David Hajdu (BSS #207)
David Hajdu is most recently the author of The Ten-Cent Plague.
Condition of the Show: Dabbling into hidden threats.
Author: David Hajdu
Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: I’m wondering if certain artists may have changed their names because the comic book industry was considered a great calumny for many of these various artists and writers. Did you face a problem along those lines in tracking people down?
Hajdu: I did. I had trouble with people who changed their names, but not for that reason. Because most people used their real names. Most people, but not all. Some use pseudonyms. Still do in comics. But most people intended to use their real names. But women married. And women who married in that time took on their husbands’ names. And I was surprised to find when I was doing my research how many women there were in comics. I mean, dozens and dozens of women who did terrific, beautiful, important work. Marcia Snider is one. I was never able to find her. I’d been told that she’d married. And nobody I could find knew what her married name was. In the case of the great many women artists, I only had their maiden names. And I couldn’t find them. I tried social security records, but they weren’t of that much value. And I did hit a wall with women artists. And I’m sure to this day, much of their story remains untold because they’ve been impossible to find.
Correspondent: Well, what steps did you take to atone for this? Because if you’re slicing off a portion of comic book history — a very important part of comic book history that involved women — I mean, how did you make up for this?
Hajdu: Well, I sought to do justice to the story that I can tell. I don’t know what I don’t know. I did make a point to ask about those women to the people who I could find. And that’s the only recourse.
Hall: I think familiar territory is always of comfort to a writer. I find the North of England, where I’m from, fascinating. It’s a very dramatic landscape. It’s kind of a Wordsworth country. So you’ve got the Romantic sense on one hand. And then you’ve got the strange past battling with the future. I suppose Hardy did this to an extent as well. You pick a territory. And even if it’s rural, you have human beings working within that arena. So human drama is going to arise out of those interactions. And I’ve always felt, even though the settings are sometimes quite remote and underpopulated in my fiction, there’s enough going on. You can explore ideas of civilization, breakdown of civilization, human emotional dramas. All the rest of that. But I think what’s interesting with Daughters of the North is — even though we’re casting ahead maybe thirty, forty years from now — and I think British science fiction and speculative fiction does this a lot — there’s this idea of play. When catastrophe happens, everything is knocked back to the past. And so here is what you’re left with. Day of the Triffids. This strange science fiction going on. But at the same time, everybody’s going down to the pub like they always have.
Correspondent: I actually want to bring up 
Correspondent: The Meryl Streep character, Joanna Silver, bears a striking resemblance to Jo Ann Beard, who wrote, of course, 
Correspondent: Going back to this notion of family, we see many kids essentially speak in lieu of the trainers. I thought that that was an interesting choice on your part. Because I’m watching this, going, wow, these folks are really trying to keep up a presence. They must actually look good in light of this particular Derby crowd. And then on top of that, they have this whole family image. I think of — I’m forgetting. It’s the Arkansas trainer Holthus.
Correspondent: Anna is actually a palindrome. Is that intentional?
Baker: What I always find is that the stuff that was kept indiscriminately is often more interesting than the stuff that was deliberately kept. You know, the stuff that was in the pocket of somebody when — I don’t know, when some terrible thing happened. The shopping list that you find on the sidewalk. I mean, there are many, many shopping lists right now in people’s lives. Millions of them. And I’m not going to worry that they’re all being thrown out. I don’t think that people should be saving all their shopping lists. I just think that it’s sometimes beautiful to have one and think about the order of things on it. And that anytime you have those odd things in a place like Wikipedia, if you have strange, sometimes misshapen entries that people have written about something that they want — an ancestor that they’re proud of or themselves — that there’s something really fascinating about what it was that moved people to want to go on record for that thing. 
Correspondent: Another thing I had read is that you don’t like to write. At least you do like to write. But then you also don’t like to write.
Correspondent: There are also these larger thematics, I think, in your work. In both of these books, you have a pregnancy happening while you’re having to let go of someone. In the first case, it’s the boyfriend. And in the second case, it’s the daughter. And this to me is intriguing. Likewise, there’s the poetry that is frequently throughout your books. And so I’m saying that there’s some stuff in here that I’m wondering why not push this further? It’s almost innately a part of a Jennifer Weiner book.
Correspondent: But I’m wondering though where does science fiction play into this? If some people are losing their shirts and some people are actually profiting from knowledge — like the Alcubierre drive, for example — then is science fiction good, bad, or is it one of those neutral constructs in our world in which people can be exploited or actually be inspired by?
Lee: As I went and discovered old Chinese cookie maxims, like booklets of these idioms or whatever, if you’re really educated in China, you were forced to memorize all these pithy maxims or whatever. So when you go and you find these maxims, you basically find out, a lot of it doesn’t make sense to an American audience, right? Because let’s think about it. China. Old traditions. Very rural. So a lot of their wisdom has to do with agriculture. So for example, there’s a saying that’s — my mom shared this with me: DO NOT BEND DOWN AND TIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU’RE IN A MELON PATCH. Right. So if you say that to an American, it doesn’t really make all that much sense.
Correspondent: I wanted to first of all ask you about the story, “My Life is Awesome! And Great!”
Millet: Humor for me has to be a part of everything that I write. I mean, I’m not saying that it’s always successful or anything like that. But it has to be part of it for me. Partly because the lexicon I was just talking about is a very earnest one. And I get so sick of earnestness. On the other hand, I really don’t have much time for the sort of cynicism that completely decries earnestness. So I want to forge a middle ground between those two. That’s why I end up having these very cartoonish characters. Even in this book, which is sort of a serious book. But there are all these cartoon-like peripheral characters. And I can never seem to give those up. You know, the Fultons.
Correspondent: But all of your characters — in many of these stories, they live rudderless existences. In fact, there’s one thing I wanted to ask you about, as a balding man myself, they tend to have thinning hair. 
Correspondent: Mimi, at one point in the film, you say, “The older you get, the less you dwell on anything miserable that’s happened. If you do, you’re done for.” And yet there’s one moment late in the film in which you cry. In fact, you just described this notion of seeing the film and crying. And on the morning that Dick [Mimi's husband] dies, you send your daughter Sarah off to Elizabeth Arden’s. And you yourself go off to an audition in California. So maybe this is a question for both of you. To what degree can one dwell upon misery or grief? Or is it a matter of continuing to move forward? Is this film intended to answer the question of just how much one can “rise above it” — so that mantra reads in your apartment, Mimi? What’s the deal here?
Ford: Here’s the thing. We lived in an all-white community. Racism as far as whites against blacks was tantamount to this time. It was there. Everywhere. But it wasn’t discussed. Because it wasn’t an issue. I mean, we had, in the high school I went to, there was one black guy. You know what I mean? So it wasn’t the kind of thing that would come up. If it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to come up, I’m not going to talk about it in the book. Because I’m not giving fucking lectures here about the time period. I’m telling a story. This is what happened. 
Correspondent: I wanted to also ask you about some of the perspectives you have. You had a few shorts — and also in your features — where there’s this first-person perspective. I think of the tree, for example.
Leitch: A lot of people worry about sports blogs going corporate, or like Yahoo hiring sports bloggers full-time. I never worry about a lack of independent sports bloggers. As long as someone has a voice and they have something they have to say, they’ll go ahead and do it. Whether someone’s paying them or not. The nice thing about it is that the good ones — the best thing I’ve learned about sports blogs since doing the site is that the ones who are good get readership. Like there is a meritocracy to it. It’s actually pretty exciting to watch.
Correspondent: You mentioned Errol Morris earlier. And this is interesting to me because there’s one moment where you have Crystal’s father staring directly into the camera and I kept thinking to myself, “Oh, is he doing that Errol Morris situation in which Morris projects his image of his face right where the camera is?” And it’s only in that particular instance. And I wanted to ask you about that.
Correspondent: But I wanted to ask why the poverty in this had vibrant, bright colors, as opposed to any kind of grit. Is this the kind of limitations of the family film? Or did you just want to keep the look of it right? And also, did you two go to various slums or impoverished areas to kind of get a sense of what it was to live like that? Or was this a case where the look of the house, which is all in pieces, and also has the signal that changes from night to day as well — that that location, the set itself — that you felt that that was enough to get the sense of impoverishment? Maybe you can elaborate on this, both of you.
Shannon: I have been told — I’ve never seen the film and I don’t know why. It’s that movie that came out in Detroit about automobiles. It was called Me and Henry or something like that.
Correspondent: But there’s also something interesting in juxtaposing this discussion amidst an obedience experiment of Stanley Milgram’s. Because you, as author, are essentially dictating, or declaring your particular personal vision, in this particular book. So this leads me to believe that how much the reader chooses to obey by dwelling upon specific stylistic tics is as much a part of the reading process as actually enjoying the story. And I wanted to ask you about this. If this was something you had in mind.