Kazuo Ishiguro My, Twentieth Century Evening – and Other Small Breakthroughs

Sadly, missing from the contemporary array of amusements and entertainment is the loss art of oratory and declamation. Probably one of the more attractive aspects of Barack Obama’s persona—if there are even a handful of people who can speak eloquently in public, I haven’t been able to identify them. Nonetheless, book publishers occasionally (for reasons that escape me, only occasionally) see fit to offer speeches in attractively designed chapbooks (see below for a partial list). Now comes My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs: The Nobel Lecture  (the only other Nobel lecture I have come across in this form is  JM Coetzee’s 2003 oration)

 

 

Kazuo Ishiguro – Nobel Lecture

7 December, 2017
My Twentieth Century Evening – and Other Small Breakthroughs

 

From Random House

 

The Nobel Lecture in Literature, delivered by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans,The Buriecd Giant) at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 7, 2017, in an elegant, clothbound edition.

In their announcement of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy recognized the emotional force of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction and his mastery at uncovering our illusory sense of connection with the world. In the eloquent and candid lecture he delivered upon accepting the award, Ishiguro reflects on the way he was shaped by his upbringing, and on the turning points in his career—“small scruffy moments . . . quiet, private sparks of revelation”—that made him the writer he is today.
With the same generous humanity that has graced his novels, Ishiguro here looks beyond himself, to the world that new generations of writers are taking on, and what it will mean—what it will demand of us—to make certain that literature remains not just alive, but essential.
An enduring work on writing and becoming a writer, by one of the most accomplished novelists of our generation.

 

Sampling the speech

 

So here I am, a man in my sixties, rubbing my eyes and trying to discern the outlines, out there in the mist, to this world I didn’t suspect even existed until yesterday. Can I, a tired author, from an intellectually tired generation, now find the energy to look at this unfamiliar place? Do I have something left that might help to provide perspective, to bring emotional layers to the arguments, fights and wars that will come as societies struggle to adjust to huge changes?

I’ll have to carry on and do the best I can. Because I still believe that literature is important, and will be particularly so as we cross this difficult terrain. But I’ll be looking to the writers from the younger generations to inspire and lead us. This is their era, and they will have the knowledge and instinct about it that I will lack. In the worlds of books, cinema, TV and theatre I see today adventurous, exciting talents: women and men in their forties, thirties and twenties. So I am optimistic. Why shouldn’t I be?

Now as you will note below, through the wonders of the digital world, Ishiguro’s valedictory is available at the Nobel Prize site (as are all the previous Nobel orations). There are, I think, many good reasons that the orations of Nobel laureates should be iterated in the way that Ishiguro’s is—if you  are enthralled by books, then it is self evident that some things belong in books…

My Twentieth Century Evening – and Other Small Breakthroughs

 

If you’d come across me in the autumn of 1979, you might have had some difficulty placing me, socially or even racially. I was then 24 years old. My features would have looked Japanese, but unlike most Japanese men seen in Britain in those days, I had hair down to my shoulders, and a drooping bandit-style moustache. The only accent discernible in my speech was that of someone brought up in the southern counties of England, inflected at times by the languid, already dated vernacular of the Hippie era. If we’d got talking, we might have discussed the Total Footballers of Holland, or Bob Dylan’s latest album, or perhaps the year I’d just spent working with homeless people in London. Had you mentioned Japan, asked me about its culture, you might even have detected a trace of impatience enter my manner as I declared my ignorance on the grounds that I hadn’t set foot in that country – not even for a holiday – since leaving it at the age of five.
That autumn I’d arrived with a rucksack, a guitar and a portable typewriter in Buxton, Norfolk – a small English village with an old water mill and flat farm fields all around it. I’d come to this place because I’d been accepted on a one-year postgraduate Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. The university was ten miles away, in the cathedral town of Norwich, but I had no car and my only way of getting there was by means of a bus service that operated just once in the morning, once at lunch-time and once in the evening. But this, I was soon to discover, was no great hardship: I was rarely required at the university more than twice a week. I’d rented a room in a small house owned by a man in his thirties whose wife had just left him. No doubt, for him, the house was filled with the ghosts of his wrecked dreams – or perhaps he just wanted to avoid me; in any case, I didn’t set eyes on him for days on end. In other words, after the frenetic life I’d been leading in London, here I was, faced with an unusual amount of quiet and solitude in which to transform myself into a writer.

In fact, my little room was not unlike the classic writer’s garret. The ceilings sloped claustrophobically – though if I stood on tip-toes I had a view, from my one window, of ploughed fields stretching away into the distance. There was a small table, the surface of which my typewriter and a desk lamp took up almost entirely. On the floor, instead of a bed, there was a large rectangular piece of industrial foam that would cause me to sweat in my sleep, even during the bitterly cold Norfolk nights.
It was in this room that I carefully examined the two short stories I’d written over the summer, wondering if they were good enough to submit to my new classmates. (We were, I knew, a class of six, meeting once every two weeks.) At that point in my life I’d written little else of note in the way of prose fiction, having earned my place on the course with a radio play rejected by the BBC. In fact, having previously made firm plans to become a rock star by the time I was twenty, my literary ambitions had only recently made themselves known to me. The two stories I was now scrutinising had been written in something of a panic, in response to the news that I’d been accepted on the university course. One was about a macabre suicide pact, the other about street fights in Scotland, where I’d spent some time as a community worker. They were not so good. I started another story, about an adolescent who poisons his cat, set like the others in present day Britain. Then one night, during my third or fourth week in that little room, I found myself writing, with a new and urgent intensity, about Japan – about Nagasaki, the city of my birth, during the last days of the Second World War.

This, I should point out, came as something of a surprise to me. Today, the prevailing atmosphere is such that it’s virtually an instinct for an aspiring young writer with a mixed cultural heritage to explore his ‘roots’ in his work. But that was far from the case then. We were still a few years away from the explosion of ‘multicultural’ literature in Britain. Salman Rushdie was an unknown with one out-of-print novel to his name. Asked to name the leading young British novelist of the day, people might have mentioned Margaret Drabble; of older writers, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles. Foreigners like Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera or Borges were read only in tiny numbers, their names meaningless even to keen readers.
Such was the literary climate of the day that when I finished that first Japanese story, for all my sense of having discovered an important new direction, I began immediately to wonder if this departure shouldn’t be viewed as a self-indulgence; if I shouldn’t quickly return to more ‘normal’ subject matter. It was only after considerable hesitation I began to show the story around, and I remain to this day profoundly grateful to my fellow students, to my tutors, Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and to the novelist Paul Bailey – that year the university’s writer-in-residence – for their determinedly encouraging response. Had they been less positive, I would probably never again have written about Japan. As it was, I returned to my room and wrote and wrote. Throughout the winter of 1979-80, and well into the spring, I spoke to virtually no-one aside from the other five students in my class, the village grocer from whom I bought the breakfast cereals and lamb kidneys on which I existed, and my girlfriend, Lorna, (today my wife) who’d come to visit me every second weekend. It wasn’t a balanced life, but in those four or five months I managed to complete one half of my first novel, A Pale View of Hills – set also in Nagasaki, in the years of recovery after the dropping of the atomic bomb. I can remember occasionally during this period tinkering with some ideas for short stories not set in Japan, only to find my interest waning rapidly.

Those months were crucial for me, in so far as without them I’d probably never have become a writer. Since then, I’ve often looked back and asked: what was going on with me? What was all this peculiar energy? My conclusion has been that just at that point in my life, I’d become engaged in an urgent act of preservation. To explain this, I’ll need to go back a little.
*
I had come to England, aged five, with my parents and sister in April 1960, to the town of Guildford, Surrey, in the affluent ‘stockbroker belt’ thirty miles south of London. My father was a research scientist, an oceanographer who’d come to work for the British government. The machine he went on to invent, incidentally, is today part of the permanent collection at the Science Museum in London.

The photographs taken shortly after our arrival show an England from a vanished era. Men wear woollen V-neck pullovers with ties, cars still have running boards and a spare wheel on the back. The Beatles, the sexual revolution, student protests, ‘multiculturalism’ were all round the corner, but it’s hard to believe the England our family first encountered even suspected it. To meet a foreigner from France or Italy was remarkable enough – never mind one from Japan.

Our family lived in a cul-de-sac of twelve houses just where the paved roads ended and the countryside began. It was less than a five minute stroll to the local farm and the lane down which rows of cows trudged back and forth between fields. Milk was delivered by horse and cart. A common sight I remember vividly from my first days in England was that of hedgehogs – the cute, spiky, nocturnal creatures then numerous in that country – squashed by car wheels during the night, left in the morning dew, tucked neatly by the roadside, awaiting collection by the refuse men.

All our neighbours went to church, and when I went to play with their children, I noticed they said a small prayer before eating.

I attended Sunday school, and before long was singing in the church choir, becoming, aged ten, the first Japanese Head Chorister seen in Guildford. I went to the local primary school – where I was the only non-English child, quite possibly in the entire history of that school – and from when I was eleven, I travelled by train to my grammar school in a neighbouring town, sharing the carriage each morning with ranks of men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats, on their way to their offices in London.

By this stage, I’d become thoroughly trained in the manners expected of English middle-class boys in those days. When visiting a friend’s house, I knew I should stand to attention the instant an adult wandered into the room; I learned that during a meal I had to ask permission before getting down from the table. As the only foreign boy in the neighbourhood, a kind of local fame followed me around. Other children knew who I was before I met them. Adults who were total strangers to me sometimes addressed me by name in the street or in the local store.

When I look back to this period, and remember it was less than twenty years from the end of a world war in which the Japanese had been their bitter enemies, I’m amazed by the openness and instinctive generosity with which our family was accepted by this ordinary English community. The affection, respect and curiosity I retain to this day for that generation of Britons who came through the Second World War, and built a remarkable new welfare state in its aftermath, derive significantly from my personal experiences from those years.

But all this time, I was leading another life at home with my Japanese parents. At home there were different rules, different expectations, a different language. My parents’ original intention had been that we return to Japan after a year, perhaps two. In fact, for our first eleven years in England, we were in a perpetual state of going back ‘next year’. As a result, my parents’ outlook remained that of visitors, not of immigrants. They’d often exchange observations about the curious customs of the natives without feeling any onus to adopt them. And for a long time the assumption remained that I would return to live my adult life in Japan, and efforts were made to keep up the Japanese side of my education. Each month a parcel arrived from Japan, containing the previous month’s comics, magazines and educational digests, all of which I devoured eagerly. These parcels stopped arriving some time in my teens – perhaps after my grandfather’s death – but my parents’ talk of old friends, relatives, episodes from their lives in Japan all kept up a steady supply of images and impressions. And then I always had my own store of memories – surprisingly vast and clear: of my grandparents, of favourite toys I’d left behind, the traditional Japanese house we’d lived in (which I can even today reconstruct in my mind room by room), my kindergarten, the local tram stop, the fierce dog that lived by the bridge, the chair in the barber’s shop specially adapted for small boys with a car steering wheel fixed in front of the big mirror.

What this all amounted to was that as I was growing up, long before I’d ever thought to create fictional worlds in prose, I was busily constructing in my mind a richly detailed place called ‘Japan’ – a place to which I in some way belonged, and from which I drew a certain sense of my identity and my confidence. The fact that I’d never physically returned to Japan during that time only served to make my own vision of the country more vivid and personal.

Hence the need for preservation. For by the time I reached my mid-twenties – though I never clearly articulated this at the time – I was coming to realise certain key things. I was starting to accept that ‘my’ Japan perhaps didn’t much correspond to any place I could go to on a plane; that the way of life of which my parents talked, that I remembered from my early childhood, had largely vanished during the 1960s and 1970s; that in any case, the Japan that existed in my head might always have been an emotional construct put together by a child out of memory, imagination and speculation. And perhaps most significantly, I’d come to realise that with each year I grew older, this Japan of mine – this precious place I’d grown up with – was getting fainter and fainter.

I’m now sure that it was this feeling, that ‘my’ Japan was unique and at the same time terribly fragile – something not open to verification from outside – that drove me on to work in that small room in Norfolk. What I was doing was getting down on paper that world’s special colours, mores, etiquettes, its dignity, its shortcomings, everything I’d ever thought about the place, before they faded forever from my mind. It was my wish to re-build my Japan in fiction, to make it safe, so that I could thereafter point to a book and say: ‘Yes, there’s my Japan, inside there.’
*
Spring 1983, three and a half years later. Lorna and I were now in London, lodging in two rooms at the top of a tall narrow house, which itself stood on a hill at one of the highest points of the city. There was a television mast nearby and when we tried to listen to records on our turntable, ghostly broadcasting voices would intermittently invade our speakers. Our living room had no sofa or armchair, but two mattresses on the floor covered with cushions. There was also a large table on which I wrote during the day, and where we had dinner at night. It wasn’t luxurious, but we liked living there. I’d published my first novel the year before, and I’d also written a screenplay for a short film soon to be broadcast on British television.

I’d been for a time reasonably proud of my first novel, but by that spring, a niggling sense of dissatisfaction had set in. Here was the problem. My first novel and my first TV screenplay were too similar. Not in subject matter, but in method and style. The more I looked at it, the more my novel resembled a screenplay – dialogue plus directions. This was okay up to a point, but my wish now was to write fiction that could work properly only on the page. Why write a novel if it was going to offer more or less the same experience someone could get by turning on a television? How could written fiction hope to survive against the might of cinema and television if it didn’t offer something unique, something the other forms couldn’t do?

Around this time, I came down with a virus and spent a few days in bed. When I came out of the worst of it, and I didn’t feel like sleeping all the time, I discovered that the heavy object, whose presence amidst my bedclothes had been annoying me for some time, was in fact a copy of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (as the title was then translated). There it was, so I started to read it. My still fevered condition was perhaps a factor, but I became completely riveted by the Overture and Combray sections. I read them over and over. Quite aside from the sheer beauty of these passages, I became thrilled by the means by which Proust got one episode to lead into the next. The ordering of events and scenes didn’t follow the usual demands of chronology, nor those of a linear plot. Instead, tangential thought associations, or the vagaries of memory seemed to move the writing from one episode to the next. Sometimes I found myself wondering: why had these two seemingly unrelated moments been placed side by side in the narrator’s mind? I could suddenly see an exciting, freer way of composing my second novel; one that could produce richness on the page and offer inner movements impossible to capture on any screen. If I could go from one passage to the next according to the narrator’s thought associations and drifting memories, I could compose in something like the way an abstract painter might choose to place shapes and colours around a canvas. I could place a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. In such a way, I began to think, I might suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self and of their past.

*
March 1988. I was 33 years old. We now had a sofa and I was lying across it, listening to a Tom Waits album. The previous year, Lorna and I had bought our own house in an unfashionable but pleasant part of South London, and in this house, for the first time, I had my own study. It was small, and didn’t have a door, but I was thrilled to spread my papers around and not have to clear them away at the end of each day. And in that study – or so I believed – I’d just finished my third novel. It was my first not to have a Japanese setting – my personal Japan having been made less fragile by the writing of my previous novels. In fact my new book, to be called The Remains of the Day, seemed English in the extreme – though not, I hoped, in the manner of many British authors of the older generation. I’d been careful not to assume, as I felt many of them did, that my readers were all English, with native familiarity of English nuances and preoccupations. By then, writers like Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul had forged the way for a more international, outward-looking British literature, one that didn’t claim any centrality or automatic importance for Britain. Their writing was post-colonial in the widest sense. I wanted, like them, to write ‘international’ fiction that could easily cross cultural and linguistic boundaries, even while writing a story set in what seemed a peculiarly English world. My version of England would be a kind of mythical one, whose outlines, I believed, were already present in the imaginations of many people around the world, including those who had never visited the country.

The story I’d just finished was about an English butler who realises, too late in his life, that he has lived his life by the wrong values; and that he’s given his best years to serving a Nazi sympa-thizer; that by failing to take moral and political responsibility for his life, he has in some profound sense wasted that life. And more: that in his bid to become the perfect servant, he has forbidden himself to love, or be loved by, the one woman he cares for.
I’d read through my manuscript several times, and I’d been reasonably satisfied. Still, there was a niggling feeling that something was missing.

Then, as I say, there I was, in our house one evening, on our sofa, listening to Tom Waits. And Tom Waits began to sing a song called ‘Ruby’s Arms’. Perhaps some of you know it. (I even thought about singing it to you at this point, but I’ve changed my mind.) It’s a ballad about a man, possibly a soldier, leaving his lover asleep in bed. It’s the early morning, he goes down the road, gets on a train. Nothing unusual in that. But the song is delivered in the voice of a gruff American hobo utterly unaccustomed to revealing his deeper emotions. And there comes a moment, midway through the song, when the singer tells us that his heart is breaking. The moment is almost unbearably moving because of the tension between the sentiment itself and the huge resistance that’s obviously been overcome to declare it. Tom Waits sings the line with cathartic magnificence, and you feel a lifetime of tough-guy stoicism crumbling in the face of overwhelming sadness.

As I listened to Tom Waits, I realised what I’d still left to do. I’d unthinkingly made the decision, somewhere way back, that my English butler would maintain his emotional defences, that he’d manage to hide behind them, from himself and his reader, to the very end. Now I saw I had to reverse that decision. Just for one moment, towards the end of my story, a moment I’d have to choose carefully, I had to make his armour crack. I had to allow a vast and tragic yearning to be glimpsed underneath.

I should say here that I have, on a number of other occasions, learned crucial lessons from the voices of singers. I refer here less to the lyrics being sung, and more to the actual singing. As we know, a human voice in song is capable of expressing an unfathomably complex blend of feelings. Over the years, specific aspects of my writing have been influenced by, among others, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Emmylou Harris, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen, Gillian Welch and my friend and collaborator Stacey Kent. Catching something in their voices, I’ve said to myself: ‘Ah yes, that’s it. That’s what I need to capture in that scene. Something very close to that.’ Often it’s an emotion I can’t quite put into words, but there it is, in the singer’s voice, and now I’ve been given something to aim for.
*
In October 1999 I was invited by the German poet Christoph Heubner on behalf of the International Auschwitz Committee to spend a few days visiting the former concentration camp. My accommodation was at the Auschwitz Youth Meeting Centre on the road between the first Auschwitz camp and the Birkenau death camp two miles away. I was shown around these sites and met, informally, three survivors. I felt I’d come close, geographically at least, to the heart of the dark force under whose shadow my generation had grown up. At Birkenau, on a wet afternoon, I stood before the rubbled remains of the gas chambers – now strangely neglected and unattended – left much as the Germans had left them after blowing them up and fleeing the Red Army. They were now just damp, broken slabs, exposed to the harsh Polish climate, deteriorating year by year. My hosts talked about their dilemma. Should these remains be protected? Should perspex domes be built to cover them over, to preserve them for the eyes of succeeding generations? Or should they be allowed, slowly and naturally, to rot away to nothing? It seemed to me a powerful metaphor for a larger dilemma. How were such memories to be preserved? Would the glass domes transform these relics of evil and suffering into tame museum exhibits? What should we choose to remember? When is it better to forget and move on?

I was 44 years old. Until then I’d considered the Second World War, its horrors and its triumphs, as belonging to my parents’ generation. But now it occurred to me that before too long, many who had witnessed those huge events at first hand would not be alive. And what then? Did the burden of remembering fall to my own generation? We hadn’t experienced the war years, but we’d at least been brought up by parents whose lives had been indelibly shaped by them. Did I, now, as a public teller of stories, have a duty I’d hitherto been unaware of? A duty to pass on, as best I could, these memories and lessons from our parents’ generation to the one after our own?

A little while later, I was speaking before an audience in Tokyo, and a questioner from the floor asked, as is common, what I might work on next. More specifically, the questioner pointed out that my books had often concerned individuals who’d lived through times of great social and political upheaval, and who then looked back over their lives and struggled to come to terms with their darker, more shameful memories. Would my future books, she asked, continue to cover a similar territory?

I found myself giving a quite unprepared answer. Yes, I said, I’d often written about such individuals struggling between forgetting and remembering. But in the future, what I really wished to do was to write a story about how a nation or a community faced these same questions. Does a nation remember and forget in much the same way as an individual does? Or are there important differences? What exactly are the memories of a nation? Where are they kept? How are they shaped and controlled? Are there times when forgetting is the only way to stop cycles of violence, or to stop a society disintegrating into chaos or war? On the other hand, can stable, free nations really be built on foundations of wilful amnesia and frustrated justice? I heard myself telling the questioner that I wanted to find a way to write about these things, but that for the moment, unfortunately, I couldn’t think how I’d do it.

*
One evening in early 2001, in the darkened front room of our house in North London (where we were by then living), Lorna and I began to watch, on a reasonable quality VHS tape, a 1934 Howard Hawks film called Twentieth Century. The film’s title, we soon discovered, referred not to the century we’d then just left behind, but to a famous luxury train of the era connecting New York and Chicago. As some of you will know, the film is a fast-paced comedy, set largely on the train, concerning a Broadway producer who, with increasing desperation, tries to prevent his leading actress going to Hollywood to become a movie star. The film is built around a huge comic performance by John Barrymore, one of the great actors of his day. His facial expressions, his gestures, almost every line he utters come layered with ironies, contradictions, the grotesqueries of a man drowning in egocentricity and self-dramatisation. It is in many ways a brilliant performance. Yet, as the film continued to unfold, I found myself curiously uninvolved. This puzzled me at first. I usually liked Barrymore, and was a big enthusiast for Howard Hawks’s other films from this period – such as His Girl Friday and Only Angels Have Wings. Then, around the film’s one hour mark, a simple, striking idea came into my head. The reason why so many vivid, undeniably convincing characters in novels, films and plays so often failed to touch me was because these characters didn’t connect to any of the other characters in an interesting human relationship. And immediately, this next thought came regarding my own work: What if I stopped worrying about my characters and worried instead about my relationships?

As the train rattled farther west and John Barrymore became ever more hysterical, I thought about E.M. Forster’s famous distinction between three-dimensional and two-dimensional characters. A character in a story became three-dimensional, he’d said, by virtue of the fact that they ‘surprised us convincingly’. It was in so doing they became ’rounded’. But what, I now wondered, if a character was three-dimensional, while all his or her relationships were not? Elsewhere in that same lecture series, Forster had used a humorous image, of extracting the storyline out of a novel with a pair of forceps and holding it up, like a wriggling worm, for examination under the light. Couldn’t I perform a similar exercise and hold up to the light the various relationships that criss-cross any story? Could I do this with my own work – to stories I’d completed and ones I was planning? I could look at, say, this mentor-pupil relationship. Does it say something insightful and fresh? Or now that I was staring at it, does it become obvious it’s a tired stereotype, identical to those found in hundreds of mediocre stories? Or this relationship between two competitive friends: is it dynamic? Does it have emotional resonance? Does it evolve? Does it surprise convincingly? Is it three-dimensional? I suddenly felt I understood better why in the past various aspects of my work had failed, despite my applying desperate remedies. The thought came to me – as I continued to stare at John Barrymore – that all good stories, never mind how radical or traditional their mode of telling, had to contain relationships that are important to us; that move us, amuse us, anger us, surprise us. Perhaps in future, if I attended more to my relationships, my characters would take care of themselves.
It occurs to me as I say this that I might be making a point here that has always been plainly obvious to you. But all I can say is that it was an idea that came to me surprisingly late in my writing life, and I see it now as a turning point, comparable with the others I’ve been describing to you today. From then on, I began to build my stories in a different way. When writing my novel Never Let Me Go, for instance, I set off from the start by thinking about its central relationships triangle, and then the other relationships that fanned out from it.
*
Important turning points in a writer’s career – perhaps in many kinds of career – are like these. Often, they are small, scruffy moments. They are quiet, private sparks of revelation. They don’t come often, and when they do, they may well come without fanfare, unendorsed by mentors or colleagues. They must often compete for attention with louder, seemingly more urgent demands. Sometimes what they reveal may go against the grain of prevailing wisdom. But when they come, it’s important to be able to recognise them for what they are. Or they’ll slip through your hands.

I’ve been emphasising here the small and the private, because essentially that’s what my work is about. One person writing in a quiet room, trying to connect with another person, reading in another quiet – or maybe not so quiet – room. Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large glamorous industries around stories; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?
*
So we come to the present. I woke up recently to the realisation I’d been living for some years in a bubble. That I’d failed to notice the frustration and anxieties of many people around me. I realised that my world – a civilised, stimulating place filled with ironic, liberal-minded people – was in fact much smaller than I’d ever imagined. 2016, a year of surprising – and for me depressing – political events in Europe and in America, and of sickening acts of terrorism all around the globe, forced me to acknowledge that the unstoppable advance of liberal-humanist values I’d taken for granted since childhood may have been an illusion.

I’m part of a generation inclined to optimism, and why not? We watched our elders successfully transform Europe from a place of totalitarian regimes, genocide and historically unprecedented carnage to a much-envied region of liberal democracies living in near-borderless friendship. We watched the old colonial empires crumble around the world together with the reprehensible assumptions that underpinned them. We saw significant progress in feminism, gay rights and the battles on several fronts against racism. We grew up against a backdrop of the great clash – ideological and military – between capitalism and communism, and witnessed what many of us believed to be a happy conclusion.

But now, looking back, the era since the fall of the Berlin Wall seems like one of complacency, of opportunities lost. Enormous inequalities – of wealth and opportunity – have been allowed to grow, between nations and within nations. In particular, the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the long years of austerity policies imposed on ordinary people following the scandalous economic crash of 2008, have brought us to a present in which Far Right ideologies and tribal nationalisms proliferate. Racism, in its traditional forms and in its modernised, better-marketed versions, is once again on the rise, stirring beneath our civilised streets like a buried monster awakening. For the moment we seem to lack any progressive cause to unite us. Instead, even in the wealthy democracies of the West, we’re fracturing into rival camps from which to compete bitterly for resources or power.

And around the corner – or have we already turned this corner? – lie the challenges posed by stunning breakthroughs in science, technology and medicine. New genetic technologies – such as the gene-editing technique CRISPR – and advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics will bring us amazing, life-saving benefits, but may also create savage meritocracies that resemble apartheid, and massive unemployment, including to those in the current professional elites.

So here I am, a man in my sixties, rubbing my eyes and trying to discern the outlines, out there in the mist, to this world I didn’t suspect even existed until yesterday. Can I, a tired author, from an intellectually tired generation, now find the energy to look at this unfamiliar place? Do I have something left that might help to provide perspective, to bring emotional layers to the arguments, fights and wars that will come as societies struggle to adjust to huge changes?

I’ll have to carry on and do the best I can. Because I still believe that literature is important, and will be particularly so as we cross this difficult terrain. But I’ll be looking to the writers from the younger generations to inspire and lead us. This is their era, and they will have the knowledge and instinct about it that I will lack. In the worlds of books, cinema, TV and theatre I see today adventurous, exciting talents: women and men in their forties, thirties and twenties. So I am optimistic. Why shouldn’t I be?

But let me finish by making an appeal – if you like, my Nobel appeal! It’s hard to put the whole world to rights, but let us at least think about how we can prepare our own small corner of it, this corner of ‘literature’, where we read, write, publish, recommend, denounce and give awards to books. If we are to play an important role in this uncertain future, if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse. I mean this in two particular senses.

Firstly, we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities. Second: we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them. In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers. We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision, around which to rally.

To the Swedish Academy, the Nobel Foundation, and to the people of Sweden who down the years have made the Nobel Prize a shining symbol for the good we human beings strive for – I give my thanks.

 

 

In case you are not familiar with Kazuo Ishiguro…

 

###################################

List of speeches in books. This is the Water, David Foster Wallace, Literature is Freedom Susan Sontag,

Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness  by George Saunders, You Are Not Special: … And Other Encouragements
by David McCullough JR  (originally a speech, expanded into larger book)

https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/?id=2731&view=2  The announcment is made in five languages, kind of impressive

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2017/ishiguro-lecture_en.html speech text

Kazuo Ishiguro (Lannan Literary Video Series) VHS VIDEO  Kazuo Ishiguro  , Pico Iyer  , Dan Griggsc(1990 video)

743

By George…

George Saunders circa 2013 (photo: Robert Birtnbaum)

Actually, as we said in the  Chicago of my youth, I could give two shits about awards, literary or otherwise.  However, when someone like George Saunders is the recipient, attention must be paid…

It has been one of the joys of my long post-graduate career to have spoken with George at least three times**  Not to mention the great pleasures derived from reading his writings and other of his creative activities. In case it has escaped your attention, the commencement speech delivered by fiction writers is a burgeoning literary genre. Here Saunders declaims at Syracuse University in 2013:

 

 

 

 

Which was subsequently published as a  chapbook  (as was David Foster Wallace’s This is Water) and  spawned  an animated adaptation…***

 

 

George Saunders and my pooch Rosie  circa 2006 (photo: Robert Birnbaum)

 

From my chat with George (2006)

RB: The last Batman was a rated as a kid’s movie. My son was terribly upset at the shooting scene of Batman’s parents.

GS: Right.

RB: We walked out. Was that supposed to be okay? Not to mention that there are Army commercials with the coming attractions for kids’ movies. Maybe that is the culmination of Neil Postman’s ideas in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “And now, this just in…”

GS: I see it in my own very limited brain. I can’t really do two things at once. In my view the whole O.J. and Monica thing was a kind of prep—a stupidity prep. And we said, “Oh, that’s important? It’s interesting? I can really lower myself to worry about the sperm-covered dress and not have to stop myself and I can actually pretend that’s serious cultural stuff?” All right, so then you lower yourself into that vat. And then 9/11 comes. And we are totally ready to be fed this bullshit and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. So a lot of that stuff was coming out in this book. And some of the reviews are, “Oh, it’s a poke at advertising.” Which to me—that’s not enough. Something about this idea that you said—you can’t wallow in shit and then come out smelling clean. I think culturally we somehow stupified [or stupidized] ourselves and now we are paying the price.

RB: The ubiquity of marketing is the most obvious thing. Consumerism seems to be a [government-sanctioned] religion.

GS: That’s right. We are of the same generation, and I remember thinking if we could just get rid of this religious stupidity, our wonderful humanist nature would rise up. And that didn’t happen. What happened was our materialist nature rises up.

 

 

 

George Saunders,  circa 2013 (photo: Robert Birnbaum)

 

From another conversation…

RB: Is there a clear relationship between the writing and your personality as you move around in the world? You have been writing 20 years and you have been doing it in a certain way to refine certain things that you want to communicate, so are you a different person because of your writing?

GS: Yes, yes. What happens is that the things that get brought forth when you are working in a story then become things that you can drape your personality around in a certain way. But you knew that this was a tendency in yourself—having written it, then, it’s concrete and you can jump to that next level.

RB: It’s like saying, “I didn’t know I thought that.”

GS: Exactly and when I was younger I thought it was the other way around. I thought you had to figure out who you were and then type it.

 

 

 

RB: [laughs]

GS: Now it feels much more like you don’t know who you are until you have worked—and it’s not even—it happens for me over a course of months. You finish something and then you go—and even then it’s not the intellectual part, it’s the visceral part. You have made this thing. Like I just had this “CommComm” story in the New Yorker; through the long process of working on that, I figured out something about how I want to proceed with my life from here. Just a small, I couldn’t express it, a small thing. I kind of knew it before but having written the story there is no looking back. So the process of having the subconscious purify that—

RB: I don’t think I have heard anyone say that—that is, to talk about the intimacy of their own thinking process affecting their life decisions—they always seem so separate.

GS: It is discrete but then I noticed—well, for me it has to do—it never happened when I was young and I wrote a story quick. But as I get older and I am taking longer and longer, I have a feeling that the subconscious mind is sort of forming itself behind the story that you are working on in some way. And if you go slow enough it overtakes the story at the end and that’s that epiphanic thing that people talk about. And then for me that’s nice that happens—

I always think if you write a story about a clown being decapitated, it doesn’t mean that you have anything against clowns.

 

 

“best book of the year.” Feb 2013

 

RB: You wrote the “best book of the year.”

GS: Yeah so far. But it’s only one month in.

RB: I can’t decide whether you were a victim or a beneficiary of two pieces of press earlier this year. There was the New York Times, which asserted that your book was the “best book of the year.” And the other was a piece at Identity Theory opining that you are now repeating yourself.

GS: No I’m not. No I’m not. No I’m not. I don’t know that piece.

RB: (laughs) I didn’t read it—if had read it I wouldn’t have had time to read something else. I read the Times piece and it didn’t read like a review. It read like a press release.

GS: That was in the magazine. It wasn’t really a review as such.

RB: Oh right. It was a profile.

GS: It had a different slant.

RB: And then your publisher took out a full page ad in the Times citing that “best book of the year” quote, reminiscent of movie reviewers who write reviews with lines they hope will be quoted in ads.

GS: Sure.

RB: That was a big expenditure for a short story collection.

GS: Yeah, yeah, I though the whole thing was—

RB:—crazy?

GS: Fun. At 54, at a certain point in your career it’s just nice to see action. It’s more interesting to have something energized happening than not. I kind of think, “Whatever, whatever happens” and—

RB: From where I sit the world of books, literature, and publishing, I think of you as being significant and important. But maybe from where you sit, teaching at a university in the middle of New York state plowing away at your work, you don’t think of yourself as being significant and/or important.

GS: No. Most of the time you are writing, writing the next thing. Or teaching, so it doesn’t seem…maybe if we’d had talked a year ago, before this book came out, I would have said something like “I don’t have a huge audience.” I wonder why not. I wonder if it is—

RB: (laughs)

GS: No, really. Is it something I’m doing wrong—?

 

 

Saunders 1st novel and awarded Booker Prize 2017

Hari Kunzru does Saunders’s novel justice…

Since the days of the beats, the Bardo Thodol has been known in the west as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. A more accurate if less catchy title is “Great Liberation on Hearing in the Intermediate State”. Waking life, dreams, meditation and in particular the period between death and rebirth are all “bardos”, states of consciousness sandwiched between other states of consciousness. We are always in transition, from dreams to wakefulness, from life to death. When someone dies, Tibetan Buddhists believe that they enter the bardo of the time of death, in which they will either ascend towards nirvana, and be able to escape the cycle of action and suffering that characterises human life on earth, or gradually fall back, through increasingly wild and scary hallucinations, until they are born again into a new body. The Bardo Thodol is intended to be read to them during this journey, an instruction manual to assist them on their way.

George Saunders has long been accepted as one of the masters of the American short story. In this, his first novel, the Lincoln trapped in the bardo is Willie, the cherished 11-year-old son of the great civil war president. As his parents host a lavish state reception, their boy is upstairs in the throes of typhoid fever. Saunders quotes contemporary observers on the magnificence of the feast, trailing the terrible family tragedy that is unfolding. Sure enough, Willie dies and is taken to Oak Hill cemetery, where he is interred in a marble crypt. On at least two occasions – and this is the germ of historical fact from which Saunders has spun his extraordinary story – the president visits the crypt at night, where he sits over the body and mourns…

 

 

George & George and Rosie (photo Robert Birnbaum)

##########################

 

  * Everything you ever wanted to Know  about the Booker Prize

**  Interview # 2 with George Saunders   Interview # 1 with George Saunders    Interview # 3  with George Saunders

***     An animated adaptation of  Saunder’s 2013 commencement speech

****   Hari Kunzru  0n Lincoln in Bardo

Who Done Talked That Talk?

 

 

 

statute of great public speaker ,Demosthenes

Somewhere in the ever expanding 24/7, selfie festooned, public sphere, the  art of  declamation has receded.  And so  it seems the only dependable source of memorable oratory is the annual college commencement ceremony festival .The adulation greeting the the First Lady following her oration at the the Democratic Party’s party apparently sparked a latent  and normally unrequited need for intelligent and well spoken  public speeches. So rarely are we treated to such a thing that her excitable auditors were called for her beatification. I stand behind no one in my respect and appreciation for the formidable Michelle Obama and the first time I heard her say (2016 CCNY  commencement) ,

.I wake up every morning in a house that slaves built

I was stunned.

Speaking of the paucity of memorable oratory David Foster Wallace’s (Infinite Jest) 2004 Kenyon College valedictory set a high bench mark for a sincere smart resonant original

 

 …By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home-you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register

…I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness-awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

 

 

Novelist and MacArthur  fellow George Saunders* made his own standout contribution to this growing literary genre at Syracuse in 2013:

 

Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you).

And I intend to respect that tradition.

Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you….

Poet /memoirist Mary Karr** begins her 2016 Syracuse declamation:

 My goal in high school was to stay out of the penitentiary, so if I can go from there to here, you guys can all be gainfully employed. Yeah, your parents are clapping.

Heartfelt thanks to Chancellor Syverud and the whole Syracuse community, especially our students and their families. You’re all 18 minutes away from my shutting up.

When I told my pal I was getting an honorary doctorate he quipped, ‘Being a doctor who can’t write prescriptions is like being a general in the Salvation Army.’ This made me a few notches less terrified about today.

You start in a scared place and get zip lined somewhere truer.

And some twenty minutes later  concludes

…Also, Walt took me to lunch all the time, which then seemed like an incredible luxury to be able to eat in a restaurant. And before I left Minnesota I said to him, how will I ever pay you back for all this?

And he looked surprised. He said, it’s not that linear. You’re not going to pay me back, you’re going to go out there and take somebody else to lunch.

Now, the idea that Walt thought, looking at me at 19 years old, that I would ever make enough money to buy somebody else lunch astonished me.

It is truly the greatest vote of confidence I’d ever received. Walt showed me that a talent for fear could also mask a talent for empathy. For caring about what other people thought.

I hope you remember what Walt says when the world scares you with its barks and bites. May you leave us more curious and more open hearted about your fellow citizens than when you showed up.

Being smart and rich are lucky. But being curious and compassionate will save your ass.

Being curious and compassionate will take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder, a word I inadvertently stole from Chancellor Syverud today.

Now you go out there and buy somebody broker than you lunch.

Thank you.”

 

And  not least, is Richard Russo ***(Nobody’s Fool, Empire Falls) whose 2004 address at Colby College included the  joyful wisdom that propel his novels

…The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life? Well, here are Russo’s Rules For A Good Life. Notice that I don’t say “for a happy life.” One of the reasons the novelist Graham Greene despised Americans was that phrase “the pursuit of happiness,” which we hold so dear and which ensured, to his way of thinking, we’d always be an infantile nation. Better to live a good life, he believed, than a happy one. Happily, the two may not always be mutually exclusive. Keep in mind that Russo’s Rules for a Good Life are specifically designed to be jettisoned without regret when they don’t work. They’ve worked for me. Your mileage may vary.

Rule # 1: Search out the kind of work that you would gladly do for free and then get somebody to pay you for it…

Rule # 2: Find a loving mate to share what life has in store, because the world can be a lonely place, and people who aren’t lonely don’t want to hear about it if you are….

Rule # 3: have children… Don’t worry that you can’t afford them, though it’s true, you can’t…

Rule # 4. If you have one, nurture your sense of humor. You’re going to need it, because, as Bob Dylan has observed, “people are crazy, the times are strange.” …

Okay, that’s pretty much it. It’s all I know, and then some. Four simple, deeply flawed rules to live by. Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don’t drink so much. There aren’t going to be enough liver transplants to go around.

Good luck!

#####

 *     My last conversation with George Saunders

**   Me and Mary Karr chew the fat

*** One of 5 or 6 conversations I have had with Rick Russo

Talking with Mary Karr

Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria,

… Everybody dies, everybody loves, and fails to love, and loves in the wrong way, the wrong person at the wrong time. There’s enough loss in any life for all of Shakespeare…Mary Karr

Some two decades I was delighted to read Mary Karr’s literary debut, Liars Club, so named after her raconteur father’s group of story-telling friends. And I did sit down and converse with her about her East Texas life and upbringing and matters to do with writing a book about a “terrific family of liars and drunks … redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth.” A number of poetry collections and two memoirs — Lit:A Memoir and Cherry:A Memoir—later, Ms Karr has recently published, The Art of Memoir.

As it happens I was able to catch up with poet and Syracuse mentor Karr recently, for a pleasant and digressive chat on, of course, writing memoirs, her recent turn to music , the proposed film treatment of her initial memoir, Liar’s Club, her mother and her wide ranging experiences including coaching Little League baseball.

Here is a snippet from her Mary Karr Thinks You Shouldn’t Google Yourselfher recent interview with Ann- Marie Cox

You are friends with a lot of today’s memoirists. Have you ever appeared in another person’s memoir?

Oh, I’ve appeared in all kinds of [expletive].

What’s that experience like for you?

Well, obviously, I would like my every portrait to be of me dispensing food to the poor. Believe it or not, I’m actually not that interested in representation of myself in other people’s writing. I’ve also never Googled myself. It wouldn’t occur to me to do so. It’s the same reason I don’t watch pornography. It’s not that I occupy some moral high ground. I just think: Down that road lies madness.

As someone who reveals so much, is there a time that an interviewer has gone too far with you?

Oh, yeah, but I have no problem saying, ‘‘I’m not going to discuss that.’’ I would never talk about anybody’s penis. You can ask me about my relationship with David Wallace all you like; I’m not going to talk about his penis.

That’s one of the least interesting things about any man, really.

If only they knew that.

Mary Karr: I was just on with Terry Gross. She’s really a good interviewer, I’ve got to say. You never know what she’s going to ask you. She always makes me think… You don’t know—you probably do know, but when you go out on the road now, the people who used to interview you were book people, you know? Michael Silverblatt,[The Book Worm at KCRW](1) or somebody like that. Real bookworms. Now you get some chirpy, twenty-five-year-old who says, “What would your ad for your book be?” I’m like, “Well, I wouldn’t write an ad for my book.”

Robert Birnbaum: There’s a hilarious book trailer for Alan Arkin,(2) the actor, who has also written a couple of memoirs. It opens up with him laying in a hotel room bed ,it’s 6:00 … the phone rings, he fumbles for the phone, picks up the phone. It’s a guy from the radio station, wants to do an interview, which Arkin hadn’t even known about. ..the radio guy proceeds to ask questions that make clear he doesn’t know who Arkin is or that he has even looked at the book…

Mary Karr: …The way I look at it, these people are doing you a favor. You’re always responsible for ponying up.

Robert Birnbaum:That’s very nice. You’re never put off by somebody’s ignorance?

Mary Karr: No, I don’t mind people who haven’t read the book.Somebody like that is just stupid, actively stupid. You don’t have to have read The Art of Memoir to have three or four questions about memoir. How do you deal with your family? Those are normal questions— a normal person would want to know the answer to those questions. [It’s]Just a total absence of curiosity. It’s hard to be an interviewer when you’re not curious.

Robert Birnbaum: A propos of nothing, where is Mark Costello today [David Foster Wallace’s best friend](3)?

Mary Karr:He lives in New York City, he’s married to somebody I fixed him up on a blind date with, Nan Graham, who’s a big editor at Scribner. They’ve got two kids. I fixed him up on a blind date like twenty years ago.

Robert Birnbaum: I see. Because I talked to him in 2002 and he had published a novel and hadn’t heard of him since.

Mary Karr:Yeah,Big If, which is a terrific book. I think he teaches at Fordham Law School.

Robert Birnbaum: Has he written or published anything since?

Mary Karr: He’s finishing a novel now. I mean, he’s the dad of two kids and he teaches full-time, and his wife is high-powered enough that he gets a lot of the kid duties. I love Mark. One of the great human beings.

Mary Karr [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Robert Birnbaum: When you write a book called the Art of Memoir, who are you thinking will want to read it?

Mary Karr: You know, it’s funny, people think of it as a how-to book, but the how-to stuff is kind of peppered in. I want to say maybe eighteen percent of it is how-to, maybe eighteen percent of it is a memoir about writing memoir, because people do ask me, “How did your family react?” Anybody with a family imagines how you deal with your beloveds, you know? But I think it is also, in a way, for anybody with an inner life, anybody who ponders how what’s happened to them is affecting how they see the world. Trying to determine what’s true and what isn’t true and what’s real and what’s not real in the course of your day. I have a big inner life and I am always … my tendency is to project onto the landscape what I want to see. I’m like an all-giving loving saint and everybody else is an asshole, but …

Robert Birnbaum: Do you know of the old Jew, Philo of Alexandria? Have you heard of him?

Mary Karr: No, I mean I know the name. He had the library, right?

Robert Birnbaum: I came across a quote of his, and I thought it was a very Dalai Lama like, “Be kind to everyone you meet, because everyone in life is going through a great battle.”

Mary Karr: That’s exactly right.

Robert Birnbaum:I thought of that when I was reading the latter part of your speech at Syracuse,(4) which, by the way, I think an excellent speech. I think some commencement speeches are a new literary genre. There’s are some great commencement speeches by writers, by novelists and writers.

Mary Karr:Steve Jobs also did a great one. I think.

Robert Birnbaum: I was focusing at writers. I put Aaron Sorkin in that group…

Mary Karr: He was also at Syracuse. He gave a really good speech.

Robert Birnbaum:I started noticing with the David Foster Wallace/Kenyon College speech, and then I started seeing others. George Saunders.(6)

Mary Karr:George Saunders’ speech—to me, that’s the pinnacle. That’s as good a commencement speech as I’ve ever heard.

Robert Birnbaum:In the first three lines of yours you said something like, “Memoir takes you from a scary place, it’s a zip line to a truer place,”

Mary Karr:Poetry. Not memoir but poetry. That poetry hopefully takes you to a truer place. I mean, all art should, right? Any art should take you somewhere truer.

Robert Birnbaum: Your speech can stand alone…it’s the kind of piece that would be included in David Shields’s anthology, Fakes.(7) All these odds and ends— a letter from George Saunders, customer relations department. All these odd writings, somebody’s laundry list, you know? But they all seem to become literary, you know?

Fakes edited by David Shelds

Mary Karr:That’s very funny. That’s a great … And David Shields edited it?

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah, Here’s the thing, I’m not inclined to read memoirs. I’m not hungry for them. I read yours, but it turns out if you wrote an instruction manual on how to assemble a tricycle, I be inclined to read it…

Mary Karr:That’s so nice. I’m not much of a writer, but I’m a dogged little re-writer. Everything I have written is about as good as I can make it.

Robert Birnbaum:I gave particular credence to your first chapter and your last chapter, so I hear you.

Mary Karr:Don’t you wish more people rewrote?

Robert Birnbaum: One forgives people for their infelicitous writing.

Mary Karr:Sure, of course, you’ve got to. I mean, journalists or people writing on a deadline, that’s a different kind of writing.

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Robert Birnbaum: What’s the difference between autobiography and memoir?

Mary Karr:Everybody makes that distinction, I don’t. I don’t think there is a distinction. I think they’re the same thing. I think there are good memoirs and bad memoirs. I think when they think of a one-off, I think the way it’s used when people make the distinction, is when it’s some film star with fake boobs tells her tale of woe. They think of that as an autobiography, and then they think of somebody who does a literary thing as a memoir. But that’s just using a French word for … I think they’re the same thing. There’s just good ones and bad ones.

Robert Birnbaum:Yeah. I hesitate to make the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, although I know there’s a hard line. I say this is because, I think Gore Vidal’s Empire series is as good a history of the United States as any.

Mary Karr: Really funny.
.
Robert Birnbaum: So, do you want to read David Herbert Donald or other biographers on Lincoln? Or do you want to read Gore Vidal’s Lincoln?

Mary Karr: Yeah, it’s true. I’ve read a lot of books on Lincoln. I love reading about Lincoln.

Robert Birnbaum:I was thinking, besides Jesus Christ, I think Lincoln has the second most amount of books written about him. How many memoirs do you have in you?

Mary Karr:Exactly. I don’t know. Maybe I have as many books as there are advances publishers are dumb enough to give me. All those books, after The Liar’s Club, I wrote the proposal for that book, but every other book, including this one, I wrote because somebody called and offered me money for them.

Robert Birnbaum: Good for you.

Mary Karr: That’s not a bad reason to write a book.

Robert Birnbaum:That’s also pretty flattering.

Mary Karr:Yeah, exactly.

Robert Birnbaum:That does remove a little bit of the anxiety about whether or not the publisher is going to support the book once they publish it.

Mary Karr: Right, that’s true. If you can gouge them for enough money, then maybe they’ll try to do it. Yeah, but then your editor leaves and other people have other problems, so …

Robert Birnbaum: Do you have much contact with the publishing world, and the business of books? When you have completed and delivered the book, while you’re writing the book, do you have contact?

Mary Karr:I have a wonderful editor, and certainly for this book, she really helped me think about how to shape it and put it together.

Robert Birnbaum:So it wasn’t you wrote the book and presented it to her, you start crying and saying, “Shit, shit, shit, fuck, shit,” and then you call her.

Mary Karr:Right. With this book. Well, I say, “Shit, shit, fuck, shit,” for every book.

Robert Birnbaum: I gathered that.

Mary Karr: Every book is like that. I’m always in a state of torment. She and I basically did a bunch of outlines back and forth over about a four month period. I would work on one and then send it to her, and then she really helped me, the outline that she gave me isn’t how the book ended up, but George Saunders actually helped me a lot, to structure The Art of Memoir.

Robert Birnbaum: One of the things I thought about in reading your,what might be construed as a manual sort of, is that you are suggesting that everyone may have a memoir in them, but not necessarily a book.

Mary Karr:I think, I really believe, as I say in the book, that the most privileged person in any room, as I said in that speech, suffers the torments of the damned. Just like you said, they’re engaged in a great struggle. Everybody dies, everybody loves, and fails to love, and loves in the wrong way, the wrong person at the wrong time. There’s enough loss in any life for all of Shakespeare. Not everybody is going to be a good enough writer to write a great one, but I think certainly in terms of … I think I said I’m always amazed when I’m on an airplane, yes, by the people who you meet who are boring, but also by boring people who you meet who become interesting when they talk with great feeling. Do you know what I mean?

Robert Birnbaum:You never know. I agree with your notion of truth, that there is something, there is a truth that makes everyone, when someone encounters something they think is true, it really does refresh one with great energy. It’s a good place to land.

Mary Karr: Right.

Robert Birnbaum:It may be sort of counter intuitive to the way human beings are constructed. My judgment about, my sense of human behavior is that many people are continuously running away from the truth or pursuit of truths?

Mary Karr: Well, let’s say all of us are running away from the truth. The fact that we’re all going to die, and we’re not all screaming every second of day, is running away from the truth in a way. I think we all are.

Robert Birnbaum: How old are you?

Mary Karr:Sixty.

Robert Birnbaum: Do you find yourself thinking about aging? Will that be the next memoir?

Mary Karr: People keep asking me—Terry Gross just asked me this, two smart people. I don’t know, I don’t have any plans. I don’t know, I’m trying to finish a book of poems.

Robert Birnbaum: Do you think a lot about it?

Mary Karr: More so since I turned sixty. I never really, I thought about it as anybody does, but …I’m not in the middle of anything. When you’re sixty you’re not going to live to be 120, so you can’t bullshit yourself.

Robert Birnbaum: Sixty is the new forty.

Mary Karr:You might live to be eighty, but you’re not going to live to be 120, so it becomes a different thing when you can’t double it, when you don’t have that much left. You’re definitely on the losing end of it. I play all kind of games with myself where I say, “I sort of became a person when I was thirty, so I probably don’t have another thirty years left in me, but maybe I have another twenty.” You know what I mean?

Robert Birnbaum:Yeah. Joseph Epstein, wrote a piece when he was seventy,(8) talking about, it was a take-off on film producer Robert Evans’s memoir/autobiography The Kid Stays in The Picture . Epstein’s was called The Kid Turned Seventy. He said every time he has a birthday he just wants ten more years. It seems like a reasonable figure to ask for.

Mary Karr:I think that’s the way I feel. Instead of people thinking I want another fifty years, I do think if I could just make it to seventy I will have accomplished something.

Mary Karr: How old are you?

Robert Birnbaum: 68—two thirds of a century.

Mary Karr: Do you think about it?

Robert Birnbaum: Yes. I don’t feel my age at all, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I see people who are younger who are in terrible shape. Can hardly walk, have blank facial expressions and flat affects… I do a lot of stuff,umpire little league, work the sticks at home high school football games, walk my dog regularly..

Mary Karr: What a great thing to do. I bet that’s a great thing to do. I coached little league, and I always said it was one of the great spiritual experiences of my life. It was really one of the funniest things I ever did in my life.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah. Being around ten-year-olds on a regular basis. Plus, I get to push them around.

Mary Karr:Yeah, exactly.

Robert Birnbaum: I have a lot of fun doing that, but it’s hard to be a good umpire.

Mary Karr: It’s hard to know what’s true.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s a test, you know? A 68-year-old guy who can still bend down over 100 times in two hours and remember things from instant to instant while attending to countless other things …

Mary Karr:It’s testing your short-term memory all the time, which is deteriorating.

Robert Birnbaum:I don’t know what your worst fears is, but one of my worst fears is losing my sentience.

Mary Karr: Your marbles?

Robert Birnbaum:Yeah, and even my memory, you know?

Mary Karr:I remember stuff so well, I kind of aspire to it. I have way too good a memory. I wish I could forget more. I’m better at it now.

Robert Birnbaum:I’m amazed at what I remember. Especially when a smell triggers something.

Mary Karr:That’s the amazing thing, right? It’s the most primitive sense.

Robert Birnbaum:You smell something and you go back forty years.

Mary Karr:It’s in your snake brain. No, it is. It’s like the most primitive part of you, smells.

Robert Birnbaum:I think I’d be willing to say we don’t forget anything. It’s not a question of forgetting. Everything we need to encounter is somewhere there, but the ability to access it.

Mary Karr:Yeah, that’s a problem.

Robert Birnbaum: Right.I’m amazed sometimes at the distinctive, vivid way that I remember stuff.

Mary Karr:Oh yeah. And especially the further back the more vivid often, right?

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah, yeah.

Mary Karr: I know, me too.

Robert Birnbaum: How much do you still recall the life that you talked about in The Liar’s Club? Is that still vivid to you?

Mary Karr: I think the traumatic memories remain very lucid, because they’re probably stored in another part of the brain, actually. You now how when people who have strokes, they keep all the curse words. You’ll often hear, go in the nursing home, you’ll hear cursing . It’s because those emotions— my daddy, when he had a stroke, if the World at War came on or something, and there was all this World War II stuff, he would say, “Cannons your tank, ” and he couldn’t say yes or no. He would say, “General Montgomery.” He would name, “Luftwaffe.” He could say things from having been in the war. Those memories, he couldn’t say he wanted a cup of juice or not, but I think those things seared in your brain meat from a very emotional time. I always say you remember the most important things to you. Things that are most important to you, to who you are.

Robert Birnbaum: Do people remember their funnest, wonderfullest, most loving moments in their life?

Mary Karr: People unlike us do. Regular people do. We don’t. We remember all the … Every time we were knocked in the dirt. Exactly.

Robert Birnbaum: You mentioned a time in your family when it was somewhat healed ?

Mary Karr:I think we were as healed as we could’ve been without everybody going into therapy. But I mean, I think to the extent that we took care of aging parents and buried people, showed up and did stuff, kids went to graduations, that’s pretty healed for a family like mine.

Robert Birnbaum: It was your mother, father and your sister. Did you count your mother’s husbands?

Mary Karr:No.

Robert Birnbaum: Once they left …

Mary Karr: Gone, that was the end of it.

Robert Birnbaum:How about your mother? Did she maintain memories of past husbands?

Mary Karr: Not that she ever shared. I think they were dismissed by my mother. I think once she divorced she opens that door and…

Robert Birnbaum: She had seven husbands?

Mary Karr: I know, right? Who know how many? There were seven she told us about.

Robert Birnbaum: And you didn’t lose touch with her once you started going to school, moved to Minnesota.

Mary Karr: It’s weird, I still, for much of my life, when I could afford it, I talked to her every day. She was an interesting person.

Robert Birnbaum: Sounds like.

Mary Karr: Not a great mother as a mother, but she’s very smart and she was curious. She was extremely curious and could be very charming. She was fun to talk to.

Robert Birnbaum: How is it that your mother and your father met?

Mary Karr:She had a flat tire. Yeah, I think she had a flat tire and he came out to fix it and …

Robert Birnbaum:That was it.

Mary Karr: That was it.

Robert Birnbaum: Did he charm her, do you think?

Mary Karr:I think they charmed each other. I think they both charmed each other. He was labor organizing then, working class hero. Handsome, kind of Clark Gable-type guy.

Robert Birnbaum: And told good stories.

Mary Karr:Tells good stories. A lot of fun to be with. She was beautiful and wild, I think it was like seeing a great thoroughbred somewhere.

Kin Songs by Mary KArr & Rodney Crowell

Robert Birnbaum: What is your foray into songwriting and recording about, is that a one-time thing (9)?

Mary Karr: No, I have at least one song on Rodney’s Christmas album, and he and I have worked on a couple of other songs. We’re actually meeting tomorrow night to talk … I think we’re going to get together this winter and work on another album.

Robert Birnbaum: Where do you do it, in Syracuse?

Mary Karr:No, no. He’s in Nashville. We mostly met on the road though. He and I were both on the road, and so I’d be in Berkeley, he’d be in San Francisco, we’d meet. Or I’d be in LA, he’d be in Orange County, we’d meet in some hotel. Or I would go stay with him and his wife down in Nashville, or he would come to New York a lot, quite a bit. So wherever we were, found ourselves, we’d work on the side. We did a lot on the phone too.He would call me and send a recording of a guitar thing, and then I’d call him back, and we’d go back and forth and then we’d arrange to meet.

Robert Birnbaum: Who do you like singing your songs?

Mary Karr: I had so many great people sing my songs. I’ll be honest with you, there’s nobody who did a shitty job. There’s really nobody who did a shitty job. I mean, I think Norah Jones and Lucinda Williams, and Emmylou Harris, and Vince Gill, Kris Kristopherson, Rodney, Lee Ann Womack, I mean, it doesn’t get much better, Rosanne Cash. Couldn’t get much better than that lineup.

Robert Birnbaum:That’s true. Does that fuel your interest or urge in writing more songs, doing more music?

Mary Karr:Yeah. I would love to do it. It was really fun. The fun part was going on the road with the band. That was really fun. I did that for a couple of weeks. That was the most fun I ever had.

Robert Birnbaum: How did you do that and stay sober?

Mary Karr: Rodney doesn’t drink.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah, but musicians are known to drink and such. What did you do?

Mary Karr: His musicians he travels with, don’t.

Robert Birnbaum: What’s the fun part of being on the road?

Mary Karr: They call it playing.

Robert Birnbaum: Oh, the playing is the fun part?

Mary Karr: It’s fun, and also you’re traveling. You’re with the band, you’re in a band where the .. He has very smart, interesting musicians play with him. He doesn’t have just anybody. Stuart Smith is a guitar player for the Eagles now. He’s an incredible classically trained guitar player, an incredibly smart human being. He reads everything. His crew … It’s not like being with the drummer from AC/DC. It’s not a lot of booze and girls. It’s a lot of smart people reading books and talking about them. I’m sure it was a lot of booze and girls …and coke [at one time].

Poster from Kinetic Playground Chicago circa 1969

Robert Birnbaum: Well I can tell you about tne music scene because after I graduated college, I worked in one of the first, sort of. psychedelic dungeons[like the Fillmore] in Chicago, it was called the Kinetic Playground, and every big group at that time played there …

Mary Karr: Psychedelic dungeon?

Robert Birnbaum: Uh huh. I took drugs as part of a regular diet of loud music, late nights and mindless sex…

Mary Karr:So did I. But that’s the name of a memoir. Psychedelic Dungeon, that’s a great memoir title.

Robert Birnbaum:The first time that Led Zeppelin played in America, they played there, Santana, everybody… you know.

Mary Karr:Wow, Santana.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah. That was my experience. And then the drugs, of course.

Mary Karr: And then the drugs.

Robert Birnbaum: You weren’t in Plainfield, Vermont (Goddard College) in 71 were you?

Mary Karr: I was in Plainfield, Vermont in ’78.

Robert Birnbaum: I attended the now famous Alternative Media Conference there in ’71 or ’72.(10 It was just outlandish and unfettered and hopeful…

Mary Karr: That’s the way things used to be.

Robert Birnbaum: I had never really taken Goddard seriously. I didn’t get a sense of there there. It seemed so ethereal.

Mary Karr: It was, it was. I still remember Ray Carver, there was a little pond, and there were these women who would go shirtless in their kayak. The pond was from here to the back of the deli, and they would paddle back and forth about thirty yards. It was the strangest thing, with no shirts on. Ray just couldn’t get over it. He called them the Nudie Veggies. That’s what Goddard was like. When you read the list of professors I studied with there, they’re all MacArthur Fellows, you know, Bob Hass, Charlie Simic, it’s nuts … Heather McHugh, they’re all amazing.

Robert Birnbaum: You were lucky in the people that you ran into as a student.

Mary Karr: Unbelievably lucky, unbelievably lucky. Geoffrey and Tobias [Wolff]. Frank Conroy was there. In terms of memoir, that was probably one of the planet’s most interesting conversations about. Three memoirs of that caliber, in one spot, you’d be hard to come by.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah. I never read Stop-Time [by Frank Conroy], but I did feel like his …

Mary Karr:You have to read Stop-Time. It’s so good.

Robert Birnbaum: Okay, okay. I read his novel and I really liked his essays.

Mary Karr: His essays were great.

Robert Birnbaum:The Dogs Bark and the Caravan Rolls On, that kind of thing. Just thought that was spot on.

Mary Karr:I liked it too.

Robert Birnbaum: He interviewed Keith Jarrett, and he asked him how he prepared, and Jarrett says, “I walk out on the stage and I sit down on the piano, and I try to clear my mind of everything. No, I don’t want any notes in my head. I just want to not think about [what I am going to do]. That approach to doing something …

Mary & Rodney Crowell [photo: Debra Feingold]

Mary Karr:Takes some big brass ones. That’s how Rodney is. Rodney is very … I mean, he’s not a jazz musician, but he hates to put together a set list. He’d rather just go out there and play what hits him.

Robert Birnbaum:Has he worked on any movies?

Mary Karr: No, but he just was music director in the new Hank Williams movie.

Robert Birnbaum: What’s the name?

Mary Karr:I can’t remember.

Robert Birnbaum: I think a lot of the narratives in movies and films and TV now are really making good use of the music, not necessarily well known songs. I think of T Bone Burnett’s stuff for True Detectivesor Nick Cave on Peaky Blinders.

Mary Karr: Right, right. I heard T Bone Burnett in Cambridge, I think. I also saw James Brown and the Famous Flames in 1966.

Robert Birnbaum: I saw him at the Regal Theater at about that time.

Mary Karr:That was amazing.

Robert Birnbaum:Yes it was. I think back now, and I think, I was afraid of black people. I don’t know why, because when I went to the Regal Theater, which is all black, me and three other white people, we never had a problem.

Mary Karr:I went with my daddy. We were the only white people there. You qualified yourself by being there, to be there by liking the music. I think that’s … You know what I mean? You had to be a different kind of person to be that into African American music.

Robert Birnbaum:Yeah. Why did I feel any anxiety? Where did all that come from? Who told me that black people were scary … You know?

Mary Karr: Well, it’s the same way, certainly they feel that way about us, with better reason. You know what I mean?

Robert Birnbaum:Yes.

Mary Karr:I can’t believe what happened to the tennis player (James Blake, who was mistakenly and forcibly arrested) in New York. It’s unbelievable.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s actually not unbelievable Ever been asked to write a film treatment?

Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

Mary Karr:Many people have. I’m currently working on Liar’s Club at Showtime with Mary Louise Parker slated.

Robert Birnbaum: What’s your participation?

Mary Karr: Executive producing and writing. I’ve written a pilot, so we’ll see, we’ll see if they do it.

Robert Birnbaum:Yea,there is that.

Mary Karr: There is that.

Robert Birnbaum:Is there a subject or a theme or person that you’d like to create … Is there a biography you’d like to do? Is there one person that you learned about, that you think other people should know about, learn about…have you discovered somebody who’s been undiscovered?

Mary Karr:Oh, in memoir?

Robert Birnbaum:Yeah.

Mary Karr: Maybe Harry Crews, Childhood Biography of a Place. I think Black Boy, the Richard Wright book, isn’t undiscovered, but I think it’s in some ways a better book than Native Son, which I know is scandalous to say, but I think that’s a brilliant memoir.

Robert Birnbaum:I remember reading Richard Wright. I remember things about it very vividly. They were part of my, the images was part of my growing up. I look at it and I go, the Sixties would be such a small window, cultural literacy. How do people know about James Baldwin, who are twenty years ,twenty-five years old?

Mary Karr:I think everybody who reads. Anybody who is a reader.

Robert Birnbaum:That’s only 400,000 people in the world.

Mary Karr:I was going to say, yeah exactly. There’s nobody left.

Robert Birnbaum:I’m assuming that all the memoirs you listed in the back of The Art of Memoir and the people are ones you admire.

Mary Karr:Yeah, I wouldn’t list them if I didn’t.

Robert Birnbaum:Would it be impolitic to ask you what are some memoirs that you think fall short?

Mary Karr:Yeah, I probably wouldn’t say that. We all know what they are. We all know the … Mostly the memoirs of the liars are mostly badly written, even if they had good stories to them. They are mostly pretty bad, pretty shabby written. I mean, a memoir like Black Boy, Richard Wright, you’re not going to forget, Dispatches, Michael Herr’s book, Maxine Hong Kingston Woman Warrior, Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, I mean those are books nobody is going to forget…

Robert Birnbaum:You mentioned Mary McCarthy’s memoir, and I’ve always been fascinated by her, what I know about her, what I’ve read about her. That memoir doesn’t sound very promising…

Mary Karr:Really? She’s so smart, so funny, and so well-written. And it was right at the time when the notion of subjective truth hadn’t really been invented, in a way. She spends a lot of time correcting herself and second-guessing, and you see her idea of truth eroding, over the course of her book.

Robert Birnbaum: I read a piece she wrote for The New York Review of Books, from Saigon in ‘66, when she did a stint in Saigon. I thought it was just brilliant.

Mary Karr:Oh, she’s so brilliant.

Robert Birnbaum:Do you have a routine where you sort of engage the news of the day? Do you read newspapers?

Mary Karr: Just The New York Times, you know. I’m not a big news junkie. In fact, I kind of don’t like the news. I’m much more interested in history. I prefer everybody to sift experience and tell me what’s interesting fifty years later, sadly.

Robert Birnbaum:I’ve come to think that people like Stewart and Colbert and now John Oliver, are the news.

Mary Karr: Well, the people watching it think they are, so yeah.

Robert Birnbaum:. How much time do you have spend talking about this book in the coming months?

Mary Karr:Probably just this week and next week, and then I go back to sitting around in my pajamas, so not so long.

Robert Birnbaum: What’s your schedule at Syracuse? You go there, what, one semester a year?

Mary Karr:I do a fall semester there, yeah. But I also supervise students, often in the spring, so that involves them coming to New York, or me going there.

Robert Birnbaum: I gather you travel a lot, for any number of reasons.

Mary Karr:I do, I do. My gentleman caller is a big traveler. He’s the head of a real estate development firm, and so he builds big buildings all over. But he’s also just an inveterate adventurer. I think I get to Asia more than I would have done with a different gentleman caller.

Robert Birnbaum: Have you read anything good lately?

Mary Karr: Other than the Art of Memoir? Yeah, I just taught Black Boy, I just read that, and I’m teaching Mary McCarthy next week, so I’m reading that.

Robert Birnbaum: You don’t have any particular inclination to read newly, fresh-off-the-press books?

Dear Mr. You by
Mary-Louse Parker

Mary Karr: Sure I do. I mean, sure I do, but not in the middle of teaching. When I’m teaching, I’m reading what I’m teaching. Actually, Mary Louise Parker has a great book called Dear Mr. You that I think is a terrific kind of …Very poetic. She reads a lot of poetry and it shows in the prose, very poetic memoir. Oh, Dana Spiotta has a novel coming out called Innocence and Others.

Robert Birnbaum: Anything else you want to tell me, that you want might to confess to me?

Mary Karr: I’m going to have to take my sins with me when I leave.

Robert Birnbaum: That’s okay. I really wasn’t expecting a confession

Mary Karr: A smooth exit, there we go.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah a smooth segue.

Mary Karr: You can absolve me. Well, happy new year.

Robert Birnbaum: Happy[Jewish] New Year to you. Thanks

Mary Karr: Thank you. Shabat tova…

End Notes

(1) Michel Silverblatt, long time host of LA radios’s Bookworm

(2) Alan Arkin book trailer

(3) Mark Costello Interview at Identitytheory

(4 Commencement speech at Syracuse

(5)George Saunders 2013 Syracuse Commencement speech

(7)David Shields interview at Our Man in Boston

(8) Joseph Epstein The Kid Turns 70 in the Weekly Standard

(9) Kin Recording of songs written by Mary Karr and Rodney Crowell

(10) Alternative Media Conference, 1971

Just Talking: How to Do Things with Words

In the last three decades I have undertaken an open-ended independent post-graduate course of study. Included in my syllabus has been nearly a thousand conversations with people I place under the broad rubric of story tellers. And here I have provided public access to an incomplete list of my notes from my chats, from all across the Internet:

From A (mis) to Z (inn)

Martin Amis [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Martin Amis

Andre Dubus III

Ben Katchor

Tony Earley

W.D.Wetherell

Amy Bloom

Ron Rash

Arthur Bradford

William Giraldi

John Summers

Josh Ritter

Julian Barnes

Adam Gopnik

Ruben Martinez

Chip Kidd

Paul Lussier

Edith Pearlman

Attica Locke

Charles Yu

Jo Nesbo

Alan Gurganus

George Saunders

George Sciallaba

Alan Lightman

Darin Strauss

Manil Suri

Joan Wickersham

Ann Enright

John Sayles

Tony Horwitz

Thisbee Nissen

Jim Harrison

Ben Fountain

Benjamin Anastas

David Shields

Howard Zinn [photo Robert Birnbaum]

Howard Zinn

In Memoriam Rosie (The Dalai Labrador) 1997-2007

Rosie [photo; Robert Birnbaum]

Not Good For the Jews

Jonathan Safron Foer (photo:Robert Birnbaum)

A friend apprised me of New Yorker “20 under 40” annointee Jonathan Safron Foer’s crusade to save literature via a collaboration with corporate fast food dispensary Chipotles. A casual search-engining will bring you numerous citations of this noble campaign, I accessed Vanity Fair:

Jonathan Safran Foer was chowing down at a Chipotle one day, when he realized that without a book or magazine or a smartphone, he had nothing to do while munching on his burrito. “I really just wanted to die with frustration.” Surviving this terminal frustration, he was impelled into action and he contacted Chipotle’s C.E.O.:

“I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn’t have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text,’‘Wouldn’t it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on it? Get really high-quality writers of different kinds, creating texts of different kinds that you just give to your customers as a service?’

Chipotle Cups

Thus was born the bold initiative, Cultivating Thought. The gist of which is that various Chipotles’s containers are festooned with original texts by Foer, Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Michael Lewis,Sara Silverman, Sheri Fink and Judd Apatow.

Now this cutting-edge scheme has garnered some grousing and opprobrium some of which can be traced to Foer’s unerring ability to piss people off. Why a successful, well-meaning young author seems to raise hackles remains a small mystery. Because he’s a graduate of snooty Princeton? A Jewish person? Because he wrote a quasi vegetarian manifesto Eating Animals? Because other than Princeton’s Toni Morrison, there are mostly white boys included in this clique of genre pioneers (this no doubt will be corrected in the near future).

If you want to read further on this kerfluffle

Wall Street Journal

Chipotle’s press release

Bloomberg

Jewcy

Gawker

A Chipotles burrito

I am partial to this note to be found at The Concourse:

So fuck you, Chipotle. Fuck you and your overpriced diarrhea torpedoes and the overly earnest fart-sniffers you hired to pimp them out. Next time, just put a maze on the bag.

¡Orale!

Currently reading Natchez Burning by Greg Ilses (Morrow)

Praise Saps the Strength

West Newton No More 2013
(photo: Robert Birnbaum)

I know some smart guys and some down-to-earth guys and some well-read guys and some politically astute and committed guys, but very few guys who are all of those things, and Robert Birnbaum is: he’s one of those invaluable voices out there fighting the good fight and keeping reading and thinking alive. He’s one of the our most incisive and important interviewers.

Jim Shepard

There’s something drastically wrong with Robert Birnbaum.
He takes literature seriously, but he isn’t self-important about it. He spends his time talking to other writers and asking intelligent questions, and – even worse – he reads their books before he talks to them. He’s no literary theory robot; he encounters books with his own mind and heart, and he thinks this is an important thing to do with his life. I mean, he’s just begging for trouble.

Tom Piazza

Part Malcolm Cowley, part Terry Gross, some Charlie Rose mixed in for good measure, Robert Birnbaum is a gift to literature. He cares about books that matter and conducts conversations that make a mark. This is a rare and beautiful thing. I wish we’d finally master cloning because we could use more of him in the world.

William Giraldi

“I never know quite what book I have written till I talk to Robert Birnbaum about it. Some people do ‘close reading.’ His can be as interior as Vermeer, as sweeping as the Hubble eye. We all count on him. He helps us see.”

Allan Gurganus

I don’t live in Boston, so I am not among the “Our” who get to claim Robert as their own. Yet once every few years, when I am in town whoring for one book or another, he is My Man in Boston, if only for an hour. And it is always the most delicious, cracked-up, dressed-down, battery-charging hour. Robert is a reminder that the deeper, grander pursuits of our culture — art, polemics, fine essay — are all around and ever worth stopping for. May I confess to you? I love him madly.

Mary Roach’

Thank God for Robert Birnbaum.

Arthur Phillips

Whenever I talk with Robert Birnbaum I get the feeling that he sees me more clearly than just about anybody. Astonishingly, he doesn’t appear to blame me for an of it, which is why he’s My Man in Boston. If you love books, he should be yours, too.

Richard Russo

Me personally I think Our Man in Boston is better than a stick in the eye. There’s just no question about this, I feel. I think people who think Our Man in Boston is not as good as a stick in the eye are not reading Our Man in Boston at all, or have what we call in the Catholic world a fecking enormous beam of timber in the old orbital socket. Trust me on this one. I have read a lot of muck in my lifetime – I mean, I read all of Jerzy Kosinsky, before I recovered – and Our Man in Boston is just not, no matter what anyone says, muck. Trust me.

Brian Doyle

An interviewer with personality, curiosity, and no fear — clearly Birnbaum will never make it in the big time. Glad he’s on my radar screen, though.

George Scialabba

George. We knew that. For years. And now the timeless Birnbaum conversations come to roost in a better, at least a more appropriate, place. About time.Read them all. Start anywhere. [This assumes Robert will get on the stick and give us some links…] Doing so will pay big dividends. Literati will be enthralled. Izzy [Robert is merely his nom d’émigré] will feel even more important (and more significantly will get that frisson he so seldom gets, as when he’s accorded respect) because someone paid attention. But most importantly, saying all this will help keep Izzy off my back, and make him continue to owe me big time.There are a lot of conversations, silently (well, I speak figuratively), slowly accreted into a different sort of literary treasure, ready to be re-re-discovered, again and again. You may end up thinking, “Robert Birnbaum spreads himself too thin.” But there’s a lot of him to spread. I speak, of course, literarily and culturally: I’ll withhold judgment on the intellectual, until he shows a little more serious intent with the copy editing. There’s always more of what we love Robert for—never shutting up. Hail to a major repository of the national cultural treasure of his 25+ years worth of conversations with noteworthy authors. As a conversationalist, James Lipton, of a different era and cultural medium, has nothing on Robert—and Robert is younger, cuter, and available.
Go Cubs.

Howard Dinin

Robert Birnbaum is a great guy, an incisive interviewer, and a true dog-lover, whose only defect lies in rooting for the wrong baseball team.

George Saunders

Another FaceBook Tourette’s Moment and A Subtle way of Proclaiming the Existence of my Chats with George Saunders

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Apropos of nothing or Another FB Tourette’s moment— Ever since Spy Magazine (righteously) lampooned Peter Travers’s blurb laden reviews I have (righteously) dismissed him as a creditable film commentator.Now comes a piece in The NYT magazine extolling George Saunder’s new opus as the “best book you will read in 2013.” Today’s NYT has a full page ad (mucho dinero) for Saunder’s new tome. I love George and his fiction (and his dogs) and would begrudge him nothing. So good for him. But the idea that an editor let that piece of grandiose piffle remain in a serious feature/profile does lead me to think degrading thoughts about the author and the editor and not least ,the NYT.

George Saunders and my departed hound Rosie

This would be a propitious moment to point out that I have had a number of conversations with Mr Saunders and well, they are.uh, conversational

Here’s one at Identitytheory

And my chat with Saunders at The Morning News

That’s all.

Currently reading Wise Men by Stuart Nadler (Reagan Arthur)