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>> -- 1970, and I was teaching a class [inaudible]
which was entitled Introduction to the Novel and I never
in my wildest dreams imagined
that Marc would be [inaudible] any of my students would want
to actually write a novel himself which was published
by a very prestigious New York House that's called the
Dogfighter which is set in Mexico and is concerned
with the-- [inaudible]?
Oh sorry. [Inaudible Remark] And is concerned with the--
a protagonist who is making his living when not
in constriction fighting dogs for a living which is a kind
of very gruesome thing.
I've read the novel myself
and thought it was absolutely wonderful, so I'm delighted
that we actually have a novelist talking today
to us about novels.
Marc graduated from Santa Rosa Junior College and then went
on to University of California at Berkley and then he moved
to New York City and did an MFA in creative writing.
I'm going to shut up now because I want Marc
to the have the maximum amount of time and I'm just going
to pin my ears back and I'm sure we're all going
to learn a great deal, Marc.
>> Thank you, Bob.
[ Applause ]
Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.
Is that too loud?
No? [Inaudible Remark] Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon
and welcome to the fourth and final presentation
of Santa Rosa Junior College English Department WOLM series.
As Bob mentioned, my name is Marc Bojanowski and I'm going
to be speaking to you today about the concept or the idea
of setting and setting as an element of fiction
in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five,
Vonnegut's use of setting.
But before I begin, I'd like to take the opportunity
to thank not only the English Department
and the WOLM committee but Janet McCulloch in particular,
I don't see her, for the opportunity to be here today.
It's rare that we're given the opportunity-- thank you.
It's rare that we're given the opportunity to come together
as a community to discuss the work of literary merit
and so this is special and I appreciate and I am honored
and I take great pride of being able to be here today
to sweat underneath these lights and [inaudible] while some
of you fall asleep in the back.
[laughter] Also, I'd like to apologize in advance
for all the swearing but I find it necessary and effective
in capturing some of the younger and shorter attention spans.
With that said--
[ Pause ]
-- here we go, the California Essayist
and Novelist Joan Didion once wrote that we tell story
in order to survive-- let me get out of the light.
We tell story in order to live.
Now, I encountered this sentence a very long time--
well not that very long ago, a number of years ago
and I've been thinking about it ever since and well,
I've been wondering what the hell does she mean?
Is she mean by this that we need stories to be able to live,
that somehow stories will actually keep us alive
or is she saying something else that maybe stories will
in fact enrich our lives and she's speaking metaphorically.
So again, that's just what I said
so I probably should move the slide.
Do stories keep us alive or do they enable us
to live our lives more fully?
Well, the conclusion that I came to and one that I come with--
to-- with most complicated issues is
that it generally depends upon the story so how about this one,
Jack drank from the well and died.
Now, if you were to walk into a space and there were
to be a well right over there and someone was dead
on the floor next to it and someone else was standing there
and you said, "What happened?"
And the person said, "Well, Jack drank from the well and died."
You then will have learned from the story, this is vital, note,
vital information that you would survive using that information.
But is that what she meant?
Possibly. But how about another story, when Jack went
to the well to drink, he became transfixed by his reflection
on the surface of the water and he stared into it and stared
into it and he continued to stare
into it forsaking everything else
until he died of dehydration.
Now, is there a literal meaning to this or is this more
of a figurative language or metaphorical.
Are we to understand that this is indeed a meaningful
information, some of you may have heard the story
with a different character's name, but there's something
about this information and there's something that I think
that we can learn from it so with both of those, yes,
I think that she meant both
that stories will help us survive literally
but they help us live.
Now, either way, Jack dies because ultimately, we all do.
I mean it's nice to see all of you here today,
but unfortunately, we're not all going to be here for very long.
I hope we're here for quite a while.
But again-- so telling stories has placed an integral role
in our lives and that it-- sorry.
It helps us better articulate what we
like to call the human condition.
For those of you who are not familiar with the term,
the human condition, it's something that we use
to describe the meaning or the meanings of life.
It's also how we talk about isolation whether
or not being alone some place or suffering from loneliness,
whether or not you are even sitting in the crowd
in here feeling very lonely.
It's about feeling isolated inside of your own mind.
But it's also about how we contemplate and talk
about happiness and whether or not we can find happiness
or whether or not happiness can be achieved and it's how we deal
with or talk the inevitability of death.
But stories help us articulate--
but not only that they help us explore the human condition,
they help us explore these things.
Now, how? Well, certain people take the time
out of their daily lives to sit down, usually sitting
down in darkened rooms and they spend a significant amount
of time thinking about how they can tell different stories
and what these stories are trying to say
and what they are trying to do.
Kurt Vonnegut was one of these people
and we're lucky to have had him.
But, it's not that it's easy, I'm not trying to say
that it's easy, but there certain tricks of the trade
and there's certain things that you can use to your advantage
that folks have been using for a very, very long time and we
like to call these the elements of fiction.
Now some of you may have heard about the elements of fiction
from when you were in high school
or maybe you've been learning about them in 1A or 100.
But what they are, the 3 that I'd like to discuss
for right now are character-- the first one would be character
and there's been-- it's kind of a longstanding debate as to
which of these are hierarchically the
most important.
As far as I'm concerned with the English language,
because we begin most of our sentences with subjects,
with characters, that character is right up there.
It's certainly very important.
Character is the subject of a story or the subject
of a sentence, the who or the what.
But-- and you can see down here at the bottom for those of you,
I don't know if you have 302, 100, 305, [inaudible].
But there's also the story, there's the plot,
there's the action, there is the how and the why.
If you notice under here we have-- we have Jack, right,
our subject and what did he do?
He drank and he died.
Notice, those are in the past tense so not only that we able
to deal with a subject, but we're able to deal with time,
but what about space, time and space?
Well, that's where this one comes in, setting.
Now setting, it's-- usually, the argument is this,
which is more important, character or story, or story
or character and what am I going to begin my story with, which--
I have to decide and I think that this one,
it's lifting the dust a little too often,
because it's essential.
I mean, if you look at the sentence,
Jack drank from the well and died.
This bit of information which as we know we put in parenthetical
so we can cross it out, our subject won't be there, right?
This bit of information, this prepositional phrase helps--
helps us arrange ourselves in space and in time.
So the setting in my opinion is very important.
Now, some of you have read the book,
some of you have not read the book, but in the book,
there is a city called Dresden
and this city undergoes a significant transformation
to put it lightly but it is in many ways an ideal setting
and if you look at this word ideal, it's a noun,
you look at it as a conception,
an idea of something in its perfection.
But look at where that appears, it's in your imagination.
Now, Dresden was a sort of Eden.
It was the culture, it was the sort of the soul of Germany,
it was the cultural center, it was where art and music
and architecture in particular, you know, it was the soul
of Germany but we need to be able to reference it back
to something and one of--
arguably one of the most famous settings of all time
in Western Canon at least is the Garden of Eden.
Now for those of you who don't know the story,
a very long time ago-- don't say forever
because that's just exaggerating.
A very long time ago,
a character named God created the heavens and the earth
and he created humankind and he said, "Be fruitful and multiply.
Fill the earth and subdue it," which is fine but then a couple
of sentences later, there's another story,
and in this story, God creates the heaven and the earth
and he creates a garden and at the center of this garden,
he puts a tree of life and then the tree
of knowledge of good and evil.
And this garden is beautiful, all right,
I mean Sonoma County is beautiful,
but this garden is beautiful, and he has no one
to tend it though and so he reaches into the soil
and he fashions out of the soil a character named Adam
and he lifts Adam and he breathes life
into Adam's nostrils and he said, "This is all yours, so--
but you got to take care of it, you need to tend it."
And so Adam began working, not the work the way that we think
of work, not toil, right, not toil, but working the garden.
But remember now at the center of this garden,
there is this tree, this tree of knowledge of good
and evil suggesting that outside of this space,
outside of this garden, there exist things
that Adam doesn't know anything about.
So after a while, Adam asks God for a companion
and he falls asleep-- Adam does, God comes in and plucks one
of his ribs he creates Eve and the 2 of them live happily
in this garden but not ever after.
One day, they're out collecting food
and the serpent comes along he says to Eve and Adam,
"You all should eat from the tree
of knowledge of good and evil."
He says, "No, we can't because if we eat from that tree,
God told us, we will die."
And the serpent says, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
If you eat from the tree knowledge of good and evil,
your eyes will be open and you will be like God.
So you should try it."
And the rest as they is history, right?
Well, banished from the garden,
we've been wandering every since.
Our eyes have been open.
Now what have we been wandering through?
Well, down through the ages,
you could see the different tools that we used.
You talked about going through stone and iron and now
into our own hydrocarbon age, petroleum, and plastics.
How about our transportation, how we're able to move
through time and space using these tools, on foot and moving
from horse, train, automobile, airplane to space shuttle.
And then from living in life in the country to life in the city
to the suburbs and complaining about it even though it's
so nice and then back to the space station and now to moving
to our life on line more and more of us everyday
and then how we communicate, how we share these stories
from things like smoke signals,
all the way up to those satellites that every now
and then come back down through.
So wires and using wires and wire list.
My point is, is that we are inextricably bound
to our settings, to our spaces and to our times.
I use the word inextricable because if you look,
it's incapable of being disentangled, undone.
If you remember in the book at one point I think it was
when he is in Dresden-- I know it was when he is in Dresden,
he steps out and he gets caught in the wire, Billy Pilgrim does
and he can't disentangle himself and then
in a very Vonnegut fashion,
the Russian takes a leak off to the side.
But we are inextricably bound.
Because as we change our technologies including story,
you have to think of story as a tool, our stories as,
we change our technologies including stories--
as we change our technologies-- excuse me, I'm a bit nervous.
As we change our technologies including story,
our technologies change who we are
and how we view ourselves and our settings.
This photo was taken in 1967, the majority of you have been--
were born after that so you've always known this,
but think about how this photo coming down through the ages,
the different technologies we had from maps that we drew
in the dirt, from maps when we finally got them on paper
and then you'd have those interesting things
like the sea creatures outside the bounds not knowing what our
landscape look like, not knowing how we were traveling through it
and moving through, but think
about how this picture has changed things.
How it has changed our perspective?
Howe we view spaces and times?
If you think-- okay, even somewhere on there, right,
and that's what were told but then we ate and this here, 1967,
this is the God's eye view, maybe.
So what the hell does all of this have to do with Vonnegut
and Slaughterhouse-Five.
Now, Vonnegut at the very beginning-- or not--
excuse me, not the beginning, towards the end of the book,
he writes that there're almost no characters in the story
and almost no dramatic confrontations because most
of the people in it are so sick
and so much the listless playthings
of enormous forces, pretty language.
No characters, no subjects, no Jack,
and no dramatic action, no confrontations.
I don't know if that's entirely true but maybe in the sense
that we are usually expecting it from a story, but the people,
the people are so much the listless playthings
of enormous forces.
Who is the character?
Who is the main character, the protagonist of this novel?
Is it Billy Pilgrim is-- you know, look at that name in it
of itself, a pilgrim, someone who is bound to their faith but
yet also exerting their will and force
to wonder almost listlessly this having her showing little
or no interest in anything [inaudible] spiritless, well,
I don't know that Billy is entirely spiritless, I mean,
particularly after he comes home and he's very excited
about telling everyone about his trips to Tralfamadore but what
about Vonnegut and what about place?
What about place?
Maybe place is a character, the main focus, maybe the setting.
It's important when we talk about people
that we understand their context, or where they are
from so we know a little bit more about them, their spaces
and their time and we do the same thing with novels.
For the sake of this, it's important to remember
that Kurt Vonnegut, our subject, was born,
subject and there's our verb.
Where? In 1922, these propositional phrases
that give us increasing amounts of information.
Do you see how wonderful language is, the elegance of it?
How it can tie us in to story, how it can tie us in to time
and place and different people's experiences,
all the way down into here right now today and planet earth,
at least that's what we call it.
Well, look at these events.
These are a number of different events
that occurred before Vonnegut's lifetime.
He was born in 1922 and leading up to and finishing right here
with the conclu--
the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Now, here's an individual-- okay, think about--
think about your own life and what happened, the major
and minor historical events that happened before you were born
and it will happen a little bit later.
You can think about-- I mean do we have this?
This is the 20th century.
The 20th century as someone would describe it as a series
of blood letting, granted people have always been dying
and will continue to dye and that's a lot of dying
but that's an exceptional amount of dying and Vonnegut witnessed
or probably heard stories about it, I mean before he was born.
Look at that, 37 million dead in 5 years and then on top of that
with all that fighting in the trenches, all that dirt
and grime and disease spreading,
you end up with an influenza, right.
My fiancee and I once came across a postcard
that had been written in 1920 and talking about the mom died
but it was very straightforward.
The language is not exaggeration.
There was no hyperbole.
They're very straightforward, a very different time,
but look at this context, look at the context
in which he is living and the thing is they've been--
the number of people who are dying and then
that he is directly witnessing when he comes in,
right, in his lifetime.
But it's also nice to look carefully a little bit more
closely at what was happening around where he was living
in the 1960 and in particular writing the novel
Slaughterhouse-Five was the 1960s and some
of you may have heard it was a fairly tumultuous time as well,
particularly here in the United States
where we got a president assassinated,
a civil rights leader assassinated.
There were numerous riots in US cities, I mean,
not nearly the firestorms that happened in Dresden,
that's not what I'm saying.
But certainly, you could fly over cities
at night and see flames.
You could see serious unrest and then in 1969 was
when Vonnegut came and published the book.
So that's-- that's the context, that's how this book came to be,
that's literally Vonnegut reaching
into all these different things, shaping it
and breathing life into it.
That's how we do things.
Now how? Well, how does he deal with setting and now he talks--
this gets back to Didion, what she was talking about earlier,
the sort of-- the figurative or the metaphorical.
Now when you read this, "Shells were bursting
in the tree tops with terrific bangs."
Look at-- notice the use of the word terrific?
That was terrific.
Notice the root, terr, right?
Do we still say that?
Right, you used to sit at the table and say,
"This meal was terrible."
My father would yell, "[Inaudible] was terrible."
Anyhow, "Shells were bursting in the tree tops
with terrific bangs, showering down knives
and needles and razor blades."
Now, did those things literally come showering down?
No, but were they like that?
I don't know, I wasn't there but that's a hell of a description.
But what about his use of the literal?
"He was 12 years old, quaking as he stood with his mother
and father on Bright Angel Point."
Nice location.
"At the rim of the Grand Canyon,
the little human family was staring at the floor
of the canyon, one mile straight down."
Notice what a good job he does of having be so young
and looking into something so massive,
such an incredible space that had been carved
over serious amounts of time.
"Well," said Billy's father, manfully kicking a pebble
into space, "There it is."
See how this is-- different elements of the human condition
that he's dealing with just on a paragraph by paragraph--
a sentence by sentence basis, that he's telling us.
I mean this is a story within a story,
within several other stories, within numerous spaces and times
and we can kind of follow,
particularly if we use SparkNotes.
But why? Why would Vonnegut-- if you look at all those deaths
that we talk about and all that carnage
and mechanized warfare completely changing our
understanding of warfare, why even try.
Why would someone like Vonnegut sit in that place
and spend hours and hours and hours and hours coming
up with stories to tell folks like us.
Well, one way to make sense of the world, have numbers,
you have other different symbols but it's through art
and literature, particularly you have something like the WOLM,
we put it in front of you, this is art, this is good art
and this is one of the ways that we make sense of the world,
where we make sense of our time and our space while listening
to things that came before and thinking ahead.
[ Pause ]
Vonnegut published in '69 but the world-- the war--
excuse me, ended in '45, he said, "When I got home
from the Second World War 23 years ago,
I thought it would be easy to write about the destruction
of Dresden," and for all of these who were here earlier
in the semester-- or excuse me, in--
for [inaudible] talk on Monday, you saw some of those images.
I haven't been including many of images because I want you
to focus a little bit more on some of these words
that he's using but the images were tremendous, right?
And here he is trying to make sense of them
as they came out piece by piece.
They weren't all just available
on the internet the way they are now.
"Easy to write about the destruction of Dresden,
since all I would have to do would be able
to report what I had seen," makes it sound easy, right?
"And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece
or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was
so big," and by so big he's being a bit flippant.
He's talking about the human condition.
Vonnegut felt strongly compared to share his thoughts
with other humans like you, that's why.
But how was he going to do it?
Now, we have a number
of different methods for telling stories.
We have stories that reassure us.
We tend to control this genre fiction
and genre fiction conforms to the conventions of this genre.
You watch a romance, now you combine romance and horror
and you get Twilight, right?
You sit there, you watch these things.
You expect certain things to happen and then, yeah, they do,
and you are satisfied because they have--
this story has conformed to a genre.
This is what we tend to read for fun.
This is what we tend to read for school
because these are the stories that challenge us.
This is the art, not to say that other stuff is not art,
that's not what I'm saying.
But this stuff is equally as important.
Now, literary fiction is what we call a book like this.
It falls into that category 'cause it is serious fiction.
These people that wear ties, that kind of stuff, right,
is usually critically acclaimed.
Now, some of these stories you're familiar with these.
From 1984, takes place in the future,
Fahrenheit 451 also a future,
For Whom the Bell Tolls a war story,
Catch-22 another war story,
The Things They Carried another war story.
These stories are written primarily by men--
well, not entirely by men excuse me, right.
But the war novel.
The war novel becomes one of these--
it falls into the literary novel character--
category but more and more often,
I think Vonnegut saw it falling into the genre novel,
that it was more and more for entertainment.
If you remember earlier in the novel, Bernard's wife--
Bernard O'Hare's wife, she is very upset, right,
she's very upset with Vonnegut being in her house
and because he wants to come and talk about Dresden and she says,
"You're going to write a story and it's going to turn
into a movie and John Wayne and Frank Sinatra, movie stars,
are going to play the parts and you're going
to send more little babies to war."
Because as she said, and Vonnegut believed as he writes
in the book, that the stories probably cause war
and that's a very terrible paraphrase and--
of course, I forgot to get my book
out before I started, but there are also--
[ Pause ]
-- a number of different reasons why Vonnegut was looking
seriously at the war novel and looking
in how all these other men have been writing the war novel
and how he wanted to write a war novel because he was maybe--
I suspect, started to believe
that maybe the stories weren't helping us live
or that they were relying on too many
of these conventions particularly
in something like the war novel.
So that he needed to find a new, a different in a better way
to go ahead and go about it.
And in turn, he talks about, "The cockles of Billy's heart,
at any rate, were glowing coals.
What made them so hot was Billy's belief that he was going
to comfort so many people about the truth about time."
But earlier in the book, he has that conversation
with the famous person, the director Harrison Starr
and people always said Harrison Star says, "Well,
you're writing an anti-war novel?"
And he says, "Well, yeah."
He says, "You know what I tell people
who are writing anti-war novels, you should be writing a novel
about glaciers," right?
Because he says what was the--
what he meant of course was there would always be wars,
that they were easy-- as easy to stop as glaciers,
"I believe that too," Vonnegut says.
And then a little bit farther along, you say--
I marked the wrong page, no.
So how to go about doing it?
How to go about changing the war novel
so it's no longer conforming to those particular conventions
and fortunately enough for Billy Pilgrim, he's in the hospital
and next to him is this character name Eliot Rosewater
and under-- in a trunk underneath Eliot Rosewater's
bed, there are a number of genre novels,
these science fiction novels and he's in the hospital
with Rosewater and Billy were dealing with similar crises,
a seeming condition, the sense
of meaninglessness in similar ways.
They had both found life meaningless partly
because of what they had seen in war.
So they were trying to reinvent themselves and their universe.
Science fiction was a big help.
I know some of you who were here maybe earlier
for Matt Murray's speech are talk--
this is a great line but there wasn't enough-- these metaphors,
they weren't enough anymore.
"But that isn't enough anymore, said Rosewater.
Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist,
'I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot
of wonderful new lies.'" Now, I think Vonnegut thought
of himself as something of a psychiatrist and he was the one
that was going to have to come up with these new lies
and I don't mean lie lies,
I'm talking about fabrications which--
but still, this is an important thing to consider.
Particularly when we're moving on and our understanding
of space and time is changing as we move along,
so that the settings, if you had Eden on the planet,
imaginary perfect place and then we have that beautiful picture
of the globe, perfect, right?
It isn't it isn't, but now imagine what that view must look
like from some place even farther away,
moving farther away using all those technologies
that I've described earlier.
Vonnegut's use of Tralfamadore as a setting
for literary novel was revolutionary for his time.
Now today, we watch movies and they're set
in outer space all the time, people travel
through time all the time, we go through different dimensions,
whatever, but no, his use--
I mean, HG Wells had done things similar to this but Vonnegut,
when he went and did this into the war novel,
when he started moving things to Tralfamadore, I mean,
it was funny and people didn't take it seriously
for the most part.
People were kind of a little bit snobbery
because it was science fiction but it was in the war novel
and he was looking at it from a very different viewpoint
than some of those other writers,
those masculine writers writing about war
that I mentioned earlier.
Again, why?
That's a big reason, right?
Money and Vonnegut-- right, one of the jokes Vonnegut made was
that he was probably one of the only ones to profit
from the bombing at Dresden.
Did he do it for fame, most certainly, right?
Vonnegut was-- had a great sense of humor
and a great understanding of himself and place and time.
That's a picture of the book
when it came out, its first edition.
But I believe this, I think that Vonnegut was aware
that the frameworks available to the writers
of literary fiction were no longer sufficient to the task
of illuminating the human condition,
of what it had become during all
that carnage of the 20th century.
I think Vonnegut has realized this and he tried to help.
He tried to convey to us in the story what Joan Didion says
that stories help us survive.
Now, I ask you what do you think the settings
of the future will be?
Some of you may have heard of the novel Neuromancer,
it was written by a guy name William Gibson.
He was the one who coined the term cyberspace.
You could think of maybe a movie particularly very famous movie
that takes place in cyberspace or some place similar to it,
but then there's this other one, this IQ 1984 which--
excuse me, IQ84 written
by a Japanese writer name Haruki Murakami.
That book, people are-- I haven't read it, but I've heard
that people are constantly moving in and out
of different dimensions.
How do we do it in film because notice,
these things they're going away, right?
So we're spending more time to these because we're learning how
to read things not only words
but reading how the word-- read images.
We pay more attention to these now.
This is where we get our story,
but also this frontier, what about this?
What about a massive multiplayer online game
where you're just kind of going through it then all
of a sudden somebody who's playing
in a completely different country comes
through a dimension in your living room, if that happens,
I want to-- thank you.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
Now, I think we have a few minutes.
I tried to keep it short and sweet, are there any questions?
Good. Matt?
>> Marc, I just wonder if you could say a little bit more
about that idea you brought up of thinking about places
and characters that you've talked more
about the [inaudible].
>> Matt's asking if I could talk a little but more
about what I meant when I said places and character.
In English 302-- or excuse me, English 306,
the class that I teach, we just finished reading Cannery Row.
It's a novel that was written by John Steinbeck.
It's a wonderful novel.
It's very short.
It's beautiful and it's difficult to read,
but in that book, it's similar to this
in that there isn't a main character.
There's not the usual protagonist that we can follow
and I mean Billy Pilgrim is a flat character,
he's not very dynamic.
So the place itself is what the writing becomes about the story.
Are there any other questions?
Yes?
>> What was that beautiful spiral nebula out there?
>> Is it galaxy?
[laughter] [Inaudible Remark] There we go again.
I mean we talk about the elegance of science
but elegance is a language as well.
Yes?
>> There's one more thing about they say as the character,
would you say that in novels, when that character becomes
or in one setting as becoming character, it has to do
with the magnitude of the setting and what's going
on so much that the characters follow it
to what there in the novel.
>> [Inaudible] into the mic, yes and no.
I think that it-- ultimately, it all depends
on what the author's intentions are in my opinion,
what the author is going for.
I don't know if that answers your question
or not at all, does it?
No, sorry.
Yes?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
I thought that someone might ask that and I debated whether
or not or how I was going to answer that
and I think it's a dirty trick not to answer it,
but I think it's best to say I want our students to think
about the future and this might be something they might say.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
Yeah, I mean it's difficult to pay attention to your setting
when this is your setting, you know,
when you're constantly staring down into
that screen that's taking you
into that completely different world
and that's what quite a few of our students do on a--
more than just the daily basis.
Thank you all for coming today.
I appreciate it.
[ Applause ]
[ Inaudible Discussion ]
>> I just wanted to say thank you.
That was really interesting idea in setting
and the character 'cause I've noticed
that the characters were kind of bland,
but the writing was more vibrant and so is the description
of setting, so I really like that you tied all that together.
>> Good, thank you very much for coming.
I appreciate it.
>> You did a good job.
>> Thank you.
>> I'm glad you came.
>> I'm glad you are here as well.
>> It was nice to watch you teach the other people.
>> Now you got to read the book.
>> Yes, I do and I'll see you tomorrow.
>> Sounds good.
>> Thank you, Marc.
>> See you later.
>> See you later.
[ Silence ]