Tag / books

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Adam Wilson

In this wide-ranging one hour radio interview, Adam Wilson discusses his debut novel, Flatscreen, the Slanket, men who cook, Saul Bellow, adults who live with their parents, and numerous other subjects.

Adam Wilson appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #439. He is most recently the author of Flatscreen.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Seeking his remote control and his dignity within an armed blanket.

Author: Adam Wilson

Subjects Discussed: Wilson’s dislike of flying, Will Self’s rules for writers, Flatscreen‘s televisual influence, working at Flavorpill, innovating literature through the Slanket, attempts to win television watchers to literature, the couch potato as Renaissance man, using bulleted lists and possible endings as alternative chapters, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, awkward uses of Viagra, the davenport vs. the Slanket, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Johnson going to Columbia because he was a Sam Lipsyte fan, “Portnoy and Playboy Go to Summer Camp,” reading Portnoy’s Complaint at the age of 13, satisfying queasiness and Jewish identity, brutal workshop smackdowns, finding a new take to send up middle-class suburbia, 21st century Borscht Belt schtick, the difficulties of writing about synagogues, spiritual vacancy, troubled and handicapped mentors, Augie March character inspiration for Flatscreen, The Modern Library Reading Challenge, creating a fictitious Boston suburb, Matt Corley’s obsessively hyperlinked interview with Wilson, Newton, Massachusetts, finding creative freedom drifting away from the realities of location, the frequency of Boston residents who live and spend time and do bad things in basements, unappealing young men with profligate sex lives, pathetic people who hook up, ensuring one sexual climax every 100 pages, throwing humiliation at a protagonist, needlessly beautiful people in contemporary fiction, the cruel fates that Martin Amis hands his characters, Money‘s John Self, Dead Babies, Success, Lord of the Flies, going through a rough period while writing Flatscreen, Kurt Vonnegut’s idea (“In America, high school never ends”), adults who live with their parents, Lipsyte’s Venus Drive, Eli being a good cook and eating good meals alone, men who build arsenals of kitchen utensils rather than making weekend trips to Home Depot, gender roles in urban environments, cooking shows and masculinity, finding an agent, writing Flatscreen over five years, resistance to unlikable characters in contemporary fiction, hostility from Goodreads, Cynthia Ozick, Amazon reviewers, Fitzgerald as a commercial failure during his lifetime, The Great Gatsby, Wilson’s father beaten down by Amazon reviews, being a victim of impressions made by blurbs, working as a bookseller at Bookcourt, false romance attached to literary people, trying to get a mass audience excited about books attached to smaller audience, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, slipping secret books to students and customers, competing literary canons vs. secret books, creative writing programs as your buying audience, Richard Nash, the literary inefficiencies of the American education system, teachers and enthusiasm, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, how literature can encourage young people to rebel, Gary Lutz’s “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” fusing different sentences together, Wilson’s answer to “portable solitude,” ideal sentences, and the inner life vs. dramatic narrative.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I’m glad I could get in touch with you before you were actually getting on a plane.

Wilson: Yeah. No, it’s good. I hate flying.

Correspondent: Oh, you do? Well, what’s wrong with flying?

Wilson: Um…

Correspondent: Aside from the security theater and all that?

Wilson: No, it’s…

Correspondent: Aside from the defenseless position you’re put in?

Wilson: Yeah. That’s a big part of it.

Correspondent: Aside from the lame snacks that you get? Sorry. I don’t want to be negative here.

Wilson: Yeah. You sort of hit the nail on the head.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Wilson: Although I do love Ativan. So it’s sort of a…

Correspondent: (laughs) Let’s get into the book. I actually wanted to broach the TV question from a weird angle. One of the items contained within Will Self’s half-serious, not really serious rules for writing. He has this on his list: “Remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you’re writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching.” Now I know that you once worked as a TV blogger for Flavorwire.

Wilson: That’s true.

Correspondent: There is a notable televisual influence down to the technical details in Flatscreen that is often so striking that one, in fact, even encounters Eli’s mom sleeping on a sofa in a Slanket. So I’m wondering. Do you have any pragmatic ideas…

Wilson: The Slanket was actually a period detail.

Correspondent: Ah, yes! Okay.

Wilson: Not to go off topic too much.

Correspondent: I’m sorry to be so out of touch. (laughs)

Wilson: But I will say the Slanket was the one thing that I guess I had to change in the book. Because I originally had it as a Snuggie. The book’s set in 2006. And the Snuggie was not yet on the market.

Correspondent: Oh, that’s right. Yeah.

Wilson: But the Slanket was.

Correspondent: Yes.

Wilson: It was sort of the precursor. But the Snuggie has since taken a monopoly on the armed blanket.

Correspondent: The armed blanket thing.

Wilson: Yes.

Correspondent: No, Slankets do seem very endurable — the Slanket, I have to say. So maybe they just seem to last like plastic that’s not going to biodegrade or something.

Wilson: Oh yeah. Anyway…

Correspondent: No, no, no! Thank you for the clarification. It’s very important to get the Slanket detail right.

Wilson: It might be that I think I learned about both items in infomercials. (laughs)

Correspondent: Well, I mean, the question I have is how novelists can win over readers from television. And do they need to follow this advice that Will Self offers. Writing long scenes describing watching television? To what degree was the process of writing Flatscreen your way of contending with your own television feelings? Clearly, we touched a nerve here on the Slanket thing.

Wilson: Yeah. (laughs)

Correspondent: Let’s just get the ball rolling here. Do you need to specialize also in short alternating chapters? That’s a lot to throw. So go for it.

Wilson: No. I don’t think necessarily. I don’t know. It does seem like a ridiculous rule. Will Self’s rule seemed almost the opposite of what you’re probably told in most writing programs. Which is: set up conflict so that your characters can move around rooms and pick up objects. And stuff like that. I don’t know. I think more so, I was just interested in a character whose worldview has been so shaped by television. Perhaps in the way that mine has, or that people of my generation or even your generation, a slightly younger, probably a slightly older generation too have. I like the idea of having this guy whose kind of poorly educated and didn’t pay attention in school. Didn’t go to college. But at the same time, he actually has quite a lot of information available to him. Based on the fact that he’s watched an incredible amount of television. And I like this idea that if you actually spend days just watching The Discovery Channel and The History Channel and The Nature Channel, but also the news and CNN and old movies on AMC, that you could sort of become this Renaissance man of knowledge, in that you know about all sorts of different things without having any kind of deeper understanding of any of them.

Correspondent: So the couch potato is a superficial Renaissance man?

Wilson: Yeah.

Correspondent: That’s all America has to offer these days? (laughs)

Wilson: (laughs) Well, I don’t know.

Correspondent: Come on! We’re trying to win these people so that they dive into libraries! I was hoping that you, the guy who managed to synthesize TV in novel form, might have a few ideas here.

Wilson: Um, no. I have almost no ideas on that front. I think we’re losing the battle.

Correspondent: We are losing the battle. But at least it’s marvelous nonetheless to watch this cultural phenomenon mushroom as it is.

Wilson: Sure. Then again, I have received — I sort of did have this idea that, oh, you know, maybe people can relate to this. Because we all spend our time on the Internet and watch a lot of movies on TV and stuff. But then I’ve gotten all sorts of criticisms on Goodreads and from bloggers complaining about how this guy just sits around and watches TV and doesn’t do anything. So maybe these people, who are complaining about the book, are like living these rich lives that the rest of us aren’t experiencing. And they’re sick of reading about characters. I don’t know. They probably wouldn’t like Will Self’s books either.

Correspondent: Yes, that’s true. Well, I’ll get into the Goodreads review thing. Because I actually checked them out too. But I wanted to get into your book before we actually did that.

Wilson: Sure.

Correspondent: I mean, you have this strategy of alternating chapters throughout the book. It kind of relates to what we’re talking about here. Where you’ll have something short, followed by another Eli episode. The first two parts of the novel have these bulleted lists. You have things such as “Facts About My Mom.” “Ways In Which I am Like a Rapper.”

Wilson: That’s one of my favorites.

Correspondent: Good! I caught the right one. And then the third part shifts to all these possible endings. And then Eli starts to reference these narrative terms near the end. Sitcom C-plot. Things like that. So I’m wondering to what extent these alternative chapters were almost a series of bona-fide notes to help you better know your character in your book. How did this tension between the self-reflective and almost the self-aware narrative occur during the course of writing this book? I’m curious.

Wilson: I think it happened in a few different stages. Originally, the book was quite a bit longer. And I felt it was bogged down. I felt it was a bit slow and that there were two things slowing it down. One is that there was a lot of time spent relating backstory. Things about this character’s childhood memories. And all this type of stuff that I felt was really slowing down the pace of the book. Because I knew I wanted to have this really quick pace. And maybe part of that is trying to appeal to readers who have low attention spans.

Correspondent: Well, this leads me to wonder. Did the bulleted lists come from the larger draft? Where one would normally expect that type of thing to come from a notebook, the awkward details you plucked from…

Wilson: Exactly. Exactly.

Correspondent: Wow.

Wilson: So I wanted to figure out a way to speed it up without losing a lot of this information. And so I thought of these kinds of lists. And I ended up cutting about 100 pages from the book and replacing it with all of these interesting little chapters that I hoped were doing some of the work in a kind of fun and more entertaining and quicker way, and that felt right for the character who is reading blogs. And it felt like it worked. So that was one thing. And then as for the other endings, I think those in part came out of — one thing I think the character Eli is struggling in the book is this idea that everything, all his points of reference, comes from television and movies. And he has this idea that he wants to be in the classic coming-of-age movie. He wants to grow and become a real person maybe. Whatever that means. And live some kind of grown-up life. But his imagination, I think, has been compromised in some way. Because I think everything he can imagine is something he’s seen in a movie or on TV. And he has bad points of reference in terms of his family. He can’t look at his father and say, “I want to be like that.” So he looks at movies and he says, “Well, I could be like that. But is that realistic? Or is that even a possibility?” Or has it gotten to the point where American life is really just a kind of imitation of these tropes and this received culture or narratives? And I think Eli’s struggle with that reflected my own struggle as a writer to try and imitate and write a book in a genre that’s been done a million times and come up with a kind of narrative that is, at the same time, aware of all that’s come before it and doesn’t cop out and have and ending where someone drives off into a sunset with a perfect song playing. And so the way I battled that was to have Eli himself imagine all these endings that he’s seen before. But then they don’t all come at the end. They come over the last 100 pages. So I think that each time one is presented, my hope is that, with the book continuing along, that ending is passed over. And that it’s pointed out as being ridiculous or unrealistic or cliche or impossible or all of those things. And then life continues to go on in the book.

Correspondent: But it’s also trying to find an ending while all these other things are happening.

Wilson: Sure.

Correspondent: Which also made me — I had a total wonkish question for you. But the whole incident on the football field with the Viagra.

Wilson: That’s not really happened to me. (laughs)

Correspondent: (i>laughs) Well, I was going to ask first and foremost, what is your Viagra experience? And second, I mean, that almost seemed to remind me, almost, of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. I’m wondering if that might have been a possible nod.

Wilson: A Fan’s Notes is one of the books I’ve read more times than any other book.

Correspondent: And, of course, Exley talks about reading other books multiple times.

Wilson: Yeah.

Correspondent: Was that a touchstone for you? In terms of reading?

Wilson: In my life. It’s funny. I didn’t think of it that much. In terms of when I was working on the book. But it’s a book that’s been really important to me in my life. And interestingly, I think, in that book, one of his touchstones is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.

Correspondent: Which I also know is a big influence on you.

Wilson: Which was in some ways a big influence on this book too. So maybe it all kind of comes together. But A Fan’s Notes is great. I just did a piece for Flavorwire on my ten favorite slacker novels,

Correspondent: Oh yeah?

Wilson: I think my favorite thing about that book is that it introduces a great piece of slacker furniture I’d never known about. Which is the davenport.

Correspondent: Yes. (laughs) So there are all these little clues for furniture that almost doesn’t exist anymore in there.

Wilson: Yeah. It’s the perfect slacker item, I think. (laughs)

Correspondent: Well, it makes me wonder if Flatscreen is, in some sense — I mean, we were talking about it being set in 2006 — whether it’s more of a historical novel as well. Maybe your davenport is the Slanket. (laughs)

Wilson: Yeah. I think so. I’d like to think that. If I leave one thing in the world, it’s to put the Slanket into the history of American literature.

Correspondent: (laughs) We need more writers to do that.

The Bat Segundo Show #439: Adam Wilson (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Stephen Fry

In this jam-packed one hour radio interview, Stephen Fry discusses Shakespeare, education, Ayn Rand, Wodehouse, eudaimonism, Secessionist Vienna coffeehouses, Apple, why he prefers Simon Raven to Anthony Powell, his efforts to dance, and at least 3,000 other interesting topics.

Stephen Fry appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #432. He is most recently the author of The Fry Chronicles.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Basking in a pleasant tsunami of erudition.

Author: Stephen Fry

Subjects Discussed: Journalists who attack morally and spiritually, capitulating an iPhone, the number of gadgets that Fry carries on him, physical books vs. ebooks, high school physics lessons and vacillating ideas about the atom, books and mass, Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room, technological developments and misunderstanding about replacement, ways in which technologies complement each other, the plight of newspapers, Page One, whether The New York Times is a trusted platform, accepting the fact that Gaddafi is dead, embedded journalists, Kickstarter campaigns and journalism, working for free in the post-Internet age, Fry’s presence on Twitter, Twitter vs. newspapers, not giving print interviews, the achievements of journalists, terrorists who rely on newspapers, the difficulties of not reporting serious changes to the Manhattan skyline, “cheating” on essays in school by writing them in advance, Fry’s ability to recall books by line number and specific edition, Shakespeare, hypothetical exam answers to Macbeth, the Wooly Willy, the pointlessness of exams, Fry’s love for technology, what education can learn from the ancient Greeks, the numerous intellectual trajectories which spring from coffee, Diderot, Secessionist Viennese coffeeshops, Gustav Klimt, the value of giving someone a single word to jump off from, Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis,” Lord Alfred Douglas, the Oxford manner, education as “the ability to play gracefully with ideas,” intelligence rooted around connection, the No Child Left Behind Act, Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, the etymology of “draconian,” vocational training, fruit trees, people who believe the Alps to be dull, those who blame teachers, having a busy schedule, Fry’s schedule vs. a politician’s schedule, not knowing things and greed, Fry’s shaky terpsichorean skills, humans and language, Steven Pinker, Guy Deutscher, how tenses imply futurity, animals and sex, the Phoenicians and writing, cuneiform and the alphabet, hip-hop, Fry’s rapping talent, forgetting to delight in the beauty of language, Wodehousian language rhythms and music, connections between Wodehouse, Cicero, and W.S. Gilbert, film adaptations of The Importance of Being Earnest, Jewish and gay identity, the linguistic roots of Shoah, 19th century anti-Semitism, meeting Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, playing Schumann’s Träumerei on the cello for Josef Mengele, when human beings are treated like machines, Hannah Arendt, Ring Lardner’s golden rule for screenwriting, political correctness, restrictions on the depictions of smoking in BBC documentaries and drama, Spooks, bizarre moral standards on British television, being exploited by Stephen Sondheim for a scavenger hunt, having a fax machine in the early days, Fry’s efforts to read Atlas Shrugged, the 1949 film adaptation of The Fountainhead, writing the book for Me and My Girl, the fine aural distinctions between a fax machine and a 56k modem, the 21st century audience for Ayn Rand, maniacal ideologies that don’t include joy or hope, the RAND Corporation, the Tea Party, reasonable addictions vs. extreme addictions, empathy, false categories when contemplating what it is to be human, Artistole’s “man is a political animal,” Kant’s symbolic logic, the behavioral thrust of David Hume, the readability of philosophers, TE Hulme’s influence on Pound and the modernists, moralists, Hulme’s “concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities,” humans being verbs rather than nouns, doctors and diagnosis-based language, referring to people by their condition, kindness and cheerfulness as essential virtues, eudaimonism, Mad cartoons, the “pay it forward” principle, Fry’s aborted career as a book reviewer, whether criticism is necessary, thick skins vs. thin skins, not wanting to hurt people’s feelings, Alec Guinness’s rude remarks to other actors, Paul Eddington, The Browning Version, Fry’s desire to play Crocker-Harris, pathetic efforts to be polite, Fry’s futile efforts to hawk his own book, teaching Aeschylus to inspire, cruelty, “Never presume to understand another man’s marriage,” ethics and absolute evil, Schindler’s Ark, the French Resistance bombing restaurants, Fry’s Apple zeal in relation to Foxconn abuses, suicides at Foxconn, Steve Jobs vs. Henry Ford, Brave New World, Godwin’s law, Apple’s business in China, overseas industrialization, Alms for Oblivion, and why Fry believes Simon Raven is better than Anthony Powell.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Tying these multifarious observations with what is in your book, I actually wanted to ask you about this intriguing period when you were at Cambridge. You describe how you were “cheating” on essays because you wrote all of the essays in advance in your head — to the point where you were able to cite chapter and verse.

Fry: Yes.

Correspondent: Specific lines down to the line number of Shakespeare. Specific critical reference works down to the publisher, the edition.

Fry: The review course.

Correspondent: Whether it was in trade or whether it was in hardcover. Rather extraordinary. And that you would actually tilt these essays in relation to the question that was asked of you.

Fry: That’s the point. Exactly. The point is: if you have an essay on Othello, if you have an essay on Anthony and Cleopatra — we’ll stick with Shakespeare just for the sake of a closed canon, so we can think about it — if you have an essay on Macbeth, you have a point of view. I know I can deliver 3,000 words very quickly on Macbeth if I know I can.

Correspondent: You have 45 minutes right now, man!

Fry: And the question is “The essence of Macbeth is the difference between the microcosm of Macbeth’s mind and the macrocosm of the real world,” say. Now that may not suit my thesis at all for Macbeth, which is actually to do with the way the poetry disintegrates as the play progresses. But I can make it exactly answer that question. You just have to polarize. You know, it’s like getting a magnet. Did you ever have it in — you probably were American. So I don’t know why I’m asking if you had them. Those little bald men with iron filings and a magnet and you used to make beards out of them.

Correspondent: That was, I think, before my time.

Fry: It probably was before your time. But that’s what you’re doing. You’re taking a magnet and you’re polarizing what you know. Now it’s kind of cheating. It’s not cheating really. Because I am passionate about Shakespeare. I love Shakespeare. But I’m very, very lazy when it comes to exams. And I also am aware that an examination is nothing other than the ability to pass an exam. And what use is that? You might as well say, “In order to qualify from Harvard University, you have to win a squash match. Or you have to do the best Lady Bracknell of your year. Then you’ll get your top degree.” But why is the ability to reproduce prepared pappy ideas about intellectual concepts on paper — why is that a good reason to give someone a job in a law firm, in Wall Street, or in a publishing company for that matter? And part of my love of technology, personally what I would love is, of course, to go all the way back to the days of ancient Greece where you had Aristotle and you had Plato and you had the Lyceum and you had the Academy. So you would actually have a master. And to me, this is how an ideal examination would go. It doesn’t matter what subject the person is reading, as we say in England, or studying, as you would say here. You would just say, “Coffee.” Now someone who’s reading history might just instantly start talking about the coffee shops and how they were banned by Charles II, how they then came back again under Queen Anne, and how they caused a movement with the coffee shops in Paris with Diderot and the Republic of Letters and Voltaire and the Enlightenment. Or they could talk about the Secessionist Viennese coffee shops of Mahler and Klimt and so on. And Stefan Zweig and the whole generation of intellectuals. Rilke and Kraus and so on. Or you could talk about coffee as: Is it an emulsion? Is it a solution? How is coffee grown? What is it as a cash crop? What is is politically? Ethically? That there are some countries who are not allowed to grow food that they can eat. They can only grow food that they can sell. Currency rates. It’s a geopolitical issue. You can talk about the history — here we are in a publisher’s office — about the coffee table book. You could talk about it as a medical student. You could talk about it as a stimulant. You could talk about caffeine.

Correspondent: Worker exploitation. Fair trade.

Fry: Yeah. Basically, what you want, if you’re examining someone, is just to give them a single word and watch them run with it. One of my absolutely favorite quotations — and I’ll try and get it right — is from “De Profundis,” the letter that Oscar Wilde wrote in prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Bosie, as he nicknamed him. The man who basically destroyed his life. The boy who destroyed his life. And at one point, he’s talking about Oxford, and he’s saying, “The fact that you didn’t get a first-class degree is a disgrace. Many first-class minds never achieve first-class degrees. The fact that you didn’t get any degree at all is no disgrace. Many first-class minds never finish their course and get their degrees. But what to me, Bosie, is unforgivable is that you never achieved what I believe used to be called” — he put in inverted commas — “the Oxford manner.” And he then says, “Which I take to mean the ability to play gracefully with ideas.” Isn’t that the most beautiful definition of education you’ve ever heard? The ability to play gracefully with ideas! So whether the idea be coffee, whether it be paper, whether it be homosexuality, whether it be floorboards, it doesn’t matter. Because intelligence is about connection.

Correspondent: Yes!

Fry: So an exam question that just says, “Discuss Shakespeare’s use of imagery in Measure for Measure.” Well, gah! Come on.

Correspondent: But it’s actually much worse here in America. I’m sure you’re familiar with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is imposing these draconian standards and is absolutely convinced that all schools can offer 100% competence adhering to these standards. As a result — and there’s a great book by Diane Ravitch called The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Fry: Oh yes. I’ve heard about it.

Correspondent: Which outlines exactly what’s been going on. Which means that if the school doesn’t meet these draconian standards, it gets sanctioned. It can fire teachers and administrators who are considered to be failures.

Fry: The pedant in me would say that Draco was a leader of the Greek Republic at a time when every single crime was punishable by death. Which is what “draconian” really means. And I’m sure it isn’t draconian in that sense. (laughs)

Correspondent: But when the Oxford manner is in opposition like this…

Fry: I know what you mean.

Correspondent: …it’s difficult.

Fry: And even more in opposition to that is the other group of people, which tend to be the right-wing industrial nexus. Whatever you might call them. Those who have influence over politics who say that education actually is irrelevant. What matters is vocational training. And so they want people with MBAs. They want people with apprenticeships. They want people who don’t have a wide, broad education and the ability to play with ideas, but who can do very specific things. Like training. It’s training. and think of that in terms of a tree. You know how you used to train a fruit tree against a wall. You straightened out its branches. [begins spreading arms] You stapled them to the wall. And that’s it. And it bears fruit very efficiently. Now we’re human beings. We’re not fruit trees. And we’re certainly not there to have ourselves straightened out to produce fruit for the state. We’re here to question, to wonder, to oppose.

Correspondent: But you are extending your arms very impressively, resembling a branch.

Fry: Thank you very much.

Correspondent: So I think that if you wanted to be a fruit tree, you could. You have a good line in that.

Fry: (laughs) I’ve certainly been a good fruit. Whether or not I’m a tree — well, of course, by their fruits, shall ye know them.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Fry: But the education point is a really interesting one. And I don’t know what the answer to it is. I think, oddly enough, if I am educated, if I have an education, it’s obviously one I’ve given myself. Because that’s what, by definition, what all educations are. You’re drawn out. Nothing’s put in. You’re not a bucket that is filled by a good teacher. And one of the saddest things is when people say, “Ah, well, Shakespeare was ruined for me at school. Because I had a terrible Shakespeare teacher.” I would say back to them, “Yeah. It’s the Alps for me. I had this awful geography teacher. I just find the Alps so dull. Because I had this awful geography teacher.” I mean, it’s ridiculous. I think it’s either beautiful or it isn’t. You can’t blame a teacher for not being able to communicate its beauty. I can look at the Alps and see that they’re beautiful. And if you can’t look at Shakespeare and see that it’s beautiful, don’t blame a teacher. Blame yourself for not looking hard enough. And I know people don’t want to hear that. But that’s the answer.

Correspondent: And you get into that in the book. And I actually wanted to discuss this further. I mean, I’m in agreement that, okay, we are in a world of riches. We have more information available to us than at any point in human history. But at the same time, learning about apple trees, Shakespeare, or what not, this requires time. And if you are someone who is working two jobs, who is raising a kid, how do you factor that into your dismissal of…

Fry: I like that. Because I’m a gay actor who doesn’t do much…

Correspondent: (laughs) No, no, no. It’s not that at all.

Fry: No. I know you weren’t. But it is funny. I have to say — and I don’t mean this in a boastful way, but I have yet to share diaries with someone who is busier than I am. Including politicians. I’ve had meetings recently. I’m trying to get…

Correspondent: (laughs) Including politicians? Like who?

Fry: Well, they always say that every single hour of every day is taken up by…

Correspondent: Even the bathroom breaks and all that.

Fry: Yeah. Etcetera. And, of course, they are to some extent. But they’re not busier than me. Because that’s actually all stuff that’s done. And then when it’s done, it’s done. If you’re a writer and you have other things, it’s never finished. And I am a very, very busy person. But you may notice I’m quite tubby. It’s because I’m greedy. And if people say they don’t know anything, it’s only because they’re not greedy. They’re not greedy for knowledge. Sometimes an image I give is — imagine that the Mayor of Washington was told when he was a child, “Go to London. Because the streets are paved with gold.” If he knew that in every city, the sidewalks, as you call them here — the pavements were piled high with gold coins and it made a noise. It made a kind of clashing noise as you shuffled your way through it. And it was terrible. And you bumped into a beggar standing with his hat out, saying, “Please. Please. Give me some money. I’m poor. I can’t eat.” You’d look at him and go, “What? Look around you! Just bend down and pick it up!” And that’s what I feel when people say, “Oh, it’s all right for you. You went to Cambridge and were taught things. Oh, why can’t I? I don’t know about this stuff.” I just want to say, “Bend down and pick it up.” It’s never been more available. All it takes is greed. Curiosity.

Correspondent: You are in a country where most Americans don’t have a passport. You are in a country where they actually don’t know these options. I’ll give you a perfect existential example of my own. So the New York Public Library — if you go in that marvelous reading room, it’s capacious. Tables. Everything. It’s like, “Of course! I’m going to study. Because this is an environment totally made to not slack off in any way.” Right? But if you try to find a seat at a coffeehouse now, every single table is completely filled up with people with their laptops. And there’s often people who sit down and they have this board meeting vernacular. And you can’t get anything done. I mean, it’s to the point where it’s almost a Trail of Tears-like situation for me and my friends.

Fry: (laughs)

Correspondent: We have to go to the next coffeehouse before they discover it! But you can pretty much almost always get a seat at the New York Public Library. And the question is: What do we do to restore the balance? To get people understanding that, yes, the streets are paved with informational gold if you go and reach down and pick it up. What do you think?

Fry: To me, this is simply prejudice. It’s prejudice that comes from the gifts that nature never gave me. And they were coordination and music. Although I love music and I’m passionate about music and I listen to music every day and I collect music. I have musical heroes that are distinct and different. You may know that I made a film about Richard Wagner, which is very important to me. Partly because as a Jewish person, Wagner is always going to be traumatic if you love him. Because he was such a bestial anti-Semite. Of course, that was not his fault. Because he died fifty years before — literally fifty years before Hitler became Vice-Chancellor of Germany, who of course adored Wagner too. So I do love music. But I can’t do it. I can’t perform it. I can’t sing. I can play the odd note on the piano.

Correspondent: But can you dance?

Fry: Absolutely cannot dance! I can’t even begin to put myself in a position.

Correspondent: Have you tried to take ballroom dance lessons?

Fry: I would hate it! I would loathe it!

Correspondent: Come on, Stephen! Pick it up! The dance is right there! (laughs)

Fry: If you read my book, you would know my physical self-consciousness is extreme.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Fry: But bad as this sounds, and this is no complaint, the fact that I was so incompetent, so uncoordinated physically, so ungifted musically, meant that all I had to give myself any pride was language. It’s all I had. And the odd thing is that’s all any of us have. It is the miracle of the human species.

The Bat Segundo Show #432: Stephen Fry (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: William Kennedy

In this one hour interview, acclaimed writer William Kennedy discusses Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, journalistic squalor, his dealings with Hunter S. Thompson and the Albany political machine, and black power.

William Kennedy appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #427. He is most recently the author of Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

For related material, you can read my Modern Library Reading Challenge essay on Ironweed.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Caught in a migratory comedy of errors.

Author: William Kennedy

Subjects Discussed: Resonances in historical fiction that align with the present day, the William Gibson notion (“The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”), Guantanamo Bay and waterboarding, the 2008 Greek riots, writing Ironweed while being firmly immersed in the 1930s, referring to the homeless before “homeless” existed as a word, prophetic novelists, Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, the tradition of torture, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Roscoe, writing about the Albany political machine for forty years, stolen elections and kickbacks, interviewing morally shady figures as a novelist and as a journalist, meeting with Charlie Ryan, Dan O’Connell, how Kennedy coaxed political figures to tell him stories over the years, sources who insist on being on the record as insiders, intrusive noise, the journalist as the intellectual equivalent to the bartender or the barista, politicians who talk differently when microphones are present, Newspaper Row in Albany, lead filings and rats descending from newspaper ceilings, journalistic squalor, Kennedy’s relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, Pulitzer’s notion of journalism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, fiction vs. journalism, The Ink Truck, Fellini, how a multidimensional fictitious form of Albany sprang from extremely devoted research, writing seven drafts of Legs, invention and informed speculation, the importance of letting imagination settle, Legs‘s resistance to realism, structuring a novel on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, discovering newness as a writer, precedents for Ironweed, parallels between Cuban history and civil rights, efforts to find the right Cuban history period for Chango’s Beads, Fulgencio Batista’s kids going to school in Albany, the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses as a possible inspiration point, The Gut in Albany, Black Power and community action during the late 1960s, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X sitting in the balcony of the New York Senate, Eldridge Cleaver, the Albany Cycle beyond 1968, telescoping Albany history for the sake of telling a story, arson and riots, the figure of Matt Daughterty, having to publish newspaper stories in out-of-town newspapers to avoid the wrath of the Albany political machine, comparisons between Quinn’s Book and Chango’s Beads, following personalities contained within fictitious families over many years, journeys away from Albany in the Albany cycle, avoiding Albany burnout, a new play based on a departure from Very Old Bones, and fiction driven by bullet-like dialogue.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: We were drawing a distinction between the journalist who is the bartender or the barista — the intellectual equivalent to that — and the novelist, who may in fact have an even greater advantage. Some novelists who were former journalists have told me that they’ll get people to talk with them more if they say they’re a novelist. I’m sure this has been the case with you.

Kennedy: Oh yeah. When the Mayor invited me over to talk about writing a book with him, he didn’t say quite why. I couldn’t understand it. Because I thought he had great antipathy toward me. But I went over. And we just had this conversation. And I sat there and talked to him. And I took a lot of notes. And he said he wanted me to maybe interview him and dredge up whatever I wanted to and write whatever I wanted to. And then he would rebut it. And I didn’t think that was going to work. But I knew that it was a great opportunity to talk to the Mayor.

So anyway we carried on. And it turned out I did write a lot about him in this book. It was kind of a biography. I wrote three pieces actually on him. And he was great in the first meeting. And then the second time, I brought over a mike and a tape recorder. And he clammed up. I mean, he didn’t stop talking, but he didn’t say anything. I mean, he was very salty in the first conversation. And he was a very intelligent man and very well-educated and smart as they come politically. And he had a great sense of humor. But it was boring in the second interview. So I took him out again. I took him to lunch. And he opened right up again as soon as he knew there was no tape recorder. And I took notes. He’s safe with notes because he can say, “He got it wrong.” There’s no proof.

Correspondent: Well, I actually wanted to ask — speaking of history, there are moments in Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game and Quinn’s Book where you have newspapermen who are wearing hats as the lead filings are falling upon them. In the case of Billy Phelan, there’s actual rats falling from the ceiling.

Kennedy: That’s true.

Correspondent: I’m curious. Did you have first-hand experience of this?

Kennedy: No. This was at the newspaper that I was working on. But in their previous incarnation, which was only a few years before I got there, they were on Beaver Street in a very old, old center of the city. The South End. In The Gut. And it was Newspaper Row. The Albany Journal was there. The Albany Argus. The Knickerbocker News. The Knickerbocker Press. Etcetera etcetera. The Times Union was up the street a bit. And then they moved into new digs. But I remember that one of the reporters and the copy editors said that the rats used to come down, walk the ceiling. The composing room was upstairs. Over the city room. And there was always these lead filings that were coming through the cracks in the floor. And so these guys wore their hats around the desks. And the reporters wore their hats indoors.

Correspondent: The pre-OSHA days. (laughs)

Kennedy: You know, it had a practical application, those hats. In addition to being the style of the day. And the rats used to come down and eat the paste out of the paste pots.

Correspondent: Which is also immortalized in Billy Phelan.

Kennedy: That’s in Billy Phelan. They were all stories that these guys who had grown up there, they’d seen it. One of my buddies, he’d been a reporter for ten years or so all during that period in Beaver Street. And he was a great storyteller. And he told me…well, you know.

Correspondent: Did you experience any first-hand journalistic squalor?

Kennedy: Journalistic squalor.

Correspondent: Along those lines. Or perhaps other forms of squalor.

Kennedy; (laughs) Well, no. Not quite like that. The paper had modernized. I mean, I was there in the age of the typewriter and the clacking teletypes and papers would stack up on the floor like crazy. At the end of the work day, everybody threw everything onto the floor. The old newspapers. All the old teletypes. And it was a great mess. There was….hmm, squalor. (laughs)

Correspondent: Rotting walls? Asbestos-laden environments? (laughs)

Kennedy: Sorry, I can’t. I knew all the guys who had gone through it.

Correspondent: Well, on a similar note, Hunter S. Thompson. I have to ask this largely because The Paris Review interviewed you and cut this bit. He said, “He refused to hire me. Called me swine, fool, beatnik. We go way back.” But I also know that he wrote you a quite hubristic letter. How did you two patch things up after this early exchange of invective and all that?

Kennedy: Well, I never called him a swine.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Kennedy: It’s possible in a letter, in later years, I might have called him a swine. But that was his terminology.

Correspondent: He was trying to prop you up.

Kennedy: I would just throw it back at him or something like that. You know, there was no rancor at all. After the first exchange of letters, almost immediately it was patched up. I mean, he was furious at me for rejecting him when he applied for a job. You’re talking about the quote there where he said…

Correspondent: He said that on Charlie Rose.

Kennedy: Charlie Rose. But he was referring to my attitude toward The Rum Diary. Which was the novel that he was writing down in Puerto Rico when I got to know him. And he had just started it. And in later years, he sent it to me. I wish I had kept it. I don’t know why. I can’t find it. I don’t think I have any remnants of it and I’ve got a lot of his stuff. But maybe I have some pieces. But I don’t remember. And I can’t even remember the letter I wrote. But I wrote him a letter and I told him, “Forget about this novel. You can’t publish this. This is terrible.” And it was a big fat novel. It was fat and it was logorrhea. And it was a young man’s ruminations and discoveries of all of that.

Correspondent: A journalist aspiring to be a novelist.

Kennedy: Right, right, right. And he was a smart guy. Very, very smart guy. But that novel just didn’t work. What was published — the book that was published is one third of the text of the old book. It doesn’t have any of those flaws that I could see — I just started to read it again the other day. I tried to see the movie three times, and I can’t.

Correspondent: Oh really?

Kennedy: Well, I’m in the Academy and I get these screeners from the Academy. But it didn’t work. The screener didn’t work. It says “Wrong disc.”

Correspondent: Oh no.

Kennedy: So I have to get another one. But I’m anxious to see it. I think it’s full of probably libelous accusations against the [San Juan] Star, the newspaper down there and the people who run it. But that was expected from Hunter.

Correspondent: What do you think distinguishes your approach — being a journalist turning into a novelist — from Hunter’s approach? I mean, was he just not serious enough and you were more devoted? Was it a matter of being well-read? What was it exactly that distinguished the two of you?

Kennedy: Well, I was a serious journalist. I mean, he presumed to be. That was the basis for our initial argument about that bronze plaque. You know about that? The bronze plaque on the side of The New York Times — it’s a quote from Joseph Pulitzer When that building was home to The New York World, a great newspaper that Pulitzer ran in New York. Anyway, he revered that. You know, it’s this high-minded attitude toward the news. No fear of favor or whatever. Work against the thieves. Whatever. I’ve absolutely forgotten what Pulitzer said.

[Note: The Pulitzer plaque reads: “An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”]

Kennedy; I remember its tone. And I could find it. And this whole episode is summed up in the introduction to Hunter’s book, The Proud Highway — his first collection of letters. He asked me to write an introduction to that. And I told the whole story of how he applied for the job and didn’t get it and so on. But his attitude toward journalism was high-minded. But when he started to practice it, a year or so later, roaming around South America, he started writing — he was winging it, you know? He wasn’t interested in “Just the facts, ma’am.” He was half a fiction writer in those days. Roaming around. Whatever caught his fancy or his imagination, he would write it. I mean, it came to a point where he went to the Kentucky Derby and that was the one that really put him on the map. “The Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved.” It ran in Scanlan’s Monthly, I think. And it had nothing to do with reporting. He was making it up. And it was fiction.

There may have been some basis in all that happens in the story for it. But he just invents the dialogue that goes on between the various people and follows his own chart and reacts as a novelist, and then presents it as journalism. This is what Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was presumably journalism. But it’s fiction. It’s a novel. And he claimed in retrospect that he had notes to prove every element in that novel. But he didn’t. (laughs) I mean, all the hallucinations. Whatever his hallucinations were, they were hallucinations. And they’re his. And they’re internal. And who’s to say who’s hallucinating when he’s writing what he’s writing. The sum and substance of Thompson was that he started off as a journalist and he became this wild crazy gonzo journalist, which was half a fiction writer’s achievement. And he was always in the early days thinking about the novel and new forms of the novel. And he created one. Novels are very valuable in their wisdom and their insights and their reporting and their historical penetration of the world that they’re centering on. And he was famously talented in all those realms to achieve those things. And he did. But in the end, I mean he comes off as a career journalist and a singular one. There was nobody like him and there never will be. A lot of people have tried. He’s inimitable. But when he started out, he had all the baggage that goes with the aspiring novelist. And he always made the distinction that I started off to be a journalist and turned into a novelist and he started off to be a novelist and turned into a journalist. And that’s true enough.

My journalism very rarely could be challenged — it could never be challenged as a work of fiction. I never did anything like that. I found ways to enliven the text with language. So did Hunter. But Hunter also reimagined history and reimagined daily life when he invented his world.

Correspondent: To go to your work, The Ink Truck — I wanted to ask you about this. Your first published novel. This is interesting because, unlike the topographical precision that you see in the Albany Cycle, the details of Albany in The Ink Truck are not nearly that precise. They’re more abstract. And I’m curious why that sense of place only emerged in the subsequent novels.

Kennedy: Well, because when I wrote that novel, I was reacting to my resistance to traditional realism and naturalism. You know, I had been there with Steinbeck, Dreiser, James T. Farrell, and so on. And Hemingway also was a great realist. Not the naturalist, but the great realist and the great reporter. And I was in a different mode. I was immersed in Joyce at that time and very much aware of Ulysses and the wildness of the invention that pervades that novel. I was thinking of the surrealists. I was in the grip of Buñuel the filmmaker. I loved his work.

Correspondent: Also a wonderful late bloomer too.

Kennedy: (laughs) And Fellini. I though that 8 1/2 was one of the great movies ever made. It may be the greatest to me and I’m not sure I don’t think that still.

Correspondent: What of Satyricon? (laughs)

Kennedy: Well, I thought it was interesting. So much of Fellini I do love. But 8 1/2, because it was in one guy’s head and it just went in and out of reality, that’s what I wanted to do. I used to say that novel was always six inches off the ground. So levitating was important. And I wasn’t really interested in grounding myself in the squalor of that situation. That was a pretty squalid time when we were in the guild room during that strike. There was a strike that I went through and was the inspiration for that novel. But that book is sort of an excursion to comedy and surreal comedy. I mean, it presumes to be serious in certain stages of its intensity. But basically it’s a wild, crazy, surreal story.

Correspondent: But when you have the character of Albany begin to appear in your work, suddenly I think there’s more of a kitchen sink approach. You have very hard-core realism. You have hallucinations. Surrealism. You have all sorts of things. Almost a kitchen sink approach. And I’m curious if the increasing complexity of your books, where this comes from. Does it arise out of your very meticulous and fastidious research? Does it arise from wanting to reinvent the form of the novel? To not repeat yourself? Does it arise from having established a Yoknapatawpha-like universe of characters? What of this?

Kennedy: Well, all of the above. Everything you said. I was always trying to do something that I hadn’t done before, that I couldn’t attach to anybody in particular. You know, you can’t imitate Joyce. You can’t imitate Hemingway. I tried and I did all the way along in various failed enterprises. And I knew that it was a dead end. I was trying for something new. With Legs, I was inundated with research. I spent two years under the microfilm machine. We no longer have to do that. Just punch in Google. Now it’s amazing. But in those days, I would spend days. All day. Half the week inside the library. Not only microfilm, but all the books of the age. All the magazines. I went to New York and got the morgues of all the major newspapers. The Times. The New York Post. The Daily News, which was fantastic. And so on. And I researched everything there was to find on Legs Diamond serendipitously. And then I also kept turning — I probably interviewed 300 people. I don’t know how many. Sort of cops and gangsters. Retired gangsters with prostate trouble. And I really stultified myself at a certain stage in that novel. And I had to stop and take account of what was really going on. And I had to reinvent the book.

Correspondent: You wrote it seven times, I understand.

Kennedy: I guess the seventh was the final time. I wrote it six times. Or was it six years and eight times? The eighth time was a cut. I had finished it but it was too fat. So I cut 70, 80 pages. I don’t remember what I cut. But I don’t miss them. Whatever I cut, it was all right. But I started from scratch really. After six drafts, I went back and spent three months just designing the book all over again and designing history of every character all over again and putting a totally new perspective on it. Because I had too much material. And there was no way to stop it from coming to me. Except to just close it off and say, “I’m not going to read another newspaper. I’m not going to crack another book. I’m going to write the story. I’m done with the research.” Of course, that never really happens. You have to go back and check. But that’s what I did. And that’s how I finished the book.

The Bat Segundo Show #427: William Kennedy (Download MP3)

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(Image: Judy C. Sanders)

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Joyce Carol Oates

In this 40 minute radio interview, Joyce Carol Oates discusses The Corn Maiden, the history of narrative violence, the allure of vacuum cleaning, and what it means to be a woman writer. The conversation also features a Dickensian exchange involving a “heater.”

Joyce Carol Oates appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #426. She is most recently the author of The Corn Maiden and the editor of New Jersey Noir.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contending with needless tempers and false heaters.

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

PROGRAM NOTE: For many years, I had hoped to schedule Joyce Carol Oates on this program. And the opportunity at long last came in November. Wishing to make the most of this, I read eight Joyce Carol Oates books in advance of the conversation. The interview was to take place in Otto Penzler’s basement office at the Mysterious Bookshop.

There was just one problem. Otto Penzler didn’t like me. You see, five years ago, I had written some satirical blog post about Penzler. Something I barely remember. For all I know, I was drunk or stoned at the time. I probably banged it out in about twenty minutes. What I did not know was that Penzler had neither the humor nor the ability to let any perceived sleights roll off his back.

Why is any of this important? Because during this program, I had the misfortune of having one of the audio channels – the channel that was recording Ms. Oates’s voice – blow out on me. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Because I could have salvaged the sound from the other channel. Unfortunately, because Penzler is not the type who likes to give up a petty grudge, he decided to turn on what he insisted was a “heater” during the course of our conversation. Not only did this “heater,” which spewed out cold air, cause Ms. Oates to shiver, but it also disrupted the conversation. And this “heater” is also the reason why Ms. Oates, despite my best efforts with EQ and noise removing tools, sounds like a robot for about eight minutes of this conversation. It is also the reason why this episode contains the most passive-aggressive moment in the history of The Bat Segundo Show. Thank you for listening.

Subjects Discussed: Prolific writing, nightmares in fiction, psychological realism, Edgar Allan Poe, carving swastikas into foreheads, pesky heaters, feral characters, the history of violence contained within tragic narrative, stories generated by characters who meet, My Sister, My Love, experiments in style, being the child of a well-known infamous figure, JonBenet Ramsey, articulate sociopaths, writing in the satirical mode, Expensive People, humor in Joyce Carol Oates’s work, characters who have a penchant for malapropisms, A Fair Maiden, characters who give into naive situations, pathetic fantasies, editorial relationships with Daniel Halpern and Otto Penzler, not sending novels out for publication until they’re ready, advances and author contracts, needy authors and first drafts, Russell Banks, Richard Ford, when business concerns impede into artistic discovery, keeping a novel in a drawer for a year to avoid emotional connections, on whether JCO requires an immediate response to the world, contending with short story requests for anthologies, Otto Penzler’s rejection of a JCO short story title, words that JCO is fond of (including “glisten”), word choice, Nicholson Baker, James Joyce, “formula” contained within Ulysses, similarities between feeling and image, the allure of vacuum cleaning, memoir vs. fiction, A Widow’s Story, feral cats that wander around dumpsters, the tough clime of New Jersey, Martin Scorsese, organized crime, fictitious communities that are inspired by the classics, appropriating places and giving the place a very different way, places like Princeton, Russell Banks and Miami, Jaimy Gordon’s Shamp of the City-Solo, Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, revisiting a 1982 keynote address collected in Woman Writer, being a woman writer in 2011, William James and multiple selves, chick lit, Kate Christensen, contemplating The Sportswriter as a “boy novel,” Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dostoevsky as crime writer, epistolary fiction, Twitter, the pleasures of reading letters, finding pleasure during the difficult early stages of writing a novel, TC Boyle, and comparisons between writing and heroin.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: In considering the ideas of nightmares as fiction — because, of course, this is The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, that’s the title of this book — I think of John Hawkes. I think of Poe. I think of Kafka. I think of Shirley Jackson. The nightmares in The Corn Maiden, I think, differ. Because these tales are careful in the way that they relate psychological realism to the dream state. In the title novella, you juxtapose this troubled mother who is losing her daughter with this sacrificial ritual. There’s the psychological grief in “Helping Hands,” which triggers a nightmare, it could be argued. In “Fossil-Figures,” you describe Eddy Waldman’s work as “covered in dream/nightmare shapes.” So I’m curious how psychological realism gives shape to these nightmares that are in your fiction.

[Otto Penzler turns on an alleged “heater” in his office, which, unbeknownst to Correspondent and Oates, begins to pump cold air throughout the room in the next few minutes. Said “heater” also creates noticeable interference on the audio, which producer does his best to rid from this program with parametric EQ. Said hiss of “heater” also interferes with collective concentration.]

Correspondent: Do you find that, without such realism, these nightmares can sometimes be too burly to contend with?

Oates: Well, it’s a very good question. I think it’s a matter of what sort of genre one is working in. If you’re working in a horror or fantasy genre, you would have no hesitation about writing about the supernatural. But I tend often to write in a realistic mode. And, of course, in reality, people have dreams. So the psychic experience or the neurological experience of a dream is real, even though it’s invisible. So in writing about dreams and nightmares, I’m not writing about a supernatural world at all. Particularly The Corn Maiden is completely realistic. There’s nothing in it that’s far-fetched or particularly preposterous. Some of the other stories shade into the surreal. Sort of the Edgar Allan Poe zone. And I think Shirley Jackson often moved into that zone where the more supernatural figures.

Correspondent: Violence. I have to bring that up. It’s an ineluctable quality in your work as well. In “Beersheba,” you have a character who is denied his diabetic shot and who experiences this very specific yet savage wound. At the end of A Fair Maiden, another book, you have a character bleeding from a deep cut at his right eye and cuts at his nose and mouth. You have, of course, the trepanning in “A Hole in the Head.” You have Herschel carving the swastika in Jeb Meunzer’s forehead in The Gravedigger’s Daughter. I could go on. But what I’m interested in is how precise your violence is. And this leads me to wonder. Well, what do you do to get that level of precision? Does this come entirely from the imagination? Do you read a lot of police reports? A lot of true crime stuff? What of this?

Oates: I don’t read any police reports or true crime material really. I don’t write about violence. I write about people. And some of the people find themselves in dramatic or tragic situations in which violence is a consequence of some choices that they made or decisions that they made. But I don’t set out to write about violence. It’s more about human beings and their complexity. And they might make a bad decision. When Shakespeare writes his great tragedies of Macbeth and Othello, they are extraordinary people who’ve made a mistake. And they take a wrong turn. King Lear is another great example. And Hamlet. They’re all examples. But Shakespeare is beginning with the character. That’s what interests him. And I begin with characters and with language. A certain tone. Certain cadences. A certain music. That to me is very interesting. And it’s interesting. I’m surprised that you mentioned the swastika cut in the forehead in The Gravedigger’s Daughter. Because that sort of came to me as I was writing that scene. That this particular character has been so mistreated, his family of Jews have been treated so badly, and now it’s his turn to get revenge. And he does something almost spontaneously. Even unconsciously. He carves the swastika in the forehead of his enemy. But I didn’t set out to write that. It’s more like it was a consequence of that character.

Correspondent: Well, that swastika certainly makes itself known in the text. But describe this. How does such violence keep coming up in your work? Is it a matter of a character proving so feral that things up that way? I mean, how does this exploration of the human condition lead to such stark and striking imagery?

Oates: Well, tragic fiction — so tragedy deals with acts of violence that sometimes are ritualistic. In works of tragedy by Aeschylus or Euripides, the acts of violence are offstage or they came before. Before the action of the play. But it’s caught in certain ritualistic, almost ceremonial language. And that’s what I’m more interested in. How people enact their destinies. I’m interested in maybe two people meeting. Or three people. Or a family. Moving through time and encountering events that then translate into their personal destinies.

[Oates is now visibly shivering, with Otto Penzler seemingly oblivious to his malfunctioning “heater.”]

Oates: It’s just a little cold in here.

Correspondent: Oh. (to Otto Penzler) Uh, Joy…

Oates: Otto?

[Otto Penzler pretends not to be paying attention.]

Oates: Hello? Otto?

Otto Penzler: Yeah.

Oates: Hi. It’s just a little cold in here. The vent.

Otto Penzler: (faux incredulous) It’s cold? That’s the heater.

Oates: It’s the heater?

Correspondent: (baffled by this bizarre Dickensian exchange) It seems like cold air.

Oates: It’s actually like an air conditioner.

Otto Penzler: It’s not. It’s a heater.

Oates: Oh.

Otto Penzler: But I’ll turn it off.

Oates: Because it seems like the ai…

Otto Penzler: It’s probably just because you’re right in front of the vent, which is…

Oates: Okay. It seems like the air conditioner.

Correspondent: Yeah. It’s cool air. Or it’s one of those heaters that take the length of this conversation to get started.

Oates: Yeah. But also, it’s a little distracting with the noise.

The Bat Segundo Show #426: Joyce Carol Oates (Download MP3)

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(Image: Shawn Calhoun)

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Dennis Cooper

In this 30 minute radio interview, transgressive fiction writer Dennis Cooper discusses The Marbled Swarm, attempts to tame language, being disliked, and the historical fusion of punk and literary.

Dennis Cooper appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #425. He is most recently the author of The Marbled Swarm.

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Subjects Discussed: Cannibalism, worming, BDSM, “industriously garbled syntax,” reconciling confusion within literature, being a Francophile, Rimbaud, irritating certain readers, attempts to tame language, Alain Robbe-Grillet, de Sade, Cooper’s efforts to disguise his own voice, violent metaphors as a writing strategy, shock value, listening to other people, garbage languages and British dialect, rereading The Marbled Swarm and a universal explanation, confusion as the new literary strategy, Occupy Wall Street, expanding space within literary space, tight jeans, red herrings, the truth offered by the protagonist, 21st century literature and longueurs, Blake Butler and the HTML Giant crowd, David Lynch, Enter the Void, humor as an entry point for experimental writing, violence in contemporary fiction, raw first drafts, constructing a voice with every book, the difficulties of not being clever all the time, secret tunnels and connections, hostility towards anime, technology and keeping up with youth culture, The Sluts, clarifying relationships between the unnamed protagonist in The Marbled Swarm and George Miles, Joshua Cohen’s review of The Marbled Swarm, the future of transgressive fiction, whether Beckett and Joyce can be deviant in the 21st century, Lars von Trier, William Burroughs, reading as a more specialized pastime, Little Caesar, whether punk can be applied to today’s literary culture, Tao Lin, contemporary experimental writers, MFA students, revolution, the absence of sincerity in today’s age, the dilemma of ignoring sophistication, emo culture, whether or not mainstream culture matters, definitions of “cult writer,” Dancing with the Stars, outsiders who are actually insiders, Harper Perennial, Shane Jones, Amelia Gray, being disliked, receiving death threats, comparing reactions to literature over the past few decades, being excluded vs. not caring, the luck of having a following, and whether a young Dennis Cooper could flourish today.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Let’s start with cannibalism. I think that’s a very good place to start. I mean, this is not exactly a subject in which one can find first-hand material in quite easily. So I’m wondering — sort of using this as a jumping point to talk about the overall violence in your work — how do you get that precision? Of biting into things?

Cooper: Well, you know, the Internet. Imagination. I did some research into it. I did a lot of research into it.

Correspondent: Such as?

Cooper: Oh, you know, there’s a lot of people who do it. (laughs) And actually there’s not only people who do it, but there’s these fetish sites where people advertise themselves as maybe interested in all sorts of things. And one of the fetishes is cannibalism. And I don’t think anybody ever does it. Because otherwise there’d be arrests all the time. But they’re very detailed about their fetishes. About the ones who want to eat and the ones who want to be eaten. It’s not a huge subculture, but it is there. And so I go that. And, you know, there’ve been guys throughout history who’ve done it. And then ultimately in the book, there really isn’t that much. He just talks about it all the time.

Correspondent: It’s a good litmus test as to whether one should carry on further. So you looked at underground websites?

Cooper: They’re not that underground.

Correspondent: Your IP must have been tracked while you were performing these searches.

Cooper: Well, they’re not that underground. There’s this site called Recon. Essentially it’s a master and slave site. Which is what it is. But there’s all kinds of subtext for people who like it. There’s weirder things than that. There are these guys who want to get wormed.

Correspondent: Oh.

Cooper: That’s the thing. They want to be wormed. It means having their arms and legs cut off — and live as a worm for their masters. So there’s stuff that’s weirder than cannibalism.

Correspondent: Wow. Worming. They actually do get wormed.

Cooper: Well, I don’t think anybody ever — I think it’s all…

Correspondent: Yeah. Sort of BDSM onto the next level.

Cooper: But they’re very serious about it. So yeah, those are all totally above board sites.

Correspondent: Above board. The “marbled swarm” in this book. It’s described as an “industriously garbled syntax,” a quote unquote — quote unquote appears quite a lot in the book — “exalted style of speaking” that the protagonist learns from his father and that becomes in his tongue “more of an atonal fussy bleat.” So you have this protagonist who is constantly alluding to hints of a deeper story throughout the text. But he’s also using language as an excuse for his behavior, his fantasies, and what not. He claims at one point, “My father used the marbled swarm to…well, I was going to say become a wealthy man, but to say he ruined would my life would be as accurate.” So the interesting thing about that is that the implication is that language — especially this stylized language — is really almost comparable to moral justification for why you had a shitty upbringing and the like. So I’m curious about this. Especially with most of the paragraphs beginning with “still comma.” There’s almost a comic formality about this reconciliation. I’m wondering how this patois developed and to what degree is this a response to reconciling confusion.

Cooper: Well, yeah, my books are in some fundamental way always about reconciling confusion. Because that’s of super interest to me. And language presents this idea that confusion can be corralled and all that stuff. And it can’t. And that tension does interest me. But how this happened? I don’t know. It took me a long time. I’m really slow and I do all these experiments. I test out things and try different forms and things. And it was a combination of living in France and not speaking French very well. And it was a very interesting thing to be on the Métro or whatever, and hearing people talk, and sort of understanding a little bit of what they’re saying. But not completely. And having to make it up or something and imagining. Because people always say that I romanticize French people enormously. Because I’m a huge Francophile. So when I’m on the subway with these people. And I imagine them talking about Rimbaud or something. And, of course, they’re talking about their laundry or whatever. So that begin to interest me. That I do that. So that started the idea of trying to create that in fiction. And I had usually written in a spare way. But I wanted to make it really, really dense so it would really multitask. Because I like things to be really layered and experimental. And so I tried to find this voice that was really, really dense and could do a whole bunch of stuff at once, and just fiddled around until that one came up. And then I had to figure out — because it’s really limited in what it can do. Its tone is really particular. And it’s really irritating. And so then it was just a matter of how fast will the pace be. Because will people not get too sick of this guy? And he can be kind of funny. But he can be really sincere, but only in a certain way.

Correspondent: Yeah. Did you actually end up speaking like this character during the course of your writing?

Cooper: No, no, no.

Correspondent: I mean, certainly I’m listening to you now and you don’t sound anything like that.

Cooper: No. I have to do readings now and it sounds so awful. (laughs)

Correspondent: Did you read any of it aloud to make sure that it could be plausible or anything like that?

Cooper: No. It all worked in my head like that.

Correspondent: Well, you mentioned this voice being irritating and slowing things down. And I’m wondering. Your books do have a tendency to irritate some people. Especially the mainstream. So how much irritation is enough in your fiction?

Cooper: It has to be really balanced out. I mean, I always feel like I have to do something formally or stylistically or structurally to justify that stuff. Because I’m not interested in — there’s this idea that — not just me, but other writers who do stuff like me are out to shock and all this. And it’s so not true. It’s completely the opposite. It’s like: How can you use really aggressive language like that and not be shocking? That’s my interest. Cause it’s such amazing language and it’s very emotional and it’s very pure. If you take that away, if you start treating it like a horror movie, or if you start doing this psychoanalytical kind of thing about what the motivations are behind that stuff, you really lose the powers. I wrote that power and I want to try and tame it or something. So I don’t know. It’s always tricky. With this book, there’s not as much violence in it. And the language like — so when you get to the part, there’s one part that’s really kind of intense. And I’m hoping that the language, you’re so involved with the language in a pleasurable — like it’s funny or something — that that’s kind of the barrier.

Correspondent: Well, you mentioned taming the language. Can your type of language ever be entirely tamed? Especially this moment that we’re alluding to about, I think, 120 pages in the book. You know, I found parts of that both funny and vaguely horrifying. But the funny to my mind outweighed the horrifying. Maybe I’m just warped.

Cooper: Well, yeah. You can only do so much. And I try different strategies at different times in different books and things. And this one, you get used to how he’s circumventing everything and subverting everything and doing everything. And he uses metaphor all the time. So that when he gets to the scene, it’s really totally metaphoric. When something violent happens, he’ll reference like an alligator or something. So that’s just my strategy. And it isn’t going to prevent people from being shocked. But with this book, you have to really be looking for it. Because it’s not as aggressive as in my other books.

Correspondent: That’s true. I’m wondering if you looked to any specific types of people to get the marbled swarm of this book. Or the “garbled marbled swarm.” Did you listen to a specific type of affluent wanker? Or what?

Cooper: It’s a little bit like the sound of French literature. Or certain kinds of French literature. I mean, there’s a little bit of that. Like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Sade and some of the writers who were important to me. And then my own voice. I mean, it’s basically me disguising my own voice. So a lot of it is just my usual stuff. I mean, the sentences are much more complicated than my usual sentences. But it’s all basically my voice. It was just more like trying to keep it sounding foreign and maybe be kind of French, but also having this weird American stuff thrown into it. And so it was kind of like a garbage language. I mean, the thing, it sounds British.

The Bat Segundo Show #425: Dennis Cooper (Download MP3)

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