Michael Krasny: A Memoir of Talk Radio

Tonight's guest, Michael Krasny I am sure everyone in the room is waiting for this moment, so I am going to go fast. Tonight we welcome KQED forum's host Michael Krasny; Mr. Krasny's book "OFF MIKE" is a memoir; his life journey through the 60s, his student life, life as a struggling novelist, an educator and finally what we in this room know him most for, a radio host. Of the writing in this book Publishers Weekly says, his steadily honed love of language is palpable and infectious, and really it can't get better than that. Please welcome Michael Krasny. Thank you, I am very gratified to be here. A little confusion, I thought, Cody's on Telegraph, Cody's on the city where is Cody's? Well here it is, and also coming in and seeing all these wonderful photographs, I am looking around and thinking I interviewed him, I interviewed her and so but feeling at home certainly here. In fact, I was in the East Bay just about a week ago, a little after this book of mine came out at Independent Booksellers conference, which is the Independent Booksellers in Northern California's annual conference. And they had I thought I really did feel at that occasion like tonight, I am that I am was among friends. They had given me an award called the "Friend of Independent Booksellers" which unfortunately the acronym of which is the "FIBS" award. But what happened was, I had mentioned that my memoir came out the same day that John Dean excuse me that Clarence Thomas's memoir came out; which prompted John Dean, the former Watergate lawyer you know, "there is a cancer on the presidency" and all that during the Nixon administration to say, "Yes, but his book is fiction." And you know, I must tell you because it's it's an important part of my book and one of the reasons that I wanted write the book, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I mean that's sort of how I started out in some fashion, more than a fiction writer I wanted to be a novelist. And I wanted to be a novelist in the sense of what I identified as kind of the Saul Bellow type of novel writing. I became an educator and professor and many people who know my public life in broadcasting aren't even aware that I have had this longer life in the academy. In fact I was at Kepler's the other night and some woman came up to me afterward and said; I have been waiting over 30 years to tell you this said; but you were inspiring to me, you changed my life, you had more effect on me than anyone in my life because I became an educator because of you; and I felt totally elated and then I said, "Where are you teaching?" She said, "I have been retired for years". These are moments where you just you go you are up and then you know you are quickly down. Actually, the first time I read from this book was at a National Humanities Educator's conference. And I said, "Gee I really wanted to be a novelist and and somebody raises hand and say, "Well, may be the reason you didn't become a novelist was because you were trained as a scholar, trained as a journalist, trained more as a truth seeker rather than what is incumbent upon one as far as with novel writing, which of course is to use imagination and to rely upon it. So I started out writing this book and I thought it would be about autobiographical things like first novels often are, even though I had had experiments with other novel writing and fiction. And found that I at that point I was pretty much a broadcaster, but I found that I was writing more about my own life. And I wrote about the youth that I would like to sometimes call as somewhat misspent youth, where I would hang around with Billy Joel calls, The Wild Boys. And it was an important excavation for me to really look back and try to find out how I got from where I was to where I presently am and all of that. I don't see any other reason really for writing your life. I mean if you are a truth seeker, if you want to find out what your devils are and your angels are, it's really very good to write about your life, it's cathartic, it's also for a public figure, kind of a crazy thing to do, because you write about your inner life and you put that public in like Stendhal says, you put a target on yourself, but you are also saying in effect this is who I am. That's either guts or stupidity, I haven't even figured out which it is. And when you start writing in this vein it becomes a kind of primary process. It's I have characterized it being like the Scylla and Charybdis on the one hand you have got self inflation and in other hand you have self laceration and you are trying to really move between the two and figure out where this ought to begin. But I also had many stories of course that I had in my quiver about working in both commercial broadcasting where I was for a number of years you may some of you remember at KGO radio and also in Public Radio, and in fact before I even became a broadcaster with KGO, being ABC affiliate, I worked for a small station called KTIM and there were many experiences there, that was free form radio, that was a kind of radio that no longer exists, and stories about interviewing stories had become part of kind of urban legends almost especially in places in Marin County where KTIM is located and some of them went on legendary, I mean Jerry Garcia actually did snort coke while I was doing an interview with him and I asked him, wait a minute, you know. You can't do that in here. And he is a very sweet man. He said, oh you can't, okay, and he just put it all the way. So there are those sort of stories that have come out of many it's a train many years in broadcasting. I'd like to say in fact that when you tell some of these stories you are telling stories of what goes on off mike. For example I was just thinking about the fact that when I was at KGO, I interviewed Ken Adelman, a name that some of you may not remember. But he was of ambassador rank; he was a chief negotiator, a nuclear negotiator for both Reagan and Bush Senior. And Dan Quayle J. Danforth Quayle had just been named as the running mate by then President Bush Bush Senior, and I said to Adelman I said, "Ambassador, Quayle doesn't seem to have a lot of grey matter. Can you opine on this?" And he said, he is being given a bad rap in the press. He is actually a very smart man, a sophisticated nuclear negotiator, he is the senator from Indiana and he is much brighter than he seems, okay. We went to a break and I said you know Ambassador, I am sorry to tell you this, your boy just seems like to a dim bulb to me, whereupon Adelman said, "Fuck you". And I being kind of a street boy said, "Fuck you." And then we are back on the air, we are talking and it goes on just like nothing like nothing had taken place. See you want to get these kind of off mike moments like that and enshrine them, and I wanted to really get my own quest and search in this book. And it was something that influenced me in meeting Saul Bellow. Actually the first I have done a lot of literary interviews, may be too many, but the first one was Saul Bellow. It was I was a graduate student excuse me, I was a senior under graduate student and hitchhiked from Southern Ohio to Athens to meet my literary idol and I write about it in the book. But I also had become enamored of Bellow's prose, of his lyricism, of his genius, of his I think, perhaps some would say, great and inimitable writing and realized that I wanted to be Saul Bellow. I was in fact set on that and only thwarted by lack of talent. You know Terry Gross made an interesting remark to me a number of years ago when she told me, she too had aspired to being a novelist and said I didn't hear those voices inside me. That was true with me. I didn't feel that I was making my unconscious conscious or getting in to an altered state of consciousness or whatever is required of one to be a novelist. And I realized I wasn't good enough to be Saul Bellow by any means were bad enough to be say, a writer for mass market or whatever it takes. We too have this division in our culture between good writing and bad writing. But Bellow gave me an idea and it was an idea that that I was consumed by in many respects and that was how should a good man live, was how he put it. And I think I'd rather be less sexist and put it generically. How should a good person live? And I am not necessarily talking about virtue here, I was talking about trying to strive for a life that is a good life and that makes sense, that's committed to some sense of social justice and empathy and concern about other people and the compassion, where other people are concerned, and I was very fortunate to find my way into Publishers Weekly also said that I canonize Public Radio and my work in Public Radio. I think that may be a little bit hyperbolic, but it certainly was finding a home and finding a way to express these kinds of desires to do good, and I like to write about and did write about many of the stories that had gone on both on my career in Public Radio as well as Commercial Radio, to write about the contrast of the two, I don't know there is many of us Peter Lathery, who works here in Berkeley, whom some of you may have heard with talking to me on KPFA, Radio Havana as I used to affectionately call it, just this past weekend, Peter and I were talking and I realized Peter is one of those rare breeds who has also been in both public and commercial airways, but I wanted to also talk about those two worlds. And also talk about the two worlds the world from which I came and the world that I now belong to, I came from pretty blue- collar world pretty rough hewn world and one that I realized when I started dating up dating women who are from higher social class than I was that, I was learning table manners, how to hold the fork the right way, how to chew with my mouth closed, things that I didn't know as a young man, being a little bit of a barbarian. And so I welcomed the opportunity to move into what Mencken called affectionately the booboisie, or to become more bourgeoisified as time went on, and I have tried to capture some of that in the book here as well and captured the life of the mind that has been so important in the literary life, that has been so important to me as well. So this is a book about class, it's a book about teaching. When I came to San Francisco state I taught black literature to black students, the year after the strike there and it was quite an extraordinary experience in many ways, it was some of the best teaching experiences of my life. It's a book about interviewing; it's a book about becoming bookish and intellectual from being a kind of rough hewn blue- collar kid. It's also a book about rage and rage is something that Adam Hochschild, when he read this this book in Galley's found particularly engaging. And I am not talking about rage at social injustice, or rage at inequities, but also rage that one feels just in the every day when you grow up in a certain kind of proletarian background like I did and somebody like it happened just a few weeks ago, cut me off and I honked the horn to show my displeasure and the guy gave me the bird, I realize that I still have those kind of impulses of wanting to go after somebody like that. This is also a book about the 60s, they say you know if you remember the 60s, you didn't live through them, but I do remember them and I remember the political activism and the idealism and I was formed; I was talking to Melissa in front of the bookstore here before I was there before I went on air, well okay. And and the fact of the matter is, she said, boy you know, you really comes across, and how you reformed and how you were made in the 60s in many ways. What I found I was writing in this memoir was more than my life; I was writing what I really wanted to write, as a novel. I wanted to distill life stories and I wanted to to write about love and family and marriage and death and loss and politics and 9/11 and so it's a large canvas and that's what it is. And it's not a novel but in some ways, it will have to represent my novel writing or at least my aspirations to novel writing and I hope it's certainly an honest and forthright story that I tell here. I tell about meeting extraordinary number of extraordinary people about public life as well as private life. And a student recently in San Francisco state came up to me and he said to me, "You are a god" and I said, "Read my book", because I do try to present an honest story here. And what I thought I would do before may be answering some questions some of you might have about the program or about the book or anything else, it's on your mind and then we can do it, normally it's done at these events signing books and all that. I have portraits of a lot of writers in here; the book is kind of a twofer. It's a personal narrative and then it's a profile, a vignette really of different writers. So it's about literature and life, literature and life and it vacillates between the two, as I have been doing for so many years. Some people just don't get it. They think, have you read about these one reviewer who remained unnamed said, you know, Krasny write so much about himself. I think that's the concept of the memoir but the idea was somehow that you know, I was over displaying self in narrative prose and giving less attention to the writers. And actually the writers are very much a part of the warp and woof of this book. It's just that they are they are like I said, it's kind of a twofer in the book. I have learned so much from the people that I have interviewed through the years and the panels that we have done on forum, that I hope that you have learned in an immense amount as well because we are infinitely curious and that's what we do, we do everyday, we want to keep the citizenry informed, we want to bring information and some entertainment, but more education to you and above all my life has been about education and public service, and that really is what in addition I write about. But let me give you actually let me give a little sampling of the book with perhaps a couple of passages and then a couple of the vignettes and I hope that you will find them enjoyable and you will want to read more. This was an interview I did actually my first interview, which was of television for public television in San Francisco State University's new at the time broadcast center and I called it a "Baptism of fire." And by the way, let me just say, this is an important point, Peter Coyote who is a friend of mine for many years, a famous actor and a wonderful man said when he found that I was embarking on this writing journey, he said, "Just don't write to get even, don't write to settle scores." And I really didn't, I it may come off a little bit that way with this particular the first interview but - My first interview, "A baptism of fire" happened by fluke. In 1976, the Audio Visual Head of San Francisco State University asked if I might be interested in interviewing Gore Vidal on the campus's new-at-the-time intracampus television network. I jumped at what seemed like a serendipitous opportunity. It was an interview that would cast me as nervous, deferential neophyte and Vidal as sour, condescending, inebriated and mean. Heading into the interview, I was sure both of us being literary types with left-wing politics, that we would become fast friends. I wanted to do a professional job and ask good, thoughtful, intelligent questions. I read as much as I could on Vidal and reread early works of his like Myra Breckinridge and The City and the Pillar, as well as his newest novel at the time, Kalki. More impressed by Vidal's essays than his fiction, I still felt certain that the two of us would have much to talk about and would get on well. When we met briefly before going to the television studio set to begin the interview, Vidal seemed world weary, as if afflicted with terminal Weltschmerz. But more important, he smelled of liquor and his voice was thick with booze. I noticed a copy next to him of James Atlas's biography of Delmore Schwartz. I asked what he thought of the book, hoping to initiate a bit of literary conversation before we went on the set. What did he think about Schwartz, a gifted Jewish writer and lifetime friend of Saul Bellow, the prototype for Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift? Vidal's response shocked me and felt like a blow. "Schwartz thought he was better than we goyim," Vidal replied acidly. Then he added offhandedly, "The Jews really think they run New York." Was Vidal baiting me, sensing my Jewishness and trying to gore me with it? How could one with such radical sympathies sound like such a rank, bloody anti-Semite? He must not have meant what he said. How could he? Well, I did know a few Jews who acted like they thought they ran New York, and I shunted Vidal's remarks aside. I was on my maiden voyage. I had a job to do. Now the amazing thing about the interview was that once we were on the air, Vidal was "on" in a way that took me as much by surprise as his prior world-weariness, condescension and anti-Semitism. The lights and cameras rolled, and he was a different man. He sounded sober and was all performer. I gave him a short but flattering introduction that I had memorized, mentioning that I was an English professor and that Vidal's real name was Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. He quickly ripped into me for bringing up what he archly called "my Christian name," adding that, unlike our born-again president, Jimmy Carter, he, Vidal, was a born-again atheist. In the first part of our interview Vidal made me squirm by derogating English professors as a pack of pedants who wanted nothing more than to write reams of useless criticism that no one but other English professors would ever want to read. We were all a bunch of Dryasdusts who longed to create something as obscure as endless annotations of Finnegan's Wake. Before the interview, I had felt as though I needed to defend my tribe. Now it was my profession. Vidal was animated and electrified, palpably alive as he proceeded to skewer his favorite targets The New York Times, Republicans, corporations, Reagan, Nixon, President Jimmy Carter. Some of it was clever stuff, refined and caustic humor that I might have enjoyed were it not for the anti-Semitic cracks and the invective against English Profs. I was trying to hang on during the interview, to keep the dialogue flowing without losing my temper or cool, without being cowed by the realization that I was conversing with the larger than life, literary Gore Vidal. As the interview moved into politics and I asked Vidal about his social concerns, another self emerged. Vidal was suddenly benign, casting himself in the role of munificent socialist. When the interview ended and the cameras were off, he once again became world-weary, cold and aloof, the man I had met before the interview, as sterile as I'd found his apocalyptic novel Kalki. There was not, I felt, anything particularly distinguished about my performance that afternoon, although I knew that I was professional. Anyway, how was one supposed to measure performance in something as difficult to judge as interviewing? It was, however, quite a performance on Vidal's part, and it was the sort of interview that might have turned someone else away from interviewing, especially since he lit out without so much as a "thank you" or "nice talking to you." But other things later converged that drew me to interviewing and set me on a path. Trying to meld life into art, as I read and interpreted and taught and wrote about writers, I went on to talk and talk and talk with writers until I had interviewed more writers, perhaps, than anyone ever has or will or should. I was on the road, my own road to literary Damascus. So that's an introduction to interviewing. There was an interview actually with Gore Vidal years later that I did when I was on Forum and I felt that it was a test to my professionalism not to mention on air this first interview. But I did afterward off mike and Vidal had as you might imagine, somewhat of a different memory about what took place than I did. I think he has a very good memory but in this case I trust mine. Let me read to you a section that I hope you like because it's very human and I am told very funny, and I think a good book and a book about one's life really ought to have humor in it as well. It's my first job interview. I read my first broadcast interview; let me read my first job interview. The first story took place after the modern language association that is of a story that I wanted to remember. I interviewed with a group of professors from Southern Illinois University at the conference. They were keen on my Toomer manuscripts I had come across some manuscripts that belong to the writer Jean Toomer. How many of you actually know that name that author and it was a coup and it turned out to be like I would say I am Toomer scholar which may be feel like an oncologist but I was also you know, a real find in terms of scholarship - Excuse me - but this was this was at the time I only interview. Invited me to Carbondale to interviews. So I took I take a couple of flights to get to Carbondale. The travel agent tells me it would have been easier to schedule me to fly to Hong Kong. I was in Madison, Wisconsin at the time. The second leg of the flight on Ozark air is choppy, after drinking on the plane and being driven to Carbondale from a nearby town called Edwardsville I have a few more drinks and began to realize what life in Carbondale would mean - drinking. As well as working on books to publish with the University Press and canvassing for the democratic party, Harry T More D.H Lawrence biographer and critic of British lit is the god-like figure at SIU. Gossiping about Harry T. and drinking and canvassing for democrats and publishing in the Press and Carbondale itself all add up in my mind to dreariness I know I don't want the job, yet at the time hot as I believed I was in Denver, Southern Illinois is the only prospect immediately following a number of interviews at the Modern Language Association Convention. The Southern Illinois hiring committee takes me to what they considered to be the best eating place in town, an Italian restaurant in the local Carbondale holiday inn. I feed on what I later described as rancid tasting lasagna and then proceed with the hiring committee to the home of the English Department Chair, Howard Webb, Seated around a fireplace with burning logs Howard Webb informs me in a serious nearly pious way that the committee wants to hire me as an assistant professor, they wants me to join the department. I tell him I am grateful and humble by the offer will you accept? He asks with great solemnity as if offering me a throne and after a few seconds of silence, I bolt - The flight, the drink, the lasagna, all of it is doing its work on me. I am throwing up in Chairman Webb's toilet. Retching and vomiting while Chairman Webb and his colleagues by the fireplace with no clue as to why I ran off after his tendered offer. I am a bit woozy, but I feel I am ready to go back and explain to them why I dashed off and inform them that I am grateful for the offer but would need time to think about it. The truth is I have no inclination to accept the offer unless no other offer would comes through. I flushed the toilet, to my horror it overflows. The question I pose, "what does one do in such a situation?" What would you do? You you've puked your guts into the toilet while a group of serious academics are waiting for you to return after they just offered you a tenure track professorship. All your vomit is coming up from the toilet and swimming around in the water like small minnows just below your ankles and the water is even starting to seep out from under the closed door of the small bathroom. So what do you do? Well here is what I do. I told myself that it's best to tell the truth and armed with that thought I go out and hastily explained to Howard Webb and his fellow English professors what happened, how I had been taken suddenly ill, had thrown up and washed in a horror as the toilet overflowed. Chairman Web quickly calls for his son and instructs him to get a mop and to go to work in the bathroom cleaning up my vomit. But I grateful to the department for wanting to hire me, will not hear of Web's kid cleaning up my puke. I go to wrest the mop away from the son, only to hear the father shout at him that he should do the mopping up and not let me while I am insisting that it's my mess and I should clean it. So that was my first academic job offer me fighting with a kid over a mop to get at my vomit, enable finally to get it away from him and do the cleaning myself while the chairman brought the bucket. Okay. Two, the the book is filled with these literary vignettes and I thought I just it's not all quite like that. Now that, I want to read actually a a couple of literary vignettes. You know, there is a there is a portrait of Kazuo Ishiguru in this book, the writer of Remains of the Day and he said to me, you know, I I love the isolation of being a writer and being alone and all that with the solitary life. And then I realized when I wrote a book, I had to be a salesman, I had to go out and sell the book and so forth and required a different self and lot of writers recently Ann Patchett was on talking about her new novel "Run" on Forum, author Bel Canto and she was saying, she hates going out and and meeting the public and having to put on that smiling face and so forth and so on and yet the division between the solitariness of writing and the more public performance which is what I have been doing so many years of Radio although Radio is working alone and not having a public except the people to work with you but knowing of course that you are out there and appreciating deeply the fact that you are. So here is a one of those - one of these brief vignettes that moves through the book about a local writer whom some of you may know and whose work you may appreciate and - well I thought I will read to you about next is Isabel Allende. Isabel Allende once said to me on air during the Clinton impeachment that the world had never witnessed a more expensive blow job. This is Berkeley, some of free speech is the rule right. And then she did actually say that you know. She also talked openly another time about having a dream of biting into a tortilla wrapped around Antonio Banderas. She she is still the heretical fallen away catholic girl who delights in body talk and sensuality. And what I oxymoronically like to call in her case female virility, the only sins of the seven that really interests her entice her, she once told me are gluttony and lust, when she came to the United States the emigration officer insisted that she was not white as she had written on the forms. He - a Latino insisted she was an other. So she showed him her breast and asked if they didn't look white to him. Allende is making one of her periodic guest appearances on my radio program. My brother Victor is in the studio because he has wanted for quite some time to meet her. She is herself not unlike a house full of spirits, full of warmth and charm and hearty laughter and love a good conversation. She relishes male attention and some times acts like a school girl around her husband Willie - a California lawyer whom she adores. Her father left her when she was a child and she grew up knowing, she was much smarter than her brothers. She resented that they had so much more opportunity. She left her husband and the church and she left Chile after the coup against her uncle who a surprising number of people still think was her father and whom the TV talk show host Tom Snyder once confused with Pinochet. She felt since childhood like a misfit and then grew up to love feeling like a dissident, finding other women and a magazine and change its ways to channel her anger, discovering both feminism and journalism the best outlets for the immense anger she felt. Had she did not found ways to channel her anger, she assure me she would be called a total bitch. Had she stayed in Chile, she is certain she would have been arrested for hiding people who are trying to smuggle on information or trying to get people into embassies. She spent 13 years in Venezuela, then met Willie and settled in Northern California. She has sold tens of millions of books including "Paula" the heart wrenching portrait of her daughter who died the book for which she wanted no money. Fans swarmed to see her in Europe and South America, she is a grandmother who occasionally will slap her grandchildren and whose own grandmother was supposed to have moved a bowl of sugar by telekinesis. She hates nationalism and swears that a good prayer the Lord's Prayer can always catch a taxi cab. Memory Allende tells me memory Allende tells me is like smoke, imagination and memory is the same process and languages is like blood. Separation made her a writer, once she left Chile, she always had an accent she wouldn't be a writer of fiction today without having left everything behind. So I will read this one about David Mamet and then open things up. David Mamet knows he is getting older, that has led him back to Judaism, I became what I am he tells me what is bind by proclivity and heredity. Funny word to use "proclivity", he says words with "T"s in them, with a bite that sounds syllabic and affected - proclivity actor - writing. He is pleasant, and chipper and polite. It is his first in San Francisco, he tells me, he loves the weather and the wine and then everyone he has met so far is peachy. He tells me that as he grows older, his thoughts turn the past. There is little that is really useful about writing, one's interest change, one should steal from anybody but one self. He wrote "American Buffalo" over a quarter of a century ago, many refrigerators don't last that long, he would rather change. Mamet was a nice middleclass Jewish boy, he felt fortunate to have been born in Chicago the son of a labor lawyer in a town full of unions and writers. He wanted to escape and he did he did "Everything in the world to support myself and loved it all". He thought at first he become an actor but his "affections did not in that way tend". He became a play writer instead and a director and then went on to what he called "The Big Casino" and wrote for the screen. He tried once to create, teach creative writing at Yale. All one needed to learn about writing, he decided it was pencil and paper and to write well. Academics were teaching the opposite of art. In the academy students wrote to please superiors. In art the self struggles with the expression of inchoate opposites and unrest. Mamet answers callers with near military sounding precision and cheeriness, after saying that he will crumple paper and pretend to know the answer to any question he cannot answer. Caller welcome to San Francisco David. Mamet heartily thank you sir. Caller hello Mr. Mamet. Mamet vigorously good morning sir. He is cheerful about the breakfast he had that morning and about pizza night at the Rainbow Sweets off Route Two in Vermont where he sees other famous writers. He is thrilled to be part of the Torah reading community and thinks Jewish renewal is great. He calls tracking a deer - one of the great experiences of his life. Can he really be so upbeat about so many things? I remember that Mamet was so pleased that a journalist for Esquire was coming to interview him in Vermont he said, "Goody, goody gum drops from the gumdrop tree". He had Mamet went years without giving interviews. He wouldn't crack even a wisp of a smile and looked a bit grim years later when I interviewed him on stage for a theater fund raiser, I mentioned the famous New Yorker cartoon that featured a well dressed man telling a street beggar, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be. - Shakespeare" and the street beggar answering, "Fuck you - David Mamet". Mamet says that may be the audiences didn't understand what he was trying to do in Oleanna because it was a bad play. Perhaps his script about Jimmy Hoffa which he wrote for his father didn't do as well as he thought it would because the script was no good. Is this feigned modesty? He blithely says - he sits in his office by himself and naps all day long. The word discipline he says makes his blood run cold. He deludes himself into thinking he writes when the spirit moves him. Perhaps inability to concentrate is been responsible for his success and as soon as he complete something, he has to move on to some thing else. Writing is like poker you play the cards dealt and then they are dead, he has no intention to go home or to stop. So I try to - as you can tell capture some of these writers, I was at UC homecoming, sad, lost to Oregon state with the famous Bruce Kane interviewing me on stage about this book with a class of '68 and he said I have one criticism and one criticism only Michael and that is you should have done with political figures what you did with literary figures in the book. But that would be be another book. Certainly I would write about political figures but these portraits are on writers and I and it's a broad swath of writers. I include Francis Ford Coppola I include Larry David, I include Art Spiegelman and Harry Becker and a range of well real writers I think. Well so thank you so much and if there are any view that I can't ask you to sent in an e-mail but you know I can ask for those of you are familiar with the way we conduct this is on forum but any questions will be glad to answer yes.