There is something frosty about the current (relatively new) staff at Seattle Arts & Lectures, and five minutes into last night's Junot Diaz talk a cold pallor settled over the room. Linda Bowers, the (relatively new) executive director, was in the middle of an introduction that, for the life of me, seemed to have nothing to do with Junot Diaz—at least not the Junot Diaz that people who love Junot Diaz know. (Had no pen, couldn't take notes, can't support this assertion, but it seemed like she was talking about far-off landscapes and memory and love and human connection and blah blah blah—generic, uncontroversial stuff for a groundbreaking, certainly not generic writer.) Granted, introducing an author is an art, and notoriously hard to get right. Bowers' predecessor struggled with it too. But Bowers' predecessor's predecessor, Matt Brogan, was rather good at it, and the executive director before him, who also founded the organization, Sherry Prowda, was so good someone should just hire her back to do all of them. Prowda was in the crowd last night, sitting maybe 20 rows back. How I longed for her to be up there onstage.

It wasn't just the coldness of stultifying generalities that made Bowers seem frosty; there was something hard and mean in the way she ran the show last night. Possibly this is because the first thing Junot Diaz did was come out and make fun of her introduction. As Paul pointed out earlier, his first words to the crowd were: "Suuuper long introduction." Which he muttered in a kind of dazed disbelief, and which the audience loved, and laughed at—i.e., all of Benaroya Hall was laughing at Bowers. Diaz poked SAL in the ribs in other ways too, making fun of the way the Q&A question cards are passed to ushers, etc., but you got the sense that he was just being himself (he made fun of himself more than anyone) and just trying to deflate the pomposity of the proceedings.

Paul called it "the most profane reading that Seattle Arts and Lectures has ever put on," which sounds right. It was as if Diaz was saying to the crowd: don't let these frosty SAL types convince you that literature is boring. The guy said "fuck" at least 40 times, and the story he read had a bunch of instances of "nigger" and at least one "pussy" getting fingered. Before he began reading he apologized for how boring readings are, and this apology, coupled with the revelation that SAL administrators had asked him to read for a lot longer than he was willing to, made the crowd love him. In addition to making fun of SAL and making fun of himself, he made fun of Seattleites, made fun of Republicans, made fun of Dominicans—pretty much no one was spared. But you got the sense that Linda Bowers was pissed, felt slighted, and when she came back onstage to moderate the Q&A, it showed. She made a point of mentioning that there was extra time for questions, i.e., that Diaz hadn't talked for as long as he was supposed to. When the questions were underway, she was brusque and prickly. She was icy. They seemed to be at war with one another, Bowers and Diaz, although it was all subtext and oddly enough seemed to energize the Q&A: to question after question, Diaz gave some of the most elegant answers I've ever heard a writer give. Seldom has a SAL lecturer triumphed over circumstances the way Diaz did last night.