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George Saunders at BAM

By

John Del Signore

Published Jan 18, 2008

Modified Dec 23, 2010

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By

John Del Signore

Published Jan 18, 2008

Modified Dec 23, 2010

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The Brooklyn Academy of Music kicked off their fourth season of Eat Drink & Be Literary last night at the BAMcafé. The sold-out event revolved around author George Saunders, a craftsman of absurdly hilarious short story and essays that lovingly lift American consumerism and mass media to surreal heights. His laugh-out-loud short story Pastoralia, for instance, concerns a man and a woman portraying full-time troglodytes in a theme park exhibit. In 2006, Saunders, who has a degree in geophysical engineering, was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant for “bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos, and literary style all his own.”

After a buffet dinner with musical accompaniment by string trio Sojourner, Saunders read from his short story Sea Oak, a tale of marginalized Americans whose lives take an eerie turn after their aunt’s death. It was fascinating to hear Saunders embody the voices of his various characters, and the reading was followed by a funny interview with author Aoibheann Sweeney. These were some of the revelations:

• Saunders said that if you think of your mind as a sphincter, as you get older it tightens.
• Saunders’s emphasis on short stories came about because he started out sneaking brief moments to write while working for Kodak, which he described as a guerrilla operation. He had a ponytail at the time, “his one rebellion.”
• When he writes, Saunders hears an “inner nun” saying “hurry up! You don’t have that much to say, Mr. Man.”
• He tried to write a novel and took 60-70 pages of notes while at a wedding in Mexico; the subsequent 700 page novel was written at night after the kids went to bed. When he went back to read it he realized “it was kind of hard to get into”; he gave it to his wife to read and returned to find her with her “head in her hands.” It was discarded.
• He aims to “take his reader by the shirt and fling him; you send him 15 feet and you’re done. And I don’t think it’s in your power to control what he’s feeling as he’s flying through the air.”
• Saunders cannot criticize anyone; “you could drive a spike through my head and I would be apologizing.”
• He thinks Einstein’s idea that “no worthy problem is ever solved on the plane of its original conception,” applies to the aesthetic of the short story, which starts out being about “A” and then becomes, intuitively, about “B.”
• Saunders finds reality TV and advertising “incredibly fertile” and uses these subjects to occupy his conscious mind while getting to “the more important things. Turgenev had nature, I have reality TV.”

Eat, Drink & Be Literary continues February 7th with Deborah Eisenberg.

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Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.

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