BGB Interview: Ben Tanzer

Ben Tanzer is the author of the novels You Can Make Him Like You, You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,  Lucky Man, other works of fiction and non-fiction.  Ben is a long time friend of the blog, which makes it a little shocking that it has taken us this long to do a proper interview.   Considering our lapse in judgement, we are mighty pleased that he agreed to submit himself to an interview with us.  We got a little long-winded, so grab yourself a snack and read on…

Baby Got Books interview with Ben Tanzer

Baby Got Books:  The new book You Can Make Him Like You seems to be getting rave reviews all over the blogosphere.  In my completely biased review I said, “Tanzer’s best work yet, and I expect that it will propel him onto his largest stage to date.”     How accurate is my prediction so far?

Ben Tanzer:  First off, thank you for the kind words, and bias, many a fine career has been built on bias and I warmly embrace it. Second, this is a great question to both take seriously and not. One piece of this I think is whether the book’s wider exposure and good tidings as compared to my previous books equates to a larger stage or to just some more elbow room on the fairly obscure stage I’m already on. I think it’s probably more of the latter for now, but even that has been wonderful, and shocking, and I really appreciate it. Another piece though is whether some of that space is a result of the book’s quality, which I hope is good, and which I hope is the case, or from the incredibly expanded network, and interest in my work in general, holy grandiose, yes, sorry, that has emerged, or is it evolved, between the release of Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine and You Can Make Him Like You. And I think to a great extent it’s the latter, but that maybe the former is coming into play as well, which if that is the case, is also wonderful. Either way, the reaction to You Can Make Him Like You while arguably quite limited compared to the Hunger Games or Go The Fuck to Sleep, has definitely been intense, and really positive, which is shockingly wonderful. Or is that wonderfully shocking?

BGB:  You mentioned your expanded “network.”  That’s not something that you generally hear authors talking about, but it seems absolutely critical to writers in the age of social media.  You clearly work hard at getting yourself out there by maintaining an online zine and blog and being active on Facebook and Twitter (@bentanzer) – did I miss anything?  How critical is social media to building your audience?  Is there a point when it becomes a distraction to writing?

BT: My father was an artist who had a lot of success, but during the last years of his life, he didn’t feel like he had accomplished everything he wanted to. One thing we talked about was his inability to make sense of how best to network, something he wanted to do more of if he only knew how. When I started writing this was always on my mind, well that, and the idea that no one just finds you, there is little magic involved in any kind of success and you have to actively try to make things happen. So I asked myself, how could networking work and how can I enhance the likelihood of people knowing I am out there? And from that perspective, I don’t think we need to network more in the age of social media necessarily, because it’s always been required to some extent. But social media does offer a new and different means for doing so, and for someone like me it’s very helpful.

I have a day job and kids and I travel for work, which has some benefits, but I also can’t be out and about like I would like, hitting every reading and bar and going to every conference and city that networking requires. Further, the writing I do exists primarily in the indie realm, which is a great place to exist, but that also limits exposure to my writing and with all the terrific work happening in the indie space alone, how do you rise above all that magnificent clutter? In part, I decided that I needed to hit whatever platforms I could and as often as I could and early on I decided on two primary strategies for approaching this. First, I would use all of these platforms to broadcast what I’m up to, at all times, writing, reading, editing, interviewing, and on and on; and two, what I’m up to has to have some kind of cohesiveness, a brand to some extent, and so inspired by the monorail episode of The Simpsons, what I also decided early on is that what I want to do is change lives, with my work, your work, anything I like.

I’m offering a lifestyle choice, with my writing being the products at the center of it all. I write this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I always pretend it’s real. I also try to ensure I’m having fun. Is it a distraction? In general, that’s not my experience, but I mostly limit my time on all of this to branding and broadcasting purposes. I rarely hang out on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else, sometimes sure, but my time there isn’t for entertainment or for killing time, it is mostly tactical, and when I’ve done what I intended to do I try to move on to the next thing. Interestingly, for me anyway, the biggest distraction these days is people more proactively reaching-out and asking me to check-out, hype, review, blurb and support what they’re doing, which I embrace, and am thrilled about, though it takes increasingly more time to do these things. I see this though as part of the brand, and it’s mostly fun, and I always intended, hoped, to support other people, in bigger ways, if, and when I could and now that I sort of can at times I feel obligated to do so.

BGB:  It seems to be working.  It’s apparent that you have been able to generate an incredible amount of goodwill in the wired world. Your Twitter and Facebook updates are an endless stream of glowing reviews and congratulations on the new book.  Speaking of which, let’s talk about You Can Make Him Like You.  (Check out my review here.)  YCMHLY is the instantly relateable story of a not so young man coming to grips with the changes that married life and family bring.  The story has the absolute ring of truth, which begs the question – how much of the story is autobiographical?

BT:  And thank you for that. There has been a lot of goodwill and a level of intensity and self-reflection that has caught me off guard. When I write, I try to let you know what’s in my head, and I hope to get into your head, the conversations you’ve had, and haven’t, touching on things you struggle with, can’t figure out, and celebrate. All of which is to say, how autobiographical is it, to loosely paraphrase the writer Scott McClanahan from a recent interview in The Rumpus, “75% of the stuff I write about is just stuff that happened to me. Of course, what’s different with me is I try to live my life like a fiction…I would expand on it by saying this: I was probably lying when I came up with that answer (at least 83.2% of the 75% percent figure is a lie).” That wasn’t exactly a paraphrase was it? But, what I am trying to say is, when I write almost anything, short story, novel, humor piece, I tend to get stuck on an idea that may have little to do immediately with me, and then as the piece slowly evolves, pieces of me get woven into the narrative. In this case of You Can Make Him Like You, I was thinking about the characters in the songs of The Hold Steady, characters I once looked like, and I was wondering what they would look like now. As I thought about this, I also began to think about the number of guys I know who while otherwise happily married still stretch what I would consider somewhat inappropriate behavior with other women to lengths I am not. Those guys fascinate me. Their brazenness, their belief that they won’t get caught, or can talk their way out of it, and for many their tremendous lack of self-awareness and reflexive behavior. That’s not me, not exactly, I can be reflexive and unaware, but I really go out of my way to avoid all of that other behavior. Do I think about it? Yes. Behave obsessively about alarm clocks being set and decision making on The Bachelorette? Yes. Fight with neighbors, hot ones, old ones and opera singing ones? Yes. Spend an afternoon compulsively assessing whether I think U2 or R.E.M. is the true super group of the late 80’s and early 90’s? Yes. And those kind of details, the parts of a story that make it more than idea, that give it some girth and flesh out some of the characters’ quirks and language, that can be a lot of me, definitely some of me, and certainly some of Scott McClanahan as well of course.

BGB:  Your book takes its name from a song by The Hold Steady and their music is quoted frequently in the novel.  Can you talk a little bit about what it is about The Hold Steady’s music that inspired you and the role that music plays in your writing?

BT:  Music in general plays a role in my work that I don’t necessarily think of as an inspirational, as much as I am always listening to music as I write, because well, I’m just always listening to music. I tend to latch onto a song with most of my projects because inevitably some song hits me as complimenting, or illuminating, for me, what I’m trying to say in that story. It also gives me a sense of what it might taste like, or feel like, which tends to get me even more focused in terms of texture and vibe. The idea for a book, and the writing of it, always precedes the song or music though, and this applies to You Can Make Him Like You as well. I knew I wanted to do something about guys around my age, guys struggling with being married, even when you’re happily married; and the allure of interns, all young and fresh, even when you don’t want to sleep with anyone besides your spouse, not exactly anyway; and having a kid, which you’re sort of into but not wanting to be as freaked-out and scared as you are; and these ideas were all bouncing around in my head when I went to see The Hold Steady for the first time here in Chicago between the release of Boys and Girls in America and Stay Positive. I was in the audience and the ideas started congealing and coming together; and there was structure and scenes and later as I wrote and edited the draft versions of You Can Make Him Like You, I saw The Hold Steady again, and then again, and I came to see the characters I wanted to write about as the more adult versions of the characters in the songs The Hold Steady sing; small town dudes and chicks, sort of literary, taking drugs and going to concerts, hoping to get laid, looking back and looking forward to bigger cities, maybe even bigger lives and being something other that what and who you are. And I know those characters, I was them, and I am now something else, older anyway, less druggy, married, with a job and kids; and that urge to be that something else was what I hoped to try to capture with this book and these characters, and these songs speak to where that starts, and what I wanted to do.

BGB:  I know that one of your interests is keeping up with the independent book scene.  Who should we be checking out?

BT: When I first read this question I thought about that famous New Yorker cover where it shows New York City as the center of the universe and the rest of the world sort of slowly unfolding under the shadows of the city’s awesomeness. This wasn’t because it made me think of New York City though, it was because it made me think that to answer this question I had to start with Chicago, because while there is a lot of indie literary things going on everywhere these days, I’m not sure it compares with what’s going on here. How’s that for grandiose? Still, and I am bound to leave some people out, but starting with Chicago there are really so many indie writers doing so many cool things to check out, Lindsay Duncan, Robert Duffer, Spencer Dew, Gina Frangello, Lauryn Allison Lewis, Brandon Will, Jason Fisk, Victor David Giron, James Tadd Alcox, Kathleen Rooney, Tim Jones-Yevlington, Mark Brand, Pete Anderson, Joseph G. Peterson, Jacob S. Knabb, David Masciotra and Luis Humberto Valadez. And then looking around the county you have BL Pawelek, Nick Ostdick, Barry Graham, Caleb J. Ross and Brandon Teitz out across the Midwest; Michael FitzGerald in Montana; J.A. Tyler in Colorado; Hosho McCreesh in New Mexico; James Greer, xTx, Matty Byloos, Ryan Bradley, Joshua Mohr and Lavinia Ludlow all points West; down South there are your neighbors Jamie Iredell and Collin Kelley; J. Bradley, Nathan Holic and Gregory Sherl in Florida; Alex Kudera in South Carolina; S. Craig Renfroe in North Carolina; Shannon Burke and Corey Mesler in Tennessee; Thomas Williams in Oklahoma; Jason Jordan in Kentucky; Mary Miller and Elizabeth Crane in Texas; and finally, and loosely, in the East, Paula Bomer, Greg Olear, Tim Hall, John Reed, Ken Wohlrob and Shya Scanlon in New York; Mel Bosworth, Laura Cherry, Ray Charbonneau, Rusty Barnes, Steve Himmer and Timothy Gager in and around Boston; William Walsh in Providence; Scott McClanahan in West Virginia; Dave Housley and Karen Lillis in Pennsylvania; Nik Korpon and Michael Kimball in Baltimore; and Amber Sparks in Washington, DC; and that’s a big list and I apologize, but I think it’s a good place to start.

BGB:  Wow.  Lots to check out there.  And you’ve been busy yourself.  Since we began this interview, a review copy of your next book My Father’s House has arrived in the mail.  From what I’ve been able to check out so far, it has a much different feel than You Can Make Him Like You.  Can you tell us a little about My Father’s House?  Anything else in the works you want to tell us about?

BT: Sorry, still feeling guilty about that last question, one of the many problems with being a fanboy. And yes, there has been some busyness, which also makes me feel a little guilty, though it may be self-consciousness, I will look that up. But with My Father’s House I think there is a different feel in two ways. First, and especially with the last couple of novels, I have been trying to tell humorous stories about relationships in a pop culture saturated world with layers of pain, coping and confusion lying closely below the surface, and with My Father’s House, a story focused on a character losing his father, I flipped this approach, and so it is more overtly about pain, coping and confusion, with the humor and pop culture is lurking just below the surface and serving as a sort of salve for both the characters and readers. I would also say though that I have been trying to emulate the music of the Ramones and the recent movies by David Cronenberg in my writing, tight, intimate, punchy, funny, and violent scenes that come fast and propel you into the next scene or chapter, and with this book I decided to tighten that approach up even more, so more sparse, quick and insular, and more like how I see the actual experience of living through some one’s death. In terms of what else may be in the works, and at this point more self-consciousness abounds, I have a collection of humor pieces coming out at some point this summer titled This American Life and I am working on my first science fiction joint, similar themes to my previous work, though more focused on work and the intersection of work and family, albeit in a not so distant Chicago where work is hard to come by, life on Mars beckons and the drugs are mostly synthetic.

BGB:  Is that sweet ‘stache staying?

BT: Not remotely. No. Next. Or is that it? Because if so, thanks for the great questions and your support, both are much appreciated.

Boys and Reading: Part 3

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a series of posts about the apparent reading gap between school age girls and boys.

In Part 1, I discussed The Center for Education Policy’s report that shows that boys consistently lag behind girls in reading as measured by standardized tests.   I also discussed the debate around the use of “gross out” books as the answer to closing the gap.

In Part 2, I delved a little deeper into the Center of Education Policy report that kicked this all off.   I also offered some “context” for framing the problem.

In Part 2.5 I threw out some interesting graphs that I thought added some additional context to the discussion.

For Part 3, I’m branching out beyond what I think and  enjoying some Q&A with Raymond Bean.  Mr. Bean is the author of the children’s books Sweet Farts and the sequel Sweet Farts: Rippin’ It Old School.  Mr. Bean first came to my attention in an AP story that asked “Can fart jokes save the reading souls of boys?”  This story was run in seemingly every newspaper, blog, and PTA newsletter in North America. Mr. Bean also received a prominent mention when the inevitable backlash followed in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Bean seems to be uniquely positioned at ground zero in the war for the hearts and minds of America’s male readers.  (I’ve tried a million times to lay off the hyperbole.)  When he agreed to field questions from the likes of us, I jumped at the chance.  Read on for…

The Baby Got Books interview with Raymond Bean, author of Sweet Farts and Sweet Farts: Rippin’ It Old School

Baby Got Books: Tell us about how the idea for Sweet Farts came about?

Raymond Bean: I wanted to write a funny book for kids. In my search for a universally funny topic I kept coming back to the topic of gas. If teaching elementary school for over a decade has taught me anything, it’s that kids find gas funny. If someone passes gas in an elementary classroom you’re going to have giggles.

I decided to try and build a fun and silly book around this giggle inducing topic. In an attempt to work science into my story, I decided to have a fourth grader set out to find a cure for the smell of human gas for his annual science fair project. My research led to a letter written by Benjamin Franklin in 1781 called A Letter to a Royal Academy. In the letter, Franklin mentioned the need for someone to find a cure for the smell of human gas. It was perfect, I figured, if Franklin could write about farts in 1781, surely I could do it today (not everyone agreed).

BGB: You are both a teacher and an author. How does your experience in the class room inform your writing?

RB: Kids are pretty honest about what they like and dislike in books. I spend my days reading with and to students. Having a constant dialogue with young readers about books helps a great deal toward developing my understanding of the kinds of books they wish were out there. I can’t wait to get more of my books out for young readers to enjoy.

BGB: I’ve read that Sweet Farts started out as a self-published book, and the agent and publishing contract came only after you were able to sell a lot of books on your own. What has that experience been like?

RB: Self publishing the first Sweet Farts book allowed me to reach my audience almost immediately. After several years of close calls and rejections, my wife and I decided to self publish under a pen name. Within three months of release we were selling multiple copies on Amazon every day. We had little more than word of mouth, but we were proving that there was an audience for the series.

About ten months after the release of the first Sweet Farts book, I signed with AmazonEncore to write Sweet Farts: Rippin’ It Old School, the sequel. About the same time I started getting more agent and foreign rights interest. A few months ago I signed with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with such an amazing agency as I move forward as a writer. So far the first Sweet Farts book has been translated into Korean and is being translated into German and Italian. In addition, both books have been recorded as audio books by Brilliance Audio. I’m currently working on a third Sweet Farts book.

BGB: You’ve been the center of some recent controversy. On the one hand, you’ve been put forward as one possible savior for boys who won’t/don’t like to read, and on the other as being personally responsible for the downfall of civilization. This must be a little surreal for you. What do you make of all this?

RB: Surreal indeed! I was thrilled to be included in the AP article. At the time of the interview, I was a self-published author being interviewed by the AP. In my opinion, the author of the article was attempting to draw attention to the CEP report on the gender gap in children’s literacy. As a teacher, parent, and author I was elated to be included in the conversation. In the days and weeks that followed the publication of the article, I was fascinated by the response.

The point I hoped to make in the AP article was that silly fiction can help bring the most reluctant readers to the book shelf, get them reading, and leave them seeking more books. I have encountered many 8 to 10 year- old students who were video game and TV “addicted”. When this happens, reading falls away as an option outside of school. Many of these students do not live in homes where reading is a priority. Silly fiction can help some kids discover that books can be fun and surprising. Once that connection is made, young readers are hopefully eager to read.

The WSJ editorial piece was particularly surprising to me. The writer made reference to the “Sweet Farts philosophy” of education. I wrote the Sweet Farts books, but I was not aware that it was a “philosophy” of education. The article went on to state that books within the genre do little more than create, “morons and barbarians.”

I take issue with such an extreme statement. I argue there is a need for light-hearted and silly children’s fiction for the simple fact that it is light-hearted and silly. Like adults, children sometimes just need a good laugh. They generally spend a few days with a book and then are on to the next one. A few days of harmless fun with a silly book is just that, harmless.

As a teacher I encounter students every year that are dealing with divorce, sick parents, and other heart- breaking situations. Silly books can provide a much needed laugh to a child dealing with an overwhelming life experience. Is the child who has a father sick with cancer a “moron” or a “barbarian” because he read The Day My Butt Went Psycho for a distraction?

BGB: Do you get the feeling that many who criticize your books haven’t actually read them?

RB: Yes, I have a sense that some of the people who are the most outspoken probably framed their opinion based on the title alone. I’m quite certain Rush Limbaugh didn’t take the time to sit down and thumb through the Sweet Farts books. Although the visual is kind of fun to think about, don’t you think? He did, however, blast them on his Morning Update in July 2010. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated the exposure. Personally, I think he might have enjoyed the books if he read them, just a hunch.

Why so many adults are paying this much attention to my book is beyond me. It is intended for ages 8 – 12. In my experience, people generally like the series. I’ve received feedback from teachers, librarians, and parents (some of them homeschoolers) on how much they enjoyed the Sweet Farts series. It’s currently being carried in over eighty library systems across the country and close to one-hundred libraries. You can search for a library near you on www.worldcat.org.

BGB: I’ll own up to suggesting in a recent blog post that just maybe the AP news story that touted your book (among others) was suspiciously timed to coincide with the release of your sequel Sweet Farts: Rippin’ it Old School. So how about it? Is your marketing team really that good?

RB: I’m pretty sure the timing of the article had more to do with the release of Dav Pilkey’s new release, The Adventures of Ook and Gluk. I think I just wrote the right book at the right time.

BGB: I’ve been talking about the “reading gap” between boys and girls for a few weeks now. What do you think is really behind the gap and what are the solutions?

RB: In my experience, every reader is different. Every child approaches reading from a different life experience. You can’t dictate a child’s readiness to become a reader. That being said, there needs to be a wide variety of good books on the shelf (and e-reader) waiting for children to discover, explore, and share. Insisting that ONLY one genre is the answer is naïve and fruitless. When young readers are immersed in all genres and many authors, they learn to love books.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that many parents read to their children when they are very young. Then, when the child learns to read, parents expect the child to read independently and still love reading. I find that when parents read chapter length books and picture books with their third, fourth, and fifth graders, it helps tremendously. Reading together not only helps increase comprehension and a love of books, it also allows for time well spent between parent and child. If you want your child to love reading, read with your child. Only, don’t be afraid to read a silly book now and again, who knows, you just might enjoy a good belly laugh together and feel like a kid again. It doesn’t get much better than that! I recommend the Sweet Farts series by Raymond Bean.

My thanks to Raymond Bean for taking the time to chat with us.  Anyone who has been taken to task by Rush Limbaugh has our enduring respect and admiration.

BGB Interview: Tom Key

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of my favorite books of all time.  Full stop.  When I heard that Tom Key, Executive Artistic Director of Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit, had written a stage adaptation of the book, I was beside myself with anticipation.  A few years ago I wrote about Mr. Key:  ”If you’re not from Atlanta, there is a simple way to tell if a play here is going to be any good – check to see if Tom Key has anything to do with it.  If so, your odds are pretty good.” That assessment still stands.  Tom Key is a pillar of the Atlanta arts community, and I couldn’t be happier that he agreed to field a few questions from the likes of us.

Tom Key (left) and Director Richard Garner (right) – Photo James Christerson

Baby Got Books interview with Tom Key, author of the Theatrical Outfit’s stage adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces

BGB Interview with Scott Russell Sanders

A Conservationist Manifesto by Scott Russell Sanders is a collection of essays on conservation and environmental issues.  Though titled a “manifesto”, Sanders’s writing here is a wide-ranging and often personal look at the state of the environment and our obligations to it.  Often the essays bravely tilt at modern windmills, such as the modern culture of greed and entitlement, “prosperity gospel” churches that distort  the ideas of environmental stewardship presented in scripture, and the misplaced notion that corporations will do what is right.   An underlying theme of many of the essays is the search for the peace and tranquility that accompanies nature and is often missing from our frantic lives. An echo of Thoreau’s call for the need to live more simply is evident throughout Manifesto. Sander’s also makes clear that environmental conservation is very much a matter of social justice.  The titular essay, among the last presented in the collection, lays out the principles that should guide capital “C” Conservation.

In a rare display of literary vandalism for me, I jotted notes directly in the margins of Manifesto, adding my own ideas to Sanders’s and jotting down questions for future thought.  Luckily, Dr. Sanders was kind enough to field some of my questions directly. Dr. Sanders is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University.  I am deeply appreciative of his thoughtfulness and of his generosity with his time.

Baby Got Books interview with Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Conservationist Manifesto

Baby Got Books: The Conservationist Manifesto is an impressive collection of essays on environmental and conservation issues. How many years of work does the book represent?

Scott Russell Sanders: The essays gathered in the book were written over the past six or eight years; but the ideas and concerns have been building in me for most of my adult life, ever since I began to realize, in my twenties, that the industrial economy and Earth’s wild economy are on a collision course.  The book draws on Biblical stories that I first encountered in childhood, on science that I began studying in high school and college, and on reading and travel that I have pursued ever since.

BGB: When you first started writing on these topics, did you envision that they would grow into a book length body of work or did it just evolve organically over time?

SRS: I wrote the essays separately, and only later gathered them into the book.  Because they all arose from the same ecological and cultural concerns, however, they combined to lay out a larger argument.  In its briefest form, the argument is that we need to shift from a culture based on consumption to a culture based on conservation.

BGB: Your essay “The Warehouse and the Wilderness” concludes with a passage about the power of myths, i.e., storytelling, as the basis for how we collectively view the world and our place in it. It seems that our national myths have become increasingly materialistic, more deeply ingrained, and more widely broadcast. How do we change the stories that we tell about what it means to live productive lives as Americans in the face of such strong (and frankly very glamorous) opposition?

SRS: The dominant stories in America are indeed materialistic, and that is because they are composed and broadcast—from television, radio, billboards, the pages of magazines and newspapers, and every other medium of communication—for the sole purpose of persuading us to buy things.  The advertising that permeates our society is funded by corporations, which are not devoted to improving our lives, serving our society, or protecting the planet, but only to selling their goods and services.  The US Supreme Court has enshrined this crass storytelling by defining corporations as persons and dollars and speech. It’s hard to imagine how any collection of ordinary citizens can gain a hearing in an arena dominated by multibillion dollar corporations.  So changing the dominant story will not be easy.  But it will change, if only because its ruinous consequences, for ourselves and our world, are ever more obvious.  Meanwhile, each of us can speak up for a vision of personal, communal, and ecological good that embraces peace, justice, caretaking, and spiritual richness, rather than aggression, power, and material accumulation. That our voices seem to be small and scattered is no excuse for remaining silent.

BGB: Thoreau is often cited as the first American guide to living simply and to getting in touch with nature. However, if all of we city dwellers were to suddenly decamp for the woods, it would be an ecological disaster. How do you think city dwellers should go about maintaining a healthy balance between city life and time spent in natural settings? And how do the urban poor get to join in?

SRS: Certainly we can’t all go build cabins and live in the woods.  All except the very poorest Americans, however, can live more simply than we do, whether in city or country, in house or apartment.  When I advocate living more simply, I am not speaking to the poor—and perhaps a third of the world’s people live in desperate poverty. They deserve to have better food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education than they presently do. I am speaking mainly to middle class and rich Americans, who consume nonrenewable resources and emit greenhouse gases and other pollutants at a rate ten or twenty times as high, per capita, as do people in developing countries.  Conservation should begin with those of us who are most privileged, and that includes myself along with the vast majority of the American population.

BGB: You note that “conservative” and “conservation” share the same etymological root but the politics of the two words are often in conflict. Why do you think that modern political conservatism places so little interest in conservation?

SRS: The first question I ask of anyone who labels himself or herself a conservative is: What do you want to conserve?  My own answer to that question would include preserving a stable climate, drinkable water, clean air, diversity of species, a fair judicial system, honest government, high quality public parks and schools and museums, and many other shared forms of wealth.  Too often, today, self-proclaimed conservatives seem intent on conserving only their own money, their power to acquire and keep more money, and their freedom to do as they wish regardless of the consequences for society or planet.  There is nothing conservative about such an attitude; it is reckless in the extreme. Traditional conservatism—epitomized by Theodore Roosevelt—placed a high value on conservation of land, water, wildlife, and natural resources.  The loudest voices in conservatism today seem to regard nature and other species as raw material for private profit; they resist efforts to protect the environment or endangered species as a restraint on “free enterprise”; and they fight every attempt to reduce our rate of resource consumption.  To explain how that shift in mindset came about would require more space than we have here.

BGB: You argue for the need of a return of the “common wealth” – the idea that there are things and places that should belong to us all. If recent events are any indication, the ideas of taking any actions for the “greater good” are wildly unpopular in certain (very vocal) circles. How can the national dialogue on conservation be rescued from the scorched earth partisan fighting that we’re seeing now?

SRS: I’ve offered a partial answer to this question in my previous responses.  America’s founding generations maintained a balance between a regard for individual wealth and a regard for the common wealth.  They insisted on the protection of private property; they celebrated the opportunity for entrepreneurs to make money, for hard work to be rewarded in cash. But they also created the world’s first free public schools, free public libraries, national parks and national forests; they cooperated to protect and foster the whole domain of shared goods—air, land, water; museums, courts, roads, bridges, colleges; scientific research, inventions, and so on.  Over the course of the past two centuries, and especially the past thirty years, however, the balance has been tipped heavily toward private wealth, especially that of the very richest individuals and the largest corporations. Our political system, from the city to the state to the federal levels, has been all but taken over by those moneyed interests. How can we restore the balance?  Let’s require television, which uses the public airwaves, to provide substantial time each day for public-interest programming, including alternatives to the stories told constantly by commercial advertising. We need to insist that all political campaigns be publicly financed; that the public airwaves be made available, free of charge, on an equitable basis, for all qualified candidates; we need to take the primary nominating process away from political parties, and instead allow all candidates that accumulate the specified minimum number of voters’ signatures to appear on a single primary ballot, and then allow the two top vote-getters to compete in a run-off election.  The moneyed interests that currently have a stranglehold on our democracy will not give up their control without a fight.  So we’ll have to fight—not with violence, but with every means at our disposal.

BGB: You make a distinction in a story about your own life between “making a living” and “making a good life.” While we may not be able to drastically change the national dialog, making changes to our own personal narrative seems within the motivated person’s reach. What advice would you pass along to those who want to begin making changes towards a “good life”?

SRS: The meaning of a “good life” will vary from person to person, of course.  I don’t presume to tell anyone else how to live.  But I do invite people to ask themselves a few questions:  What gives you the deepest satisfaction?  How do your actions affect the lives of other people, for better or for worse, and how do they affect the earth? What gifts have you received, from family or biology or society or God, and what obligations follow from those gifts? What are your talents, and how do you wish to use them?  What do you love most deeply, and how can you protect and nurture what you love?  What are the values you seek to live by?  In answering those questions for yourself, you will gain a clearer sense of how to lead a good life.

Dr. Sanders will be giving a reading tomorrow evening, Thursday, March 25 from 8-10 PM at Agnes Scott College in Decatur as part of their 39th Annual Writer’s Festival.

BGB Interview with Stuart Archer Cohen

Stuart Archer Cohen is the author of three novels, Invisible World, The Stone Angels, and his latest – The Army of the Republic.  Cohen lives in Juneau, Alaska and is the owner of a company that deal sin the trade of wool, silk, alpaca and cashmere in Asia and South America. I posted a review of  The Army of the Republic yesterday.  I noted that the novel stuck with me and raised all sorts of questions.  I am thankful that Mr. Cohen generously agreed to answer my burning questions.

Baby Got Books interview with Stuart Archer Cohen, author of The Army of the Republic

Baby Got Books: Army of the Republic features the activities of several citizen groups that are in opposition to a repressive and powerful Right wing presidential administration. Their responses to the perceived injustices range from protests/direct actions and violent “terror”. Were there particular real world events that inspired you to write this novel?

Stuart Archer Cohen: I was inspired by two things. One was a long-standing interest in guerrilla movements and revolutions in South America. I’ve been doing business there since 1984, and I was intrigued, on a human level, how a bunch of university students and young professionals could develop the will and the skills to take on a corrupt state. I was also acutely tuned in to how the state responds to that.

With the 2nd Bush Administration, I saw our government becoming more and more like Latin America in its corruption, cronyism and absolute impunity. Also, the Right has taken on an increasingly war-flavored rhetoric and stance, where the goal is now to utterly destroy the “Left” and its institutions by any means necessary. I see this as a recipe for political violence, and that made me want to tackle the subject of political violence in a United States setting.

BGB: The recent non-fiction work It Could Happen Here: America on the Brink by Bruce Judson says that a potential political uprising could occur here that would be driven by financial inequality. The events in your book that lead to protests and sometimes violent political action include mass privatization of water supplies, ballot irregularities, domestic use of of a Blackwater/Xe-type contractor for police actions, and the abuse of courts. Are the issues that you raised in your novel the specific powder kegs that you see on our horizon? Or were they more hypothetical?

SAC: I haven’t read that book so I can’t comment on it. The things you mentioned above are all elements that can engender a violent reaction, as they are in the book.

However, I think the real danger is not those symptoms, or even inequality, but rather the constant, dehumanizing propaganda that is being regularly pumped into American society. The non-communist world has never had such a sophisticated, wide-ranging and cohesive propaganda campaign directed against its own people. Psy-ops techniques that we formerly used on enemy countries are now being used against the American people by the Right. The message of Fox News and other hate-speakers is that Liberals are subhuman weaklings, that Left-of-Cheney politicians are liars and traitors, and that we are engaged in a civil war of Right vs.Left, Patriots vs Elected Government. That’s the real powder keg, both because it stokes Right Wing anger, and, more importantly, because it sets up a future Right Wing administration to ruthlessly, violently repress any opposition.

BGB: I read that your research for this novel included conversations with 60’s activists, CIA operatives, and current student protesters. How did you go about locating these people and were they generally open to having frank conversations with you?

SAC: I locate sources in various ways. The CIA people I met through martial arts connections. It’s something that I have in common with these men and it establishes a certain bond beyond politics. The Argentine revolutionaries I tracked down through introductions provided by friends and other sources. Some people I contacted simply as names I saw on the Internet. I hit some dead-ends, too. I’m not so big and famous that everyone is eager to talk to me.

My experience is that people will answer as honestly as they can if you are non-judgmental and they know you won’t embarrass them. Sometimes, it’s what they don’t say that’s most revealing.

BGB: “The Inside Story” on your web site mentions that you were once held under suspicion by the Salvadoran military. How did that experience inform the events that unfold in AOR?

SAC: That experience really enlightened me as to how decent people become caught up in an evil machine. Things came out fine for me in El Salvador because I had an American passport, but Salvadorans picked up there who were equally as innocent as me met some terrible ends.

BGB: The types of reading that you did as research for this novel, books on “how to form a new identity, improvised explosives, surveillance and bodyguarding”, would seem to send up numerous red flags under the “Patriot Act”. Were you concerned at all about ending up a “No Fly” list or experiencing other negative consequences as a result of researching/writing this novel?

SAC: I didn’t really worry about that, although that distributor where I got most of those books was under constant pressure from DHS to surrender his client list. My feeling has always been that I’m just a novelist writing fiction. People like community organizers, lawyers and investigative journalists are a much greater threat to a regime than someone working in a dying field of the entertainment business. When I see those people start to go down, I’ll worry about myself.

BGB: In the book you present a fictional right-wing reactionary television news host called The Hammer who seems all too believable. In the novel, your protagonist Joshua Sands has a discussion about the power of pictures over words, and The Hammer seems to embody the power of the “picture” side of that argument. Why did you elect to tell this story in words (instead of pictures) and what does that say about where you weigh in on the relative merits of each?

SAC: To tell a story in pictures, you need a movie studio, and I don’t happen to have one of those at hand. Also, making a movie is, above all else, a major business venture, and a book like mine, where urban guerrillas are, to some degree, the heroes, isn’t necessarily a good risk for a backer. I did get a film offer on this book but I turned it down because I didn’t like the direction they wanted to go with it to make it more mainstream. It was probably a stupid decision on my part.

That being said, words can convey ideas in a way that pictures simply can’t. That’s why movies are always shallower than the books they are based on. I was an Art History major, so I know well that pictures can be beautiful, and they can convey a lot of emotion and spirituality. But they are in no way worth a thousand words, not if the words are any good. If you want to illuminate deeper, complex truths, there’s no substitute.

My two previous books were optioned, and at one time I thought I might want to write screenplays of my books, both because of the money and because movies are just so damned large. You think you’re large by extension, but you’re really not. You’re still just a guy sitting in an empty room, so you might as well be writing what you want, and not have to take notes from some producer or see your work covered over by some re-write man.

BGB: While reading your novel I had Reagan-era punk songs going through my mind, songs that were relatively straight forward in their left wing militancy. I kept waiting for these kinds of songs and other artistic responses to surface during the Bush 2 presidency, but for the most part they never did. Do you think that Sept. 11 effectively killed what I’ll call the “romanticism” of anti-government action and rhetoric during that period?

SAC: I think Reagan’s 1984-style propaganda was new, so maybe people reacted to it more strongly. I think by the time Bush 2 came around, the Right had massively amplified and perfected its propaganda machine and 9/11 had also enabled them to up the ante. Rove and his gang made it pretty clear that anyone who didn’t support them internationally was an enemy, and domestically, a traitor. I think this was very successful in intimidating a lot of people in and out of government. Look what happened to the Dixie Chicks for making a few comments on stage in London: they were vilified and their records were burned publicly. Artists see that and they don’t want to go down that road. Also, the propaganda machine made the troops sacrosanct, and, by extension, the wars, so it was just uncool for artists to question government policy.

There was protest music, such as Green Day’s American Idiot, but I think people were worn-down by the endless barrage of garbage that was being dumped every day by the propaganda infrastructure. That’s one reason they do it. After a while, I think it’s hard to keep reacting.

I truly don’t understand why no other novelists have taken on the issues that I did in The Army of the Republic. My book was rejected more than forty times by publishers: so maybe all those other writers were right! The only books I’ve seen dealing with the possibility of political violence are racist garbage like The Turner Diaries, or Right-Wing heroic fantasies written by ex-military guys, where heroic gun-owners fight an oppressive Federal Government.

BGB: Does the rise of right wing protests and direct actions (i.e., Tea Parties, attempted bugging of Sen. Landrieu’s office, etc.) surprise you?

SAC: I’m not surprised, because dissatisfaction among that element of the Right was pretty high even in the waning days of the Bush Administration. Those people are doubly angry, both because of the drift of the country and because their illusions about the Republicans have crumbled. Unfortunately, they are so crippled by their own ingrained hatreds, as well as a completely fanciful view of how the world really works, that they’re unable to express their very justified anger in a positive way. Instead, they just want to dig the hole even deeper. They don’t even realize it’s a hole.

I thought it was interesting that the Corporates used these people to harass and intimidate the Democrats during the health care debate, disrupting Town Hall meetings, etc. The Tea Party people would say that it’s not Corporates who are organizing them, but let’s not forget that the main platforms for Tea Party ideologues (Beck, Limbaugh, Palin) are Corporate platforms like Fox News and Clear Channel. So, yes, to a great degree, this already is a Corporate-backed movement.

If the Tea Party people succeed in gaining real or ideological control of the Republican Party, and the Corporates decide to fully back them, we will be on the fast track to authoritarian government and political violence.

I actually would like to see the Left working on organizing them, because they have the potential to help change this country for the better.

BGB: As an author whose work was recently caught up in the Macmillan/Amazon feud with the result of having your book become suddenly unavailable from the world’s largest bookseller, what do you make of the situation?

SAC: I don’t know all the ins- and outs: it has something to do with electronic rights and e-books. My general impression of Amazon is that they’re always looking for a new way to pick the publishers’ pockets, and I guess the authors just got in the way this time. My advice is: try www.Powells.com or your local bookstore.

Need more? Check out Cohen’s blog post about the Revolution from the Right.

BGB Interview with Michael FitzGerald

Yesterday I glowlingy reviewed Michael FitzGerald’s excellent debut novel, Radiant Days.   The author graciously consented to subject himself for a little Q&A from the likes of us, which will endear him to us forever.  Onward…

Baby Got Books interview with Michael FitzGerald, author of Radiant Days

Baby Got Books: I found out about your book over beers with an author that I met through my blog. I read your book, loved it, and then was able to meet up with you via Goodreads. What’s your take on this crazy web 2.0 world? It must be nice to have these avenues for getting word out about your book and to interact directly with readers, but does it take away from time that you would have spent writing if a global corporate marketing department was doing the work for you?

Michael FitzGerald: Many cool things happened with the book because of these avenues, but communicating with people on Goodreads, while somewhat rewarding, just sort of wasn’t writing. As it’s been said, the web is a 2-inch deep ocean, going on in all directions indefinitely, but nothing really under the surface. I guess to extend that flimsy metaphor: marketing your book on the internet is like wading through this massive puddle. No real danger, but not a rewarding as swimming across something big and deep.

Sort of along these line… my own process with this book…I’m not connected to any sort of writing community or the publishing world in any real way. I don’t teach regularly. (I’m a software developer to pay the bills—although I was laid off last Friday!) I had two boys under the age of 3 when the book came out. So I really had no idea what I should be doing for promotion. The best I could come up with is to treat it like writing, which is to just show up. My writing process—if you could call it that—is to wake early and write for 2-3 hours before my day job. When the book came out, I did the same thing with promotion. Just made sure I spent 30 minutes every day doing something, anything, toward getting it read. The Web 2.0 world certainly made this easier to do from Boise, ID than it would have been 5 or 10 years earlier.

BGB: The reviews that I’ve seen for your book focus on Anthony, your protagonist, as a prototype of the disconnected American youth living abroad. Yet by and large the European characters seem to be as morally bankrupt, if not more so, than Anthony (perhaps for different reasons). Do you think that this emotional disconnection among young people is just part of the modern condition?

MF: I did when I was in my 20s, when most of the book was written. Now I think it’s just how we are in our 20s. And the European characters were a bit extreme… they were forged by war or 50 years of Communism.

On a personal level—and I think each of us has some distinct thing like this that we use—but I had a strict Catholic upbringing. All-boys Benedictine uniform-wearing boarding school. And while in that structured environment, I experienced all the normal stuff high school kids do: a bit too much LSD, awkward desperate attempts at sex, humiliating social life. But because the Catholic part was so unbending, there was a feeling that once the rules have been broken, just get hurly-burly. You’re going to hell anyway, etc… It all felt very dramatic but cool, since we were in bowties.

BGB: I read Radiant Days after reading “genius grant”-winner Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project and couldn’t help but notice that the two books work well together as companion pieces. In Hemon’s book, a young Bosnian finds himself disconnected and adrift in the US. (Some literature class somewhere will be assigned both books.) I’ve read an interview where you were quoted as saying that you have read all of Hemon’s work. Do you know if Hemon has read your book? Is your genius grant on its way?

MF: Yeah, Hemon is so amazing. I read The Question of Bruno just as I’d finished the first draft of Radiant Day and immediately felt like a fraud. I don’t know if he’s read it. I think my ears would fall off.

BGB: Marsh, the British war correspondent, was an especially interesting character. He was one of the few people that seemed to have some purpose (and a real job) in his life and there are hints in the book that suggest that his aloof attitude may have been a front to some extent. In many ways he seems out of place with the motley group in Bucharest. I kept wondering what he was doing with those people. (There’s a question here somewhere – I’ll go with this:) Does the expatriot scene lend itself to this type of strange bedfellow scenario?

MF: Yes and no. Common language, especially someplace like Hungary where expats are pretty isolated from the natives, creates bonds between people that wouldn’t normally exist. But at the same time, the young journalists I know tend to be game for anything. Marsh was accomplished, but he was also just sort of finding his way. He was educated, but he really couldn’t drive a car. And there’s a tradition of witty Brits who have little utility outside cocktail conversation.

I don’t how I feel about revealing this… but Marsh is based on two close friends, both journalists. He’ll vigorously deny this, but Owen Matthews was a main inspiration for Marsh. (Read his Amazon review.) He’s brilliant and a lot of fun. He’s presently the Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek and the author of the astonishing, Stalin’s Children. The other is Charlie Graeber, who writes for Wired, National Geographic’s Adventure, and others. He has a book coming out about the compliance of New Jersey hospitals with a serial killer nurse. He’s a dear friend.

BGB: It is unclear from Anthony’s account whether Anthony’s “girlfriend” Gisela’s activities in Hungary and Croatia were on the level, and he may not have cared one way or the other. Did you purposely keep her actions vague to keep Anthony on the hook for his apparent lack of concern?

MF: I’d like to say there was something purposeful behind this. But mostly I just felt it was true. I dated Hungarians when I was over there, and I never had any idea what was going on with them. Once, I thought we were going to church, and we ended up a pig slaughter (family ritual) which involved a four-wheeler and palinka.

BGB: The travels in the book kept me running to my laptop to fire up Google Earth to follow the trail and check out the locales via maps and the user-posted pictures there. Some of the war torn areas you describe in Croatia are among the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and they appear (from here) to have recovered well. I’ve read that you visited the area extensively before the war broke out, have you been back since writing the book? If so, how has it changed from your memories?

MF: No, unfortunately, I haven’t been back. I was pretty delusional about how a book gets published. Specifically, I thought there would be a step where I got a massive advance and could return to the Croatia for some fact checking. Whoops.

BGB: Radiant Days was nominated for a Henry Miller Award by Nerve.com for best literary sex scene. I went and re-read the passage that they cited. What’s wrong with those people?

MF: Intern with a wicked sense of humor?

BGB Interview with Frank Portman

Frank Portman is the author of the novels King Dork and Andromeda Klein.  He is also Dr. Frank, leader of the Bay Area punk band The Mr. T Experience (MTX) that is now playing into its third decade.   Since we love, Love, LOVE the intersection of books and music, Frank Portman is officially “our kind of guy.”  Accordingly, I was thrilled when he agreed to field some questions from the likes of us.

Baby Got Books interview with Frank Portman, author of Andromeda Klein and King Dork

Baby Got Books: I was a college DJ way back when the MTX album Night Shift at the Thrill Factory first came out.  Looking back on it, a song like “The History of the Concept of the Soul” may have hinted at a bookish future.  When did you first begin to write prose (as opposed to songs)?  And at what pint did you first begin to think seriously about writing a novel?

Frank Portman: Before doing King Dork, the only kinds of writing I’d done other than songs were essays and papers for school (and a blog that I started up in 2001.)  That song was actually a song version of a paper I did for a class on Greek and Roman religion when I was in college.  At the time, it just seemed like it would be funny to put footnotes in a punk rock song, and I guess it kind of was.

I started writing the first book in 2004, at the suggestion of an agent who believed the sensibility and characters in some of my songs might make for a pretty good YA novel.  Turns out he was right, but I don’t think I really took it all that seriously till it was well into the revision process.  Then it hit me that it was really happening.

BGB: Neither of us is a young adult exactly, but here we are talking about books that are ostensibly “for” young adults?  Did you set out to right for a particular age group?  How do you feel about the “YA” label that has been assigned to your books?

FP: I love the YA tradition, and I have for practically all my reading life.  I’m proud to be part of it.   That said, I don’t believe in “reader profiling” and I think trying to tailor a novel to match the supposed expectations and tastes and attention span, etc. of a particular narrowly-defined demographic group is a recipe for dull, inauthentic books.

There is a debate, not likely to be resolved, about “what is YA?” (similar to the “what is punk?” debate in some ways.)  I think the marketing answer (e.g. they are books marketed to or “aimed at” young readers as opposed to the general reading public) is the least interesting or fruitful one;  it’s certainly not an approach I’d recommend as guide to how to write a worthwhile novel.   For me, the thing that makes YA YA is something more essential and profound:  it is the attempt to depict a teenaged  character from the inside rather than as a figure observed from without.  The high school years are crucial years for everyone in our culture, and the sting and occasional joys of that experience stays with you, forever.  So it is a great “frame” within which to examine some universal things about human experience.  (Of course, you can read it as nostalgia as well.  I’m not saying that’s not there for older readers — I’m just saying it’s not all that’s there.)  Anyway, there is a reason why the fascination with high school so evident in our popular culture never seems to die out, among all age groups, and I think that’s it.

As for the marketing label, it’s a blessing and a curse like most things.  The downside is that a lot people in the literary establishing tend to take you less seriously as a writer.  And people in general will often tend to assume that your books are simplistic or dumbed down and not worth their time.  (This is summed up pretty well in the question that every YA author hears over and over again:  “so do you plan to write a real novel one day?”)  On the plus side though:  it is a happening, hip place to be these days.   We’re like the “cool kids” of publishing all of a sudden.  And it is a growing market, which is not something you can say about many things in this day and age.  Also, I believe that YA publishers are a lot more open to new things and are prepared to take more risks than “adult publishers.”   So I think it is a good fit for me.  It certainly has worked out well so far.

BGB: Your new novel “Andromeda Klein” features a high school girl who has a strong interest/obsession with the occult, a subject that always seems to be at the top of the list along with “Satanism” as a rationale for challenging books at libraries. Was the possibility of challenges/banning a concern for you or publisher?  Has it happened yet?

FP: While I was writing, that honestly didn’t occur to me.  I was just so absorbed  in Andromeda’s world that I wasn’t really looking at it from the outside, perhaps.  And that’s ironic in a way (and maybe says something unflattering about me) because that it is sub-theme in the book itself.  It wasn’t till we were at the publishing point-of-no-return phase when people started saying “you know, this book is going to get banned” that the thought first entered my head.  I was shocked by that.  And then I was even shocked-er when a school visit was actually cancelled.  So far, that’s the only incident I know of.  We’ll see what happens.

BGB: It’s clear from the book that a great deal of research into the arcana of the occult was involved.  Has the occult always been an interest of yours or did you dive into the subject as you began to write Andromeda Klein?

FP: It was an interest of mine as a kid, sure, but I really did have to do my homework to get up to speed with Andromeda.  The model for Andromeda’s obsession with and approach to the occult, to the degree that there was one, was not my own obsession with the occult as a kid but rather my obsession with rock and roll.  I think the two areas of interest have a lot in common, especially inasmuch as the “record nerd” and and the “occult nerd” can be equivalent types.  Moreover, in both cases it is a side of things that fairly common, but not often recognized or depicted.   So there’s a similarity between the two books, and the two characters, if you like, despite the fact that they are very very different in almost every other way.

BGB: One of the things (among many) that I learned from Andromeda Klein is that Ozzy Osbourne mispronounced Alistair Crowley’s name in the song Mr. Crowley.  The book presents several examples of musicians who botch the meaning of occult symbols/beliefs (e.g., they are Satanic).  Do you think this is due to a general misunderstanding based on the esoteric nature of occult texts?  Or is it just lazy appropriation?  Both?

FP: The big mistake people tend to make in general regarding esoterica is to assume that because it is of an earlier age and off the radar of conventional contemporary rational discourse that it is simplistic, or naive, or that it can be discussed meaningfully without much knowledge about or engagement with the material.  In fact, it might well be nonsense, like anything, but it is a rich, extremely complex chunk of nonsense with its own rules, conventions, traditions, etc.,;  and moreover, it relates to various unquestioned aspects of our own conventional rational discourse in often surprising ways.

Rock stars are no less immune to these habits than anyone.  And of course there’s nothing wrong with appropriating iconography and symbolism for effect, “coolness,” what have you.  It is done all the time, to great effect.  I don’t know that the song “Mr. Crowley” would have been a better song if it had truly attempted to depict “Crowley the man and his thought,” but I kind of doubt it, really.  I think the mispronunciation, though, is a kind of symbol of the general situation,  and thus is rather precious as a reminder never to assume you already know everything about everything.

BGB: Andromeda Klein differs markedly from your first novel King Dork.  A notable example for me is that Andromeda is largely clueless regarding modern music where King Dork‘s Sam Hellerman and Tom Henderson discuss music constantly.  Did you make a conscious effort to limit the musical references in the book or did the pop culture obliviousness of Andromeda Klein limit the opportunities?

FP: There were lots of reasons to make Andromeda oblivious to contemporary music and pop culture.   It underscores the degree to which her occultism obscures everything but itself in her world, and it makes her eventual discovery of Led Zeppelin “mean more” in the end.  Mostly though, it had its own logic.  Not to belabor the point, I hope, but occultism plays much the same role in Andromeda’s life as rock and roll plays in Tom’s and Sam’s life.

BGB: A character in Andromeda Klein is an HP Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu-rock band?  Is there really such a thing?  What does/would Cthulhu-rock sound like?

FP: There isn’t such a thing as Cthulhu Rock, per se, as far as I know.  I imagine it as a kind of techno-metal geekery, maybe the least hip music conceivable.  So of course, I bet I’d be pretty into it were it to exist.

BGB: The covers for both King Dork and Andromeda Klein are made to appear as though they have been defaced.  Should we read anything into that?  Is it becoming the Frank Portman signature look?

FP: I think that is more a function of how “booky” both books are.  Books as artifacts play a big role in both.  That said, I do like defacing things, on principle, and I suppose you could say that that’s part of what I enjoy about writing novels, as with just about anything else.

BGB: A character from King Dork makes a surprise cameo in Andromeda Klein.  Can we expect to hear more from Sam Hellerman and/or Tom Henderson in your future novels?

FP: My next book will be a sequel to King Dork called King Dork Approximately, so there’s wall-to-wall Tom and Sam in that.

BGB: I am a HUGE fan of your novel King Dork.  I hear that the book is being made into a movie by the Adam McKay/Will Ferrell production team (true?). What’s the latest word on the movie and to what extent have you been involved in the process?

FP: Thanks a lot.  Glad to hear you like it.  The film is in “development” currently.  That term can mean anything from “we forgot we bought the rights to it” to “we’re definitely for sure gonna make it.”  You never know.  But yes, the producers are Will Ferrell and Adam McKay and the studio is Sony Pictures.  A lot has been happening recently, and the project seems very much alive at the moment.  We’ll see what happens.

BGB: NPR recently aired an interview with Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America, that claimed that Jay-Z may be “a master of occult wisdom.”  Are The Mr. T Experience secret masters of the occult?

FP: I guess all I can say to that is:  them as knows don’t tell, and them as tells don’t know.

Don’t forget to enter our Andromeda Klein giveaway over here.

Audio Bonus:

Ozzy Osbourne – Mr. Crowley (Andromeda says the first syllable should be pronounced  ”crow” like the bird)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

BGB Interview with Katie Kitamura

If you read my review of Katie Kitamura’s The Longshot last week, you’ll know that I am a big fan of the author’s first novel.  You’ll have to take my word for it that a novel about the world of mixed martial arts fighting was not one that I was prepared to fall for so completely.  I was first intrigued by Kitamura’s back story – she’s a petite Ivy League graduate who has a PhD from the University of London, she’s a former ballet dancer, and – of course – she’s a woman writing about a brutal ultra-male sport.  But the story won me over on its own its own merits.

Katie Kitamura was gracious enough to take time out to answer our burning questions.  She’s awesome like that. Read on…

Baby Got Books interview with Katie Kitamura, author of The Longshot

Baby Got Books: Your novel The Longshot takes place in the violent world of mixed martial art fighting. What is it about violent sports that makes for compelling literature?

Katie Kitamura: I think writers necessarily live in their heads. It’s a disembodied lifestyle, and the highly embodied nature of combat sports can become an alluring contrast. I don’t know that writers are necessarily drawn to writing about what they know, even if they should be. I can only speak for myself, but I’m more often drawn to writing about what I don’t understand. You have to be a little bit in love with the world you’re writing about, and I think it’s easier to fall in love with what you don’t fully know.

BGB: At what point will it become very old and/or very insulting that every review or article about this book will begin with pointing out that you are “a girl”? (And I am as guilty of this as anyone…sorry about that)

KK: To flip the tables again, if a man wrote a novel set in a nail salon, people would inevitably comment on it! I genuinely don’t mind – it seems like a natural enough response.

I’m slightly more intrigued by the fact that on the whole, people are saying they can’t tell the book was written by a woman. I can see myself all over the book, and I’m not exactly out of touch with my feminine side. Having said that, I can’t pinpoint exactly where and how that expresses itself in the novel; I think it must do so ways that I haven’t fully worked out myself.

BGB: A cornerstone of the book is its intense realism. It’s clear that you must have spent a great deal of time with fighters and coaches. How did you go about inserting yourself into the very male MMA world? Was there resistance to you being there?

KK: I spent a lot of time with fighters, but to borrow from Joan Didion – I’m small, unobtrusive and neurotically inarticulate. I think they were only half aware I was present. I spent most of my time listening. I wasn’t necessarily listening for content (although a lot of the fight lingo that is in the book came directly from the mouths of fighters); I was listening more for the cadences of their speech. The rhythm of the banter, the jokes that would be picked up and drawn out, the things that were left unsaid.

I never sat down and asked a direct “What is it like to step into the ring?” type of question. It almost didn’t seem necessary, because so much of that experience was telegraphed in their faces, and – both before, during, and after the fight – their bodies. The atmosphere around a fighter is very particular, it has an incredibly tense vibration. I can see how people get addicted to the adrenaline rush of a fight. Even the post fight crash has its nuances.

BGB: Did you ever end up lacing gloves on yourself?

KK: No, no – physically speaking, I’m a complete coward. Probably if I’d had the courage to fight myself, I never would have felt the impetus to write the book in the first place. Maybe to write at all!

BGB: Longshot centers on the relationship of two men, Cal the fighter and Riley the coach. Clearly there is an interdependency between the men. Quoting myself, “Each has a responsibility to the other, neither wants to let the other down, and each play a central role in the continued livelihood of the other.” On the page their relationship is defined as much by what they do not say to one another as what they do say. How did you find the restraint, and the confidence, to leave so much of what is happening between the men off the page?

KK: Any good fight tells an emotionally engaging story through the bodies, and not just the minds, of the fighters.  I think I wanted to see if I could do the same in fiction. I didn’t want to do a lot of exposition on the emotions of the men, their motivations and their back-stories. When you sit down to watch a fight, you don’t need to know the back-story of the individual fighters to get drawn in; all you need is the most basic of narrative arcs.

Having said all that, I really did not want to (and hope I haven’t!) frustrate the reader by leaving things unsaid and off the page. I hate the idea of frustrating the reader solely for the purposes of servicing some kind of larger conceit you’ve entertaining as a writer. I hope the relationship between Cal and Riley still feels sufficiently engaging, and also realistic. I think there are a lot of relationships where the core of what is happening is never explicitly stated, but is only revealed in the small details.

BGB: In a profile featured on The Daily Beast, it quotes you as saying that you were shocked at first by the way that MMA is fought here as opposed to Japan where you had previously seen the sport. It’s difficult to imagine your description of the scene in Japan – 50,000 people in attendance, families watching together, polite applause, etc. Why do you think what can be a family outing in Japan has been recast here – whether through marketing or perception – as a bloodsport?

KK: There are a lot of arguments for cultural context – there’s a long history of martial arts in Japan, with judo, karate, and sumo, and most children learn some kind of martial art in school. Certainly I think the way we understand any sport is couched in a received set of aesthetic standards. We perceive boxing as aesthetically valid in part because of everything from Norman Mailer’s prose to archive footage of Ali. I don’t know that a similar aesthetic has been developed for MMA; on screen, it can strike people as ugly, in part because when we watch MMA, we don’t have the tape of Raging Bull or Fat City running in the back of our minds.

Maybe the language of martial arts has been more fully integrated into the Japanese imagination, but I think you’re absolutely right to think that it’s as much a question of marketing as anything else. In America, there was initially a bit of a back door approach to the sport. The marketing relied on shock tactics (the use of the cage, for example, is in essence one giant marketing ploy). It’s now methodically cleaning up its image, and I think is poised to become fully mainstream. But in Japan, MMA was presented and understood to be a mainstream sport from the beginning.

BGB: I’ll admit to not having watched any MMA fights prior to reading your book, so forgive the ignorance that is inherent in this question, but… The fight in your book takes place in Mexico in what seems to be a traditional boxing-type ring. Everything that I have ever seen about the sport – which is only the marketing behind the UFC – takes place in a small cage. Did you purposefully set the fight in Mexico to avoid the UFC scene as – maybe? – too distracting from the story that you wanted to tell?

KK: Yeah – well noted! They use a ring in Japan, and when I went down to Tijuana to watch some fights, they also used a ring. But on the whole, the cage has become the standard across the sport. I’m getting used to it, but I still prefer the ring. I like the associations better, I like the word better in prose – and then there’s the very simple fact that you can see the fighters more easily in a ring.

But to respond to your larger question – in a lot of ways, the book is deliberately nostalgic. In some ways, I wanted to take a very contemporary sport (MMA) and blunt that currency by creating an atmosphere around it that was less immediately locatable, less identified with a particular brand and cultural moment.

BGB: Your first novel has not only found its way to a supportive (and large) publisher, but it has also been getting great reviews. What has that experience been like so far?

KK: I feel very lucky that the book found a home at Free Press – it’s not the most obvious book, and first fiction remains a gamble for any publisher. They’ve been incredibly supportive; my editor used a very sure and light touch in working on the book, and the team at Free Press were very generous in allowing me to meddle in everything from the font on the book cover to marketing ideas.

I’m starting to get feedback from actual readers, and that’s possibly the most exciting part of all. It will sound naïve, but I’m completely astonished to discover that people apart from my friends and family have taken the time to read the book! Giving over that time to an unknown writer seems to me an incredibly generous thing to do, and I’m very grateful.

Bonus: Speaking of grateful, the author has graciously signed three (3!) copies of The Longshot for us to give away here on BGB.  Again, she’s awesome like that.  If you’d like to get your mitts on a copy to check out this excellent novel yourself, leave us a comment. At the end of the week holiday weekend we’ll choose three enthusiastic readers at random.

Catching Up With Steven Hall

Steven Hall, author of the excellent post-modern thrill ride novel The Raw Shark Texts, is one our all-time favorite authors here at BGB.  Mr. Hall was gracious enough to send me a copy of his book after I snarkily called him out over a wrongly interpreted remark (oops!). Once in my hands, Raw Shark just blew me away.  I give the book a shout out almost every chance I get. Seriously: type “Raw Shark Texts” in our search box over there on the right and see what happens.

Hall was the subject of our very first author interview, and he has been a friend to the blog ever since.   In the greatest coup this blog has ever scored, Steven Hall was the guest of honor at a  Baby Got Books’  Reading Series event here in Atlanta.  See!:

We decided recently that it was high time to catch up with Steven Hall to see what’s new.

Baby Got Books Interview with Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts:

Baby Got Books: First things first.  When’s the new book, variously known as “Book 2″ and code name “Hula Hoop,” coming out?

Steven Hall: I’d tell you if I knew! “Hula Hoop” really has taken on a life of its own and I’m just holding on as best I can. It’s a very complicated book to write, it has a lot of specific demands, some of which are pretty unique. I want to make sure I get it right, or at least give it my very best shot.

BGB: At 3 AM Magazine, they quote you as saying, ““Even more than Raw Shark Texts, the second novel uses the architecture of the book to tell the story (but not in the same way). The book also features one and a half returning characters from the first novel, a kite, lots of dolls houses and a gigantic art installation called Narnia Junction.” One and a half characters? What is that supposed to mean?! Any new developments to share?

Steven Hall: Heh, it means that the second character had a tiny cameo in Raw Shark Texts, so brief that most people won’t remember. Actually, it’s starting to look like ‘one and two half returning characters’ – somebody else from that first book is now making very odd semi-appearances in this one, it least, it might be them…

I’m very interested in creating a series of books that all enhance each-other – You can read any of the book alone, that’s fine, but if you chose to read Raw Shark and Hula Hoop, then each would be enhanced by possibilities presented in the other. Or not. It’ll depend on the sort of reader you are. I’m excited by the meta-game of how all these books fit together (the plan is for there to be seven, eventually) – so there will be areas for dedicated reader to explore not just within each novel, but very much in the spaces between them.

Hula Hoop is a hub book, in some ways – we’ll be meeting people in Hula Hoop that play important parts in books 3, 4, maybe 5. And that someone who played a very important part in book 1 too.

BGB: How many languages has Raw Shark been translated into now?  I’ve lost count.  Do you have a shelf with all of the editions on it?

Steven Hall: I think we’re up to thirty languages, although not all of them have been published yet. The complex Chinese edition came out last month. It’s a thing of beauty. Yes, I have a shelf with all the editions. People say “wow, I didn’t realise you’d written so many books.” I have to put them right. It’ll be nice when there are copies of ‘Hula Hoop’ up there too.

BGB: The screenwriter for the film adaptation of The Raw Shark Texts is Simon Beaufoy, who won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire moments after working on your project.  Nicely done. What’s the latest word on getting Raw Shark to the screen?

Steven Hall: It was nothing to do with me! The credit for that goes to FilmFour and Pete Czernin from Blueprint Films. I think they’re trying to attached a director to the project at the moment, I’m trying to keep my nose out and let them get on with it. It seems to me that there are wall-to-wall cooks in film making at the best of times, they don’t need me sticking my nose in too. That said, I am very interested and excited to see what they come up with.

BGB: On your blog you mention working on any number of projects: Dr Who radio plays, a short film project, a top-secret e-book project for Book Two, on-going Raw Shark projects, Book Three (or did I make that one up?). Anything else that I’ve forgotten?  It sounds very busy over there at Hall Manor.  With so much happening, how do you keep everything moving forward?

Steven Hall: With difficulty (and no, you didn’t make Book Three up – that’s on the slab too, insanely). I’m also putting the groundwork together for a big project with the very talented Christian Ward. This is going to be something a bit different to my novel work, a different area of interest for me. I’m looking forward to stretching a different set of muscles and hopefully adding a second string to my bow. If we can pull it off, it’ll be quite a piece of work, I think. There never seem to be enough hours in the day, but I’m enjoying myself very much. To be honest with you, Raw Shark Texts was paralyzing for a while – it was so big, it completely took over my life, and it was very difficult to get past the craziness that ate up almost all of 2006-2008. I think I’m doing that now, or at least I’m getting there.

BGB: Speaking of Dr Who, you went out and bought your own Dalek with your Raw Shark advance.  Have you picked up any new sci-fi ephemera lately?

Steven Hall: I haven’t, partly because there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go after you have your own dalek!

BGB: When you were here in Atlanta, you got me listening to the Finnish band Pepe Deluxé.  It’s still my go-to disc if I am faced with “I need to be cool” emergency.  Do you have any new top-secret bands that I should get hip to?

Steven Hall: I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t call them cool (but that’s good, cool people are often a bit naff, aren’t they?) but I’ve been very much enjoying the Envy and Other Sins album ‘We Leave at Dawn.’ It really is a brilliant piece of work, I think. And the last song, Shipwrecked, could have been written for the Raw Shark movie (if you’re reading this, FilmFour!). Very much worth a listen, I’d say.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Pepe Deluxé – The Mischief of Cloud Six

BGB: Have you started laying the groundwork with your US publisher to make sure that the book tour for “Book Two/Hula Hoop” comes through Atlanta?

Steven Hall: If I tour the States with it, I shall do all in my power to pass through Atlanta. We drank a lot of beer that afternoon, didn’t we?

BGB: Anything else we need to know about while we’re checking in?

Steven Hall: www.steven-hall.org

——————————————————————————————–

Through a top secret arrangement that I really can’t talk about, so we’ll really need to keep this between the two of us, ok?, I have a draft of the first few chapters of “Hula Hoop” in my inbox as we speak!  What I can tell you, from what I’ve read so far, is that this second novel is going to be an interesting departure from Raw Shark.  But remember, mum’s the word.

An Interview with Joe Meno

My introduction to Joe Meno was through his heartbreakingly awesome novel The Boy Detective Fails – ZOMG! – check it out if you haven’t already. When the chance to interview Meno presented itself, I was on it like the proverbial thing that is on that other thing.   Oh, and be sure to check out Tim’s rave review of Joe Meno’s new novel The Great Perhaps.  Read on…

Baby Got Books interview with Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps

Baby Got Books: Your books, particularly the new one, are all very, very
character-driven-the characters are incredibly fleshed out and real,
with frighteningly well-thought-out eccentricities. Who are some of your
favorite characters in literature-”classic” or newer?

Joe Meno: Thanks so much for the compliment. To me, stories about characters, and their relationships to one another, so that’s where I always start. The ones that live on in my imagination always seem to have a real sense of complexity about them—Byron Bunch from Faulkner’s Light in August, Salinger’s Fanny and Zoey, Pecola Breedlove from Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I have stolen liberally from each of those authors for my own books and stories—how Faulkner uses place to reveal character, what Salinger does with dialogue and gesture, how Morrison can give the reader a new understanding of a character through a single object.

BGB: Regarding the new book-clouds and squids: did you have to do much
research into either topic to make the imagery/meaning factually
accurate (is it factually accurate?)

Joe Meno: I worked on The Great Perhaps for about four years—the research for the novels was pretty extensive, ranging from looking into the prehistoric giant squid, German-American internment camps, radio serials of the 1940’s, social bird dominance, Marxism, the development of the F-4 phantom jet, and epilepsy, and I tried to make it as factually accurate as I could, although that is never the goal I have when I write. I just kept following my curiosity, looking for connections between the lives of the characters I was describing and what already existed in the world. For me the most interesting thing I discovered was how prevalent and, at the same time, how little we know about epilepsy. In the book, Jonathan has seizures which are triggered by clouds, which seems pretty absurd. But in reality, there are all sorts of cases of people whose seizures are triggered by these incredibly specific cues—lights, movement, sounds, one woman in Germany is stricken whenever she hears a certain piece of music by Brahms.

BGB: What was the impetus for Boy Detective Fails? That novel ranks in my
favorite books of all time, ever, and it’s so funny and aching and strikingly original that I’d be remiss in not asking about how it came to be.

Joe Meno: Thanks again. I actually started working on the book some time after September 11^th, and at the time I was turning thirty, and in that way, the book is about how terrified I was that the world had become this random, violent, disorderly place. Usually, when I feel lost, I turn to books and music. In this case, I started thinking back to The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and bands like Belle and Sebastian: there’s something incredibly sad about children who are smart, which Belle and Sebastian seem to capture in their music. Like all my books, it was a way for me to come to some kind of understanding about the world: why mystery was something important, something necessary.

BGB: What books do you recall reading as a child that first pushed you to want to write?

Joe Meno: With my daughter, I’ve been revisiting some of those books, like Where the Wild Things Are, and Madeline, and Ferdinand, and you realize how all the basic storytelling techniques that work for adults are there: character, place, action, change. It’s actually really helpful to see that, even as adults, I think we go to books for the same reasons: to have a moment to daydream, to experience something outside of ourselves, and be reminded of the possibilities of things.

BGB: What music are you listening to as of late?

Joe Meno: I’ve been listening to a lot of Beatles lately. My daughter is a year and half old and she just started asking to hear them by name, which is pretty exciting. I feel like whatever mistakes I make as a father, that at least I passed on something important, like an appreciation for “Hey, Jude.” She gets very serious and sings the Na-na-na parts at the end of the song, and it makes you realize what the point of making art is all of a sudden.

If you’d like to have Joe Meno read a part of the first chapter of The Great Perhaps just for YOU, click here.

Life on the shelf

I’ve been talking lately about books that operate, in some form or fashion, as a paean to a love of literature. One of the most excellent, moving books to cross my path this year on such a topic is The Whole Five Feet, by Christopher Beha.

Harper Magazine assistant editor Beha, undergoing an incredibly difficult time in his life-cancer-recovery, family death, a stillborn novel-decided to tackle the task of completing the collection of classic works known as the Harvard Classics, aka the “five foot shelf”. The chronicle of his excursion into the classics, the past and, ultimately, himself, is what comprises the brief, touching The Whole Five Feet.

I was really intrigued as to what Beha had found in the days and months following his completion of the Harvard Classics, and so he and I exchanged a few emails about his time living inside the five-foot shelf.

Interview with Christopher Beha

BabyGotBooks: The Whole Five Feet picks up as a very, very specific project and a very, very specific time in your history as a reader. What books did you read as a child/young adult that had a formative impact on you?

Christopher Beha: When I was young, my mother read a great deal to me and my two siblings –Madeline L’Engle, the Narnia books — and this was certainly formative. But I’ve never been much of a literary nostalgic. I don’t have particular affection, really, for books that meant something to me earlier in life, unless I can return to them and they still say something to me now, rather than serving as mementos. So I don’t tend to revisit or even think much about children’s books, even ones that were once quite important to me.

A friend told me the other day that she’d seen a statistic that suggested that the physical presence of books in a house is actually more important to a child’s development than being read to, and if this is the case, then I can fairly say that the set of the Harvard Classics on my grandmother’s shelf played a formative role in my early life, even though I didn’t start reading them until a few years ago.

Now, if we’re using “young adult” not in its more recent demographic sense of “pre-adult” or “late adolescent” but in a more literal way –in which case I maybe still am one — I can say with some certainty that the single most important writer in my reading life has been the late David Foster Wallace, whom I began reading as a sophomore in college and to whom I still return with great frequency now. He wrestled so movingly with one of the major issues I’ve tried to deal with in my book, that is, the place of the didactic in imaginative literature. Put in that clumsy way, it doesn’t sound like so thrilling an issue. Put differently: to what extent is literature supposed to teach you something about the world and your place in it, and to what extent is it supposed to give you an aesthetic experience, to provide what Goethe called the highest human faculty — the shudder of awe? Are these two goals in some opposition, or is it possible to do both in equal measure? In The Republic, Socrates says that all the knowledge in the world is useless without the wisdom to know what knowledge is for. Wallace, who was thought of while he was still alive as an encyclopedic writer, was so wonderful not because of his knowledge but because of his wisdom. Since his death, it seems to have become obvious even to those who once thought of him as cold and brainy that he was fundamentally a moral writer whose main concern was the possibility of connection. But that was there in the books all along. When I started reading the Classics, I chose quite actively not to read them in an academic way; that is, to read them for their wisdom, not for their knowledge. The result is that the book is not a work of literary criticism, but a book about the part that books can play in one’s life.

BGB: Since the completion of The Whole Five Feet, have you reflected back on your time with the Harvard classics-and, if so, what of the collection has stuck with you the most?

CB:On my website, I’ve been posting some things I wrote about the books while I was first reading them, and as The Whole Five Feet has come out, I’ve been re-reading some of the volumes, particularly the volumes of poetry. As my answer above would suggest, I’m more interested in what they have to say to me now, not in remembering what they said to me then. Just this morning I returned to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, which is fitting in this context, because it is in part about the extent to which you can or can’t revisit earlier selves, return mentally or physically to a past experience for nourishment:

That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence.

BGB: Your read of Ben Franklins’s Autobiography was refreshing to me-I’ve always read it (and commiserated with those who have similar viewpoints) an incredibly egotistical piece of work, and tend to miss the good stuff in it. Do you think Autobiography still is worth reading in today’s day and age?

CB: Franklin’s Autobiography is the very first work in the first volume of the Classics. I found it instructive, for reasons touched on a bit above, that the set would begin with such an unapologetically didactic work. You’re not going to get a shudder of awe from Poor Richard, but you might learn a few practical lessons. I found it worth reading at the time, but it’s not one of the volumes I would go out of my way to recommend. I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone to put down Shakespeare or Dante to pick up Franklin. Even from a purely practical point of view, I think you’d learn a lot more about how to live from Marcus Aurelius than from Franklin.

BGB: Do you feel, having subscribed to the Harvard Classics reason for being and stepping through them, bit by bit, that the five foot shelf achieves the purpose it was created for?

CB:The Shelf is idiosyncratic in many ways. To the extent that part of its purpose was canon-shaping, I think it was probably flawed to begin with, and it’s certainly outdated now. (I’m setting aside entirely the question of whether such a purpose is even worthwhile; I happen to think it is, but that’s a fight for another day.) To the extent that it’s purpose was to collect together a kind of curriculum and make it widely available, it certainly succeeded. And of course, it was a commercial venture — for the publishers, at least, if not for the editor — and it succeeded incredibly as that. Several people have written to me to say that after reading my book they tracked down a set of the Classics. I found this extremely gratifying. There may now be better ways to receive an all-in-one-place experience of the “great books,” but they’re aren’t many, and if my book sends others to the Five Foot Shelf, I’m thrilled.

BGB:What are you working on now?

CB:More than one writer friend gave me the very good advice to get as far along as possible on my next project before this one came out. I finished The Whole Five Feet nearly a year ago, and in the meantime I’ve managed to write a draft of a novel. A very messy draft, which will take much revision before it’s remotely presentable.

Housekeeping

I had fallen way behind in keeping the author mugshots and links current in the “Authors at BGB” sidebar over there on the right.  That’s all fixed up now.  Check it out and make sure you didn’t miss any of these quality interview/guest posts.

An Interview with Dara Horn

I’m always glad to have the oppurtunity to interview Dara Horn. She’s one of my new favorite writers, one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and a very interesting person to boot.  She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard, is a mother of three, and she is only in her early 30′s.  I first interviewed Dara Horn in 2007 after being wowed by her wonderful novel, The World to Come.  BGB reviews of The World to Come can be read here and here.

Her new novel, All Other Nights, validates the grand pronouncements of those Granta people.  It is a wonderful novel.  (Check out my review of All Other Nights.)  In this interview I fearlessly showcase my ignorance of Jewish culture, a few plot points, and a thematic element or two.  Dara Horn, a gracious and generous interviewee, is fascinating as always.

Baby Got Books interview with Dara Horn, author of All Other Nights

(Photo: Michael Priest)

Baby Got Books: This book feels different stylistically from your previous novel, The World to Come. There are some familiar themes between the two
books, but All Other Nights seems to be a more straightforward (and action-packed) story. Was it your intention to do something different
with this novel?

Dara Horn: Yes, it was intentional. Like most readers, when I read a novel I enjoy, I immediately return to the bookstore or library to find other books by the same author. The pleasure usually continues for one or two more books, but then it abruptly ends as I realize that the author is actually writing the same book over and over. I remember loving Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and then enjoying
Norwegian Wood, and then feeling less inspired by A Wild Sheep Chase. By the time I got to South of the Border, West of the Sun, I just thought, “Gee, I wonder if this will be a novel about a disaffected man on a quest involving a disappearing girlfriend, a hidden history of suicide, and submerged guilt about World War Two.” (Yep, it was.) When I started writing a third novel, it occurred to me that I was at risk of repeating myself too. So I didn’t.

My two previous novels both were written from many characters’ points of view, with many jumps in time and no attempt at linear storytelling. I always found this to be an easier way to write a book, because if one storyline wasn’t working out, I could always skip to another until I recovered momentum on the first one, and the stories ended up reinforcing one another. But I often wondered whether I could ever write a “normal” novel—from one character’s point of view, with everything happening chronologically, with no narrative tricks. It turned out that I could.

All Other Nights is a Civil War spy novel, as you’ve noted, told from the perspective of Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army who is sent to New Orleans to assassinate his own uncle. Things proceed downhill from there, and the book is full of all kinds of plot twists and adventures. But since I’m still me, it is still grounded in themes I’ve explored in other books—little-known aspects of Jewish history, the drama of how families shape our lives (with or without our awareness or approval), and how we make the moral decisions that define us.

BGB: Both The World to Come and All Other Nights are similar in their use of historical figures that play central roles in the plot and
themes. As a reader, I feel that I’ve learned something new from both novels about fascinating figures both well known and virtually unknown
(to me). It is clear that a tremendous amount of research goes into your novels. Can you tell us what your research process is like?

DH: I wrote The World to Come while completing my doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and the research I did for that novel was part of
my doctoral work. I have no academic background in the Civil War, though I’ve written about it for American Heritage magazine, where I once spent a summer as a fact-checker. At first I was a bit intimidated by everything I had to learn—especially since my old fact-checking job left me with a visceral fear of Civil War buffs. But I discovered that after doing a doctorate in Yiddish literature, researching the Civil War was relatively simple: Everything was in English! And the books were right in the library, and could even be checked out! In Yiddish literature, I had to go on goose chases through archives to dig up microfilm of the most basic resources. But for the Civil War, everything is right there in bookstores for you—or even on your home computer. I bought the “Official Records of the War of the Rebellion”—the U.S. government’s compilation of all military documentation—on CD-ROM. Even the internet had astonishing resources. The Library of Congress’s website, for instance, has transcripts of interviews with elderly ex-slaves that were done during the Great Depression. My description of the slave auction was drawn from those interviews, as well as from an 1859 newspaper article by an undercover correspondent who covered the largest slave auction in American history (also available online).

A lot of this novel was inspired by things I discovered during my research. But “research” makes it sound arduous, which it wasn’t. The more I read, the more material I had to work with to make the story more compelling. One female Confederate spy, for instance, knew how to dislocate her jaw at will—something that became a plot point in the book. I couldn’t have made that up. As the story took on its own trajectory, I was able to expand the plot while respecting the boundaries of historical fact. The major mystery in the book, involving Lincoln’s assassination, unfolds in a way that may never have happened in reality, but which is well within the limits of the possible. Now I just have to sit back and wait until I hear from the Civil War buffs, or someone’s enraged descendants. I hope they’ll cut me some slack.

BGB: The afterword of All Other Nights indicates that the story was inspired, in part, by a trip that you took to a New Orleans cemetery. Your character Jacob Rappaport finds himself in different cemeteries in two important scenes in the novel, and it is remarked upon that ”his family was descended from the Biblical high priest and there was a Hebrew law that forbade them any contact with the dead.” I’m unfamiliar with this law, and it seems important thematically. Can you tell us a little about it and what the rationale might have been for that kind of prohibition? How is a high priest different from a rabbi? (Is he?) How would a lineage be traced back over that kind of
time span?

DH: Jacob actually finds himself in cemeteries three times in the novel—the book’s final scene is a showdown in a graveyard. And as you
point out, he shouldn’t have been in any of them.

Jacob is what is known in Hebrew as a cohen, which is a direct descendant of the Biblical high priest. (This has nothing to do with rabbis; rabbis are scholars and teachers by training who have no special lineage.) In the Hebrew bible, Moses’ brother Aaron is appointed as the high priest, who represents the Israelites in divine services that involve killing lots of goats. Aaron’s male descendants are appointed to serve as priests in this fashion in the Temple in Jerusalem. To perform their responsibilities, they must observe certain laws intended to preserve the purity of the priesthood, one of which is that they are not supposed to have any contact with the dead
(including entering a cemetery). Since the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in the year 70, these descendants are expected to maintain these strictures in case the messiah should arrive and the Temple should be rebuilt.

Believe it or not, certain Jewish families today trace their lineage to Aaron and his sons, and continue to pass on this legacy through male descendants. Families with surnames like Cohen, Kohen, Kagan, Kahn, Cohn or Katz (a Hebrew abbreviation for “righteous priest”) are usually part of this lineage, as are some other surnames, including Rappaport. (And believe it or not, DNA studies have confirmed that more than 75% of men with these last names share a single male ancestor.) Religious families, like Jacob’s in the book, still maintain these laws to this day.

I gave Jacob this lineage in the novel because it underscores how people bring their own unshakable histories with them to America, a place where the national mythology is centered around the idea that we are all supposed to be self-made people, freed from any obligations to the past. But it is through the cemeteries in the book that Jacob, a child of immigrants, sees how people have put down roots in America, tying themselves to the land in a way that their lives never did. When I visited the old Jewish cemetery in New Orleans in 2002, I was surprised to see graves from the early 1800s. I hadn’t been aware of how deep the Jewish community’s roots were in the old South. To Jacob, that awareness makes him reconsider what it means to be an American—that being an American doesn’t necessarily mean being a person without a past.

BGB: When you were here last, you mentioned that one of the themes of All Other Nights is “a story about loyalty, about how we decide who
deserves our devotion, and why.” Viewed in this light, the character of Judah Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State, seems especially fascinating. Benjamin was the only member of the Confederate Cabinet that did not own slaves (while on the Cabinet), and he proposed freeing slaves to join the fight against the Union. It is also made clear that as a Jew, Benjamin was viewed as a second-class citizen. It seems difficult to ascribe his loyalty to the Confederate cause as anything more than geography – previously serving as a US Senator from Louisiana, it was where his home was. In the afterword, you seem sympathetic to the idea of Benjamin as misunderstood. What do you think drove his loyalty to the Confederacy?

DH: It would be misleading to suggest that Judah Benjamin was some sort of closet abolitionist. In fact he did at one point own a plantation, and his plan to emancipate slaves who agreed to serve in the Confederate army was motivated more by the army’s lack of manpower than by any sense of justice. But your suggestion that his loyalty to the Confederacy was due only to “geography” makes it seem much less significant than it was.

I think Benjamin had the immigrant’s bottomless gratitude for the places that accepted him and allowed him to maximize his talents, in a way that few places in the world would have at that time. He was born in the Caribbean to an impoverished Jewish family that moved to North Carolina and then to South Carolina when he was a young child. He was an intellectual prodigy who was admitted to Yale Law School at age fourteen, and as an adult he rose to prominence as a lawyer in New Orleans and then as a politician. In a sense, Jews benefited from the South’s institutional racism; in the South they were mostly considered “white”, while in the less racially diverse North, they were
considered ethnic. (It was a Northern general, Ulysses S. Grant, who expelled the Jews from territories he conquered in the South.) Benjamin’s loyalty to the Confederacy—to the point of even taking the blame for other Confederate leaders’ mistakes—was a reflection of his devotion to America, and to the part of America that he had served all his life. It was only after his crazy escape to England (he disguised himself as a Frenchman, walked across Florida, found a safe-house by following a talking parrot, survived two maritime disasters and more) that it was clear he wasn’t willing to die for the cause.

But his loyalty wasn’t rewarded in kind. Benjamin endured a lot of abuse in the press and from his colleagues. He is also a very cryptic figure in history: he didn’t have many close relationships (his wife essentially abandoned him, spending most of their marriage in France), and unlike most public figures who kept diaries and wrote memoirs, he burned all of his personal papers. I saw his life as a revealing and somewhat painful example of what a person of his background at the time had to give up in order to succeed in public life.

BGB: What was your favorite part about writing this book?

DH: Making up a story that would be fun to read! There’s a disdain for traditional storytelling in a lot of contemporary fiction, where literary authors are expected to be “experimental” in order to be taken seriously. But I think that readers still want what readers in the nineteenth century wanted, which is a great reason to turn the page and wonder what happens next. It is very liberating to write this book with all kinds of action-adventure moments, without irony—there’s a shoot-out at a wedding, for instance, and a murder, and a prison break (or three), and a kidnapping plot, and many other twists that I’ll avoid spoiling. It was as fun to write as I hope it will be to read.

An Interview with Dan Baum

Dan Baum’s Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans is a stunning non-fiction look at a collection of ordinary (and not so ordinary) people who represent the essence of the City of New Orleans – for better or worse.  If you haven’t read my review yet, go ahead and check that out – we’ll wait.

Now that we’re all on the same page, I forgot to mention an interesting side note in my review.  Baum and his wife, Margaret Knox, work together as a two-person journalism team under his byline.  Baum does much of the legwork, while his wife serves as “bureau chief.”  You can read about their interesting arrangement here.

Atlantans should also note: Both Baum and Knox once worked for the AJC. Of course, I forgot to ask Baum about that.  Enjoy the rest of the interview.

Baby Got Books interview with Dan Baum, author of Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

Baby Got Books: You’ve indicated that you don’t think of Nine Lives as a “Katrina book.”  Clearly though, this book grew from your reporting on Katrina for The New Yorker.  Why did you think it was important to go back to New Orleans and write Nine Lives, a book that tells a much deeper story about the culture and people of New Orleans than anything else that I’ve read about the city since Katrina?

Dan Baum: Big as it was, Katrina is not the most interesting thing about New Orleans. To say the city is unique goes way beyond the food, the music, and the architecture. New Orleans’s relationship to those three guiding obsessions of American culture — time, money, and race — is completely different than in any other part of the United States. I had the sense, reading and participating in the coverage of Katrina, that all of us reporters were so focused on the disaster that we were missing what was really important.

BGB: The preface to Nine Lives is one of the more insightful takes on New Orleans that I’ve ever read.  With maybe one or two exceptions, my experience has been that the best writing about the city (at least post-Katrina) has been by people who are not from there.  Why do you think that is?

DB: The usual advice to young writers is to “write about things you know about,” but Tom Wolfe turns that advice completely on its head and I think he’s right. He says writers should write about things they don’t know about so that they have to do real research and real learning, and not fall back on their lazily acquired preconceptions. Also, if you live in a place like New Orleans, it becomes commonplace, and you lose sight of what makes it so weird to people who aren’t familiar with it. The trick in writing “Nine Lives” was recreating the city both for people who know it well and those who don’t.

BGB: The narrative style in Nine Lives is one of the book’s primary strengths. Dan Baum the interviewer is almost entirely absent from what is presented on the page.  Clearly your intent was to let these people speak for themselves. Was it difficult to resist the temptation to editorialize, explain, or put things into context for the reader?

DB: No, Margaret and I decided early on that everything would be “in scene.” I was only present for a small number of the scenes in the book. (The evacuation of Anthony Wells, moments in JoAnn Guidos’s bar, and a few others), so it was easy to leave myself out.

BGB: That said, why is Anthony Wells’ story the only one presented in the first person?

DB: I started out writing Anthony the way I wrote the others — in close third person. But those chapters really lit up when Anthony was talking. Finally I decided to get out of the way and let him tell it. Of the nine, Anthony uses the language in the most magical way.

BGB: I love the fact that you let most of the unique New Orleans words and phrases (e.g., neutral ground, banquette, debris (as a food item), merlitons, etc.) go by without providing definitions or expository remarks.  As an outsider, how difficult was it to get your bearings in the unique cultural world of New Orleans?

DB: New Orleanians make it easy. In other places, people are doctors, or janitors, or school teachers, and live in the town where they live. In New Orleans it always seemed to me that living in New Orleans is what people do, and the jobs they hold are really secondary — just to pay the rent. I’ve never been in a place where people are as conscious, minute-to-minute of the place where they’re living and their own place in the culture. At first I thought, well, it’s just because of Katrina. But as my nine characters told me their pre-Katrina stories, I realized, no, this is how this place has always been.

BGB: Some of the people that you follow describe activities that are deeply intimate, criminal, and/or of a nature that one wouldn’t want them widely broadcast. In your Acknowledgements you mention that the interviewees motivations for revealing so much about themselves is unclear. Are you aware of any repercussions that have arisen for those who participated with the writing of the book?

DB: No. I’ve gotten back a quibble here and there and minor factual details — the color of a hat, the type of flowering shrub, the spelling of a name — but, amazingly, nobody’s complained that my portrayal of them was too intimate. I didn’t put in anything they didn’t tell me themselves. But I agree; I’m flabbergasted at the things people told me.

BGB: I have a friend who is a newspaper editor, and he has a theory that any book over 300 pages is a victim of poor editing.  Given that your book weighs in pretty close to that restraint, do you have a similar philosophy?

DB: Not specificially. But a book has to have a good reason to go long. And nowadays, publishers are pretty strict, because of the cost of manufacturing books. This may change with Kindles and other means of reading books. I don’t necessarily buy that the public’s attention span is shortening. If it’s good, people will read.

BGB: What has been the most rewarding aspect of your time in New Orleans reporting on Hurricane Katrina and writing Nine Lives?

DB: During the time I was researching the book — January to June 2007 — I was also writing a daily online column about New Orleans for the New Yorker’s website. (Those who are interested can find it on my website, www.danbaum.com, and click on “articles.”) The blog, willy-nilly, proved popular in New Orleans, which was extremely gratifying. Nerves were rubbed raw in those days — they still are — and New Orleanians were rightly suspicious of outsiders interpreting their city. That New Orleanians liked what I had to say about their city was very heart-warming and encouraging.

Futureproof: An interview with N. Frank Daniels

Reading N. Frank Daniels’ first novel futureproof left me shaking and stunned, as though I’d just collided head-first with solid concrete. Thinly-veiled references to places I encountered during my adolescence in Marietta, GA are juxtaposed with Daniels’ intriguing, infuriating narrator slowly growing up and failing, time and again, to be in the right place at the right time to advance himself in his life, all adding up to a story that (yes I’m going to say it) serves as my generation’s Catcher In The Rye-namely, a hyper-focused narrative on the all-important meaninglessness of what happens during our teenage years.

Despite the rampant and blatant language, drug use and (at times violent) sex within futureproof, I’d recommend it as a high-end young adult novel for a teenager looking for a book that holds more truth about their world and speaks to their experiences or those of their peers, or if they genuinely need a book that won’t talk down to them. That said? This is a violent, at-times-hard-to-read, incredibly powerful and emotional experience. It’s a wild and worthwhile ride…straight into the pavement.

Frank was kind enough to take some time out of his hectic schedule and life to answer a few questions (admittedly written when I was still deliriously book-drunk over having just finished futureproof, adrenaline pounding my veins as a result-read the book, you’ll see what I mean) for Baby Got Books.

Baby Got Books interview with N. Frank Daniels, author of futureproof

Baby Got Books:I was first pointed towards futureproof as a result of it being compared to one of my favorite authors of all time, Bret Easton Ellis. In the book, though, I see less of Ellis and more of what Catcher In The Rye would be if it still had the ability to speak to modern adolescent experience. What books would you point to that you first read that really, really moved you?

N. Frank Daniels: I’ve always been surprised that more people haven’t made the connection between the style I employed in futureproof and that of Catcher. That book was hugely influential on me, and was, aside from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, probably the book that impacted me the most in high school. Also Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows. That book still destroys me. The last time I read it was a few years ago when I read it aloud to my son. Still breaks me up. In fifth grade as an assignment we were to write a letter to a favorite author. I chose Wilson Rawls. He never responded. I never blamed it on him though. I always figured the publishers in all of their infinite wisdom found something lacking in my 10 yr. old writing ability.

BGB:Where did you grow up, and how much do you feel the events of your childhood influenced futureproof?

NFD: Well, as Luke does in futureproof, I grew up in the Atlanta suburbs. Prior to that I lived in bumfuck south-central PA. I always like saying ‘south-central PA’ because despite the fact that I did grow up close to Harrisburg, which is geographically south-central PA, somehow when you say ‘south-central’ it evokes grit. Thank you Tupac (who isnt even from Cali), Eazy E, and Snoop. Yeah, south-central Pennsylvania is more Amish and northern rednecks than it is anything else. Also a giant hub for Richard Petty fans. So it wasn’t much of a change when my parents moved us down to Atlanta. Except without the Amish. They stay up North, but for some inexplicable reason decided at some point to migrate west to Ohio.

BGB urely on a personal level, I have to tell you I was immediately hooked, from the level of “I can completely relate”, when I read about the school that you in the book call Peckerbrook. I know the school you’re talking about-as a high school theater kid in Marietta we did many a one-act competition there-and I always had the same thoughts about the juxtaposition between the theatrical side and the rest of the school. Nicely written.

NFD:Well, Russ, this isnt really a question, but I feel I need to respond anyway. First, thanks for the compliment. Second, if you went to Marietta H.S., and were there at the same time I was attending ‘Peckerbrook’, then you will also relate to how much we hated you bastards, with Eric Zeier at QB on the football team, with his unbelievable numbers and his goddam 10,000 touchdowns a season. But, just like the Amish, he ended up in Ohio, and the Cleveland Browns destroyed his NFL possibilities. And believe it or not I took no solace in that. It just felt like he was yet another casualty of the Atlanta bad luck I’d grown accustomed to by that point.

BGB:The character of Luke-I’ve talked to some people who’ve read the book who feel that Luke’s hell-bent on self-destruction. My read on him is that he’s simply exposing a side of modern teenage angst that too often gets either ignored or glossed over. What’s your take on your character’s desire to end himself in any way possible?

NFD:You know, this is an impossible question to answer honestly. I don’t know what to say on this. I mean, I wrote the book, the book is admittedly semi-autobiographical, and I am somehow supposed to analyze whether or not the main character is suicidal in small increments or just a symbol of modern, completely fucked-up teen angst?–I guess I think it’s both. Because as teen angst has been allowed to progress over the decades since we haven’t been forced to work in factories at the age of eight, we have been given more time to realize what a shitty hand we’ve been dealt. And if that doesn’t make you suicidal nothing will. I also think that Luke wants to live and can’t figure out how to do that in a positive way because he’s never been given a positive role model in that arena. So it becomes live in this fucked up way or die in that fucked up way. In the end, remember, he only chooses life because his son is born and had no choice in the matter. So Luke really only ends up continuing to live for THAT life, that innocence that has yet to be corrupted.

BGB:The book’s graphic depiction of the circle of abuse of/by and addiction to drugs hit me really, really hard. I literally put the book down shaking and stunned. Were any points of futureproof more difficult emotionally to get down and then go back and edit/tighten up than others?

NFD:So strange to get this question now, as I was asked something very similar in an interview conducted by Frank Reiss of Atlanta’s A Capella Books on a GPB radio interview that aired this past Sunday. I can speak more freely here though, since I couldn’t cuss on public radio. Yeah, writing parts of this book fucked me up big time. There are parts of this novel that I still have trouble reading because they trigger a despair in me that is bottomless. I remember my wife telling me that I needed to walk away from writing it because it was so obviously traumatizing me. She would have to hold me at night for hours sometimes. When you are really tapping demons like this it is really hard to reconcile your stable life with the chaotic life being depicted. My wife has since left me and there are still nights when I don’t know how I am going to make it through. This book is in many ways a testament to everything that has ever haunted me, and its repercussions still reverberate through my life now. Even answering this question now is traumatizing because it forces me to acknowledge everything that I try to force myself to ignore on a daily basis. Is there a fucking therapist in the house? Please tell my wife I am dead on the inside…or do therapists not do that?

BGB:In the back of futureproof, you thank “the futureproof 500.” For those who don’t know, your book has a really interesting story about how it came to be a Harper-Perennial paperback. I’m sure you’re sick of talking about it, but would you care to summarize, briefly, how it came to catch the attention of a major publisher?

NFD:You’re right, I am sick of telling this story, Russ. More than anything because I only recently realized that the ‘story’ behind futureproof‘s being published was the main reason why HarperCollins decided to pursue me to publish this book. They saw this story–me wrecking my entire life in order to get my lauded novel ‘traditionally’ published–as a good way to sell it in the market. I guess this was what was decided on as what would be my book’s gimmick. Look back on any of my blogs prior to August of ’07 and you can see how disillusioned I am with Big Publishing, in that they couldn’t see how futureproof would speak to many readers. I only realized a few weeks ago that their main interest was in the immediately exploitable angle of my having gone from self-published wunderkind to mainstream published phenom. These people could give a shit about the real emotion and craft behind the book. They want to make the fast buck and get out. Which is fine, I guess. But it makes me angrier and even more disillusioned, and makes me question motives and true intentions even more. But maybe I was born to fill that place. I just want to meet one motherfucker embedded in the mainstream publishing industry who is what (s)he says (s)he is.

BGB:you submitted a brief piece for one of the most interesting collections I saw last year, Santi-The Lives of Modern Saints. Talk about how you came to be involved in that collection and how your piece in that came to be

NFD:I became involved with that anthology in much the same way that I got my book deal with Harper–I was approached by the people behind the scenes. Unlike my deal with Harper, I don’t have a bad taste left in my mouth, in gratuitous need of a sorbet to get that taste out of my mouth. Luca Dipierro, the editor of Santi, read a self-published copy of futureproof, and asked me if I’d be interested in both contributing a story as well as co-editing the anthology with him. I jumped at the chance. I will always jump at the chance to do something outside of mainstream publishing like that. Unfortunately the shitty economy has closed the doors (for now) on Black Arrow Press (Santi’s publisher), but I would still recommend that anthology to anyone, and not just because I am its co-editor. That anthology of stories is still one of the tightest, most-well-written anthologies I have ever come across. When I saw the roster of writers Luca had secured for that collection I immediately signed on. It was a win-win situation. I still wish I had the resources open to me to make that collection more well-known. Please link it to Amazon or whatever when you publish this.

BGB:What are you reading AND listening to right now?

NFD:I am currently severely limited in my reading, as I am couch-hopping like a shell-shocked kangaroo and am therefore very limited in how many books I can carry with me. But I was in L.A. last week for the final reading of my book tour and while out there I met with Henry Baum, of Self Publishing Review (selfpublishingreview.com). He gave me his recently re-released THE GOLDEN CALF, which I find to be just stellar writing. I’d recommend it to anybody. I would also be reading Jerry Stahl’s PAINKILLERS if he had offered to give me a copy (I read with him at my L.A. Book Soup reading). But he didn’t. So I’m not. I was disappointed by that at first, then realized it was probably a blessing as it would have made my duffel bag another pound heavier and my back is breaking as it is.

Music-wise I’m not as limited, what with downloadable tunes. I’m currently obsessing over old pre-Postal Service Death Cab for Cutie. And Fleet Foxes, who I fear have seen their zenith come and go, because really, how far can bluegrass go, outside of the odd Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack?

Anointed

In the immortal words of the beloved Irish poet Bono: Hello Hello hola hola. I’m elated to join the illustrious ranks of the bloggers no no scratch that out I mean writers no no cross that out too I mean bloggers…bliters?, no that doesn’t work…bloggers. I’ll stick with bloggers.

Take two:

I’m elated to join the illustrious ranks of the bloggers for Baby Got Books. As you may or may not know, for full disclosure’s sake, since we’re all journalists around here and value intergrity, in my former role as Marketing/PR director for Wordsmiths Books, I collaborated with the BGB folks often, so this feels like a natural fit.

This week sees the launch of Wordsmiths’ Zach Steele’s first novel, Anointed: The Passion of Timmy Christ, CEO, published by Sandy Springs, GA’s own Mercury Retrograde Press. It’s a religious satire/comedy/labeled “speculative fiction” by the publisher/labeled “sci-fi/fantasy” by the Publishers Weekly review, concerning itself with the big business of religion. If you like Terry Pratchett or Christopher Moore, Anointed is your cup of tea/coffee/rum. The book officially hits your local Hudson News airport bookstore on March 3, but Wordsmiths will be throwing a typical Wordsmiths-y book launch for Anointed this Saturday, Feb 21st. The whole shebang begins around 7/730-ish, but it’s basically going to be a “show up whenever, start drinking once the drinks show up, eat when the food shows up, and pretend to pay attention to Zach as he reads from his book and make sure you laugh in the appropriate places” sort of thing.

Oh, I should mention: in my new capacity doing freelance book PR, I’m the publicist for Anointed.

Oh, I should also mention: I’m quite good friends with the publisher. Her name’s Barbara. I hear tell she makes mean brownies.

Oh, and also: I’m serving as a sort of “project manager” for the book’s massive online marketing campaign.

Oh, and to quote Steve Jobs at the end of every MacWorld other than this last one: one last thing. I’m the one who brought Anointed to said publisher’s attention. So I kinda acted as the agent? Only, you know, without making a lot of money on the deal and saying “ciao” in that Eddie Izzard voice.

To keep the aforementioned journalistic integrity of myself and the credibility of Baby Got Books intact, I, the publicist for Anointed and former employee of Wordsmiths, did a brief interview with Zach about his book for this book blog right here. So when I say “it’s a hilarious romp through the corporate-driven world of religion and you should buy ten copies and read them all simultaneously”, you know I mean it.

A completely non-biased and properly-punctuated interview with Zachary Steele, author-type person of Anointed: The Passion of Timmy Christ, CEO

Baby Got Books: Describe in 5 words the plot of Anointed. In another 5 words, tell me why i should read it again. Then, in 5 more words, tell someone who hasn’t read it why I should read it again.

Zach Steele:Reluctant man becomes corporate Christ.
Because it’s freakin’ funny, man.
You won’t get it anyway.

BGB: Who all would you say you ripped off in writing Anointed? And by ripped off I mean in terms of both intellectual content and money.

ZS:I ripped off a lot from God, you know. He’s pretty much the author of the Bible, right? So, I have to include him. Aside from the that, it was pretty easy pickings with Terry Pratchett, Christopher Moore, Kyle Watson (though you wouldn’t have heard of him) and some finely-detailed intellectual hotness from Marisha Pessl. As far as money, that’s pretty easy. I ripped off my publisher, but she won’t figure that out for a while, and likely all of my readers (once they’ve read it and realize what dreadful crap it is).

BGB: On a scale of 9 through 10, how awesome is Anointed?

ZS:All of my scales go to 11, so that’s pretty much where I’d put it. It completely redefines “awesome”. In fact, the use of “awesome” is now outdated and has been replaced by “Anointed”. As in, “Man, that sure was an Anointed movie, wasn’t it?” I would wager that, when I am old and fading away–or perhaps even dead already–people will still be discussing how Anointed completely altered the methodology of writing and saved the publishing industry. But I’m pretty modest about it all, actually. I’d rather not discuss it any further.

BGB: If you end up on Bill O’Reilly, and he’s all screaming in your face and cutting your microphone’s signal and stuff without listening to you at all, what will you have for dinner after?

ZS:After? How about during? I’ll be sidestepping his questions while waving a fork in the air and taking my time dining while he rants about stuff I surely won’t be listening to anyway. Steak au Poivre with Dijon Cream Sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, a nice Chardonnay, and a bowl of cheese to throw at him when he stops talking. No wait. I wouldn’t do that to cheese. Maybe I could get a soufflé or something instead. After, I might go for an Icee.

BGB: In terms of your writing style, what books would you say influenced your second novel? oh wait you haven’t written it yet.

ZS: Ha! Good one coming from the man who hasn’t even written his first book yet! Look out David Sedaris! This guy’s a riot!

BGB: You solicited quotes about the book, aka “blurbs”, from your Facebook friends. Are you just too lazy to actually hunt down famous people?

ZS:”Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” ~Winnie the Pooh~ There’s a famous quote for you. Happy?

BGB:Your press materials all begin with “Satan and the Antichrist walk into a bar”. Tell me a good joke about a pope and a rabbi. Or a pope and a rabbit.

ZS:The Pope (not ‘a’, you idiot) walks into a bookstore to look for a book about Catholicism, because he doesn’t understand any of his followers, but before he can make it to the section oddly marked “religion”, he is distracted by a sharp sound from the back of the store. When he goes to investigate, he finds a large cage with a fluffy, bouncy rabbit inside, and a sign atop the cage that reads, “Cadbury Rabbit, Bookstore Bunny”. The Pope smiles and leans to the cage and says to the rabbit, “Hello there, little rabbit. I am the Pope. How are you today?” To which, the rabbit bounds in a quick circle, stomps a foot in a loud thump, stares at the Pope, and says, “Nom, nom.” The end, joke over. A POPE AND A RABBIT? ARE YOU SERIOUS? Do you get paid to come up with these questions or did you pawn it off on an 8-year old?

BGB: How freakin’ awesome is your publicist?

ZS:Question #7 may answer that better than I can. It’s very difficult to answer this question though, now that Anointed has completely redefined what is understood to be “awesome” and taken over its use entirely. I suppose I can say that my publicist is less than Anointed, more Anointed than “awesome” (in its former form), but not as Anointed as my book minus me. Hope that helps.

Anointed: The Passion Of Timmy Christ, CEO is officially available only at the launch party on Saturday, Feb 21st at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, GA, and will then be available at your local library for free reading on March 3rd. Ask for it by name.

Author Interview: Laurel Snyder

I met Laurel Snyder, an author that lives locally, last year when we were on a panel together discussing books and the Web 2.0 world.  She has written several books, including two books of poetry, a children’s book, and she edited an anthology of nonfiction, Half/Life: Jew-ish tales from Interfaith Homes.  Her new novel for children was released yesterday.

Laurel agreed to pop by and have a virtual beer with us and talk about her new book for children.

BGB: Hey, Laurel, word on the street is that your new children’s book, Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains OR The Search for a Suitable Princess, was released yesterday by Random House.  Tell us about it.

Laurel Snyder: It’s a kind of old fashioned fairy tale, about a little milkmaid and her best friend, a prince.  When the prince is forced to find a “suitable” wife, and the milkmaid determined to be too common, she runs away from home and has a series of weird adventures on top of a rainy mountain.   The book has these amazingly classic illustrations by Greg Call, who did Dave Barry’s children’s book, and a lot of silly little songs in it.   I want to think it’s a bit about bad government and class, in addition to being about magical forests and sniffly prairie dogs.

BGB: One of your blog posts says that Up and Down was 8 years in the making, which appears to pre-date your own children.  What first attracted you to writing for children?

Laurel Snyder: Oh, my passion for kids books has always been there, and it was my big secret in grad schoool.  I spent days each week in the children’s library in Iowa, avoiding the John Ashbery reading group (no offense to Ashbery himself, I’m just not a theory gal).  When I was awarded a Michener-Engle Felloswhip, and had more time than I knew what to do with, I began working on this novel, though I didn’t know at the time that was what it would become.  Having kids made the idea of being a children’s author more exciting, but I’ve been re-reading my Eager and Newsbit and Lewis every year since I was about 6.

Laurel Snyder: Oh, lordy– I could write a book about this.  Part of has to do with the fact that most professions that relate to kids (teachers, pediatricians, etc) are less esteemed (and less well paid). Which is, of course, crap.  But I also think that because children aren’t as discriminating as adults, or as snooty,  there isn’t a money-driven need to distinguish pulp from art. Kids who love “literary” kids books also like to do Mad Libs, so we can shelve them together in the bookstore. I think this means that adults tend to see them all as defined by their lowest common denominator.  It’s also true that children’s books don’t get reviewed as much as adult books, so there’s less critical approval from say, the NYTimes.  But these are simplifications. It’s a really complex situation, and I hope that will change.

Laurel Snyder: LOL!  Everyone wants to write a picture book. Everyone! Now that I’m publishing these books, everyone I know wants to tell me about their ideas.  I think it’s just that celebs can sell anything they want to write, so we actually see their (usually awful) attempts. Whereas the checker at the grocery store (who might have a great idea) can’t call her agent and just make it happen.  If Madonna wanted to write a 700 page novel, she could publish that too.  But a picture book is a much smaller investment of time.   Though as you’ll see if you check out Miss Ciccone’s picture books, it isn’t so easy to write a good one.

Laurel Snyder: My kids are very young, so it’s all picture books. Current favorites are “Roadwork” and “When Dinosaurs Came with Everything”, though my older son just finished his first chapter book, Ruth Gannett’s classic, “My father’s Dragon”.  It always makes me happy when they like a book I loved as a kid, like “Mister Dog”.  I love that book!

Laurel Snyder: Ha!  I just got a Mac for the first time, and I wanted to try out imovies.  Cute baby footage is all I have to play with, since I’ve spent the last 3 months without a single hour of childcare.  I’m glad you like them. They’re pretty silly.

Warning: This Video contains blueberries and a baby from Laurel Snyder on Vimeo.

Laurel Snyder: I’m doing a fantasy panel with Adam Rex and Brandon Sanderson, Sunday at 2:30.  Please come!  I didn’t know I had written a fantasy until very recently, and I’m eager to see how this goes.  I promise that if I can’t answer people’s questions about fantasy, I’ll do a tap dance or something!!!

Rivka Galchen Interview: Part 2

If you missed it, yesterday I posted Part 1 of my interview with Rivka Galchen, author of the exceptional debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances. Today’s final installment includes startling revelations by the author and an embarrassing faux pas by the interviewer. Read on…

BGB: Dr. Leo Liebenstein, your narrator, is a man of science – a very rationale person. Yet he has a very philosophical view of reality. At one point he refers to what we would call objective reality as the “consensus view.” He also seems very keenly aware of the limitations of human perception. These characteristics would seem to make Dr. Leo more susceptible to the delusions that he appears to suffer from. Conversely, these same characteristics may also make him more open to recognizing the type of conspiracy that he suspects that he has become involved in. The line between madness and “crackpot” genius is a fine one. I’ve alternated in firmly believing one interpretation of Dr. Leo’s state-of-mind over the other, and then switching back again, equally sure that this time I’ve got it all figured out. Was it difficult to maintain this ambiguity while writing the character of Dr. Leo? Did the scientist in you want to remove the ambiguity?

RG: Well, maybe I am of that variety of people who consider the search for absolute truth a vain and superstitious habit. That is, I have more faith in, and am more dedicated to, the project of finding new and better and more interesting ways to be wrong. (I mean, one could make the argument that the history of science, or the history of philosophy, is just that: an exciting evolution of differently incorrect ideas, of ideas not making the same old mistakes but instead new, unforeseen ones.) In this way, I never thought of Leo being right or wrong, or the reader as being right or wrong, I just thought it was a contest of different ways of being wrong, and which was more compelling at which moment. Maybe this is a smoke and mirrors answer in an unfair way. But it’s just like how scientific language can sometimes give that sense of elucidation at the very moment that it obscures, and vice-versa. Sometimes, in a certain context, an equation say, or an MRI, really does explain in a substantive way; but at other times, in other ways, these same things are really misdirections, some stealing away of the attention while in the other direction a rabbit is being stuffed into a top hat. After all, even something like the laws of gravity—it’s hard to articulate whether they really explain gravity or just describe it very lucidly. Neuroimaging and mental states—ill, aberrant, normal, all the labels are useful but nevertheless grossly insufficient—surely bear an even more muddled relationship to one another.

BGB: The novel also features a mysterious meteorologist named Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen. At first I thought that he was just a literary device since your last names are identical except for a hyphen. I was surprised to learn via Google Scholar that he was, in fact, a notable meteorologist with a significant body of research. (Whoa!) Is there any relation between yourself and the famed meteorologist?

RG:Yes, he’s my dad! He died 13 years ago. (When I got American citizenship–later than him–we got rid of the hyphen in my last name mostly because it caused endless clerical errors. I’m glad his name is slightly different though, it’s this chance thing, and yet emotionally spot on, because it’s a very ‘alternate’ Tzvi who is in the novel.)

And yes, well, there’s a lot of misdirected emotion in the novel, and likewise, the process of writing the book for me was like a kind of sublimation of my own emotions for my own lost love. In a sense the dead and, say, the person we were ten years ago—neither of those people are walking down the street tomorrow. They’re both gone forever. Or at least probably. Leo is on some level searching for a woman who no longer exists in his world, and I was, while writing, similarly ‘searching’ for someone who no longer exists in my world. Naturally my search sent me to my dad’s research, because that’s one of the few things that’s still here, and still just what it was when he was around. There’s also a mood in the novel—maybe I’ll call it a 70s mood—and it’s a mood, a set of interests, that kind of brings me back to who I myself used to be, who I was when I still had him around. So that’s two ghosts. The ghost of my dad, and the ghost of the former me, kind of collaborating, meeting up over these old science research papers.

BGB: Wow. That revelation adds so much depth to the story. My mind is blown. I have to go back and re-read the novel now. So is the picture of Tzvi’s family in the book really your 70′s vintage family? You’re the “little chub of a girl” in the “Bavarian” dress?!

RG: Yes, that is my family, and we think my dad looks the coolest in that photo. That’s one thing I love about fashion; it makes it quickly vivid how strange our normal in fact was all along, and must still be. I should admit though, I do love that dress I’m wearing there, and if I had a larger version, I would definitely wear it.

BGB: You mentioned the poetry of science earlier, and the idea that first came to mind for me is when scientists refer to “elegant” solutions. The bits of Dr. Gal-Chen’s research that you present in the novel are “elegant” in that they nicely echo the book’s themes. For example, the Initial Values Problem – that our ability to adequately model the future is limited by our ability to adequately measure and describe the current conditions – struck me as particularly apt. Can we really know one another – or even ourselves – with any certainty given the relatively small amount of information that we are presented with or can process at any one time? Or am I reading too much into that?

RG: Your mind is after my very heart; I, as you seem to have intuited, also can’t help but project all sorts of emotional value into scientific phrasings and concepts–can’t help but want to extend their analogical power. (Leo is similarly, though much more so, inclined.) Sometimes I think such projection is legitimate, sometimes not so much. But regardless, I’m always interested, even when it tells us more about the projector than about what’s being projected onto. Within the context of the novel, I’d say those science terms and methods fall somewhere along a spectrum between Rorschach blot and map of the world; somewhere between ‘every interpretation is real and valid and significant’, and ‘No, if you want to sail the Straits of Magellan, some map interpretations are significantly more valuable than others.’

I do think though, that science is this other language, and that, just like with any language, it has its turns of singular and untranslatable beauty; even if we aren’t fluent in the language, we can catch something of this.

BGB: In an interview that you conducted with Nathaniel Englander, you mention that although you are now friends, the two of you unknowingly wrote in the same Brooklyn coffee house for a time. Your novel and his wonderful The Ministry of Special Cases both discuss the disappeared in Argentina’s dirty war (yours less than his, obviously). Is that just a wonderful coincidence, or did some of what you were each working on seep into the other’s novel?

RG: The coffee shop isn’t in Brooklyn! The Hungarian Pastry Shop is here in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. (More on that below!)

As for the Argentina overlap, well, my longtime friend Shlomit, whose family is Argentine, insists she is the origin of Rema being from Argentina. But of course there’s also Borges. And his concept of “the South.” Which is where, mentally, I needed my narrator to go. So: lots of answers. Probably my friendship with Nathan isn’t as irrelevant as we like to imagine it is, although I knew him for a long time before I knew where his then-still-unfinished novel was set. Maybe the truest explanation is just that there was so much coverage of the economic shock down in Argentina right around when I started writing? Hard to say where notions come from.

BGB: The New York Observer recently printed a map of the literary hot spots in Brooklyn and the “literary 100″ – a list of the top literary players in the Borough. What’s the mood among Brooklyn writer’s about who made/didn’t make the list? Are you glad that the coffee shop that you write in was left of the map? Is there really a law that says that all writers are required to live in Brooklyn?

RG: Yeah, so like I said, the sad truth is that I don’t live in Brooklyn, which means that when I want to see almost any of my friends, I have to get on a subway for a solid 45 minutes in order to do so. (Result: a lot of my husband and I just renting DVDs, or, on wilder nights, going out for tacos on Amsterdam Avenue.) It does often seem that there can’t be more than seven writers (sign of apocalypse?) left on the island of Manhattan. I don’t think that’s actually true. But it’s true-ish. We probably have a chip on our shoulder around here. Maybe because we know that Brooklynites have much finer record collections than we do.

But as for what the true Brooklyn writers think about all this? Isn’t it part and parcel of the definition of being a hipster that you disdain hipsterdom and will have nothing to do with it? I imagine the Brooklyn writer scene is a similarly impossible set of all sets that do not contain themselves.

Well that’s embarrassing. I guess that she’s the exception that proves the rule that ALL writers live in Brooklyn. Oh the humiliation of it all.

More on Atmospheric Disturbances and Rivka Galchen can be found at these links of distinction:

• Check out the trailer for the book
• See the book’s official web site, featuring Rema and her doppelganger
• …and the official doppelganger site
• Read Chapter 1
• and Chapter 3
• and Chapter 8
• and part of Chapter 13
• The New York Observer calls Galchen “The latest successor to Pynchon”
• A Rivka Galchen short story in The New Yorker
• Bookforum hearts Atmospheric Disturbances

Rivka Galchen Interview: Part 1

Rivka Galchen is the author of the wonderful debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances. The novel went on sale yesterday and already Galchen is being compared to Pynchon, Auster, and Borges. (Read my review of the book here.) The author is also very generous with her time, and she agreed to subject herself to some Q&A. Read Part 1 (of 2) of my interview with Rivka Galchen below.

Baby Got Books: I’ve read that while an undergraduate in the English Department at Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates was your thesis advisor. That seems like it would be incredibly intimidating for an undergraduate. What lessons, if any, did you learn from her that you’ve carried forward into your novel?

Rivka Galchen:Alas, Joyce Carol Oates would more appropriately be described as the grader of my thesis, rather than the advisor (even though ‘advisor’ is, I believe, what is listed in the official ‘filing’ of my thesis.) We didn’t workshop the manuscript together or anything. But. She is quite am imposing presence on that campus, far more imposing than you might imagine a 90ish pound person could possibly be. I never really had the courage to talk to her, even though I had a class with her…but I’d see her slight bespectacled self around and just know: there’s this wild, rigorous, strange, Trollope-scale-prolific imagination there. Just right there. So that’s a nice atmosphere—one that makes whining about being ‘too busy’ to finish a story seem pretty pathetic. Her work ethic is infectious; I only wish the infection could be a raging one.

BGB:Your bio notes that you received an MD degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine (specializing in psychiatry) and then went on to get your MFA at Columbia. Atmospheric Disturbances has been called a “novel of ideas that tries to bridge science and literature.” While you seem uniquely qualified to bridge that gap, was that your intent when you sat down to write the novel?

RG:So far as I can remember—and, for better or worse, my memory landscape is as dynamic as my present, it always seems to be shape-shifting when I look back into it—but, again, so far as I can remember, my main intent in writing the novel was somehow to get away with writing my dad’s name down again and again, of making it become a significant clue. So maybe the novel for me was more of a bridge between the living and the dead than a bridge between science and literature. The fact that there’s a great deal of science in the novel just seems really normal to me, as normal as there being, say, a great deal of the Civil War in someone else’s novel. It’s just this enormous interesting thing out there in the world, and it happens to be one of the ‘things’ that I’m most perpetually drawn towards.

BGB: With chapter titles like “Least squares method of fitting functions to data,” you’ll have the full attention and enthusiasm of the scientists. It also appears that you have not dumbed down any of the scientific discussion. Do you worry about how the book will be received by those without a science background?

RG: Well one sad fact is that most of the books I really love I find on the remainders table at my corner bookstore. Or on the street for $2. So, I don’t know, perhaps it’s dangerous company.

But I think even a non-science-geek can be susceptible to the poetry—often accidental—of scientific language; it certainly has that old air of mystery and authority. It tempts towards interpretation, it hints at profound significance, but then, sometimes anyway, it undermines those sentiments at the same time. I guess for years now science is this thing that as a culture we both kneel before and raise the mighty paw against. And that’s interesting to me, even on just an emotional level, that seduction, that ambivalance. Leo often appeals to science, and yet also wrenches and distorts it and misappropriates it to his own emotion ends—and I like that kind of engaged, manipulative work that he does. I think we can learn a lot about a character not just (or even) by the direct content of that they say, but about their choice of materials and methods for saying so.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 of my interview with Rivka Galchen…

Interview with Rob Sheffield

As we may have mentioned, next week we are kicking off the first in what we hope will be a long line of events in the Baby Got Books Reading Series. Our first guest is Rob Sheffield who will be reading from his excellent book Love is a Mix Tape on Wednesday, January 23, at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur (details). Mr. Sheffield graciously agreed to subject himself to a few questions about the book.

Baby Got Books: In the book, you describe yourself as someone who comes across as introverted and fairly reserved. How did you arrive at the decision to begin writing what is an intensely personal story of pain and loss? How much time went by before you started to write the book? How long did it take to get it all down?

Rob Sheffield: Yeah, I guess I was always shy, the “Shy Boy” that Bananarama sang about. When I was in my early 20s, all I wanted from life was to hide out with my records and my fanzines and my books and let the world pass me by. I used to think that was the best I could hope for, but it turned out I was wrong, although I guess I can always go back to being a hermit boy when I’m old and grey if I want. But it took five years before I could start the book, really. There were some false starts in there, but I’m glad I waited until I was ready. I started it in 2002 when I was moving into my new apartment in Brooklyn (which isn’t so new anymore, I guess, but I still love it) and I finally had shelves big enough to hold all my tapes. So I stopped putting them in those rickety Elfa shelves, and put them up in the china cabinet where I could admire them, and took others out of boxes where they’d been cooped up, and slapping them into the boombox, and every tape kept telling me, Play me—I have a story to tell. They brought those moments alive so vividly, I knew I had to write about the tapes, and the book just kind of spilled out of that, for about two years. Somehow writing about the tapes made me feel brave enough to start telling the whole story.

BGB: In the book, your description of Renee’s death and the aftermath is very powerful, because it is written in a way that feels very raw and immediate. Was it difficult to stop yourself (or others) from editing out the rough edges and gritty emotion?

Rob Sheffield: One of the reasons I’m glad I waited till I was ready is that I wouldn’t chicken out of writing about the really bad times. I knew my editor, Carrie Thornton at Three Rivers Press, and I knew she wouldn’t let me chicken out either. I was surprised (more than I should have been, because my friends warned me) how tough it was to write about them, to admit that I was in trouble, even a few years after the fact.

BGB: In retrospect, are there things that you wish that you had not included in the book?

Rob Sheffield: The only thing I regret including is that one of the tapes had a song by G Love and Special Sauce. I really should have left that one out. “My Baby’s Got Sauce,” ugh and ugh again. But I figured, once I start leaving embarrassing songs off the tapes, I’ll never stop, so I better just leave them alone.

BGB: Are there things that you wish you had included?

Rob Sheffield: There’s a lot I had to leave out—I felt like I could have gone on for a thousand pages without using up the story, so it was just a matter of where to draw the line. I wanted it to be short enough to read in a weekend, because there was so much sad stuff in the story it seemed too harsh to ask for more of people’s time than that. Yet I can’t BELIEVE I didn’t have a single tape with a Dusty Springfield song. Now that is a shame.

BGB: Were there any negative reactions from friends or family that were close to you and/or Renee for sharing your story as a couple in such a personal way?

Rob Sheffield: I was lucky to have the support of all our friends and family. I needed all I could get, really. It’s funny how since the book came out, I’ve been hearing a lot of other people’s favorite Renee stories they think SHOULD have been in the book. I guess she told her friends a lot more of our private business than I was telling them!

BGB: I recently attended a funeral for a friend. At a gathering afterward, a mix CD of some of his favorite songs was handed out, which turned out to be a fantastic idea and got everyone sharing stories. Why do you think that music is able to create such intense memories/bonds between those that share it?

Rob Sheffield: I’m sorry about your friend. It is amazing how deeply music connects to the memories of specific people in specific times and places. It’s funny, I was just up in Boston visiting my parents and we were sitting around the fire and my mom made me sing the old Irish song “Bold Thady Quill,” just like she does almost every time I’m there, because that song reminds her of my grandmother from County Kerry. No matter how old people are, or where they come from, the music they loved is something I remember, and that’s the key that puts me in touch with their spirit.

BGB: Your book and others, like Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, resonate with many of a certain age that spent too much time hand-crafting what one hoped would be the ultimate mix tape — one that would be remembered for the ages (or maybe I’m just projecting). The mix tape is now an historical artifact and even CD mixes may be on their way out. Do you think that recent technologies make “the mix” a lost art? Does dropping 30 songs into an iTunes Playlist carry the same emotional weight?

Rob Sheffield: Yeah, it’s definitely a lost art. You can make ten mix CDs for ten different girls in an hour. A mix tape, that proved you put at least ninety minutes into it. You picked out the catchy song at the start of Side Two, and the slow song at the end of Side Two, and the short songs to fill up the blank tape at the end of the side—it’s a complex calling. And they were finite—the other night I had dinner with a friend and we were listening to an ipod her boyfriend gave her with 800 songs loaded on it, and I thought, that’s an awful lot of songs to try and dazzle someone with at one time. Thing is, I just plain love mix CDs too, love how fast and easy they are. I guess there’s no sound-bearing media I don’t love. This summer I got pulled out of the security line at LaGuardia because I had a Walkman in my bag. The guy was like, “What the hell is this?” They asked, Why do you have an ipod AND a cassette player? I started to explain I just like listening to “Beggars Banquet” and “Let It Bleed” on tape better than on mp3—but fortunately they let me through.

Additional reading:

• BGB review 1
• BGB Review 2
• Details for Rob Sheffield’s appearance at the Baby Got Books Reading Series