Bill Bryson

Enjoyable evening. I'm very glad I got to hear (and sort of see) Bryson in person, despite not being really sure why they invited him (aside from guaranteed box office, probably the main point). This was the final presentation in a series organized by the Smithsonian and sponsored by the tourist boards of Ireland and Wales. Bryson has written a little about Wales (he read a section from Notes from a Small Island about his non-experience with the Ffestiniog Railway, which was fun for us because John and Pat took that train (the day Nick and I were tramping around Harlech, but at least we saw Blaenau Ffestiniog from the car later), and also simply funny on its own) and has done the usual amount of tourist exploration for someone who's lived in Britain and likes to travel, but he's not exactly an expert (as he admitted). I doubt that made his talk less entertaining, however.

What did make it less entertaining was the format, in which an interviewer (magazine journalist guy) asked him questions that he was supposed to answer. For the most part they were stupid questions ("Is Wales a boy or a girl?" "What's the difference between Wales and America?" I mean, come on) and ended up focusing much more on Bryson's career than on the ostensible topic of the evening. The questions asked by the audience at the end were better, and they only had time for a few of those.

Anyway, we had seats a long way back (this was at the Lisner Auditorium at GWU, for anyone who's been there, and the place was packed), a result of starting off at the last sensible moment (we went with the neighbors, and their daughter was delayed getting home) and then forgetting that you can't take Canal Road into the city during rush hour. Would have needed opera glasses (which we do own, but I never bring them) to see Bryson properly, but he seemed to resemble his pictures, a rather pudgy academic type who looks like... a writer. I don't know, I get this visceral thrill out of seeing the stage lights reflecting off someone's glasses: flash. We'd just listened to him read A Walk in the Woods on our trip to Maine, so I was used to his voice, which is an odd one - people describe him as having a British accent but he doesn't at all; there's a lot of his native Iowa left, with an overlay of having lived in Britain for many years that shows up in the precise t's and the occasional vowel shift and some of the intonations, but it's not the midatlantic of 30s American movie actors; it's very much his own amalgam, neither fish nor-- well, let's say neither corn nor hops. (Interesting to talk about it with our neighbor Mark, a Brit who's lived in America for twenty-odd years, and whose accent is migrating in the opposite direction - but no one here would say he sounds American.)

For those of you planning your reading several years in advance, Bryson's next book will be about his childhood (Iowa in the 1950s), and he would also like to write about Japan (which would be great). And he does seem to love Wales, though he has no opinion on its gender. I think the evening also suffered a bit from being impromptu - no writer comes off as well speaking off the cuff as he does in print after careful editing, and there were a lot of "wonderfuls" and other repetitions - but there were plenty of laughs and a few insights, and it was fun. (And we did not join the line to have him sign things afterwards, but headed back north and had dinner at a Lebanese restaurant we all like, and then home and to bed.)