Walk, Talk, Read: 72 hours in Ubud
Arrived in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia in the dead of night and woke up to this.
The Ubud festival is not a showcase of lumpia but a gathering of writers and readers. Ubud is where the last part of Eat, Pray, Love happens. We sat through that movie yelling “Ang laki ng problema mo!” at the screen, but Ubud is fairly spectacular. Likelihood of running into Javier Bardem: zero. We’re more likely to hang out with Anton Chigurh, his character in No Country For Old Men.
We’re at Alila Resort, in a villa surrounded by vast fields, trees, rice terraces, mountains. It’s gorgeous! What have we done to deserve this?
Absolutely nothing. Life is unfair. At 3am we leapt into the shower, and in the morning we realized that the shower has a view.
Hmmm. Modesty, or a shower after walking up and down tropical Ubud at high noon? No contest. Luckily we’re too old to get expelled from school and the only real danger is to passing water buffalo.
Breakfast is served at the Plantation Restaurant, where the staff understands late nights and jet lag and allows you to order cereal at 11am.
They had us at rice porridge.
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News flash: Summa at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival (UWRF) Media Centre got us interviews with Chang-Rae Lee and Jeffrey Eugenides. Help! Post your questions for the authors of The Surrendered/Aloft/A Gesture Life and The Virgin Suicides/Middlesex/The Marriage Plot in Comments. Incisive questions, okay? Make us sound good in the podcasts.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 4th, 2012 at 19:48
For Jeffrey Eugenides:
“What was it like to portray Henry James in a Vogue spread?”
Vogue Sept 2012 issue – Edith Wharton write-up and photospread (Natalia Vodianova as Edith Wharton. Jeffrey Eugenides, Junot Diaz, et al, as Ms. Wharton’s friends)
October 4th, 2012 at 23:15
Mr Jeffrey Eugenides, have you met people like Cal of “Middlesex” in real life? What do you think of Buck Angel? *kidding*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel
October 5th, 2012 at 09:16
m’jessica, medyo mahaba, sensya na.
For Jeffrey Eugenides:
you edited a collection of love stories. your intro to the anthology is superb. it’s like a treatise, dissection of short stories about love that high school students can just cut and paste to book reviews
at one point, a passage: “two unexceptional people, for no demonstrable reasons, being exceptionally in love.” seems to portend oncoming mix of cheese and drama in the oncoming stories :-)
but then we were bombarded with bleak, melancholy, fatalism :-)
was it your intention to show that brilliant (true?) love stories always have some gloominess in it?
or was it because of your disposition at that time?
October 5th, 2012 at 11:15
For Jeffrey Eugenides din. Follow-up to UVDust’s question, what’s your favorite Henry James work?
You’ve mentioned in a New York Times interview that the best marriage plot novel of all time is Portrait of A Lady. What’s the worst you’ve read so far?
October 5th, 2012 at 16:36
For Chang-Rae Lee:
Some of my memories of his work are foggy, mostly because I came across him in one of my English classes – and only in essay form. Before that, I had this image of Asian-American literature following the “sad immigrant” narrative, but something about his work came across as vibrant in comparison to the other essays we read in class – including an article on feminism by Audrey Niffenegger, which impressed neither my teacher nor my classmates. So forgive me if my questions are not as trenchant as they should be; all I can remember is how humorous and “New York-ish” his work turned out to be, which struck me as a welcome change.
– I remember when your (first) novel Native Speaker came out, and critics were comparing your book to Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. How do you feel about those comparisons now, several novels later?
– Considering the growing presence of K-culture within the US (not just “Gangnam Style,” but soap operas, food, movies, Noraebang) how would you classify this kind of “acceptance” of Korean culture into the American consciousness? Could it even be considered as “acceptance,” for that matter?