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Robert Waxler and David Beckman, "You Say, I Say: Staying Alive with Literature, Language, and Friendship" (Rivertown Books, 2025)
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- [00:04]
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David Beckman
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Robert Waxler
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- [01:30]
Robert Waxler
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network, New Books and Biography. And today I'm here with Robert Waxler and David Beckman, who are the authors of youf say I say Staying Alive with Literature, Language and Friendship. Robert and David, thanks for being here with me today.
- [01:52]
Robert Waxler
Thank you for having us.
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David Beckman
Good to be here.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So could you talk? Your book is a little unique. Sue, could you kind of give a little bit of an overview of what this book is and how it kind of came to be, how you decided to put this book together?
- [02:09]
Robert Waxler
Go ahead.
- [02:10]
David Beckman
Well, okay. Bob and I were friends in college, Brown University, way back some years ago, many years ago. And we both discovered our freshman year we loved poetry and language. We were going to be English majors. We both wanted to be writers in some shape or form. So that friendship was great. And it extended out to a group of people actually with similar mindset. So we used to have late night talk sessions over beer and what College kids do. Then we published a little chapbook of poetry our senior year called Echo Aeonides, an obscure title we were very proud of, basically referring to the muses in ancient Greece. We thought we were carrying on that tradition. It had some success there. So it was reviewed by the local Brown Daily Herald and so on. So we had that. And then we both graduated, of course, and went our separate ways. Bob got a PhD, became a college professor of Romantic literature. I went to New York to become a writer. I split my time between commercial writing and non commercial writing, poetry and plays, and lived with those divisions for years. Then many decades later, Bob, we reconnected. Bob published a piece in the Brown Alumni Monthly. I responded, bob, my God, it's you. And we reconnected that way. I visited Bob outside of New Bedford and he showed me files and files of research he continued to do with many writers he loved. And we decided to. I went back to California. We started writing emails back and forth to each other about literature and language and just kind of free association. And that's now what the book is. We start calling them letters after a while, though they are indeed emails. And there's like 30, 40 of them on language and literature and memory and our friendship and what happened to us and how we're the same, how we're different. And that became. You say? I say. And it was really Bob's idea that, hey, I think this could be a book. There might be other people interested here in what we're doing. And he had to kind of convince me of that because for me, it was the process of going back and forth with Bob and that's how the book came to be.
- [04:50]
Rebecca Buchanan
So how long did you write back and forth? Can you talk a little bit about how you sort of started this? How many years does this book cover with sort of your conversations back and forth and that kind of thing?
- [05:04]
Robert Waxler
I think it's about two and a half, maybe three years that we continue to write email back and forth. I think probably two years ago, when we finally decided we might have something that looks like a book. But I think David really hit on something that's very important, and that is that in a sense, no matter what else was coming out of this, there was a kind of joy in the exchange and the dialogue itself. So we're talking about literature a lot and language and how it works. But that process somehow evokes the friendship that we had back really in the 60s when we were both undergraduates at Brown. So I think there's something interesting to me, at least, and I know David, too, there, about dialogue itself and the exchange that occurs through language and the necessity for people who might not agree on everything, because David and I certainly didn't agree on a lot of topics that we discuss. But nevertheless, a thinking together and that, I think, makes up dialogue and the importance of kind of mortal human communication. I also find it very interesting to think about the fact that even though we hadn't really seen each other for an extended amount of time, maybe 20, 30 years, once we did see each other again, it was as if it was just yesterday when, you know, when that friendship was rekindled. And I think really they intensify because of that dialogue and exchange that we had through the email. So I think there's something interesting, important about what's between people, which is part of any dialogue that you have. Two people who don't agree on a lot of things, but nevertheless, they're sort of focused on something. And then through language, it can bring joy and friendship and intensify whatever relationship in a positive way that you might have. I think that's part of the book. It's part of what comes out of the language, out of the reading of the book.
- [07:42]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. And I think there's a number of themes that you get at. And one of the things I did love about this, and we can talk about maybe some of the themes you saw in this is that the role that literature really played and how it played a role in your lives and how you even between the conversations, like, you started to return to different texts. Right. You might suggest a text, or you might be like, I'm going to reread that because of how one of you talked about it. And so can you talk a little bit about that, too? And just the importance of literature as a. As a start, maybe. I don't know if a starting point is the right word, but how literature plays a role in returning and rereading texts and being able to talk to someone who you hadn't talked to for a long time about these texts, about them.
- [08:31]
David Beckman
I'd like to invoke William Blake at this juncture, and Bob can pick up. Bob, in his work as a literature professor, became a specialist to William Blake. So he knows a lot more about Blake than I do. But in returning to Blake, in part of our discussions, the intense creativity and dreamlike quality that his language can invoke, I found very, very gripping when I returned to it, because the imagination. And for him, Blake, it was literary but also visual because he was a Painter. The use of not just use, but the plunging into language at its best, spurs the mind to imagination. That might not happen otherwise. And I think we're all born with the potential for great imagination. But until a medium is tapped into, be it language, in our case language, that imagination can kind of lie dormant and not really realize itself. And so that's one aspect of. I think we explored a lot what language means, what we would be without it. In fact, one of our themes at the beginning is the aspect of silence. That silence is, in a sense, something that has to be rebelled against in order to write. Silence is, as one of my poet friends here said, who knows the book? Does that mean silence is the enemy? Well, maybe not quite that, but it's something that, as writers, we all have to come to grips with and realize in starting a poem and starting a piece of prose will never be William Blake, but at least our own imagination can come into play. And we've taken a stand against silence. We've made our statements and continue to. Through language.
- [10:30]
Robert Waxler
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned William Blake, of course, since, as you suggest, he's really my favorite poet in that sense. To me, an irreplaceable person, both in terms of literature and also in terms of art, that is painting. And I think part of the reason I am so attracted to him and always have been is, as you suggest, because of his belief in imagination. I mean, he's one of the few people that never seemed to doubt the power of imagination and how imagination can transform the world. As he says, essentially, you are what you envision. And so he offers a possibility for a world that could. Could be close to imagined, at least close to perfect. And more than anything else, it's the fact that he has the courage not to back away from his own belief. He's not a great success in terms of material goods while he's alive, but he's had a huge impact on people since he started writing back in the 1800s. And he, interestingly enough, my oldest son was. I named. His middle name is Blake. And I named him in part because of my own love for Blake and I. Also, we mentioned the Poetry pamphlet. It was a poet in residence at the time at Brown who wrote an introduction to that pamphlet, Echo Aeonides. And he made a reference in his introduction to our poetry and our work in the pamphlet. One of the things he said at the time was mentioning very generously, my own poetry. He said something to the effect Waxler has lake in muscle. I think that was the phrase he used. And that sort of. I never really thought very much about it until recently, sort of going over these things and writing about them today. But I think that was probably the flame that lit my interest in Blake and I began to think more and more about him. And then I eventually wrote a dissertation on them and I've written some articles and other things about Blake. But again, in terms of our book, it's certainly not just about William Blake. As Rebecca mentioned, it's a book that covers a large territory in terms of literature, really, from the Bible to contemporary and modern literature. We talk about, on Norman Mailer and J.D. salinger as well, in between, of course, Dante and Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, generally Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats. So it's a variety of literature. The question that you put a while ago now, Rebecca, about, you know, how literature somehow brings us together, I think is also a really important and interesting question because I think part of what happens when you're reading serious literature that it's as if, again, we enter into dialogue with a book. The book tells us as much about ourselves as we tell a book as we read it. So there's this exchange between the writer and the reader, and it's as if the book, to me at least summons the responsible reader and then the reader sort of talks back to the book itself. And through that process, I think we learn a lot about empathy and we learn a lot about our own feelings and emotions and our own sense of self and we tap in both to the joy and also to the pain of the vulnerability of our mortality and of our life.
- [15:10]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I thought that was like. And you mentioned the Bible. Like, I thought that was really interesting throughout that you also had conversations about Judaism, about the Bible, about sort of these, those kind of big, large, I guess I'm going to call them billboard topics that people often shy away from. Right. But we get to see this real, this conversation on, like how how these things have shaped your life and why they've shaped your lives, you know, in certain ways because of experiences that you've had over the past. Like what is it since you've, you know, went to 50, 60 years since you were in undergrads together. Right. And what that means.
- [15:54]
Robert Waxler
Yeah, so.
- [15:55]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So, yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [15:58]
David Beckman
Well, I think another aspect or a similar aspect for me is modernism. My favorite poet probably ever was T.S. eliot Yates, in terms of prose fiction, James Joyce, Ezra Pound. That was the era that really grabbed me. And I grew up in a medium sized city in Western New York. And after college, went to New York City. I couldn't wait to get there. It's what I wanted to be. So I plunged into city life. And I found lines of T.S. eliot coming back to me because he writes a lot about London turning on the lamps. When he was there, it was oil lamps, I guess, at night, and the flickering of the light against the bricks of the streets. Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. Whoa. That is a long way from the Romantics. Now we're talking a modern sensibility, which could be even a little scary. His poetry helped me a lot when I was just integrating myself into a place like New York, because I realized I'm not the first one wandering around these streets wondering what's going on and where do I fit in? So it's always a pleasure for me to return to the poets of that era. And even a guy like Pound, who was a very polarizing figure, became a fascist late in life, just kind of disturbing, but really was able to bring the modern sensibility into poetry. He once said about Walt Whitman, something to the effect of Walt Whitman, you cut the raw wood, now is time for carving. So he saw Whitman as a bit somewhat primitive, which he really wasn't, but a groundbreaker. And now it was up to Pound to really make something out of all that. So those poets always appealed to me a great deal. And we talk about them a lot in the book as well.
- [18:09]
Robert Waxler
Yeah, in that context, too, I think it's interesting to consider the way. Call it the curve of the discussion in the book itself. Because when we start, one of the first things David does with his opening letters are to. Is to write his own poem, or at least begin to write his own poem, which sets really, to some extent, the tone of the book. Because then I have something to respond to. And again, it's as if there's a call and then a response. And the other thing he does early on in the book is to raise the issue of the Holocaust and the meaning of that in relation to literature. And that's, for me at least, became a kind of touchstone to think about Judaism. I'm Jewish, and it helped me to sort of deepen my own interest and to read more about Jewish tradition and Jewish heritage. I might not have gone as deeply into those things if it wasn't really for the way the book opens and the way the Holocaust and David's voice really sort of inspires me to look toward These other things and to sort things out for myself. And that's part of the friendship. You can't really do it alone. We're not sovereign individuals, really were, in my mind, vulnerable human beings in that sense. We are all connected and we all are related. And we need this kind of ongoing call and response. And we have a responsibility to help each other in that context. And David was very helpful in leading for me in that direction, which, as I say, part of it was by the Jewish sensibility and sort of returning to the stories, especially Abraham in the Bible, and thinking about the relationship between the Jewish tradition and the Greek tradition, which is really part of the Western and academic tradition to a large extent. So all those things, I think, becomes important and interesting in terms of the way the book itself evolves and keeps changing its perspective.
- [21:06]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, there's so many things that come up throughout this. Like, one thing I think is really interesting towards. There are a couple things towards the end that I really liked, but one was, I think you even have a chapter titled, like, about commercialism and killing your poetry. Right. And killing your writing. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that because I do think, too. I think and reading this and working with a lot of, you know, young English majors who want to be writers, and they do have this feeling like, what does it mean to be a writer and what does it mean to read deeply? And I think your book gets at a lot of that. But can you talk a little bit about that too? Being, like, writing for pleasure, but also writing for. Yeah, purpose. I guess purpose is not the right word, but, yeah, commercially, for sure.
- [21:55]
David Beckman
That was a dilemma that I brought with me to New York. Well, no, I'll take that back. I discovered in New York because I. I was determined to be a poet. That was going to be it. And I realized after a year or two, oh, wait a minute, that means I'm going to be living in a cold water flat on the sixth floor somewhere and maybe discovered when I'm 40. Do I. Is that how I see my life? And the answer came up, no. Life is expensive. I had to have money or leave New York, which would have just shattered my dream. And so I looked around and I said, I live in the epicenter of where people get paid to write. Other people, painters find a way to do graphic art, and they get paid. Musicians get paid. Why shouldn't someone who loves language and think, I can do something with it, why should I have to flee the big city and go either live in a Place I didn't want to, or be poor. And I looked in the mirror literally one day and said, what's it going to be, David? David said back to me, I'm staying in New York. I know I can write. I'm going to try commercial writing. And then it became, well, the old adage is, of course, that will kill your muse. You'll never write poetry again. And my answer to myself in the mirror was, well, then I must not have been very serious about poetry to begin with if it could get killed that easily. So that gave me the courage to, yes, in a sense, do both things and discover how language worked in both areas. For any young writer, I'd say, don't box yourself in. Language is everywhere. We're surrounded by the printed word and the electronic word. Just go where your impulse takes you and don't apologize to anybody for what you have to do to make language work. Because that's an individual's destiny and a really good one. So.
- [24:06]
Robert Waxler
You remind me, David, of one of the themes, I think it's fair to say, runs through the whole book. And that is the notion. Notion that each one of us has one unique precious life. And it is unique, each one that's, in a sense, the difference between one person and another. And to me, at least, it's part of our responsibility as limited human beings to try to discover what the destiny of that one unique life is. And what kind of contribution supposed to make during our precious mortal existence which doesn't last forever. So it is really a challenge. But as you suggest, David, it often takes some courage to sort of pursue that destiny. But I think it's important for us, and it's part of our responsibility as human beings to try to discover that uniqueness. What is it that we can give to the world? And language obviously plays an important part. And as you say, David, the language is everywhere. We're surrounded by language, and we're born into language. And so language becomes incredibly important in that kind of relationship. I think it is the human element that allows us to connect with other people. On the other hand, I also remembered, as you talk about your experience in New York, when I was first at Brown, I think probably when I was a freshman, even before we put out that poetry pamphlet, I always would think about being a novelist or maybe a poet. I remember tacking on my bulletin board in the dorm room something to the effect that if I don't publish a novel or some poetry by the time I'm 25, I think I might want to kill Myself or something. That's how mature I was in those days. I got to be 25, and I decided to postpone that. Yeah, I did. So I began. So I became a professor instead.
- [26:36]
David Beckman
I so unders. I so understand where you were coming from.
- [26:41]
Rebecca Buchanan
It's so in. Yes. When I often hear, like, 25 is so old, 30 is so old, I'm like, okay, well, can you get back to me about it? And, like. Like, I'll touch base with you in, like, five years, and you can let me know.
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David Beckman
Right, right, right. Oh, so true.
- [26:58]
Rebecca Buchanan
Another. You know, like, Bob, you talked also about, like, you have, like. Like, pancreatic cancer, but. And you talk about talking to your oncologist about being on sub oxycontin. I think it was for pain. And that you said it like you thought it made you think better. And he said, it doesn't make me. You think better. Just think differently. And that became a conversation. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because I thought that was a really important distinction to make that we. That some people spend their whole lives not getting to that point of thinking, like, it's not better or worse. It's just different. And that's okay.
- [27:36]
Robert Waxler
Yeah. Well, again, I think you're saying something there, Rebecca, that is really central to the book itself, thematically. It is one of the strands of the book that runs from the beginning to the end. And that's the notion that I was, at least on my side of the. You say, I say dialogue, sort of pursuing the sense of difference. What is. You know, what is. What makes it unique, what makes our life unique, what makes anything we do unique to our own existence. So as you're suggesting, I remember that discussion with the doctor because, as you say, I. I have pancreatic cancer. That becomes part of the book, too. And struggling with that and thinking about it, I think was an interesting part of my own life. And in that context, I take oxycodone sometimes to help relieve the pain, which is ongoing. But the notion there was that I thought at times by taking the oxycodone, I was seeing things clearly in a way that I might not have seen them otherwise. That was a question I asked the doctor. Is that. Do you think that's right? And his response. And he's a very wise person, I think he said, I wouldn't say it's. You're seeing it more clearly, but I would say there's a difference in the vision itself and what you say. And he wasn't making, as you suggest, Rebecca. He wasn't making a value judgment about which one was better or not. It was just the notion that it's a change. There's a kind of uniqueness to that as well. We quote the poet Rilke sometimes in that context. He's got a poem that ends with Change youe Life, but he doesn't say, change your life for better or Change your life for worse. He basically says, change your life. And to me, at least, it's part of the ongoing responsibility we have. You move onward. We're in the process of continuous change. And attempting to define our uniqueness is also, in a sense, an attempt to define the difference as well as the relationship between ourselves and other people. And that was part of that dialogue that you're referring to with the doctor's office that day. I thought, something I always remember. And you do, too. It's great.
- [30:34]
Rebecca Buchanan
So I have. Because I love J.D. salinger and I love Catcher in the Rye. So we have to talk a little bit about Catcher in the Rye because I really loved how you talked about his writing and him writing to kind of make people pay attention to Holden. Right. And make people be in that space. And so can you talk a little bit about that and that conversation and just that idea as a writer, like the way that writers use sort of silence and the way that writers use their words to make you listen and make you pay attention.
- [31:12]
Robert Waxler
Yeah. Again, I think part of the thematic strand of the book is the relationship between voice and, as you know. Right. Is using language on the one side and silence on the other side. And part of what with. Talking about with Holden is the notion that he's got a very unique voice. It's that voice that, to me, at least, calls to the reader. It's as if the reader listens to that voice. You can hear the voice. It's unique. It's Holden Caulfield. It couldn't be anybody else. And if we don't pay attention to that voice, to that language and to its uniqueness. And I don't think we're being totally responsible as readers, but metaphorically at least, it's as if we're not paying attention to another person. And I think that's part of what Salinger's getting at. We have to listen to Holden. He's calling to us. He needs us as part of the relationship that he's attempting to make with the reader. And to me, it's very interesting to think about the fact that Salinger always said that you could never film Catcher in the Rye. It's not the visual effects that you're looking for. It's not the images on a screen. But again, it's the voice. It's the call that that Holden, in a sense, makes to us. And if we close the book, we essentially are closing off Holden and the voice and in that sense, Salinger himself. So I think all those things are operating there with Holden, who certainly needs our help. I mean, you know, he's called. He's a very vulnerable human being, as everyone is. I mean, I think that's part of the point. Everyone is. We need each other.
- [33:41]
David Beckman
One of my favorite scenes in Catcher in the Rye is it's fairly late in the book. He's going back to where his younger sister goes to school and he sees graffiti on the wall, obscenities. And he's so outraged and he so wants to protect her against this. Not just the words on the wall, but the dumbing down, essentially making human life bestial, deeply moving. And it's interesting that those are words that he's reacting to, his language on a wall, but a good old Halden. He's got, you know, he's got a moral sense that for all his humor and rebellion, it comes across almost latently. And then you realize, no, it's driving everything he does, that his values, which he's discovering as he goes, related to language in this one scene, it just brings out this protective, nurturing quality in him for his sister. It's just one of many things that is so brilliant in that book.
- [35:00]
Robert Waxler
Yeah. Also in that context, I mentioned that I think one thing that Holden and the reader begin, both was the reader and Holden to begin to see is the. The sense that you cannot ever get rid of that graffiti. It's going to come back. It's on the wall. You try to get it off, but it returns. It's part of the world. You've got to somehow figure out, again, a way of bringing people together to work as much as possible for an ethical universe. But at the same time, again, there's a limitation at the very end. And I connect those two scenes, Holden is thinking he sees his sister, sister in their relationship. It's very important. He sees his sister on the merry go round. And again, he wants to save her. He's worried she's going to fall off the merry go round. But then he keeps a little bit of a distance and he realizes that he can't save everybody. Unfortunately, you can't catch everybody who's going to fall off the cliff. And that's sort of, again, coming to terms. And I think it's also part of what Salinger wants to say in that book, that as human beings, we want to work as hard as we can to. For an ethical universe rocking in the free world is Neil Young, he put it. But at the same time, we are mortal human beings and you really can't get rid of all the things that all the graffiti. Death itself lingers there. That's obviously part of what Holden is really haunted by, the death of his brother. And, you know, I think that just can't quite come to terms with that. And who can? It's our mortality at stake. It's a great book.
- [37:23]
Rebecca Buchanan
It is. It's my favorite.
- [37:26]
Robert Waxler
Yeah.
- [37:27]
Rebecca Buchanan
And often, I think, underrated. My students. Yes, I. I often hear. I. I get flack for not really liking Gatsby, but loving Caulfield and loving Salinger, but that's a whole nother story. So what is it speaking like? So I'm just wondering from both of you, I mean, there's probably many things, but can you talk each of you about, like, something that you really learned or gained from doing this, right. This. Cause you didn't start out by thinking the. It was just sort of, we're going to connect, we're going to kind of talk back and forth. But what was it like? What do you think you gained from this, from continuing to have. Right. Like, sometimes we start to write people back and forth, we stop. But you kept doing this. So you were getting something from it. But I'm wondering what it was or what is one thing it was.
- [38:20]
David Beckman
I think for me, one of the things is it allowed me to discover things I know that I didn't know. I knew. I thought I'd either forgotten or never knew. And I'm not just talking about literature. It was a joy to rediscover so many things about literature that I love and just weren't part of my daily consciousness until Bob got it, you know, drew it out of me through this process. So that. That was certainly part of it. But then on the other side, I'll embarrass Bob here, but the richness of Bob's mind and the depth of his, he's lived poetry and the Old Testament and many other aspects of what we talk about. It was just a joy for me to be exposed to that which wouldn't have happened otherwise. So it's almost like there was this whole rich field of stuff. What's in Bob, what's in me that was just sitting there waiting for expression. And, you know, since we're lucky that we found the expression.
- [39:32]
Robert Waxler
Well, for me. And thanks for saying that, David. I think we're sort of mentors for each other in that context. And as the title suggests, you say, I say it's. We had different views, and yet we had a commonality. We had something between us that actually grew in its joyfulness. And it was between us. To me, it was a great mystery. Exactly what it is. It's undefinable. So in a sense, unlike David, who I remember late in the book, even as, you know, he says he wants to know what he can know, I increasingly realize that, in a way, my life had been dedicated to trying to know what we cannot know, in a sense. And that also to help to define a difference, I wanted to know what we cannot know.
- [40:44]
David Beckman
And.
- [40:46]
Robert Waxler
It drove me to think deeper and to think more about all sorts of things, as David was saying. But it came from a slightly different direction than the direction my good friend David had taken. And I think that, again, was extraordinarily valuable for both of us. And that was part of the richness and. And the joy of writing this. And also continuously thinking about it and talking more about it. And I think that leads to the sense of depth of how we read and how we live. I think it's important to not only see what is, but also what ought to be, if you want to put in those terms. And it's that gap that, you know, what Philip Roth once called the unwritten, that drives us on to want to think more and to write more. And as joyful as it is, I would also have to add that at times it's courageous. It's a sacrifice. It can be painful to come face to face with some of these things that you're writing, but at the same time, there's a kind of humanity to it and a certain heroism. I think, at moments, I think you see that we talk about that in the book. When David's writing his poetry, for example. To me, in a sense, he's sacrificing part of himself. But he's. He started giving me inspiration at the same time. Out of that comes his voice that I can then hear and respond to. I gotta thank him a lot for that.
- [42:46]
Rebecca Buchanan
So on that note, I'm gonna ask you my final kind of question, which is more self promotion. So the book is out now. So promotions for the book or anything you're doing connected to the book or anything else either of you are working on that you wanna promote. So go.
- [43:02]
David Beckman
Oh, wow, okay. That's a good One. Well, I had a gathering here at my house three days ago. Good friend Catherine Hastings, who writes one of the tributes to our book, it's there as former poet laureate out here in Sonoma county, now lives back east, but came out here, we threw a party and it was all poets and writers. And Catherine said, look, you've got to kick this thing off by talking about your book. Well, I was the host and I just didn't feel comfortable doing that. Everyone was here because of Catherine. So I said, no, I'm not going to do that. She said, give me your book. I said, go find a copy of your book and give it to me. Okay. So she kicked things off by holding the book up and talking a little bit about it. And now I'm going to follow up with all those people, send them emails and say, well, if you want to buy this thing, here's the way to do it. I want to do more readings out here. Some friends of mine are urging me to do that. One of the problems is Bob and I should be doing this together, but he's on one coast and I'm in another and neither of us are doing that much traveling. So I guess I have to do it by myself, which feels a little weird, like I'm a one armed juggler. But yeah, there's that and certainly some of the other interviews we've done. We've put an ad in the New York Review of Books, it's in the current issue and it'll be in another issue. And Brown itself has picked up on this and going to do a nice piece on us in the Alumni Monthly. So we're doing what we can.
- [44:42]
Robert Waxler
Yeah. Again, in terms of the book and you know, what comes afterwards, the sense that I have is that nothing is ever fully complete. And in that sense the. What the book in part did because I suppose in part because of my absurd sense that I want to know what I cannot know. I think of that book as, among other things, an opening to further exploration. That is, there are so many issues and so many questions and many of them are raised in the book that I'd like to try to pursue answers for Write More Things was done without my part of the book. I was still thinking a lot, for example, about just nouns and verbs and what language was all about and how mysterious it was, and my own crazy belief that the language, words, you put two words together, you've got a story. So there must be an awful lot in every word, if not every phoneme, every syllable. So if I had the opportunity. I would certainly want to continue this writing, at least in part to explore further the questions if not the answers to deepen the sense of questions which by the way again is one of the themes in the book itself. The sense that for me it's one great thing about literature is that it raises important questions. It may not give us answers but but to know the questions and to explore the paths that the questions offer us and open to us is extraordinarily important. Our pursuit of each unique human precious life.
- [46:58]
Rebecca Buchanan
Wonderful. Again, thank you so much Bob and Dave for talking with me again. Robert Waxler and David Beckman, the authors of youf say, I say Staying Alive with Literature, Language and Friendship. Thanks for being on New Books Network.
- [47:12]
Robert Waxler
Thank you, Rebecca.
- [47:13]
David Beckman
Oh, you're so welcome. And just the gross commercial pitch. It can be got on Amazon through the publisher rivertownsbooks.com order it through your local bookstore. Any of those ways.