Saunders muses over girl-on-girl

George Saunders says he is getting old.

When he turned on his television to find the… George Saunders says he is getting old.

When he turned on his television to find the likes of Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton “engaging in girl-on-girl action” in the name of Pizza Hut, the author decided that he was a prude – that when he was young, girl-on-girl action “hadn’t even been invented yet.”

And thus, he found a subject that he decided to dissect for The New Yorker in April 2006 and rehash accordingly to a crowded Frick Fine Arts auditorium last night.

It was Saunder’s first trip to Pittsburgh.

“The room is full. I love Pittsburgh,” he said, laughing as he took the podium, calling himself an egoist for basing his judgment of the city on the night’s turnout.

Saunders – whose fiction has appeared in magazines like Harper’s and Esquire and is known for works such as “Civil War Land in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia” and “In Persuasion Nation” – was the first speaker in this year’s Pitt Contemporary Writers Series.

His most recent novel is “The Braindead Megaphone.”

In addition to sharing his insight about the evolution of sex and violence in society through his reading, Saunders also read the title piece from “In Persuasion Nation,” which he described as a collection of “commercial vignettes.”

“You should be able to write anything, and if you work hard enough, something should come out that’s not totally irrelevant,” Saunders said as he prefaced the collection of his homemade commercials.

One such vignette described a boy so engrossed with making “MacAttack” macaroni and cheese that he ignores his grandmother’s cry for help after she is hit by a truck crossing the street and projected into the backyard off of a trampoline into a rose bush.

Each story was written as if a scene from a commercial.

The dramatic readings took Saunders’ characteristic satire to another level and as he lent a different voice to each character, the audience howled with laughter.

His last reading was called “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” which appeared in “Pastoralia.”

Based on a barber he observed at a bus stop while living in Rochester, N.Y., Saunders said he found himself disgusted with the man who was constantly “ogling women” and consequently felt the need to describe the “pear-shaped barber’s” fantasies about the women that surrounded him.