Not A Chance Meeting: Me and Rachel Cohen

 

 

Some ten years ago, as happens occasionally, I chanced upon A Chance Meeting  that, to this day, remains one of my favorite books. And which was sufficient motivation to arrange to speak with its author, Rachel Cohen (you can find that conversation here

Rachel Cohen [photo by Robert Birnbaum]

  In the fall of 2014, Rachel Cohen authored a slender biography of famed art historian Bernard Berenson and  she and met again to conversate about her book and many related and unrelated  topics. In the decade between chats w she has had two children, received a Guggenheim for the writing she is doing about painting, Time in Pieces: Painting Modern Life. And in the fall of this year her family migrates to the South Side of Chicago where she takes an appointment as a Professor of Practice in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. Additionally she is contributing to the Virginia Quarterly Review’s instagram feed.

 

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Robert Birnbaum:  What do you want to talk about?

Rachel Cohen: (laughter)

Robert Birnbaum: I put you on the spot, sorry. That was a serious question, though. I do want to know what you wanted to talk about.

Rachel Cohen: Probably about painting. In a way, the thing that I’m doing now is spending a lot of time going to look at paintings. That’s one of the things that is connected to this book, but then it kind of goes on.

Robert Birnbaum: You live in a good place for that. There’s a lot of museums and  galleries  here.

Rachel Cohen: It’s wonderful.

Robert Birnbaum: Are there many contemporary collections of paintings here? People still paint, right?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah, people do, although less and with less attention given to it. Yeah, there’s some, and there are a lot good galleries here and the Institute of Contemporary Art. There is contemporary stuff, but a lot of what I’m looking at is historical. This is a great place for that. It’s fantastic.

Robert Birnbaum: What period?

Rachel Cohen: I’m especially looking at impressionist painting. That makes everybody feel like, “Oh, I stopped looking at those when I was thirteen, and there was a reason.”

Robert Birnbaum: It’s passe isn’t it?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. They are. They’re too sweet.

Robert Birnbaum: But, they’re always really popular.Every couple of years a major museum will have a major Impressionist exhibition.

Rachel Cohen: Exactly. Lines going around the block. Everybody who never goes to museums goes, and everybody who does go to museums disdains those shows.

Robert Birnbaum:  You’re interested in paintings meaning that you want to write about paintings?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. That’s what I’m doing now. It’s something I’ve always done. When I first moved to New York, when I got a job, the first thing I did was buy a membership to the Metropolitan Museum, which was largely symbolic. You don’t actually have to pay for the museum. (laughter)

Robert Birnbaum: Did they give you a membership card? That’s a good thing.

Rachel Cohen: I have a card.

Robert Birnbaum: When I traveled abroad I would  go to the press office to get a press credential even though I never used them there [I more often used them locally].

Rachel Cohen: It’s that kind of thing. I  do want to feel  part of the painting world. When I lived in New York I went to the Met basically every week for almost seventeen years. It was a longstanding kind of a thing to really be looking at paintings in a very serious way.

Robert Birnbaum: Let me refresh my memory of you— you took a ten thousand mile trip around the country?

Rachel Cohen: It was actually closer to twenty thousand, but yeah that’s right.

Robert Birnbaum: You were very modest. (laughter) That  trip preceded your first book .

 

A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. A Chance Meeting. That’s right.[ 1]

Robert Birnbaum: We met about ten years ago, twelve years ago? It was to talk about that book.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Ten years ago, nine years ago.

Robert Birnbaum:What are your memories and impressions of that trip, ten years later now that you’re married and you have a child Do you have flashbacks of the trip? Do you think about that trip?

Rachel Cohen: All the way back. Yeah, I do. For me the trip is now actually twenty years ago because it took me ten years to write that book. It’s  been so long. Things get farther and farther back. Yes, I do think about that trip. I took some subsequent book trips too. I used to do that, go for several months and kind of get away. Those trips were very helpful and informative, just to get immersed in your own mind, another way of thinking, to get away once a year.

Robert Birnbaum: A gutsy thing for…

Rachel Cohen: A single woman…

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: I would worry about driving through certain rural areas.

Rachel Cohen: Yes. When I did that trip my mother gave me a —

Robert Birnbaum: —Your mother? (laughs)

Rachel Cohen: My mother worried.

Robert Birnbaum: She gave you her shotgun? (laughter)

Rachel Cohen: That’s a good idea. No, she gave me a cell phone. It was twenty years ago so it was one of those giant things that basically took up the passenger seat of the car for… (laughter)

Robert Birnbaum: Don’t make me laugh when I’m drinking coffee, alright?

Rachel Cohen: It never worked all that well but it was some security for me to have it and for her.

Robert Birnbaum: Did you find that you were in places where you were fearful?

Rachel Cohen: I was, at the time, nervous. I was nervous. I developed some habits as I went, that were things that I learned to do that made it more comfortable. One was that I stopped staying in Motel 6s and started staying in family run motels because those felt like safer places and there were people who felt ownership who were running them.

Robert Birnbaum: You’ve got to write a traveler’s guide.

Rachel Cohen: (laughs)  When I would check in I would ask for a room next to the night desk. The closest room  because often those places would be empty but then I would know there was somebody there within shouting distance. Those things made me feel more safe.

Robert Birnbaum: What is the most prominent memory of this? What is thing that you always think about when you think about

Rachel Cohen: That trip?

Robert Birnbaum: Is there one thing?

Rachel Cohen: I don’t know. I have different memories of…

Robert Birnbaum: Do they suddenly appear out of nowhere sometimes? All of sudden something triggers a thought about a particular

Rachel Cohen: About a place or something?

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. They do come to me at different moments. Especially landscapes because it’s very hard to write about landscape and I took these very inadequate snapshots as I was going through this huge western spaces.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah.

Rachel Cohen: I was having these incredible experiences of being immersed in the horizon.

Robert Birnbaum: That’s why [Ansel]Adams [2] used an eight by ten [large format]camera.

 

 

Ansel Adams, Jeffrey Pine, 1940

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Exactly. Much bigger and kind of a plain. Or video or something, like David Hockney compilations, but recently I was talking to a friend of mine who’s writing a book that’s set in the West. It’s a book of history.

Robert Birnbaum: About what?

Rachel Cohen: It’s about a man who was part of reconstruction after the Civil War and left that job and ended up in the army fighting the Indian War in the west. So he was  part of these two terrible things that were happening right after the Civil War. As we were talking about this I suddenly remembered going to the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho, what that was like and the museum there and what I had seen and what I had learned about that place. It turned out that he had just spent several weeks on the Nez Perce reservation and was surprised to discover that there was somebody else that he knew who had been there. It seems remote.

Robert Birnbaum: A White person?

Rachel Cohen: No the place not something that people study, but it was a really interesting place and while I was there I bought a book that was in the museum gift shop there called With the Nez Perce, which I think is, fantastically, out-of-print at this point. May be get-able.

Robert Birnbaum: Right.

Rachel Cohen: It was a book about two women who had been trying to administer the land grants for the Nez Perce as they were force-ably converted from a roving people to what was supposed to be agricultural in a land that was wildly unsuited for agriculture.

Robert Birnbaum: You know what  General Philip Sheridan said about Indian reservations?

Rachel Cohen: No.

Robert Birnbaum: “Worthless pieces of land surrounded by scoundrels.”

Rachel Cohen: Yeah,exactly. You still have that feeling when you’re there.

Robert Birnbaum: Amazing. We’re still screwing those people.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. It’s a hideous … It’s terrible.  Yeah. It’s really astonishing that it goes on. Those were the kinds of things that it was very good for me to drive around the country and run into them. I grew up in  a college town, went to school out here. East coast life, and  one can easily stay in a metropolitan corridor and not really encounter things.

Robert Birnbaum: How do think this notion of the “fly over zone “originated? Where did that originate? (laughter) Had to originate on the east coast from people who never leave the east coast?

Rachel Cohen:Like a Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover.

 

Saul Steinberg, detail from New Yorker cover

Robert Birnbaum: Did you see paintings when you…? You said you were interested in painting from a very young age, so was that something that you also had a chance to partake in

Rachel Cohen: I didn’t do so much of that during that trip.

Robert Birnbaum: You were focused on?

Rachel Cohen: I was more looking at landscape and going to small museums, but tending to be museums of personality and museums about particular people. Billy the Kid, or else the Native American museums. I remember seeing some good paintings in Austin, and seeing some good things in Los Angeles when I went through those cities. Mostly I was in rural places.

Robert Birnbaum: I’m fascinated by these quirky museums that exist around the country. There’s a Lucille Ball Museum in Jamestown, New York. Also there’s a guy, years ago, who contacted me who had a 1968 museum up in New Hampshire. He just would accumulate all sorts of things contemporaneous to 1968,

Rachel Cohen: These  are different ways of collecting our past. Also, part of my interest is in the more regular painting museum. It’s a strange thing, a museum. It’s really an invention of the last couple hundred years. Previously there were palaces. With lots of paintings in them, but the idea of a public museum that was open…

Robert Birnbaum: What was the first museum do you think?

Rachel Cohen: Let’s see, the Louvre became public at the time of Napoleon because his idea was  to return the collections to the people a little bit. That was circa 1800.

Robert Birnbaum: Were the people in charge  of the Louvre, were they actually curators? Or were they something else?

Rachel Cohen: The people under Napoleon are hilarious, actually. They’re connoisseurs and a lot of them knew really a lot about painting, but they were also bandits… (laughter)

Robert Birnbaum: Do you ever see yourself writing another book that’s as unique and original as A  Chance Meeting?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah.That’s what I’m working on. I’m working on these two books. One is a novel and the other is a book about paintings.

Robert Birnbaum: Your dust jacket bio states you are a creative writing teacher, but I only know you to write non-fiction. But now you’re writing a novel?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah, I’ve been writing it for seven years, so I’m seriously about it. It’s a ways from being done yet. Both of these new projects are creative. This Berenson book, which I really enjoyed writing, was a commission. I was happy to have some work. It was a nice thing to do and I ended up learning a lot of things that are valuable to me. It certainly was a book with a traditional form prescribed by the series[Yale University Press Jewish Lives series. It wasn’t possible to be too flexible with this one.

Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade
by Rachel Cohen

 

Robert Birnbaum: I have to confess,  Berenson is  an interesting figure and seems like he’s a decent person but I find it hard to get interested  in a guy sitting around an Italian villa and living the good life . Tell me , do you think the book’s cover photo is posed ?

Rachel Cohen: I think it’s posed. Yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s a perfect little picture, but it’s just, uncanny.

Rachel Cohen: There’s artifice in everything that he does. That’s correct.

Robert Birnbaum: I did think it was interesting that he said late in his life, something about making himself a work of art. That’s what he was working on?

Rachel Cohen: He came of age in an aesthetic generation where that was a project. An Oscar Wilde sort of project to have an aesthetic of yourself. I found that interesting too. I think in the end what I stayed interested in thinking about him was two things. One was that all of that elaborate fancy material was, for him, a compensation for the lack of his early life. That’s actually a common story. Many people have deprivation early on and are then making up for it in their later life. I  also thought there was something about the experiences of prejudice in his story. He ended up on the far end of the elite, that’s definitely true, but it was interesting to me that his fierce ambition to have all of that stuff came from the absence of it.

Robert Birnbaum: Somebody at Harvard said he had more ambition than he had ability.

Rachel Cohen: Charles Eliot Norton,who was born in the elite and happily ensconced there.

Robert Birnbaum: It reminded me of something, that Justice Felix Frankfurter said about Roosevelt—” he was a first class personality and a second class mind.” That’s giving with one hand and then taking with the other

Rachel Cohen: Then you take hard. I think of  what H.L. Mencken  said about Baltimore— City of Southern Efficiency and Northern Charm.

Robert Birnbaum: How old’s your daughter?

Rachel Cohen: She’s eighteen months.She’s a year and a half. She’s a sweet one.

Robert Birnbaum: What’s her name?

Rachel Cohen: Sylvia.

Robert Birnbaum: Needless to say, that changes things for you.

Rachel Cohen: This changes your life pretty fundamentally.Beautifully. It’s very nice. I’ve been going to museums with her too. Which has been a very sweet thing. You can learn a lot by doing that. We had a nice experience the other day. We went to the Children’s Museum and we had actually mostly been going to the MFA. I’d been taking her there , letting her see stuff and then play outside.

Robert Birnbaum: Did she look at the walls? Did she look at the paintings on the walls? Did she actually look at them?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. She will look at them and find stuff in them. Especially statues, she likes because you can see them in the round and it’s easy to understand, but actually paintings— she likes a lot. She like the colors. She has a good eye for color and she likes to say all the colors that she can see.

Robert Birnbaum: What do you think she sees?

Rachel Cohen: She sees the things assembling into forms. She sees color assemble into forms.

Robert Birnbaum: What does she describe? Given she has an eighteen month old vocabulary, so what does she describe?

Rachel Cohen: She actually has a huge vocabulary. (laughter)

Robert Birnbaum: Put a dictionary under her pillow… In the Dominican Republic they put baseball mitts in the babies’ cribs.

Rachel Cohen: A dictionary —something like that. She says, “Boat. Cloud. Momma. Baby.” Things that she sees.

Robert Birnbaum: So from the very first you didn’t baby talk her. You pretty much talk sentences to her.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: Are you capable of baby talking? (laughter)

Rachel Cohen: Maybe not. Maybe not. Might not be. I might be one of those people without that ability.

Robert Birnbaum: You learn what your limitations are at some point. Even though it seems like a common thing. I didn’t do it either. Now I sometimes do it with my dog. He’s such a child. You’re going to view paintings, do you paint yourself?

Rachel Cohen: No, I don’t. I draw a little bit, just to understand.

Robert Birnbaum: Did you aspire to paint? Never even tried it?

Rachel Cohen: No.

Robert Birnbaum: You knew right away?

Rachel Cohen: I guess so. I never really tried it but drawing I like and I’ve taken a few drawing classes.

Robert Birnbaum: You take photographs?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. That’s been a strange thing about going, recently. I’m keeping this notebook online about looking at paintings, which I hadn’t done before. I’m making these sketches and writing online—which I love doing and I hadn’t expected to love it as much as I do. It’s really nice writing online. I see why you do it.

Robert Birnbaum:  I hate the word ‘blog’.There’s something essentially ugly about the word

Rachel Cohen: I think so too.  I think that’s right. I’ve been calling it a notebook because I never liked that word[blog]. ‘Notebook’ has a long tradition and there are reasons for keeping notebooks. Artists kept them and people going to look at paintings have always kept notes.

Robert Birnbaum: Do you have people who respond to the things you write?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Usually by writing to me directly. Not so much by commenting on the site. I get responses, sometimes from strangers, and also sometimes I get letters from friends or students who I haven’t been in touch with in a long time. Often about something they’ve seen. That’s really wonderful. I didn’t expect that to be part of it. I’m writing these little essays, basically. They write me one back. It’s really nice. My notebook entries end up being letters from Cambridge or something, and I get letters back. It’s very nice.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s hard to figure out what one’s expectations are . Of course, you want people to read your stuff and  to interact with you about it. That’s a wish— in reality, when you write this online, you don’t know. It’s hard to say where it enters the public conversation.

Rachel Cohen: I’m curious what you think about that. You’ve been doing it for a while and you’ve shifted forms a little bit too. You’ve gotten more compact over time.

Robert Birnbaum: I found my… I don’t want to say my concentration is limited, because it’s not. I only can do the same kind of thing for ten or fifteen hours a week. I have distinct moments where I want to spend thinking and writing, I like to think. It’s an indulgence. I also use my online journal to publish interviews that I don’t want to justify to an editor…I love that we’re talking about me.

.Rachel Cohen: I noticed that you don’t do it that much but it’s a chance for me.

Robert Birnbaum: Actually, I try to excise my part of a conversation because readers might think, “I thought this was an interview?”

Rachel Cohen:  It’s nice. It s eccentric what you do and there used to be more places for it. Many of the kinds of writing that we are fans of, there were more places for them.

Robert Birnbaum: I think there still are a lot. I really do. At least more than I can keep up with. I look at places like the LA Review of Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Baffler,  N + 1, McSweeney’s and TomDispatch.

Rachel Cohen: I also think that people make mistakes about circulation in retrospect. They miss X,Y,Z,  magazine, the old New Yorker or something like that. They think, “Oh, everybody read that.” In fact, it had a circulation of ten thousand. Not so many people read it. The current literary magazines are also reaching that kind of range of people.

Robert Birnbaum:There is also the importance of archiving the past on the Internet.  Both the Atlantic and Harper’s have archived their past,  from the nineteenth century, on line?

Rachel Cohen: It’s really wonderful. It used to be you published something in a fairly obscure place and if people didn’t buy that issue, that was that. Now it’s online, or you can put it up yourself and then it’s there forever. These small magazine can have a lot of influence and wonderful writing can be found in those places and come into the world. I’m really liking writing for the web. I’m an old fashioned person. I live mostly in the nineteenth century. I’m often out of the technological world. But I’ve found that I really love it. This is what I started to say, that when I go to look at paintings now, because I know I’m going to post about them, I take my iPhone and I take lots of little pictures. Not just of the whole painting but lots of the details of the painting.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s produces more what your eye is seeing

Rachel Cohen: Exactly.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s one thing to show the whole painting. I can look that up. Is that right?

Rachel Cohen: I can show the process of how I’m looking at it, what I’m seeing. How the details are in relation to one another. That’s a much closer communication. It’s more like actually going to a museum with my reader than what I’m able to do in print.

Robert Birnbaum: You just called yourself a nineteenth century person. I know what you’re saying, but I always wonder, and I especially wonder about people who are literate is what’s your cultural diet? Do you know who  Sarah Silverman is?

Rachel Cohen: Yes.

Robert Birnbaum: You know who Rhianna is?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Thank you for giving me a couple that I can get.

Robert Birnbaum: Tupac?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.

Robert Birnbaum: To me all these things are floating around, and I do partake. Netflix. It’s a bane and it’s a benefit. Itunes, no, Spotify. Where you can almost any piece of recorded music. You have available to you, if you wanted, all this information. I wonder if generations behind them avail themselves of this stuff or if they just stay focused on certain fractured windows of genre?

Rachel Cohen: It’s true, in part, what I mean when I say I’m a nineteenth century person is that I value certain kinds of continuity. I like the long history of things. That comes up to the present. It’s not that I’m missing the present, it’s that I’m not forgetting the past or something.

 

Robert Stone [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Robert Birnbaum: I was impressed by Robert Stone’s [4] latest novel Death of the Black Haired Girl in that, here’s a guy in his late seventies. His book takes place a little bit after September eleventh. Maybe within two or three years, but there was no temporal references that were wrong. There were enough citations of contemporary life that he referenced. His cultural antennae  were acute— that may become more rare.

Rachel Cohen: I think great fiction writers are very alert to the world around them and if they’re not experiencing it directly, they’re still watching how other people are experiencing it so that they’re not- What somebody in their twenties feels is not of no interest to them now that they’re seventy. They still care about how people are taking the world in. I hope, aspire, to be that kind of person.

Robert Birnbaum: To what kind of music do you listen ?

Rachel Cohen: I mostly listen to classical music and I do listen to contemporary classical music, but

Robert Birnbaum: You listen to lots of contemporary music?

Rachel Cohen: No. I listen to a lot of Bach, but I do

Robert Birnbaum: I always wonder when I see a biography of a  world historical person —hasn’t anybody written enough?

Rachel Cohen: And everything about them?

Robert Birnbaum: One of the things I think is useful about your book and the series is that it’s obviates not having to read these six or seven hundred page tomes filled with endless details. I don’t find them helpful.

Rachel Cohen:  That was one of the interesting things about writing this book was thinking, “How do you make a biography interesting?” As a form, this thing that we accept about biography are pretty dull. (laughter)

Robert Birnbaum: What the subject ate when he was five years old…

Rachel Cohen: There’s the grandparents and jobs that the parents had, and the education. It’s so tedious. There’s the train they took to Geneva and what time the train got there. Then there’s the death scene, and then there’s the legacy.

Robert Birnbaum: There is one major biography of Berenson [editor:subsequently I discovered there are two].

Rachel Cohen: I used it religiously.

Robert Birnbaum: You had to read it.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Over and over. With hundreds of little sticky notes and all that stuff because you’re reducing that and reinterpreting it.

Robert Birnbaum: Giving it a narrative as opposed to—

Rachel Cohen: Exactly. You want to make it the story of a life.  And the other thing is that lives don’t really make stories. When fiction writers make stories, they’re deliberately making lots of choices about what they’re including. Great narrative is not soup to nuts. It doesn’t really go from birth to death.

Robert Birnbaum: We barely can connect the things in our own lives as we’re living them.

Rachel Cohen: Exactly.You try to make a narrative. We’re desperately trying to make narratives of our lives. That’s the interesting thing in biography. You think, “How do you relate the different things?”, so that you come out with something thats  propulsive so you want to keep  finding out what happens and that the things at the beginning seem connected to the things at the end. because they may not, in a life, feel that connected.

Robert Birnbaum: I thought you did a splendid job of concising how he managed to survive Italy and the War. I was surprised that he had champions that slowed the bureaucratic process down.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: That was interesting to me. There is a rough connection in my recent interest in Stefan Zweig [6]  Two people who were exiles…

Rachel Cohen: That’s right. They were similar also in their commitment to a European culture that was, especially a Jewish internationalist position, after the first war. They were of the same milieu in that period between wars.

Robert Birnbaum: Did they ever meet, do you think? Both of them met everybody.

Rachel Cohen: Everybody.

Robert Birnbaum: They were the hubs of culture.

Rachel Cohen: I think that they did meet, although I couldn’t swear to that. I have a way of checking, but I know that Berenson read Zweig.

Robert Birnbaum: Do you find it interesting that he’s not read today?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. I do. Although I think he’s coming back a little bit.

Robert Birnbaum: Pushkin Press is publishing a lot of his writing.

Rachel Cohen: The New York Review of Books also has done several things.

Robert Birnbaum: There was a biography that came out last year called Three Lives.

Rachel Cohen: I wrote a review  [7]of the one that Joan Acocella  wrote a forward for, for The Chess Game.

Robert Birnbaum: It had a different title though didn’t it, for a long time? The Royal Game?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. That’s right. It was called The Royal Game but I think they returned it to The Chess Game and that edition, which is a spectacular book. That was a pleasurable project. I read a lot of his correspondence.

Robert Birnbaum: Where is it?

Rachel Cohen: It was in Bookforum. I think it’s online too, as we were saying. Everything is there. I really enjoyed trying to think about how his fiction works. It has a very particular kind of shape to it.

Robert Birnbaum: A French physician, who was also a novelist, wrote a splendid little novel called The Last Days. [8]Which  covers the last five or six months of his life in Brazil.

 

The Last Days by Laurent Sesek

Rachel Cohen: Oh really?

Robert Birnbaum: It’s a novel, but it really seems like the writer  had a very good sense of his harrowing ending… he was a tortured soul… as was his wife.

Rachel Cohen: You can really see it in those last works.

Rachel Cohen: If you really understood what was happening [in the world]then you  went out of your mind.

Robert Birnbaum: You would have thought being in Petropolis, Brazil that he  would have felt safe.

Rachel Cohen: You couldn’t get away from that.

Robert Birnbaum:  There were German immigrants. There was life there.

Rachel Cohen: That’s right. I think it’s also hard now. German culture is so irrevocably marked for us by that war, but if you really grew up before that Germany was the fountain head of a lot of artistic and cultural life.

Robert Birnbaum: I think more so of Vienna. Vienna was a whole different thing.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah, for Zweig especially, that was a source for him. I guess I’m thinking of those things together. The musical and literary heritage and to feel that that was somehow being destroyed, or coming apart, or that maybe it had contributed to this horrible thing in some way. It’s very hard to get back to before. To think what it was to be somebody like Zweig.

Robert Birnbaum: Do I get the sense that you’re not in a hurry? You just write at a comfortable pace for the things that you do?

Rachel Cohen: That’s a nice way of saying it—”not in a hurry”. (laughter). I’m a very slow writer.

Robert Birnbaum: Your agents is still Eric Simonoff?

Rachel Cohen: He is, yeah.

 

Edward Jones, author of the Known World [photo : Robert Birnbaum

Robert Birnbaum: There’s something special about this guy —I discovered he represents about some really remarkable people. Ed Jones, he represents Edward Jones. [9]When I heard that he represented you and Ed Jones and there were a couple other people. This is a tough business that he’s in. This indicates certain kind of taste and simpatico.

Rachel Cohen: He’s terrific.

Robert Birnbaum: Book agents for writers like you need to be like a member of your family.

Rachel Cohen: (laughs)He’s very patient. He never asks me anything. We go and we have coffee and if I say it’s going well, he says good. I think he’s got all different scales.

Robert Birnbaum He moved to a different, more powerful agency.

Rachel Cohen: He went to William Morris, and he’s the co-head of literary at William Morris.

Robert Birnbaum: Which means he must have money making authors, probably who are his money making writers.

Rachel Cohen: He has some very literary writers who sell, like Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem, and people like that. He also does non-fiction. He does very well. He does really well. He’s really a wonderful combination of business  and insight. He really understands the business and he’s very far sighted about it. He thinks in a long way about how to make places for literature in the world.

Robert Birnbaum: The long game’s always important.

Rachel Cohen: He really is good at that. At the end, he has wonderful taste. He took, not that in taking me he showed he had wonderful taste, but when he took me, I had written a few essays. He said , I’d like to represent you. I was put in touch by somebody who was already represented. I said I really didn’t know what I  was doing.

Robert Birnbaum: You were looking for an agent.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah, I was, but I had an idea for that eventually became a book that you liked [A Chance  Meeting ]

Robert Birnbaum: Did anyone else like that book? I’m thinking about a list of tragically overlooked books.

Rachel Cohen: No, people love that book actually. It’s still in print. People still write to me about it. It got wonderful reviews. Yeah. It was loved. Thank you.

Robert Birnbaum: Is it the case that one of the benefits of having someone like Eric is that you don’t think much about the business?

Rachel Cohen: I think it is. It’s also the case that having a steady teaching job has allowed me to have more flexibility about the kinds of things I write. I tried a little bit to make more of a living as a freelance writer, and that’s hard. It really is hard. I was writing about one piece a year for The New Yorker and I really liked doing it but I was spending six months researching the pieces. It was taking pretty much all my time to do that one piece a year. Which was maybe worth it but I couldn’t do it forever.

Robert Birnbaum: Do you have enough essays, criticisms, etc. that you could anthologize?
Rachel Cohen: Almost. The thing I’m proudest of, actually, that I wrote in conjunction with the Berenson book was an essay that was in The Believer. It was called Gold, Golden Gilded Glittery. [10]It was about four ages of artistic and financial invention and how financial invention and artistic invention often would have very similar structures in different periods of history. There was one part comparing double entry book keeping and perspective painting and another part comparing abstract expressionism and basically what got us into the Lehmann brothers. (laughter) .These amazing mathematical models that are ways of mapping the future into the present.

Robert Birnbaum: Algorithms.

Rachel Cohen: Exactly. That’s, in some sense, what abstract expressionism does is take future time and zap it into the present.

 

Hari Kunzru [photo: Robert Birnbaum

Robert Birnbaum: Hari Kunzru, in his last novel, [11]one of the parts of it about a stock broker, one of the characters  who worked at a hedge fund  and they were looking for this incredible algorithm that would put the most diverse events in the world together. A plague on the silkworms in Burma would somehow effect the output of machinery in Germany…

Rachel Cohen: Not so far fetched, yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: Right.

Rachel Cohen: I haven’t read that book but I guess maybe this is connected to things that we were talking about earlier. I’m interested in finding strange forms for the unbelievable knowledge streams that are available to us. In some sense, that’s what those formulas are obviously trying to do.

Robert Birnbaum: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but we’re talking about looking at old things in new ways…somehow seeing them from a more oblique angle.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. In conjunction with things with which they were never juxtaposed before so that you’re then just taking into account huge new things.

Robert Birnbaum: And that’s at the base of A Chance Meeting?

Rachel Cohen: Yes.

Robert Birnbaum: About two individuals that most people wouldn’t see connecting.

Rachel Cohen: Through a landscape in some sense, yeah.

XXRobert Birnbaum: Speaking of landscape, do you know Simon Schama’s book Landscape and Memory[12]?

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. I do know that book. Thank you for reminding me of it, because I haven’t looked at in a while. You asked before, am I going to do something formally innovative again. Both of my current projects are that. To me, if you’re really trying to reflect the way we see now, it requires some kind of formal innovation. You want something that…

Robert Birnbaum: Like Jennifer Egan [13]writing a novel in PowerPoint?

Rachel Cohen: That’s a possibility?

Robert Birnbaum: She did it.

Rachel Cohen: I know. I know. I know. I don’t know if that’s it, but I do think is in some sense, yes. In some sense, I like that she just goes for it. She thinks, “Okay. Maybe there’s a way to do this. Let me see what I can do.” I feel that too about these little essays that I’m writing online that are about paintings. Part of the reason I’m interested in the impressionists is because they’ve had to respond to photography. They were the first group of painters who had grown up with photography and had to think about the painted image with the print image always in their mind. They responded brilliantly. They really, in some sense, they seemed to be very stimulated. They both used photographs themselves in order to paint and worked to distinguish painting from photography. That seems the variety and  possibility of invention that come with new technology. It was an interesting thing that  they were able to do. And formally, they were brilliantly inventive.

Robert Birnbaum: Impressionists  are seemingly dismissed by a lot of people. Because,  we’re over saturated with them? You see them so often,

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Ironically, they’re still reproduced. They were of a world where that stuff, … There was an exhibition last year at the Met that was called “Impressionism and Fashion.’ There’s some way in which they’re very close to apparel. They already look like fashion.

Robert Birnbaum: There’s always books being issued on the Impressionists. This year I got a book about Impressionists’s images of water.

Rachel Cohen: They’re incredibly specific. So many books about Monet and Cézanne, but I do think they’ve become very easy for us to love, but that in itself is very interesting because they were not. They were wild when they were made. People thought they were slap dash and vulgar, and ugly, and that the colors they chose were ugly. That the combinations of colors, but the started to do something that became the way we see things. Now everything looks like a Monet, or even Van Gogh.

Robert Birnbaum: You can make photographs that look like Monet’s with certain filters. There’s a photographer named Abelardo Morell who lives around here and one of the projects he’s going to embark on is he wants to go to Giverny. He wants to go there and take photographs just because things were painted there. I think he uses tents to, he has a very specific process where he uses the inside and outside of something. As a photography, he’s impressed by painting. He said something to me about it and I didn’t even realize people still painted.

Rachel Cohen: For me, I was going to tell you this story at the beginning actually with my little girl, Sylvia, that after many times going to the MFA to see paintings, I thought we should go to the children’s museum. I took her to the children’s museum. The things she loved there was the bubbles. They have bubbles for kids, big vats of bubble stuff and you can blow bubbles and move stuff around with bubbles and bubbles float in the air. She couldn’t get enough of the bubbles. We came home and she has a little plastic horse called Lagoo and she was sending Magoo to the museum. Magoo was going to the museum and I said, “Some museums have paintings, and some museums have bubbles, and which kind is Magoo going to? She said, “Bubbles.” (laughter) Don’t be stupid. Of course bubbles. Afterwards, I was thinking, “That’s what paintings are like for me.” It’s like bubbles, like you’re really physically in them in a way that’s totally different than any other visual experience or museum experience. No photograph gives me that experience of entering and being part of a world, breathing the air, feeling the weather. I was pleased about that in a way. I think she’s getting the right idea of museums, that they are collectors of direct experience.

Robert Birnbaum: For me the museum experience is always difficult because there’s so much. It’s hard to sit in front of one thing even though one thing seems to draw you.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: Even if I end up spending more time on one thing you’re distracted. It’s like reading.

Rachel Cohen: You feel like, “Oh, but there are fifteen thing under my bedside table.” Maybe somehow getting patient with that is a significant part of enjoying museums. For me, feeling that I go often makes me feel like, “Well, I’ll be here again.” It doesn’t matter if I go past all of these things. Today, I’m just going to look at this thing. I tend to only look at one or two things. Maybe walk past a few things to get a sense of what I might like to look at next. Being patient with that is helpful.

Robert Birnbaum: I’ve relied on museums to send me the monographs of the exhibitions.

Rachel Cohen: If you’re fundamentally a reader, that’s a way into the images.

Guernica by Pablo PIcasso

 

 

Robert Birnbaum: I don’t think a reproduction of Guernica is going to do it for me, but I understand and I’m not sure how I would look at it anyway. Guernica always reminds of the opening of that film on Basquiat.[14] Have you  see the film by Julian Schnabel

Rachel Cohen: Yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: Which opens with a kid staring at Guernica.[15] Forever that’s the way I see the painting now. (laughter)

Rachel Cohen: I think it’s somehow a medium that’s hard to get into relation with or something. That is also part of what interests me and it used to part of everybody’s life, or more regularly part of people’s lives. Not so much anymore.

Robert Birnbaum: I own one painting. The painting I have is of a man with short hair, dressed in a slip on the edge of a cliff. His hands seem to be scrunched up, expressing a kind of anger or tension, or something like that. It got to me.

Rachel Cohen: That is the thing about paintings. The way you described that, it was the way somebody would describe a dream or something. The images in a dream and they’re condensed in the way that dreams are. They’re powerful and they allow you to imaging different directions out of them. All of that can be true of photographs, or of films, certainly.

Robert Birnbaum: I like Fernando Botero [16]too. They’re sort of silly, but not. I don’t know, his cartoonish way of looking at painting but a lot of it has to do with colors and the odd people you put in paintings.

 

Botero “Picasso” 1999

Rachel Cohen: Which, in a way, can be a lot like fiction. You’re making a world, inhabited by people. It’s not the real world but it’s close to the real world and considering it

Robert Birnbaum: Writer’s today, who I think are very conscious of putting some kind of artwork in their narratives. Not necessarily novels. There is a writer,  Mark Z. Danielewski  [17],who has these hybrid illustrated  novels. Anyway, have you written other fiction besides the novel you’re working on. Its a

Rachel Cohen: Not really.I’ve written a few stories.

Robert Birnbaum: Brave place to start.

Rachel Cohen: (laughter) I guess so.

Robert Birnbaum: Pretty ambitious.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. I know. I know. I guess I love to read novels. I’m not such a short story reader. I admire the craft of them, but they’re not where my own attention gravitates. I have always loved novels, so somehow that was where I headed. I had tried to write a novel once before and failed.

Robert Birnbaum: Where is it?

Rachel Cohen: What?

Robert Birnbaum: You trashed it or did you…?

Rachel Cohen: Trashed it. It exists on some obsolete computer that would hard to access now but it wasn’t worth keeping.

Robert Birnbaum: I’m always fascinated with people’s, what they do with their failed first efforts. Some people keep them, somewhere.

Rachel Cohen: It’s somewhere.

Robert Birnbaum: They’re closer to them than you’ve described.And  some people just can throw them away. That’s it, forget it.

Rachel Cohen: This was so bad that I could let go of it. I really could. I failed several times in trying to write the thing I’m writing now and I kept all of those failures.

Robert Birnbaum: You’re going to get it right.

Rachel Cohen: I am. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. I like to go live in a world for a long time, so to me the working on a novel was a lot at the beginning, which is actually an unbelievable effort is getting the world up and running. Getting it so that it has it’s own principles of functions and it’s own kind of characters and it’s own language. Now that that’s all there

Robert Birnbaum: Do you know what the ending is?

Rachel Cohen: I do now, although only recently. I worked on it for six years before I started to have the sense of how it might finish. All of that development, once you’re far enough along that it is a place, then going there is…

Robert Birnbaum: Do you get the same feeling in writing fiction as you do from writing other forms

Rachel Cohen: It’s a different internal experience, I think. My feeling is they’re related things. You still need a lot of imagination to write non-fiction. You still need openness and sensitivity.

Robert Birnbaum: A certain kind of excitement or uplift.

Rachel Cohen: Yeah. It’s different. I get excited from both things but the feeling of one is different. Maybe more internal for the fiction and non-fiction I have a little more sense of, “This is an idea that has purchase. This is a thought that has stuff that’s worth some consideration.”

Robert Birnbaum: You may not have to work as hard because you have a grasp of what it involves?

Rachel Cohen: The stages of work are different. In non-fiction, for me there’s a huge amount of research before there starts to be a feeling of what the thoughts are that are interesting. There’s one period of wandering and reading and not knowing and then the gears turn. In fiction, the preparatory work is more imagination. Wondering also, but not accumulating facts. Then when things start to get going it’s because the world is alive. It’s a little bit different thing than a non-fiction where it’s in line].

Robert Birnbaum: What do you like reading? You said you like to read novels. What novels have stood out to you, let’s say this past year?

Rachel Cohen: Past year? I haven’t been reading that much because of the baby and the various projects. One thing I’ve been reading over and over is Jane Austen’s Persuasion because that is a really fantastic book. That’s a wonderful thing to read. I’ve read some things which have been pleasure to me. I read Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, and that was fun to read, go through and have the exhilaration of story. I read Margot Livesey’s Jane Eyre book, The Flight of Gemma Hardy and really enjoyed the pulse of that. Actually, now that I think of it, those are both novels well-plotted novels where you move through. That’s actually not the kind of book I’m writing. (laughs) Anyway, those are the ones I like.

Robert Birnbaum: What’s a formative book for you in your life? What’s a book that when you read it you had some sort of “a-ha” moment?

Rachel Cohen: The Brother’s Karamazov is a book  that I read over and over.

Robert Birnbaum: I have a problem with Russian novels. I can’t remember the names. I can’t pronounce the names. I can’t remember the names. It’s hard for me to

Rachel Cohen: Hold them. Yeah. They sprawl. They really do sprawl. It’s true.

Robert Birnbaum: I’m fascinated by people who say War and Peace is the greatest novel ever. I wish I read it. I wonder if somebody would actually anglicize all the names.

Rachel Cohen: So you could read it, or give you some visual diagram that you can see and that would keep your

Robert Birnbaum: They must be on audio, right? War and Peace? Although a length audio.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: Maybe that’s what I should do.

Rachel Cohen: If somebody was saying it for you then…

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

 

Robert Birnbaum: Actually, there was a novel  that Louis de Bernières [18]wrote, it was the one after Corelli’s Mandolin. Birds Without  Wings —the one about Anatolia. It was a vivid novel about the life in in the Eastern Mediterranean around the turn of the 20th century , and there was an audio version that makes all these, there are eight or nine different nationalities in this book and all manner of tongue twisting kinds of names, so after reading it, hearing it was illuminating.

Rachel Cohen:I’m really good at names. Proper names correlate and make sense to me. I’m definitely the person who’ll leaf through the index of a book first to see who’s in it. Then I remember all the places where they are. Those books map for me. I can see all the people in them in an almost visual way.

 

Robert Birnbaum: You were teaching at Sarah Lawrence?

Rachel Cohen: I’m not teaching right now. I’m on leave. I’m on this super extended leave that they’re kindly making available to me.

Robert Birnbaum: What’s Sarah Lawrence look like these days?

Rachel Cohen: Sarah Lawrence is great. I love Sarah Lawrence. I’ve had seven or eight years of teaching there. I have tenure there. It’s been a wonderful place to be. The student body is extremely creative. They went a different route than a lot of the schools. They didn’t take test scores. They didn’t make that the main thing about admission. As a consequence they got all kinds of terrific students who are not necessarily good at taking standardized tests. Those are actually wonderful people to teach in creative writing. Those are the students you want.

Robert Birnbaum: That’s pretty bold.

Rachel Cohen: It was bold and really good. They have great students.

Robert Birnbaum: What are the aspirations of these great students?

Rachel Cohen: Many of them want to work in the arts somehow. There are other kinds of students too. There are scientists and other things, but there’s a strong arts community.

Robert Birnbaum: Affluent backgrounds?

Rachel Cohen: A mixture. It’s an extremely expensive school. Some of the students have a lot of money. Some of the students are scholarship students without much money. That is a challenge.

Robert Birnbaum:In James Galdofini’s last movie Enough Said ,[19]with Julia Dreyfus. There’s a short scene where Galdofini’s really snotty daughter, who’s very hip, meets Dreyfus and they’re talking about colleges. Dreyfus’ daughter is off going to Sarah Lawrence in the fall, and the snotty little girl said, “Oh, it’s going downhill.” (laughter) Like this eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old girl knows anything.

Rachel Cohen: They say it’s going downhill. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s going downhill.  The other thing I liked at Sarah Lawrence is the graduate program. I taught a lot in the graduate non-fiction program. They’re wonderful students there, many of them returning after having working in various ways in the world. Those are great.

Robert Birnbaum: Who are your peers there? In writing?

Rachel Cohen: The person who I work with most closely is Vijay Seshadri, who’s a wonderful poet, and who is the director of the non-fiction program. That’s been really nice. Our other close colleague in non-fiction is Jo Ann Beard, who also writes fiction. That group has been really wonderful. There are other people who come through and teach. Nicky Dawidoff  [20]has taught.

Robert Birnbaum: I’m talking to him next week.

Rachel Cohen: Oh really? He’s going to be in town I think.

Robert Birnbaum: I talked to him years ago. He wrote a book about his grandfather, but he’s also edited an anthology on baseball for The Library of America.

Rachel Cohen: Yes. Does he writes a lot on sports.

Robert Birnbaum: His new book is about football, a sport that I hate. I hate football. My son plays football. But I hate it especially the upper levels—college and the pros.

To Be Continued

 

######

1 Rachel Cohen’s website

2 Ansel Adams photographs

3 Saul Steinberg’s art

4 One of my 5 or 6 conversations with Robert Stone

5 Biographies of Bernard Berenson

6 On Stefan Zweig

7 Rachel Cohen’s  review of The Chess Game by Stefan Zweig

8 The Last Days by Laurent Seksik

9 One of my conversations (2004)with Edward Jones

10  Golden Gilded Glittery by Rachel Cohen

11 My LA Review of Books  chat with Hari Kunzru,

12 Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama

13  My most recent conversation with Jennifer Egan

14 Basquit by Julian Schnabel

15 Guernica by Pablo Picasso

16 Columbian painter Fernando Botero

17   Writer Mark Z. Danielewski ‘s website

18 My last conversation with  Louis de Bernières

19 Trailer for Enough Said

20 Talking with Nicholas Dawidoff

 

Michael Lewis No. 5…Better than Chanel

Michael Lewis [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

In the course of my prolonged post graduate education (and adolescence) I have been privileged to discourse with countless accomplished, talented, creative and socially conscious people—some a number of times. I may have lost count, but the conversation (my fourth or fifth)that follows with Michael Lewis, author of Flash Boys, Money Ball,The Blind Side, Coach and more, fills in the gaps between Lewis’s published endeavors. At this writing he is awaiting the green light on a series for Showtime (which we discuss) and just started the reporting on what may not be his next book. Not to mention his dedication to the upbringing of his children…

My teenaged jock son (baseball, football), Cuba, joined our table at Boston’s Four Seasons and so in addition to an update on the frequency trading issues (Flash Boys), the talk turns to the awful NCAA, the commodification and monetization of kid sports and our kids performance arts, The Peaky Blinders, the golden age of TV, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and whither goeth the NFL and the sport of football.

After spending four or five hours with Michael Lewis, I continue to be impressed by his reportorial skills and narrative talents and abiding decency, which is good reason to make this chat part of an ongoing, unfinished skein that may yet continue…

Robert Birnbaum: Okay, we’re rolling. This is the 26th of March. My son Cuba is in attendance. He will inherit the business (laughs).

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s all yours.

CUBA BIRNBAUM: Thank you.

MICHAEL LEWIS: [to Cuba]Everything before you, the signed books and the microphone.[to RB] I’m sure you have a library.

Robert Birnbaum: I have a 100 cubic feet storage space —most of which is filled with signed 1st editions,art work and my photo archive.

MICHAEL LEWIS: They will have some value someday.

Robert Birnbaum: Maybe.

CUBA BIRNBAUM: Hopefully.

Robert Birnbaum: I remember when the man who was the director of the Toronto the International Festival of Authors was canned, after years of his service. And the organization tried to reclaim his[signed] book collection.

Flash Boys by Micheal Lewis

Robert Birnbaum: Okay, so is this a victory lap for Flash Boys?

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s the paperback tour. I think the war is still being fought. That’s the problem, and you can see that this war is for trying to establish fairness in the market … these guys [I write about ]in the book, it’s going to take years for them to get big enough.

Robert Birnbaum: Really?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I think so. They’ll become a public exchange in the fall. I just made a bet with someone, and I took the over.

Robert Birnbaum: You’re talking about Brad—

MICHAEL LEWIS: —Katsuyama. There’s such inertia in the financial markets, and the regulators seem inclined to help them a bit but not that much.

Robert Birnbaum: I thought a big problem was that it’s hard to regulate technology.

MICHAEL LEWIS: That’s right. That would be the real risk — that the regulators try to regulate the technology and it ends up screwing up the system in some new, other way. What could be done is the current economic model of the exchanges and the dark pools could totally be challenged. They could ban a payment for order flow. They could ban the maker/ taker model on the exchanges, the bribes and the kickbacks.

Robert Birnbaum: So simply stated, the litigation would be a mistake, right?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I think that’s right, but the market itself, it’s just got lots of inertia. People who work at giant, mutual funds don’t want to tick off their banker by saying, “We’re not going to send you stock market orders anymore because that dark pool is fleecing us’. You would think it’d be easy.

Robert Birnbaum: So they’ll accept that?

MICHAEL LEWIS: They accept it as part of the packages of services. If you are a big bank with Morgan Stanley and they’re covering your firm in various ways, the equity business you give them is a way of paying them for a whole bunch of other services that they’re charging you for.

Robert Birnbaum: You’re saying it’s sort of a ‘tribute’, a hidden cost?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Commissions are already a tribute, but no one wants to get into it with a Wall Street firm because if you’re the person…

Robert Birnbaum: …They’re too big to fail and what else?

MICHAEL LEWIS:They’re too big to fail, and you’re one person, even if you’re a big person inside the giant mutual fund. You don’t want to be identified as the troublemaker in the market.

Robert Birnbaum: Like Brad Katsuyama.

MICHAEL LEWIS: You don’t want to be that because your career is unlikely to be at one firm. You’re going to be out in the job market again. You’re going to be one of those rabble-rousers. It’s just that people are very reluctant on Wall Street to pick fights, and when it happens, it’s so extraordinary. This is why BILL Ackman gets into it with Carl Icahn. It’s very strange.

Robert Birnbaum: How would you rank the litigation, the findings and such that’ve happened since the book came out?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I’ve never had anything like this happen before.

Robert Birnbaum: In terms of effectiveness…

MICHAEL LEWIS: Maybe do it this way—what do I think the most important regulation, legal action that’s happened and what’s the least? I think the most important are the lawsuits brought by the New York Attorney General against the Barclay’s dark pool and probably will be followed up against other bank dark pools. Second, and this sounds, maybe a little loopy, but this class action suit that Michael Lewis, the big tobacco guy, is bringing against the exchanges, I think could be very interesting.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s still in process. How long does it take to litigate cases like this?

MICHAEL LEWIS: A long time. How long did the tobacco lawsuit take. So it’s slow moving, but I think that could be a big deal. The fines that the SEC have lobbied against various high-frequency traders for market manipulation are also really useful because you start to be able to see what’s going on so there’s transparency now.

Robert Birnbaum: Where does that money go, the fines that the SEC collects?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I asked this question yesterday, and I couldn’t get a straight answer. I asked the question of someone… people at MSNBC had calculated all the fines paid by banks as a result of the financial crisis to the Justice Department, and it comes to 82 billion dollars. That’s a piece of change, right?

Robert Birnbaum:Wow. You could buy a fighter plane with that, right? You can burn …

MICHAEL LEWIS: Someone had something for that. Sometimes the money is restored to victims, but most of the time it goes into the general treasury.

Robert Birnbaum: It wouldn’t go to the regulatory agency, like the SEC?

MICHAEL LEWIS: You would think it would be … I don’t think the SEC gets to keep it, and if they did, they’d be self-funded. They wouldn’t need Congress, so I doubt Congress would let them do it. It would actually be an interesting innovation, a way to free the SEC to do its job if it was allowed to keep the ..
.
Robert Birnbaum: It might incentivize them. Do you feel like you’ve become more of a crusader since you started writing?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I don’t mean to be, but I really do inevitably. I think it’s more that I stumble upon things that obviously need to be crusaded against, but the motive hasn’t changed.

Robert Birnbaum: Its because they end up being interesting stories, right?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yeah. The motive hasn’t changed. I think what has happened is I look for stories that I think are worthy, really long form and it just so happened the financial crisis has yielded a couple of stories.

Robert Birnbaum:You’ve said, I think, that Wall Street is the gift that keeps on giving, so are you done there?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Very cynically— the financial crisis has been very good to me, right? The last thing I want is for them to resolve all this. I don’t have any interest in writing another financial book right now. I’ve got a few other projects that I really want to do, and none of them are …

Robert Birnbaum: You haven’t started the next book?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I’ve been writing a TV show. I started the next thing in the sense that I’ve started reporting. I haven’t started writing it.

Robert Birnbaum: Are you still doing long articles as the first step to writing a book?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Sometimes I do do that, but in this case, I’m not doing that but I haven’t started writing another book. Again,[my] children [see Lewis’s Home Game] slow me down a bit.

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Robert Birnbaum: I was hoping that somehow after you wrote The Blind Side that you would take on the NCAA.

MICHAEL LEWIS:I did write a little op-ed for the Times arguing they should pay players.

Robert Birnbaum: Where do you see all that going? Is somebody going to take on NCAA?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Here’s the problem with that. I never take on anybody really, right? If there was a Brad Katsuyama inside college football and he was a really interesting character, it’s conceivable there would be a narrative that would undermine the NCAA.
.
Robert Birnbaum: What about the Northwestern quarterback who started, I think he started union or was a ..
.
MICHAEL LEWIS: And there’s Ed O’Bannon, the the former UCLA basketball player. I’m totally on the side of the agitators here. I mean, the NCAA is a grotesque institution right now. If you think about it, actually back away from it, it’s even worse than just pure economic exploitation because in the case of football, it’s exploitation while these kids play a sport that’s probably going to damage them in the long term. And there’s this wall that is put up between poor black kids and the rich white boosters. If you took it down, at the very least there would be some social relationships developed that the kids, after their football careers were over, could go to and lean on, and they’d start to develop … they’d have jobs in the summer and all the rest and would develop careers. I was thinking about what the solution here. In a perfect world, I’d actually say open up pay for players. Let them capture their market value, but something so crude as that is not going to happen. What I could imagine happening is a movement to create trust funds or that they could be tapped when they were 40. Big, fat very fat, pensions so that if you were going to essentially tax the future of these kids by one, not allowing them an education because they just play football all the time and, two, damaging their brains while they play, set aside the money down the road so they’re taken care of. You don’t have to pay them right away, but have a fancy pension plan.

Robert Birnbaum: For all the talk of the student athlete, the NCAA doesn’t seem to really care about the players.

MICHAEL LEWIS: No. On an individual level, I’m sure there’s plenty [who do]. I’m sure coaches care about the ..
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Robert Birnbaum: Mark Emmert. The head of the NCAA. He doesn’t strike me as being concerned about the athletes… it’s so hypocritical. It’s so duplicitous.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yes, it is. I would love to know if you just open it up and let the kids get paid what would happen to coaches’ pay. I’m sure it would decline, right? I’m sure it would decline, but by how much, I don’t know. Imagine a world where you say there are none of these rules anymore. If Alabama wants to be number one in the nation, you’ve got to buy the team. How much money would come into it? It would obviously cost the NCAA a lot of money and would probably cost the coaches who are being paid some money.

Robert Birnbaum: You’re assuming there’s a finite amount of money that they can take in, that any particular school could take it.

MICHAEL LEWIS: It would be interesting to price the athletes. I mean, this is an exercise, right, because it’s hard pricing an 18 year old. I guess the football players are more predictable than, say, baseball players are at that age, but even then, there’s lots of uncertainty. It would be an interesting intellectual exercise to decide what the star high school quarterback is worth in college football.

Robert Birnbaum: You might have to step back and figure out what is the whole university system worth today?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Well, our university system is much more complicated than the European, right? It exists for all sorts of reasons other than to educate people.

Robert Birnbaum: I just read that Tennessee is making its schools tuition-free — free college educations. The state of Tennessee …and Germany and Chile are also making college free.

MICHAEL LEWIS: I didn’t see that.

Robert Birnbaum: It seems to me that kids’ sports – I’ve become more aware because of my son – kids’ sports are big business, big money, and a lot of that money is made distinctly against the interests of the kids.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yeah.

Michael Lewis with Cuba Birnbaum [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Robert Birnbaum [to Cuba]: How much was your baseball program, the fee for one year? $4,000? [this does not include equipment, travel and other incidentals][

Cuba Birnbaum: They raised it to $5,000.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Where is this?

Robert Birnbaum: Near us.

MICHAEL LEWIS: [to Cuba] So which sports do you play?

CUBA BIRNBAUM: I play baseball and football.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Okay. Which is your better sport?

CUBA BIRNBAUM: I’d say now football is.

MICHAEL LEWIS: What position?

CUBA BIRNBAUM: I play offensive tackle and defensive tackle.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Okay.

CUBA BIRNBAUM: I just got voted a captain so …I’m excited.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Good team?

CUBA BIRNBAUM: Last year, 9 and 2.

Robert Birnbaum: They were beaten by the Catholic school teams.

CUBA BIRNBAUM: Yeah. Catholic conference team.

Robert Birnbaum: Those guys are always like Alabama, the Catholic schools[they can recruit].

CUBA BIRNBAUM: It’s crazy.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Do you have ambition to play in college?

CUBA BIRNBAUM: I do, yes. I have a big ambition. I’m definitely looking out there.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Is there a chance you’ll be recruited to play in college?

CUBA BIRNBAUM: I believe so, yeah. With my size projectability, I think I definitely have a shot. I need to start reaching out to schools, though. I’m doing a lot of camps in the summer, so I’m excited for that.

MICHAEL LEWIS: How big are you? What do you list at?

CUBA BIRNBAUM: Right now 6’2″, 265.

Robert Birnbaum: I try to put my arms around him, and I can’t … he’s pretty big. The reason I mentioned that baseball program is because now somebody is paying $5,000 a year. What’s the parent’s expectations? What do the people who have that program tell the parents? Of course, they tell the parents the kid’s got a lot of talent. He’s really good and he’s got a shot at Division 1 or something like that.

MICHAEL LEWIS: I’ve seen a slightly scaled down version of that in my girls’ softball a lot, and some sad things happen. Well, parents get too involved. It’s supposed to be fun. That’s the obvious problem, but beyond that, the kids start to get professional at a very young age and so when they’re on a team, they’re not actually teammates. They’re not rooting for each other. They’re rooting against each other because they want the playing time. They want to be the star, and there’s too much at stake.

Robert Birnbaum: The fun is being drained out of it. Now young kids are having pro sports aspirations.
Down in the Caribbean, a lot of these kids start playing seriously at8 or 9, 10,are funneled into academies. And they’re already in debt before they hit the age of 16 when they are eligible to be drafted by MLB.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Well, its also like now math, where you peak very young in life, and so it is a naturally tendency for the market to creep down to the children and professionalize it. Probably music is like this, too, right? Really gifted …

Robert Birnbaum: And tennis.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yeah, but I was thinking about things other than sports. It isn’t just sports where kids’ lives get disrupted by professionalism.

Robert Birnbaum: Chess.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Chess, yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: Dancing, ballet, gymnastics.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Music.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Have you seen Whiplash?

Robert Birnbaum: No.

MICHAEL LEWIS: So Whiplash is the musical equivalent of what we’re discussing. It’s like Juilliard. It’s kids playing until their hands bleed, and the joy is being drained. Sometimes when you hear kids talk about, who are really gifted, say, pianists when they’re really young, they sound a bit like really gifted football players or softball players. The joy gets beaten out of it. It’s something that’s started as that joy and, through the professionalization of it, it becomes something else.

Robert Birnbaum: Well, all this stuff has become commodified.

MICHAEL LEWIS: True. It’s been made to pay in extraordinary ways, right? And the winners do so well, it encourages lots of people to try for it.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah, and of course, lots of disappointment. Your writing career started because of your ignorance of the financial world, right?

MICHAEL LEWIS:.Yeah.

Robert Birnbaum: The basic core of your writing has always been about interesting people and them solving problems. I can’t [at the moment remember why you wrote Moneyball *. What was the spur for that?
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MICHAEL LEWIS:The original spur had nothing to do with the book. It was when free agency came to baseball in a big way.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Robert Birnbaum: Curt Flood or Andy Messersmith…

MICHAEL LEWIS: I always think of Andy Messersmith, right, but actually it was in the mid-90s, we moved to California. I started to watch the Oakland A’s and noticed at one point that the left fielder was being paid 6 million bucks and the right fielder was being paid 200 million, and my first thought was, “I want to write a piece about whether the right fielder’s pissed off when the left fielder drops the ball.”
But it’s a piece of a class warfare about baseball and I started watching the money, on the field. That led naturally to seeing the discrepancies between the payrolls. Which then led to just idling. I thought it was going to be a magazine piece, and I would call Billy Beane, “Can you explain to me how you compete against 6 times the money?” His answer was so interesting, I started to hang around. Books all go that way. It starts with something … it doesn’t ever start as a book. It starts as a question, and then the question, the answer to the question is so interesting that I want to come back and ask more questions. At some point, I’ve got so many questions, I see this is going to take some time to unravel.

Robert Birnbaum: So you’re normally not inclined to write a book, right?
…
MICHAEL LEWIS: The things that started … the things that were conceived as books, “Liar’s Poker”, “The New New Thing”, “Moneyball”, “The Blind Side”, “Big Short”, “Flash Boys” and that’s it. The rest could be the collections of magazine pieces or little magazine pieces that were tossed between hard covers, and even those that were conceived as books, I think it’s fair to say that all of them with the exception of “Flash Boys” and maybe “The Big Short” – because I could afford to do it now – were started as little magazine pieces. They just got out of control.

Robert Birnbaum: You couldn’t stop?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Couldn’t stop. I have to spend so much time investing in the subject before I’m comfortable saying I want to write a book about it. It wouldn’t make any sense to go in thinking it’s a book. It’s always you’ve got to go in with small ambitions.

Robert Birnbaum: The Heisenberg Principle says something about the observer changing what is observed by observing. Years ago, people didn’t know who you were. I suppose exponentially “Moneyball” put you …

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s changed. It’d definitely changed.

Robert Birnbaum: Right. When you talk to people now, do you feel like …

MICHAEL LEWIS: I’m changing what I’m watching?

Robert Birnbaum: Well, they’re changing themselves because of you.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Ah. Yes. The answer is yes, and the way to get around the problem is to spend so much time with them that your presence becomes normal. The first 10 hours of interviews are not all that useful in getting the character. Sometimes you get a lot of information, but if you move into their lives, eventually they surrender.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s like the photographer shooting blanks the first few minutes

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yeah. That’s exactly right. It’s just like that. I try to make my presence so normal that they just forget what it’s all about, and it takes long enough that there’s no way … it’s really hard if I’m with them for a year for them to … things happen. The kind of person who I’ve tended to write about is intelligent enough to realize that’s going to happen, so they just give up and they give up very quickly.

Robert Birnbaum: Most of the time when I talk to people, it’s an hour, hour and a half, and maybe the first half hour is just back and forth. It’s like a cop interrogating someone. At the 5th hour, the guy is not going to give up anything, but by the 20th hour, he’s going give up whatever you want…
..
MICHAEL LEWIS: You know, it’s funny you say that because I was just thinking about this because I’ve done several episodes of Charlie Rose in the last year, — the 25th anniversary of “Liar’s Poker” came out, the hardback, “Flash Boys”, paperback. I realized when I was sitting there talking to him two days ago that I had actually just completely forgotten I was on television. I was talking to him as I would talk to you in a private situation. Afterwards, I thought, “What the hell did I just say?” How is that going to play? It was very odd.

Robert Birnbaum: Thomas Jefferson, I think he said, “If you never tell a lie, you don’t need a memory.”

MICHAEL LEWIS: This is true. It’s true.

Robert Birnbaum: But we all need to shade some things and maybe not reveal other things.

MICHAEL LEWIS: No. It was more … I was talking about friends. I was talking about other people, and I just didn’t … without a filter.

Robert Birnbaum: He [Charlie Rose] did an interview* with Henri Cartier Bresson. He went to France for it, and Bresson is an incredibly charming old man — it was a great interview. Rose was never more attentive and sensitive to his subject than I saw him then.

MICHAEL LEWIS: He’s got a gift for making people comfortable, and it brings out … you know what it reminds me of? There are interviewers who think that the way you get things out of people is to needle them and the interviewers who realize it’s the opposite. I’m more like Charlie Rose when I talk to people. Do you know the Traveler’s Tale? It was a kid’s story, I think, but the story was about a man who was walking through the landscape with a cloak and the sun and the north wind challenge each other to see who can get him to remove the cloak. The north wind blows and blows, and he just holds the cloak more tightly around him. The sun comes along and makes it nice and gentle, and he removes it voluntarily. This is my approach. I’d rather be the sun.

Robert Birnbaum: The sun?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Right. I’d rather get people to remove their cloaks voluntarily.

Robert Birnbaum: Who actually does decent interviews these days in the mainstream media?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Jon Stewart.

Robert Birnbaum: You’d expect, given some of his guests, you expect a little more persistence [he did hold reporter Judith Miller’s feet to the fire]… His great moment, I thought, was when he was on Crossfire and he just let those guys have it. Colbert is the same thing. I don’t know if John Oliver actually interviews people, …
MICHAEL LEWIS: Did you see his show on NCAA sports?

Robert Birnbaum: Yes. That was great. That was really great.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Fantastic.

Robert Birnbaum: He did a show on the US drone program that was also really convincing. Chilling and funny at the same time—the effect is to see the absurdity .
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MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s important journalism. It’s actually important journalism.

Robert Birnbaum: Which I think is an evolutionary step from the Colbert/Stewart thing which are still comedic.

MICHAEL LEWIS: It is still funny, though.

Robert Birnbaum: Absolutely.

MICHAEL LEWIS: My 8 year old doesn’t have any idea what the NCAA is or what is going on. He’s rolling with laughter as he’s watching the thing.

Robert Birnbaum: I wonder if there’s a critical mass of media that will affect them, affect the NCAA?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yes. Oh, I think so.

Robert Birnbaum: I know that Joe Nocera at the Times is hammering them. Shelby … it wouldn’t be Shelby Foot, somebody in the Atlantic a couple of years ago wrote a scathing take down on the NCAA, and now some of the more articular players – Richard Sherman. Do you remember the guy at Houston, the runningback, Avery something talked about how they didn’t have enough food? He’s going, “My coach is driving an expensive car, an Infinity or something like that, and I’m here …” So we told the coach, we said, “Coach, we don’t have any food.” He went out and got us 50 McDonald’s burgers… Anyway … What would the critical mass be? The government’s not going to take them on

MICHAEL LEWIS: Well, except the culture’s shifting on the subject. You can feel it just like you can feel the culture shifting on football. Generally, its to your detriment if you want to play, I think it’s this … we move slowly. You might have said exactly the same thing about smoking in the 1950s. You know this because you’re intelligent and on the edge. You know the studies that show there was a link between smoking and cancer. You’d be outraged that the big tobacco companies were able to rig the system and prevent change, then one day it all come collapsing down. I feel like that’s where the NCAA is headed. I feel that’s where football is headed, with concussions. Its not just concussions either. The thing about that sport is if you go and see a former professional football player at the age of 50, it is depressing. It’s not just their brains. It’s their knees. It’s their shoulders. You take such a beating. [to Cuba] With any luck, you won’t be good enough so you can only get so far.

Robert Birnbaum: I’m not a great fan. Cuba gets a lot out of it, and he’s good at it —so what are you going to do? And these kids, you tell them not to lead with their head, they lead with their head.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Right. They’re immortal. That’s the problem.

Robert Birnbaum: Right.

MICHAEL LEWIS: They think it.

Robert Birnbaum:He’s been lucky. You’ve had no serious injuries, right?

CUBA BIRNBAUM: Not a thing.

Robert Birnbaum: But also I have to say, to his credit, he’s not suicidal. He’s not one of these guys who gives up his body in every play. He’s the polite kid who pulls people up from the ground at he end of the play.

CUBA BIRNBAUM: Sometimes. Sometimes.

Robert Birnbaum: If he likes them. I noticed the NFL now has a neutral trainer at games.

MICHAEL LEWIS: To evaluate the players.

Robert Birnbaum: Evaluate the players and make a decision.

MICHAEL LEWIS: They’ll do whatever they can do to …

Robert Birnbaum: To masquerade.

MICHAEL LEWIS: … to put lipstick on the pig.

Robert Birnbaum: Why do Americans like football so much? What happened? Is this just brainwashing over year to year after year after year, spectacle upon spectacle?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I mean, I plead guilty. I think it really works on TV.

Deep Crossers by Nick Dawidoff

Robert Birnbaum: Right. I like the game, too, and I liked it a lot more after I read Nick Dawidoff’s book on the Jets* — the year he spent with the Jets. Did you read that? It’s a terrific book.

MICHAEL LEWIS: I bet it is a terrific book. He’s a great writer.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah, and he seemed to do it with the right group, too. Ryan is actually a lively and likable subject, I think, from what I could tell in this book.

MICHAEL LEWIS: I think there are a handful of football subjects I would love to go after… that aren’t polemical… Why do people like it so much? It’s simulated warfare with enough violence to make it plausible. You’re watching generals command armies. You’re watching armies fight.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s interesting. For fans, I think that’s the case. One of Cuba’s coaches stated that he didn’t buy that comparison, and I think maybe that’s okay to tell the players.

CUBA BIRNBAUM: It’s giving respect to those who actually fight in actual war — not calling it warfare in that sense. We’re …

MICHAEL LEWIS: Well, in the olden times, you did give respect to your opponent in warfare.

Robert Birnbaum: Right. That’s right. They were more formality. There were more rules.

MICHAEL LEWIS: You’re obeying a chivalric code.

Robert Birnbaum: Now they have people that bite each other’s ears, break fingers.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Biting seems to be one thing that an athlete does, and his reputation never recovers. You don’t want to bite your opponent. There’s something about a guy biting that just disturbs people.

Robert Birnbaum: Do you think Mike Tyson’s suffered?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Robert Birnbaum: Really? Well, look at him now. Interesting character, huh?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Mike Tyson?

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah.

MICHAEL LEWIS: I haven’t looked that closely.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah. He’s … a Broadway show. I’ve seen him speak.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Is he on Broadway now?

Robert Birnbaum: He had a Broadway show, I think.

MICHAEL LEWIS: He was good in The Hangover.

CUBA BIRNBAUM: Yeah. The tiger. The tiger is my .
..
Robert Birnbaum: Did you see Boyhood?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yes, I did see it, and I thought it was extremely good. I still want so badly to know how Richard Linklater did that because how he plotted it, scripted it, whether he let the characters decide … there’s no way he could know where they were going to be or even if they were alive.

Robert Birnbaum: It was a total flier, right?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yeah. It was a total flier. Shocked that it didn’t get the Oscar.

Robert Birnbaum: I’m shocked that Citizenfour won an Oscar.

MICHAEL LEWIS: That it did? That’s interesting. Why?

Robert Birnbaum: First of all, it’s controversial. Second of all, because as a film, it’s pretty flat.

MICHAEL LEWIS: True, except the period when he’s actually in that hotel room.

Robert Birnbaum: Yes, there’s that tension.

MICHAEL LEWIS: There’s a real tension there when it’s actually happening. After that it goes flat.

Robert Birnbaum: I come away certainly from that thinking the guy’s a hero, and I think he should get the Nobel Peace Prize for what he did because he’s just blown open something that people were taking for granted. Maybe they’re still taking it for granted just like high-frequency trading still seems to be acceptable but people are looking at it. I think this NSA invasion of everything is starting to sink in.

MICHAEL LEWIS: One of the great things about that film is it totally undermined the public perception of Edward Snowden which was that he was a sneak.

Robert Birnbaum: And a traitor.

MICHAEL LEWIS: That he was a ne’er-do-well. That he wasn’t thinking when he did it.

Robert Birnbaum: And he had a character flaw, which is why he whistle blew. How did that happen? This big reversal about whistle blowers that are now treated like pariahs.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Well, it depends on the whistle blower, right? Whistle blowers have never, ever been extremely popular. My daughter right now who’s writing a paper for her 10th grade history project is writing about The Pentagon Papers, and Daniel Ellsberg happens to live blocks away.

Robert Birnbaum: Did she get to talk to him?

MICHAEL LEWIS: She more than talked to him. She’s turned her project into a piece about Daniel Ellsberg.

Robert Birnbaum: Wow. Like you. She found a character.

MICHAEL LEWIS: She found a character. That’s right. Her history teacher said, “Actually, forget about the Pentagon Papers. If he’ll talk to you, go do it about him.” There’s even ambivalence about him now. He’s a hero in Berkeley. There are places where they’ll lynch him in America. We have an uncomfortable relationship with people who turn on institutions.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah. That film Michael Mann did on tobacco… The Insider, he lost almost everything, right?

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s not a good … usually being a whistle blower is not a good career move. It’s brave.

Robert Birnbaum: They are mostly viewed as turncoats.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yes. Some subset of our population views blind loyalty as an admirable character trait, the capacity for it. Disloyalty, no matter what you’re being disloyal to, is a sin, but it’s funny. Even those people if you give them extreme cases – von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler – they’ll say, “Oh, that was great,” but when there’s more ambiguity to it, people fall back on their emotional, core response.

Robert Birnbaum: There’s a great novel by Justin Cartwright about the most famous plot to kill Hitler, and it involves Isaiah Berlin and some fictitious German. He really gets inside that story. I think it’s called
The Song Before it is Sung (2007)

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s an incredible story.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah. Didn’t they put Tom Cruise in the movie called Valkyrie ?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I don’t know.

Robert Birnbaum: He plays a Wehrmacht Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. (laughs) What’s the television production writing part of your life now?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I’m a failed screenwriter. That’s the sad truth.

Robert Birnbaum: Most screenwriters are failed screenwriters.

MICHAEL LEWIS: I haven’t given up. I’m on my 4th or 5th pilot, Commissioned. Two for CBS. One for TNT. One for HBO, so this is the 5th, for Showtime. I’m getting better. I’m starting to figure out how to rig the system in my favor, and I’m handing in the pilot next month. It’s done. It just needs some touching up, and I haven’t had time because I’ve been on tour. I think there’s a real shot this time.

Robert Birnbaum: You’re just the writer. You’re not producing, you’re not casting?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Produce and writing.

Robert Birnbaum: So if you’re producing ..
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MICHAEL LEWIS: I’ll help run the show if anything. That’s what I will do as a job, and I won’t write a book for a while. I’m that interested in it. I tell you, these are my ambitions. I would love to have a really great drama on the air and then use it as an excuse to write a play. I’ve always been interested in the theater, and I would love to do that. On the other hand, it’s nice to have things you still want to do, so maybe I should wait so I still have things I want to do. If I got to write a play right now, I wouldn’t have anything left.

Robert Birnbaum: (laughs) Well, something might come up. What are the great dramas that you think are on television now? Are there any for you?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Oh, my God. The ones that are … some have come and gone. Breaking Bad.

Robert Birnbaum: I never got that one, but I’m the only one.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Really?

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah. The Wire?

MICHAEL LEWIS: The Wire and The Sopranos were the originals. The Wire especially.
The Wire was just a breathtaking achievement.

Robert Birnbaum: Dostoevskian, I think.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Or Dickensian or … it was a novel on the screen, and it showed what you could do. In the moment, when they’re creating that thing, it didn’t attract, in the beginning, that much attention or that much of an audience.

Robert Birnbaum: They weren’t almost going to do a 4th or 5th season.

MICHAEL LEWIS: But they’ll sell DVDs of that thing forever, and it’s nice that model now exists because it means that you can do that kind of quality work and not go whoring after eyeballs right away and find a home for it. It’s the golden age of television… Well, Homeland, I think Homeland is fantastic.

Robert Birnbaum: Netflix stuff is getting interesting.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Mm-hmm (affirmative). House of Cards lost me the moment it became … it detached so far from whatever could happen.

Robert Birnbaum: I thought the 1st season was okay, but the 2nd season … it does have strong—it’s very strong casting.

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s beautifully performed.

Robert Birnbaum: Everybody looks good on screen— there is a 3rd season coming.

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s amazing what you can get away with if you have really talented actors. I was just watching … two nights ago, I went to a play in New York, The Audience, which is with Helen Mirren, a Queen Elizabeth thing.

Robert Birnbaum: She’s magnificent.

MICHAEL LEWIS: If you just read … I haven’t read the play. If you just read the play, you’d think, “This is going to be the most boring play ever produced. There could be nothing on paper that would be all that interesting,” and the performances are riveting. I mean, you’re totally captivated because of what the actor is doing.

Robert Birnbaum: I get that—I could never read Shakespeare, but I love watching the plays performed. I don’t get reading it. I guess I don’t have enough imagination to enliven the characters, but I love it. I love the drama. Netflix did that woman prison movie. Not bad.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Orange is the New Black? I have only seen a few of them, and it was really good.

Robert Birnbaum: Certainly an unexpected place to go. I don’t know if you’ve seen this one, Peaky Blinders?

MICHAEL LEWIS: What’s it called?

Robert Birnbaum: Peaky Blinders. This is about criminal gangs in Birmingham, England post World War I, and they’re all competing and one of them, the Peaky Blinders, is trying to get big enough to go to London.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Uh-huh.

Robert Birnbaum: They have Tom Hardy. Tom … is in this. Great actor. He just did this film called Locke where he does a movie entirely in a car. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one. Anyway, he plays a Jewish mobster. He’s like Fagan. He’s funny, and he’s also an Elmore. Leonard character He’s funny, but he’s …

MICHAEL LEWIS: Where did it air?

Robert Birnbaum: Netflix. They’ve done two seasons, and I think they’re doing a 3rd. Yeah. You’re right. It is the golden age of television, and I think it’s finally because whoever’s doing it is letting writers write.

MICHAEL LEWIS:The shows no longer require big audiences. They require passionate audiences, and that is the key.

Robert Birnbaum: Right. That’s right.

MICHAEL LEWIS: The people who are producing or creating, producing these things are paid to understand that. All I need is a passionate following.
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Robert Birnbaum: They’re enlarging the shelf life of these shows . I think ‘hit; used to mean we’re grabbing the money and six months from now, no one will remember, but now these things all have a longer life. Is your stuff fictional or …

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s fictional.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s all fictional?

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s fictional, but it’s drawn from …

Robert Birnbaum: Based on true stories? Or the ever popular “Inspired by a true story”?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Based on a true story. It’s actually not based on a true story. The characters are based on true characters. They’re characters pulled out of the 1920s on Wall Street. They’re some great characters. They’re characters who are worthy of being dramatized, and the situation rhymes with net (????). It’s a way of describing how the financial system first came to be, and there’s enough of an echo in that time with what’s happening now. You get at what’s happening now through that in a much more concrete, simpler way.

Robert Birnbaum: So you say you’re waiting for approval?

MICHAEL LEWIS: So Showtime hasn’t seen it. They’ve seen an outline with which they were very pleased, and the script will go in in the next couple of weeks and then we’ll wait and see.

Robert Birnbaum: You can do a lot more in a film version of something, of a story…

MICHAEL LEWIS: Each medium has its strengths, right? There are things that are hard to get across in film. There are things that are easier. I get a lot of pleasure out of figuring out how to do new things well, and it actually is informing the books and the magazine pieces because the storytelling that goes on in a script, it’s got to be so compressed. It’s so unforgiving, and everything has got to have a point and drive the story forward. That discipline is really useful to just have in the back of your mind when you’re writing something where you actually don’t have that constraint. I think I’m going to get better at keeping the reader because of it.

Robert Birnbaum: You just reminded me that now, these days, when I see the dog in the story in a film, I know something bad’s going to happen. I think these directors are including this as a cue … seriously. What’s the point of having a dog in the story unless something terrible could happen
.
MICHAEL LEWIS:Marley and Me.

Robert Birnbaum: Well, that was totally bad. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

MICHAEL LEWIS:Give me an example. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Robert Birnbaum: God, I just saw a movie [Mister Pip] and they shot the dog.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Where the dog got shot?

Robert Birnbaum: The dog got shot
.
MICHAEL LEWIS: Like Old Yeller. Actually, maybe you’re onto something here.

Robert Birnbaum Percival Everett* used a funny dog thing his Western send up In God’s Country the dog’s fate receives the most sympathy …

MICHAEL LEWIS: A sudden doom came over you.

Robert Birnbaum: Yeah, and I think I’ve been set up like that before. You’re still doing magazines? Are you exclusive to Vanity Fair?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yes. I will write columns for Bloomberg, and I can imagine there might be some piece that Vanity Fair wouldn’t want that I’d have to go somewhere else.

Robert Birnbaum: Do you have to give it to them first?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I don’t have to, but I like them.

Robert Birnbaum Your were friendly with Adam Moss at the New York Times. He is gone, right?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I did stuff with Adam and my editor there was Gerry Marzorati who then took over for Adam.
.
Robert Birnbaum: They redesigned it didn’t they?

MICHAEL LEWIS: It’s funny. There was a time pre-internet or even when the internet was in its early days when that magazine felt like the center of the universe. If you put something there, everybody you knew saw it, and now it feels like no matter where you put something, because it’s on the web everybody’s going to see it. Placement means much less than it used to. A lot of the value of that magazine has been undermined, I think, by the internet.

Robert Birnbaum: I do have a digital subscription to the Times and so when I look at the thing I just see so little to read that I want to read.
.
MICHAEL LEWIS: I think they’ve changed their minds about this – but they basically abandoned their commitment to long format. They shortened the articles. They shortened the magazine. They didn’t trust the attention span of the reader, and that was a huge error because that’s all they had. They can’t compete with the internet. If you want a distracted reader, you’re never going to beat the internet, but they could run a 10,000 word piece and make it big and say this is important and demand you turn off everything and read it. People did, and that was very, very valuable and they should never have walked away from it.

Robert Birnbaum: Well, I think the magazine is now designed for the net. It’s not designed for print.

MICHAEL LEWIS: That’s true.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s not designed to be held.

MICHAEL LEWIS: This is true.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s a sad thing. Have we missed any medium that you’re not in? Books, magazines, television.

MICHAEL LEWIS: I’m not really in television. I’m trying.

Robert Birnbaum: Well, I’d say you were in. You’re spending your time doing it. You’re in.

MICHAEL LEWIS: On Monday, the film for “The Big Short” starts shooting in New Orleans. I think it’s going to be really good, but I don’t have anything to do with it.

Robert Birnbaum: They just optioned it and that was it?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Paramount bought it with Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt’s in it, but the only reason it’s happening is this fellow, Adam McKay, who’s Will Ferrell’s writer and partner in crime on the Funny or Die website got obsessed with it. He wrote this spectacular script, and he’s attracted all this talent to it.

Robert Birnbaum: So they showed it to you? They showed you the script?

MICHAEL LEWIS: They did. It’s not a broad comedy like he’s done before. It’s different. It’s very powerful. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be fun.

Robert Birnbaum: Well, there are comedies that have punchlines and jokes and there are comedies that are comedic because the situations are comedic. As a New Orleansian, I meant to ask you, have you watched Treme?

MICHAEL LEWIS:Yes, the first couple of episodes.

Robert Birnbaum: What do you think?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Didn’t do it for me. My wife really likes it and swears that I would, if I sat down with the whole thing and tried to watch it in a gulp, I’d care about it and I may one day, but it felt … so often when people come from the outside in New Orleans, they notice the stuff that’s picturesque, picaresque and are drawn to it, and they direct it at the expense of getting at the actual soul of the place. They think that’s the soul of the place, and he isn’t that far off but it felt like very much an outsider’s take.

Robert Birnbaum: Did you watch Spike Lee’s movie on Katrina?

MICHAEL LEWIS: Yeah. It seemed crazy, I thought. I don’t think the government tried to blow up the levees.

Robert Birnbaum: He’s does leave you with that impression.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Anybody who I think is being honest about New Orleans now would say the city is in so much better shape now than it was before the storm, so much better shape. There’s still problems, but it’s a vibrant place with a future instead of a charming place with a past.

Robert Birnbaum: It’s sort of like knocking down all the old projects. In Chicago, they knocked down a bunch of old housing projects. That had to be done.

MICHAEL LEWIS: You couldn’t have done it. You couldn’t have replaced the school system with a charter school system. You couldn’t have upgraded the healthcare system.

Robert Birnbaum: The charter school initiatives are taking a beating, a lot of bad examples of corruption and …
MICHAEL LEWIS: There are a lot of bad examples. There’s no way it could be worse than what was there before in that case, and I know because my mother helped create one of them, two of them. I’ve spent some time in these places, and there was no public school – well, maybe there was one, but for very gifted kids – but they’re basically so much better than before …

Robert Birnbaum: When do you have to leave for the airport?

MICHAEL LEWIS: I have to go now.

Robert Birnbaum: Thank you.

MICHAEL LEWIS: All right, Robert.

Robert Birnbaum:I hope it isn’t 10 years until the next time.

MICHAEL LEWIS: No, no. It won’t be. It really won’t be. Good to see you.

Robert Birnbaum: Good to see you.

MICHAEL LEWIS: Thanks for making the time for me.

Robert Birnbaum: Oh, absolutely.

MICHAEL LEWIS: It was a pleasure as always.

Robert Birnbaum: I feel the same way.

MICHAEL LEWIS: [To Cuba] If you ever get your bell rung, get yourself out of the game.

CUBA BIRNBAUM: All right.

* My [2nd]and most recent conversation with Nick Dawidoff here

* My conversation with Percival Everett here.

* One of my conversations with Michael Lewis here.

*Charlie Rose interview with Henri Cartier Bresson here

Me and Nick Dawidoff talk Football and More

Though I am conflicted about football despite watching various levels of play (high school, college, NFL) for many years and despite my disinterest in reading books about sports, I was drawn to Nicholas Dawidoff’s
Collision, Low Crossers because I know him (having chatted with him previously) to bring an insight laden intelligence to bear on whatever interests him. It turns out this book is also unique in that he spent almost a year,essentially embedded, with the New York Jets.Reading this book and the conversation below went some distance to removing the scales from my eyes and I am able to watch my son’s Newton North Tiger’s with a fresh vision and generally having acquired a modicum of respect for players and coaches.

Collision, Low Crossers by Nick Dawidoff

RB: Remember I have the last word—so don’t mess with me.

ND: Even if you didn’t I would give it to you.

RB: Rachel Cohen calls you Nicky

ND: That’s what everybody calls me except for football coaches. They call me Nick.

RB: And they called you ‘Worm’.

ND: That too.

RB: That’s not so bad. I had a high school friend called Worm. He didn’t suffer from it.

ND: Well, from Miami to New York to West Newton Massachusetts, it’s all in how its intended.

RB: Waxing philosophical now, are we? Is there a subject that you wouldn’t write about?

ND:(pauses) So many, probably. I should only write about things that I am really enthusiastic about.

RB: You wrote a book on country music. You wrote a memoir about your grandfather. You edited the Library of America anthology on baseball. And as far as I know you have now done this book on football.

Baseball edited by Nicholas Dawidoff

ND: In between I wrote a non-fiction, coming of age book of my childhood.

The Crowd Sounds Happy by Nicholas Dawidoff

RB: About you.

ND: It was mainly about other people.

The FlySwatter by Nicholas Dawidoff

RB: So, is there a subject that you can’t imagine writing about?

ND: So many. It seems to me that these are—they are not all the same book, they all basically come from the same terrain, which is outsider somewhere in the United States who, by virtue of some form of ingenuity and persistence, overcomes different forms of adversity to penetrate the culture and then engage with the culture.

RB: How is that manifest in this book? I didn’t get that?

ND: Football players and coaches? These are not—most of them are not necessarily already in any form of privileged position in American culture. The huddle really is America. There is a little bit of everybody and they all come together.

RB: So with the new ‘no huddle‘ offenses—

ND: (laughs) I don’t know. It could be off shore.

RB: I was bemoaning the fact that my son’s football team doesn’t have huddles either. The coaches call plays from the sidelines. I’m thinking that takes away something from the game. I have come to, intellectually, dislike football. While I seem now to be hard wired to pay attention to it. But I don’t like myself for watching it. To me it’s evolved into a vicious game and a rotten business.

ND: Certainly football has had its share of really bad press lately. Everywhere from New Orleans with the bounties to Miami with bullying to concussions and the deplorable way the NFL handled concussions for many years. To even here in New England, where you have a player on trial for murder.Football evolves so slowly in many cultural ways but it evolves so quickly in many other ways. More than any other sport. It evolves quickly in terms of its relationship to technology.

RB: Are there statistics that cover frequency and degree of injury pre-1960 and the present? Was it a noticeably less injurious game?

ND: I don’t know. There are so many different theories. All I can say is that people are much more aware of injury and even pain. When I was spending time with the Jets I saw the distinction between how some of the players had been taught to respond to their own physical ailments when in college and now in the pros. There really is a change going on. Greg McEllroy, who was a quarterback at the University of Alabama was a rookie, he is now with the Bengals. But he was a rookie with the Jets, my year there. When he was at Alabama you were considered soft if you went to the training room. The best thing about being with the Jets for him, in that respect, was that everybody was encouraged and it was considered irresponsible if you didn’t go to the training room because they understood that a healthy player was an optimal player.

RB: Was that attitude player enforced at Alabama?

ND: He wasn’t blaming anyone in particular and I certainly wouldn’t say it was unique to Alabama. When people talked about concussions, they talk about it exactly the way you do. They talk about football with a kind of queasy ambivalence— that’s pushing towards something in which they feel their guilt about watching it. “How can you watch something that you wouldn’t let your own children play?” That kind of thinking is slowly overtaking the joy in watching it. But within the [Jets] facility nobody ever talked about it unless I asked them. And even when I asked them some of them didn’t want to talk about it. Many football players are very young so they think they are going to live forever. But even more they really want to do this. They love playing the game. It’s extremely hard to gain a foothold in the NFL and then remain there. NFL—Not For Long— that’s what they say. I also think that it would be very difficult to play something that fast, that violent and that dangerous if you are thinking about getting hurt all the time.

RB: What do they say; the injury rate is 100%?

ND: That’s what Rex Ryan always says.

RB: Everybody gets hurt.

ND:Everybody gets hurt at some point or another. It’s about levels of injury and degrees.

RB: Are you a football fan?

ND: No. With this book— my two previous books had been very internal books. They have been biographical memoirs. And [so] I wanted to write about a subject that was a big American subject that was of concern to a lot of people. I was feeling sort of adversarial in my choice of subjects. Often when I choose a subject I would write a magazine piece first to see if it would be sustaining as a book. Both for me but more importantly for a reader. And I wrote about climate change deniers. I wrote about a presidents [Jimmy Carter]—since I don’t usually write about big public prominent people, that was different for me. I was really curious after President Obama was elected what the reaction to our first African-American president would be in communities where very few people voted for him. I spent a better part of a year in this northern part of Alabama in a county where almost no one voted for him.

RB: So there were no black people there?

ND: Very few. Those who were—the people who were there were very conservative to begin with. Yet their local representative was black.The sport that I was always interested in and felt the most affinity for was baseball. At the Jets facility I was known among some people as the baseball guy. A million things you’re known as —always other than your name. But I was really interested in things about football. I had written about intelligence officers before in my first book (about Moe Berg) I was really interested in the idea of people working very, very hard to the exclusion of everything else. About a big public subject and football people—the games are the exceptions. They are 16 holidays. But most of the life is spent off limits, behind walls in this window-less place where they are plotting and scheming for as many as 16 hours a day. Often it is 7 days a week on how to win football games. I really loved the idea there was this secret world which not only was it planning what every body was going to see but what every body was going to see effectively still remained secret—since when you watch a football game on television you have no idea, really, what’s going on. And it’s all based on these plays —they look like bistro menus or something that these guys are holding up [on the sidelines]. We don’t know what they mean or what they say. So where in baseball eventually everything becomes clear—the camera will even show you what pitch is called and the broadcaster will sometimes tell you. Football— I just liked how mysterious it was. So that was one thing. In a funny way I thought I would be able to bring people closer to something that they loved. Which seemed like a rewarding thing to do. But then also I always wanted to write a book about an office— a group of people working together in a very committed way on some collective endeavor, which was every thing to them to the exclusion of everything else. I would have loved to have written about the Manhattan Project in its time.

RB: What a group [that was].

ND: Exactly. And so this had always just been in mind and I thought of it as the book that I would write about a group of regulars. In effect, the Jets coaches became my regulars. It could have been any group of coaches.

RB: Really. It wouldn’t have been the same book if you had done this with the Giants

ND: It wouldn’t have been the same because the personalities would have been different. But

RB: The difference between an 8-8 team that failed to make the playoffs and a 9-7 team that won the Super Bowl.

ND: Right. It really was true that going in I ,of course, I hoped things would go well for the Jets. You can’t spend all that time with people who you come to really like and admire without wanting the best for them. But it didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to see a representative NFL season. And Bob Sutton, who you meet him the book who is the linebackers coach, and is now the defensive coordinator of the Kansas City Chiefs, told me at one point that he thought of the NFL as a corporation with 32 branch offices. And so itinerant is the NFL life that people who were with the Jets then, are now scattered all over the league. And it’s just the luck of the right combination.

RB: There is a large amount of recycling of head coaches who are bum rushed out of one town and find glory in another town. These guys don’t lose their jobs because they are terrible coaches.

ND: If you are a terrible coach you probably are going to lose your job—

RB: —and you’ll get another one.

ND: Probably but not for certain. If you are a good NFL coach you will keep finding a job. Maybe a more powerful position or lose a little power like Tony Spirano who was a head coach with the Jets who was then the offensive coordinator. Now I think he is the line coach with the Raiders. You move up and down depending on the fortunes of your team. But it is —there is a little bit of serendipity involved. Just the right combination of people at the right time. And it really does start—clearly the Jets would have been a very successful playoff team, if they had even a workmanlike successful quarterback. The fact that they had a severely regressing quarterback—quarterback is one privileged position in the game where—

RB: You were kinder to Mark Sanchez in the book then you are being right now.

ND: I don’t feel I am being unkind to him. He would say the same thing.

RB: He would say he was regressing?

ND: That he had regressed that year? Absolutely. He is a pretty honest, straight-up guy. I really liked Sanchez— even though he teased me sometimes in merciless ways, I was sitting there watching them lose. It is all about inflection. Keep in mind that football players are really young. Some of them are not much past high school. You accept different levels of maturity —

RB: And it must be the case that some players are not intelligent.

ND: People always said that to me but I never felt that way. I always felt the way George Plimpton felt about when he was writing Paper Lion. He was constantly defending football players to his friends.

RB: I am not saying they are stupider than the norm. Unscientifically, I want to say that average intelligence is not intelligent.

ND: All I can say about football is that—it requires, more study, more book learning, more preparation, then any other sport that I can think of. It requires more time in formal classrooms, more time in absorbing information and understanding how to process it and use it with such a mastery of that information, that you don’t even have to think about it. Those are classroom techniques and if you can’t do that you better be a really, really good intuitive athlete, otherwise you are not going to last in the NFL.

RB: You noted a linebacker who couldn’t remember plays.

ND: And they reduced his role. If you just spoke with him you would think he was one the most well-spoken, interesting people in the community. There is a distinction with what we think of as academic intelligence and football intelligence. I really think, for example. that Rex Ryan is an unusually intelligent person. His qualities of human intuition, his understanding of how to motivate people and also his ability to explore the emotional life and what distinguishes people is extremely sensitive. And impressive to me.

RB: You refer a number of times to your being ‘embedded’. Was that your intention from the start?

ND: My intention was simply to spend as much time as a possible with a group of people so that I could understand what they were doing.

RB: You were prepared to but did you think you would end up spending as much time as you did?

RB: When I began I didn’t know. I doubted it; I thought that for sure I would stay through training camp. But nobody has ever been allowed to spend an entire year with a team. And I don’t think it would have happened had Rex Ryan not been head coach. I can’t say for sure ,I don’t people with the other teams—other people with the Jets are very proud of the work that they do and they feel very comfortable with themselves.

RB: You are hinting that he may be unique for the NFL coaching fraternity.

ND: He is a very unusual person whose strengths and flaws were there in very full relief. As a coach he is certainly unusual. Most coaches have a scheme and within the scheme the 11 starters play 11 roles. And with Rex its an extremely elastic scheme and find roles for everybody within it. And he is constantly revising it. He is so flexible and receptive to new information about people that he then uses with football application. That to me was very appealing. See, you know that I was always very interested in baseball and you also know that baseball writing has been far superior to football writing—not even close right? There are a lot of good reasons for that. People like Walt Whitman to Ring Lardner to Thurber to Malamud to Updike to Roger Angell—all these wonderful American writers—

RB: I’m happy you didn’t include George Will in that group.

New Library of America anthology of Football
writing

Ed note:A Library of America anthology on football, Football: Great Writing About the National Sport has been published

ND: (laughs) All these great American writers who have written so well about the game and there are lots of good reasons for it. The primary is that baseball is accessible. It’s accessible because everybody has played it. Because you can see the faces. The game moves at a reflective pace, which lends itself well to being written about. Also, the game has always been receptive to journalist and reporters who can come and talk to the people for as long as they want. Whereas football has always been closed off. The form and function of the sport —it happens so fast. It’s hard to see. The players wear masks. They are obscured by armor. The rules are abstruse. Most of the life takes place off camera backstage. I wanted some way to slow football down so that you could write abut. That is what Plimpton did. He suited up and became a last string quarterback. It was a stunt but a necessary stunt because it was the only way you could get to know the people but also to get to know the mechanics of the sport with sufficient precision. For me what I came to see is the way a football season is planned, a game is planned. That felt literary to me. It was slow and gradual and resolute and fraught with mistakes and corrections and revision. That felt, to me, artistic. That was the artful part of football. For that reason, if you go and look at the acknowledgments and the source notes to my book, only one football book was a great influence to me. And that’s Paper Lion. Other than that—

RB Fredric Exeley’s A Fan’s Notes?

ND: Especially the first half, it is a wonderful book. But the books that were most affecting to me as I thought about this, were not those books.

Nicholas Dawidoff circa 2002 [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

RB: Do you know Dave Meggessey’s book Out of Our League?

Out of Their League by Dave Meggesey

ND: It’s a good book.

RB: Don Dellilo wrote a football novel.

ND: End Zone. A few people would say that Don Dellilo is the highest tier .

RB: I read this book because of you —you did open my eyes to the less obvious aspects of football. I loved that the Jet’s coaches let you call a play. Also, that Ryan called a play where all the linebackers were supposed to rush and they dropped back instead and the play worked. And Ryan didn’t want anyone to know that it was a mistake.

ND: [Ryan] “Don’t tell! Don’t tell!”

RB: Then Marv Lewis [of the Bengals] sees his guys running the same play, ”You dumb asses!” He knew it was a mistake. (laughs)

ND: There is a whole world—if you sit as I did, for an entire year with a group of seven defensive coaches in effect watch the season through the prism of their experience of it. They are watching a completely different sport. Just as the angles on film, the way that you watch film is different from what’s televised. Everything that is happening is completely different —or not completely different —its two parallel games.

RB: It does give one pause to wonder about the intelligence of the football fan.
I think of the obese, widow maker wearing, beer swilling, chip devouring, couch tuber—yelling at the TV when his team is not performing well.

ND: Not Fred Exeley?

RB: Right. Every sport has fans that couldn’t perform one athletic feat but are able to denigrate the players when they aren’t doing well.

ND: Isn’t it the same with politics—you’re up, you’re down. Same thing.

RB: You think that people approach politics in the same way they view athletic contests?

ND: People feel perfectly comfortable assuming a level of expertise that would risible and yet they do and that’s also acknowledged within and without as part of the pleasure of it. It ‘s fun to talk about politics, wherever you are, and its fun to talk about football. And you would talk about these things and, maybe write about them in ways that you wouldn’t talk or write about other activities.

RB: I’ve seen the observation that many people would rather read about baseball then watch a game.

ND: It’s a testament to good writing.

RB: And the andante tempo of the game.

ND: Most of the best baseball writing probably isn’t an account of a game except for the exception of Don De Lillo. But even that is so inflected with his imagination. I am talking about “Pafko at the Wall”, which became part of Underworld. Your conception of football fans —I know you don’t really mean because football is the single most popular thing in the country. So every body is watching.

RB: Can you explain why? Especially as you point out most people don’t really know or understand the game.

ND: When we say they don’t know what they are watching, they don’t know the coded essence of the game, the underpinnings of the game. But what people see is incredibly dramatic. It’s graceful. It’s violent. It’s exciting. You can understand it. Also, a lot of the appeal of football, of course, has to do with television. Television has amplified, broadened, brightened and also slowed down football in such a way that you can —coaches after games who were just watching it live standing in the sidelines often will tell the press. I can’t answer your question until I look at the film. And the only reason we can answer questions, sometimes, is because of replay. There are other more, deeper reasons why people respond to football. The Jet psychologist would say that people respond to football because there is somewhere in everyone the urge to ‘drill’ another person. I would say that so much about football is actually counterintuitive. Football is the game of touchdowns and America is the country of films with happy endings, feel good films. I really think of football as the sport of disappointment and failure and what you do with it. Even though fans watch hoping to win, people stick with a franchise like the Jets which hasn’t won everything since 1969 —it has to do with, not misguided loyalty, but acknowledgment that there is something in football disappointment that is powerful and compelling. If you walk into an NFL facility on a Monday morning after these guys have all but eliminated sleep and all but eliminated family life pleasure and joys to completely concentrate on this. And to have gone out there in the most public way in front of all these people and been humiliated. And you have to walk in the facility on Monday morning and watch the film of what just happened to you and know that there is a press corps that is going to writing about this in the most scathing possible ways and then you have to play another game the following weekend. To walk in on a Monday morning is like —I just always thought of it as something into the picture of a depression.

RB: (laughs)

ND:I expected to round the corner in the hallway and there would be trees down and there’d be overturned cars and garbage cans and broken glass, papers blowing around and things like that. People are devastated after they lose. Especially a big game. They don’t sleep. And then they have to do it all over again. I thought what was most admirable about football people—people who were made for the sport—which wouldn’t be me— are they can overcome this by Wednesday. And greet their players and subordinates in such a way that they can be optimistic. They can resume their sense of confidence and even bon hommie. And by the following week they can be ready to do it again.

RB: Baseball is also a game of failure. Every [good] coach will tell his players after they strike out or make an error. “Forget about it. On to the next one.”

ND: Yeah but in baseball the stakes are so much lower. The ultimate stakes are similar. A three game losing streak in baseball— in football is the equivalent to a 30 game losing streak in baseball. The Jets just lost 3 in a row as we sit here. How would you feel after you lost 30 baseball games in a row? I mean, it’s unimaginable. But the proportions are the same.

RB: Is there a growing interest in football by women?

ND: Much greater. It’s the fastest growing demographic.

RB: Why?

ND: Why shouldn’t women take some of the same pleasure that the men do?

RB: They don’t play it.

ND: A lot of the man who enjoy football didn’t play it either. More people play baseball than watch baseball but football is a different thing—its graceful, beautiful, dangerous and dramatic. I talked to several wives of Jets people about this. They all pointed out how handsome football players and how great they look in those uniforms.

RB: You can see well-defined butts.

ND: Yeah and you can see then doing the most balletic things. The aesthetic qualities of football have been much enhanced. Also, how people think about their bodies. Look at Tom Brady when he was a rookie versus Tom Brady now. I am sure it doesn’t help that he is married to someone whose whole business is appearance. He has completely transformed his appearance.

RB: And the Super Bowl winning Redskin offensive line—what were they called The Hogs?

ND: Most linemen are enormous men But to watch people who are that big and run that quickly with that kind of choreographed agility is something to see. Why do we like spectator sports? Ultimately, it is a chance to do something, which I think is one of the most admirable things about humanity, which is the appreciation of things that other people can do. People who can play professional football for all of the —you talk about people in the peanut gallery talking in disparaging ways about athletes. Everybody understands that underneath it all, that the worst guy on a football team is the most sensational athlete from his town in generations.

RB: I don’t think they understand that.

ND: I’m not sure.

RB: IF they knew that there might be a more generous attitude about the players. If you are right than tht unerstanding must be very deeply buried

ND: One of the advantages of football being so distant, in a way, is that you didn’t have to be kind. It was a place to put those lesser angels.

RB: The defense of what I call crass behavior of fans is that you buy the ticket and you can say whatever.

ND: There are a lot of people walking around with a lot of frustration—wouldn’t you say? This is a fairly reasonable way to express frustration.

RB: It’s preferable to going into a post office and shooting the place [and people] up. It doesn’t make those fans more attractive.

ND: Nobody would say this is the Platonic ideal of spectating.

RB: Do you still watch football? And might you watch it with more devotion than before?

ND: It’s a funny thing I really never thought of this as a football book. Obviously, the setting is football and I was learning abut something that I didn’t know very well and was interested in—but I always thought of it as an n office book. Once I was no longer in that office it —the sport that I would really follow is the office. And while I watch football games now and certainly watch the games of the people I came to know well and care about who are in my book I wouldn’t watch it nearly as avidly as I would if I were spending time with them day in and day out. Its so different’—once you know how it works moment to moment leading up to a game if you are really immersed in it, than just to see it with a little more distance —you can see what a wonderful sport it is but for me it feels not quite as satisfying.

RB: So you enjoyed Michael Lewis’s Moneyball that is ostensibly a baseball book.

ND: A wonderful book. If I am saying that everyone of my books that boils down to outsider on fringes of society uses prominent American institution to enter and influence the culture, wouldn’t you say that everyone of his books involves looking at, somebody finding some sort of weakness or flaw in a system that can be exploited for short term even long term gain before everybody else figures out what this person has anticipated first. That’s every Michael Lewis book—that’s
Michael Lewis on business, on baseball, on high tech. That’s because it’s a great theme. And it’s so interesting.

Editor’s note: I contacted Michael Lewis on Dawidoff’s take on Lewis’s oeuvre:

“Certainly true of Moneyball and The Big Short and maybe The New New Thing. Not sure it fits the others.”

RB: What I found compelling in your book was the way coaches and scouts evaluated players and the colorful phrases that used to describe them.

ND: Obviously for me it’s going to be a book about interesting characters going through something together. Overcoming a form of adversity or not. Situations that throw them into some form of conflict. It’s just setting for the oldest virtues of storytelling.

RB: Have you carried over relationships from the book?

ND: Are there people I stay in touch with? Yeah, even coming here I got an email from one of the people I met.

RB: What’s their reaction to the book? Rex Ryan’s,if he’s seen it?

ND: I doubt it. Most people in the facility —I sent them copies but whether they have opened them I have no idea. There were a few people who read it before the season began. They have been uniformly positive. They all told me, like Mike Pattin who is the defensive coordinator and is now with the Bills told me, “You shouldn’t really worry about what I think. You should be worried what you reader is thinking.” And my experience by and large with football people was they were pretty straight up people. I loved how frank and candid they were. And they would have been disappointed with me if I weren’t the same. Bart Scott, the linebacker said, “You know football isn’t always pretty. It’s not any easy life in lots of ways. And you do us a disservice if you don’t describe it that way.” That was fairly consistent throughout. Even the very anxious general manager, Mike Tannenbaum, whose job is to be anxious and controlling —its his nature and his job. Even his response to it has been very generous. I wasn’t writing it for them. I was writing it for someone else. Your question points to something, which is a decision for a writer. Because once you are that intimately involved, in a sense that I am with them every day, watching what they do, part of the necessity of the culture is to bring everybody together in a common cause. And that common cause may ask people to make sacrifices in their own careers—statistical or otherwise. It’s just a very seductive thing to be a part of a big group especially for a writer who works by himself. It was very different to step outside it. As somebody who was inside/ outside all the time, I really got a sense of how fragile is the life in football. But also to write about it you really would have to be outside. You really have to make a definite break from it all, otherwise they were no longer characters to you— they were still people who you worry about how they felt.

RB: My son plays football and he is smart about it —he doesn’t unnecessarily throw himself into the fray. He is not one of those kamikaze players who hurls himself into the play. And I realized that he is into it because of the camaraderie. When the season was over I asked him if he missed it and he does.

ND: That’s what all the coaches say. More than playing the game itself they miss the company of other people. Some of the players were even prematurely sentimental.They were thinking about what it would belike not to have all these people to talk with everyday. For a lot of people in football they come from terrible childhood circumstances. Many come from single parent families, grew up in dire poverty. Lot of them knew considerable violence when they were children. There is the player in the book—Julian Posey who says football is his father. But he speaks for lots of people I the book in the sense that its very seductive appealing thing to have this community of people who want the best for you but are going to push you to achieve your best and also are going to be on hand all the time to support you. Sure there are many other accouterment of daily life—meals are there at the facility for you. There’s a dry cleaner. There’s a car wash. Everything is taken care so you can concentrate on being as successful as you can ta very difficult pursuit. More than anything, the younger players just really having older players who they can look up to. Older players like having coaches. For me. that was the most appealing part of it.

RB:What do you make of what happened in Miami?

ND: For me. It was different. It’s a SUV world. I drive a mini Cooper. It’s a steak and burger world and I would eat beet salads at lunch. When I exercise I wear a bandana. One of then is purple—the chief of scouts stops a meeting and he says, ”So Nicky, there are headband concerns.” There was a tremendous amount of teasing, all of which I loved. And you can just tell —intuitively, you can tell the difference between something that is affectionate and makes you feel closer to other people and something that’s mean spirited. What can happen is—we were talking earlier about Mark Sanchez and the other quarterbacks—they called me Bookworm, which quickly turned to Worm. Nobody likes being called worm or creep, everyday. I can see that when your whole life is endless meetings and practices, which go on from before dawn till deep into the evening, everyday with the same people and one of them is just getting a lot of pleasure about making you feel badly about yourself. How pretty quickly it could become intolerable if you were a certain kind of person. Especially, if that person were the most powerful colleague you had.

RB: I get that.

ND: Football is tedium. It is practicing and revising and over and over. The few days that you are repeating the same physical motion hundreds and hundreds of times and if you have someone around who can bring joy and humor and seem as though—Rex Ryan used to talk about his greatest coaching ability was his ability to make people believe that they weren’t doing the same thing over and over again. Sounds like small thing but it isn’t.

RB: So what do you think happened with the Miami Dolphins? Or how was it allowed to happen?

ND: One of the things that can happen is that environment things almost casually devolve. I don’t think it was ever that any one pointed to any one.

RB: Abuse wasn’t pointed toward Jason Martin?

ND: I think it was —of course I think it was disgusting and degrading and he was the object of derision. But it was never done—the expression of it wasn’t so deliberately brutal (this is all speculation on my part) but over time it gradually devolved into something that was horrible.

RB: Martin took it for a while and then it reached a point where he didn’t.

ND: The degrees of what he was taking and how it was feeling abut it. He’s young person. Nothing could be more troubling than Incognito’s behavior bit almost as troubling was that—I talked to some of the Jets guys about this, “I never saw anything remotely like this was I missing something?” They said no, what they couldn’t understand were the other Dolphins players. Bart Scott said, “If I saw anything remotely like this, that guy would have had 6 of us, he would have been up against the wall, answering for this.” Let’s not pretend that football locker room all harmony and comity but there is a great deal of fraternity and a great deal of —the word ‘love’ was used an awful lot. I saw a great deal of affection and concern for other people I don’t know why that didn’t happen in Miami. Makes me glad I wasn’t in Miami.

RB: I find the professions of ignorance disturbing.

ND: You shouldn’t be as surprised by that. The idea that this is locker room culture is a misnomer. Football players don’t spend all that much time as a team in the locker room. Even when they are together somebody is in the shower. Someone is in the equipment room. Someone is late. Someone has gone to lift weights. Only in team meetings is everyone together. By and large, the time when people spend the most time together would be in their position groups. In those little windowless rooms where they go to have their meetings and things. Somebody who is bound and determined to give you a hard time, pretty quickly those walls will close in.

RB: Are all NFL team facilities like bunkers?

ND: That’s what I am told. This is a job where you want be completely focused and committed to your purpose and you want to have mothering else going in but football. That’s the object.

RB: Are football players conservative by and large?

ND: You shouldn’t think of professional football players in any sort of general way. Every kind of person is playing football. Rex Ryan used to begin training camp, the first team meeting, by describing who was on the team. It was a long, bluesy riff and it was funny. In effect we have tall guys and short guys we have wild guys and religious guys and he would just go on and on. And it was true.

RB: But there are demographics that stand out—lots of black males, many from poor circumstances.

ND: Sure the sport is 67 % African American.

RB: Many who were sold football as a way of climbing out of their poverty.

ND: I don’t think too many of them would use the word ‘sold’. For many of them it was a joy and a pleasure and escape.

RB: I was reading Greg Easterbrook’s King of Sports. He argues that Nick Saban recruits for Alabama by selling it his program as a steppingstone to the NFL. As opposed to appealing to his kids with Alabama’s glorious tradition and wonderful campus and the joys of being a student athlete.

ND: All these guys want to be in the NFL.I don’t see that has anything to do with their reasons—

RB: The notion of selling the program—

ND: That’s what all college programs do. Penn State used to have—every team has a pro day in which professional coaches come to visit and evaluate the draft eligible players on a college team. One the things they do is sprint and the coaches see how fast they can sprint. At Penn State the place where they hold the sprints is slightly downhill grade. Every college team wants its players to go to the NFL and the players want to go. It’s no different than Yale selling its drama program by the number of people who get to Broadway.

RB: Yes, but what are the odds.

ND: And the odds are better from Alabama than from other schools. You are suggesting they are giving these kids false hope.

RB: Sure.

ND: Might be. Ever read Darcy Frey’s book The Last Shot. It’s a whole book about false hope. And yet the only reason people make it is because enough people have to believe they can overcome and be the exception and it creates an activity full of exceptions.

RB: Maybe this an obvious question —are you happy with this book?

ND: Yeah, I think so. It’s not really for me to say any more. I did the best—

RB: —you wrote it. I am not asking, is it a good book?

ND: Am I pleased with it? Yeah. It takes a while with books —the same thing happens with every book. Which is to say where your book is going to go and how you are going to feel about are so mysterious. When I say where its going to go even for your more obscure books, you’ll still have business in some far fling place and you’ll check into a little inn and you’ll get into bed and you turn on the night light and there will be some books there and you’ll look and then one of them will look pretty familiar. So you never know where they are going end up. But then if you are the sort of person who hadn’t looked a that book in long time and maybe it was published 30 years ago and you open up that book and you start reading—most writers I know would say that they felt, ”I guess it was ok”. And so far I think this one is ok

RB: You haven’t gone back to look at past books?

ND: I was projecting to my own future. I have heard other writers talk about their books in that way. For me, I don’t really like to look back because there are so many books I want to write. Life is short and they take me so long to write that I wouldn’t want to spend time feeling nostalgic. I am reading portions of it around the country right now. When I read from it I feel ok about the portions I am reading. You can always immediately think of small things you wish were different. The major decisions, the conception and the architecture of the book are sound. I created it based on two outlines that took me many months to make—one was chronological, the other was thematic. The whole pleasure and joy of this kind of non-fiction writing is to embed a series of themes in events and move in and out of them so that the whole thing is woven together in way that reads like a good story. The actual structure of it is based on a fairly if only to yourself complex notion of what it could be.

Nick Dawidoff circa 2002 [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

RB: So now you are about the task of hawking your book, publicizing your book…

ND: (chuckles) I am telling you, you would just be a phenomenal success in an NFL locker I can just see a “C” [captain] on that jersey very soon.

RB: (laughs) Did I say something wrong?

ND: You have skin like an armadillo

RB: (laughs) So what’s next?

ND: I am interested in two big themes and I want to find the right subjects for them. One, is I am very interested in income inequality. I grew in a city which is one of the poorest cities in the country. New Haven. And it has one of the wealthiest universities in the world there. Since my childhood not much functionally has changed abut New Haven even though New Haven has changed a lot. It breaks my heart that New Haven is this way and makes me want to think about why in America, such a prosperous country, why this happens.

RB: What’s an organizational entry point in that issue?

ND: I have some ideas. They are so inchoate it’s not right to say yet. And then I would really like to write a book about a great American artist.

RB: Any candidates?

ND: Even when I was writing this book when I had free time I would go and visit Robert Frank {The Americans).

Genesis by John B Judis

The Americans by Robert Frank

RB: How old is he now?

ND: He’s in his late 80s.

RB: How coherent is he?

ND: I love spending time with him. I find him to be a wonderful person.

RB: He opened up to you?

ND: I think so.

RB: You get football players to like you. Cranky, old artists. Not bad.

ND: I am going to have to work on you. Just kidding.

RB: I like you fine.

ND: I am just so interested in his work and then was interested in that he’s the person who made it.

RB: The more recent work or the work that made him famous?

ND: I love the Americans—like most people that’s what brought me to him. If that is a source of attraction once you become interested in someone everything is apart of it. If you are interested in a novelist like Svevo than he come to him because of Zeno’s Conscience. But all the other books, which are essentially small sketches for that novel, are still interesting because you all the years that made the great book.

RB: How is it that Rolling Stone is interested in Robert Frank?

ND: They asked me if there was something I would like to write about.

RB: So can offer suggestions. They must like you.

ND: (laughs)

RB: Add magazine editors to the list

ND: Pretty soon I am going to have a whole team. (both laugh)

RB: You’re pretty popular.

ND: Tell that to my neighbors, maybe they’ll like me

RB: What, do you play music too loud? Raise chickens? Your kids break windows?

ND: I aspire to raise window breakers. Remember the part in the book where the coaches teach my son how to be a better tackler?

RB: Why would think I have time to read a 460 page book? (both laugh)

ND: There is a point in the book where my son —

RB: —I know.

ND: —tackles a little 2 year old girl in his singing group who is wearing a pink ballerina tutu. And the coaches are overjoyed the next day. And they give me tips how to teach him to tackle better

RB: What are the people who come to your readings wanting to know about football?

ND: They want to know quite a few of the things that you have asked.

RB: What! (laughs)

ND: I mean, with in the broader themes that you are interested in—pain or injury. The big national subjects of concussions and bullying are—its clear football has to change. This should not be the conversation especially about something that is intended to be for enjoyment and pleasure. They shouldn’t be talking about brain injuries, about bounties and murder. And they shouldn’t be talking about harassment. So this is not good for football. If football is savvy about it and football has always been pretty savvy in its modern era.

RB: And recalcitrant.

ND: Recalcitrant but savvy. Football has many advantages that saw that I don’t see the NFL taking much interest in. Namely, there are so many interesting people within the sport. And they are all obscured form the public. Football would do better to continue with Hard Knocks, the Bill Bellichick documentary—even my experience where you tell the stories about football that have been traditionally told about baseball.

RB: More questions?

ND: People want to know what it was like to call a play. Only 10 % of the time do all eleven players do what they are supposed to do. It was really fun. Nothing can compare to actually doing it under live conditions. Football coaches by and large—I had so much admiration for first and foremost what we were talking about earlier—their ability to overcome tremendous pubic adversity and to some degree shame and walk out into the world, days later with an integrity to their optimism and self confidence intact. That is, they were able to arouse the same I their players. That’s hard to do. The really good ones—I would say that every coach (with Jets) would have been so clearly the best coach I had ever been around. I never had any coaches like that. They are in the NFL for a reason. What a really good coach does is he has you thinking about his ideals long after you have been around him. I think a lot about their expectations. And their expectations of me— these are people who are simultaneously nurturing and evaluating all the time. I felt it that I had to behave and be on my marks at all times. It is such fragile professional life. People were getting cut all the time. That phrases “on the street—that’s a true phrase. You are either in or you are gone. Once you are outside that facility. The gate closes and— it’s a large and lonely echo. I felt entirely to the end, all the time, I felt I the back of my mind that they could just wash their hands of me. That I had become a distraction in some way. Once some one began making jokes in a meeting that I was a spy for the Patriots and I was going to divulge secrets (I didn’t understand the secrets well enough to divulge them) it was horrifying to me. There were several moments like that. Of course I didn’t want him to know it was horrifying to me but it was. There was a day that had a media consultant come in (who usually worked with politicians) on how to deal with the press. Up on the screen come the Michael Hastings /Rolling Stone piece, “The Runaway General”. He was going on and on about how all reporters were just trying to make friends with you but they were just out to betray you and ruin your life. And I had just written a Paul Simon profile for Rolling Stone, which the coaches all knew and they were all looking at me

RB: (laughs)

ND: IF I could disappear into the fabric of your seat that would have been me then.

RB: Excellent, thank you.

ND: Thank you —always nice to see you