This one hour radio special is the first in a series of “at-large” conversations presently categorized under the old “Bat Segundo” label. It features a rare interview with Jack Butler, author of Jujitsu for Christ, a highly underrated novel that has recently been reissued by the University Press of Mississippi.

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Author: Jack Butler

Subjects Discussed: Moving west over a lifetime, having a double bachelor’s in English and math, the yin-yang existence, reading science fiction as a boy, why the stars are so inspirational in the Delta, using the Holy Ghost as a narrative device, Lautréamont, narratives within the Bible, Ulysses and The Waste Land, theological implications within fables, Finnegans Wake, speaking in tongues, starting a book with only 60 pages, becoming an accidental novelist, the poet’s life, the strange yet highly modest financial incentives of novels, the Judo for Christ Club, Tom LeClair and “prodigious fiction”, comparing novels with a 7-Layer Burritos, how to present information within a story, the College of Santa Fe, Los Angeles as a source of escape, why Butler’s fiction left the South, writers who become unintentional spokesmen for the South, not being bound by assumptions, “authentic” vs. “smart,” Eudora Welty, Faulkner, science fiction and Southern literature as lowbrow inspirational territory, literary authors who scavenge from genre and write unsuccessful novels, how genre can be used to write meaningfully about humanity, African-American stereotypes, caricatures, missed opportunities because of bigotry, living in shanties, common experience, scavenging from comics and used books to form a borrowed bedrock of knowledge, the character “Jack Butler” in Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, “autobiographical fiction,” the neediness of novelists, combating desperation in a world that increasingly devalues risk-taking authors who don’t sell, Bum Festrich modeled on the Clarion-Ledger‘s Tom Etheridge, using racist newspaper rhetoric as an unsettling guide for fictional perspective, writing about sex, religious blasphemy vs. sexual blasphemy, Hugh Hefner’s philosophy vs. the Baptists, being part of the way actuality goes, why religion in fiction often causes the author to create a comparative ideological construct to present contrast, gay rights, the Belgian Malinois making mysterious noises in the back, corporeal collision in debut novels, approaching the holy through the material, chalk talks, tragicomic side characters, when the ABA voted Jujitsu worst title, mixing the funny with the repulsive, writing about humidity in Mississippi, massive IBM clone computers in the 1980s, writing a book on a 400 pound computer, slowing down writing speed, whether or not a writer needs a sense of compulsion, chasing down a locale in one great shot, allowing the reader to experience life as Butler saw it, The Illumination of Elijah Lee Roswell, what happened with Butler’s agent, the dangers of writing with the idea of money in mind, the virtues of academics, forbidden styles, the benefits of rebellion, people who sell out, clearing the head of extraneous voices,

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to first of all talk about how you got your start. You were a poet before you were a fiction writer. And I also know that you have a bachelor’s in English and a bachelor’s in math. And I was wondering. How does a guy like you have the yin-yang thing going on here? It seems that you have a yin-yang thing in terms of what you studied and what you ended up doing as a writer.

Butler: Yeah. A lot of that — at least as far as math and the arts go — is that I loved science fiction as a kid. I used to read it all the time. Most of it is literarily horrible. But I was in a Baptist conservatory in Mississippi and they weren’t really aware of science fiction. So that was something I could get away with and what I really loved was just the ability to speculate. You know, that the world might be different from what was right around you. For pretty obvious reasons. But I’ve always been interested in mathematics. I think one of the sad things about our culture is that we have such a dichotomy set up between art and science or math. I mean, the two things I say that people are most afraid of are poetry and mathematics.

Correspondent: Yeah. How has math and poetry encouraged you to speculate? Both in terms of your imagination and in terms of, for example, books like Nightshade?

Butler: I guess it’s just that they give me the tools. I’m pretty picky about details, even though I do get some things wrong. Just in case there’s anybody listening, I’m not a medical person at all and I gave the exact opposite cure for angina. I said digitalis. And that will kill you. (laughs)

Correspondent: (laughs)

Butler: Aside from that, I had to not only get the gravity of Mars right. I had to allow for it in every action. Which you just don’t really see very much. So it’s more nearly that it’s given me the tools to do what I’m psychologically inclined to do.

Correspondent: So with science fiction, do you feel that it’s that speculative nature that really makes it fiction or meaningful? That this was the drive for you when you were growing up reading a lot of it as a boy, as a young man. That kind of thing?

Butler: Yeah, right. And as I said in the interview with Brannon (PDF), I believe, the Delta had a big wide sky. Because of all the flatland and not too many trees. So in spite of the humidity, you could really see the stars. And I loved the stars. That got me going on that.

Correspondent: Your first three novels (Jujitsu for Christ, Nightshade, and Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock) all feature some intriguing narrative mode somewhere between direct first person and a quite literally godlike omniscient voice. It almost reminds me, to some degree, of Lautréamont’s narrator in the way that you suggest to the reader that the narrator has lived and this allows the narrator to share some experience with the reader. And I’m wondering. Why did you need this particular type of halfway narrator to tell a story for these first three books?

Butler: Well, I’ll go back to — it’s not really an anecdote, but when I first thought of having the Holy Ghost — and I hasten to add that I mean this as a model of the Holy Ghost. I’m not pretending to represent the actual thing, if it even exists. But it’s like what Wallace Stevens said. “Not as a god, but as a god might be.” Well, not as the Holy Ghost, but as the Holy Ghost might be. And I couldn’t believe that nobody had ever picked up on it. You had the ability to have both first-person narration and a justified reason to switch personas. It was wonderful. And, of course, I got all that Holy Ghost stuff, a lot of it, growing up. It was drilled into me. So it was a chance to play with that a little bit. The Holy Ghost is narrator in Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, but one of the main problems with Westernized Christianity is that we don’t have a trickster god. And of the candidates, I felt the Holy Ghost was the best candidate for that. So the Holy Ghost is kind of a trickster there. As for the other, one of the things I really like to think about is the nature of individuals. The nature of the individual. Mind. And so playing on narrators lets me play on that.

Correspondent: I’m wondering if this reflects any kind of storytelling you heard growing up. That when people told you stories, either around the house or around the town, that people were telling you the absolute truth or perhaps inserting their own asides. Was it something like that?

Butler: Well, it’s true that people love anecdotes in the South. I think I’ve really gotten more of my tendencies from the fact that my father stood up in the pulpit every week and talked. So that’s always seemed to me to be a natural thing to do. And like you point out, there were a lot of things that didn’t scan for me with the stories I was told. And the Bible, it’s stories. I love the Bible. But I view it as a library, not as a book. It was written over several hundred years, maybe a thousand or more, by different people with different conceptions. And it’s more fascinating as a narrative than anything else. So my storytelling probably had more to do with that. But there’s a background nature that Southerners in general love language and they love to tell stories and there’s a premium put on wit. So I think that was so naturalized without thinking of it.

Correspondent: So if the Bible is a library, what is the Ulysses or The Waste Land of the Bible?

Butler: Well, it’s more beautiful than The Waste Land. Ecclesiastes is one of the more beautiful things ever written in my opinion and it’s very much — not quite nihilistic, but Ecclesiastes very plainly does not countenance belief in an afterlife. It says people are just like grass. Like the grass of the fields. We come from the same kind of place and we go to the same kind of place when we die. Nobody imagines a heaven for grass. So if we’re the same as grass, that has a lot of theological implications.

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Bullying is the most common form of violence in America and often carries into adulthood. Every day, more than 160,000 students stay home from school because they fear being bullied. This week, we discuss bullying at length. Poet Shane Koyczan uncovers the dark beginnings of “To This Day,” a poem abut bullying that went unexpectedly viral. We talk with Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones, to learn more about the bullying phenomenon. Dr. William Copeland reveals how bullying’s long-term effects extend into adulthood and discusses an unprecedented study that followed 1,420 kids from North Carolina for twenty years. Distinguished author James Lasdun tells us how a relentless student cyberstalked him and refuses to stop to this very day. And we find out how an innocent girl with progeria was relentlessly tortured by cyberbullies who reviled her for no good reason at all.

As if Broken Bones Hurt More

Shane Koyczan read his poem, “To This Day,” over a video that was animated by volunteers. The video became a YouTube sensation, racking up five million views in a week. But before Koyczan had poetry, there was the daily hell at school in which he was singled out for being different. Now that the bully’s reach has extended beyond the classroom, Koyczan discusses how conversation and compassion are invaluable tools against the hate and meanness. (Beginning to 5:46)

More Than Sticks and Stones

Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones and senior editor at Slate, reveals how Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus has developed an anti-bullying program in place within many of America’s schools right now. But how can kids stick up for themselves? And what of school principals who believe that putting the bully and the victim in the same room to talk out the problem? And with so many other national problems, why should we care about bullying? (5:46 to 12:10)

The Long-Term Effects of Bullying

In late February, JAMA Psychiatry published a report revealing how the long-term effects of bullying stretched into adulthood. In an unprecedented undertaking, 1,420 kids from Western North Carolina were asked about bullying at various points in their life over a twenty-year period by a group of psychologists. For subjects who had been bullied in school, depression and anxiety continued into their twenties. We talked to Dr. William Copeland, the lead researcher, to learn what this means for those who past, present, and future children. (12:10 to 25:02)

On Being Cyberstalked

James Lasdun is a heralded poet, a celebrated novelist, and a distinguished and generous teacher of creative writing. But when a former student started sending him emails, Lasdun’s quiet life turned into a nightmare. His new memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, chronicles the ongoing horror. (25:02 to 53:24)

The Princess and the Trolls

Adalia Rose is a five-year-old girl suffering from progeria. She lives in a modest apartment with her single mother. But Adelia’s harmless videos became a dark magnet for trolls. We chat with Camille Dodero, who wrote a lengthy investigative piece for Gawker, about why the trolls found the prospect of picking on an innocent girl so funny and reveal how high-profile cyberbullying feeds into another American sickness. (53:24 to end)

Loops for this program were provided by The Psychotropic Circle and Martin Minor. Follow Your Ears Theme (licensed) by Mark Allaway.

Follow Your Ears #6: Bullies (Download MP3)

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The rebel. You’d think that a culture that gave us John Brown, Margaret Sanger, and Rosa Parks would be more encouraging of this proud American tradition. This week we examine why rebels get the short end of the stick. We talk with historian Jeanne Theoharis about how Rosa Parks’s rebellious life has been swept under the carpet of modern American history, examine Pussy Riot’s rebellious legacy with many of the band’s supporters, and chat with a rebel journalist about a mysterious shooting in Missouri and the pros and cons of assumption.

Robbie the Rebel

Have you heard the tale of Robbie the Rebel? We all know him to some degree. One last exiguous belch from the 20th century. But in this nine minute performance of an allegorical tale of a rebel emerging from the dregs of the 20th century, we establish a template for this program. (Beginning to 9:43)

Seeking Rebellion in Times Square

Times Square was once devoted to go-go bars, adult theaters, and other rebellious fixtures of New York City. But in 2013, rebellion is more of a commodity. In these series of street conversations, we ask people to tell us the most rebellious thing they have ever done. Some of our subjects are adamantly against rebellion. Others are on the fence. By sheer fluke, many of the people included in this segment are from the United Kingdom, and those from across the pond are more committed to spilling the rebellious beans than Americans. (9:43 to 13:03)

Callion Hamblin and the Case of the Rebel Journalist

In 2010, novelist Frances Madeson moved to Farmington, Missouri and became the editor and publisher of The Madison County Crier, where her rebellious take on the local biweekly newspaper proved alluring yet controversial. Madeson doesn’t see herself as a journalist, but a literary artist. In recent months, Madeson has concerned herself with a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story about Callion Hamblin, a 32-year-old man on the run from police and bounty hunters and killed by the police during the early morning of February 20, 2012. Madeson believes the story to adhere to an official narrative that must be resisted. But because the facts aren’t all in, Follow Your Ears questions Madeson’s approach and engages in an unexpected examination of journalism vs. literary artistry, talking with Hamblin’s ex-wife and the local coroner, and wondering if rebel journalism is all that it’s cracked up to be. (13:03 to 38:28)

(Shortly after this program aired, the Associated Press’s Alan Scher Zager filed a new story on Callion Hamblin, with statements from the county prosecutor and more details about the autopsy report.)

Pussy Riot: The Legacy of Punk Prayer

On February 21, 2012, one day after Callion Hamblin was shot in Missouri, Pussy Riot performed “Punk Prayer” at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior to protest the Orthodox Church leader’s support for Vladimir Putin during his reelection campaign. Three members of Pussy Riot were arrested weeks later and held without bail, kept in custody on charges of hooliganism. Two of the three members were sentenced to two years in a penal colony, with this gross injustice attracting notice and support from around the world. During the print release of Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer for Freedom, we talk with Feminist Press editorial director Amy Scholder, Zena Grubstein, producer for the documentary Pussy Riot: Punk Prayer, poet Eileen Myles, Laurie Weeks, Johanna Fateman, Barbara Browning, and Elizabeth Koke to learn more about how Pussy Act’s brave act of rebellion impacted the world at large. (38:28 to 47:16)

Rosa Parks: Not Just a Meek Seamstress

The historians and the statesmen describe Rosa Parks as a meek seamstress who boarded a segregated bus after a long and tired day of work on December 1, 1955. She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger when asked and, through one act of defiance, changed the course of civil rights. But as historian Jeanne Theoharis points out in her new book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks wasn’t nearly as quiet as history has painted her. (47:16 to end)

Loops for this program were provided by alividlife, minor2go, JoeFunktastic, supersymmetry, Jadon, hamood, DubTek, MaMaGBeats, DubDelta, Psychotropic_Circle, and MejiaM.

Follow Your Ears #5: Rebels (Download MP3)

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Giving aid to nations and people who desperately need help has been an American staple for more than a century. Yet in 2013, aid has become more beholden to red tape and incompetence than ever before. This week, we go to Staten Island to talk with the organizers and volunteers of Occupy Sandy to find out how they helped people when others could not and get a sense of their philosophy. We talk with Jonathan Katz, the only full-time American journalist stationed in Hatii during the 2010 earthquake and reveal how billions of dollars given by Americans to help the impoverished and the homeless ended up in the wrong place.

The Very Mass of Facts

On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall said in his speech that “the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation.” But here at Follow Your Ears, we’d like to give a shot. (Beginning to 1:35)

Occupy Sandy — Aid to Staten Island

Occupy Sandy emerged in the aftermath of last year’s hurricane. Aid wasn’t moving fast enough. So Occupy Sandy stepped in and has been hard at work ever since. We made a visit to Staten Island to spend some time with some of the people behind this relief effort. We chronicle the origins of Occupy Sandy, its philosophy and functional ethos, learn how volunteers juggle their time, and peek in on a “data entry party,” where hard won and carefully collected data from a neighborhood canvassing campaign is being placed into a computer so that other individuals and organizations can find new solutions. (1:35 to 14:26)

Haiti — The Truck That Went By

Jonathan Katz was the only full-time American correspondent in Haiti when the devastating earthquake hit in 2010. His new book, The Big Truck That Went By, documents what happened in the quake’s aftermath and reveals how, despite $15 billion in donations, the aid didn’t always find its way to the people of Haiti. We learn discover how aid has greatly harmed the Haitian health services infrastructure, reveal how Bill Clinton’s best intentions are often guided by inflexible neoliberalism. (14:26 to end)

Loops for this program were provided by Joe Funktastic, hamood, The Psychotropic Circle, and builtmymusic.

Follow Your Ears #4: Aid (Download MP3)

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This week, we examine cycles. Are our lives and our culture locked within cycles? Are we aware of it? Should we be aware of it? Or is there a certain folly in paying too much attention? Our quest for answers has us talking with bike shop owners and a Finnegans Wake reading group. We reveal how Raiders of the Lost Ark caused two teenage boys to become consumed by a relentless cycle of remaking the movie they loved with limited cinematic resources. We also talk with Scottish novelist Ian Rankin about how he returned to Inspector Rebus and got caught up in cycles he couldn’t quite describe and Lesley Alderman, the author of The Book of Times, who shows us how being aware of time doesn’t necessarily preclude you from finding enticing new cycles of existence.

Like Riding a Life

We begin our investigation into cycles by wandering around Brooklyn on a cold Saturday afternoon talking with various bike shop owners about how the cycles of life relate to their passion for bicycles. Our gratitude to Fulton Bikes, R&A Cycles, and Brooklyn Cycle Works for sharing their thoughts and feelings, which range from calmness to restrained anger. (Beginning to 4:11)

Commodius Vicus of Recirculation

Every month, the Finnegans Wake Society of New York gets together in a Spring Street apartment and reads aloud a page of James Joyce’s cyclical masterpiece. And then they discuss the page, whatever theories they can find, for about two hours. Organizer Murray Gross tells us why it’s important to slow down. Other members tell us how they became unexpectedly married to the book. (4:11 to 10:09)

Standing in Another Man’s Cycle

Are cycles a red herring? I spoke with the novelist Ian Rankin to get more answers. Rankin’s latest book, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, marks a surprise return to the Inspector Rebus series, which Rankin had closed out in 2007 with his 17th Rebus novel, Exit Music. Somehow Rebus eluded retirement and manged to cajole Malcolm Fox, the protagonist of Rankin’s new series, into the mix. This seemed as good a time as any to press Rankin on whether he’s caught in a pleasant cycle. Our side trips in this conversation include consideration of Anthony Powell, the A9 Motorway and its homicidal possibilities, Skyfall, 20th century policing instinct, and how men in their sixties get into fistfights. (10:09 to 40:15)

Pardon Me, Do You Have the Time?

We meet Lesley Alderman, author of The Book of Times, a collection of time-related data that will make your more conscious of the clock than Christian Marclay. But we learn how being aware of the time doesn’t mean you can’t find enticing new cycles hiding behind the corners of your complex existence. (40:15 to 45:51)

Raiders of the Lost Remake

It was 1982 and three twelve-year-olds in Mississippi decided to remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was before the Internet, before the movie had been released on VHS. These kids had to hustle. What they did not know was that their ambitious project would take up their next seven summers. They would grow up making this movie. We talk with Chris Strompolos, who starred as Indiana Jones in the remake, and Alan Eisenstock, author of Raiders, a new book documenting the remake. Was all the fun and youthful ingenuity a mask? Can a cycle of remaking beget a new cycle of remaking? (45:51 to end)

Photograph by Steven Sebring.

Loops for this program were provided by Psychotropic Circle, DextDee, and HMNN.

Follow Your Ears #3: Cycles (Download MP3)

Last week, we examined the Second Amendment’s history and the seductive allure of guns. This second of our two part program includes our efforts to contact the National Rifle Association, reveals how gun-related crimes have affected human lives, and shows how a flood of affordable large magazine semiautomatic pistols altered the course of American history.

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Thank You for Calling the NRA

The NRA, along with other pro-gun organizations such as Pink Pistols, refused or didn’t bother to answer our requests for interviews by telephone, email, or Facebook. In an effort to get somebody from the NRA on the record, we contacted the NRA Member Services hotline and had a very strange conversation. (Beginning to 7:12)

The Night the Sky Opened Up

On October 28, 2000, three days before Halloween, Sezin Koehler was out for a night on the town in Los Angeles. But what she did not know, as her best friend Wendy Soltero rolled up in her car, was that the sky was about to open up. Koehler reveals the little discussed pain of living with the consequences of a gun-related murder and talks about how she’s still coping more than twelve years later. (7:12 to 27:25)

The History of the Glock

To understand how handguns with large magazines have become a greater part of American culture, we spoke with After Paul Barrett, assistant managing editor at Businessweek and author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. Barrett discusses Gaston Glock’s parallels with Samuel Colt, reveals how Glock’s savvy marketing strategies were used to cajole city police departments, how gun manufacturers exploited the grandfather clause of the 1994 assault weapons ban, whether Glock feels any remorse, the 2005 ban on civil lawsuits against gun manufacturers and suppliers, and the NRA’s failure to compromise on any issue. (27:25 to end)

Loops for this program were provided by Exoflex and JoeFunktastic.

Follow Your Ears #2: Guns, Part Two (Download MP3)

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Aurora, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech. We’re shocked by the massacres and the loss of life, but how did we get to this? This is the first of a two part program examining guns at length.

Edge of the South Bronx

On the edge of the South Bronx, everybody we talk with has an opinion about guns. One man, held up at his store twenty years ago, developed a lifelong fear. (Beginning to 2:49)

Falling in Love with Guns

Before she was the acclaimed author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects, Porochista Khakpour fell in love with guns. In an essay for Slate published in December, Khakpour wrote that she thrived on the attention, even posting a series of sexy shooting range photos on MySpace. Khakpour talks about why she could relate to Nancy Lanza and why guns proved both seductive and problematic. (2:49 to 7:51)

“1776 Will Commence Again”

After Alex Jones’s meltdown on CNN, we talked with Saul Cornell, a a professor of American legal history at Fordham University and the author of A Well-Regulated Militia to untangle the Second Amendment’s true roots. Cornell points out that the Second Amendment has a good deal more to it than the right to keep and bear arms and the “Red Dawn fantasy” and discusses how militias and civic obligation were more what the Founding Fathers had in mind. (7:51 to 23:26)

Interpreting the Second Amendment

Adam Winkler is a professor of constitutional law at the UCLA School of Law and the author of Gunfight. He provides more answers on the Second Amendment, describing how the NRA was originally for gun control before a fateful meeting in Cincinnati when gun rights radicals took over an annual meeting and pointing out how recent Supreme Court decisions such as District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago have helped to curtail regulation efforts. (23:26 to 44:46)

Living with Guns

Our final guest is Craig Whitney, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and author of the book, Living With Guns. He is a liberal who believes that the Second Amendment should be honored. (44:46 to end)

Follow Your Ears #1: Guns, Part One (Download MP3)

This 30 minute radio special serves as a transitional episode between The Bat Segundo Show, which aired its final episode last November, and Follow Your Ears, a new thematic radio program that will be premiering this month. It features an interview with Michael Apted, director of the Up movies. His latest installment, 56 Up, is now playing in select theaters in the United States.

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Guest: Michael Apted

Subjects Discussed: How intimate documentary competes with YouTube and viral video, the creative solidity of a long-standing broadcast guarantee, the Five Guys Burgers review, whether the Up films an appeal to a younger generation, the heightened political nature of 56 Up, why Cameron’s austerity measures affected Apted’s subjects more than Thatcher, pressing Tony on his possibly racist suggestions, avoiding predictability, conflict as the stuff of drama, how Apted’s subjects collaborate beyond being in front of the camera, how Apted is a part of the Up subjects’ lives, self-editing, behaving yourself in front of subjects, efforts to include Peter and Charles, Apted’s anger towards Charles, Charles’s lawsuit against Apted, being transparent with documentary subjects, why the Up subjects didn’t have a choice, persuading the subjects to appear in each new installment, the Up subjects’ sense of ownership, Neil confronting Apted about the filmmaker not knowing anything about his personal life, whether snapshots are fair representations of people, knowing that every grimace or every emotion on camera is going to be dissected by audiences, the ubiquity of the camera (and smartphones) in everyday culture, trust, taking risks, the degree to which people lie, the skill of interviewing, doing a disservice in not being open, why Apted credits himself as researcher, carrying on the legacy of 7 Up, fact checking and corroboration, the difficulties Apted had with 49 Up, passion vs. obligation, and the textures of lives.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: So there is a big question I wanted to ask you — and, regrettably, I did not talk with you for 49 Up, but during that particular time, we were in a stage where YouTube and viral videos were mere striplings compared to what they are now.

Apted: Right.

Correspondent: And this has led me to ask you, especially with these Up films, how a movie that deals with how humans evolve over nearly six decades of their lives — does a filmmaker like you compete with something like that? Or reality television? Of which interestingly, Peter, one of your subjects, seems to be using some of the moves normally one would associate with reality television for you, of all people. So what do you do to adapt? Or do you not really change up the setup you’ve had going now for several films here?

Apted: No. You see, I think I’ve got one huge advantage over everybody. I am at least thirty years ahead of the game.

Correspondent: Aha.

Apted: No one’s got what I’ve got. You know, and, uh, I think that’s what’s unique about it. That’s why of all the work I’ve ever done, this is to me the most precious. Because it is entirely original. And people have only copied it. No one has really come anywhere near to equaling it in longevity, nor do I think will they ever. Because as much as you talk about modern media, modern media is nothing as unpredictable, on marshy ground, can sink and dive and whatever at the drop of a hat. There’s about seven mixed metaphors in there. But the solidity which was in the broadcast world when we started, which guaranteed it at least into, say, 35 Up without any question about “Should we do this? Can we raise the money to do this in particular version of it?” has given me a running start. And I don’t think that anybody will ever catch me up. So I look at these newcomers with sort of a blase way and say, “Off you go.”

Correspondent: But aren’t you concerned with — for example, there’s — I’ll give you one example. There’s a viral video going around. It’s amusing enough. It’s a guy who is reviewing Five Guys Burgers in the back of his car. And he goes, “DAYM!” And this gets remixed over and over. And then weeks later, we see that he’s now a fixture on Jimmy Fallon.* And then he’ll be forgotten. And whatever natural exuberance he had is almost stifled instantly. And so, yes, I grew up on the Up movies. I watched them throughout my life. And it’s always a pleasure to go back every seven years. And it’s sort of like going to church, except on a seven year schedule. But simultaneously, I mean, doesn’t this bother you? I mean, how can you woo, for example, a younger generation of viewers when presently it’s really all about reducing human behavior to novelties, to something that’s kind of an ephemeral indulgence as opposed to really exploring the depths of someone?

Apted: (laughs) That was a bit of a mouthful. I don’t know. I suppose you’re right. I’ve never lost the audience. I always thought I’d give the series up if the viewing figures dropped away. And they don’t seem to have done. So whether young people are attracted to this, I don’t know. It’s almost staple stuff in teaching, you know, all sorts of sociology and whatever. You know, I don’t believe everything just disappears with the bathwater. I think people do have a sense of the past and a sense of history, especially when they cease to be teenyboppers and then become people with children and people with mortgages and all this kind of stuff. And this is the drama — this is, I call it, the heroism of everyday life of this series And I think everybody responds to that at some point. I mean, maybe nobody between the age of 11 and 25 will want to watch this. But there will come a time when they’ll discover it later on. And because it’s in a sense, without boasting, so rich because it covers so much of people’s lives, which no one else has ever covered, you know, I’m optimistic that it will stay around. So I don’t feel threatened by it. I know what you mean. About how can I attract a young audience, competing with Youtube. I mean, this is all over YouTube from the minute I practically finished editing it. So anyway, it’s a good question. But I’m not worried about it.

Correspondent: So this seems to me a far more political installment of the series than previous ones. I mean, we have Jackie, who is on disability, and she excoriates [Prime Minister David[ Cameron at one point. You have Lynn, who we see after she has lost her job as a school librarian. There seems to be a great concern, at least on your part or on the camera’s part, on capturing the consequences of various austerity programs. And I’m wondering why the film tended to shift this way. I mean, these were going on under Thatcher. These were going on under a variety of…

Apted: You’re missing the point. The point is that how does it affect their lives. I’ve never been interested in any of the series of objectified politics. Politics only appears in issues when it affects their lives. Now certainly Thatcher was doing all sorts of bloodthirsty work. But these people were very young then. And it didn’t affect them. These people are now 56 years old. Their pensions are going out the window. Their salaries are going out of the window. The future of their children and their grandchildren is going out of the window. So that’s why it’s in this film. I don’t ask them political questions. They talk about it. Because I gave up asking politics in 42 Up when I foolishly asked them about Princess Diana, who had just been killed, and I threw it out, threw it away, because I was asking them their opinions on something that weren’t organic to their life. I’m not interested in their political opinions. I’m interested in how politics determine their life. And in this generation of people living in the United Kingdom, which is going through a worse time than here and will go through an even worse time and you’ll go through an even worse time, it’s of profound importance to people’s lives. And so my films — this generation from 56 — reflect the personal effect of this political kind of fallout that’s going on. But this is the first time this has ever really happened in the series. Because I haven’t found that politics has so interested or determined or, you know, concentrated itself in people’s lives as it is now.

Correspondent: Politics is only a concern for the Up series when it is personal.

Apted: Yes. Because the politics of the film are their lives. They are the political statement of the film. They’re not objective opinions. I’m not interested in opinions. I’m interested in the organic manifestation of politics in people’s lives.

Correspondent: I’m glad you brought up the Diana moments in 42 Up, which…

Apted: I thought I cut them out. Are they still around?

Correspondent: I’d heard about this. But you do leave the moment with Tony here where he’s very defensive in relation to certain racist connotations of immigration. So in a situation like that, that’s kind of a political..

Apted: Yes. But again, it’s organic. It’s about the culture he grew up in. It’s about the society that he feels has been degraded. Where he grew up, his roots have been degraded by immigration. And, you know, I called him out on it basically. And, you know, it was a pretty scary moment for him and for me. Should I ask the question? I thought, “Sod it. I will ask the question.” I think it’s the question everybody was asking. Is he racist? Or was he not? Does he have a fair point? Maybe he does. He has a right to express it. He was. People were turfed out of their habitats by a great invasion of people from other countries and whatever. And maybe he has a point. So with him, you know, the whole idea of racial integration is very, very crucial. Because it did transform the whole community that he grew up in.

Correspondent: How do you decide what questions to ask of the subjects? Is it largely intuitive?

Apted: Yeah.

Correspondent: I mean, clearly, you’re still getting into trouble after all these years.

Apted: It is intuitive. And it’s…it’s…I wish I could think of an amusing way to express it, but basically I assiduously do not prepare for it. I do not go back into the old films. I do not say, “Oh my god! They’ve said this in 49. What are they going to think about it in 56?” Because I’ve noticed over the generations that the films change tone. They’re not the same films. And I thought the only way to preserve that is to make each episode as fresh as I can. To sit down like we are now and talk and not know which way the conversation’s going to go and what you’re going to ask me, what I’m going to answer you. I’ve no idea. And that kind of spontaneity, I think, is kind of crucial. Because it’s not predictable. Once this series becomes predictable, then I think I’m sort of dead in the water. There’s an element of predictability built into it — i.e., the whole idea that from the minute you’re born, you know what kind of actions you have. But given that, and that’s become kind of less important — again as the series has gone on. Because English society, the society of Great Britain, has changed a lot. Social mores are much more flexible. Education’s much more flexible and all this. These people came into life at a certain period in time in the English class system, seem to be very, very strong. And there’s still a class system. But it’s changed. It’s become more Americanized. It’s more to do with money than it is where you were born and whatever. So I’ve forgotten what the question I’m answering is about.

Correspondent: No, no. I was very curious about forgetting the previous films.

Apted: Ah yes!

Correspondent: I mean, there’s this aspect too. Do you carry enough of a reliable familiarity with the material? Or do you find that the relationships, both positive and fractious, are enough to steer you into the next installment?

Apted: No, it’s both. I mean, I have a huge amount of information in the back of my brain. I mean, I know what the great iconic moments are. What each character, what’s been there, kind of a few key moments. And I know that without having to think about it. But, you know, the provocative fractious stuff that I have with them, I think that’s what gives it life. And that — you can only approach that by having a genuine conversation and surprising each other.

Correspondent: Because conflict is the stuff of drama, it should be the secret ingredient of your relationship with your subjects for the Up movies.

Apted: Yeah. It is. And, you know, there’s lots of ground for conflict. There’s an overwhelming sense of trust, which is why they’re all in it pretty much and how it continues. But on the other hand, there’s also conflict. There’s a residual anger from them, I think. Because they were — they were press ganged into it. They didn’t make a decision at seven to do this. They didn’t make a decision at 14 to do this. And then when they became adults, suddenly they were in the middle of this rollercoaster and sort of stuck with it. So there’s still an anger, I think, which I still find with them about that. But generally I think that’s been kind of now overtaken with a sort of a sense of a trust. And the trust they have in me is that if they’ve got something to say, I’ll let them say it. And I’ll answer it if I can. Or acknowledge it if they’re right and I’m wrong.

Correspondent: But Nick in this movie, he says, “This is not a picture of me. It’s a picture of somebody.”

Apted: Yeah.

Correspondent: He complains that he doesn’t have any control over how he is actually being presented. Suzy says, “Well, I don’t think this is presented as a well-rounded picture of me.” So it’s very interesting that your subjects seem to complain or, at least, I noticed their complaints more this time than I did in previous ones, although you have had skirmishes with them in the past. I mean, what do you do to placate them? I mean, do you allow them to see elements of the film or how it’s actually taking place? And, of course, Charles, he threatened to sue you. And he’s….there’s no trace of him in this movie. I was sort of surprised.

Apted: And do you know what his job is?

Correspondent: He’s a TV producer. I know.

Apted: Documentary filmmaker.

Correspondent: Yeah. But does that recuse him from…

Apted: No. Of course not. It makes it unforgivable. If you live by the sword, you have to die by the sword. But you’ve asked me about a thousand questions in the last twenty seconds and I’m trying to figure out — I mean, what you missed out is the point that Nick is making. He’s saying, “No, this isn’t a proper representation of me. But it is a representation of somebody.” I.e., it isn’t the details of him. But it’s some iconic representation of what he stands for and who he is. Which is what all these things can be. Of course. How can I put people’s lives into eighteen minutes? Or whatever, however long I give them? Of course it’s my judgment. It’s my taste to decide what goes in. That’s true of any film ever made. Whether it’s a documentary. The only film that doesn’t qualify is Andy Warhol pointing at the Empire State Building for 24 hours without changing the film. Everything is a cultural or judgmental decision and I make those and, if I”m wrong, I’m wrong. But all I can say is they’re all still here. They haven’t been so offended by it that they’ve gone away and dumped me, as it were.

* — Note: The broadcast erroneously referred to “Jimmy Kimmel” rather than “Jimmy Fallon.” The transcript reflects the facts, but we apologize for the on-air error.

J. Robert Lennon is most recently the author of Familiar. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #300. This conversation was recorded live at McNally Jackson on October 3, 2012. This is also the final episode of The Bat Segundo Show. Thank you for listening.

Listen: Play in new window | Download (Running Time: 1:00:35 — 55.5MB)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contending with five possible endings to his existence.

Author: J. Robert Lennon.

Subjects Discussed: Attempts to disseminate chocolate chip cookies in a bookstore, parallel universes, being confident in the rightness of not knowing, getting inside other people’s heads, how Elisa’s conditional ambiguity created a deeper connection with the reader, whether framing shops can exist after the Great Recession, why guys named Larry tend to sound sexy, Stephen Dixon’s “The Frame,” art and self-therapy, Wilhelm Reich as influence and huckster, technological reliance and memory, a digital camera in which nobody bothers to offload the photos, being a photography nerd, the multiverse per Brian Greene and William James, Lennon’s affinity for characters with bare feet, subconscious calls for New Age aesthetic, the Stephen King aesthetic of everyone wearing blue jeans, casual Fridays applied to novels, when a character can be associated with both Hugh Hefner and Hephaestus, spending far more time revising than writing, a definition of insanity of finding meaning when there is no meaning, needlessly close reading, Reevesport, Lennon’s secret shadow map of central New York, Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, physically impossible floor plans in fiction and films, labyrinths and labyrinthine structures, how the question of identity is a trap, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, The Funnies, comparisons between Silas and David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Blow, revision revelations, Braid, advice Lennon received from Tom Bissell, video game titles that aren’t dumb enough, Lennon’s efforts to write a draft without internal monologues, Richard Matheson, The Twilight Zone, the thin line between insanity and genius, the stigma against unusual perspectives, broken and corrupt institutions, crackpots, impostor syndrome, Capgras delusion, Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, similarities between Familiar and Nine Princes in Amber, the Nine Princes in Amber Commodore 64 ROM, cell phone addiction, how smartphones reveal mundane lives, Infocom text adventure games, and fictional vs. video game description.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: We have a lot of cookies and they have to be eaten. So please pass these along.

Lennon: These are the very same cookies you saw today on Twitter in the form of uncooked dough.

Correspondent: In the form of uncooked. And then there was a picture of them being cooked. So now we see the transmission from digital to reality. Sort of like your book.

Lennon: You see the baby pictures. And now they’re graduating from college. And now they’re all going to die.

Correspondent: Yes. And they need to be sent away to your stomachs. So please. Anyway, John, how are you doing?

Lennon: Hey, Ed, I’m doing very well. Thank you for having me on the show again. And thanks for sharing your swan song with me.

Correspondent: No worries. So in this book, you have this 46-year-old woman and she’s named Elisa Brown. She enters another life very early on in the book. She’s put on some weight. She trades in this cracked Volvo — or cracked Honda; there’s a Volvo that comes later — with a Dodge Intrepid. She sees her son Silas, who has died in her previous life, suddenly alive in this new one.

Lennon: I think what you’re not explaining is that it seems to be a parallel universe.

Correspondent: It seems.

Lennon: All this happens instantaneously. And she’s transferred into this apparent other world.

Correspondent: Yes. Apparent. Which leads me to my initial question. I mean, she could be inhabiting a parallel universe. This could be a psychological projection. This could be a maternal fantasy. It could be any number of things. You leave this up to the reader. I’m wondering, as author, if you knew with any certainty what this was all about.

Lennon: I aggressively and definitively refuse to know.

Correspondent: You refuse to know. It’s a hell of a way to write a book.

Lennon: Like I’m very confident in the rightness of not knowing. I’ll put it that way.

Correspondent: Okay. But how do you get inside the head of a character when you don’t exactly know what the condition of that head is? Or do you?

Lennon: Does anyone know the condition of their own head? Or the meaning or the circumstances?

Correspondent: Do you know the condition of your own head?

Lennon: Of course not! No! I think it’s an arch sci-fi metaphor for the feelings of dislocation that all of us have in the less obviously nerdy way.

Correspondent: Well, it seems that the very ambiguity of Elisa would allow, as I suggested, the reader to find her own way into what this is all about. And I’m curious. Were you thinking more about the reader in mind with this book? Some of your other books have dealt with minutiae or quotidian life — such as Mailman, to very alarming degrees in that wonderful book.

Lennon: Alarming quotidianness.

Correspondent: Yes, exactly. In the case of Elisa, I’m wondering. Did that uncertainty allow you to connect with the reader perhaps more than your other characters?

Lennon: That was my hope. I mean, my goal in presenting this conceit or this unsolvable dilemma to the character — she ends up quite logically, because she’s a scientist, searching for both the meaning and the cause of what has apparently happened to her. But in the process, it forces her to do other types of searching of the self that she was previously unwilling to undertake.

Correspondent: Got it. So there’s this framing shop in the book run by a guy named Larry. And this intrigued me quite a bit. Because I said to myself, “Well, how can a framing shop exist in a small town after the 2008 recession?” It leads me to wonder, hmmm, I wonder if this is possibly a fantasy.

Lennon: (laughs) You’re onto me.

Correspondent: I think there’s something romantic about a guy named Larry. I think you and I can both agree about that.

Lennon: Sure. Sure.

Correspondent: But I wanted to ask you where this came from. Do you know of a framing shop in a small town that is financially successful? Or does Larry have another business of some sort? And, of course, Elisa as well does all sorts of naughty things with him and we only really see him through how Elisa observes him in that Korean cafe and so forth. So I’m curious about the origins of Larry and how you stuck your thumb in the nose of present economic realities.

Lennon: This is a curious thing to fixate on, I must say.

Correspondent: Well, I’m a curious person. And you’ve written a curious book!

Lennon: Thank you. There are several functioning frame shops in my town. It didn’t seem terribly unusual. But the framing bit is — I don’t know why he’s in a frame shop. Maybe…has anyone read the Stephen Dixon story “The Frame”? It’s essentially a joke about a framed story. And a guy goes into a frame shop. And this reminds him of something that happened with his sister in the past. And the frame of the story is a frame. Maybe I had that in mind as a goofy meta device. But in any event, the plot device that you’re talking about is that, in her old life, what she considers to be her real life, she is having an affair with this guy Larry from the frame shop. Whom she met because she brought some art that she was trying to make to be framed. And the art was therapeutic art to deal with the death of her son. And in this new world, where her son never died, this guy doesn’t know her. And so she tries to get it on with him. It doesn’t go as planned. But I like the idea of a quiet business. That the whole point of it is not about the content. It’s about the context.

Correspondent: Yes, it’s about the framing.

Lennon: Exactly.

Correspondent: I see. So the artistic aspirations that Elisa has in this book, which aren’t necessarily totally fulfilled. We sort of see a little bit toward the end. But basically she has this studio. She’s not really doing much about it. Why is it that art — represented of course through Elisa’s painting and then transferred later onto Silas and his video game company — why is this the benchmark for these characters who are in such disarray to try to find themselves? I was curious why this seemed to be the motive for these characters.

Lennon: Well, I’m always kind of interested in this idea that creative effort is a form of therapy for people. And that usually doesn’t create good art necessarily. That the kind of self-criticism required for making…

Correspondent: True art.

Lennon: Yeah. It’s maybe not compatible with the needs of a self-therapeutic process. So in each of these worlds, I gave the creative output to one or the other character as one of them is dealing with the death and her possible culpability in it. And the other is dealing with his horrible childhood, for which he blames her. And she doesn’t get to do art in the world where he’s alive.

Correspondent: Yes. But it’s interesting that you call it therapy in light of all of the Wilhelm Reich references throughout the book. There’s some sly quotes. There’s this crazy family therapist named Amos, who is using very Reichian-like techniques. The whole idea of “blame yourself first,” which comes from Reich. And it’s interesting that that exists side by side with art. And it makes me wonder, well, is Larry, who we were talking about earlier, is he offering a form of therapy in terms of his sexual escapades? But I’m curious about where the Reich interest came from. I mean, he’s known as both one of the most important therapeutic forces of the early 20th century. But simultaneously, he’s also something of a huckster.

Lennon: Yeah. And I haven’t read him extensively. I’ve read some of the book that that quote comes from. But I read enough to use him as a motif. But not enough to know what the hell I’m talking about. But the entire book is about ways of perceiving experience and the extent to which people choose, no matter how hard we think we’re working, to understand the truth about our lives. We’re engaged in a form of self-serving narrative making. And so this whole process, which I think is hidden from us a lot of the time in real life — I’m sort of foregrounding this book by giving her an extra life and an extra version of her life to compose. And she seems to be screwing it up just the same way she screwed up the other life, which I think is what we would all do if we were given a second chance.

Correspondent: But is she entirely screwing it up? I mean, this book has some fairly damning things to say about technology, starting from the first technological implement we see. This camera, that has about a year worth of photos on it. And there is an interesting domestic dispute when all of the photos disappear. And the fact that these photos have not been transferred over says something about what our relationship is to memory through technology. And we see later on, of course, she sees a guy whose looking down at his phone over the last dregs of his meal. And of course there’s the video game motif as well. So I’m wondering why this notion of technology is almost defining many of these characters. Do you think we’re just now in this realm and fiction has to wrestle with this vital point of living?

Lennon: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think of technology as a motif that’s sort of extrinsic from psychology and emotion and that which has to be addressed. Rather, I wanted to bring it into the fabric of the book in a way that it might not naturally do so for nerdy people like this family. My wife said she was very proud of me with the camera thing. The deal with the camera is that they just never print the photos or put them on the computer or anything. They’re just all on the camera. And so everyone, they want to look at pictures, they just look for the camera and they pick it up and they just go like this for a while. And then Elisa’s mother-in-law appears to have deleted the photos of the child who has died. And for whatever reasons we don’t really understand.

Correspondent: Or did she? She just could have been messing with it. We don’t know.

Lennon: Maybe not. And Elisa ends up — she realizes that if she really wanted, that the files are still on there. That all, when you delete a file from, say, a hard disk or a memory card or something, all that changes is the bit of information that tells the computer or the camera that the photo is there. It’s still there. It just can’t be seen anymore. So this for me was kind of the metaphor for things that we try and put out of our heads that are still there. And the reason my wife is proud of me is because I’m a photography nerd. And I would never in a million years treat photographs like this. I’d have to download them to my computer and then edit them and disseminate them into a million different places and print them out and flog them in front of people. And I think it was really a stretch for me to realize that not everyone is like this.

(Photo: Sarah Weinman)

Chris Ware is most recently the writer and illustrator of Building Stories.

Listen: Play in new window | Download (Running Time: 30:10 — 27.6MB)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Learning how to wash his hands.

Author: Chris Ware

Subjects Discussed: The significance (or lack thereof) of the date September 23, 2000, technological reliance and its intrusion upon existence in Building Stories, the amount of time that humans presently stare into screens, the virtues of shapes and forms on paper, coming from a family of journalists, Ware’s decision to self-publish, the materials used in Building Stories, Ware’s affinity for small rectangular panels, the buildings that inspired the building, Charles Burns, losing track of time and space while drawing, temporal drift, Ira Glass and accusations of cliche, the pleasant frustration of not knowing the names of the Building Stories characters, people not saying Chris Ware’s name in his dreams, when characters are too defined by their names, flowers that grow along Illinois railways, SoundCloud, whether comics can compete with technology to encourage imagination, comics as a visually reductive medium to create a new language, Brandford the Bee and his influence as a narrative spirit, a fondness for circles, understanding other people, looking at animals for a very long time, empathy, Ware’s insistence on visual clarity, typography, operating from a place of uncertainty, Acme #20 and a character aging one year for every page, working with and without deadlines, how the Oak Park Public School system determines how much Ware turns out, observing the human world, parents who aren’t allowed to see their children as often as they need to, being in a privileged position, failed or aborted forms, Ware’s experiments with television, Ware’s difficulties in working with other people, cartooning as a singular art, whether there is an ideal medium for explicating or portraying human behavior, non-objective painting, representing a multilayered consciousness in comics, the physicality of doing the work, the frequency of Ware characters with afflicted or amputated legs, the creative inspiration which emerges from breaking legs, human frailties, and whether the human soul can be contained through illustration.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Is there any specific significance to the date September 23, 2000? I do know that a baseball player named Aurelio Rodriguez died that particular day.

Ware: Is that true? I didn’t know that. No, I picked it simply because it seemed like a date that didn’t particularly have any meaning to it. It’s just sort of a random day.

Correspondent: Well, let’s talk about the role of technology in Building Stories. I mean, we see that you have a concern for its effect on everyday life, ranging from the Facebook searches for lost boyfriends to this one page stark illustration with this unnamed woman with the leg. She’s standing naked before her husband and her husband is there with the iPad, also naked, not paying attention to her at all. Then of course you have this really terrifying last page augmented reality future, where they can’t even spell “fuck” right. So this would suggest, I think, a deep pessimism on your part for how technology is affecting life and so forth. And here you have a collection of fourteen various pamphlets ranging from something very small to almost a newspaper size. Is this really what we have to do now? In order for literature and comics to survive, do we now have to create massive physical palpable forms in order to get people off of this highly addictive technology that has encroached itself into culture all around us for the last five years?

Ware: No. I don’t think so. I mean, it is a little disturbing. The amount of time that we spend increasingly staring into these glowing pits in front of us. Just simply standing out on the street here, the number of people who are looking at the palms of their hands. There’s probably a higher percentage of people doing that than actually looking up. And I think the gesture for trying to remember something now has changed from looking above one’s head to slapping one’s pocket. But it’s really not that different from what adults do anyway, which is not necessarily looking at the world around them, but looking into their own past and thinking about their future and simply just kind of navigating in a world. Just trying to get through the world while worrying about the past and thinking about the future. I don’t think it’s necessary to try to make something — I don’t know what word I could use here. It’s elaborate, I guess. That’s what I tried do. But at the same time, why not? I mean, paper can do things that screens cannot. And I’ve tried to take advantage of that with the book. And we’re at a moment right now too where certain experiences and the way that we get knowledge about the world has been attached to certain shapes and forms. And those shapes and forms are disappearing. And it seemed to me just like a possibility for a slight sense of poetry in using those shapes and forms as a physical way of imparting a sense of life or everyday experience.

Correspondent: So shapes and forms in the form of paper. Old forms are the way to counter the conformist technological forms. That the housing of the form is probably going to get through to people more than the elaborate Tuftean graphs you’ve often had in your work. So you think this is going to be a solution? You think paper will persist? Do you actually have to change as an illustrator, as a cartoonist, as an artist in order to woo people’s attention?

Ware: Well, no. I grew up at a time where I read everything on paper. And I don’t have a sentimental attachment to it. I’ve never subscribed to a newspaper in my life. I’ve always read the newspaper either just simply on the Internet or picked it up here and there. Even though I come from a long line of newspaper editors and publishers. My mom was a reporter and an editor. My grandfather was an editor. My great great uncle was a publisher who actually won a Pulitzer Prize for an essay in, I think, 1911. So it’s in my blood. I feel that it’s no longer the most efficient way of disseminating important up-to-date information. Newsprint was for a long time. It was almost a fiber optic cable. But now it’s not. It’s great for art though. So I think art needs a certain kind of containment. And it needs a certain kind of containment to it because so much of the things that one writes about as a novelist or tries to get at sometimes as an artist are so ineffable and uncontainable that they almost need a certain form to stop them or something. Or freeze them.

Correspondent: So this leads me to ask, I mean, did you have to learn a lot about materials and publishing for Building Stories? Or did you have someone shepherding this for you? I mean, how did you decide upon the forms for Building Stories? In which you’re essentially collecting things from the Acme Novelty Library as well as a few new things as far as I know. How did you decide upon the forms? And what research did you do in making sure they would stick together or would be lasting to counter the end of newsprint era that we now have rolling?

Ware: Right. Well, everything in the book is made out of the exact same paper. Which is intentional. And they’re almost all coverless, with the exception of a couple. And that’s also intentional. I didn’t really have to research much. I’ve been self-publishing my own hardcovers now and comics for a while. And I’ve actually dealt directly with printing companies. So I’m more or less familiar with how those things are put together. But for this particular project, the production manager at Pantheon handled all of that for me and was able to make it work. But I just simply gave him very specific parameters for the size and paper that I wanted to use. And he accommodated me essentially. He was a very nice guy. Andy Hughes.

Correspondent: So why did you move to self-publishing? I was always curious about that.

Ware: I was sort of uninspired, I guess, at a certain point. And I felt more that if I published something myself, it would feel closer to art. The way it had early on. And I felt like I was taking the whole risk myself at that point.

Correspondent: You wanted to be a control freak.

Ware: Well, somewhat. Yeah. But at the same time, if there are any mistakes, they were entirely mine. I was solely the product of my hand. It just simply felt more like art. I was making something specifically, giving it to someone. I didn’t go through a publisher. It was less of a product and more of a thing.

Correspondent: So when you’re creating an elaborate — well, there’s tons of questions I have to ask you about layout and so forth. But let’s start — I was always curious about your small microscopic rectangular panels that are often in your work. I’m wondering if part of your attraction to this is because you’re interested in communicating the maximum amount of information with a minimum amount of detail. Is this the allure for you?

Ware: Yeah. Somewhat. Yeah. And the reason I use square panels is simply because the page is square. It’s reflective of the shape of the object itself in the same way that a leaf of a tree is somewhat reflective of the shape of a tree itself. But that’s not unusual. That’s the way all cartoonists work. I think it’s the way it’s been handed down to us.

Correspondent: So the building that is at the base of Building Stories, was this based off of any particular building?

Ware: It’s a synthesis of two buildings that I lived in in Chicago before my wife and I moved to Oak Park, Illinois. But the inhabitants are completely imaginary.

Correspondent: Are they based off of floor plans and layouts that you wandered through or lived in?

Ware: Yeah, it’s a combination of the exterior of the second building that we lived in and the floor plan of the first that I lived in. Which really means nothing to anyone except me.

Correspondent: How much did the building dictate the dimensionality of the characters? Like, for example, there’s this couple who’s unhappy. And of course, we see that pretty much all the walls are painted blue. And I’m wondering if the blue room or perhaps a yellow background may have influenced where you were going with the characters. And had you thought many of them out in advance?

Ware: You know, I thought them out. But I did not think of the colors as having any influence on the narrative. I guess, if anything else, it was just simply a way of color coding the various floors of the building itself. I find — Charles Burns and I were just talking about this recently — that, sometimes when we sit drawing, we realize that we completely lose where we are in space and time. When I’m sitting at a table, sometimes I’ll forget what room in the house I’m in. Or if I’m even in the house that I’m in. That I’ll even imagine for a second I’m in the apartment that I used to live in. And Charles was saying that he would recently find himself thinking that the sister’s room was right around the corner the way it had been when he was a child. And I’ve experienced it. Everyone has certainly. I mean, it starts off. Proust. And when you fall asleep, you tend to lose a sense of where you are when you wake up in the morning. Sometimes you don’t have any idea where you are. You have to recalibrate yourself.

Correspondent: That temporal drift, I think, informs many of the stories that are in here. Especially the thin stripped one where there are no words whatsoever. It’s all about motherhood and how we see the passage of time throughout that. And I’m wondering. Does this often inform how you organize a story along those lines? Do words often get in the way? Is time sometimes more of an allure than words or dialogue or even blank speech bubbles?

Ware: Well, in that case, there was an attempt to try and give it a sense of the general activities that one might go through during a day. And if I use words, then the segments would be too specific and seem too much like a slideshow of actual reality. Where I was trying to get more of a sense of a general repetition as well as getting a sense of time passing very rapidly. That the strip was inspired by a comment that my friend Ira Glass, the radio reporter and…I shouldn’t say “radio reporter,” but the producer and inventor and progenitor of This American Life.

Correspondent: Well, This American Life has journalistic standards. You can call him that.

Ware: I mean, he’s a great journalist. He’s broken many stories for which I think he doesn’t get adequate credit. But I was just telling him one day over lunch how quickly it was that children grow up and how fast time seems to pass. And he looked up at me and he just said, “Cliche.” And I thought, “I’m just trying to tell you a story here, you know?”

Correspondent: (laughs)

Ware: It is actually true. That it is kind of a cliche. So I tried to write this strip in such a way that maybe it wouldn’t be such a cliche and to try and give it a sense of how the time passes rapidly. How it almost seems like in one day your children grow up.

Benjamin Anastas is most recently the author of Too Good to Be True.

Listen: Play in new window | Download (Running Time: 42:19 — 38.7MB)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wrestling with failure.

Author: Benjamin Anastas

Subjects Discussed: Memoirs devoted to literary failure, Paul Auster’s Hand to Mouth, Tom Grimes’s Mentor, being inspired by Notes from Underground, measuring life through the medium of writing, seeking existential symmetry through writing, recurring images of sedans crashing into a tree, the difference between work in fiction and work in nonfiction, Brooklyn Flea vs. South Brooklyn flea markets, being confined to specific areas of Brooklyn, maintaining a literary illusion, staying in denial about gentrification or geographical change, being slow to adapt, “you” vs. “I” in a memoir, living in Williamsburg and Italy, the need to close off the world to get your work done, the pros and cons of needing to notice, the need to believe in the illusion as a creative person, writing as a ontological gamble, the stigma of not talking about the realities of being a writer, standing in a boxing ring designed for Muhammad Ali at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Penguin/Random House merger, publishing with Amazon, talking with Jason Epstein, writing as a life going through self-inflicted hardships, why broke writers aren’t special, parental legacy, adultery as a choice, giant posters of Franzen and Eugenides, the writer’s ego, how book fairs can devastate a writer, the attenuated lifespan of a book, blurbs, why New York is an unhealthy place for a writer to live, a level playing field in which all publishing houses are equal, Brooklyn as the second most expensive place to live in the United States, publishing a celebrity journalist’s Facebook messages, Coinstar machines, the divide between the public and the private, navigating through Facebook posts, the need for reflection, the ineluctable physical demands that come with a Kindle book cover, clearing appearances of the Nominee and Marina with various legal counsel, earlier vindictive forms of Anastas’s letter to the Nominee, Dwight Garner’s hostility to the letter, the true manner in which a prize winner talks, Ali’s “It’s not bragging if you can back it up,” boasting, the blues as a shape-shifting force, writing chapters that cause you to burst into tears, what Anastas had to omit because of personal limitations, money as the stigma that has replaced sex, unknown novels being written about the financial crisis or unemployed men, the Fitzgeraldian association with the Manhattan skyline, and the many holes and changes and rebuilding in New York City**.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: There are a number of memoirs that are devoted to literary failures. I think of Paul Auster’s Hand to Mouth. I think of Tom Grimes’s Mentor. And I think that there’s something about reading a book about literary failure that’s kind of akin to looking at the mirror and seeing the sagging and aging body and so forth. This leads me to ask what it must feel like to write such a thing, to expose something that is so identified with books and so identified with failure in book form. How do you contend with the notion of shame or humiliation? Or do you have no shame?

Anastas: Do I have no shame? Well, clearly, I actually have no shame. (laughs) I never set out to write a memoir. I actually have always been kind of anti-memoir in my writing life. I’ve written screeds against them. My first novel, I thought of it as a kind of Russian tract against the memoir when I was writing it and publishing it. I was very much influenced by Dostoevsky and Notes from Underground, which was a response to — I don’t remember the name of the tract*, but it was a response to this contemporary political tract. So I was trying to use the novel in my first book as an answer to what I thought then was the memoir craze. But of course the memoir craze has just spread and metastasized. And we live in a memoir society. But anyway, I ended up writing a book honestly because I really had no other choice.

Correspondent: You had no other choice?

Anastas: Well, seriously, I mean, I’d been trying to write fiction for a long time and I just hadn’t been working. I would either abandon projects 100 pages in or I would just edit them to death so there was really nothing there. And the circumstances of my life had gotten so bad that I couldn’t really do the necessary work of imagining. Every time I sat down to write, all I could think about was, well, god, how am I going to pay the rent this month? Or, jeez, is my girlfriend going to leave me because I’m so broke? Or what am I going to do about my child support payment coming up on the 15th? That’s all financial stuff. But there was also this overwhelming sense of “How did this happen to me?” How did I find myself here?

Correspondent: Did you feel that you were a victim and that you needed to memorialize this notion of “How did I get here?” Did it come from a sense of victimhood, do you feel?

Anastas: No. Definitely not victimhood. I mean, what was really interesting to me was trying to figure out — well, the book moves in two directions simultaneously. The first is it moves forward in time, which I was literally writing in real time. How am I going to get myself out of this mess? How am I going to find a job? How am I going to keep my girlfriend? How am I going to keep on seeing my son as well? Because I absolutely want to.

Correspondent: So you weren’t a fact checker at the beginning of writing.

Anastas: No. I wasn’t. I started writing the book in the fall of 2010. And I was just about to hit financial rock bottom. And it was the kind of situation where people had stopped answering my emails. The kind of things that I had done to make money had all disappeared.

Correspondent: You weren’t led past the velvet rope in any form. (laughs)

Anastas: (laughs) Exactly. Exactly.

Correspondent: So why did you feel — I guess you felt the need to grapple to the closest reality at hand. And that was the only way to actually deal with it. I mean, there’s actually one line where you say, “How much of our lives do we write? And how much of them are written for us?” And I’m wondering why you feel life has to be measured by how it is documented or how it is written about or how it is chronicled and how this was a way for you to deal with this really sordid rock bottom existence that is there at the very beginning of the book.

Anastas: Well, it’s funny. I used the phrase “write.” “How much of our lives do we get to write?” Of course, that’s how I think about life. Because I am a writer. But I really meant that metaphorically in the sense of how much of our own lives do we get to control. How much agency do we have? And how much of it is stuff that we’ve inherited? So there were two things simultaneously happening in the book. The first is that I’m trying to figure my way out of this mess and actually find work and try to keep my relationship alive and keep my relationship with my son alive. And also at the same time try to restore my relationship to writing by going into my son’s room with a notebook everyday with a pen. Just writing this book or the pages that began this book. Writing them out in longhand. And the second thing I was trying to do was go back in time. All the way back to the beginning. To my first memories. To try and figure out, well, how much of where I found myself is due to experiences I had when I was young? How much of it can be traced to be formative experiences I had when I was three years old? Including the really bad childhood therapy, which gives the book its title. So more than assigning blame, more than claiming victimhood for myself, it’s a way to try and create connections, to find where the symmetry is. Because I did feel like my life was weirdly symmetrical. Like I had been returned to the state that was very much like my earliest beginnings.

Correspondent: But it’s interesting that you view your life from this image of premonition throughout the book. The idea of the sedan that’s running into a tree, which then starts to have applicability to other incidents later on. Or even “I lost my marriage going down a glass elevator.” There is a sense of personal responsibility we all have, that we can in fact take action to if not inform that premonition then to also throw a few curve balls at the inevitable. Why do you seem to default, at least in this book, towards the premonitory? Or the “Oh, well my life has this trajectory that’s just going to play out this way”?

Anastas: Because I think that, as I said, I was trying to trace the moments of symmetry and put the pieces of this life that had been broken up into large pieces that were kind of dangling all over the apartment and hung over the railing and all this kind of stuff. I wanted to put it all together and figure out how I got to this place in life. And to me, that’s being active. That’s not being passive and saying, “Oh, life has done these things to me.” I haven’t been an equal part in saying, “Oh, life, how could you!” To me, that feeling never really entered into it. It was more a sense of taking what I do have, which is a knowledge of writing, a knowledge of books, and some measure of talent and trying to use those to knit back together a life that had broken to pieces.

Correspondent: It’s fascinating to me that you couldn’t actually approach this dilemma through fiction or that there was difficulty. You said that you were writing fiction that was too edited. Did you just really need to have an extremely broken place with which to turn out something as a writer? What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction to you? I’m really curious about this. Why can’t you approach fiction in the same way that you approach nonfiction? Which is like “Here I am. I’m kind of responding to the broken place I’m in, but I’m going to write my way out of it.”

Anastas: Well, that’s what I had been able to do my entire writing life. Up until the last four or five years. Obviously your life informs your fiction, even if the characters you’re writing about and the time that they live in has nothing to do with where you are. You always have some kind of overwhelming feeling that you’re trying to capture. And the feeling often comes from your immediate set of circumstances. You just lend it to somebody else. But I think just because of the dire state of my circumstances and because of the ways I’d failed as a fiction writer over the past five years, I just couldn’t do it anymore. And I had to, for this book anyway, I had to write it straight. It was a reality experiment. I was writing about things as they were happening. Which was incredibly rewarding in a lot of ways. But it was also so I could get the immediate satisfaction.

* — It was Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, which in turn was a response to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

** — Please note that this conversation was recorded before Hurricane Sandy.

Jami Attenberg is most recently the author of The Middlesteins. She previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #172.

Listen: Play in new window | Download (Running Time: 39:06 — 35.8MB)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Dodging the slings and arrows of families.

Author: Jami Attenberg

Subjects Discussed: Chapter headings with weight listings, why Edie wasn’t the first Middlestein to emerge from the Attenberg brain, finding the structure in The Middlesteins, The Corrections, how imagining alternative universe versions of the self is helpful in creating three-dimensional characters, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, why it took so long for Attenberg to write about where she came from, the virtues of getting older, why it took nine years and four books for Attenberg to write about Judaism, the two books that Attenberg threw away, the aborted Antiheroine novel about a comic book artist, the inspirational qualities of breaking an ankle, pop-up books, the aborted Upstate novel, the problems with territorial novels, being message-oriented, attempts to get rid of bullshit, turning forty, writing a chapter in the first person plural, Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, Nick Hornby, unspoken statute of limitations concerning style, hearing fictional people gossip in the background, when agents find certain chapters to be too much of a risk, Benny’s mysterious and sudden hair loss, the long Richard chapter, how to sympathize with a bastard character, being protective of characters, leaving someone who is sick, balancing hope with hopelessness, emotional life vs. assessment, using the word “like” too much, Marilynne Robinson, when small domestic issues feel big in fiction, research into vascular surgery and Chinese cooking, exploring the unknown, asking mom for help with Yiddish, Attenberg’s new historical novel, writing a draft in four months, being a fast writer, spending too much time on a book, overthinking fiction, Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, having no idea what’s going to happen, why Paul Ryan is an evil man, the horrors of National Bohemian Beer, what people drink in Baltimore, Joseph Mitchell’s Mazie as inspirational force, getting into the head of a real person, Instant Love vs. the fictional characters that inspire Attenberg now, how much “me” a novelist needs, Attenberg’s expanding worldview, and efforts to control life.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I was curious not only about Edie’s fluctuating weight over the course of time and how time shows the perception of that, but also Benny’s hair loss. And not just because I’m bald. The fact of the matter is that you have this character. He balds all at once. Which suggests that there’s some Hapsburg-like problem within the Middlestein genotype. But I’m wondering. Was this a way to level the gender playing field in any way? Or was this a way of showing that anybody in this book could have her physicality or her place in the world just change on a dime?

Attenberg: Yes. That sounds really good.

Correspondent: (in melodramatic voice) How did it come about, Jami? (laughs)

Attenberg: I know. You always make it sound better and really important. You have a way of heightening things.

Correspondent: You’re saying you’re not important? I would disagree with that.

Attenberg: I think that Benny — I don’t know. It might be a really personal thing. Like all the men in my family, they all go bald really young.

Correspondent: All at once like that?

Attenberg: No! Not at all.

Correspondent: (laughs) I mean, it’s really one hell of a fate.

Attenberg: It’s like that psychic obvious emotional disturbance. He doesn’t really deal with things as he should in the time that he should. And he keeps things inside the family. And so that’s how it gets manifested. The hair loss. So it’s not really like a tough metaphor to get.

Correspondent: What about the long Richard chapter? This was one of my favorite parts of the book. Because he leaves Edie. And at that point, I’m thinking, “Well, this guy is a total bastard.” And then you have this long sad chapter of his efforts to date and who he gets involved with. And I then felt extremely sorry for him. And my feelings for the character changed over the course of this twenty or thirty page stretch. We were talking earlier about how a lot of the book was dictated by instinct. And I’m wondering. How much of the other side of Richard were you aware of in advance when you were working on this chapter? Or was this chapter a way for you to not view him as “Ah, this guy’s an asshole”?

Attenberg: It is a really good question that you ask. Because I actually had to write my way into feeling sympathetic for him. So you actually were with me on the journey. By the end of the book, I actually — I don’t know if I love him. But I like all of them. I was just trying to understand them all really deeply and understand all their imperfections. Again, when I say it, it just sounds so obvious and not complicated in the slightest. But people are flawed. And we need to understand why they’re flawed. And these people feel very real to me, even though I don’t know them. By the end of the book, I felt that I knew them. And I’m very protective of them actually. I’m a little terrified of any bad reviews. Like where they judge these characters. I’ll be like, “I’ll be the judge of them! Nobody else can!”

Correspondent: The books aren’t your children. The characters are your children.

Attenberg: The characters are my people. Yeah, I was trying to understand how somebody could do that. And how you could leave somebody who was sick. People do it all the time. And I know people who’ve done it. And I also know people who have gone back when they find out that people are sick. At some point, you have to be able to take care of yourself, I think.

Correspondent: But it seems to me — I’m wondering if you ever actually got a definitive answer to that question in exploring the other side of his character. Because people may leave someone who’s sick, but they may not even know why they do it.

Attenberg: I think he did the best that he could for himself. I don’t think he could be with her anymore. But it didn’t work out perfectly. But you just don’t get everything that you want. I don’t think there’s a lot of loose ends necessarily in the book. It’s not unfinished. There’s hope in it, but there’s also a little bit of hopelessness. You can’t have it all. You just can’t have all. Sorry, I’m getting strangely emotional about this. Because I haven’t talked about the book before. Not really, but I’m just…

Correspondent: I have yet to make anybody cry on this program.

Attenberg: Oh no! I’m not going to cry.

Correspondent: This is not a Mike Wallace kind of thing.

Attenberg: Because this is the first interview that I’ve done. So I haven’t really thought about this. Because so much of it is instinctual. So you don’t.

Correspondent: Where does thought apply when we’re talking about instinct? Obviously, assessing what you have done is an awkward thing for any author to do. But how does it play into the writing process? How do you assess what you have written? Or do you leave it and let it have its own emotional life?

Attenberg: No. I’m just starting to be able — by the way, I’m appalled at my use of the word “like” in this interview. I hear it like every five seconds and it’s making me crazy.

Correspondent: Do you need me to edit it out? (laughs)

Attenberg: What? Can you just do all the ums and all the likes?

Correspondent: We can just put a really strange sound where you say “like.” Auggh! Or something like that.

Attenberg: A little honking noise or something.

Correspondent: But seriously, back to this idea of, like, emotional life and analysis or assessment or intellectualizing something. I mean, does that play into any part of your writing process?

Attenberg: I’m so much more of a visceral writer than I am a cerebral writer. But I’m getting better at being a cerebral writer. Just the fact that I even thought about structure in the way that I did for this book makes me just think it actually is exciting to me. Because it’s just a step forward for me. I’m strategic. I’m getting to be more strategic. The more I read, the more I write. I treasure the fact that I’m a visceral writer. That it’s such a pure emotional — like, I’m on a quest for the emotional truth at all times. Again, everything I say sounds so pretentious. But I’m really trying so hard to be responsible to people’s emotions. Even if they’re fictional.

Correspondent: Maybe a way to answer this. Because we were talking before the tape was rolling about you reading Marilynne Robinson. And I’m wondering. What is it about her work right now that speaks to you as a writer? I mean, you mentioned that you were reading her for some future project. What do you draw from her? What do you take from her that is of value to you in evolving as a writer?

Attenberg: Well, she writes about faith. And since I’m writing a book about a character right now who’s finding faith, I was interested in that. But I think she’s someone who can just write about things that are very emotional and small and personal and domestic, I guess, but makes it feel really big. Like apocalyptic almost. I’m interested in the little moments, in making the little moments feel bigger. Am I answering this question? Sorry.

Correspondent: No, no, no, no. Don’t worry about it. Look, honestly, if you were to provide an insufficient answer, I would probably pester you. Or pester you politely. Or nudge you or what not. So in the acknowledgments, you mention your research into vascular surgery, Chinese cooking, and the magical powers of cumin and cinnamon. So I’m curious. What topics in this book required no research at all? And do you need to sometimes explore the unknown to push yourself further as a writer? Is this something that was part of the whole process of exploring faith? Getting older and so forth?

Attenberg: I mean, I had asked my mom for help on a lot of the Yiddish words. I will say that. Like I remember them from my youth. But I didn’t know when certain things were going to be appropriate. I was just talking about it. So the book that I’m working on now is a historical novel. And then The Middlesteins is more present tense, but also set in the world that I grew up in. And I visit there once a year and see a parents, who still live there. Who are still happily married and not morbidly obese. I should just clarify that. They’re not these characters. But it was whenever I stepped away from The Middlesteins — and I wrote it really fast. I wrote it in four months. The first draft was four months. Whenever I stepped away from it, I could come back to it fairly easily. Because I always knew where it was located. So little things that I had to research ended up informing it and being really delightful and helpful. But I didn’t have to do a lot of research on it. Because it felt really familiar. The book that I’m working on now is a million times harder. Because it’s set in an unfamiliar location. It’s set in an unfamiliar time. Everything about it is new. Everything has to be invented. And it’s just really hard for me to put myself in the room. That said, once I get there, it’s a really wonderful place to be.

Correspondent: Everything has to be invented? I mean, there’s a lot of documentation for a particular time.

Attenberg: Yeah. But it doesn’t feel like anything familiar to me for some reason. Yeah, I mean, I could look at pictures of things.

Correspondent: So you need a certain amount of familiarity with any kind of novel.

Attenberg: For it to go like super fast. Yes. I don’t need it. But it was certainly much more helpful. Like I admit. I think this book is going to take me a year to write for a first draft. Like it’s hard for me to imagine just flying through it. But I love it. I love it. I’m like very struck by the character. The narrator. And it’s fun to write first person. I haven’t done it in a while. But The Middlesteins was, I don’t want to say it was an easy book. That’s not true. Because I really thought very deeply about things. But it came out of me very easily.

Correspondent: How important, do you think, is it to maintain a certain amount of speed? Do you have any frustrations of any part of the process going slower than the norm? Or anything like that?

Attenberg: No.

Correspondent: Do you accept the pace that it is?

Attenberg: Yeah. I have always been a really fast writer. I think it’s because I have a background maybe in advertising. Or I’m a fast thinker. Or whatever. But I’m learning that it’s good to slow it down. I’m learning that your senses — like, I think you can spend too much time on a book. I actually do believe that. Because I know people who overwrite. And I’m like, “You know what? Sometimes somebody just walks across the room.” It’s totally fine for them to just walk across the room and not experience eight emotions while they do it. And you don’t need to know how their foot fell on the floor. Sometimes you just have to get that character across the room. So I think that you can overthink things. But I’m pretty into just getting to the heart of the matter. Getting to the story.

Correspondent: When was the last time you overthought any piece of fiction that you were working on?

Attenberg: I’m overthinking it right now a little bit. I have to admit. I usually write 1,000 words a day. And I’m doing 500 words a day. And it’s like pulling teeth. Even though I love it. I love writing. And I love this book. It’s because it’s inspired by a real person, I think. That’s part of it. And I want to be respectful of her. Even though I never met her. She died before I was born. Twenty years before I was born. And I don’t know very much about her.

Correspondent: Do you fear knowing too much about her?

Attenberg: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s inspired by one of the characters in Up in the Old Hotel. Did you ever read that?

Correspondent: No, I haven’t.

Attenberg: It’s by Joseph Mitchell. Oh, you have to read it! You have to!

Correspondent: I have not read Joseph Mitchell. I know. I know.

Attenberg: Oh my god! YOU have to.

Correspondent: I know. There are gaps, I’m afraid.

Attenberg: And also because it’s reported. And you’re somebody who reports. Oh yeah. It’s totally for you.

Correspondent: I know. I know.

Attenberg: Maybe you’re afraid to read it. Are you afraid?

Correspondent: No! I just…I’ve never gotten around to it! I read a lot!

Attenberg: It’s so good.

Correspondent: I read like 200 books a year or something. So…

Attenberg: I think it’s important for you to read it.

Correspondent: I know. Other people have told me this.

Attenberg: The next interview.

Correspondent: I will read it next year. How about that?

Attenberg: Promise? Alright. I want to hear how much you love it. So anyway, that was one of the characters in the book. She — see, I’m almost more excited talking about the book that I’m working on now…

Correspondent: Sure! We can do that.

Attenberg: …than The Middlesteins. Not because I’m not excited about it, but it’s in such a no man’s land. Because I don’t know when you’re going to put this on the Internet. But I have two and a half months left to go until the book comes out. As of right now.

Correspondent: It’s going to go up in two and a half months.

Attenberg: So it’s going to go up in two and a half. So right now, I have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s August in New York. The publishing industry is dead. Everyone’s like on vacation somewhere.

Correspondent: We don’t even know what’s going to happen politically.

Attenberg: Politically.

Correspondent: Ryan has just been announced as VP. So for those who would like to travel in time with us. (laughs)

Attenberg: I know! It’s freaking me out.

Correspondent: Because what else is going to happen? This has been a crazy cataclysmic year, news wise.

Attenberg: I don’t even have anything to say about Ryan. Because I’m really stunned by the whole thing. Like he’s like a horrible evil man! He’s a terrible person.

Correspondent: I should point out that, when you said “horrible evil man,” you had this huge, huge smile on your face and this great delight and glee in your eyes. Just to be clear on this. (laughs)

Attenberg: (laughs) He’s just like the worst human being ever. And it’s interesting to read all the coverage today.

Correspondent: Oh man! What if something happens to Ryan in the next two and a half months? And this goes on. And we’ve been talking about him. And we’ve called him a horrible evil man. And it’s actually proved. And he’s disgraced or something. And then Romney has to choose another VP candidate.

Attenberg: There’s not going to be any disgrace. This man is a robot.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Attenberg: He’s such an evil robot! He’s been living a perfect unassailable life since he was like born basically. He’s like Satan’s spawn! I mean, I think he’s really been sent here to destroy all of us. I think. God, and the glee from all the commentators. They’re losing their minds over this. Because he’s so evil. Gosh, anyway…

Correspondent: Okay. I have a very important question. Probably the most important question I will ask you. And that involves National Bohemian Beer. It’s a rather notorious Baltimore specialty.

Attenberg: Yes.

Correspondent: Fifteen years, you could not even get this in draft. And they only recently put in kegs. In 2011. So I’m curious if Kenneth’s adventures late in the book was a way to atone for any notorious carousing experiences in the Baltimore area that you might have had. To exact retribution, perhaps, on the Pabst Brewing Company.

Attenberg: (laughs) No! I was just thinking about Baltimore. Because that’s where I went to college. But I’m really surprised that you know so much about this. How do you know so much about this? Or you from there?

Correspondent: I’ve been to Baltimore a few times, but, no, I just know this.

Attenberg: You just researched this.

Correspondent: National Bohemian is a terrible beer. And it’s only a Baltimore beer.

Attenberg: Natty Boh. That’s what we used to call it in college. Because he lived in Baltimore. That was the beer that you drink in vast quantities. Whether you wanted to or not.

(Photo: Jesse Chan-Norris)