Junot Diaz made a successful appearance at Duke's White Lecture Hall on Wednesday evening (if you missed it, check out this feature). Besides his reading from excellent debut novel (and Pulitzer Prize winner) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and sophisticated, humorous story "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars", the entertainment value came largely from his urban intellectual humor and obvious lack of reservations. The man was clearly comfortable behind the podium, and here are some of the highlights from his banter that didn't make it into the story (often because they would've been unprintable in The Chronicle):
—"So how many of you are here because your teachers were like, 'You gotta f--ing come and I’ll give your a-- extra-credit?'"
—"Sometimes the student life is so busy that if I didn’t force my students to see art, they wouldn’t have the time to do it... It's one of the only coercions that has a positive outcome."
—[Regarding President Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 election] "You guys pulled it out of your a--... You guys must be very proud, people must’ve worked very hard for that. That could not have been an easy victory. You guys are doing really good now. S--."
—[Addressing a member of the audience] "Somebody smokes way more than me. I already see you. You look like you grow yours."
—[Regarding the title of his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] "A lot of times there are people who are very good at titles, and there are people who are not. I am in the not... It’s like naming your child something with 23 syllables."
—"One of the weird things about language is that when we discuss language we always think of language as a moral choice. In Latin America it’s the same way. If you come home to Santo Domingo and your English is better than your Spanish, people act like you chose that s--."
—"I teach at a university part-time, and it’s the biggest nerd university on the planet, it’s MIT. It doesn’t matter that we have a president [Obama] that collects comic books, we are still deeply hierarchical mammals."
—"It’s absolutely no problem if a white boy likes Star Trek, but if a 6’6 black dude likes Star Trek, they’re like what the f--? Shouldn’t you be playing ball?"
—"The only way you get other people to accept complexity is when you accept it in yourself."
—[Regarding why he only writes fiction] "There are plenty of people who are multi-talented. Like Kanye West... I'm like your uncle's keyboard, where only one key works."
—"I was one of those kids who tested off the charts, and what I noticed was, I was a pretty bright kid, and just because I spoke in an accent, people would be like, 'Do you want me to help you open the door?'"
—"The only way you get out of hell, guys, is not by trying to run from it. The only way you get out of hell is by pushing deeper into it."
—[After being asked whether he has any bond to writer Julia Alvarez] "Out of all the writers, you picked the other Dominican."
—"I’ve always been much more interested in how do we survive not getting what we want. For some of you maybe not, but for the rest of the world the world is one long chain of being thwarted. What’s remarkable is that the world will not obey us, the world will never obey us, but we still find a way to make beauty and art and happiness."
—"If you have two sisters, almost the same age… my sisters are very beautiful, and really really smart… and if you’re a smart woman, it’s pretty tough out there... My little sister says, 'If I keep my mouth shut all night, I’ll have ten guys. As soon as I open my mouth, no guys.' I guess that fuels my writing."
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