Support of gun rights, its not a good thing to word the questions in particular way. Id like you to answer to that, please. Lets keep it brief because, basically, saying that you okay. So i did not word any of our survey items to get a particular response. They were worded to address a policy, what the policy did and what its purpose was. So ill end it at that. Okay. Next question. Im the maryland state leader for the well armed woman, and i believe in the training as well. And my big question to, you know, all the politicians, all the people and even you four up there is really can excluding emily, because i know she knows but really, do you really think, do we really think that criminals are going to obey the laws . Laws are good. Laws do help. But criminals do not obey laws. So my question is simple, and i know youve all heard it a million time, do criminals obey laws . They do not. Sure. Id love to take that one. Actually ive been told we only have three minutes left, so lets each address the question, one minute apiece. Here we go. Well, ive heard that speeders dont obey the speed limit, so i think we should do away with speed limits. I mean, that logic that why have a law because someones going to break it, i just dont buy. Thats not what she said. Thats precisely what she said. You said criminals dont obey gun laws, so why should we have them . No. The laws what she was saying all right, all right. Let me just finish my sentence. Two more sentences from daniel, and then well move on. Sure. The policies are designed to hold people accountable so they dont put guns in the hands of prohibited people. So if theres no accountability, it will be very easy for them to get a gun. If all right, emily, we really only have a couple minutes. Im sorry. Emily, why dont you go ahead i think what youre saying is because daniel advocates for more gun control, more gun laws arent going to reduce the 9,000 deaths because the guys theyre not like me, theyre not going to the police station, registering. Bad guys, if they want to shoot you, if they want to have a life of crime, theyre not going to go and register a gun because you give up your fingerprint, you give up your home address, they do a background check. And just to clarify earlier the person who was talking about background checks, we have a federal system, the fbi runs it. If you go to a dealer and buy a gun it happened for me and, im guess, im sure for everybody else op this panel who has a gun, they do a background check to see if youre a felon, to see if youre dangerously ill. We have a system in place. The problem is like we said weve got straw trafficking and other ways, the bad guys just know how to avoid those systems. All right. And, craig will wrap it up for us. Criminals dont obey laws, and the nra has always vigorous lis supported prosecuting them to the maximum extent and so do i. There you go. How about a good round of applause for our panel. [applause] thank you. That was good. Okay. Oh, right, yes. The authors will be very grateful if you follow us on, down the yellow brick road here where well be signing copies of our books. [inaudible conversations] is there a Nonfiction Author a book you would like to see featured on booktv . Send us a tweet email at the booktv cspan. Org or tweet us at twitter. Com booktv. Michael sims recounts Henry David Thoreaus formative education and the intellectual path that led to his writing career, which include his authorship of walden. The author reports that the harvard graduate who built a cabin on Ralph Waldo Emersons property where he lived and wrote for over two years was more than a recluse he is normally remembered as. This is about 50 minutes. The bottom line is i like to type. Thank you very much for coming out today, and i was wondering if is going to rain on me and i was thinking i should be worried about that because its Henry David Thoreau and your richard milk and. You worry about those things and my wife has tolerated Henry Thoreau around the house for two years while i was working on the book. Is taken to tweeting famous quotations such as a where enterprises that require new clothes. And so now she makes me very selfconscious on thinking the things i can worried about wheres my blazer when going to give a talk . Thank you to the concord bookshop, a wonderful bookstore ive been several times and pass. I did not return to conquer while i was writing this book because i wanted to keep the 19th century in my head, not the 21st century. So i was completely immersed in the primary sources of the era and had john rowman staggered as threedimensional aerial view of concord on july 4, 1845, the actual david henry moved into the cabin. I kept up on the wall beside my desk and was completely surrounded by the atmosphere of the mid19th century. So i was afraid to come there because i was afraid a parking lot might ruin it for me. The very first thing i would like to address, the pronunciation of this thing. Locals and from the members and scholars, there arent any family members now, know that he was born david Henry Thoreau, and the accent on the first syllable, and people, readers of his pronounce it thoreau if they did nothing or the area because it looks french and it turns out it was. His family was from jersey, french dominated island in the channel. So there were only two generations away from the pronunciation that is thoreau and changed it here. So i just dont think it matters are much antiflip in and out of the. If we learned was if we learned one of the Ernest Miller pronounces what actually hemingway, very few of us would bother to do that. Site 10 to go in and out of the pronunciation i think in part dependent on who im talking to. If i know they know more about i try to stay thoreau. Having spent up close time with him for two years as i said i tend to call them henry. The book is a very close up personal almost novel like look at his early years. In my novel like i dont mean anything sexual at all. Very textured and detailed and a lot of dialogue from the primary sources. So throughout the book i call them henry. No doubt i will fall into the. So i need to start a properly with the quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson who said of his old friend, he was free and strange your and the one thing i keep coming back to was henry was very, very strange and that was the exciting part of this, was the personality and character in getting that on paper. At times it felt like i was wrestling five guerrillas into one little bitty cage and it worked but to me when i look at the book it almost vibrates with the tension getting all those personalities into the same boat. A lot of people come down on one side or the other or feel they ought to. City, a thoreau idolater or acolyte or they decide theyre a critic of his or an enemy of his that he was a fraud in some way or whatever. I felt no worst to do the. I dont have an ax to grind if any kind. Im just interested in the reality. He was an important writer jimmy beginning in my early years and early caching to to import in my life but im not interested in hero worship anymore that i am interested in trashing or showing he had feet of clay. Thats what made it fun to write. And a great deal of his life was about various synonyms and alternative ways of saying fun. There was a huge amount on a very deep level and on several superficial levels, and over all year long period and on a daily effort of fun in the researching and writing of the book. I hope that shows on the page because henry was a paradox. He was an ox cart full of paradoxes and it is what makes him poignant to read about i think. The book is sort of half joyful and half melancholy and it makes them funny to read about because he was a very sarcastic, lively, caustic wit. So he can be very funny knowing he was. Fortunately, for me as a writer every as a reader he could also be funny in many ways he was totally unaware of which is almost more interesting to write about. In my story i dont, because i dont have to cover his entire life and i dont have to trudge from significant accomplishment to significant accomplishment, im able to zoom in and focus on things i dont play profit and i dont look ahead. I dont analyze or criticize or critique. I just tried to convey the story as much in the air as i possibly can. So im writing in a third person void voice in and out of the minds of hawthorne and his wife and emerson and two or three of the Young Children who were in the school run by henry and his brother john. For all of those private forces to me to a lot of texture and make a few more alive and brought on more characters and made it feel like a busy little movie to do. As i talk about i kept saying seen in such after Something Like that. He said are you writing a movie or a book . I said i found so much gorgeous original material with texture that it feels like a movie at times. There was so much dialogue written down an hour later by the participants and do it right in with the thoughts were across counsel may also be writing a letter with their experience of the same event, and then it would be a new storytelling everything about the weather into the famous people were resident. Theres so much texture, dialogue and detail that it comes alive in a way that completely captured my imagination. I love biography and i read biographies obsessively, and occasionally i get frustrated with some of them because they seem to forget that these people didnt know they would amount to anything. They didnt know they would become famous. They didnt know anyone would care. They certainly didnt anyone would be poring over their letters and diaries 150 years later, or they wouldve been more discreet definitely. You can tell when a certain writers when you do research in literature over the years, riders reach a certain point when they think theyve become important are when they signed over to donate the papers, the correspondence gets correspondence gets more cautious. They had none of that at the time. Theres a great deal of lively critique of each other, a lot of people participating in a gathering and then going home and saying im sure he means well but hes an idiot, or whatever. All of those details make it come alive in a beautiful way for me. I kept reminding myself these people did not even know, just like us, like f1 in this room, if they would get through the day. They did know if they would live until tomorrow. They certainly had no glimpse of ever being important. And so i wanted to include in this book something that fing occasionally disappear some biographical writings, which is the thing that keeps us getting up every morning and looking ahead, suspense. If you dont already know the details of Henry Thoreaus life, i think youll be surprised about every five pages because theyre so much more to him than i encountered in high school when basically i loved my High School Teachers and i loved the english course of the i dont mean any critique of that but a lot of times these people like ken Norton Anthology of literature your present the work but at the same time your expect to pat the marble bust of the icon. I did want to does the icon. I felt that it been done plenty of times. I wanted to try to find henry before he was thoreau, before he was the patron saint of environmentalism and Civil Liberties and certainly the men who best expressed i think for the 19th century the sense of how do you live a life in which you have selfrespect and a sense of worth and you have your own direction that youre participating in the world at that time. I think no one else in that era expressed all of those things so well. So i was working on the proposal for a different book which i dont need to talk about your book it didnt come to pass. When i was reading the diaries of hawthorne who was, who married nathaniel. And i bring the hawthorne hawthorns in a lot because they knew henry clay was lesser with them the day they moved to concord and i wanted them in part because the offer a different view than in recent years of hendrick but also because they come in after the story has been going for a while and also because they are deeply in love. They are absolutely warm, fuzzy, out of focus over each other. So that contrast with henry sloane the life in which he keeps having a crush on one girl or woman after another and nothing coming of it, and he was a man who emerson ambersons made significant to the back door and went to the kitchen and encountered a woman, he blushed to anywhere he encountered a woman. So the contrast with a hawthorns being in love seemed to me to add a little poetic resonance to the story, and Emotional Depth but also different point of view as a new character coming in and seeing henry. So i was reading hawthornes diary and came across a scene that is of absolutely no historical significance, so this is not going to go on the quiz. Its of no literary importance whatsoever, but its a wonderful human moment that brought all these people to life in ways that i have not really thought of them before. So what am going to read this a couple of paragraphs from my book thats the result of my encountering is seen in her diary and researching it in a bunch of other sources and piecing it together. The wonder of 184243 was a cold a difficult time in concord with the thermometer sinking to its lowest point in recent memory. Despite their hard work, the hawthorns raced into intellectual. The first snowstorm found them in Sleepy Hollow just east of the square were cut stalks of the summer sealed of indian corn lay buried under snow. The newlyweds slid down hills together, their laughter at going from the chestnut trees and the nodded arms of the folks that surrounded the hollow on all sides. The concord grows after flooding lowlands for miles, thus providing wide, Clean Services forcefeeding. She liked to run and slide on the ice instead of skating. Often they saw other skaters, always boys or young men, never women. Few women skated. When josiah bartlets wifes sister visited concord in the early 1820s, she impressed the locals by skating with energy and grace. But concord women were slow to follow her daring example, at least publicly. One afternoon, henry and emerson joined hawthorne for a skating party. She watched from the wind as they paraded by on the river. At home on the ice from countless forays since childhood, henry led the way with energy and an abandoned that was both impressive and ungainly. As if suddenly a static he cavorted in which eason described to a friend as dances in leaps. She sounded slightly embarrassing. Second them i was hawthorne driving across the service with his usual slalom grace, a peering to adoring eyes like a greek statue. Then came emerson seeming half asleep, tilting forward at the waist until his top that was horizontal. As if he napped by reclining on the air itself. Soon exhausted, emerson came indoors to rest. He said her husband reminded him of a tiger whose energy might be the death of an ordinary mortal such as himself. He deemed his famous kind smile after. Mr. Holder is such an agent. Who can cope with it . Thus began my research for what became the adventures of Henry Thoreau. The other book died on the vine at least for now. Is a half written proposal in a drawer in my desk at home in western pennsylvania. The adventures of Henry Thoreau, i had to defend the title a little bit with the publisher. I chose the word adventures because thoreau was not and i think our ideals, a thinker sitting with his chin in his palm your he led a very busy life. In this book with james and aching for sex halfway through his time at walden, he found a progressive private school with his brother. He faces his own illnesses and the deaths of various loved ones, one of them literally dies in agony in his arms. He falls in love your kid asks the same girl to marry him and is rejected by her that his brother had too much earlier asked to marry him and was rejected by her. So theres a lot of human crazy, wonderful adventures in there, and he has a dramatic spiritual revelation atop a mountain in the wilderness in maine, and he spends a very small and unimportant night in jail. Until he makes it important i being the person who wrote best about the concept of civil disobedience, and creating about 25 fictional autobiographical i as a narrative, so those are interesting to me. So it was such fun to recruit the texture and detail of all these things, like the night in jail. What did he hear from the window . Find a definite things are happening on that day and what did he say in his journal and so on. I have to mention he may not know that he spent six months on Staten Island working as a tutor to ambersons brothers children. That was fun. That was i think the most fun ive ever had a as a writer was taking Henry Thoreau off to manhattan and Staten Island and recreating what it was like. Sporty dodging people in the crowd, driven by livery servan servants, theyre hoping workmen dragging giant blocks of ice still covered in the insulating sawdust down to basement level was to parse. And the vagabond slime of manhattan, the wild stray pigs acted as if they had founded and owned the island. They were everywhere industry. For getting all of the details once i think as much fun as ive ever had while sitting at my desk. I have to just say this, it kept coming back to his personality and characters. I just found that sitting to try to wrestle it onto the page. Despite the glorious revelations of the human genome project, personality and character are still a mystery and how they got to be the way he was and how he influenced others and that weird alchemical way that one person can be a catalyst and another persons life, all of those things were so much fun to try to track down at the same time asking myself what did the cabin spelled like . What did he sound like walking down a street in concord in 1841 at night on an average day . And in the 1840 president ial Campaign Came through here. Tippecanoe and tyler too. And it was the first grassroots outrageously rowdy campaign of american history, and it changed everything because it was entirely about style. They presented, each, i called and characters, each of the president ial candidates, those are largely fictional version of each one set up against a largely fictional version of the other one and they would head to toe in the public imagination and had almost nothing to do with the real people. A tradition which we have proudly continued ever since. Getting all these details with exciting for me. Im sure you know this living your. Henry was not a hermit. He was not hiding out. He was not a monk. He was caught up in the life of the town and his friends and his family, a very doting, adoring son and brother. And he lived most of his life in concord as you know, and he admitted that he considered what he called homeopathic doses of gossip to be as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peaking of world. And so many weird surprises like that were fun to me. You realize gradually because his family had a boarding house that was very rowdy and busy all the time, the cabin boldin was to study was a private workspace and hang out what he did to peace and quiet without hearing some impact in the can of that hearing everything cling in the kitchen and people going up and down the stairs and to give a stranger at the breakfast table every morning. So he said he was come his family says every day or so every day or two, theres the classic line of hooded thoreaus laundry. He helped build the house that the family lived in and was there every couple days to help keep running it and work on it, and be constantly kept track of everything. He was the handiest writer in the history of literature as far as i can tell because i have to tell you, we are naturally the most useful people in the whole world. Henry could fix anything. He could make anything, and im so bragging about changing a doorknob six years after it happened. So henry was not like anyone else in literature that ive run across. Part of it was who was very anchored in the real world. One paragraph from a description of them in his college years. Not all of henrys classmates knew the fivefoot seven google with the unkempt light brown hair. He had a distinctive shape, sloping shoulders led to long arms contrasting with short legs. Some recognize him by his unusual and purposeful stride which reminded them of an indian. He took a shortcut whenever possible, sometimes walking with his hands behind his back or clenched into fists at his side. During his years in kimchee often kept to himself. Some fellow student nurses earnest expression as he walked across campus with his eyes on the ground distracted as if looking for something he had lost. He tended to dominate a conversation and even turn it into a monologue. Otherwise his self absorption and awkwardness became standoffishness. His earnest excitement transcended the plane features and quirky personality and attracted young men who are equally serious about life. A few intimate friends witnessed henrys love of natural history, his tendency to notice animals more than people. This plate on his imaginative side. Is ecstatic response to nature and love of kittens. His obsession with indians and the notion of a noble savage life. His fondness for rural characters rather than what he saw as stated townsfolk. Friends knew that because it is practical side, at 16 he had built his own boat, and before approving his a enrolled at college at harvard is been considered a practicing him to a cabinet maker. Another thing you wont find in the story. So for many period that henry begins to be interesting is when he begins to disappoint emerson. Because of its great deal of thinking that this sort of platonic in the sense of the grand ideals behind the realities that we see, that everything we see is an image of a greater reality and to everything around us is in that sense lessons and lessons and to symbolic, and thats it. And outrageous simple vacation. Feel jump on that and trounce it. So at the point that henry begins to be interested less in a symbolic bird which is an abstract term, and very specifically paying attention to a particular blue jay in front of him as an individual creature that had a history and had experiences that day in which is as real as he was, i think at that point and it became a little less interesting to emerson and a little more interesting to the rest of us. He was reading darwin. He was a huge fan of travel writing so read the voyage of the beagle. He was very crowded and ready when the origin of species came out and could see the validity emelia the idea that earth was a whole lot older than people, that ancient hebrew shepherds realize which is not exactly surprising. So although my bookends in 1846, halfway through a waldin years, it includes a wonderful moment to me a wonderful moment when he is literally plumbing the depths of walden pond which an image is used symbolically in the past and very carefully goes out on the ice one winter and drills hundreds of holes and very carefully measures and goes into the detailed crosssection which theres a many books about him of the pond, every little corner, every little cove, and measured it precisely. Before thabefore the independens bottomless, as so many ponds are. And he said no, its actually this many feet. So those are the kinds of ways that he was becoming more and more attuned to the world around him. Theres one last point of what to do and im going to read just two more paragraphs from the book that i think will give you an example of why i was so excited about this book and so excited about him and writing a. One of the points is something yoyou see disappeared in the eay biographies of him, and later on in a couple of other things im going to mention. Its the role of the women in his life. They start to vanish, and an example is the 1970 play the night thoreau spent in jail, which to me is a very annoying one because when Jerome Lawrence and robert lee working on it they clearly carefully did the research and then they played very fast and loose with it. Henry had two sisters who were very bright, and they talked, wrote letters to him in latin, and they were an important influence on him. His mother and the two sisters were founding members of the concord female antislavery society, one of the many very important active at this labor societies that white women were leading in the sense that this time the white role in battling slavery. And hugely influential. So all of those effects if you look at the play are taken away. They argued a long time to get emerson to be involved in abolition. In the play they take all of her eloquent words out of her mouth and put them in henrys mouth. Of the sisters vanished, they disappear. The girl that both boys proposed to was never a student of theirs but inflation becomes a sort of been boat, noting student. His mother who is very smart and outspoken and tough and interesting becomes a sort of nag. And so it was interesting to me to see all of this happening and to see it sort of, i dont mean scholars are erasing it. I mean injuries work of art and Popular Culture and earlier biographies there was definitely a tendency to wash that all aside but it didnt fit the image. So part of the fun for me was bringing so many female characters back into it. It makes me think of the play guess whos coming to dinner, the whole point of which is that black men are equal and real as the lightning into play. Meanwhile, all the women are presented pretty much as silly and irrelevant. Thats difficult to do with Katharine Hepburn but they did in that movie. As you know, the 19th century was a time of rampant illness. There was very few safeguards against illness and disease and loans, other than the darwinian one of the hardy constitution, which may be found with natures bottom line but to be tragic on a personal basis as a still can now. So as we all know, and i think we forget, every work of art or attempt at a work of art, and of going to presume in this broad definition to include biographical writing an attempt to work of art, is a former selfportrait. And that whatever you are creating at whatever level you are in part presenting yourself, you are at the time. You may be drawn ive noticed on fiction writers being drawn to topics that seem objectively chosen of intellectual interest but their drawn to them in a certain way from a certain angle at a certain time in their life. So this was very much happening with me during this book. And while i was writing and researching this book, everything was going on in my life. My niece was killed in a tornado, an an adult needs, so t down to tennessee and in response to the death, if i dont mother had a very severe, massive stroke. So i spent a month in tennessee taking care of her. The week she has the stroke we learned that my wife is pregnant with our first child. So instantly the odds are those two trains will pass and our child will not meet my mother. Which is what happened. So after a month down there taking care of her, during which time because work distracts me and i didnt a contract added to bills to pay and thats been a month down in tennessee, there were times when shed go to sleep and i would be holding her left hand, and this is in or last couple weeks of life, and im bouncing a little black book on my lap and im typing with one hand. And then my son was born a few months later. I have photos. I may be the most pathetically doting father of all time. Which is that im sure from the outside. I would be holding the newborn son in this arm and realize that there i was again sitting in the dark quietly typing. I realized that my hands had connected the generation. And the circle of life became more and more real to me, and writing became a way of responding to all of it in the course of doing this book. So on that note with that background, the idea of the circle of life, the risk of loss that accompanies loving anyone, adult or child, i want to close his talk with a very brief passage from another thing in my book that is absolutely no historical significance, not literarily important. Henrys buried was a great fun to write about in part because so may things are happening then that laid the groundwork for what became our era. Insane dreamers had presumed to imagine instantaneous indication and finally there was the telegraph. People had created the first form of movement that did not involve animals or wind, which is strange. So everything was changing in this way. Henry was fascinated with all of this, and then there was a development that came along at exactly the same time in the middle of my story that is my favorite invention from history, photography. There was nothing before that was accurate record of anyone could ever known or loved or cared about. Humid from england, you moved to the new world, that was it. No pictures, no connections. Just a letter once a year if it didnt fall off a ship. So theres a spoiler alert here. A minor character doesnt appear for very long, emersons five year old son, walter, dies in the course of the story, and i dont think that will mess it up for you because is there for a very short time. And i think these moments and this image sums up for me the excitement of trying to resurrect the past, the feel, the smell of it, the sense of everyday life, their everyday lives and they were just as real as we were. And i think it perhaps explained what i want to do that with concrete, walden pond and thoreau. This is the aftermath. The emerson for the first generation to possess a new kind of momentum after the death of a loved one, a daguerreotype. This New Invention which has been announced as recent as 1839 at a meeting of the academy of sciences in paris was already being touted as a miraculous machine to preserve time. Original photographic exposures would take hours or days, but over the last couple of years the process have been improved. A positive imag image reversed n a mirror was produced directly on a silver iodide coated copper plate. The result was so significant as much in it had to isolate underclass inside a friend or a folding case. Daguerreotype portraits to record excruciatingly slow exposures. Children posing for photographs had to be coaxed into premature sal and richard. The previous autumn, other friends and some members have been unable to talk wall though into sitting still long enough for the slow, boxy camera to capture his image. Only john had prevailed. At his behest that they at the photography fashion photography student, waldo, dressed in the grossmont comments that any wooden armchair with his hands folded in his lap. After his death, the emersons could gaze at a framed oval daguerreotype of waldo. His expression solemn and far away, his hair parted in the middle with the bangs combed sideways into temporary obedience. His scope to defend lets so like his mothers have had to remain great and still. Like the and recorded movement of people strolling paris boulevards as the garrett took his photograph, laughter was invisible. Even smiles faded while the infinitely patient chatter waited for enough light to see them. A persons like this could be preserved comcast billing memories into sober gray portrait magically drawn with the light. But the fleeting gestures, smiles, raised eyebrows, the sparkle of life were lost. Thank you. [applause] if i were a better person i would know what time it is and how much some of the questions and answers. Okay, we are good. So someone here will tell me, i do hope doing something fun, the q a is my favorite part because ive some rough edges what i was doing although i kept wandering off for the scenic route on the comments. So i encourage you to say anything that strikes you as interesting, or ask a question you will always have wondered about. Holiday song and dance pretending to participate. [inaudible] spent i thought i knew a lot about thoreau. I now know quite a bit more spent thank you very much spin one of the episode you describe in your, it seems as though, i was one if you could elaborate a little bit more because i guess it was a letter that john begin to feel calm,. [inaudible] trying to find what the source of that was. But do you have any more information about because you know a lot about henry and his spiritual journey. Thats a very good point. I had so many footnotes that i was fiercely at the very last second cutting and combining. It is possible that i snipped the source fo for the annual magical repair in the paperback. I would am going over the book right now so its entirely possible i did that but it does the source and i can say the background. Henry was a much of the question and the one always being aggressively skeptical about the world, and john was very much more traditional, very calm and considered very much a gentleman, and the use the phrase very clean minded gentleman. He loved the girls of the village and did want to hear negative comments by the other boys. He was very much more traditional, and he wrote some verses about dying and death, which a romantic religious teenager might well do. They are quoted in his eulogy, a couple of the verses from that. He was much more traditional in very many ways to he was also the handsome brother, the popular brother. He was patient with everyone. He didnt have the traits that make come he didnt have the traits that make any so much more interesting to write about than john in a way. Their affection for each other was so interesting to me. John is the second most important character in the first half of the book because the relationship is so interesting to me. But he was definitely much more traditional in his thinking and much more religious in that way. Henry very quickly completely abandoned and became rather aggressive towards organized religion while still thank you very much there was a god behind nature and the design of the world. I found a poignant and humorous at the same time john said he was developing lockjaw. He couldnt really john was considered so lighthearted and easy going and i was wondering everyone around him feel good that he really was joking. He was dying right there and lockjaw, he was beginning to sort of arched into this. John was at the moment that his jaw muscles were locking up was saying to henry, sit down and talk to me about poetry and literature. To me that was sweet and funny and poignant, and i got very much into the story. But then ive had a brother die on me, too, so i think all that was in there. Yes, maam. You mentioned, i know that thoreau wrote on the syllabus obese because he was rebelling against taxes, as i thought about, i wonder where he would be in this whole situation, where would he be now . They say all different kinds of people quote thoreau and taking as their own. Yes. Ive seen him quoted by democrats, republicans, libertarians, atheists, episcopalians, which is great but its not like theyre misrepresenting them but he is like shakespeare. He said something so incredibly well that you can pretty much pulled him up with many phrases. But he paid his school tax. He paid his road tax ricky bobby very much willing to purchase but in the neighborhood, but he eventually stopped paying for while his poll tax, part of which went to supporting the larger federal government and within participate in supporti supporting, still getting along with the slaveholding Southern States and financing the mexican war, which more progressive people at the time considered a future unnecessary aggressive act on our part. So i think now he would be, hes really the kind of person that he was so involved and however much time he spent at walden, very little time really in the wilderness. He always said he never could resist a newspaper. He would talk about camping trips where they would buy some food in the village and then that night by the campfire henry would lean in to read the stained piece of newspaper because he was that desperate to always read something. So i think would be totally caught up in everything. He might be the most sarcastic person on twitter. Who knows what he would do . The role of, the roots and seeds of civil disobedience essay are all in the book because it appeared in which he goes to jail, and it makes interesting to me what a fabulous writer he was because he wasnt that original. He was, as he often was, imitated, and in a way Henry Thoreau reminds me of picasso very much, and incredibly gifted address and who could absolutely anything, but he approached each new period of his work and life like a giant, creative, and devouring a need for that we come into a new corner of art and gobble up everything and begin but imitating and doing a version of the. To me email henry was like tha. He took emerson that way. He completely worked his way through. So i think the origins of that show that because of the imitated aspect, because really hell that one evening each of the could of gotten out of, and when his taxes were paid next morning he was furious. He refused to believe to leave, and the jailer said if you dont leave, im going to throw you out. So then its like the time is walking out the door is beginning to think of ways to magnify the experience into a symbolic gesture when it comes back to, he was just the most amazing writer. And hemingway says that all of america let you go back to huckleberry finn, and i really think a vast amount of nonfiction goes back to walden. You see everything moving toward it and thats that you have to cross that bridge. You cant ignore it. As a writer, do you have a ritual that you used to get focus before you sit down to do it . Extensive denial. Snacks, errands. Vaguely workrelated emails. A lunch with somebody that i have done some work with but we dont discuss worker to all those things get in there before i settle down and do it. The best periods of a naked up first thing in the morning, which is no longer possible with a one year old. Most of you in the room probably know that. But as soon as possible, get up and go straight to work in the morning. Im a morning person, and my brain begins to feel like its getting overworked by about two in the afternoon. I also have to survive as a small businessman in the ways i spend about what would come up to a day a week planning ahead, sketching out proposals, i keep bridge projects in different stages of completion but as i mentioned i edit a series of anthologies that i created because i got tired of the downtime between books, and so when i signed, i just signed a new contract for the origins of Sherlock Holmes but whenever i sign a contract i signed another contract at the same time so it gets rid of the overlap. The reason i mention that is there are lots of ways to make the more difficult sound aspects of the career work. I got tired of doing lots of articles that i didnt deeply care about. And so i didnt in the Anthology Series to take up that amount of money and make up that amount of income. So the ritual i would say is to clear thats a thoreau thing to he has this immortal line, i consider the cost of the same to be how much id call life has to be exchanged for. Immediately or in the long run. And so i would say that in order to have the time to think and write and to throw away a quarter of what i write, and to waste time and spin my wheels i need to keep my bills very small. I need to have a low overhead operation. Because it really requires time to think and breathe. That is more than you asked, and less than you needed, and im sorry. The risk of free association, i apologize. You understand that if you dont have a question i may reassociate more. Did thoreau have a thing for Louisa May Alcott . Was he one of the ones not that i know. She came to time when she was nine i think. I believe it was 1840, and so she later had a bit of the crush on him and worked him into one of her later novels. Hes a character in one of the novels. And i have to mention as if you were planted in the audience, you have given me the opportunity to worry, no free association, to quote what i think is a very best insult of the 19th century. Even though she had a crush on him she wrote as we know from reading are very clear eyed sardonyx wonderful brain. So Louisa May Alcott made his comment about henry. In that time, these are the photos we all know of them, the neck appeared where you would shave down here which make it looks as if you been decapitated and your head has been set on a hedge. Not that handsome and look really. So i got to be known that henry thought that was attracted, and there are people who could correctly in the wording of this but as well as i can remember it, very close to, methinks henrys chin whiskers will protect his virtue in perpetuity. [laughter] now, it would be shortened to and nobody going to guess that. [laughter] she had a way with words. She did have a way with words, yes. Changing the subject, could you tell us what the timeline is for your other work . The timeline. Part of it again, the idea that you want to write stuff from your site about the check to survive in the real world. Everything is promoted in the real world or not promoted. A lot of it is timing so think ahead about i want to do project and the question is when. Ive bee been thinking i wantedo become operate a lot, done the anthology, i know this corner backwards and forwards and ive been a speaker at the baker Street National meeting of sherlockian things like that, Wonderful Group of people. So because of that i thought, if im going to do a Sherlock Holmes book now with a pretty good time. Some editor got on board, get very excited about it, and the timeline needs to be quick because, in terms of notice and attention on trying to get a subsidy the book, mediumsized, the real story reconstructed in a narrative form like this of the real people that inspired him to great Sherlock Holmes. Right now im very in 1877. It is moody and atmospheric and creepy and cool. And so part of the deal is i finished the book quickly. My goal is christmas. I have until next spring on a