life as understood

Sarah and I attended the Sun Valley Writers' Conference this weekend with my family. For those who haven't heard of this, it's one of the world's elite writers' conferences, where mortals like me sit around and quaff in the brilliance of geniuses talking about their specialties. Ironically, it's those mortals that I wish to speak about in this post, but not before putting in a plug for the conference, and some of the fantastic talks we heard there. You don't have to read the list if you don't care.

--"Writing About Wrongs" with Philip Gourevitch, editor of the Paris Review, staff writer for the New Yorker, and author of We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families.
--"The Ideals of Medicine, Unchanged Since Antiquity" with Dr. Abraham Verghese. A heartfelt and scientific call for better bedside manner and patient-physician relationships. I'm not into medicine, but this was one of the best anythings I've ever heard.
--"Can Good Writing Redeem Bad Faith? Fiction and Historical Trauma" with Nam Le, winner of the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize and author of The Boat.
--"A Talk and Reading by Ian McEwan" Absolutely incredible talk and reading by possibly the greatest living writer in the world, who's suddenly somehow friends with my family. Leading us to...
--"WASPs in Literature, in America, and in my Family" with Tad Friend of the New Yorker.
--"The Hemingses of Monticello: Beyond Tom and Sally" with Annette Gordon-Reed, author of a new book on that subject.

Also talks by Roy Blount, Jr., Jan Morris, and Vernon Jordan, and I could have seen this year's Pulitzer-winning poet W.S. Merwin had my priorities not been out of wack.

Anyway, whether or not you're into writing and literature, it's fun just to be surrounded by such brilliance. I could go on forever about the things we learned and experienced. I sure owe my family a ton for helping to provide such wonderful experiences like this for me. But anyway, back to the audience.

I've heard this generation of mine called the "look at me" generation, and what with Facebook status, YouTube, and especially Twitter, you can see where that comes from. In a way, I think it's kind of a shame, and I hope we as a society eventually outgrow the sentiment that everything we have to say deserves to be made public. (Nam Le discussed this phenomenon as well.) But in another way, I have a blog. So I guess it works out for everyone.

It just became sort of tiresome, honestly, to be around large audiences for two days. And I don't mean the crowds. I mean this: Quite frequently, when an expert in his/her field was up on stage calling down rays of glorious wisdom upon us, various members of the audience would do their best to ensure that ample attention was instead turned upon themselves, at least among the few people nearby. Most often, this attention was attained through a cacophony of asides about the audience members' own literary conquests: "Ah yes, of course--Somerset Maugham. Brilliant."

But what got me more than that were the political clappers. Allow me to explain. A political clapper is one who absolutely must make his/her personal political views known to the remainder of the crowd, at whatever the cost to dignity and decency. It's become so that in some venues, one can't even mention certain people or issues without eliciting claps or boos before the sentence is even over. Not long ago on TV, I heard a comedian mention something about our previous president having ruined the nation, and the audience exploded into raucous applause. Were they glad that such an event took place? Is it so important that our petty partisanship be made known that we're willing to applaud a tragedy?

Anyway, I guess we all do it. We all love attention, and that's why we all have blogs. I don't know how or when or why this trend took off. All I know is that if you're reading this, you should tell all of your friends to read it too, and tell everyone they know. These distinct opinions, and no one else's, might save your life, or at least your soul.