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Episode 271: Brin-Jonathan Butler, 'The Passenger,' and 'Giving Up the Ghost'
201 Plays4 years ago
Brin-Jonathan Butler's "Giving Up the Ghost" for Hazlitt is part memoir, part criticism, part mediation on suicide, part travelogue, but it's all Brin.
An incredible piece of writing. Settle in, CNFers.
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Transcript
Expanding Written Works
00:00:00
Speaker
My passport for being here is not like most people that are doing it. And there we are. And I don't know what happens next, but I would love to be able to write some more things like this. I was hoping after having written it, I could expand it into a book. And absolutely, I'm clear, nobody's gonna pay me to do that. So yeah.
Bryn Jonathan Butler's Return
00:00:33
Speaker
Well, he did it again, man. He did it again. It's Bryn Jonathan Butler. He's back on the show. Number five? Six? I don't know. Doesn't matter. His piece, Giving Up the Ghost for Hazlitt, is one of the greatest things I've ever read. I put it in last month's newsletter and I'll be sure to link it up to the show notes in this episode. Brynthenovera.com.
00:00:59
Speaker
I've read it twice. Part of the fun of reading pieces like this is being along for the ride with a brilliant mind, a brilliant writer. And then when the piece is done, you're like, I need a cigarette. And I don't even smoke cigarettes.
00:01:16
Speaker
Somehow, Bryn ties in Anthony Bourdain's suicide, Italo... Calvino? Fuck, am I pronouncing that right? I think so. Francis Bacon, Jose Tommas, The Spine of the Entire Thing is a relatively obscure film by Michelangelo Antonioni, titled The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson, and yes, Bryn somehow.
00:01:40
Speaker
Got 30 minutes on the phone with Jack Nicholson and folded that into this. I can't describe it, so you should read it. It's 23,000 words. It's part travelogue, part meditation, on suicide, part memoir, part criticism. It's all Bryn, man. It is all Bryn.
Creative Writing Promotions
00:02:02
Speaker
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00:02:31
Speaker
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00:02:48
Speaker
And promotional support for the podcast is also brought to you by Hippo Camp 2021. Hey, this is your last chance. It's next week. It's back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Registration's still open. I imagine there are a few spots left. Maybe not. Maybe you're out of luck.
00:03:06
Speaker
Hardwire to self-destruct. It's a conference for creative non-fiction writers. Marion Winnick will be this year's keynote. We've got a debut CNF author panel featuring Lily Danzger, Greg Mania, Carol Smith, and Janine Millett. August 13th through the 15th. Dig it. Use that promo code CNFPOD21 to get 50 bucks off your registration fee.
Recognizing Bryn's Achievements
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, Bren, man, ugh. He's the author of Domino Diaries, the Grand Master. He's been a Best American sports writing notable pick, and I think he's made the volume of Best American Travel Writing. It doesn't matter, it's just like he's got a big burnin' fastball that's clockin' mid-90s, man. And, you know, your buddy Brendan here, it's just like lobbin' slow pitch softball.
00:03:55
Speaker
It's not a jealousy thing. It's just, it's a fact. It is facts. I don't make it up. I don't know how he does it. He's just a special dude, man. I'm glad to call him a friend and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I'm his biggest fan. Big limb. But I'm gonna go out there on that edge. Show notes are at BrendanOmero.com and consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash CNFpod.
00:04:22
Speaker
I'm very behind in transcripts. Sorry, it's been a lot of my shoulders at the moment, workload wise, and I, no excuse, I'm just dragging my feet on them, but I'm working on them. Shop around, pick a tier that's right for you. Your dollars help keep the lights on at C&F Pod HQ and pay for writers in the audio magazine. You know, check out Summer.
00:04:44
Speaker
And there's a new submission guidelines for the next one at BrendanTheMayer.com. You'll forgive me.
Podcasting and Writing Influence
00:04:50
Speaker
I didn't have time to edit this podcast like I normally do, but don't fret. There's gold in every second. There's gold in the bar. He'll so riff by.
00:05:14
Speaker
I got absolutely nothing at the end of the board if you don't. It's the worst. It's the worst. How has being in the podcast sphere, how has that maybe affected your writing habits or even the tenor of your writing itself?
00:05:34
Speaker
I think it has in the sense of just gaining access to people for an hour is a little bit easier than I would have thought because with writing you'd have to have an editor greenlight an article and if it's a podcast especially if you have a few
00:05:52
Speaker
names on it upfront, when you make your pitch to these people to come on for an hour, it can really help put pressure on is the right word, but people can say, oh wow, you've had Errol Morris or Wesley Lowry or
00:06:11
Speaker
you know, gate to lease or whoever. So they say, yes.
Journalism's Challenges
00:06:14
Speaker
So it's been interesting when you're able to get somebody for an hour. I mean, with COVID and it's all remote, I much prefer doing it in person. Just learning more about the process of people who've been at the industry of journalism for 20, 30, 40, 50 years sometimes has been instructive about trying to navigate it myself where the calculus is so much different now in terms of
00:06:41
Speaker
It being really hard to make a living from it. Where the audience is right now is a bit of a challenge for me to get to in terms of my own interests, coinciding with, you know, like, do we really need the New Yorker allocating Gia Tolentino and Ronan Farrell on the Britney Spears conservatorship?
00:07:04
Speaker
I don't know, but is that the most vital story to have their aces covering? Well, it is in the sense of, I guess that's where the discourse is for a lot of people, you know, combining
00:07:18
Speaker
kind of a tabloid-y celebrity and a multi-million dollar slave story in a way. It seemed to be the way it was presented, but it's not really what I'm particularly interested in. With podcasting, I guess, I've just sought out all the people that I've been most interested to talk to who are currently alive.
00:07:44
Speaker
It's been really interesting just gaining a bit of a backstage pass into what their plan was and then the sort of unexpected derailments that happen or left turns and that sort of thing and just trying to plot out as I enter my 40s.
00:08:06
Speaker
I don't know if you feel this, but my energy is different at 40 than it was at 30 and certainly different at 20. Looking ahead at 50, as Glenn Stout told me when he turned 60, he said, I'm equidistant to 80 as I am to 40. I'm the same way except it's 60 and 20 when I turned 40. I don't know, it's an interesting thing to revisit and just try to get an assessment of
00:08:35
Speaker
what you want out of your career after a little bit of time in the game and some luck and then some misfires and that sort of thing and the politics of it. Yeah, you bring up – I have a short list of things that I wanted to bring up with you and you've already brought up essentially two of them, which was I wanted to get your sense of what your relationship is to journalism these days and also how your ambitions might be different or how they have changed.
00:09:05
Speaker
in the last in the last few years last 10 years as you enter a new decade you and I are both 41 so we're both cresting into that new decade and so it's just it's great hearing you talk about what you've already talked about which is actually two big boxes I wanted to check off in talking with you today so I don't know maybe you can speak to that a little more
Unconventional Writing Paths
00:09:24
Speaker
Well, when COVID began, I applied for every grant that I could or fellowship. And I thought finally for the first time in my life, I'm like beginning writing, I have a pretty good resume now to apply for those kinds of things as opposed to an absolutely worthless resume to apply. I have no formal education.
00:09:47
Speaker
And I had no formal credits trying to break in. I mean, I kind of had to sneak in and lie to get credentials in the boxing world, where fortunately for me, there was no barrier to entry. Yeah. It's like me and horse racing. It's like, you want to write about it? Go for it, man. No one else is doing it.
00:10:08
Speaker
Yeah, and so applying to all of these places, it was quite humbling because I was able to attract some of the people that I've interviewed in the past who are very prominent writers, often prominent award-winning writers to speak on my behalf with testimonials and that kind of thing.
00:10:28
Speaker
It didn't do a thing. So it was sort of like, okay, you're not going to get 50, 70 grand to go out and write a book. You have to figure out another way to make a living. And where my interests now are don't really have a lot of intersectionality with, I think, the zeitgeist. I think I'm more interested in
00:10:53
Speaker
plunging down a lot of rabbit holes of characters mainly from the past, but I mean a few that are contemporaneous by them. So I've tried to find my way in and utilizing the podcast a little bit.
00:11:10
Speaker
doing some reviews for things Bloomberg magazine reached out to me to ask if I would review stuff and I didn't ask what stuff they wanted me to review I just started saying yes because I I figured that I could try to make it work so I mean I even though I don't drink alcohol I have reviewed several whiskeys for them I just don't mention that I haven't actually tried it I just bring other people to try it often
00:11:39
Speaker
pretty serious alcoholics through your assessment of the alcohol, or exercise equipment, or now I'm branching off a little bit to review films. Interviewing Ken Burns about his Ernest Hemingway documentary and then PBS asking me to join panels with him.
00:11:59
Speaker
Now he has a Muhammad Ali documentary coming out in September. That's a big overlap for you right there. Ken Burns movies, boxing, that checks a lot of boxes.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, and I've always loved film a great deal. I've never seen any of these contemporaneous comic universe films. I've never read a page or seen a frame of film of anything to do with Harry Potter, which I think has sold 300 million copies or 400 million copies and made billions and billions of dollars.
00:12:42
Speaker
at the box office. So the kind of films that I'm interested in often are documentaries or sort of niche indie stuff. I do like some mainstream stuff as well, but I'm just doing my best to try to find stuff that people are curious about that coincides with my sort of curiosity. So Anthony Bourdain was one with this new documentary about him.
00:13:10
Speaker
that Morgan Neville did and I was trying actually to push the piece that you read about the passenger and interviewing Jack Nicholson.
Influences of Bourdain and Nicholson
00:13:22
Speaker
What I had intended to do was completely derailed by trying to go to the last location where the passenger was shot by Michelangelo Antonioni and then just hearing on the radio of Bourdain's death.
00:13:37
Speaker
It was interesting because I was quite repelled by him as a person, at least in the fleeting glimpses I had of his show. A friend once took me in 2016 to watch him do a talk at BAM in Brooklyn, and I just didn't like his bravado. I didn't like his demeanor. It seemed really phony to me.
00:14:01
Speaker
his suicide just really sent me into his life. And I just kept finding things that were pretty fascinating and also pretty alarming. And as I usually do, just sort of trying to create a nexus with what I'd been working on and then stumbled onto this realization that maybe some of the buttons he was pushing for me coincided with a lot of my own
00:14:32
Speaker
origins, unlikely origins to get into this industry, including by accident in a way, deceitfully having a friend send in a story I'd written, really a letter I'd written to an ex-girlfriend that he passed off as, this was written by my best friend who killed himself after he wrote it.
00:14:56
Speaker
And that was not a contrivance to try to exploit suicide to break in on my part, but it was a very bizarre way to see your words in print when you've been trying for 10 years.
00:15:11
Speaker
And I think I'd written a million words at that point without being able to sell even one. So a lot of the desperation and a lot of suicidal ideation in my teens and my 20s was very legitimate, but it was this kind of
00:15:32
Speaker
I don't know, just a weird place to land to break in as I ended the piece. A lot of what writing is, is trying to have people listen to you, to be heard. Like Laurence Olivier said to Dustin Hoffman when they were doing Marathon Man, what's my motivation as an actor? Hoffman asked Olivier and he just said, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me. I think with writers very often, it's listen to me, listen to me, listen to me.
00:15:59
Speaker
It's why we're so offended with a JD Salinger not wanting to publish. What are you trying to say that we want to publish, that we want to be heard? You're saying there's something wrong with it? And even Bourdain touched on that by saying a lot of sharing is not really sharing. As Fran Leibowitz said, it's leaking.
00:16:21
Speaker
I've always been very caught by some real discomfort about writing about personal things and then...
00:16:30
Speaker
Also, a lot of the work that means the most to me from artists and writers is the most personal, which somehow simultaneously coincides with being the most universal about the human condition that they touch upon. You listen to Hamlet. Hamlet's consciousness is fighting on humanity's behalf, even though it's all, from his point of view, solipsistic.
00:16:55
Speaker
It's hard not to just connect that I think this is the first time the characters ever been written that's smarter than its creator and Shakespeare is pretty intelligent.
00:17:07
Speaker
Yeah, so I had a chance to watch The Passenger over the last couple days, and it's such a peculiar film, but it was arresting. I almost couldn't take my eyes away from it, even though it was so quiet, contemplative, and really weird.
00:17:26
Speaker
And so maybe you can just talk a little bit about why this movie really glommed on to your consciousness when you first saw it, and I think it was 2005 if I remember right.
00:17:39
Speaker
Well, I think, as I just mentioned, my way into print was a bit of the catalyst to this story, which is somebody very similarly to Anthony Bourdain is an incredibly powerful journalist in the world. He has the world's attention for the stories that he's covering, but not just the stories he's covering, the way he tells it.
00:18:02
Speaker
has captivated the world. And for some reason, at about 37 years old, it's unclear, it's unstated. He's fallen over a cliff. There's some kind of existential crisis in his being where he's burned out and at the end of his rope.
00:18:25
Speaker
And Chance seems to offer this opportunity when somebody he's just had a fleeting conversation with the previous day in the desert of Northern Africa. And it's a strange conversation. It's quite poetic and elliptical.
00:18:48
Speaker
the next day he goes out to try to find the war that he's been commissioned to find, can't find it, and ends up having to walk home desperately thirsty, hungry, and for some reason this just pushes him off this edge to say, what am I trying to do anymore with this
00:19:09
Speaker
business uh... with this identity i have professionally that blends into the personal identity i am a witness to things but i'm not participating in my life hence the passenger i'm a passenger in my own life and i've heard many journalists uh... over the last ten years put it one way or another that they feel like flies on the wall of their own life or the recently deceased janet malcolm saying that essentially were
00:19:36
Speaker
incredibly parasitic. If we're honest about what we do, we are doing something immoral with the subjects that we find, even though we may be doing something that assists them or assists understanding of them. There's something about this that doesn't sit well with a lot of journalists. There's a kind of ambulance chaser component to it that a lot of people contend with.
00:20:02
Speaker
When Nicholson gets back to his hotel room, a kind of anonymous hotel room in an anonymous area of Northern Africa that he doesn't know, he notices that the person he had the conversation with the previous day has died and remembers that there was a mention that he had a bad heart.
00:20:20
Speaker
In the spur of the moment, in a very quiet, unobserved few moments, he decides to exchange identities with this dead person. The problem is he doesn't know who this person is, so he has to reverse engineer and deconstruct who the person is, just with a few little artifacts.
00:20:46
Speaker
a daybook with some names that mean nothing to him and locations all over Europe and it becomes this exploration of identity which Nicholson goes on this kind of quest even though he's going into the quest blind.
00:21:04
Speaker
I think I just love the idea of this and I love how so many of the most important moments in our lives happen when we're not seen and we're not performing.
Family Influence on Writing
00:21:20
Speaker
And Nicholson performs this film and especially this scene very quietly. There's none of the little ticks and antics because Antonioni told him like, don't do that shit. I want you to be real here. And
00:21:36
Speaker
So I became totally fascinated by the performance. Nicholson meant a lot to me when I was a little kid because my dad and I used to watch a lot of classic movies. And my dad in university was a theater and a film critic before he went into law school and himself was a documentarian for the CBC when he was only 18, 19 years old and was a playwright. And then he was
00:22:06
Speaker
He wrote a play in his university and the professor told him, you're the most talented student I've seen in 30 years and I just can't wait to see where you go with the rest of your career because I think you're going to be a very important voice.
00:22:23
Speaker
in Canadian literature and my dad was really never able to finish anything after that. It changed his relationship to writing and art from something that was just a natural facet of who he was to kind of a responsibility and he felt like he was a fraud and he just couldn't really go forward.
00:22:47
Speaker
I think my earliest memory was listening to him on a typewriter smashing away.
00:22:54
Speaker
always being afraid to ask him like, did it go okay? Like, are you getting close to finishing what you want to finish? And yet he never did. It was just another beginning and another beginning. And so when he introduced me to The Shining about a school teacher who's burned out with that profession and would much rather identify with being a writer, even though there's no
00:23:19
Speaker
There's nothing suggesting that he's actually a good writer in the first place. Beyond, that's how he wants to be seen. My father was capable of occupying the role of being a very good writer, I think. Maybe even an important writer. It just really colored my childhood in really profound ways. Writer's block and my dad's identity and this kind of person, he and I think I thought he was meant to be, but instead,
00:23:50
Speaker
moved to a very different role, which I think led to an increasing reliance on alcohol and a lot of self-destructive habits. But seeing Nicholson go from who I first met in The Shining, where he and Danny in the film were the same ages as my dad and me,
00:24:13
Speaker
And then, I don't know, just the unexpectedness of finding the passenger the way I did because Nicholson had hoarded it. Nicholson literally owns the film like a private work of art and he has one of the largest, most lucrative private art collections in the United States.
00:24:32
Speaker
And not many people get to see it because he's just lived on Mulholland Drive for whatever it's been since Easy Rider. So the film in a way became part of that collection because he got it in some kind of deal with MGM. And he never really pushed to have the film released. And yet I heard at some point around 2004, 2005 that it was actually his most treasured film.
00:24:59
Speaker
And he described it as the greatest adventure of his career. So I found that so bizarre. And then when I encountered the film, I just never really seen any kind of film like it. And my dad had warned me a bit about Antonioni that he hated him.
00:25:15
Speaker
when he first encountered him until his film professor sort of explained, no, these things that you're hating are actually the things that Antonioni inserts to replicate real life. Like all of the barriers to what you're looking at, the subject is shrouded in all kinds of things. Antonioni's comment is that no matter what we're looking at, we suffer the same problem. We're never really able to look at anything clearly.
00:25:43
Speaker
And the way that he manages time, as you were saying, like the pace of it is very, very unusual. And a lot of the stuff with like, for me, when I fell in love with various artists, you know, watching Andy Warhol or learning of Andy Warhol filming the Empire State Building for eight hours, I thought, what an asshole at first.
00:26:07
Speaker
And then you learn that this was a bedridden kid who very often was quite organically looking at things that he cared about for six or seven or eight hours as just a very natural extension of his
00:26:24
Speaker
perception of art and his attention span. So it wasn't him trying to be a jerk, it's just for him it was natural. And so there was something like that with Antonioni that I went into it thinking, what a pretentious bore. And then when I actually encountered it,
00:26:40
Speaker
I just never really seen or experienced anything like it. I just had so many questions. It reminded me a lot of my favorite writer, Italo Calvino, where you read Invisible Cities. For some people, it's one of the most profound experiences they've had in connection with literature. Then there are other people like Paul Theroux who just says, oh, a lot of people wax poetic about this, but it's really a lot of convoluted bullshit.
00:27:07
Speaker
I don't know that he's wrong, but it's not true for me and it's not true for a lot of other people.
00:27:12
Speaker
It seems like you have the heart of a novelist, whatever that means, and I wonder if that's something, if you could, if you could make a go of it strictly writing the kind of novels of Atalucavino and writers of that nature, if that's something that would really lock you in, or if the journalism you do and the essays you do is all the more interesting for you.
00:27:41
Speaker
Well, I tried it for a long time and was a complete failure. And I think I was trying it with where my influences were when I started, where, you know, there were a number of great novelists who began as journalists. And so I...
00:27:57
Speaker
You know, Hemingway was one of the first people I read, but I mean, so many of those novels are, the characters are based on real people and the events are often transposed, you know, a little bit, but he was not, he was not an originator of, he's not creating worlds and creating
Writing Real-Life Experiences into Novels
00:28:17
Speaker
universes. He's really drawing from a lot of real life. And I was trying to do the same, but I think I just hadn't had
00:28:24
Speaker
the experiences that were really worthy of it, you know, were interesting enough to do that. And I would love to do like, you know, the early stuff of Orwell was really influential for me. Not the fiction, but I mean like homage to Catalonia and down and out in London and Paris and a lot of his essays.
00:28:50
Speaker
But I would love to make the jump like the way he did with Animal Farm and the Dicetopias that he created. And Kafka did the same thing. I have had a few, I think, good high concept premises to develop into something.
00:29:12
Speaker
of narrative fiction, but I think I'm a little daunted about starting. So I just, I find I just outline and outline and outline, but I don't crash into it. Whereas with journalism or the books that I've been hired to write, and I'm in the odd position that all three of the books that I've published were publishers coming to me to write them. Every book that I've ever proposed to a publisher has been summarily shot down almost instantly.
00:29:42
Speaker
What do you think it is about your writing and your style and your voice and what you bring to the page that publishers are courting you to write the books that you have written, given that it's so often the other way around?
00:29:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's strange because, I mean, with my first two books, I had a very good experience with the publisher with what I handed in, where they just went relatively lightly edited. It's not to say there wasn't some course correction, and this is going on too long, or we need to streamline this or that. But I mean, fundamentally, the initial conversations I had with them about what I intended to do and what they wanted
00:30:28
Speaker
Everybody was happy after it was handed in and I was very happy editing with them and then with with my last book about the chess world. I just didn't I really didn't understand how what I was hired to do was possible in the sense that.
00:30:46
Speaker
If there is an event, I was hired to cover the 2016 World Chess Championships, and it was gonna be published two years later during the next Chess Championships. I don't know, even if you have a really good championship that happened to say, you already know what happened here, so there's no tension for the unacquainted. I'm gonna still make it compelling for you.
00:31:13
Speaker
Well, what if it's a particularly loathed championship and you're saying, hey, guess what? Let's revisit this thing that you really had no interest in in the first place. And anytime your curiosity dug into learning about it in case there was something interesting, you were told there's nothing to be concerned with here.
Publishing World Conflicts
00:31:35
Speaker
And so what I tried to do because it just wasn't a very compelling championship and the characters completely denied me any kind of access for interviewing was the gate to least thing and run around.
00:31:50
Speaker
who the characters were. And I tried to do an overview to create a bit of a buffet for non-chest people and saying at the outset, I am a non-chest person. I'm an outsider to this world. I'm a tourist to this world and fellow tourists. I have been listening to the questions that you're most interested in this. So what about we look at
00:32:12
Speaker
um prodigies let's explore the dynamic of prodigies through the lens of chess let's explore why this is a segregated game by gender because that has mystified a lot of people that i talked to that didn't know much about chess um let's look at bobby fisher as a character who as a chess player was
00:32:31
Speaker
for a period of time, the most famous person on earth. Let's talk about a game that's existed for 1500 years that was invented in the same century as toilet paper. Why nobody's been able to make money from it, even though 600 million people play it.
00:32:48
Speaker
And my editor didn't like any of this. He said, no, I hired you to do a kind of play by play of the World Chess Championships. This is not Malcolm Gladwell. This is not some sort of, you know, looking at artificial intelligence that began with
00:33:08
Speaker
Alan Turing, playing chess, playing himself as the AI. And in 1997, when Deep Blue defeated the World Chess Champion, that was the biggest event in internet history in 1997. My editor really wasn't enthused with any of this. And so I kind of got to a point where, just tell me what you want. Like, I'll completely abandon what I want to do with this.
00:33:33
Speaker
I don't know what the Grandmaster as a title even means. It sounds like a Kung Fu movie and I had hired an illustrator. I had my own title, Heavy Lies the Crown is what I wanted to call it. I had a kind of Macbeth crown that looked like a bear trap that I just thought like
00:33:55
Speaker
within chess and all that. The editor just totally disagreed with me. And so it was one of the most, I mean, it was the most lucrative thing I've ever been involved with as far as it's Simon and Schuster. And you get reviewed everywhere, you don't get reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post. And I was profiled in the New York Times right before or during the World Chess Championships at the end of 2016.
00:34:25
Speaker
But it was very eye-opening to me about what this industry is, where I was interviewed by The Times as I was reporting on this World Chess Championships.
00:34:36
Speaker
in relation to teaching boxing in the park and getting a book deal with Simon & Schuster and somehow still being on Medicaid, still qualifying for Medicaid. Fidel Castro had died. I got a completely glowing profile. Havana was the most Google searched location in the world for tourist destinations, and it moved 1,200 copies of my book.
00:35:03
Speaker
the Domino Diaries. So I just thought, boy, when you think of that confluence of events, Castro dying,
00:35:13
Speaker
Cuba opening up because Obama was opening it up to tourism and a glowing review in the biggest paper in the world. I mean, I think a circulation of 1.2 or 1.4 million, it was cover of the Metro section and the Times on Sunday, and then maybe read 10 million times online or something, and it moved 1200 books. So it definitely was an eye-opener just to think,
00:35:39
Speaker
Um, there's no bigger place to be profiled and it didn't really move the needle at all. So I wonder, is it about me? Is it about my relationship to the subject matter, what I'm drawing from it? Um, but it's, it just was an eye opener to me that you're never going to have to, you're never going to be able to stop hustling in this. I'm not one of those people where, you know,
00:36:04
Speaker
John Mayer opens up with some stupid song about, you taste like bubble gum or whatever, and he's off running into a multi-million dollar career. That's just not going to be me, but I've also been very fortunate to have a career. I'm not in debt after 10 years by some miracle, even though I came to New York
00:36:26
Speaker
leaving behind $50,000 worth of debt, trying to make a documentary about Cuban boxers that nobody in the United States has any interest in paying to watch. So I don't know why my journey is so quixotic. And I don't know, maybe from somebody's point of view, it's a cautionary tale, and yet
00:36:49
Speaker
I feel very fortunate that the main thing that I was driven by was access to people that I wanted to talk to. And I got to talk to so many of them and have good conversations. But it's not been particularly lucrative, Brendan. So I don't know why it's gone the way it's gone. But I mean, I would still keep it if I had a choice to do it over again. But I don't know that if my son, if I have a son or a daughter and they said,
00:37:16
Speaker
I want to pursue this same career. I kind of think you're crazy because I got very, very lucky even to have the career that I did.
00:37:27
Speaker
And there's always something that strikes me as fearless about your writing and the way you go about it and the globetrotting you do to chase down and follow your taste. And I wonder what your relationship is to fear and how you manage to dance with it to put out the work that I know I love reading and I'm sure countless thousands do too.
Fear and Anxiety in Writing
00:37:52
Speaker
Well, I think fear was a big thing for me. I have a lot of fear in my life, a lot of anxiety. You know, if there's two people sitting across from me at a restaurant, I feel uncomfortable.
00:38:09
Speaker
But if it's just one person, I don't really care who it is. I'm pretty convinced that I could have a good conversation with President Obama if you gave me an hour with him and it was just us alone or kind of anybody. I've always had the sense in a weird way that meeting anybody in my life is sort of
00:38:32
Speaker
the world feels a bit like a big grand central station and you encounter people who are there sitting around waiting for a train and you don't know what train they have and it's possible they might have the same ticket as you in terms of the train that you're going to ride on. But I always have this sense that like we're passing through each other's lives in some way and there's a bit of
00:38:59
Speaker
I was listening to Orson Welles the other day saying in an interview, I hate every single kind of goodbye because all goodbyes are death.
00:39:08
Speaker
And I thought, oh, I've always been very uncomfortable even saying goodbye to people. Any form of goodbye, I'm very, very uncomfortable with. And I hadn't thought that, of course, it's true. Goodbye is a prelude. It is an entree to the ultimate goodbye. And I'm uncomfortable with it. But I love the beginnings with people. So I just tend to hope that
00:39:36
Speaker
Because I'm not a planner by nature, I tend to learn to swim by diving into various bodies of water that you get away from what your habits are that way. You know what I mean? Like in the sense of if I show up
00:39:54
Speaker
When I showed up to Havana the first time when I was 20, my guide was an alcoholic on the plane who was buying antique books in Havana and then illegally bringing them back to Canada and selling them on eBay. He plugged me into a neighborhood and a community that there's no way in hell I would have ever found. I've always consciously made an effort
00:40:22
Speaker
to plan as little as I can, maybe have a destination, but the path to get there, I want that to happen as organically as possible and to allow chance and accidents to happen. You just meet so many unexpected people along the way. I think it creates a sort of framework that's a bit like
00:40:47
Speaker
You know, like in wartime, they say relationships become really heightened and sped up. And I think there's some element of that. If I only have two weeks or a month somewhere, I have to make some core relationships in order to overcome the obstacles that are in front of me to get the stories that are necessary to bring something back to readers.
00:41:12
Speaker
And I like that impetus and I like the fear that it provides because it means you're not just going to, when you see the girl that you're in love with across the street, you're not just going to look at her and observe her. You have to cross the street and talk to her and see if you can make something happen. And I'm very, very nervous and very shy and rejection really hurts me. I have very thin skin about it.
00:41:40
Speaker
But I've been rejected so many times in my life that I've learned a very useful lesson which is the recovery from rejection does improve with how many times you're rejected. It's just how much it hurts you to be rejected always stays the same. That's kind of set.
00:41:57
Speaker
And the first time I was dumped, it took about a year and a half to get over it. But the second time, it took about two weeks. And then the next time, it was much less. That's a good lesson because if you haven't experienced it, you're going to have an illusory relationship that it's always going to take a year and a half to recover from rejection. And maybe you're not going to risk it again.
00:42:26
Speaker
So, the one good thing that I've discovered, but through being afraid, which is the fear of being massively in debt, man, I have to knock on a bunch of fucking doors that I have no business knocking on, that literally it's illegal to knock on these doors in the country that I'm doing it. But I have to do it because what is the alternative? The alternative is sort of total self-destruction.
00:42:53
Speaker
There's no path forward. And so I think that I've tried to use that curse as a bit of an asset because my thought was always other journalists or writers who are coming here who maybe have better credentials or have money or have options are never going to take the chances that I will. And so that's a roundabout way of saying I don't think it's anything to do with courage. It's just I think I'm more acutely
00:43:26
Speaker
You had mentioned that Nicholson alluded or said the passenger was his greatest adventure and I wonder if writing this amazing piece that you did for Hasley, which I've read twice and have just been completely engrossed by it both times I read it, I wonder if it is one of your greatest adventures or if it isn't. Maybe what has been your greatest adventure to date?
00:43:47
Speaker
than most people.
00:43:55
Speaker
Well, I think when I embarked on the chess book beginning at the end of 2016, Trump was elected. It felt like New York City was...
00:44:04
Speaker
in a collective nervous breakdown. I literally was seeing people crying all over the subway everywhere. And this is it seems like another lifetime ago with COVID happening in between and Biden being elected. But I haven't had more than three hours sleep since I took on that assignment. It just the stress of it.
00:44:26
Speaker
I had a cat die on me, which if you're not an animal lover, I guess that, you know, what's the big deal there?
Memory and Writing Productivity
00:44:34
Speaker
But if you are, I think you understand it very much. Deeply. Yeah, it devastated me. And, you know, right now I have the brother of that cat sitting next to me on his little cat tree condo sort of thing.
00:44:49
Speaker
So I've noticed that my memory has really suffered from not being able to sleep properly. I don't know how to fix it. I just not had more than three hours sleep in the last five years. And that book was very frustrating. It's very, very frustrating to have a work put out into the world and to get pretty harsh criticism from some corners, you know, like New York Times or
00:45:18
Speaker
Wall Street Journal and what they're criticizing are things that you yourself criticize to your editors. Don't put this in here. Don't make me say this. My name is attached to this. Yours isn't kind of thing. But then it's good because you just go, fuck it. I mean, I had some people say, you were reviewed in the New York Times in six months. All that matters is you were reviewed in the New York Times. It doesn't matter what they said.
00:45:44
Speaker
So I kind of like the detachment of that, but at the time it was very frustrating to be like I am creating a track record as somebody who writes critically acclaimed stuff that doesn't sell.
00:46:00
Speaker
And, you know, almost all of my books have been nominated for very prestigious awards or shortlisted and that kind of thing. And yet they haven't made close to their advances, even though I'm not getting big advances. So there was this part of me that I had a long distance relationship and for my birthday, the
00:46:21
Speaker
The lady said, I want to take you to Spain and let's go on this quest where you want to go to see where Nicholson filmed this movie because you're so obsessed with it. And I've never written anything where I've looked back on it. I mean, it's such a weird monstrosity. I mean, what the hell is it, Brandon?
00:46:43
Speaker
23,000 words that's travelogue, memoir, annotated film criticism, an interview with Jack Nicholson where now it's abundantly clear nobody under 40 years old knows who the fuck he is, let alone cares. That's what I love about it. I'm reading certain things. I'm like, where am I? How did I get here?
00:47:08
Speaker
Well, and it became a very labyrinthine kind of piece. I mean, in a way, I was working on another piece ahead of it, like examining magic and the mechanisms of magic and like the so-called too perfect theory of magic that if it's sort of like CGI, when you look at CGI in movies, it doesn't amaze you because you know it's not real.
Artistic Turmoil and Creativity
00:47:36
Speaker
Unlike if you watch Star Wars or Indiana Jones, it tricks you and you go, wow, like that's amazing. But if it's too perfect, it loses all its splendor. And I became obsessed with this idea that why is it with magic? The moment I tell you what the secret is, it completely obliterates your connection to the wonder that was created by the trick.
00:48:01
Speaker
And if I tell you behind the scenes the stories that led to the great works of art that you love, it heightens your connection to that work. Suddenly, you know, is Van Gogh Van Gogh without the suicide?
00:48:17
Speaker
is, you know, we filled with crows. If it's not his last painting and all the ambiguity associated with it, what's our connection to it? It's just inextricable that you cannot remove the suicide from the work. You cannot remove the
00:48:37
Speaker
tremendous awareness we have of his mental illness with how lucid all of his letters are and how incredibly lucid the paintings are. His power is in total control in those paintings while he is the embodiment of mental instability and chaos and suffocation. He has no friends. He has no connection to anybody. And so I wanted to go deeply into that.
00:49:06
Speaker
Because I think a lot of what was the impetus for art, for me and a lot of the people that I've admired, is that we need to escape what is written in our own history. And so we take that history and we begin to rewrite it creatively.
00:49:25
Speaker
And art for me began with a trauma of a bullying incident where I just, it was not tenable to live within my identity. So you start, you know, I think Hemingway did this too and tons of artists do. I mean, F. Scott Fitzgerald didn't even realize that Gatsby was based on himself.
00:49:45
Speaker
and Zelda until years later, because it's so obvious it's impenetrable for us. Freud saying that drives are silent should give everybody pause that the more intimate and vital some of this information is to who we are and our identity, the harder it is for us to see it, even though it could just be like dirt on your face for any idiot can see it on your face. But if you don't have a mirror, it doesn't matter how brilliant you are to see it on yourself.
Balancing Stability and Creativity
00:50:19
Speaker
mixed feelings I had with doing the chess book where on the one hand it gave me three years of financial security that I've not had as an adult. On the other, it felt like a very mercenary thing where I was incredibly frustrated working on it and it really fucked with me. I went through a big breakup and the death of the cats. I was in a really unstable place that I needed to
00:50:39
Speaker
And so I think a lot of the
00:50:47
Speaker
embark on something blind that I felt was entirely in my voice and was the thing that I would most want to read, even though I was fully aware to do a huge piece on a film that nobody knows with an actor now that has aged out of recognition in the culture for many years and trying to do a kind of Janet Malcolm thing of this
00:51:13
Speaker
assembly of all of these different themes into one thing. I originally had it with the Atavists. They took it, I think mainly because of the Nicholson interview. And for the first time in my life, I took a kill fee when they said, look, we have a house style.
00:51:28
Speaker
And this doesn't really fit. We totally recognize there's some extraordinary stuff, but this is not our style. And I just thought about it and just was like, I need to see where this goes. I've never taken a kill fee in my life. And I just said, absolutely give me a kill fee. I was fully ready to accept that nobody would ever want to publish this thing.
00:51:50
Speaker
And then I presented it to the main editor at Haslett, Jordan Ginsberg, and it took forever for him to get back to me. He's a very busy person. And when he finally did, you know, I don't know how much rejection you've encountered in this industry, but I've encountered a lot and I just went, okay, here it comes.
00:52:10
Speaker
And he just went, I don't know how this works, but it's just one of the most incredible things that I've read. And I couldn't believe that I thought it was a joke. I honestly thought there was going to be a punchline at the end that was like, are you fucking kidding me? Like a 22,000 word piece on Jack Nicholson and the passenger.
00:52:32
Speaker
and the first time you got published, you lied about having killed yourself. This is in such bad taste or whatever. But he was just after two years of legal issues with Jack Nicholson's lawyer to use images from the film in the piece, all of which failed. Originally, that lawyer said you can use whatever you want and then ghosted us when we just wanted him to sign a paper to that effect.
00:53:02
Speaker
So we had to find alternatives, but I mean, it was sat on literally for over two years. And it was the most rewarding thing I've ever worked on. And it was absolutely the most frustrating thing I've ever worked on to get it fucking published at the same time. And it's been fascinating to see the people who read it, at least the ones who've said anything about it,
00:53:26
Speaker
all kind of landed on it. They thought it was the best thing that I've ever done and it completely disappeared within like a day. It just did nothing. So you know it's humbling but I mean would you rather
00:53:42
Speaker
Write the thing that you're most passionate about and it does nothing or would you rather do something that you have absolutely no investment in and it does tremendously well. I've had several pieces sort of do the quote unquote go viral, but I didn't particularly give a shit about them.
00:53:57
Speaker
And it's okay, but you're just sort of like, okay, you got lucky and it tapped into where conversations were. But I guess, you know, really doing a deep dive into suicide and identity and an esoteric film with an old actor, you know, an octa-generation actor, are not where
00:54:19
Speaker
people are interested in going for 23,000 words or I wasn't capable of keeping their attention, but it was something that was very necessary for me to offer, maybe just myself, but also to have it published was a real treat for me.
00:54:35
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think of it almost, and I'm sure this is part of your intent as well, is that it strikes me very similar to The Passenger in a sense because that is a movie that I, if you put that in front of 9 out of 10 people today, it'd be like, wow, what is this? There's no music. It's shot all in the daytime except for the very end.
00:54:57
Speaker
And it's just kind of this weird thing. You almost don't know what's going. You get unstuck in time. Sometimes the point of view changes and you're like, I don't even know what to make of this thing. But it's one of the most – it is the proudest piece of work that Nicholson ever did. And I imagine this piece – like I said, I read this thing twice and I love it to death. And I imagine it's going to be one of those
00:55:21
Speaker
Big game trophies that you're gonna have on your wall no matter who else likes it But that doesn't matter because this this is truly your you know your lion hanging above the mantle Well, you know, I'm the opposite of a lion hanging on a mantle I'm adopting a feral cat from Connecticut I'm the adopt the feral cat that is feline AIDS and I need to protect her out wolf from him
Metaphors and Personal Beliefs
00:55:50
Speaker
But I know what you mean, I'm just teasing. Yeah. You're talking to a vegan, so it's just like, yeah, hunting and killing animals is nothing, is in bad taste for me. No, no, no, but I know the point, your man, I'm just teasing. But I just think, you know, there are there are lots of artists that I've loved that their stuff
00:56:14
Speaker
Took a while. There's a great line that Picasso had when he had Gertrude Stein sit down for something like 85 sittings, and he just couldn't get her right. And then finally, he took a crack at it when she wasn't there for a sitting. And she came back, and she said, it's not me. And he said, it will be. And boy, when you look at it, I've seen that painting several times in the museum.
00:56:45
Speaker
I don't know who this piece is going to find, but it's been rewarding to see that those it has found had a kind of connection to it that felt similar to how I felt about it. And I'm not saying I feel that way in comparing it to other pieces or in a competitive way, just that sometimes you
00:57:09
Speaker
get to have a sustained period of time where it's like you're singing in the shower in a way that you wouldn't sing even for your partner. It's just too naked and this was one of those for me for better or worse where I just
00:57:25
Speaker
I still would like another crack at changing a few little things in it. And I understand it's a weird approach to go through the entire film in a kind of annotated way. But some of the writers that most influenced me, I'm thinking Charles D'Ambrogio, Michael Hare,
00:57:47
Speaker
And of course, I love all of Susan Sontag and Janet Malcolm and Renata Adler. Some of my favorite pieces from them are just the ones that are kind of the weirdest and the most idiosyncratic and the most personal and not just the most personal and the kind of oversharing feel sympathy for me kind of way, but where they're not sympathetic, where the jagged edges are there.
00:58:15
Speaker
This was just one for me that was, you know, like I was saying about Van Gogh and the piece. It's interesting that the person who seems the most unfamiliar to him when he does a portrait is when he does a self-portrait. And I feel kind of similar. And I've, you know, there's a little bit in there about my parents and
00:58:38
Speaker
I've always felt really frustrated after I've ever written about them that it doesn't capture how I feel about them properly because it's reliant a bit on the context of what you're talking about. Does that make sense? To mention that my dad battled alcoholism, okay, but that's different for every person who has a battle with alcohol.
00:59:07
Speaker
And their reasons for doing it are different. And this was the first time where when he read it, he said, you know, I never thought about my career in child protection law, the way that you framed it, or my reliance on alcohol being something that you were part of that ritual.
00:59:24
Speaker
But I mean, it's not child abuse, but it has an impact. And similarly, my mother being somebody that saw a number of people executed in Budapest during the Hungarian revolution,
00:59:38
Speaker
How much did that impact her in wanting to give me not just a great childhood for me, but to make up for the childhood that she didn't have? Those are good intentions, but those good intentions create a certain kind of pressure.
00:59:55
Speaker
And it's hard not just to live your own childhood, but also recreate somebody else's and be this kind of patemkin version of their fucked up childhood. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it impacted me in strange ways where
01:00:14
Speaker
A lot of my perspective was very gray and I found in doing a lot of research on Anthony Bourdain, it's fascinating to me somebody that would get a tattoo on their arm saying certain of nothing.
Society's View on Suicide
01:00:29
Speaker
that we go, oh wow, it's so humble. What a wonderful perspective. And then this documentary comes out and you have people in the film saying, don't let the suicide color who he was. The real him is not that bullshit. This was part of his trajectory all the way along.
01:00:49
Speaker
and it created a lot of wonderful light in the world too but that darkness that subterranean thing is very true as well and you can try to separate it but you're only trying to separate it to feel
01:01:04
Speaker
better about yourself and better about your illusions of how people actually function. I wanted a crack at creating a nexus of collage therapy for me in as personal a way as I could. Then you just don't know, does any of that have overlap for anybody else? I hope it does. I hope it's of some utility. I hope trying to be honest about some things that are embarrassing or
01:01:34
Speaker
I'm not a shameful person, but you know what I mean? Darker stuff or coming close to suicide a few times, even talking about it is a part of me that feels like it's sort of vulgar or garish to do that.
01:01:50
Speaker
I'm living in a country where suicide has tripled the rate of homicide. And we don't just talk about homicide all the time. It's the lowest common denominator of shallow entertainment in this country.
01:02:05
Speaker
And yet suicide has such tremendous purchase on this country. And it's this ultra taboo subject and you can't bring it up without a suicide hotline number being down there. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but I also wanted to delve into it with so many of these characters that we are passionately connected to and try to make sense of how
01:02:30
Speaker
Suicide has been, you know, it's not an accident that almost every religion reserves the most vicious punishment possible for suicides. And I think it's just because it's so frightening to us to actually delve into our own pain and
01:02:53
Speaker
We like to think that there's some sort of magical solution or silver bullet where every day all of these negative feelings or, and I say negative with quotes, we can just get rid of them.
01:03:09
Speaker
I'm very nervous about the idea that we'll have a pill very soon. And if you lose a parent, you can just instantly remove any sense of grief. And I'm kind of frightened of that. I think all feelings are valid. And even psychiatry, it's just like we've pathologized everything. So what is normal now is just so incredibly fucking narrow. And I don't know who's assigning this kind of stuff. I mean, being a homosexual was on the,
01:03:38
Speaker
the DSM until the 1970s, and why was it removed? Because enough people said, no, this is normal. Well, if they can remove it through petition, then how is this a science exactly?
01:03:54
Speaker
check in with the validity of this kind of stuff. And suicide has been a thing that I've been really obsessed with in the culture and especially with artists. I mean, as I mentioned in the piece, Mike Tyson was the first one to say to me, why is it that all of your heroes have this in common? And it had never occurred to me before.
01:04:17
Speaker
Yeah, well, for a piece that dives into so much of that and it comes right up against it and stares at suicide and death in the face, to me, this thing was just so full of life and joy. And maybe that's just because I've got a twisted mind. But I sunk into this. I don't sink into many things. And I was always just so moved by the entire thing beginning to end.
01:04:43
Speaker
and just in awe of how seeing some of the threads like the girl or who ends up being Daisy in the movie how she talks about the dust and then you bring in dust to Francis Bacon's final work of the bull and it's just mostly empty space and they're staring out at empty space so much in the passenger and it's just like I'm wondering
01:05:06
Speaker
How is, it's just amazing these threads that you were able to organize and synthesize and intellectualize
Maturity in Artistic Creation
01:05:12
Speaker
in this piece. And I was just like really an odd, just like looking at the work and then sinking into it. Well, I think, you know, I think there's something magical about people out of the gates with what they do with their work. And they're not even thinking about what they're doing. It's some of the most fun time to catch artists in any mode of expression.
01:05:36
Speaker
But occasionally, a little bit of maturity and reflection and distance from things open up other pathways that can be quite interesting to look at also. And this was a period of time where I had a few months to really meditate on some stuff, some major themes in my own life. As I say, I didn't think of it this way, but looking now, it's totally collage therapy.
01:06:05
Speaker
of this constellation of characters in art, their biographies, the biography in relation to the work, seeking out the context and the time of that work, and then just trying to bring it home. I mean, if you're wanting to join the club of these people, even if you have no business
01:06:30
Speaker
thinking that you deserve to be there or anything, you kind of have to look at your own story. I mean, very often, I've kind of thought like, what have I done to deserve to spend half an hour or an hour with a hero that I had when I was a kid, you know, calling Jack Nicholson and probing him about this film. I was just thinking, I'm nobody to him.
01:06:59
Speaker
We're going to talk for 30 minutes about it. It was an unbelievably strange conversation and what a bizarre beginning. I mean, it was sort of, had this sort of Odysseus quality where it's like the first thing he said to me was, after granting the interview, you know, I don't do interviews, right? Like, I don't do this.
01:07:22
Speaker
And I was like, well, then is this the interview or is this the preliminary discussion to do an interview? What is happening? And all the while we had a bad connection. There was construction going on in the apartment next to me in Spanish Harlem. And I just thought this is more than likely the only time you're ever going to talk to this human being in your entire life.
01:07:49
Speaker
This is never gonna happen again. This is he's gonna be dead soon What can you get out of this and some of those some of those opportunities Turn out so unexpectedly amazing and then there are others which are just weird so I mean, I think I think we all have
01:08:10
Speaker
juries in our mind with what we're doing with expressing anything and we're constantly trying to appeal to this jury.
Writing as Legacy and Growth
01:08:21
Speaker
It's worth it. Don't condemn us in some way and I don't know who's on your jury and often I feel like my jury is for
01:08:32
Speaker
one or two people that I didn't think would ever be born, being kids that I would have, just so that it might be of some use to them on their journey. I think it's really been only in the last year where I've even considered wanting to have a home, wanting to have a wife, wanting to have kids.
01:08:56
Speaker
as Nicholson said, you know, I quoted it in the piece, all of my work, I don't do interviews, I don't do TV, but all of my work is autobiography. And I don't know, I can't say that all of my work has been autobiography, because I mean, some of it's just been to pay the rent or something, right? But a huge portion of it has. And it's
01:09:21
Speaker
Like I was saying with the podcast, you get a few people, it becomes harder for the people you want to talk to to say, no, they still can't. But it just becomes that much easier when you have a bit of stuff behind you where people go, well, if those people said yes, I guess I at least should think about saying yes. And entering this decade, I just kind of think, I don't know what's around the corner, I didn't expect
01:09:51
Speaker
to meet somebody that I want to spend the rest of my life with or have kids and stuff. And then it just makes you think about what you're writing in a very different way in that a piece like this, which I think is the best thing I've ever done, if this opens absolutely no doors, then it's kind of like, well, would I rather just be writing this stuff for myself?
01:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, I would, I think. I wrote something the other day about a woman who recorded J.D. Salinger's voice and put it in a bank vault 40 years ago. After we talked, she said, you know what, Brienne? I'm going to put it in my will. I'm going to change my will and I'm going to put it in the crematorium and get rid of this goddamn fucking thing. I love this woman, Betty Epps, the most foul-mouthed, wonderful lady in the world.
01:10:43
Speaker
You know, this thing gets picked up all over the place. I mean, every major curator, not everyone, but tons of them picked up this story. And we talked for six hours, a wonderful conversation where it ended with us saying,
01:10:58
Speaker
I need to go down to Pearl, Mississippi and she invited me to have dinner with her and stuff, this 81-year-old woman. But what does Bloomberg want? They want five minutes of that conversation. And it's reduced from a 4,000-word article I hand in to 800 words where anybody could have written it. It doesn't have any semblance of who I am or my connection to Betty or the conversation we had. It's just a fucking headline. And it's a headline where people go,
01:11:27
Speaker
you know, good for Betty, good for Betty. You know, she's she stole his voice and she should destroy it. And other people saying, Betty, who the fuck are you to destroy it? This this sort of like Indiana Jones, it belongs in a museum kind of thing. But neither of these are particularly interesting to me. I'd rather go to Pearl, Mississippi and talk to Betty Epps for an evening about why this was why this thing is
01:11:52
Speaker
you know so strange this this one day where she met with J.D. Salinger that everybody wants to know about and she won't share the story so I don't know I I guess it's
Embracing Unique Career Paths
01:12:09
Speaker
I guess I've always liked the misfits and then you find out you become one. You look back and you're like, well, I have a decade and change of a career that is just bizarre and doesn't fit into a lot of boxes. My passport for being here is not like most people that are doing it. There we are and I don't know what happens next.
01:12:36
Speaker
I would love to be able to write some more things like this. I was hoping after having written it, I could expand it into a book. And absolutely, I'm clear, nobody's going to pay me to do that.
01:12:51
Speaker
So yeah. I gotta ask you one more thing about the, at one point you cite in the piece how David Locke says maybe the real subject of every interview is how you can't learn much about someone from an interview. And I was just like, oh, and that's the opening line of Domino Diaries. And I was just like, I loved seeing the parallel there between the things. And I just, I don't know, it just stuck out to me as a lover of your work. I'm like, oh cool, there's an echo in the canyon.
01:13:21
Speaker
There's echoes all over because I am sketching these things and trying to find my way in the dark a lot.
01:13:33
Speaker
And so I do create little flares to try to illuminate my path of where I'm headed because a lot of the stuff that I'm most interested in pursuing, I can have kind of a loose guide about how to get there, but I have to go on my own. And I have to go on my own to sort of deep waters that I'm not comfortable swimming and I do get lost out there.
01:14:02
Speaker
And something like this, it took a lot of time to shape this into a piece that I hope is coherent. It has an order. It has a structure.
01:14:18
Speaker
I didn't fall into it. I, you know, it had to be rewritten a lot and it had to have its own logic. And sometimes you can see that with, you know, expressionistic paintings where at first you look at it and you're like, oh, it's just chaos or whatever. But after a while, I mean, my best friend growing up, I remember saying to him, like the real artist for me is Van Gogh, like there's no, there's no,
01:14:46
Speaker
erudition there, he didn't develop, that's just pure. And he said, you have no idea what you're talking about. You have no fucking clue about how much then go developed. And go read his fucking letters and look at what a bookworm he was, what an incredible student he was, all self-educated. But that man was struggling so much to pull off the tricks that he was doing.
01:15:13
Speaker
And the fact that you just think it's natural, I mean, there are a lot of people who read F. Scott Fitzgerald and say, what a natural he is with the language. Bullshit. I'm not saying that these guys aren't endowed with tremendous talent. You don't read Joe Didion or Janet Malcolm.
01:15:33
Speaker
Where sontag and and and come away thinking like they didn't bring an enormous amount of talent but they work their asses off to pull off what they do and
01:15:46
Speaker
This was a piece I took a lot of time with so that I would not feel shitty if I didn't find an editor like Jordan Ginsberg who just got it. But every other editor I took it to, I'm not saying they didn't get it, but they didn't like it. They're just sort of like, why don't you turn it into 50 other things?
01:16:07
Speaker
Well, I wanted to turn it into what I would most want to read. And those are still the stories that I come back to, you know, reading Michael Hare's dispatches. A lot of Charles D'Ambrogio's early stuff is so personal.
01:16:22
Speaker
and strange and kind of infuriating but but as a 20 year old I felt like this is what I want to do I didn't know that you could do this and get it published and I think they're both a lot more talented than I am but but I don't care like I mean
01:16:39
Speaker
I remember reading somewhere like Billy Joel was contacted by Ray Charles to sing a duet together and he's like, how do I sing a duet with somebody that I've been imitating my entire life?
01:16:54
Speaker
And I don't think I'm still imitating Michael Hare or Charles D'Ambrosio. I was when I was 20, but this was one that I think had all my influences, but I feel like I sang it in my own voice, for better or worse.
01:17:10
Speaker
Oh, certainly for better, man. Like I said, I can't sing the praises of this piece enough. And so as always, I could talk to you for six hours, but we should probably cut it off at 72 minutes. But yeah, Bryn, as always, what a great pleasure to catch up. It's been too long. And thank you so much for the work you do. And always such a pleasure to get to speak to you on this show. So thanks so much. Likewise, Bryn. Take care. Nice chatting.
01:17:45
Speaker
Well, thanks to Bryn for the time. Ma'am, I could talk to that guy all day long. We'll listen to him all day long. And maybe, maybe one day we'll meet and grab a few coffees and watch The Passenger or some other esoteric film. Wouldn't that be nice?
01:18:00
Speaker
I know I dig it. To that point, I was writing in my journal the other day that the more people get to know me, the more I'm afraid they'll hate me. It's why I don't talk very much. I ask a lot of questions. Go figure.
01:18:16
Speaker
people like being heard like being listened to like being seen but if I let's just say let's just say I get to drinking then I start getting chatty and if I get chatty then I get all kinds of anxious and I wonder the next day if I said anything weird and well I guess they don't like me anymore
01:18:34
Speaker
Like, is that, is that a thing? Does that really happen? Is that like the crux of social anxiety? I don't know. Thanks to West Virginia Wesleyan's creative writing MFA program for the sport, as well as Hippocam 2021 for the support. Yeah, that's going to do it. Cutting this short. All right. Stay wild seeing efforts. And if you can't do interviews, see ya.
01:19:15
Speaker
you