Which internet did you hear that on?

I'm in Memphis with the Oxford American for a literary conference of sorts. I watched the debates last night in a little broken bar with a pool table and christmas lights just one block from where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Passing by the Hotel Lorraine on our way to dinner (decision to eat determined via gut check) made me sad. Downtown Memphis is old ornate buildings interspersed with late 1970s monoliths, it feels rather dead but ornamentally so. Like every city suffering a renaissance for its blighted downtown, there is a novelty trolley. Somehow urban wastelands looked for redemption and were presented with apparitions of novelty trolleys that have since been worshiped as false idols. We had ribs from Rendezvous, and I really wanted to Fed Ex someone a package of ribs. It's a pretty penny though.

So Jacques Derrida has died. I imagine there have been various candlelight vigils and memorial panels at Brown. Ugh. Sometimes I daydream about going to an MCM class and sitting on that big wooden table at the Malcolm S. Forbes Center and vomiting on the best-dressed student in the discussion section.

Today I also fell in love with James Ellroy. He asked me what my name was. I said Emily. He looked me in the eye and said, "Emily, history rages." Then took my copy of American Tabloid and signed it, "To Emily. History Rages! J.E." He did this for no-one else that I saw. I was pleased.

He's pretty crazy. He said something along the lines of "I always tell writers not to write from their own lives," and yet at the same time he talked at length about growing up in L.A., about how his mother was murdered in 1958 when he was ten, "an unsolved body dump sex crime," and how all his best friends are cops. This is a person whose life and experiences are totally inseprable from his fiction, to an uncanny extent. He's also a total populist, all his favorite books were released as trade paperbacks and he was very up front about only writing film scripts (none of which have ever been made, excluding adaptations of his own work) for money. He think films are a lesser art than literature. He hopes to die without any money, except enough to build an auditorium at his old junior high in L.A. (where he says he spent a few happy years). And in the James Ellroy Auditorium he would erect a statue of himself with the words "Read motherfuckers!" inscribed at the base.

He "dreams of a new language for popular American fiction.''

It's been a day surrounded by the middle-aged however, and the maroon and forest green motifs of my hotel room in the "Sleep Inn" are beginning to swim before my eyes. I must go take the novelty trolley to trays of canapes and small tarts and Edward P. Jones accepting an award.