On Thursday night I went to see Ben Ehrenriech and Etgar Keret at the LA Public Library’s ALOUD series. They were in conversation with the topic, “Is reality overrated”? Easy to answer in a month when stock markets around the world have tanked, yadda yadda. Surreality, it was easily agreed, is much better.
“The times are very difficult to live in, but easy to write about.” That was Keret. I think he was quoting, or paraphrasing someone. But he said many insightful and funny things of his own. Describing overly-perfect art versus messy genius, he described Bob Dylan’s voice as that of “a choking crow” — but you’d still rather hear it than an American Idol contestant’s pitch-perfect cover.
Someone asked Keret a question that I sounded pretty dumb: since he’d written about suicide (his story “Kneller’s Happy Campers” was the basis for the film Wristcutters), did he have any personal experience with it? Geez, I thought, fiction means it’s made up. But I was wrong.
“My best friend killed himself during Army service,” Keret said. People who know his biography have probably heard this before, but it was news to me. They’d stay up late nights talking about life and whether it was worth living, then his friend decided it wasn’t. “Writing for me,” Keret said, “is the answer for why I’m living.”
I did take pictures. But I can’t find the cable that connects my camera to my computer.
Instead of Etgar Keret and Ben Ehrenreich, I’ve got a picture above of an orchid in my father’s Florida greenhouse. I can never remember which is what — this one might be a paphiopedalum. If it isn’t, it’s a good word, anwyay: Paphiopedalum.
Good words. Reasons for living.
