I Think You're Totally Wrong Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’tneed to get a biopsy—when she did—because Michael had been so obsessed with his father’s death for so long that the two of them, Norma and Michael, just couldn’t deal with any more incoming. What Michael loves about the German soldiers is that they couldn’t handle the war. Through them, Michael—
    CALEB: There’s no satisfying X factor to life: people suffer and die, and that’s it, but that’s what I’m interested in. Let’s get to life, not this evasion of life, not “escaping reality” hunger. Maybe your friend thinks he’s gotten to something, but it’s personal and not universal.
    DAVID: I couldn’t disagree more. You’re missing the entire point of art.
    CALEB: I get what life’s about.

    DAVID: Sometime soon I want to write a book where I talk to three guys around the corner from me: the owner of a French bakery who fled from Vietnam, an Iraqi guy who runs a mailing service, and the owner of the overpriced restaurant Kabul, who left Afghanistan.
    CALEB: That’s a book I’d read.
    DAVID: I’m sure I cartoonize you, too, but I think you cartoonize me as unaware of the world. I think of myself as political.
    CALEB: Politically naive.
    DAVID: Let me get to my point. I’m also interested in whyhuman beings behave the way they do—how could I not be? You’re trying to take the position of “Open it up—I want to hear about people’s lives.” Okay. Sometimes, though, my reaction is just “Heard it. Heard it. Tell me something new.” The endless complications of that soap opera you were spinning out—this guy fucked that girl and that girl fucked this guy—who gives a shit? I don’t know these people. You know them; they’re part of your life. Me, I’m bored. You have to cut to the fucking chase: what’s the point?
    CALEB: That’s a legitimate response. You investigate abstract questions; you keep circling back to them. You want these serious epistemological and existential questions: What’s “true”? What’s knowledge? What’s memory? What’s self? What’s other? What’s death? I’ll quote Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer.… That’s the answer.” I want to ask questions that have substantive answers: Why do we kill? Why do we inflict pain? Why do we suffer? How can we stop suffering?
    DAVID: And I’d say the only way you can get at those questions seriously is to watch how you yourself think.

    DAVID: A former student of mine is writing about her marriage to a Libyan Muslim. She’s a blonde beauty from San Diego. Her daughters wear the veil. She and her family live in the Research Triangle in North Carolina. Her name’s Krista Bremer.
    CALEB: Is she Christian?
    DAVID: Not particularly.
    CALEB: In name only?
    DAVID: I guess.
    CALEB: Because it’s illegal if she’s not “of the book”—namely, a Jew or a Christian.
    DAVID: But don’t be atheist.
    CALEB: Or Hindu or Buddhist or Wiccan. When I worked in the United Arab Emirates I had to fill out paperwork, and my employers told me to check the “Christian” box, even if I wasn’t. Also, and I realize you’re more Jewish than me—
    DAVID: I’m not really that Jewish.
    CALEB: You were raised that way. In that one story, your stand-in uses an anti-Semitic slur, tells his father, and the father goes ape. I never had that.
    DAVID: You’re Jewish?
    CALEB: Yeah.
    DAVID: You are?
    CALEB: Persian. My grandfather was born in Iran, though my father was born in Lebanon. He’s Sephardic.
    DAVID: That’s a major surprise. Not that it particularly matters, but with a name like Caleb Powell—
    CALEB: My father’s name, at birth, was David Jamil Mizrahi. He came to America when he was two.
    DAVID: Hold the back page, as my father used to say.
    CALEB: My grandfather, his dad, Jamil Mizrahi,