The view from above

LA, LA events, authors No Responses »
Sep 292010

That’s the view from the Soho House in Los Angeles, with downtown LA off to the southeast. I talked to James Ellroy there yesterday afternoon for a lovely book club session on the semi-outdoor terrace, which was semi-sweltering yet entirely grand. The terrace includes a reflecting pool and olive trees, which is sort of marvelously sci-fi when you’re 15, 20 — how many floors up? It’s hard to say, as when you get into the elevator to go to the Soho House there are only two buttons, the button for the club and the one to return you to the basement parking.

The bust of Beethoven isn’t always there. That was special for the event.

Thanks to Tyson Cornell for producing and Mr. Ellroy for being the one and only Mr. Ellroy.

Posted by paperhaus at 5:25 pm

Blue penises, brutality and boring sentences

authors, interview, jacket copy, la times, meta No Responses »
Jun 192010

If I had a feeling of deja-vu when I read other pieces about Bret Easton Ellis, who seemed to go through exactly the same routine with each interviewer, people (on MeFi, in the comments here) scoffed. That was to be expected, they said, the same routine, the same answers — and some made the point that it was due to the same questions.

Well, I don’t think it’s to be expected, because there are a lot of angles on a book, and authors spend years writing them, years in which lots of ideas have come and gone. There are many places for a conversation to go, and I’d like to think that I listen and follow and ask questions that might have interesting answers.

All these are excerpts of interviews I did for Jacket Copy. If you’d told me in 1989, when I read The Handmaid’s Tale, that I’d be talking to Margaret Atwood about penises, to a National Book Award nominee about the conflicting responsibilities of journalism and fiction, and to that guy who’d just published  Mysteries of Pittsburgh about his four kids, I would have told you yes, your acid had kicked in and it was time for you to go see the Butthole Surfers show, already. But here we are.

Margaret Atwood had just published Year of the Flood, a fearsome yet slightly giddy post-apocalyptic sideways follow-up to Oryx and Crake. Part of the novel follows an eco-cult with a charismatic leader, and it includes lyrics of the cult’s hymns. Those hymns were sung — by a choir, trio, individual — in staged performances on tour, with Atwood reading and actors performing scripted parts of the book. The performances shared a script and Atwood, but otherwise were widely different.

Kellogg: After you’ve seen [Year of the Flood] be performed in all these different ways, would you like to see it as a film?

Atwood: It might be too big and multiple for that. It might lend itself more to a series. The real stumbling block is those people with big blue penises (laughs). How are you going to show that on film? I just don’t know. You could have them lurking behind bushes, I suppose. You’d have to have somebody with a very good sense of style. It could be pretty tawdry, but of course any story could be pretty tawdry, depending on how it’s made.

Kellogg: Do you think there’s enough sex in literary fiction? Do you think literary fiction writers are a little afraid of being tawdry?

Atwood: I think they’re a little afraid of being inelegant verbally. There is an award given every year in Britain for the worst sex scene in a book, and nobody wants to win that award. It’s very easy to overwrite a sex scene, at which point it becomes comic.

Kellogg: Why do you think that is?

Atwood: Sex itself is a very subjective experience. So that when you’re describing it objectively, it can quite easily become funny.

Kellogg: But so many other states of being– [meaning to say "that are subjective that can be written well," but Atwood cut me off]

Atwood: Think about it: he put his X on her Y.

Kellogg: (laughs)

Atwood: Already it’s funny, and you don’t even know what the X and Y are. It has to be handled pretty carefully, if you don’t want to be writing just plain old porn, or if you don’t want people to collapse in hysterical laughter.

–

When Far North by Marcel Theroux was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award, I realized we hadn’t yet given it any coverage in the LA Times, so I interviewed him. Another post-apocalyptic book, this one is more quiet than Atwood’s — it follows Makepeace as she ekes out a marginal survival on the freezing edge of a disappeared society (think Mad Max on the opposite end of the world). Theroux is a novelist and journalist; he’s reported for the BBC.

Kellogg: [In Far North] Makepeace is such a loner. She spends much of the early part of her life alone, and she is often remote from the people around her. Was it hard to render the world around her? She’s always the filter.

Theroux: I never felt like her landscape was that empty, because there was so much in it, she had so many things she needed to do. There were all kinds of sources of conflict for her, and she’d had a very rich and interesting past. I guess I’m quite interested in isolation, anyway. That never felt like one of the difficulties of writing the book.

It’s a real place — the place where she is having her adventures in Siberia –- I’ve visited maybe five or six times for other reasons before I wrote the book. So it was a place that felt very real to me. Things in it — quite surprising things — I’ve actually seen. I felt confident rendering her world.

Kellogg: By things you’ve seen, do you mean the way people live in that environment?

Theroux: Partly that. Things in the far north — I’ve been into reindeer herders’ huts in north Siberia. But even smaller things. I went to Chechnya in 2000, which then was in the grip of a terrible civil war. The place — Grozny, the capital — had been bombed to hell, and it was very, very dangerous. There were Russian soldiers in checkpoints along the streets, and they would kind of hide in their little posts at night because it was even too dangerous for Russian soldiers to go around. There was a guy whitewashing the sidewalk outside his apartment, which was an insane bit of punctiliousness. The whole place was horrible. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was cleaning it. His name was Shamsudin. I kind of put him in the book, to commemorate him, that civilizing impulse. He was a guy who decided he needed the sidewalk to look nice outside of his largely ruined apartment building, which I thought was kind of amazing and improbable.

Kellogg: You’ve been in some pretty rough places as a journalist.

Theroux: I’ve tried to avoid them, but I have occasionally. I suppose Chechnya was the hairiest place.

Kellogg: What are the different responsibilities of the journalist and the novelist toward violence and brutality?

Theroux: In fiction, you’re saying, “look at this horrible brutality,” but at the same time, the author made it up. So the author’s weirdly complicit in the brutality in a way that a journalist isn’t. I’m sort of haunted by violence, I suppose everyone is. I find it –- I’m sort of fascinated by it. I suppose one of the things I’m interested in is that human beings have composite brains that reflect different stages of evolution — we have a lizard brain that is violent and impulsive and ugly, and we have successive layers of more sophisticated brain that have higher functioning, empathy, the capacity to love and care for each other. The ghastly truth about human beings is that all these things coexist in the same person. And the structures of civilization are a restraining influence on our capacity to do horrible things to one another. I suppose that’s another reason why post-apocalyptic — I prefer calling it speculative — genre is interesting, because it allows you to explore what would happen when some of these civilizing influences are taken away, the same way that [William Golding] does in “Lord of the Flies.”

–

Manhood for Amateurs had already been covered by the LA Times when I talked to Michael Chabon about it. The book is a collection of essays Chabon wrote for Details, and while I don’t know anything about fatherhood or being a son, it was still a lovely read. Chabon’s writing is like that — really lovely, even when it’s saying something difficult.

Kellogg: In our review of your book, Steve Almond wrote that you’re incapable of writing a boring sentence.

Chabon: How about that? That was very nice of him.

Kellogg: But I wonder if maybe you’re incapable of publishing a boring sentence? I’d like to ask you about your writing process. Because I’m guessing that these pieces did not spring fully formed onto the page.

Chabon: Oh, no, they definitely did. I actually just wrote them on napkins. While I was cooking dinner and watching a baseball game.

Kellogg: (laughs)

Chabon: I work really hard on my sentences, and on my paragraphs, too.

Kellogg: It’s kind of stunning to anyone who’s ever tried to write that you and Ayelet have four kids and you both actually finish books. What’s your routine? How do you make space to craft your work?

Chabon: Thank god school was invented. I don’t know what we would do if it hadn’t been. We send them away every day. They leave the house — we drive them to school, and then we’ve got all this time. Ayelet works primarily, almost entirely during that period, and she’s very efficient. When she’s really working on a novel or whatever she gets her word count in every day, and that works well for her. I have a harder time — my natural rhythm is to work at night, stay up late and to sleep late. I can get more writing done between midnight and 1 o’clock in the morning than at any other hour of the day.

Unfortunately, that schedule does not work at all well in a family with small children. If I sleep late, then I miss out on what I think is the nicest, most pleasurable time of the day, of an ordinary, everyday routine. In the morning — my kids are generally in a pretty good mood when they wake up, you know, we make breakfast. I hate missing out on that, so I get up. So that means I can’t really stay up as late as I might like. Or else I don’t get enough sleep. I struggle with the schedule. And I’ve been struggling with it for years. Lately, sleep has been losing out. I’ve been staying up late, and getting up early. It doesn’t work as well for me as it does for Ayelet, and I envy her that she’s more of a morning/day person than I am.

Often, I have to go away [to write]. I’ll go to a place like the MacDowell Colony, or borrow somebody’s cabin, or go to a hotel even. Stay up until all hours, and sleep late, and just crank. I can get a lot done. Even in three or four days, I can do about as much as I could do in a month at home.

Posted by paperhaus at 3:33 pm

The Bret Easton Ellis Meets the Press routine

authors, la times, writers 14 Responses »
Jun 132010

In late May, I went to Bret Easton Ellis’ apartment to talk to him for a feature for the Los Angeles Times (it’s in Sunday’s paper). I’d arranged to be there late on a Friday afternoon, hoping he’d be up for a cocktail, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Ellis, perfectly pleasant, met me at the door, barefoot and in jeans, and walked me to the kitchen. Like this:

He answers his door barefoot, in jeans, and leads me through into his kitchen: grey glass mosaic tiles, white Ikea cabinetry, brushed metal hardware. He hasn’t changed a thing since he bought the place in 2006.

But I didn’t write that; the London Times wrote that. Their reporter, Tom Shone, must have visited earlier in the day, because Ellis made coffee. He offered me Coke, or Diet Coke, if I preferred, in tiny cans. And while I did write an opening with the coke-haha-Coke joke, I deleted it in an early draft. But Carl Swanson went for it in New York Magazine:

Coke for Bret Easton Ellis these days comes in those 7.5-ounce mini-cans—the new, vaguely European ones containing only 90 calories. This is what he offers me, taking one for himself, after inviting me into his apartment….

In article after article, Ellis meets a journalist at his apartment in jeans, barefoot (variation: hoodie, polo shirt). Time after time, he walks to the kitchen before settling in with the reporter in his office. It’s hard not to think the Coke offer is designed to lure writers into the allusion to drugs — what, no Snapple? — and that the bare feet deliberate, tempting (successfully) each writer to mention this seemingly unique detail.

We’re all desperate for details, something that will ring true without being exactly the same thing that gets reported elsewhere. And there’s the challenge, because as a reporter, I have to tell a story that we’re all telling: there was this book, 25 years ago. It was about LA. The author, who got famous from it, was a New Yorker for a long time, but now he’s back in LA, and he’s revisiting the characters in his new book.

As an author, Ellis has to talk about the book; what he may also be do is performing a role of as a certain version of Bret Easton Ellis. During my time sitting on the low chair in his office, as he sat behind a large computer monitor — which was beeping as, I’m pretty sure, emails arrived, and his eyes flickered to it regularly — I asked him about what Lou Reed, or maybe Andy Warhol, had said: interviews are an art form. Are they?

“They are,” he said. “But you can do them as an art form and completely tell the truth, and not like stretch the truth at all. I don’t think there is anything that I have said so far in this interview that is not true.”

I considered writing about trying to get at the real Ellis, but that wasn’t this story, and I was nowhere near the real one. I only had a vague nagging sense that it wasn’t what I was getting.

That became clear when I read these other articles: he not only went through the same routine, he said the same things over and over, virtually verbatim. Quotes about narcissism, about his idea of Empire and post-Empire, a lot of things that I left out. One thing I didn’t report has surfaced elsewhere: Ellis says that his new book, Imperial Bedrooms, is like Chandler. But right now, let me say: it’s not.

  • Chandler writes like this: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”
  • Imperial Bedrooms has sentences like this: “The blue eyes are complementing a light blue V-neck and a navy-blue miniskirt, something a girl would have worn in 1985 when the movie takes place.”

There’s nothing wrong with what Ellis has done, but seeing how much of his interview was said elsewhere reinforced the idea I had upon leaving: that whoever Bret Easton Ellis is, I had only seen a shadow of him. And I can’t help but wish there were something more authentic about this process. That Ellis was actually answering questions, rather than performing the skit starring this rehearsed version of himself.

No wonder he was reading his email — it must be boring to say the same thing to Vice, to Movieline, to the London Times and New York Magazine and the LA Times and whoever else has gone through the exercise, pieces pending.

Posted by paperhaus at 6:02 pm

Talking to John Edgar Wideman

authors, la times No Responses »
Mar 292010

When I heard MacArthur Genius, National Book Award nominee John Edgar Wideman was doing a book with self-publisher Lulu, I was more than a little surprised. Then when I learned I could catch him at a Wordtheatre production in Santa Monica, I jumped at the chance. What he told me about writing, microfiction and the business of publishing is in today’s LA Times.

“Stories, in a way, are about time,” Wideman says. Now 68, he holds up his hands to indicate how much of his time has passed — and the smaller span that lies ahead. “What’s that mean?” he asks. “I’ve lost the best of what I have? Or is there something that I can look forward to in another scale, as life crystalizes?”

Following in the footsteps of Richard Wright, who began to write haiku near the end of his life, and taking inspiration from Yasunari Kawabata’s “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories,” Wideman is miniaturizing. He’s taking “the same ambitions” he’s always had and writing them into drastically smaller works.

As much as these stories grow out of Wideman’s current circumstances, they’re also built to connect with busy, distracted readers. “In the pace and rhythm of life we have around us today,” he says, “it’s a struggle to get a private minute. For me, the private minute is what it’s all about. It’s what a powerful culture like ours tends to crush.”

And yet, for all that Wideman wants readers to find focus in his micro-stories, his main concern ultimately is that of a writer trying to take control of his own work. “Most people write,” he notes, “because they want independence. And that independence is threatened when you have to kowtow to the means of production.”

Posted by paperhaus at 5:36 pm

Oh, I'm the book critic

authors, book reviews, twitter 3 Responses »
Feb 122010

Jennifer Weiner just called me a book critic, and she didn’t mean it in a nice way.

Weiner, of course, is the author of a heap of books, including Good in Bed & In Her Shoes, and a lively advocate for popular fiction. She thought I was shitting on Jackie Collins when I tweeted “Jackie Collins, serving up sexy Hollywood trash! Oh, YAWN.” Her reply was swift: “Book critic being snotty, dismissive to popular commercial writer? I see your yawn + raise you a coma.”

Well, she hadn’t clicked on the link, to this Jacket Copy post — it’s about how Collins’ stock-in-trade — shockingly sexy tales of Hollywood! — has been usurped by sources of more immediate gratification: TMZ, Perez Hilton, you know. Seems to me like there isn’t much of a place for 400-page trashy Hollywood novels anymore. Collins has a new book, Poor Little Bitch Girl, that treads a mashup of Heidi Fleiss and Paris Hilton and more and… feels very tired.

What shocked me, though, wasn’t anything about Jackie Collins — it was that Jennifer Weiner was calling me a book critic. As if I was one of those shadow bogeymen of haute culture, a gatekeeper. Me? But… and I think of all the ways that I have been outside the gates. Oh, so many. Oh, for so long. Take today: I am totally wearing the wrong shoes.

But it’s true, I have to admit, that I write book reviews. I’ll be on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, starting in March. And I love writing about books, in a way that’s thoughtful, and even smart.

And I suppose that makes me a book critic.

And I think I’m OK with that.

Posted by paperhaus at 7:31 pm

Talking to Rebecca Skloot

authors, on books, science, writers, writing No Responses »
Feb 112010

I met Rebecca Skloot in New York last fall, when after a National Book Critics Circle event I had little business attending, I tagged along with a group of former board members in search of cocktails. Because we’d gone to the same graduate MFA program I knew her name — not that I learned the names of all alumni, but the nonfiction program had been passing Skloot’s book proposal to class after class of new students, saying This is the way you do it.

The book, however, had been in (and out) of the works for a long time, and when she told me it was finally on the way, I suppose I was dubious. But I was also curious. It sounded fascinating, and it was.

The book was released Tuesday, Feb 2; my piece on Skloot and her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, ran in the LA Times this Monday. Here’s some of it:

Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951, is the source of the HeLa cell line, the first human cells able to reproduce on their own in the laboratory.

By the time of her death, researchers at Johns Hopkins University had been trying for years to find cells with such reproductive properties. Lacks’ cells — powered by something in her cancer — were so remarkable that Hopkins shared them with scientists around the globe. A new industry of mass-producing human cells grew up around them.

HeLa cells have been used in experiments for decades, enabling countless scientific discoveries, including the polio vaccine and the discovery of chromosomes. The were blown up with an atom bomb and sent into space.

Still in use, they have been produced at mind-blowing volumes — enough to wrap around the world three times. They’ve been called immortal. Yet as vitally important as they have been to science, few have thought about their origins.

Skloot first heard the story of the cells as a teenager, learning only that they came from Lacks, an African American woman. She found the information tantalizingly inadequate. At the time, Skloot’s father, Floyd (who is the author of several books about living with brain damage) was severely ill and enrolled in a difficult, frustrating drug trial.

“I think that’s why I latched onto the story,” she says. “My first question was, ‘Does she have any kids? What do her kids think of this?’ “

One thing I didn’t mention anywhere is that Skloot has established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, in hopes of providing resources to subsequent Lacks generations. Henrietta was poor when she died; her children grew up poor, as many of their children have, unable to afford to health insurance even as major biomedical industries have grown up around their mother’s tissues. Maybe some of the people who make charitable decisions in those industries will consider putting some resources into the foundation.

I interviewed Skloot in January, before she embarked on a massive, 100+ day book tour. Part of that conversation was posted on Jacket Copy, the LA Times book blog. Seeing Skloot in action, and hearing her story of this book, is highly recommended — she’s a total dynamo. I feel lazy around her, and believe me, I generally only feel lazy when encumbered by a massive hangover.

Chances are, if you’re living in the continental US, she’ll be showing up somewhere near you soon.

Posted by paperhaus at 9:14 pm

Joshua Ferris on The Unnamed

authors, interview No Responses »
Jan 152010

When I first reached Joshua Ferris to talk to him for the Barnes & Noble Review, my call surprised him. “I’m driving!” he said, and before he got pulled over for using his cell phone, we arranged to talk the following day. Crossed wires, publicists, scheduling – it happens. Anyway, our subsequent, not-driving conversation — in which he talks about the ideas underlying his new novel, The Unnamed — is now online. The protagonist of The Unnamed, a very successful NY attorney, is afflicted by a disease that has no known diagnosis. Here’s a bit of Ferris:

It seems to me that when a scientist or a medical doctor or a philosopher says, well, Descartes is over, the mind/body problem has been solved and we know that everything is located in the brain and we should celebrate, it seems to have missed the point. We don’t yet have subtle enough tools to alleviate all suffering, and the mystery is far too great – the confoundedness of disease; it brings me back to the soliloquy in Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man.”At the end of it, he says, “to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” There are two poles  — one says we’re just this machine, and the other says, what a piece of work is man. I did not want to come down on one side or the other. It’s possible that this poor guy, with enough research and enough time, could have solved his problem  — but essentially, the mystery at the heart of his entire being can never be solved….

That was my greatest hope for the book – that it came to a place where the most pressing questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be heroic in the face of evisceration, and whether or not this particular character could muster the resources to do something in spite of his illness. All of these things became pertinent. I kept going back to the quote by Albert Camus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” That was a kind of challenge, as I was writing the book, because clearly this is kind of Sisyphean disease — its very recurrent nature makes it such. I had to wonder, Is this particular man going to find a way to be happy? And what is it going to be about – his career, his physical comfort, his family?

Tod Goldberg has just reviewed the book for the LA Times. “The Unnamed is an accomplished and daring work,” he writes, “by a writer just now realizing what he is capable of creating”

Posted by paperhaus at 3:42 pm
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