carolyn kellogg

paperhaus June 13th, 2010

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.

• authors , la times , writers
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paperhaus February 11th, 2010

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.

• authors , on books , science , writers , writing
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paperhaus September 15th, 2008

By now, everyone has heard that David Foster Wallace committed suicide Friday; Sarah notes that the news was at the top of twitter on Saturday. I have read him only in bits and pieces, many times almost buying Infinite Jest but always too daunted by its size and the commitment I’d have to make to it. Others must have been in the same boat — it’s now #20 on Amazon’s bestseller list.

I can’t say much about him — others are far more qualified — but I liked what I read, I admired his work, have no animosity toward footnotes (or endnotes), and I wish he’d found a way to keep on keeping on.

Today I’ve been reading some of his work that’s available online.

“Good People,” The New Yorker, February 2007
“Federer as Religious Experience,” New York Times, August 2006
Kenyon commencement speech, May 2005
“Incarnations of Burned Children,” Esquire, November 2000
“The Weasel, 12 Monkeys and a Shrub: Seven Days in the Life of the Late, Great John McCain,” Rolling Stone, April 2000

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paperhaus July 3rd, 2008

One of the things I love about Los Angeles is the way we get all the good book stuff. Take Sunday: Nam Le read at Skylight Books in Los Feliz from his debut collection, The Boat. He read part of the first story, which has a character that appears to be himself; this has confused some people, who think this makes the story nonfiction. They should pay attention to the way Le is deliberately playing with literary conventions and expectations. At one point in the story, he introduces a gun, which, shortly later, is fired; if this isn’t a literalization of Chekhov’s dramatic principle (”If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there”), I’ll eat the ARC of your choice. All I know of The Boat is what I heard in that story, and I can tell that Le is a writer who is aware of expectations and works to disrupt them — or at least to churn them up a little.

Le went to the Iowa Writers Workshop and a huge posse of his classmates and friends showed up at the reading. I had no idea so many Iowa MFAs had come to Los Angeles. There are great writers everywhere here, camouflaged as all sorts of normal people.

Not that going to Iowa makes one necessarily a great writer. But it is a motherfucker of a program.

• LA events , writers
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paperhaus July 2nd, 2008

Mark’s house, that is. A new John Banville Q&A is live and sparkling at The Elegant Variation, including:

The Elegant Variation: What is it about the German thinkers that has always seemed to resonate with you so profoundly? And how do you think they reach us today?

John Banville: German literature, including philosophy, has been an abiding interest with me since I was a teenager. I find it exciting and challenging and, I suppose, a fascination since, having been born in 1945, I grew up in the long, ashen shadow of the concentration camps. How could such a culture end in such catastrophe? I’m still reading, still trying to find out.

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paperhaus June 18th, 2008

Norman Mailer’s house in Provincetown, Mass will be turned into a retreat for “more established” writers — sorry, newbies (via). The announcement was made at a party in the house.

In proper Mailer fashion, the wine flowed, ice clinked in glasses and the dining room table was laden with food and hospitality.

… where apparently they were serving wine with ice, Mailer himself once flowed like wine and hospitality was placed upon the table.

No wonder they want to keep the newbies out.

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paperhaus June 9th, 2008

Long ago I sat on the floor of a dilapidated craftsman duplex on a dark street that ended abruptly at the precipice of the Hollywood freeway. In the house was a band, the Geraldine Fibbers, a band that was well-known around LA, known for its twisted punk-country sound and Carla Bozulich’s extraordinary voice, known, like so many other bands, to be independently releasing their records. Until that day. That day they’d decided to sign with a label, they told us, but they didn’t want to say who it was until they’d gone in and signed the contracts.

They told us this only after a while, and I think after a few beers.* They told us this because we were there to interview them for Fizz Magazine, me, inexperienced and really quite clueless, and Gabe Soria, who had done this band interviewing thing before and came prepared, with questions, he’d actually written down — in advance.

Today, the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed Life Sucks, a slacker vampire comic from First Second written by Gabe Soria and Jessica Abel, drawn by Warren Pleece.

Gabe Soria wrote a comic? Cool!

I had to make sure it was the same Gabe Soria, though. And I found evidence that seems to indicate it must be. In this interview, he provides a list of songs his slacker protagonist might listen to: two CDs by the band Possum Dixon, another Fizz fave (was Gabe there for that Possum Dixon interview, when the guitar player told us how to smuggle drugs into jail?), and one CD by none other than the Geraldine Fibbers.

Congrats to Gabe Soria on Life Sucks! And for being the one who’s getting interviewed these days. I bet it doesn’t take as much prep work.

* Although if you read the interview as it ran in Fizz Magazine, it starts with the news of picking a label — which was Virgin, by the way — but I recall lots of small talk and hanging out before we ever got there. The magic of editing.

• Music , writers
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paperhaus April 20th, 2008

In a letter dated October 2, 1946, Raymond Chandler wrote:

I suppose you read a bookseller our here was convicted of selling indecency in Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County. Very discouraging. The book is indecent enough, of course, and in exactly the most offensive way — without passion, like a phallus made of dough. Now they are bootlegging the damn thing at $25 a copy. It isn’t worth the original asking price. Being, like all those who have worked in Hollywood, somewhat of a connoisseur of the damp fart, I place Mr. Wilson high on the list. His careful and pedestrian book reviews misguide one into thinking there is something in his head besides mucilage. There isn’t.

What with Wilson being all the rage this fall — two Library of America books of criticism and a new bio — I was feeling pretty guilty about finding his writing tedious. Now, not so much.

• backtoschool , writers
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paperhaus March 3rd, 2008

Jonathan Safran Foer came to Pitt. He spoke winningly on laughter, using notes but kind of musing, as though he were working out the ideas for a new essay. In the Q&A session, he spoke candidly about his writing process, admitting it’s difficult, struggling to find the right metaphor.

If you are a traveler, it’s about the destination, he said. And then, “writing is the airplane; it’s not the foreign country.” What is the foreign country, the questioner asked. Acknowledging that his metaphor was collapsing, he finally decided that writing “is a journey without a map.”

“I’ve never written a book I’ve intended to write. As it turns out, there are things I care about more than what I thought…. The things that are at the heart of my book are things I didn’t know were at the heart of me.”

He also said that he finds writing hard, and that he’d heard from the likes of Don Delillo that it never gets any easier. Perhaps in total that was hard for grad students to hear — writing is hard, stays hard, and you’re writing your way forward in the dark — because some of my colleagues found him, they told me, arrogant. Perhaps they’re feeling a little professional jealousy of this wildly successful 30-year-old writer. Because I thought he was open and humble and genuinely engaged with the people in this particular audience, of which there were more than 200.

Which was why it was a surprise when the winner of the raffle for his latest book, Joe — photos of Richard Serra sculpture and a prose poem by JSF — was Irene, one of my students. She’s a professional and mother from Botswana who has come to Pitt to earn an American bachelor’s degree. There we are: Irene’s the one with the book, Jonathan Safran Foer is the surprisingly tall guy, and I’m the other one.

• codename:MFA , writers
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paperhaus February 28th, 2008

Editor of The Paris Review, author of two books — A Cold Case and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families — former New Yorker staff writer and Errol Morris collaborator Philip Gourevitch was the guest of Pitt’s English department yesterday.

First he had lunch with graduate students, including me; then he did a master class, which I attended without speaking (uncharacteristic, believe me); then he was swept off for dinner with faculty; then he read at the Frick Fine Arts lecture hall (pictured); then he signed and got stuck at a reception, at which point it was more than 10 hours since that lunch and we couldn’t talk him into a single post-event cocktail. (”George Saunders did!” failed to convince him).

He was impassioned and smart — no surprise. I’d write what he said, but the master class was off the record, and his Q&A, while excellent, was directed by the somewhat random questions from the audience (one man really, really wanted to talk about Sierra Leone).

Upcoming is the Errol Morris project — Standard Operating Procedure, a film about Abu Ghraib, followed by a book by Morris and Gourevitch, due out in May. Want to get Gourevitch fired up? Ask a question about Abu Ghraib. I mean, he’s articulate about Sierra Leone - but he’s pissed about Iraq.

• pittsburgh , writers
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