I am a simple farmer, and rubbing elbows with the glitterati is not really my thing. I don't mean to pretend I don't enjoy reading a book, but going to a reading last night by three former Stegner Fellows at Stamford's writing program, I realized that I could never survive the world of graduate school writers. For one thing, they were all talking about the lives of their fictional characters as if they had will and determination saying stuff like ". . .by the second draft, the character of Mensa really leapt up off the page. I had breathed life into her, but now she wanted to be difficult, complicated. So I made her an alcoholic. . ."

Not that I am anyone to talk about how to write. These people were all serious writers. But writing fiction, like acting, seems like something best not talked about. Also the host of the evening, who had a formidable resume, having taught everywhere from Harvard to Stamford, said that when this writing program started there were three in the country, and that today there are 674 or something. Which means legions of writers are sitting in critiques, discussing the arc of character, the nuance of blah blah blah, and soon the world will be full of these people. I'm probably just jealous. After all, the reason I was there was that my new friend was speaking, and she had just sold her first book for a small fortune, with overseas rights and translated versions and all that. Which I wish I had done.

But being there, and by there, I mean in Francis Ford Coppolla's cafe, which is located under the offices for his literary magazine, Zoetrope, which is where the writers had published short stories, I couldn't help but think snide thoughts about the world of both writing and FFC. Coppolla had his wine, which was stacked on the walls, all from his vineyard, named Coppolla, as well as CDs for sale from the soundtrack to his daughter's movie, Virgin Suicides. I guess there is nothing wrong with putting art, food and wine out into the world, but somehow his franchise irritated me, maybe set off by his annotations on the menu "I serve no pizza below the standard of Lombardi's in New York", or mabye it was because I was clautrophobic, trapped in the back of the room behind a mob of tousle-haired writers, wearing writer type outfits. I kept thinking the place would catch on fire and I would have to throw my chair through the window to escape. And my chair was wicker which would probably just bend against the window, and the marble topped tables were far to heavy to lift.

The guy next to me was marking up a copy of a local maritime newspaper, no doubt sharpening his editing chops to kill time, reworking the prose of some low paid newsman whose beat was not so much the waterfront as the actual boats. I also might have been cranky because there was no food served, and I was there for a few hours of stomach grumbling hunger. The only thing close to food was lemon soda, which just made my stomach burn more, and cost me two bucks to boot. But although they served food there, there was no food service during the reading, so I was left to staring at the olive oil and red pepper flake dispenser on the table and think about how much I would like Lombardi's pizza.

Afterwards, I went out and bought a slice, which, I weren't already feeling nostalgic for New York, what with the standing in a halo of a street lamp in North Beach, hungry and tired, the poor excuse for pizza put me over the edge. It was so much worse than a frozen supermarket pizza, that when I went to fold the slice, to eat as pizza should be eaten, it cracked in half, like a matzo, and the cheese slid out the gully on the wet slick of the tomato paste. Of course I ate it anyway, but it was about as bad as pizza could be, and kind of stank of oil, no doubt from the effluence of the deep fat fryer located near where it was located on the counter. I should add that the actual readings, meaning what was written, was quite impressive. Which sort of undergirds my initial point, which is that I like reading. I like books. It's just the other stuff that goes with books that is a little hard to take, like the tweed coats and the alcoholism.