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Tim Kreider on writing, W. Bush v. Trump, and the future of the future
83 Plays2 months ago
Tim Kreider is a cartoonist and essayist. If you’re not familiar with Tim’s work, sign up for his Substack (“The Loaf”), and read his two books of essays, “We Learn Nothing” & “I Wrote this Book Because I Love You.” Tim’s writing is a deadly combination of elegant & original prose, wicked humor, and bare-it-all honesty. He’s my favorite writer. We discuss…
- With Cormac McCarthy gone, who’s the best living writer of the English language?
- How a young Tim enjoyed the works of YA / sci-fi writer John Christopher (real name: Christopher Samuel Youd). Books mentioned: The World in Winter and The Death of Grass and the Tripod Trilogy, plus…
- Moby Dick is strange. The best standalone chapter: “The Line.”
- It’s possible neither Tim nor I know what “postmodernism” is.
- Is “DEI” the new way of using the “N word?”
- One of Tim’s first big breaks—commentary on Eyes Wide Shut in Film Quarterly.
- James Salter, a writer’s writer.
- Revisiting a few of Tim’s essays and characters — Tim’s peak-oil obsessed friend and the state of Tim’s busyness.
- Is writing a “nice thing to do?”
- On how Tim is stylishly homeless.
- Melville House’s FUTURES Series.
- Tech utopians: “people who don’t like being people.”
- Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Trilogy.
- Tim’s recommendations:
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis.
00:00:23
Speaker
This is a dream come true because I've been rereading your books and you're having all these boozy conversations with a lot of your close friends. And here I'm about to have a boozy conversation with, with Tim Crider. We each have our our drinks. I've got some cheap whiskey and what do you have there, Tim?
00:00:39
Speaker
Uh, well, it's a martini that I made on the spur the moment. And, I just wildly miscalculated the amount of vermouth, so I tried to overcompensate with gin.
00:00:50
Speaker
I really don't know what it's going to be like now. Let's just have a sip. So I wrote a a tiny little introduction for you. um Let me just read it now.
Conversation with Literary Hero Tim Kreider
00:01:01
Speaker
I'm honored and thrilled to be interviewing one of my all-time literary heroes, cartoonist and essayist Tim Kreider.
00:01:10
Speaker
If you're not familiar with Tim's work, sign up for his sub stack, The Loaf, and read his two books of essays. We Learned Nothing, and I wrote this book because I love you.
00:01:22
Speaker
Tim's writing is a deadly combination of elegant and original prose, wicked humor, and bare-it-all honesty. He is my favorite writer.
00:01:33
Speaker
Hi, Tim. Jeez. Really? I really favorite writer? I mean, you get that a lot, don't you? I've seen some of the comments on your People are gushing over you.
00:01:47
Speaker
ah Is that living writer? do you have Do you have more favorite dead writers? I probably do have some dead writers, but you know we don't need to start comparing you with George Eliot and Shakespeare now.
00:01:57
Speaker
but yeah yeah so yeah so um For the listeners, I think I kind of flattered and fanboyed you onto this podcast because... I called you the English language's greatest living writer. And I was being completely sincere when I said that. And I'm sure you would humbly dispute that claim. So I'm wondering who's on your shortlist for best living writers.
00:02:24
Speaker
Well, that's a tough call now that Cormac McCarthy is dead. Didn't used to be a tough call. There wasn't a close second. um In you know I don't know what people really mean when they talk about being a good
What Makes Writers Great?
00:02:40
Speaker
writer. like It could refer to the quality and music of the prose, which is how I was thinking of of McCarthy.
00:02:49
Speaker
McCarthy has deficits in other areas, such as he doesn't really seem to give a shit about human beings, um at least not until very late in his work. ah But there are writers like um George Saunders, who is great.
00:03:06
Speaker
partly because of the language. I mean, the way he uses this sort of idiom and the euphemism of corporate America is great and devastating. um And he's very funny, but really he's a great writer because of his heart, you know, because of this deep humanity in him.
00:03:27
Speaker
um those Those two guys are at opposite ends of a spectrum of sorts, and they're great for really different reasons. Not to shortchange Saunders prose, but it's not trying to do the same thing that McCarthy's is, which is you know basically swinging for the same fences as Shakespeare.
00:03:48
Speaker
i love Cormac McCarthy. And I think he had a lot of heart in something like The Road, though I can't quite remember the plots to all his other books. Yeah, i I think The Road is sort of when he discovered that he could love another human being, which was is his young son.
Admiration for Prose and Reading for Pleasure
00:04:03
Speaker
um And that's very much what that book is about. You see, i i not too long ago, I listened to the the three Wolf Hall books by Hilary Mantel. And I've had a friend who's tried to read those. Yeah, I've had a friend who's tried to read them. And it's difficult reading because she uses tense and kind of strange...
00:04:22
Speaker
idiosyncratic ways. But when you listen, there's this one reader, his name is ah Ben Miles, and he has he does like all 100 character voices in those books. And it is unreal.
00:04:34
Speaker
And I think what I love about that is I love books that have like wisdom on every page. And I love, I love, so I love elegant prose. So if you can kind of combined elegant prose, a little bit of humor and that wisdom kind of drenching into the page that jet just hits my spot. And that, I think that's why I love your books because I feel like,
00:04:59
Speaker
but Most times I read, I read because i want to be like a good citizen. you know i read because i want to be informed, because I want to be interesting, because I want to learn things.
00:05:11
Speaker
um But rarely is it that I'm reading just for pleasure. But when I read your books, it's just like it's pleasure. and i'm i'm I'm getting that wisdom of learning about humanity and myself through your prose.
00:05:24
Speaker
Well, that's very high praise that I don't quite know how to respond to, except to say that I yeah i think most people who read as adults are still doing that because they remember what it was like to read when you were a kid.
00:05:39
Speaker
And not like a little kid, because all little kids read picture books and story books. But, you know, when you hit pubescence and you start moving into YA, as it's called now, there are some kids who just get so engrossed in, you know, pages in in novels that are hundreds of pages long.
00:05:59
Speaker
And they're just always sitting in the backseat of the car or being rude at the dinner table, just reading their book because they have vanished into a different world. And. That's a ah high that I think you end up chasing as an adult with diminishing returns the rest of your
Nostalgia for Childhood Reading
00:06:16
Speaker
life. But you long for books that will do that to you.
00:06:20
Speaker
It's a struggle for me to find stuff nowadays. Yeah, it's not that easy find. Yeah. So what were you reading when you were younger? What were those things that occupied your mind and you obsessed over? Well, there was a ah About the age I'm talking about, there were a few writers...
00:06:38
Speaker
who I could cite because I noticed their style. You know, I noticed the writing as not just the content. ah People with really foregrounded prose styles like Edgar Allan Poe or Ray Bradbury um or or even Douglas Adams. Like he's a guy, some of whose jokes aren't about the content. They're about the way he sets them up and deploys them.
00:07:02
Speaker
ah You know, like that that line, ah the the Vogon ships hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don't. o um Like that really was a light bulb over my head when I was 12.
00:07:15
Speaker
Like, oh, the the way you say it can be funny. um But I would say that the guy who I was that way I described with like obsessive and just reading one book after another was a science fiction writer who wrote really good novels for adults. ah He wrote The Long Winter, which was a pretty pretty prescient book about climate change.
00:07:39
Speaker
and ah The Death of Grass, about a ah disease that started killing off the vegetation on Earth. These are both kind of apocalyptic dystopian novels. But oh who's this?
00:07:51
Speaker
John Christopher was his pen name. ah He had, ah I think his real name was Samuel Yod, or Yod. And he wrote a lot of different genres in a lot of different pen names. But his, his YA science fiction books really hooked me.
00:08:05
Speaker
ah He wrote a the The one trilogy that people still read is the Tripods trilogy that consists of the White Mountains and the City of Golden Lead and the Pool of Fire.
00:08:16
Speaker
And he wrote a prequel later on. um they They were pretty, you know, now that I am a grown up and have read lots of science fiction, they were not original in their conceit. It was just a race of aliens who enslaved the earth and young people who joined freedom fighters to try to to win independence back.
00:08:35
Speaker
But what was really, i think, gripping to me was that the main character was not the strongest kid and he wasn't the smartest kid. There were other kids in the book who were those people, but he was just ah stubborn.
00:08:52
Speaker
And that was a handicap and a difficulty for him, but it was also his great strength. um And I think that he was a pretty perceptive writer just about character and understood what it's, I don't know, like to be 14 years old, but also just what it's like to be a person in the world.
00:09:11
Speaker
Is that when you were reading this, when you were 14? Yeah, I was reading it, I think, when I was right around that age, 13, 14. And he wrote a lot of YA books, and I read pretty much all of them until I aged out of that demographic.
00:09:25
Speaker
um There's still probably some I haven't read. But yeah, he wrote a lot of them. The Lotus Caves was one that I really loved. ah That was just a standalone.
00:09:36
Speaker
But yeah, I think it was the psychological complexity of them or or just the psychological realism of them. I'll have him in the ah show notes.
00:09:47
Speaker
um And speaking of writers, I know you're working on
Unique Qualities of 'Moby Dick'
00:09:51
Speaker
Moby Dick. What are your impressions as you're going through that book right now? Yeah. My girlfriend and I are reading that out loud. We have a long standing habit of reading out loud together.
00:10:01
Speaker
Um, there was, and there's a funny story that would probably embarrass her if I told it that explains the origin of that habit. So I won't. Um, but we both have read it before. I read it probably 20 years ago.
00:10:20
Speaker
um maybe longer. Uh, And I guess what i notice about it this time is its strangeness.
00:10:31
Speaker
um This is not a novel you know insight, but it's really a very postmodern book in the same way that Tristram Shandy is a postmodern book. um I don't know enough about 19th century literature to say with authority that no one else was writing anything remotely like this, but I've certainly never heard of anything quite like it.
00:10:51
Speaker
um It's really not unlike what Maggie Nelson does in books like The Argonauts. It's this intertwining of personal narrative with ah what you'd call essays or just nonfiction reportage. ah you know A lot of it's just about what it's like to be on a whaling vessel.
00:11:14
Speaker
Is that postmodern, though? I mean, I read the book 10 years ago, and postmodern is not the first thing that would come to mind. What what makes it postmodern? Well, maybe I don't even know what postmodern means. don't know what it means either. i mean, it's a sort of... ah collage of different forms, not just different styles, but, you know, some of it is sea story. Some of it are, I mean, you know, I sometimes will teach standalone chapters from that book as though they were essays to my students because they are.
00:11:45
Speaker
ah like, maybe, maybe the best standalone chapter in the book in that way is called The Line. And it's about the rope that they attach to the harpoons that they're flinging at the whales.
00:12:00
Speaker
And it it's, ah you know, I shouldn't try to paraphrase it because I'm just going to ruin a great work of literature. But it's all interlaced among the men in the whale boat. And if they do harpoon a whale, it's going to dive. And suddenly that rope that is intertwined all around them becomes white, hot, sizzling, and is dangerous enough to take off an arm or a leg.
00:12:23
Speaker
And it's only a three or four page chapter. And he starts out talking about this arcane piece of equipage. And he ends up just in the last lines of the essay saying, well, you may wonder ah how these men can sit there surrounded by near death all the time. And he's like, well, you're doing the same thing right now. You just don't know it.
00:12:44
Speaker
um And this is a thing that I find myself more and more often trying to do in my own essays is i take the risk of maybe boring the reader at first or them not knowing why I'm telling them what I'm telling them about. Like I just wrote an essay about stuff, like having to decide what to do with all this stuff when you move and your parents stuff. And this is not a very novel or interesting subject in itself, but my hope is that, uh, I'm finessing the, the pros and the, you know, throwing in some jokes and keeping people
00:13:20
Speaker
Interested long enough to bear with me and get to the part where like Melville I revealed that this is a metaphor for all of life It sounds like there needs to be some mutual respect there between writer and reader because you need to kind of respect your readership to kind of, you know, have some stamina as
Writer-Reader Relationship
00:13:39
Speaker
they're reading. But the reader also needs to trust Tim, the writer, that, oh, we know we've been here before. This is going to get to something good after a while. Although if you've never read a person before, you know, they they kind of have to earn your trust as fast as possible.
00:13:56
Speaker
there's um There's an essay I keep meaning to publish every year on Montaigne's birthday about Montaigne, and I keep not finishing the essay in time. But ah I teach a paragraph from Montaigne when I talk to my students about authorial persona.
00:14:12
Speaker
And i teach a lot of passages that week that are really complicated and layered. and have a lot of different things going on in them. And Montaigne seems like the simplest one, but it's really the hardest because what he does is make you trust him and like him right away in this very unassuming, I'm just a regular guy ah manner, but you're, you're, you,
00:14:35
Speaker
You're just willing to believe that he is, in fact, a regular guy, as he claims, and that you can believe whatever this guy says and that he doesn't care whether you believe him or not. He's really just writing for himself. And you find him very forthright and likable and you're willing to just see what he has to say.
00:14:49
Speaker
um And that's a feat. Is there a but that that follows that? ah In Montaigne's case? Well, it sounds like um we should be skeptical about how he's kind of presented himself. I know. I mean, I think you approach all writing with mixture of openness and skepticism. Like, well, this is better be good ah because I got other things to do. Plus, there's TV and the whole internet at my disposal.
00:15:19
Speaker
um I mean, i don't I don't think Montaigne exactly misrepresents himself. He's not... Quite a regular guy. he's Wasn't he like a governor at some point or something? Yeah, he was some local official and a noble.
00:15:35
Speaker
i mean, he certainly had enough. I mean, I've been to his tower where he wrote. It's really, talk about cushy setups. It's nice. he's just He's in a tower and he's got a library there. And he was always procrastinating and giving excuses when he was called to fulfill his official functions because he really just wanted to be left alone to read and write.
00:15:56
Speaker
And so he wasn't an ordinary guy, but I think he was right in assuming that he was ordinary enough and that whatever was true of him was likely true of his reader.
00:16:07
Speaker
And that this is something that I bank on also. And it's something I tell my students they can bank on. ah You know what i I often say on day one to my undergraduate students, especially like, you are not special, ah which sounds mean, but I want them to resist the impulse to write about the most ah interesting things, the coolest stories, the most fucked up stuff that ever happened to them.
00:16:34
Speaker
Because that stuff just makes good bar stories. it's not It's not good essays. And you famously begin your book of essays, We Learn Nothing, with just a little hint, like, oh, I got stabbed in the neck.
00:16:46
Speaker
And then we we never get that story right at all. and And I like it. I like what you did there. Well, because that's a bar story. um And I don't even think it's an especially good bar story. Like, if you know me, it's kind of an interesting factoid about me.
00:17:03
Speaker
But... it It's not a great narrative, and it really just didn't change much in my life at all. um It wasn't even as cool as getting hit by lightning. it It just like happened, and then it was over, and then I was like, huh, well, that was weird, and then went on with my life.
00:17:22
Speaker
I won't ask for the details, because that would be a very lame lame question. i want i'd I'd rather have it. But we're talking about ah Montaigne, you being a writer, you being an essayist, but you're also...
00:17:34
Speaker
are cartoonists and I'm sure you just absolutely love sports analogies, but I think of you as kind
Creative Development and Talents
00:17:41
Speaker
of ah the Deion Sanders of the arts in that, you know, he played baseball and football yeah both very well and and you cartoon and write very, very well. And I'm just kind of curious, like what the relationship is Between the the two of those is, are those like distinct talents or do you have like this rich topsoil of creativity out of which all these, you know, types of art flower out of?
00:18:10
Speaker
Well, i you know, I was just back home going through a big chest of drawings and writing that my mom had saved from my early years and having to decide, you know, what to do with that stuff.
00:18:26
Speaker
It's not like Harvard is requesting my papers or anything. I think it's just going to be junk that someone's going to have to dispose of when I die. But it was an it was an interesting retrospective of my early creative development, if you want to call it that. But I wasn't doing anything very different from what most kids do. Kids are pretty spontaneously creative.
00:18:50
Speaker
um But, you know, I would say as early as grade school, when people's talents start to diverge and express themselves.
00:19:01
Speaker
And you know some people are better at sports than others, and some people are better at singing than others. ah I think you know my my fellow elementary school students thought I was a good drawer, as as we then said. And ah I wrote some humorous dog roll that was generally acclaimed in sixth grade. So I mean i was was pretty good at writing and drawing. And I wasn't really sure which of those things I wanted to do.
00:19:30
Speaker
um but I, I think I decided really by high school, at least that I was going to try to be a writer. Um, and I'm not really sure why that instead of, instead of the cartoonist or illustrator, some other kind of artist, um,
00:19:47
Speaker
And I did get waylaid into being a cartoonist by accident for like a decade, because that's the first thing that someone would pay me to do. They didn't pay me a lot, like $20 a week. But still, when when you have a gig in the local alternative weekly, it's a kind of meager fame. And more importantly, it's a little slot in the world. It's a thing that you get to tell people you are.
00:20:13
Speaker
And, you know, if you've been a young creative person yourself or aspiring artist, it's kind of a dismal business. Like everyone, you know, is getting ah jobs and careers of some sort and they get to call themselves a thing.
00:20:31
Speaker
Like they're going to law school or they're learning a trade and you're just kind of to all appearances, floundering about and not accomplishing much.
00:20:43
Speaker
So it meant a lot to make $20 a week and have a cartoon in the local alt weekly. Cause then I was a thing that I could tell people. And it was a thing I could tell myself I was.
00:20:54
Speaker
um But to your question, I don't feel like those two things had a whole lot of overlap. Like you would think that I would eventually have started doing graphic novels, but I never did.
00:21:09
Speaker
ah art never turned into a narrative thing for me. um I guess one thing they had in common is I always felt that economy of means was really important. so What does that mean, economy of means? Well, I mean, like I always did single panel cartoons, not strips.
00:21:27
Speaker
Because why why couldn't you compress the joke into a single image? ah like At most, you should take two panels, like set up and punchline. And I've never done a whole but book because most things I think you can say in an essay.
00:21:43
Speaker
um I've never had anything to say that was big or complex enough that I needed a whole book to say it. there're there's there's so There seems like seems to be some relationship in tone and voice, like self-deprecation seems to run both through your cartoons and your essays.
00:22:01
Speaker
um Maybe. i mean, that's just a way of being funny. I mean, that's pretty standard humor trope ah to make fun of yourself preemptively.
00:22:13
Speaker
um Well, I'm just thinking on this this question about how much those two art forms have to do with each other. um i would say probably ah similar personality emerges ah through both those things.
00:22:28
Speaker
I don't remember ever getting an idea for something that could have been either an essay or a cartoon where I had to decide which. like there were cartoon ideas and essay ideas. um And cartoon ideas tended to come about when you're having a beer and joking with your friends and you're just riffing and coming up with ah scenarios and, you know, something crystallizes and you're like, okay, that could be a cartoon.
00:22:56
Speaker
Whereas essays coalesce usually more slowly and it's, Either something that you suddenly notice you just haven't been able to figure out in your life or else it's more like a ah file drawer in your head you didn't know was there finally fills up with enough examples of something that you've got an essay.
00:23:16
Speaker
Like, um oh, it's a good example.
00:23:22
Speaker
Oh, like, you know, someone sends you an email that you weren't supposed to get, and it gives you a little glimpse into what they really think of you. And it turns out you've been amassing anecdotes and insights about that for your whole life, but you didn't know it until the drawer filled up.
00:23:39
Speaker
And now it pops up and you're like, oh okay, I could write five-page essay about that. It takes years for those things to accumulate, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, sometimes less than that, but, you know,
00:23:52
Speaker
Usually the the background of experience and and reading and just knowledge that you're drawing on to write the essay is decades long. Yeah.
00:24:05
Speaker
Once in a while, it'll come to you in a flash. i remember writing when Notre Dame was on fire. i in All in one train ride, I wrote an essay about that. um Because it seemed like the perfect metaphor for like ah civilization burning down. like You know we could still lose it all, guys.
00:24:24
Speaker
Well, this ties into kind of another question about
Frustrations During Political Eras
00:24:28
Speaker
cartooning. um You described during the Bush years that you were professionally furious for eight years. And I remember being furious too, um but it also feels like the W. Bush years like took place in a previous life.
00:24:46
Speaker
yeah And maybe that's just because Trump has eclipsed W. Bush and everything from depravity to stupidity to incompetence. So yeah, how are you holding up during these Trump years and does it feel different in any way than the W. Bush years?
00:25:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think it feels much worse. Um, You know, the body count is much lower so far. I mean, George W. Bush got a lot of people killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
00:25:20
Speaker
ah There's no way of tallying the deaths, but it's at least half a million people, mostly civilians. So you've got to give Donald Trump that. He hasn't really started any wars.
00:25:33
Speaker
um He may, but so far he hasn't. I think probably out of some kind of reptile brain understanding that he is not remotely competent to wage a war.
00:25:46
Speaker
Oh, so he recognizes his own inadequacy in that way. And maybe that's a really optimistic read. I mean, I wasn't expecting such generosity from you there, Tim. Yeah. Well, yeah, he doesn't recognize his incompetence in any other arena. So, um,
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah, despite that, I think Trump is much stupider and much meaner than George W. Bush was as a person. And much more than Bush, Trump is sort of, i don't know how much you know control he really has day to day over what his administration does, so but I definitely felt like Bush was more a puppet of smarter, meaner people. Yeah.
00:26:30
Speaker
You know, I got to interview Jules Feiffer a couple of times before he died. And I asked him once during the Bush years. Remind us who Jules Feiffer is. Oh, I'm sorry. He was a polymath artistically. He was probably best known originally for his cartoons in the Village Voice.
00:26:48
Speaker
But he also wrote plays. He wrote screenplay. wrote children's books. um I can't remember. I believe he illustrated The Phantom Tollbooth. Yeah.
00:26:59
Speaker
Yeah, he was a great all around artist and satirist. And I asked him during the Bush years, like, you know, you were an artist during the McCarthy years.
00:27:09
Speaker
yeah Can you help me out here? Like, are things that bad now? Or are they not as bad? Or are you immediately, i didn't get to finish my question. He just cut me off and said, oh, they're worse. They're much worse.
00:27:20
Speaker
Because Bill McCarthy wasn't the president the United States. He wasn't a Supreme Court justice. Yeah. And I think things are now worse than they've ever been. i i did not really then have the same sense I do now that um I don't quite know how to articulate it.
00:27:41
Speaker
ah Just that there's absolutely no grownups in charge anymore. like so It feels like things are less predictable. Yeah. Well, yeah, I felt like there were evil but competent people in charge. Yes.
00:27:55
Speaker
Back then, and things were still operating, you know, within the sort of geopolitical framework that had kept the world more or less stable, albeit horrible for lots of people for a half century. And now it's like, it's...
00:28:16
Speaker
he's like the school shooter of American presidents. It's like a thing that used to not be remotely thinkable, that you would just walk into school and murder all the people who got on your nerves.
00:28:29
Speaker
um But now it's a thing that can be done. And Trump just did that stuff. Like, it turns out there was nothing stopping people from being this outright petty and vindictive and ignoring all norms and laws and, you know, constitutionality before.
00:28:48
Speaker
They just did. There was a gentleman's agreement. And, you know, to to put it politely, he's no gentleman. So part of the problem is that he's kind of normalizing the unthinkable.
00:29:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, you know, George Bush was worse than the McCarthy years, and this is worse than George Bush. And each one of those aberrations makes that aberration normal.
00:29:13
Speaker
And then what's thinkable ah is is widened until until finally things that would have been absolutely inconceivable 20 or 30 or 50 years ago are now just the the world we live in.
00:29:27
Speaker
And Like remember, John McCain wasn't allowed to be a presidential candidate because he made a weird noise. Yeah.
00:29:36
Speaker
Oh, no, you're thinking of Howard Dean. I'm sorry. That's who I meant. Yes. Yeah. um Yeah. So how would you kind of characterize your, your, how you're feeling, your,
00:29:48
Speaker
outlook I mean, the Democrats and people on the left, they just seem kind of out to sea and rudderless and um people are feeling very kind of jaded and cynical and worn out. Where where are you at these days?
00:30:04
Speaker
ah Well, I'm having a hard time figuring out what to do with myself. Like, I don't really know what to do with how I feel every day, um which is you know,
00:30:18
Speaker
overpowering impotent rage. um You know, I don't feel like writing
00:30:26
Speaker
is all that helpful. You know, there's there's this quote by Kurt Vonnegut about the cumulative effect of all the art deployed in opposition to the Vietnam War being equivalent to, I believe he said it was a banana cream pie, six feet in diameter dropped from a height of six feet.
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah. You can imagine the noise. like that And that's how you feel about, you know, your art, your writing. You know, and it probably makes people feel better to have their inchoate feelings articulated well, which is nice, but it's not really changing things.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah. And beyond that, it's hard to know what to do You know, you you write your representatives or call them, but that feels more or less like beaming messages into space at this point.
00:31:15
Speaker
um I shouldn't say too much about this because i I don't want to get myself in any trouble or get the institution I teach for in any trouble. But it came as a kind of relief to me when the Trump thugs came to Sarah Lawrence, where I teach and No, I probably shouldn't talk about it, but it it came as a ah relief to me when the thuggery kind of came into my own personal sphere.
00:31:41
Speaker
um And therere there came an occasion where I could at least have opinions about something that pertained directly to me. and So that that feeling of impotence was momentarily paused?
00:31:54
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's like the difference between... dreading something happening and the thing finally happening. The dread is worse um because you can't do anything about the dread.
00:32:07
Speaker
But ah at least when you you yourself are peripherally involved in some sort of imbroglio, then there's something for you to do that feels real. Gotcha.
00:32:18
Speaker
Gotcha. but Let's take a ah step back. um And i was kind of sad to hear in in one of your books that you viewed your cartooning as 10 years of, you kind of squandered 10 years of your productive ah life. I hope that's not actually true.
00:32:35
Speaker
And I kind of wonder what you would have wanted to spend that time. Well, right. mean, if I, you know, if I could have done something else, I probably would have done that instead.
00:32:46
Speaker
ah I just worry about having devoted so much energy to topical political issues. I mean, really who looks back at old political cartoons?
00:33:01
Speaker
There's a few geeks and collectors who are still looking at old cartoons from, you know, the McKinley administration, but not a lot of them. They have a short half-life, don't they? Yeah. It's very ephemeral art. And, you know,
00:33:16
Speaker
Again, how much good did it do? It's not like I expected to topple the Bush regime all by way. but what it does, though, and what writing does is, yeah, maybe it doesn't, maybe it's, ah you know, that banana split dropped from six foot high or whatever, however you described it.
00:33:29
Speaker
But it does help people feel sane, you know. it's just like when someone can articulate something in a superior way than everyone else, but that somehow captures how you as the reader feel it's just a wonderful feeling of oh i'm not crazy it's just a sense of kinship with someone yeah it's like that philip k dick feeling of being the only person who remembers the old reality the real reality um um Yeah, I just talked to my agent yesterday who said that I had written a recent essay where I talked about how DI is just the new euphemism for the N-word.
00:34:06
Speaker
And that's what conservatives mean when they say it. It just lets them say that in a way that's acceptable now. And she I did not think of that as a novel insight. But she was like, oh my god, at least somebody said it.
00:34:19
Speaker
um They're getting pretty elaborate in their euphemisms, though. I mean, they're using... Yeah, acronyms. Yeah. um Okay, well, cartooning aside, when do you get your first big break as ah writer?
Writing Career Beginnings
00:34:37
Speaker
um I would say for there's there's a couple different answers to that one is you know, what really began my current career as a writer.
00:34:53
Speaker
But the other one is in a way the more important one, which is what let me know that I wasn't completely deluding myself. Um, and the, the first would have been when I sold an essay to the New York times and the editor, when was that?
00:35:14
Speaker
Well, what year was that? I lose track. Um, nineties, two thousands. was more like 2010. ten um it was, I had written a one-off about when they de-planetized Pluto.
00:35:30
Speaker
Uh, but I'm not even counting that cause it seemed quite possible that that was just my one, you know, op-ed that I, where I had a weird niche as a pro Pluto partisan. Um, and that would never be repeated, but later, I wrote a piece ah about alcohol actually.
00:35:49
Speaker
Um, about drinking as an antidote to time's passage. ah And that being much of the allure of alcohol, because they they were doing a whole series on alcohol. And I read one of the pieces in there that I thought was just terrible, utterly pedestrian. And I was like, well, OK, I can do better than that. so I sent the piece in, and the editor liked it and ran it. And also, he liked my writing. And he said, I want you to write for the next series, which is on happiness.
00:36:20
Speaker
Um, and that began a collaboration with that editor. His name is Peter Catapano, uh, that lasted several years. And we did, i don't know, 25 essays. Wow. together Um, and that's what got me a book contract.
00:36:35
Speaker
But for me, it was much earlier than that. It was 1999. And it was when I wrote an essay for film quarterly. And really that's an essay that I co-wrote, um, with the guy who in my book, I called Ken, the peak oil guy.
00:36:50
Speaker
Um, but he declined a um, co-writing credit for it. Uh, but really the, the thinking was as much his as mine. It was about the movie Eyes Wide Shut.
00:37:01
Speaker
And i I, sent it off to film quarterly and got the acceptance letter at my local mailbox. And I just, I like, sagged with relief and like fell against the side of my car and maybe. And you had no background in film or film criticism or anything like that? You know, I, I took some classes at Hopkins with, um, Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a great book about television and film called boxed in.
00:37:30
Speaker
Um, but I wasn't my major. Uh, it was just, I was a guy who wrote and liked movies a lot. Um, But I got the acceptance letter for that. And it really, ah you know, i' I might have said, oh, thank God out loud, because ah it just meant that I wasn't completely deluding myself about maybe being a writer.
00:37:50
Speaker
And Film Quarterly- You had doubts. You had doubts. Well, sure. How do you know? I mean, I'm not the kind of person who has no doubts. Maybe there are such people who thinks that, that that you know,
00:38:01
Speaker
if the world doesn't recognize them as a genius, it's the world's fault, but I'm not one of those. So, so film quarterly provided that external validation that yes, I am a writer.
00:38:13
Speaker
And they don't pay any money. It's a scholarly journal, but it still is a national publication and pretty prestigious. And it meant a lot to be in there. What's the synopsis of your take on eyes wide shut, by the way, well basically nobody liked eyes wide shut when it came out.
00:38:29
Speaker
Uh, I think, I think maybe Janet Maslin at New York times did, but most people thought, Oh, how, you know, sad that Stanley Kubrick's last film is such a misfire. Um, and it was probably wrongly promoted as this very sexy film.
00:38:45
Speaker
And it's not mostly about sex really. And I, my argument was that this is way more a film about money and class than it is about sex and love.
00:38:56
Speaker
Um, yeah I'm sure you can still read it online somewhere. Um, if you're interested, but I, I wrote a few more essays for film quarterly over the next few years. But I think, you know, whenever my own students get their first thing published and it's usually in a, you know, literary magazine or an academic journal, and they're always very self-effacing about it when they show it to me.
00:39:21
Speaker
Um, They're like, you know, it's nothing. Nobody's going to see it. But I always tell them this is the happiest you'll ever be about getting this is a big fucking deal in your life. And don't tell yourself it's not.
00:39:33
Speaker
So how do you go? and why How do you go from these New York Times essays and these film quarterly essays? How do you get to your first book of essays? We i had a couple agents write me after I think my very first New York Times piece. They liked the voice in it.
00:39:53
Speaker
um And the the one I met with, Meg Thompson, i we just clicked. She and I both liked the writer James Salter, who's very much a writer's writer.
00:40:06
Speaker
um he's He wrote ah Sport and a Pastime and Light Years and All That Is. His novels are amazing. um His prose is superb.
00:40:20
Speaker
ah But he's, yeah, like writers love him more than readers do. um So I just felt like she was someone who understood literary literary writing. um And she...
00:40:32
Speaker
I had a couple essays that were viral things at the time, like the Busy Trap essay. And so there were, at the time, a couple publishers, mistakenly, as it turned out, vying for ah me as their author because they thought I would be the next big thing, um which benefited me only. But I was not the next big thing.
00:40:55
Speaker
But I got to write some books. i got I got a book contract. And We Learn Nothing is is absolutely fabulous. And you have blurbs from people like Judd Apatow and David Foster Wallace. Wow.
Joy of Cartooning and Writing
00:41:08
Speaker
um Well, David Wallace, I ah ah sort of illicitly got his contact information from a friend who'd interviewed him. And i I think I sent him my my comics, my mini comics.
00:41:22
Speaker
which ah he liked quite a lot and graciously responded. And ah you know i would I would write him long, effusive letters and he would write me short, polite ones. ah That was the extent of our relationship. But he did graciously agree to do a blurb for me.
00:41:38
Speaker
And any writer knows that it's it's mostly torment to write and a lot of self-doubt and self-delusion and all of that. Can you describe you at your...
00:41:51
Speaker
most joyful when you're writing? What does it feel like when you're happiest writing? Jeez, what a good question. It's like forcing me to admit that sometimes it's fun.
00:42:03
Speaker
It's a good thing for me to be made to focus on because I mostly don't. um
00:42:10
Speaker
it's It's seldom fun the way that cartooning was fun. And the the fun part about cartooning was a that usually it involves sitting around for hours with your friends drinking beers and saying funny things until one of them really cracks you up and seems like it'll make a good cartoon.
00:42:27
Speaker
And also drawing is just inherently more fun because it's a physical activity. And, you know, every you little kids know that drawing is fun. It's very enjoyable and absorbing.
00:42:39
Speaker
And writing can be enjoyable in the same way in that it's very deeply absorbing when you get into it. Um, and sometimes it's absorbing in a really persnickety way, the way that cleaning your house is, you know, like it's just a mess and it's your job to make it not so much a mess.
00:42:59
Speaker
And it rewards the kind of persnickety obsessive, uh, patients and, you know, just being dissatisfied with anything other than perfection.
00:43:11
Speaker
Um, And eventually somebody's just usually got to pry the manuscript out of your hands and say, oh okay, it's done now. It's done. i don't hear you describing the joy in any of this. oh though That absorption is and enjoyable state in a way, although it's really beyond enjoyment.
00:43:31
Speaker
It's just, you're, you're kind of not, you're both very fully there and also not there at all, you know? um But I would say the fun part,
00:43:43
Speaker
I mean, you know, there's fun in in setting up and springing the kinds of little humor traps that Douglas Adams was good good at devising. Yeah. ah There's fun in thinking up, well,
00:43:55
Speaker
what's a less boring way to say this? Or I feel like I'm using an idiom I've heard a million times here. What's a more creative or unexpected way to to get the idea? And that's what I love. Every line is is so fresh in yours. It's as if nobody has ever said the same sequence of words. And I think some of the joy, and maybe I'm speaking for myself here,
00:44:17
Speaker
is when you get to nail something, when you can put two words together that perfectly describe something. And I think, I think when I'm reading your stuff, I see that joy happening because you're just being, I don't know, very, as they say in Britain, very kind of cheeky in, in your use, in your phrasing sometimes.
00:44:38
Speaker
Well, that's nice to hear because I, uh, it's, it's not easy and it's not accidental. I mean, I, I, I try very hard not to write a boring sentence ever.
00:44:49
Speaker
are you Are you making noises when you write? Are you guffawing? Are you laughing? are you What are you doing? I'm trying to remember. if I've certainly cracked up at my own drawings before. i'm not Because you know they sometimes turn out better than you thought, better than you planned.
00:45:06
Speaker
um I don't know if writing ever quite does that. Writing so... um Gee, I don't know. I never got into the kind of flow state where I don't know if Faulkner was bullshitting, but he talked about just chasing after his characters, writing down what they did. That that sort of thing certainly doesn't happen to me. It just feels very meticulous. and No, but you just, you describe being at like a 4th of July party and and needing to write something down.
00:45:33
Speaker
Sometimes you feel compelled to get something down. um Yeah. Well, there's a, there's a
00:45:45
Speaker
Compulsion to not let the moments disappear, ah you know, to to write down the things you remember and the and and the people you loved, ah to not let it all vanish into the slipstream of time. That feels worthwhile.
00:46:04
Speaker
And it's fun to relate funny stories and to try to convey or or at least approximate what it was like to be there.
00:46:15
Speaker
you know You can create a different experience by telling a funny story. It's not going to be the same as had you been there and the funny thing had happened. But you know you're giving the reader some approximate equivalent of that.
00:46:28
Speaker
Like, well, you get to hear a funny story about the funny thing that happened. And it's nice when you can pull that off in a way that also seems funny. um i mean, i i I don't really... love many writers who aren't funny.
00:46:43
Speaker
And that's, I think, probably the most joyful part of it um for me. What does that mean? what does it Why is it that you don't? um Well, I don't know. I guess it just seems, I mean, there's probably some exceptions to that.
00:46:58
Speaker
Court McCarthy is like funny maybe once every hundred pages, but then he's really funny. um because you don't expect it coming from that guy. But he's got a very mordant sense of humor.
00:47:09
Speaker
um I guess there are probably some writers who aren't funny who I admire, but admiring them isn't the same as really loving them. And I just think a sense of humor is some, it's not just telling jokes. It's like a ah basic way of experiencing and viewing the world, right?
00:47:29
Speaker
like just Yeah, just as we want to have a beer with our president, we want to have a beer and our laugh with our favorite writers. Yeah. um
00:47:40
Speaker
It's an interesting question. If I can think of writers I really like who aren't that funny, I'll send you a follow-up email and or I'll interrupt some future conversation we're having to blurt it out. ah Okay, so We Learn Nothing publishes, and I don't know how it does in terms of popular success, but it appears to have done really well as a critical success. How do we go from from that book to your second book of essays, I wrote this book because I love you?
00:48:08
Speaker
Well, I was lucky they let me write a second book because i don't think i i mean, I certainly didn't earn back my advance. Yeah. I have a good friend who just wrote a book and she was very keenly interested to know, well, I happened to be at lunch with her and her editor when she was kind of trying to feel out like, well, how did it do? Are you guys, you know, satisfied with its performance? And I can, ah you know, do I get to write another book? And he seemed almost bemused by this line of questioning, like, well, no, nobody buys books. Not like we expected it to sell. They don't sell. That's not why we do this.
00:48:44
Speaker
Um, I don't
Publishing 'I Wrote This Book Because I Love You'
00:48:46
Speaker
know. It sold well enough, I guess, or got good enough reviews, or I don't know what the calculus is at publishers, but I got to write another one and I just wrote another book of essays and, um, it ended up being, you know, they, they both, I guess, have vague focuses.
00:49:05
Speaker
Um, and the first one was much about friendship and the second one was about romantic relationships or sexual relationships. Not entirely. They, there's a lot of overlap. Um, that title made more sense with the drawing I originally did for the cover, which was someone who looked like he'd crawled a thousand miles with this thousand page manuscript that he was plopping down at the feet of an. Okay.
00:49:28
Speaker
Rather than, um, a man hugging a pillow with a, a print of a fifties starlet on it. Uh, yeah, I'm trying to remember who that is.
00:49:40
Speaker
i think it's, um, oh, she was also an ah an inventor and I'm blanking on her name. um Sorry, we'll edit back in the part where I remember her name. It's it's okay.
00:49:51
Speaker
It's a great photo by Nina Lean, who was a commercial photographer who had a very kind of arty and surreal edge to her work. um
00:50:02
Speaker
Hedy Lamarr. That's who is. Okay. You don't need to edit it in. Yeah. See, sometimes i I go back to a George Eliot book. I loved middle martin so i'm just like okay i'm just going to go through the whole george middle martin is an amazing book yeah the whole george elliott canon and then i'm just reading it it's just like oh just another 19th century book about class and then i read an austin you know i try to go through all the greats i'm just like none of this is relevant to my life but when i read someone something like
00:50:34
Speaker
um Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or I wrote this book because I love you. I feel like it it's got the same richness and elegance of prose that I would desire from those 19th century English books.
00:50:51
Speaker
um But it has a lot of relevance to my life because you know I'm 41, but you know these past years navigating love and romance and sex and as like a straight heterosexual guy it's it's few and far between what i can read that's going to give me a little bit of wisdom some anecdotes guidance advice just kind of learning from someone else so that's what i i just i just ate that book up does does that any of this resonate with you
00:51:27
Speaker
Well, sure. It's funny. It used to be that the entire Western canon was by and for the the straight white guy. um Well, you know, ideally you're writing, I mean, i this will sound really hubristic and pretentious, but I'm always writing in hopes that someone a thousand or two years from now would be able to read my book and and like it and relate to it.
00:51:53
Speaker
and And I imagine... Elliot was too, but you know, the circumstances of the society you're in are so particular and ah ours is a very strange moment in history and there's a lot to navigate. And I remember, I think in in one of his books, Kim Stanley Robinson says, it's really, your peers are the only people who are ever going to really understand you.
00:52:23
Speaker
Um, you know, you can, you can read Montaigne or Seneca and they sound very much like real 3d people talking to you about the same kind of problems you have, but they don't know what it's like to try and, you know, date in the 21st century or yeah even just reclaim what's left of your fractured attention span from the internet or, uh,
00:52:49
Speaker
you know, be in a country that that calls and itself a republic in which you have no power at all. um All that stuff is very particular to to where we are and when we are.
00:53:00
Speaker
um So, you know, I remember when I was probably 14 complaining to my writing teacher that it seemed like everything had already been said. well Like, well, yeah, but Everyone needs to hear everything all over again, every time.
00:53:18
Speaker
ah So you have to say things in the contemporary vernacular so that people can hear it. um And, you know, every generation, there's all these new people who have never heard anything.
00:53:31
Speaker
And for a book like this to get written, two things need to happen. the the The culture of the publishing industry needs to be open to that sort of voice, but the writer himself needs to be very open and unguarded and uncensored to kind of put so much of his experiences and and soul and vulnerability on page. You don't seem to hesitate at all when it comes to those things.
Honesty and Risks in Writing
00:54:02
Speaker
Well, i wonder I wonder, there's probably stuff I wouldn't write about, ah both spare other people and also to spare me ah from looking bad. But if I think if you're going to undertake to write at all, why bother if you're not going to try to be as honest as you can be within those parameters? I mean, why not?
00:54:31
Speaker
talk about what your life is about what life is really like to you. i mean, otherwise of what value is it? Um, it just, it seems like, I don't know.
00:54:45
Speaker
What's a good example. It'd be like cheating on the crossword puzzle. Like what's even the point? Why are you doing this? So the point is to be ah uncensored and we just got through, a period of censoriousness um where a lot of people were felt very reluctant to say what they do. And I have a few job applications out right now. So there's a lot of things I don't want people ah to read, especially those who are looking over my application.
00:55:15
Speaker
Did you over these past years, five or six years feel any hesitation, any reluctance, or were you kind of unaffected by this culture? um I would say I was like, if if you're talking about the kind of censoriousness on the left,
00:55:33
Speaker
Yeah, like around issues of of gender and race and stuff like that. that I mean, i I would say that I was most keenly aware of that in teaching um because you can really see those currents ebb and flow in the classroom.
00:55:51
Speaker
Like, you know, for us. Without any editorial comment on it at all, I just ah would observe that for a while, you pretty much needed to ask people what their preferred pronouns were.
00:56:04
Speaker
It was just a thing you did, like introduce yourself or what's your name and so on. um And in the last couple years, it's not so much anymore. It's not expected. I don't know i whether that's a good or a bad or indifferent thing, but it is true.
00:56:18
Speaker
And there were times when you approached teaching a text like, oh, Michael Hare's dispatches that uses a lot of racial epithets, not necessarily in a racist way, but with a lot more trepidation than you you had before.
00:56:34
Speaker
And I don't know i don't know where now. that is now um but you really can feel the cultural currents, uh, in a classroom.
00:56:48
Speaker
Um, in terms of my own writing, I would say mostly it was a kind of glum feeling that maybe, uh, the world was not clamoring for the thoughts of straight white so much anymore.
00:57:02
Speaker
Um, yeah which, you know, is inconvenient for me and a little depressing, but fine. I mean, it was nothing but straight white guys for 5,000 years. ah So it's fair that other people have their turn, but it's, yeah, it's it's too bad if you feel like you've got stuff you want to say. But, you know, no one's stopping you from writing.
00:57:27
Speaker
And, you know, the fact that you're talking... about applying for jobs and so on, does remind me, I should say, that I i didn't have much to lose.
00:57:38
Speaker
Like, I'm not married. i didn't have a day job. but So I was freer than a lot of people are to say things that are potentially self-incriminating might come back to haunt me.
00:57:52
Speaker
I see. But you have some things that were probably ill-advised. Like, I wrote a whole essay about teaching at Sarah Lawrence for the first time. And it's it's not an all-women's college anymore, but it used to be. And it's still mostly women. It's like 70, 30.
00:58:09
Speaker
thirty And my friends gave me a lot of, I think, mostly good-natured shit about being around all those young women. And, you know, I just i wrote about that...
00:58:20
Speaker
And i I contrasted it to a story about an affair I'd had with a much younger woman. And I was writing about sort of transitioning from thinking of myself as just a free agent in the world um to someone who is in a position of ah authority and of caretaking.
00:58:38
Speaker
over younger people and navigating that. And that is some tricky stuff to write about if you have an eye toward a career in academia.
00:58:49
Speaker
And maybe it was little ill-considered, but ah so far as I can tell, it didn't get me into any trouble. and and and And how does teaching figure into your life? Is it just a ah way for you to kind of continue the writing life on the side, or is it more significant than that?
00:59:07
Speaker
No, I really like teaching. i um Whether I'm good at it or not is not for me to say. You'd have to ask my students, but I really enjoy it. um It's good for you to be around younger people.
00:59:26
Speaker
And it's also helpful to have to articulate the ah principles and what to call them, you know, just the rules of operation of your own writing to to other people.
00:59:44
Speaker
um And it's, I don't know, it's really pretty easy and fun. You're showing up once a week to talk about great books and read each other's writing. it's It's a thing that adults arrange to do for fun.
00:59:59
Speaker
um And it's it's school, you know, when you're young and you're paying for it. because ah Have you had like a special moment of pride as a teacher that comes to mind?
01:00:11
Speaker
Well, I'm very proud of my former students who have become writers, um some of whom are already way more successful than me.
01:00:23
Speaker
um And yeah, I
Impact of Essays and Friendships
01:00:27
Speaker
adore them. And I'm, i'm yeah, i feel very ah avuncular, if not fatherly about them. um But
01:00:36
Speaker
Beyond that, I would say there are a couple moments in teaching where and also I should backtrack and say, I'm also proud of the ones who just became extraordinary adults. ah You know, that writing wasn't what they were going to do with their lives. They just took a writing course, but they went on to become interesting and delightful human beings in the world.
01:00:57
Speaker
um But I've had a couple moments in the classroom or in conference where I should say that for the most part, I feel like I'm just running a study hall.
01:01:07
Speaker
Like the way you become a writer is you read a lot and you write a lot. And I provide a framework for them to do that. And, you know, I show up and try to say smart things, but that's not the important part of the class. um But once in a while, I feel like I accidentally say a smart thing and I'm pleased about that.
01:01:23
Speaker
Like I remember...
01:01:27
Speaker
a student had written an essay about the family cat. And she more or less said in the essay that she she herself hadn't been particularly attached to this cat.
01:01:38
Speaker
And in conference, I was asking her, why did you write this essay then? Like, what is this essay really about? We were kind of floundering about looking at different details in it. And there was there was a bit where she mentioned that her dad used to pet the cat with his foot in an absent-minded way while he was reading the paper.
01:01:56
Speaker
um And I that sort of struck me. And I said, so. What's story with your dad? Where's he? She said, oh, he died a few years ago. and So that's what this is about.
01:02:09
Speaker
I thought, OK, so that's what your essay is about. Yeah. Like, that's why you're writing your way very obliquely at that. um And I have no idea if that was right.
01:02:19
Speaker
I don't even know if that student would remember that conversation or if it seemed especially insightful to her. But to me, it felt like a rare moment where I guessed right or where I was on to something.
01:02:32
Speaker
um I mean, I think I was able to give pretty good nuts and bolts technical advice about improving their writing. But. The real interesting conversations are when you have to get down into what the piece is really about and say, well, can we get any deeper here? What what would make it what would make this more interesting? How can we get into some terra incognita?
01:02:54
Speaker
um That stuff is what I remember and feel sort of proud of. that That's where I feel like I'm doing my job. Like not not just the million times you have to give them the same kind of advice about prose.
01:03:10
Speaker
And I'm sure a lot of your fans are wondering if you have a cat now because you've written about your your previous cat, plus his or her heart, in some of your essays. are Do you have a cat now?
01:03:22
Speaker
I do currently have a cat. ah my My girlfriend originally got him as a kind of proxy cat for me. She and g I met, we got together during the pandemic. It was a long distance pandemic relationship, but she got a cat.
01:03:39
Speaker
because I couldn't have a cat where I was then. um And so he was my proxy cat. And like, I was just in an apartment where the owner wasn't going to allow pets. So I didn't get to have one. But now we live in the same place and he is my actual cat, not a proxy cat. A long distance pandemic relationship. I'm not even going to ask how you guys remained intimate during.
01:04:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's all very calm. Well, we traveled by train a lot. Oh, train. Goodness. to um What do you live in? Belgium or something? ah Well, US does have Amtrak. and And back then it was a way you could travel and encounter no other human beings. You could get yourself a little sleeper car.
01:04:20
Speaker
I found it interesting how when you were 13, you said you had this dream of being a writer in a circular Montana house with a Puma. So there's always been writing and cats and yeah the cat uh yeah and you know in some respects my life did not conform to the outline of my future life but in a lot of respects it sort of did like i i lived for a long time in a triangular house and i had a cat okay we've gone from circled the triangles yeah um
01:04:57
Speaker
ah let's Let's talk about some of your your old essays just for ah second there, because I'm sure a lot of the Tim Crider fellow fanboys are wondering kind of if any if there's any interesting updates to these stories. Now, one of my favorite ones is about your friend Ken and his obsession with with peak oil. And yeah it sounds as if your friendship was ruined because of his peak oil.
01:05:25
Speaker
obsession and i'm not even sure what peak oil is is it just when we run out of oil and don't have anything else in place uh yeah i mean specifically that phrase refers to the historical moment at which oil production has reached its maximum and will never be as great again but More broadly, it means we're going to run out of petroleum eventually, and there's no energy source that can possibly replace it. And our civilization is completely dependent on that for more stuff than you realize, and it will all collapse.
01:06:01
Speaker
Now, my like my question here is, do you feel any... ah vindication or schadenfreude that we have not and probably will not experience a peak oil collapse.
01:06:15
Speaker
ah No, no. I mean, I never thought he was necessarily wrong about that. I simply, I wasn't informed enough to have an opinion about it.
01:06:26
Speaker
I mean, he had really done the research and he was absolutely convinced. I didn't know what I thought was that he was making himself very difficult to be friends with because he was monomaniacal on this subject.
01:06:40
Speaker
As indeed you would be if you thought your friend's survival was dependent on them listening to you about this. um But yeah, I mean, I i think he would argue our friendship ended because I wrote that essay.
01:06:55
Speaker
um And, you know, I think he was badly affected by it. And or felt himself badly affected by it. And I feel badly about it. I i think I don't, I can't say whether I would have acted differently knowing what I do now, but I certainly think differently now about writing about people.
01:07:17
Speaker
Like I approach it with a good deal more caution and circumspection because I'm aware it can do damage. What was going through your mind then? Was it just the the art form that you were dedicated to? This book, this essay, I need to make it as good as as possible and contain the most juicy nuggets about my life and friendships and whatnot.
01:07:38
Speaker
Well, it's always tricky to go back and try and recreate what your motives were in a moment because you're often falsifying them in memory. But it just seemed to me like it had become too interesting not to write about.
01:07:54
Speaker
and it just seemed like a good essay and, you know, in the way that something's too funny not to turn into a cartoon. Um, yeah, I mean,
01:08:08
Speaker
you know, I think he probably felt that I was just opportunistically exploiting him for the sake of, uh, putting a good essay in my book, but I just felt like, well,
01:08:19
Speaker
i don't I don't feel like you can spend years talking to someone about something and then forbid them to write about it. ah you know you were And you were as fair as could be at every...
01:08:32
Speaker
you know Well, often as you could be in that essay. I'm glad do you think so. He didn't. i mean, I didn't mean for it to be an unsympathetic essay. It's just, I think a lot of people and probably more people in recent years, because a lot of people went down a lot of different rabbit holes during the pandemic and after have had this experience of some good friend just going somewhere where you can't follow and you don't get to be friends with them if you don't go along with them.
01:09:05
Speaker
i it was interesting reading that essay now in 2025 when we have figures like Elon Musk and big tech and Silicon Valley kind of in bed with the White House. And I just saw a lot of kind of Elon Musk in your friend Ken. And I don't know if that would please him or make him angry or anything like that. He was so much smarter than Elon Musk. Was he?
01:09:32
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, he's probably the smartest person I've ever known. But I mean, I don't get this sense. Elon Musk is really very bright. ah I mean, yeah, I don't. I don't I don't know either. But I mean, you have to kind of look at his like billion dollar industry and be like, there's got to be something there.
01:09:54
Speaker
I mean, I guess you can hire a lot of talented and smart people. He mostly seems to delight in firing people though. That's his favorite thing. and When you look at his his Twitter account and his behavior, and you could point to a lot of political leaders here, it's just like, something like some like a Jordan Peterson. Sometimes he says this unbelievably smart thing, but if you look at their Twitter feed, it's just like, what are you, a 14-year-old boy? yeah i mean, this is why you don't say everything you think.
01:10:23
Speaker
ah This is why like you spend several years before you put out a slim book of essays is to make sure you've taken out all the stupid stuff. Um, yeah, I, Twitter is not a good, um,
01:10:36
Speaker
form of writing. Gotcha. So, so, so the other thought I had about that is kind of sociopathy and art. And especially when you're doing essays or a memoir, sometimes the best stuff is the juiciest stuff, the the stuff that's going to complicate
Balancing Art and Relationships
01:10:57
Speaker
friendships. And you kind of have a decision to make is like, is this, is this for the art form? Is it, or is this for preserving relationships? And it sounds like you've, you've been on a journey there. Yeah. Well, I think it remains, um, I don't have any blanket policies about that stuff. It remains like a case by case judgment call every time. But I think that that can, as contributed a lot of important new information to my, my judgments.
01:11:27
Speaker
Um, yeah, somebody who was it, wrote that, you know, writers are just, they're not nice people. Or rather, it's not it's not a nice thing to do.
01:11:41
Speaker
i mean, you're there's ah there's a part of you that is very dispassionate and detached and is just observing rather than, um I mean, there's a kind of of close attention that comes with love, but there's another kind of attention that is just ah a lot more alien and cold. And you're you're trying, you just, what you want is just to see what things are like, you know, you're just, just watching the world and trying to to get the most accurate read on it. You can, and not necessarily be favorably disposed toward your subject.
01:12:21
Speaker
um You know, Janet Malcolm wrote that great book, The Journalist and the Murderer, about how everybody always falls prey to the delusion that this writer is going to tell my story. They'll tell my side of it. And at last, everyone will will see the way you know things the way I do. And always they're betrayed um because that's not the writer's job.
01:12:42
Speaker
um And how do you see yourself? Because on the page, like, yes, you're using, i don't want to say using, but you, you know, you talk about, you write about your relationship with, with Ken.
01:12:56
Speaker
um But yet you're also very self deprecating. You're sincere. You know, there's a lot of, a lot of your soul.
01:13:06
Speaker
on the page, do you view yourself as that kind of person sitting against the wall observing who's dispassionate or or what? It's an I mean, I think it's just an aspect of what you do as an artist. I mean, i mostly write about people I really like or love. I have I have a lot of friends um and a lot of close friends. And they're mostly my subjects.
01:13:31
Speaker
um But, you know, we can all be quite devastating about our friends' hilarious foibles. um ah ah just Someone like Harold, who's, you know, a constant character in your book, he is he okay with how he's represented?
01:13:48
Speaker
Is he having a good laugh when he sees himself in your book? Oh, yeah. I don't think he has any problem with that stuff. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, i mean I mean, there may be other things that he would be sensitive about if I wrote about them, but though the kind of Rabelaisian way I portray him, he I think, is ah is a caricature he endorses.
01:14:08
Speaker
It was interesting reading your books because... here in in britain and i'm american living in britain but here in britain people can kind of tell your like social class just by like one word you say um and there's this this this john jonathan raybon book i think it was old glory or no he was it was something else where he was kind of um doing the perimeter of britain in a boat or something and he gets off shore and he talks to someone and he says one word to this working class guy. And in this one word, there's this amazing exchange of information. Like Jonathan Rabin has all this wealth and education and, and blah, blah, blah.
01:14:45
Speaker
And one of the things like I didn't quite, I couldn't quite pin you down, tim on like where you're from and your cultural background, because you're very are you are erudite and educated and um you're a master of words, but it sounds like you're also hanging out in like,
01:15:04
Speaker
dive bars with who you might describe as like uh retrobates reprobates so it's very hard for me to kind like where are you like a prep school guy or are you working class guy i couldn't figure you out prince hal in uh henry the fourth is that you kind of uh i mean you know it wasn't really ever destined to royalty or anything uh don't know i think my I mean, I think I sound like that because I'm American. I watched a lot of TV and, you know, read a lot. And so I sound like all that stuff.
01:15:39
Speaker
I mean, Robert Stone writes in his memoir about the 60s, about how much more diverse the country really was before TV. um He talks about he was at...
01:15:52
Speaker
Bainbridge Naval Base, which is about which is near where I live in Maryland. ah And they served what they called pizza pie in the cafeteria one night.
01:16:04
Speaker
And some of the guys put ice cream on it because that's what you do with pie. And they'd never heard of pizza. oh my god Yeah. Well, and that was the sixties, but it was the early sixties, which is a whole different century from the late sixties.
01:16:17
Speaker
um And now, you know, everybody just kind of talks the same. I mean, I've read a lot, so I sound, ah you know, erudite.
01:16:28
Speaker
um But you know my my parents were from two different places, Ontario and Ohio, and I grew up in Maryland. So I just have kind of ah mid-Atlantic American voice.
01:16:41
Speaker
um And I guess we were like upper middle class. My dad was a doctor. mom was a ah teacher of nursing. But I went to public school with people from all kinds of class backgrounds.
01:16:54
Speaker
i never i never I didn't go to private school or an elite prep academy or anything like Olden Caulfield. You don't write about your your dad much, but it seems like when you do, you write with some admiration.
01:17:08
Speaker
And I remember one passage in one of your books where you talk about how he told you not to get just some dumb job. That's right. Yeah. And was that like a meaningful...
01:17:21
Speaker
moment for you. Yeah, no, it stuck in my head. Well, he was, he had been diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed him by then. And I don't think it's the kind of thing he would have said to me even a couple years earlier, but you know, ah diagnosis like that changes people's perspective. And I think he, um, must really have believed in my talent.
01:17:47
Speaker
he would He was, he was, ah very busy guy, but he made time for me doing things that were sort of sneakily getting me to be more ambitious than I really was or am. Like we took night classes together in subjects that interested me, like music and astronomy.
01:18:09
Speaker
Um, And kind of unbeknownst to me, these were like real college courses for college credit. And I was amassing all these college credits. But mostly we were just like spending time together and in learning neat stuff about Mendelssohn or relativity.
01:18:27
Speaker
um But yeah, he was, he had, I think he had hopes for me. And it was a very surprising thing for him to say coming from him. Not what I'd expected, but Yeah, I think he must have felt at that point like, you know what?
01:18:42
Speaker
Life is short. don't Don't get some dumb job where you're wasting your time. You should to dedicate yourself to cultivating your talent.
Influence of Family and Future Thoughts
01:18:53
Speaker
And I think you write that he died kind of early in your in your life, but like while you were in college or something in your 20s. I was not long out of college, I guess.
01:19:03
Speaker
Yeah. So he didn't get to see your meteoric your your meteoric rise and yeah in world of literature that's how i think of it um yeah no i it's too bad i regret that i wish he i wish he had seen his faith in me vindicated but you know what do you think he would say think he'd be enormously proud of me i think he would have found my writing very funny um You know, my mom loved it when I started getting published in the New York Times because like she couldn't show her friends my obscene, ridiculous city paper. card
01:19:39
Speaker
It's like a little alt weekly rag, but New York Times, her friends have heard of that. That's prestigious. that Moms love that shit. That's legit. And you you describe your dad as being busy. And one of your most famous essays is um Lazy, a manifesto where you lament the state of busyness in everyone's lives.
01:19:59
Speaker
um And you describe your ideal day. And this sounds perfect to me as I'm reading this four and a half hours of work, afternoon errands, and then seeing friends reading or watching a movie in the evening. Are you are you living that life are or are you busy these days?
01:20:17
Speaker
No, I'm not terribly busy. I'd like to be a little bit busier than I am right now, actually. ah I mean, my life is logistically very complicated right now because I've been semi-homeless for a while, but um homeless in the cushiest possible way, could say.
01:20:33
Speaker
you you It looks like you're in a home for the listeners here. I can see where you are right now. It's a very nice home too. ah Well, I would say like like a lot of people, I got very isolated and withdrawn in the pandemic. And I really, i don't know, some people wrote books in that time, but I just watched a shitload of movies is what I did.
01:20:54
Speaker
um Some really good ones. I used to i had a friend I simulcasted a movie with every day, but I and didn't get a lot of work done. And i just feel like my attention span got shattered and I've been...
01:21:09
Speaker
<unk>re very gradually working my way back to normal levels of social interaction and attention and work. So um I just talked to my agent yesterday about writing the next book, and I would like to be a little busier than I have been. You want to be more focused on this yeah book, more productive. And and you kind of teased it a little bit in one of your Loaf, The Loaf essays. It's about, what is it about the the future history? can you Can you tell us a little bit more about the book you're working on?
01:21:41
Speaker
Well, there's a couple books I have in mind. There's one project... that my very first editor at Simon & Schuster is no longer there, but she remains secretly my editor for life. And she was for a while at a small publisher called Melville House, and they were doing a series called The Future Series.
01:22:04
Speaker
modeled on a similar series that was done many decades ago. um And there's short volumes, each of which is called the future of blank.
01:22:15
Speaker
ah thing And some person with some claim to as expertise in that area writes that book, um like the future of songwriting ah or the yeah I forget some of the other titles, but because I'm a wise ass, I thought, oh, I will write the future of the future.
01:22:33
Speaker
um And that fell through because she's no longer at Melville house, but I might still write that book for another publisher because I got very interested in reading a lot of future histories and utopias and dystopias and ah the really boring speculations of the singularity people, the tech bros who think that we'll all download our consciousness into machines soon.
01:23:01
Speaker
um And I got mostly interested in like digital,
01:23:07
Speaker
drought of any positive visions of a future these days. um Like people find it just about impossible to bear contemplating the future. Like they can't really see anything beyond apocalypse,
01:23:21
Speaker
um which is not healthy. um Like there's Star Trek, but that's really just a relic of mid 20th century culture. I would love to write something ah that restored a little perspective to people.
01:23:39
Speaker
Because, you know, civilizations do rise and fall, but, you know, humanity goes on. And like, you I am still rooting for America to pull out of its current nosedive. But even if not, it's not the end of history. And I think people will survive climate change.
01:23:59
Speaker
Um, because we're, there's a lot of us and we're very adaptable species. So there might be ah bottleneck, but we're going to be around in a thousand years, I think. And,
01:24:11
Speaker
What kind of future do you envision? It doesn't sound like one the tech bros, the techno utopians would draw, would illustrate. What do see? Practically, somebody wants the future that they do. I mean, those guys hate being human beings. I mean, they're like the same people who invented Soylent so they wouldn't have to eat because eating is such an odious chore to them.
01:24:35
Speaker
um I don't know. they're just very They're people who don't like being people is my impression. um I don't really know. You know, I've mentioned a couple of times the author Kim Stanley Robinson in our conversation. He's one of my favorite living writers, and he's a pretty indefatigable optimist about the future.
01:24:55
Speaker
And you know it doesn't mean jet packs and bubble dome colonies on the moon. i think he thinks of optimism as a very tough-minded, resolved state of mind, um not empty-headed and you know cheerleader-ish.
01:25:14
Speaker
i I like to think of the future as if looking into the past, because I think there's so much from the past that we could borrow that would Enrich our lives. And i'm that's why I'm very inspired by kind of some de-extinction movements to kind of bring back the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon and to kind of reimagine a reanimated North American...
01:25:38
Speaker
landscape so if we're imagining futures lessons of jurassic park ah exactly exactly but just kind of let's let's not go back to the jurassic just the the place the scene please um so that's the future i i would like to imagine that i would like my great greatg great great great and 10 more times great grandchildren to live in yeah well Robinson wrote a ah trilogy called The Three Californias in which he, it's not a sequential trilogy. There are three alternate futures with the same cast of characters.
01:26:15
Speaker
And one is just kind of an extrapolation of the present. And one is ah post-nuclear dystopia. And one of them was a kind of ecological utopia.
01:26:26
Speaker
which was a little like what you're describing, like a sort of rewilding and ah restoring ecological balance um and living in a more sustainable way.
01:26:39
Speaker
i mean, I worry we're not, we're very dumb, stubborn species, and we're not going to do that unless we suffer catastrophic consequences of living the way we are, which soon enough we will.
01:26:50
Speaker
um But i I don't have any great ideas yet about what I might propose in that book. But I guess I i um ah recently was thinking about Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.
01:27:07
Speaker
Did you ever read that? No, but I know of it.
Preserving Knowledge for Future Civilizations
01:27:09
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, of course, way more than a trilogy by now. It's a franchise. But ah the premise in that, he really was just trying to to rewrite Sir Edward Gibbons' Decline and Fall the Roman Empire in a science fiction guise. And the premise is that the Galactic Empire is falling. And the goal of the heroes of that book isn't to stop that because that can't be stopped. The goal is to try to preserve knowledge and shorten the period of barbarism that's going to ensue and lay the foundation, hence the title, for a better civilization.
01:27:44
Speaker
Um, and I don't know, there's not any one thing that we should be doing right now. There's room for a lot of different people to do a lot of different good things, but yeah, maybe, maybe some cabal of people is working on laying the foundation for the next civilization that will be, you know, a little better than this one, the same way the enlightenment republics were a little better than the monarchies that they replaced.
01:28:08
Speaker
I would, I would definitely want you in that cabal, Tim. Um, And yeah yeah yeah, I've taken up so much of your time, Tim.
Film Preferences and Recommendations
01:28:17
Speaker
Let's just get to the last question, which is, um what do you recommend? Are you reading something aside from Moby Dick or watching something? Or do you have any recommendation for the listeners?
01:28:28
Speaker
Yeah. um My next, I think it'll be the next essay I publish on Substack is about movies and how like i've I've lost interest in movies that like tend to win Academy Awards because they're good.
01:28:43
Speaker
like I'm just not that interested in good anymore. like I'm more interested in things that are more interesting than good. like Things where while I'm watching them, I don't know what I'm watching.
01:28:55
Speaker
I don't understand what this is what I'm supposed to feel. And I love movies that make me feel kind of like I did when I was a kid or a young adult watching movies. And I just didn't know anything.
01:29:05
Speaker
what to expect. The context isn't there. The form isn't there. Right. ah So I guess a couple movies I saw this last year that fell into that category for me were Rumors by Guy Madden, which is about a G7 summit.
01:29:22
Speaker
That's all I knew about it going in. And it is an endlessly surprising film. And I found it in the end kind of surprisingly moving um and very funny throughout.
01:29:35
Speaker
And the other one is Christmas Eve at Miller's Point by, ah
01:29:44
Speaker
is is it Tyler Tamina? I don't know. Tyler Tamina or Taylor Tamina? ah he's He's made a few films and he seems kind of interested in showing us American rituals in a way that makes them very strange and alien.
01:29:59
Speaker
And the previews for that made it look like a Christmas movie. Like, oh, the whole family gets back together for one last Christmas. But you could kind of tell from the preview there's something a little off and not right about it. And indeed, that is what that movie is like. It is not a normal Christmas movie at all.
01:30:17
Speaker
There is something just slightly surreal and strange throughout about it. like the dialogue, like every line of dialogue makes sense, but together it doesn't make sense. It's like it was written by AI. I mean, it sounds kind of Lynchian is. Yeah.
01:30:37
Speaker
Uh, It's not the tone of Lynch, but it has the same. It's similar in that it uses very non-naturalistic means to get at some emotions you otherwise don't have access to.
01:30:52
Speaker
ah If that makes sense. Like it's surrealist in the way that Lynch is surrealist. um And, you know, there's real emotion in it, but it's, it's,
01:31:05
Speaker
it gets at it in a very oblique sideways way. um And those films I just found sort of jaw dropping while I was watching them. Like, what is this? What might possibly happen next?
01:31:16
Speaker
And I love that feeling because it gets rarer and rarer the more art you absorb and the more stuff you see. um Amazing.
Humorous Anecdotes and Promotion
01:31:24
Speaker
ahll put I'll put them in the the show notes for everybody see. So,
01:31:28
Speaker
Tim Crider, the greatest living writer in the English language. It's been a huge honor and thrill to talk with you these past hour and a half.
01:31:39
Speaker
Thank you so much for Can actually add an anecdote by way of CODA? Go for it. i I thought of something, when we were talking about the difference between observing people in a cold, dispassionate way as an artist and just looking at them as someone you love,
01:31:55
Speaker
It reminded me of something that just happened to me. I've got a good friend who stayed at my nearly finished house in Maryland, and she left a lot of ah food there for me.
01:32:09
Speaker
And the last day I was there, I found a pie in the freezer. And pie, to me, it's just like a piece of cheese left for a mouse. Like, of course, carved myself a huge slice of pie and ate it.
01:32:22
Speaker
And then an hour or two later, when it was just about time for me to call an Uber and go to the train station, I began having what felt like a panic attack. Oh, okay. and eventually, that this panic attack felt very familiar to me. And I texted my friend, listen, is there anything I should know about that pie? Yeah, what's in that pie?
01:32:45
Speaker
And she said, well, that's a that's an apple ah sour cream pie with a crumble on top that, yes, does have a little weed in it. And i was both very annoyed with her.
01:32:57
Speaker
But even in the midst of my panic attack was bemused because this was such a quintessentially her thing to have done. And there's this sort of deep familiarity and fondness, like, I am mad at you, but this is so you.
01:33:12
Speaker
i I felt I just kind of loved her like she was a ah fictional character who's not someone you even need to like. You just love the character. See, I find it unfair that, you know, you're the Deion Sanders of the arts. I fit i find it unfair that you're great at two things.
01:33:29
Speaker
And I find it unfair that these little characters, crazy, wonderful things always seem to be happening to you. Well, you have to invite a lot of potentially very irritating people into your life. Maybe that's it.
01:33:43
Speaker
And that's the problem. I'm averse and allergic to dysfunction. So I don't let kind of those sorts of people come anywhere near me. So I'm probably missing out on all these anecdotes that you just kind of casually pick up.
01:33:59
Speaker
Well, there's better things in life than anecdotes. Yeah. Maybe my peace of mind is worth it. Yeah. I think you should be happy that I'm amassing the anecdotes and you get to live a placid.
01:34:13
Speaker
i'll I'll let you deal with all the. dysfunction. And I can't wait to read about more. And I can't wait to read about your future book. But yeah, again, everybody should go sign up for the loaf on Substack. I'll have that in the Substack notes and um go out and buy. I wrote this book because I love you and we learn nothing. You will be so impressed.
01:34:36
Speaker
So Tim, thank you so much. Thank you for all your kind words and and good luck with your own work. Thank you. We'll see we'll see what happens. Well, if you if you come up with something, I would love to see it. Excellent.
01:34:48
Speaker
All right.
Podcast Credits
01:35:03
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis. Original music by Duncan Barrett.
01:35:17
Speaker
Oh, oh, oh,