left eye. I begin to measure how I can squeeze back out, can I push back, can I step over her, and the much larger woman at the end of the row, can I tip my chair over backwards, anything to get away from disease girl.

There is a girl in a red sweater in front of us. She continually flips one side of her hair over the other, so that it's always lying in this half plait.

A tall man with a semi-bozo bald head hair-do walks in. He has something that looks like a blue latex glove sticking out of his back pocket. Later I'll see that it's really a blue hankie in his right rear pocket. The hankie code escapes me just now.

The prima donna finds one gray hair while she's in the bathroom, and announces this to an intern who's come to try to speak with her. "Maybe it's from ...," her husband, or bf, I guess, the intern offers, helpfully. "Maybe." The keynote speaker checks her makeup.

Then, surprise, she's on time for her lecture, wearing a black-knit top and a red-striped handkerchief skirt over black, spike-heeled boots. Ole'!

All weekend, here and there is the aura of someone with a stomach ailment, stench of vomit, and diarrhea in the ladies room, and sometimes in the air above a chair just vacated. I don't sit there.

Some writers write, and you can feel the roll of the words in your mouth as they speak them, or as you read them. It's a sweet, delicious, luxurious abundance, and you treasure it, you roll it around, as you read it, or hear it. De Neen Brown is like that.

All weekend, the hotel employees like CIA men, earphones and suits and walkie talkies, speaking into their lapels, skulking around, appearing and disappearing, in doorways, silently.

Sitting lined up behind the microphone, the visual during Q&A is often of big, bunchy butts. Move.

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© 2003 m. lucas