Transcript
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Dan Kennedy (1:30)
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Many times stories are about taking the long way. They're about what happens when we make the difficult decision that we knew would be good for us and we made it, even though it was too tough. But what about the times when we don't exactly rise to the challenge? This week, two stories about taking shortcuts. First up, we have Lawrence Wood live at the Moth Story Slam in Chicago, where the theme of the night was gangs, cliques and crowds.
Lawrence Wood (2:00)
Here's Lawrence When I was a teenager, I read only what I had to for school, and there were rare exceptions. In ninth grade, my English teacher took me aside after class one day and she gave me a book called the Learning Tree by Gordon Parks, who's best remembered now as the director of the 1971 movie Shaft. And it's a good movie. It was a good book. And the Learning Tree is his autobiographical account of growing up black in the Deep south in the 1930s. And it was banned in in my school because of a brief sex scene at the beginning that was not nearly explicit enough for my taste. But I liked the book. But still, it didn't trigger a love of reading that my teacher hoped it would. I still only read what I had to but that finally changed my senior year when I took an English class from a teacher who at first I really didn't like at all. She had had us read and write a book report on Jane Eyre. And the night before the report was due, I banged out a first draft and I typed Jane Eyre on the title page because that's what the paper was about, and handed it in. And a week later, she holds my paper up in the air and she says, this is not Jane Eyre. This is a very poorly written analysis of Jane Eyre. And then she said, d and she gave me the paperback. But then she started assigning books by more contemporary authors that I really loved. And I finally understood for the first time why people read for pleasure. And from that point on, I read constantly. And many years later, I joined a book group. And this book group had some academics in it, English professors, people who took literature very seriously. And one of them was a woman named Laura who taught English at Northwestern University. And she got to assign our book two months in a row. And the first book she assigned was the Secret History by Donna Tartt, which is about this group of pretentious college students who kill one of their own. And I just hated it. And when I looked at the author photo, I thought, oh, this is why she recommended it. The author looked just like her, and it was long and boring, and only one of the characters died, and I wanted them all to d. And the next month, she made us read, or she told us to read Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. And I didn't read it, partly because it reminded me of the 19th century Novels like Jane Eyre that I hated in high school, and partly because I was still so annoyed about having to read the Secret History. And so I knew I'd have to miss the discussion. But on the night this discussion was scheduled to take place, I stopped off at Tower Records, and there I saw a whole rack full of those yellow and black study guides called CliffsNotes. And I saw one for Lord Jim, and I thought, maybe I can go to the discussion. So I went and I offered as my own insight something that I had read in the Cliffs Notes. And Laura said, well, that's really interesting. And then she asked me more about the comment I'd made. And so I repeated what I could remember from the study guide. And we went back and forth like this. Really dominated the discussion for the whole evening. And at the end of the night, everybody agreed that the discussion had been a success. And even though I should have just been relieved and kept my mouth shut, I confess to reading the cliffs Notes. And everybody just stared at me. And Laura looked like I had kicked her in the gut. And when I got home and told my wife what happened, she said, what were you thinking? And she had been in a book group for many years, another book group, and she knew that these things were just not done. And the next morning, a guy from the group called me and he said, look, after you left last night, a few of us were talking about what happened, and we, we decided it would be better if you didn't return. And I said, you're kicking me out? And he said, yes. And I said, of a book group? And he said, yes. And I said, because I read the cliffs notes? And he said, yes, because you read the cliffs Notes, Larry, you cheated. And I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had never heard of anybody getting expelled from a book group before, and neither had my wife. And when I gave her the news, she said, well, you know, that I didn't expect. And she sounded sympathetic. So I said, well, can I join your book group? And she said, absolutely not. Thank you.