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1 Tour Diary: the Diviners, North America, 2005 by Rick Moody From Tour Diary: The Diviners, North America, 2005 by Rick Moody from Post Road 12 Selected by Elizabeth Searle, author of Celebrities in Disgrace, A Four-Sided Bed, and My Body to You. The Diviners, North America, 2005 is divine guilty pleasure: dark bitter chocolate I couldn't stop eating; a warpy funhouse mirror I couldn't stop staring into. Rick Moody's tour diary is (the 'three r's', each related to the other) relentless, rambling, real. It is (three 'h's too) harrowingly hilariously honest. It is LOL and damn depressing at once, like life. Picking it for this anthology makes me feel self-conscious and guilty in a Moody-esque manner-- which I mention as a high compliment, writing-wise. Rick Moody is a writer who gets into your head so his witty 'whiny' italicized and quotation-marked voice is your own inner voice after reading. Maybe/probably it was before, as well. An innate kindness and modesty shines through in all Rick Moody's works, even a seemingly casually composed 'diary,' meant perhaps as a letter to himself but speaking to the many selves out there who've ever tried to write and/or to engage in any ambitious/artistic/all- 1 out activity requiring one to be (in the words of, of all people, Angelina Jolie, but Rick would be OK with that) 'crazy-brave.' – ES. August 30, 2005 Rainy on Fishers Island, and even though it’s not the remnants of Katrina, it has that apocalyptic feeling to it. I bet we got two inches of rain last night. But it’s sort of too late. My garden is dead. My lawn is dead. Meanwhile, the situation here is that I am bound to read from my book at the library on Fishers Island. And I don’t want to do it at all. One thing I like about living on an extremely remote island is that everyone leaves me alone. I come and go without prompting remark. Now, it’s true that not very many people here read very much, so it’s possible that no one will come to this event at the library. But if even only forty-five more people take an interest in the fact that I’m a writer living on Fisher Island then there’s that much more discomfort for me. I feel like I should have one of those witness protection program voice-changer devices for this reading. Probably part of my reluctance has to do with the fact that it’s sort of the first night of the tour, symbolically anyhow, and there are problems (the books didn’t arrive like they were supposed to), and there’s two months or more of this to look forward to, and I have to crank up this simulation of myself for the night, the representation that has very little relationship to how I actually feel. 2 September 1, 2005 It went okay. I mean, I guess some people at the library liked the piece, which is the “Botox” chapter of The Diviners, the part that was serialized in Tin House. There were a couple of younger people up front who laughed quite a bit. I worried that some of the over-fifties in the crowd were feeling as though the reading was somehow directed at them, all this stuff about cosmetic repair, though really it’s just the chapter that requires the least explanation. Someone asked afterwards if the chapter were tailored to rile, which of course it wasn’t. All in all, a tough crowd, but I expected it to be tough. Some people walked out during the Q&A, but not because I was inflammatory, I imagine it was the first chance they had to leave. Anyway, I’m glad to be done with the hometown type events, as these are not pleasant. And I use “events” in the plural because the night after the library, I had to do another reading, for my stepmother’s sixtieth birthday. I like my stepmother, but that was an even tougher crowd. Hard not to feel like a performing monkey in these kinds of circumstances. September 12, 2005 Actual pub date, which means nothing to me. I’m told there was a nice review in the Boston Globe yesterday, but I didn’t read it, as I try to avoid reading reviews. In fact, I avoided everything today excepting the U.S. Open final. And in that case I disliked the outcome. It’s going to be three or four years, probably, before anyone can beat Roger 3 Federer. Theoretically, tonight, I’m going to read a little, and maybe play a song or two, at a hurricane relief gig at Barbes in Brooklyn. Hoping to sing the new song I wrote with Claudia Gonson (of the Magnetic Fields) when we (my band, the Wingdales) played in Boston in June. It’s a sweet, sad little song, and I am pretty proud of it. But I am incredibly nervous singing in public. I used to feel that way about reading, and don’t anymore, so I figure if I just keep singing, even though I’m nervous about it, eventually it won’t be as much of a problem. September 14, 2005 The first genuine reading of the tour, if genuine means in a chain bookstore and arranged by Little, Brown and Co. The venue was Barnes and Noble in Chelsea. I hope I won’t offend anyone too much if I say that I detest reading in the big box bookstores. There’s always too much noise and the audience, I think, feel as though they are exposed somehow. They are not relaxed, and neither am I. As a result, it’s usually kind of a drag. There was a completely reasonable crowd, and I read the “Botox” chapter of The Diviners again, which is mainly what I have been reading from it. There was some tittering and a few guffaws. In the “green room” there was someone’s electric guitar, and I really wanted to play that instead of reading, though it would have gone no better. The best part of the whole event was I took an informal audience survey about who likes the jacket of the Diviners ARC and who likes the jacket of the finished book. The women did 4 seem to prefer the finished jacket. The men were not as clear cut. After the reading I had pumpkin soup for dinner and it was great. September 19, 2005 I dreamed last night that I was flying into Ireland and had forgotten my passport. How boring and predictable. I include the dream here, despite my belief in Henry James’s dictum, “A dream recounted is a reader lost.” My particular dream serves as a prelude (along with seeing my book in the window of B&N on 8th Street, except that it was flopped over on its side where no one would be able to take note of it). A prelude to book tour. So I did fly today, into DC, and I did read tonight at George Mason University, where they have a festival called Fall for the Book. Everybody was extremely pleasant and it was completely painless. I read the “brick” chapter of the book, where Samantha Lee comes out of her coma. This required a lot of explanation, but I think it might be worth it out on the road. However, this subject—what I read—is dull when compared to witnessing my first ever university food court. Yep, I had some time to kill before the event so I went to get some food in the dining hall, except that it’s not really a dining hall, it’s a combination classroom, event space, and food court. Replete with Taco Bell and Burger King. I was a little shocked at the philosophical ramifications of Virginia’s hard earned tax dollars funding an institution of higher learning with a food court in it. Amazingly, I did find a little salad bar type of a place (I doubt there are a lot of vegetarians in Fairfax), 5 so I went there. One thing was nice: the student body is incredibly diverse at GMU. There were lots of Muslim women and lots of people speaking Chinese. It would be a fun place to go to school, notwithstanding the food court. September 20, 2005 I forgot to say that my father hates the photo of me in People magazine. I’m lying on a couch. On my wife’s couch. Well, I guess it’s our couch. In the photo, I’m wearing a t-shirt that says “Hamburgers” on it, even though I am a vegetarian. For some reason my father thinks this photo is the height of bad taste. Maybe I am meant to wear a tweed jacket. The photo shoot was three hours, which is my idea of hell, but I don’t feel horrible about it. Who cares? There are many more important things to worry about. The New Times Book Review? That is something to worry about. I read today at Politics and Prose in DC, where I was, at the time of the reading, number eleven on the Politics and Prose bestseller list, right underneath the excellent Carnivore Diet by Julia Slavin, which was at number ten. Thank god there were fifteen books on the list! The reading was modest, but the audience was fervent, and there was a guy there from the Supreme Court, who apparently had delivered to the press the official announcement in Bush v.
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