Month / July 2012

by Edward Champion

Alix Ohlin (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this 45 minute radio interview, Alix Ohlin — author of the novel Inside and the short story collection Signs and Wonders — discusses finding her literary voice, working in publishing, and how to shift empathy on a larger canvas.

Alix Ohlin appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #467. She is most recently the author of Inside and Signs and Wonders.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Careful to distinguish between Uganda and Rwanda.

Author: Alix Ohlin

Subjects Discussed: Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, California weather, New York City as ideal place to consider the vocational experience, aspiring rock stars, working in the publishing industry before becoming a writer, slush pile people vs. literary giants, working in an atmosphere of rejection, maintaining a love of reading and writing while being employed as a publishing booster, the benefits of being familiar with canonical fiction, writing stories in secret, working in a bookstore, drinking an enormous amount of caffeine, Ohlin’s four year self-imposed apprenticeship, finding a voice, “The King of Kohlrabi” as Ohlin’s first breakout point, hiding in a cafe in Nex Mexico, being a reserved person, resisting a reserved voice, callousness and bad things in fiction, why Ohlin’s characters don’t seek revenge, when the human equation isn’t direct, being treated poorly in a relationship, whether or not revenge is true to life, parents and therapy, building dimensionality out of empathy, removing cautiousness from characters to explore human feelings, fragmented marriages and divorces, being not pro-war, Don Swaim, attempts to be a well-rounded person, Ohlin’s Harvard background, whether writing fiction can make you a more well-rounded person, doing scientific research, having Don DeLillo as a hero, being an information-based fiction writer in the early days, “Vigo Park” and Chekhov’s gun, “A Month of Sundays” vs. Updike’s A Month of Sundays, using explicit literary references in a story, being honest about the author/reader relationship, being too precious with titles and tropes, tactile elements of characters in Ohlin’s sentences, giving the reader sensory guideposts, Tug’s Rwandan backstory in Inside, moving empathy onto a greater canvas, playing around with time, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, structure and false starts, why Ohline’s stories never transform into novels, being a heavy planner, knowing the ending of a story, the pros and cons of revisiting a short story after it had been collected, short story culture in the digital age, uncollected short stories that aren’t available online, the fate of the short story, being freed of commercial restraints, instantaneous reactions to work, critics who misinterpret work, factual errors in fiction, being grateful for attention, hardcover vs. paperback, and the reduced output of short story collections.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Now I may be misconstrued as the “nine types of weather” guy in E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, but, as a native Californian, I do feel compelled to ask you this question. There are two moments in these two books where you do remark on the California weather. One is the beginning of the story “The Only Child,” where Sophie calls California weather “sunny and childlike.” And in Inside, you have the situation where Anne is in Los Angeles. She’s running along the beach and she’s calling it this sort of fantastical dream. Now I don’t know why this actually stuck inside my head. But I feel that this is a very good jumping off point to describe what it is you do in terms of selecting those right details. Because I can see it from a California point of view. Because it is too good to be true. I can also see it as someone who has lived here in New York for five years and also say, “Well, yes, it is too good to be true. And it deserves to be mocked or ridiculed in some sense.” But at the same time, we’re also dealing with an author who is ascribing this through a character. And this becomes something that I obsess with. And I’m sure that some other reader is going to obsess over something along those lines. I ask you this about how you choose these details, such as the weather, because your prose is very sparse, very economic, very selective in its own criteria in terms of its syntax. So how does something like the California weather or, for example, Chinese food — also featuring in both books — how do these things make their way in a story? What is the filtering mechanism that causes this? A very bad, eccentric, possibly deranged way to start this, but I thought I would do that.

Ohlin: No, it’s always great to start with weather. I certainly think that everything in the books is filtered through the consciousness of the characters. And that’s always where I begin. It’s my entry point as a writer to start creating a narrative. And it’s certainly how I choose the details. Which is not really a conscious process. It’s more that I’m there in the moment with the character and imagining what might be the most conspicuous thing to them. So both of those descriptions of California, to respond to that, are absolutely moments of experience that are specific to characters who are from the East Coast and wintry climates, who come out and, of course, that’s what they remark upon. Of course it feels like a fantasy and an escape and something amazing and remarkable. Because to them, it is.

Correspondent: Did you get burned in California? Did you get burned by the weather or burned metaphorically?

Ohlin: I love the weather in California. And I do think it’s amazing. But, for me, I will always experience it as not home. Not the climate of home. And I will always be the person remarking upon the sunshine in January.

Correspondent: Okay. Well, aside from Anne struggling in New York in Inside, in Signs and Wonders you have a number of stories set in New York City. And “Who Do You Love?” made an impression upon me for a number of reasons. The notion of a band called Das Boot, which is actually noted around a German mode, or a mood, as opposed to the actual Teutonic experience full boar — that resonated with me because I’ve known people like the — well, rather interestingly, she doesn’t have a name, the woman who is smit with Adam, the aging rock star who is past his prime, doesn’t want to do any particular work and yet he has a draw in Williamsburg. That men like that are allowed to get away with such pathetic behavior, both in that and what we see with Inside and what we see in a number of the other stories in Signs and Wonders. I’m curious. Do you think that this particular fixation is common largely to New York? The vocational experience, is it rooted in your own personal experience? How do these fixations on, I suppose, vocational nightmares along these lines and the terrible influence on other people, how did these come about?

Ohlin: So by “vocational experiences,” do you mean the fact that he wants to be a rock star?

Correspondent: Aspirations. Is this common to New York? Why does this seem to be your idea of what New York is?

Ohlin: Well, it’s not my only idea of what New York is. But I do think that both New York and Los Angeles are places where a lot of young people move in their twenties to pursue artistic dreams that they thought were less available to them wherever they came from. So in that story, it’s the kind of story about someone who was on the cusp of being too old to be aspiring. At a certain point, you’re just sort of a person who never made it and that’s an extremely difficult moment to switch over in your own head. And then I think I have written about other characters in Inside, like Anne, who is an aspiring actress, who starts off first of all in the theater world in New York and then goes out to L.A. to try — or winds up being cast in a TV show in L.A. I just think that there’s something about both those cities that they are conduits to not just any kind of vocational experience, but artistic experiences. And then they don’t work out for people. And that’s incredibly difficult. And it’s part of your growing up to try and figure out how to come to terms with that.

Correspondent: Did New York work out for you? I mean, I know you worked in the publishing industry. And this leads me to ask you also if you had to get certain elements of how you viewed fiction and how you viewed books outside of your system in order to truly inhabit these stories as an artist.

Ohlin: Well, you know, that’s a really interesting question. I moved to New York straight out of college and I did work in publishing. And I loved it. I learned a lot and I was having a great time. But I also had this secretly harbored desire to write. And I would go to work all day and there were two things about it that were difficult. One was that a huge part of my job as an editorial assistant was to reject manuscripts. So I was right there at the forefront of rejection and understanding how difficult the odds were.

Correspondent: Did you reject anybody big?

Ohin: I don’t really want to say who I rejected. But a big part of what I rejected were slush pile people. The people who are just writing in cold without an agent. But there were so many of them and my entire cubicle would be full of these works of love — you know, 500 page novels that people were sending in that I would write a simple two-sentence letter rejecting. That was hard, when you think about, well, what’s going to become of my work. But then on the other side of the coin was that the books that were accepted, I mean, I was working at Knopf and we were publishing people like Cormac McCarthy and Tobias Wolff and Toni Morrison. And their work was so incredibly sophisticated and adept. And then I would go home and I would write these terrible, terrible, terrible stories. And the contrast between what I could do and what these published authors could do on the one hand and the rejection of the unsolicited manuscripts on the other hand really did not create an ideal context for artistic risk-taking. So I think it was really because of that, and not something about New York in particular. I love New York. But it was really about working in this atmosphere of rejection and impossible standards that I just thought, “Well, I really can’t do this.” I made the impetuous decision that you make when you’re in your early twenties and I thought, “I’m leaving New York! I’m starting over!” You know. “And it’s going to be an adventure!” I think, had I been a little older, I probably would have realized that there are ways that you can reconcile those two things. But at the time, it seemed like going away and writing in secret far away from New York publishing was the thing that I had to do.

The Bat Segundo Show #467: Alix Ohlin (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

3:AM Magazine — How Twelve Years of Literary Content Disappeared in an Instant

In this investigative report, we tell the story of 3AM Magazine’s unexpected disappearance and raise questions about preserving online culture.

On Monday, 3:AM Magazine‘s editorial team made a shocking discovery:

3:AM Magazine, the first literary magazine to champion Tom McCarthy’s work and a pioneering avant vanguard that had published the early work of Tao Lin, Tony O’Neill, and Ben Myers, had vanished in an instant, with the hosting company seemingly disappearing along with it. While a substantial chunk of the magazine’s content was still available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, there was no backup. And according to editor-in-chief Andrew Gallix, the site was held together by little more than “a doctored WordPress system.”

“It never occurred to me that our server could just be switched off without a word of warning and that the owner would do a runner!” wrote Gallix to me by email. Gallix’s efforts earlier in the week to reach the host were unsuccessful. Emails bounced. The phone had been disconnected. Gallix hadn’t received so much as a notice that his valiant magazine was disconnected and no longer in service.

While Gallix had used another host for a site dedicated to McCarthy’s work, he never switched 3:AM over during the twelve years he ran the site. He had a full-time day job. He wanted to read and he wanted to write. If the server crapped out, it would find a way to resurface after a time. “I kept postponing the move in the hope that things would improve,” said Gallix.

There was no reason for Gallix to worry. Because he had experienced very few problems. “The site was down on some occasions,” said Gallix, “sometimes just for a couple of hours; at worst for a whole day: there didn’t seem to be any real cause for concern.”

* * *

3:AM began, as many literary magazines begin, with a short story. Gallix started corresponding with an American named Kent Wilson, and a website was born. 3:AM Magazine, initially a static site comprised of a handful of stories, was founded in 1999. But Wilson had an unanticipated spiritual awakening. And 3:AM, which abided by the motto “Whatever it is, we’re against it,” didn’t fit into these mysterious ways. Wilson asked Gallix to take over 3:AM in April 2000.

“We were the first to really make use of the global dimension of the web,” said Gallix. “All the editors and contributors met online, and it was only after that some of us became friends in real life.”

This commitment to friendship and passion sustained a literary magazine with a distinct and inimical tone. “While in the middle of a feverish pawing at the back-clip of her bra,” begins one typically edgy and entertaining story around this time, “I did not think much of her whispering in my ear that she could not stay for the night because she had to go home feed Satan.”

But as long as the website continued to work, Gallix didn’t rue over the technical logistics. Wilson had given Gallix the name of a host: RMIhost.com, which was run by Reece Marketing Inc. Reece Marketing Inc. was a one man operation run by Brandon Reece. And when I tracked Reece down by telephone on Friday afternoon, he told me that he was stunned that someone was still using it.

“We haven’t done hosting for four or five years,” said Reece, who sounded somewhat surprised at the news that 3:AM had vanished. “I haven’t hosted anybody’s site since 2008.”

Gallix informed me later in the afternoon that he had paid an annual hosting fee, but it was unclear whether someone had taken over from Reece. He received an email every year asking to pay for the next year. So what was RMIhost.com?

“That’s all still up there,” replied Reece. “It’s not doing any business.”

Reece claimed to not know anything about 3:AM Magazine. He said his company had once specialized in website design and had operated out of Dallas. “It was never a successful side company,” said Reece.

Reece recalled a guy named Kent when I asked him. He identified a “born again Christian,” and confirmed that this was Kent Wilson when I provided the surname. But Reece didn’t appear to know what Wilson had given him. Was it possible that he wasn’t even paying attention to RMIHost?

“I don’t ever remember hosting 3:AM Magazine,” said Reece. “I think I would know.”

Reece referred to “a server admin in Bucharest” — a gentleman named Florin — who he promised to email tonight. When I asked Reece if RMIhost had leased any particular server, he seemed baffled.

“DNS,” said Reece. “I haven’t done anything like this in a while.”

Reece was busy “looking for something new right now.” He intimated that he was in a transition period and that the hosting company had been more of an unprofitable sideline. These days, he was living on savings.

“I don’t trust my personal expertise,” said Reece when I asked him about his technical chops. “I don’t even know how to do that myself. You forget everything you do.” But he did promise to get on the case by Monday. He also allowed me to pass along his contact information to Gallix.

As for Gallix, he informed me that he had tech people retrieving what they could off the Internet Archive. But even if 3:AM manages to extract the content, he’s unsure about what “more reliable and reputable host” he’ll offload his content onto. The experience revealed to Gallix “the fragility of online content.”

It remains unclear whether Reece was playing dumb or acting in good faith. But he was willing to pass along his contact info to Gallix, even after I informed him of the significant online outcry that had followed 3:AM‘s server outage. And these efforts do represent a step in the right direction to preserve 3:AM‘s vast archive.

No matter how the 3:AM predicament works out — and there are positive signs that it will — preserving online work may very well be as dangerous as other historical precedents. Or as Tom McCarthy, reached on holiday, declared to me upon learning the news, “My first reaction is: ALEXANDRIA!”

[7/6/2012 6:45 PM UPDATE: As of 6:45 PM EST, 3:AM Magzine has been restored. Many thanks to all who helped out with this story and to Mr. Reece for following through with his promise.]

by Edward Champion

Brian Francis Slattery II (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this one hour interview, novelist Brian Francis Slattery returns to our program to discuss Lost Everything, agnosticism, dystopian fiction, the value of human existence, and Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.

Brian Francis Slattery appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #466. He is most recently the author of Lost Everything and previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #142.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Hammering in the morning, the evening, and the afternoon.

Author: Brian Francis Slattery

Subjects Discussed: Radio programs which force authors to starve for an hour, the glut of dystopian novels after 2008, taking criticisms to heart, distinguishing many forms of sarcasm and irony, a segue with two friendly gentlemen with hammers, the bleakness within Lost Everything, the seriousness of a major economic collapse, hope in the “Who knows?” area of bleakness, the possibility of restoration in Liberation vs. the unknown storm (The Big One) in Lost Everything, “squanch” as a word, Lost Everything‘s wandering narrator, using up a quota of semicolons, starting a sentence with a verb, faith and spirituality, agnosticism, the philosophical value of Christopher Reeve quotes, agnostics who dodge questions of faith, Nicholas Wolterstorff, the pacifistic and apolitical nature of taking Christianity seriously, the balance between forgiveness and righteousness, moral codes that are mishmashes of philosophy and religion, discussing issues in both religious and secular terms, the physical limitations within the Carthage, not providing the answers to the reader, deliberate ambiguities, super-omniscient narrators, narrators who match character predicaments, resisting the word “fun” when investigating nightmarish human predicaments, Russian roulette, violence and bleak humor as a defense mechanism, working at a social science research foundation, the choice between laughing and becoming serious when presented with genocide, how much a human life is worth, Guatemala vs. the Ukraine, life being cheaper in certain parts of the world, superfluous playground warnings, judgement of other parents over trifling details, sugar as a disruptive force, being reprimanded for saying “fuck” joyfully in a Park Slope restaurant, reading bleak books, finding the value in everyone, engaging in reckless behavior, when the removal of safeguards creates unanticipated possibilities, writing about a world devoid of electricity, 19th century human existence, how people live without electricity now, Darwin’s Nightmare, Hubert Sauper’s Kisangani Diary, Rwandan refugees who have nothing when coming across as a sanctuary, a maturing point in Slattery’s career, guilt, taking things seriously, a writer’s commitment to human existence, form following function, George Clinton and Bob Dylan as inspirational forces for (respectively) Spaceman Blues and Liberation, basing a narrative voice on the way people talk, Dock Boggs, Skip James, and 1920s music, expressing resistance through music, musicians authorized to marry people and given authority by the author, free spirited life in the face of chaos, music grounded in social reality, partying when everybody is freaked out, the house, river, and highway structure in Lost Everything, Life on the Mississippi, Kerouac, finding the specific region in America for Lost Everything, comparisons between Lost Everything and Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, modeling novels from The Odyssey, the Susquehanna River being underutilized in American fiction, Slattery navigating the Susquehanna River in a canoe, William T. Vollmann, “Sunny Jim” Rolph, Captain Mendoza and Lydia Mendoza, character names, eels coming out of mattress, and making sure the constant degradation wasn’t repetitive.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Slattery: Thanks for letting me eat and drink while I’m talking with you.

Correspondent: Yes.

Slattery: Which I’ll be doing.

Correspondent: It’s one of the very rare programs that allows authors to drink and eat.

Slattery: It is.

Correspondent: Most programs allow authors to starve for an hour. Anyway, we don’t do that here. Well, first of all, how are you doing? I didn’t quite get that question answered. You’re doing okay?

Slattery: How am I doing? Oh, I’m great. I’m good.

Correspondent: Alright. Well then, let’s get right down to business. For some inexplicable reason, and I have no idea why — maybe you might have a few ideas — but since roughly around 2008 — again, I have no idea why — there’s been a great rush of dystopic novels. Dystopian novels. Doom and gloom. And here we have number three from you, sir. So just to start off here, I’m wondering, when you started writing Lost Everything, were you aware of what might be called a glut or what might be called an overpopulated filed of dystopian novels? Did you care about such an output that was going on simultaneously as you were working on a book?

Slattery: I guess I should say that I was mildly aware, but not that aware. It’s not something I pay that much attention to, I guess. Even in stuff that I read, I read a ton of nonfiction. So I’m sort of vaguely aware of trends in fiction. But they have to be pretty big for me to be aware of them, I’m afraid. But yeah, it’s not something that I think about that much. The idea of chasing a trend or worrying about a trend, you just have to sort of — at least for me, I just worry about whether I can write a good book or not, and I see where it turns out. And in the case of the third one, it was like, from the first to the third one, one grew pretty naturally out of the other. There were questions that I liked in the first one that I never got around to that I did some of in the second one. And then there was still some left over. So there’s another book. Quite a bit.

Correspondent: Such as what? What specific questions are we talking about here?

Slattery: Gosh, let me think. I think that from the second to the third one, probably the best thing was — you know, the reception to it was really great. It was really very gratifying. One of the things that I ended up taking to heart though was that there were people who were being too flippant.

Correspondent: Really?

Slattery: And I thought, “That’s fair.”

Correspondent: You took that to heart?

Slattery: I did.

Correspondent: Does this explain why this one is really very bleak at times?

Slattery: It is.

Correspondent: It’s not to say that it’s devoid of humor. Because you do have the music.

Slattery: No, no. It is. It’s quite a bit darker. And for a while, I got halfway through it and I thought, “God, this book is really dark.” And then I thought, “Well, at least I should finish it.” And then I finished it and I thought, “No, it’s still really dark.” And there’s a part of me that — because, you know, I’m not really that serious of a person. And I was really kind of surprised that I’d written such a serious book. But it also seemed like — you know, there’s a point where, for the first two books, I think that there was a really conscious endeavor to make sure that the stakes weren’t so high that you couldn’t joke about it. And then eventually the stakes are high enough that it seemed kind of creepy to joke about it. It was like, you know, nobody would be joking in this kind of situation. Nobody would be just kind of horsing around. There’s no place for it anymore. And so I tried to find the humor where I could get it. But it felt increasingly forced to go for it. And it also seemed like kind of a fair trade. I felt like I was trading sarcastic for creepy. And I’m sort of okay with that.

Correspondent: You are. Well, what do you define as sarcasm? Having joy and having fun against an especially bleak or depressing environment, to my mind, isn’t sarcasm. And I don’t think it has been sarcasm in either Liberation or Spaceman Blues. I think it was a sense of irony. So how do you distinguish between irony and sarcasm here? And I’m really curious about the fact that you decided to…

Slattery: That’s a fun question to ask me, actually. Because I consider myself to be a pretty sarcastic person, but also kind of anti-irony. If that makes sense. And I think that what it comes down to is that I don’t — the way that I — I mean, this is obviously the pop culture version of irony. It’s not the lit crit version of it. But, you know, the pop culture version of it is that at the end, the joke is everybody not really sure what the person’s intentions are. Like the person has done a lot to hide what they actually think. And I don’t try to do that. So like…

[Food arrives.]

Slattery: No, this looks great.

Correspondent: Did you want to pause? So you can actually eat that.

Slattery: No, no, no.

Correspondent: Okay.

Slattery: So it would be like — I try to joke around and I try to be kind of honest about it. If that makes sense. And to not be really ambiguous about what it is that I’m trying to say.

Correspondent: Okay. Well, in terms of distinguishing between lit crit irony and pop culture…

Gentleman with Hammer: Sorry. Are you recording?

Correspondent: Yes.

Gentleman with Hammer: Because I’m going to use the hammer for a few. Do you have a long time?

Correspondent: Probably thirty or forty minutes or something like that?

Gentleman with Hammer: Okay. Do you mind? Just for five minutes. I will tell you.

Correspondent: Okay, why don’t we…?

Slattery: We’ll stop.

Correspondent: We’ll stop. Five minutes.

* * *

Correspondent: Okay. So back in action here. So we were talking about irony and sarcasm and humor and the differences between pop culture irony and lit crit irony. And then two gentlemen decided to start construction on us. And they stopped thankfully.

Slattery: Yes.

Correspondent: They were very nice.

Slattery: And it looks really good.

Correspondent: Yes, it does really look good. So we were trying to peg what you view your humor to be.

Slattery: Right.

Correspondent: And I insisted that it was working in some quasi-ironic mode.

Slattery: (laughs) That’s nice of you.

Correspondent: A sincere irony, I suppose. Or I suppose the joys of contradiction. And you were saying, “No, no, no, Ed, actually….”

Slattery: No, no, no. We’re probably talking about the same thing.

Correspondent: Yeah. We’re probably talking about the same thing.

(Image: Houari B.)

The Bat Segundo Show #466: Brian Francis Slattery II (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Jess Walter II (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this 50 minute interview, novelist Jess Walter discusses Beautiful Ruins, the fifteen years it took for him to write it, the enthralling qualities of 1970s thriller novels, and capturing digital life in fiction.

Jess Walter appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #465. He is the author of Beautiful Ruins and previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #163

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating a trip to Italy to push his debauchery to the next level.

Author: Jess Walter

Subjects Discussed: The folly of great quests, whether true quests are measured in hope, not writing the same novel twice, starting a novel in 1997 and carrying on for the next fifteen years, Scientology, the “Psych!” moment in fiction, early versions of Beautiful Ruins, Walter’s experience as a cop reporter, Over Tumbled Graves, having to write several novels to get to the end of Beautiful Ruins, the importance of hovering central questions, hiking the Cinque Terre, having a 26 page explosive breakthrough in Italy, imposing a generous structure, the problems that come when you get sick of your characters after working on a novel for a long time, curing a novel’s frustrations by writing another novel, responding to the 2008 economic meltdown through fiction, plummeting house tax assessments, funneling anxieties into The Financial Lives of the Poets‘s Matt Prior, existing in a bubble, Albert Camus’s “The Wager of Our Generation,” marrying social concerns with entertainment, “table-leg sideburns” and other poetically entertaining descriptions, big fat American novels, the advantages of being unaware of the publishing industry or not having a MFA, Walter’s dubious bachelor’s degree, being a laugh whore, introducing social dilemmas to avoid cracking jokes all the time, pegging a writer’s DNA based on her ten favorite books, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joan Didion’s The White Album, secret trashy books that writers are inspired by, Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File, Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction, 1970s thrillers, the dramatic benefits of evil Nazi doctors, surprises of motive, the present literary stigma on melodrama, Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo, being fond of riffs, Shane, Dee Moray and Rebecca De Mornay, the origins of names, Robert Evans, description which mimics Hollywood screenplay description, virtual adultery in The Financial Lives of the Poets and “pining for the digital hit” in Beautiful Ruins, capturing digital life in fiction, accidental zeitgeist moments, observing other people, characters who want to be younger better versions of themselves, writing short stories about fatherhood, looking for the specific angle for a novel, journalism vs. fiction, senility, the magpie method of novel writing, the Crispin Glover movie about the Donner Party, researching Richard Burton, Burton on The Dick Cavett Show, Louis Menand’s inspirational phrase, Robert Sellers’s Hellraisers: The Inebriated Life and Times of Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris & Oliver Reed. the freedom of writing about the dead, Michael Deane’s abandoned first chapter, “We want what we want,” using narrative fragments and “bad writing” to find poignancy within characters, feeling genuine about a story, writing a section of Beautiful Ruins without using a comma, deliberate efforts to write the world’s worst poetry, when people don’t think that they are the villains of their own story, inevitable actions, responding to Allegra Goodman’s charges about extending beats too long, pushing hard on the emotional buttons, the impossibility of the perfect novel, the inevitability of bad writing, reality shows based on Web concepts, collisions between high and low culture, emotions and language, the beauty of faded art, artistic compromises, and whether writing can ever fully capture romance.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I’d like to start off with a sentiment that’s expressed late in the book. Because I think it really encapsulates what this novel is about. “But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos — we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us.” And in this passage, you suggest that true quests aren’t measured in time and distance. They’re actually measured in hope. So to my mind, this is also a very good description of writing.

Walter: Yeah.

Correspondent: So I’m wondering how you counter this idea of knowing what’s out there while writing Beautiful Ruins. This notion of the quest that guided all these considerable styles, considerable characters, considerable decades, considerable locations — all crammed quite majestically into a 350 page narrative: what steps do you take to find that quest? And to make sure you’re not writing the same novel twice?

Walter: Well, I haven’t had a problem writing the same novel twice. The novel, I think, is very much a reflection of the way I work and the things that I think are important in fiction writing. And that passage you talk about, this novel I started in 1997 and I kept putting it down. So it was that journey. It was very much one of those quests that took me to different styles of writing, to different places, to Edinburgh, to Italy, to England, to different places in the United States. And every time I’d come back to it, the thing itself would kind of be about storytelling. Those “beautiful ruins” of the title are, to me, the artifacts that make up this piece. The lives are reflected in the stories that we tell about ourselves. So it was a bit of a meta experience for me, writing this. I kept feeling as if I was commenting upon the writing of the book itself through this big storytelling voice, this third-person omniscient, where I was able to just grab a character and tell you everything you needed to know about them. That idea of storytelling kept coming around in a big grand way.

Correspondent: 1997. So what shape, what direction, was what became Beautiful Ruins like back then? I ask because there’s this tantalizing bit at the very beginning. “Oh, Jess is going to write a Scientology satire, a sendup!” And then “Psych!” No, it’s that story at all. Nicely mimicking Lydia’s parallel story near the end. So this would explain, if you worked on it for so many years, why it became so mammoth and complex. But I’m wondering what the prototypical version of this looked like.

Walter: Yeah. I like the idea of having the word “Psych!” every three or four pages. Psych! You thought it was going to be this.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Walter: We may have to talk with the audio book people about that. I’ll just lean over the actor’s shoulder and say “Psych!” every few minutes.

Correspondent: That would probably be a good way to read the David Foster Wallace footnotes.

Walter: It would.

Correspondent: Psych!

Walter: Psych! But I went to Italy in 1997 before I published any novels. And I’d been working on two novels that would fail. That would just never be published. And this was my third failed novel in my mind. It was called at the time The Hotel Adequate View. My mom had been diagnosed with cancer. And I originally thought I would write a magical realism piece about a woman dying of cancer who goes to this small Italian village where, for some mystical reason, her cancer stops. And it was really just a way for me to take my mom to this place she’d never gotten to see. And then I was sort of tweaking with the idea. I didn’t want to write that book about my mom. But I still had this woman arriving at this village and this man Pasquale Tursi seeing her. And I had to figure out: “Who was this woman?” And my first book had been made into a miniseries on CBS. Ruby Ridge, in 1995. So I’d had my first dealings with Hollywood. And so I thought, “She’s an actress.” So in 1997, I had this idea she was an actress. I had already looked up Cleopatra. I thought she was part of that. I even had the parallel stories. But I really just hit a wall. I didn’t know how to write that novel then. It was more ornate than I think I was capable of doing. So I stepped aside and I wrote Over Tumbled Graves, which was a crime novel that I outlined. Like a lot of young writers, I was really teaching myself how to write a novel. And I didn’t have the chops then to write this book.

Correspondent: So out of this early version came this fixation on serial killers. That’s quite interesting. (laughs)

Walter: I had been a cop reporter.

Correspondent: Yeah, I know.

Walter: So I turned — I did what every young writer does. Write what you know. You don’t know Italy. You don’t know Hollywood. I lacked the confidence, I guess, to finish it. And I also didn’t know where the story was going. I mean, it becomes about the span of these lives. And I hadn’t had as much life as I’ve had now. I hadn’t had that span. So I wrote Over Tumbled Graves. When I finished it, I went back to The Hotel Adequate View. Still couldn’t crack it. Wrote Land of the Blind. Went back to it. Still couldn’t crack it. Wrote Citizen Vince. This kept happening on and on and on. Finally in 2008 — July of 2008 — I finished a draft of it. It was now called Beautiful Ruins. I gave it to a friend of mine. And I read it. And it still didn’t work. And so I set it aside and I wrote The Financial Lives of the Poets in about eight months. As a kind of palate cleanser. Because by now, it had grown to this puzzle with all these pieces that I could sort of intuit how they fit together. But I couldn’t quite get them to work in that way.

Correspondent: This is fascinating to me. So you had to write several novels to get to the end of this. To get to the end of the draft.

Walter: Yeah, right.

Correspondent: This suggests to me, perhaps, that, because you were mimicking several styles within the course of this book, each incremental step forward was almost a new style. Almost like a mini-novel, I suppose. Is that safe to say?

Walter: You know, not really. Because I would go back to the beginning…

Correspondent: Oh! Okay.

Walter: …and tear it up from the beginning. There’s not a sentence that exists which was in that original version.

Correspondent: Wow.

Walter: Every time I would go back to it, I’d be left with Pasquale and Dee. Most of the rest of it didn’t quite make sense to me. Michael Deane exists in some form. I probably discovered Richard Burton in about 2006, that I wanted to write about him. But there were just odds and ends and bits and pieces that would make their way into it. But it was more — it really was like a 3D puzzle that fits together. And while it’s sort of complex in structure, I never wanted it to be complex in narrative. I always wanted it to be a story that pushed forward. And there’s a central question. This couple meets. And are they going to get back together fifty years later? And as long as that was hovering over it, I felt like I could do all these other pieces. So I went to Italy again after I finished The Financial Lives of the Poets. I went to speak. A friend was teaching there and I went to speak at his class. And I hiked the Cinque Terre again. And I had this burst of understanding of what was missing. I stayed up and wrote 26 pages of my journal — my writing journal — of notes. And the last note I wrote was “It’s morning. The birds are chirping. I’ve stayed up all night.” And in there was a kind of outlined description of what I thought the novel should do. I didn’t follow all those rules. But it was a nice path to get me through this last burst of writing. And when I finished it this last time, I had a sense that this is it. This is the book that I wanted to write before I knew what it was.

Correspondent: So would you say, during this period of writing this novel and also writing several other novels, that really it was a matter, with Beautiful Ruins, of giving yourself permission to set down at least a tentative structure so you could actually push forward? Was that really the breakthrough with this?

Walter: Well, every writer knows that feeling of something that fails. And I never thought it was going to succeed. Honestly. Every time I hit a wall with it, I thought, “Well, that thing’s done.” Because I’ve had other novels that peter out after however many pages. So it wasn’t that I lacked the structure. Because I thought I knew what it was. It just didn’t work. And it just wasn’t right. And I always write two or three things at once. It’s my one superpower. That I’m a really good driver. So I write poems at the same time that I write essays, at the same time I write reviews, and I just sit at the desk. And if I’m stuck on one thing, I work on something else. So I’ve got two novels going now. And I don’t know which one will grab me.

Correspondent: A race to the finish.

Walter: Yeah. And I might finish it and decide it doesn’t work. But the structure I imposed on it the last time was a little more generous structure. I think I was even more indulgent with myself and trying on the reader in earlier drafts. And this time I said, I’m going to make sure that you’re rewarded when you have to start over and meet new characters. That when things come back around, there’s a payoff. And I knew that Alvis Bender, this writer from World War II, would figure in it. And I knew that I wanted to have a pitch for a film about the Donner Party. I knew these pieces. And so I trimmed a lot of those and made them shorter so it was less trying on the reader. I tried to make the connections more complete. And I always sensed that the novel would make or break on the last chapter when I had this idea, that I wrote in my journal in Italy in 2008, that everything would swirl back around in this big present tense.

The Bat Segundo Show #465: Jess Walter II (Download MP3)

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