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Episode 17—Brin-Jonathan Butler
132 Plays9 years ago
Brin-Jonathan Butler, a freelancer writer whose much-acclaimed work has appeared in SB Nation Longform, Esquire, ESPN the Magazine, and Harpers, stops by the podcast to talk about his approach to his beautiful writing.
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Transcript
Introduction to Bryn Jonathan Buller
00:00:00
Speaker
I wasn't sure whether to call you Bryn Jonathan for full or Bryn so I'm glad you cleared that up so that works out well. It was a parental decision not mine.
00:00:12
Speaker
That, my friends, is Bryn Jonathan Buller, a freelance writer whose many bylines have appeared in SB Nation long form, ESPN The Magazine, Harper's, and Esquire. He even spoke with Iron Mike Tyson for Amazon.
Bryn's Literary Works and Inspirations
00:00:28
Speaker
He's also the author of The Domino Diaries, My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions, and Chasing Hemingway's Ghost in the Last Days of Castro's Cuba. I'll let you pause so you can wipe your brow.
00:00:42
Speaker
Ready? Alright. Here's what I think you'll come away with the most. One, Bryn is really, really smart. Like, he's playing with napalm and I've got a butane lighter and a can of hairspray.
00:00:57
Speaker
I'm always glad to play the bumbling fool beside a brilliant mind, and Brynn is just that. Brilliant. Second, if you're a freelancer who gets super nervous or has a tremendous amount of anxiety and fear, your benevolent host included, then listening to this 90 minutes will light a fire under your ass and get you chasing stories. After I got off the phone with Brynn, I about charged through my apartment wall like the Kool-Aid man.
00:01:23
Speaker
Links and such are in the show notes. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with friends. Also, subscribe to my email list at BrendanOmero.com so you can stay abreast of hashtag CNF Musings, some riffs on freelancing, and other links that I may be working on.
00:01:40
Speaker
Emails ship once a week on Tuesdays at 8 a.m. If and only if I publish something on my website. Small payment for big information. Ah, and another thing. Thanks for listening. Here's the notorious BJB.
The Art and Ethics of Journalism
00:02:01
Speaker
kind of think on a similar level when it comes to the process and approach which typically makes for interesting conversations about the craft of narrative journalism. There's more like bubbling under the surface than just swooping in and then swooping out to write a report. It's really getting deeply embedded with something and I think like you and Eva and Joe, Greg Hanlon and certainly Glenn,
00:02:31
Speaker
Everyone there just does such a good job of that. I think that's a testament to just your sensibility as a reporter and a writer Yeah, well one of the things that's really interesting with Glenn is I don't think there are many people Who are editing in the realm of sports or long-form journalism whose background is so extensive in poetry. So I think you that leads him I think to curate material almost as much on the basis of sound and and
00:03:00
Speaker
language and sort of mood and emotion almost more than the ideas and just the conventional places that you go.
00:03:10
Speaker
in this in this realm so especially for me where i think like i need to i don't have a background in journalism so i've sort of been finding my way as i go so that's that's has been really fortunate for me and i think almost everybody who works with them just to again just have a fresh angle on on how to approach your stuff and uh...
00:03:31
Speaker
One of the things that's wonderful with him is he's always trying to find the best material rather than his way of doing it or even your way of doing it. He's looking for the best story in terms of the chemistry between subject and the writers. So he's just been wonderful to work with.
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, and him and Eva and even Charles Bethea, who I had on in the last episode, what I found that so many people who are really, really good at this oftentimes come at it from a non-journalistic background. Even Charles was a poetry. He studied poetry. Eva was in history. So it's like they're almost bringing a writer sensibility and then kind of learning the reporting. I imagine that's kind of a year angle. You have a deeply
00:04:19
Speaker
literal style and also I think some of your greatest teachers were a lot of the greatest writers from a lot of the 1920s expats.
Influences and Storytelling Techniques
00:04:32
Speaker
I feel their influence in your pulsating through your prose in a lot of ways. So I wonder what that's like for you as someone who doesn't have that journalistic background to then come to this style of journalism and then do this kind of storytelling.
00:04:48
Speaker
well you're you're actually right the first the first writers that i really delved into were the american greats from the nineteen twenties uh... and i guess also the russians as well because i mean any way in particular i think was uh... enormously influenced by dusty esky and told story and and i like some others that were a little outside of their like google and and some of these other guys and i mean check off in particular
00:05:18
Speaker
and if you just evaluate check off short stories on the basis of journalism in terms of documenting
00:05:25
Speaker
uh... you know a whole generation of all of russia i don't think anybody did it more comprehensively than he did really any other time really so it's interesting as a doctor that's what i always find interesting with writers is is what did their parents do what was that household like that they grew up in what's what's the orientation of their mind about how they curate stories and material and how they
00:05:50
Speaker
um comment material and I mean my dad's a lawyer my mother was a gypsy fortune teller and I think in some ways um that is a bit of my orientation too I'm looking for something a little strange and unusual um you know why would people come to a fortune teller because they've kind of exhausted hope
00:06:12
Speaker
in every other area for their problems. As most lawyers I know tell me, every time the phone goes off, it's just somebody else's bad news that you're dealing with. But you're presenting an argument. You're an advocate.
00:06:32
Speaker
like to look at people who don't have a voice and sort of turn them into a human being for people in unexpected ways because surprise is one of the biggest weapons you have as a journalist to affect people emotionally.
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't know if you've heard interviews with Gay Talise, but his father had a tailor shop, but the real sort of breadwinner was his mother's dress shop, which is right next to it, or in front of it. And a lot of women came into the dress shop and really just sort of spilled their guts to Talise's mother, and through
00:07:12
Speaker
watching his own mother sort of just hear these stories and listen, empathically listen, essentially report without the notebook. It really developed his sensibility of being able to take these stories and tell them in cinematic and empathic ways. And I wonder if your mother being a fortune teller, you kind of, you absorb some of that, some of her story absorbing sensibility and apply it to your own trade.
00:07:41
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I'm very familiar with Talise and I've interviewed him for some stuff as well. Interesting who the person is on the phone versus on the page as well. There's quite a discrepancy. Yeah. But yeah, I'm sure, I mean, my mother's house to this day has never, the front door has never been locked and there's about 10 people a day who walk in.
00:08:05
Speaker
who just feel that kind of comfort level with her just to burst in, which wasn't an altogether pleasant thing for me as a kid either because I didn't know these people and many of them were quite desperate people, as they say, who've kind of exhausted every other measure of getting counsel for their problems or direction in their life.
00:08:27
Speaker
But I noticed that while I don't necessarily believe in a lot of the same things as my mother, even if you think it's bullshit, it's still, if it is bullshit, how has she been doing it for 33 years, sitting in front of a person one on one and offering something of use to these people where they come back again and again and again?
00:08:47
Speaker
And I think a lot of it is just listening to people, empathizing with people, spending a couple hours of preparation to really absorb as much as you can about where they're coming from, how they see the world. One of the things I do with every person that I interview is, and I think it's just a base kind of primordial instinct, is how would they most like you to see them? And what are they most trying to keep from you?
00:09:17
Speaker
Those are very useful places to sort of gaining an understanding of where people are coming from because most of the time what people hide is a lot more revealing than what they want to reveal.
00:09:27
Speaker
But I like to know both and it gives me a good idea of the motivation of, you know, like Atelis, he's wearing this wonderful outfit to present himself. It's a very big deal for him, presentation, first impressions and all of that kind of thing. I would do exactly the opposite. I would try to – I would want people to make an assumption about me that's completely wrong and then surprise them so that we're going to be somewhere new that they didn't expect.
00:09:53
Speaker
that's really interesting and i've heard you know to lease speak about that about his he dresses up for out of respect for the people he's with and also dressing up to the story as he as he's want to say and uh... that said that's interesting that like you wanna poll you wanna like kind of keep something can keep something back and use that element of surprise where
Interviews with Iconic Figures
00:10:16
Speaker
where it is like, oh shoot, I didn't expect him to say that or come out with that or have that base of knowledge. Of what value do you think that element of surprise is for you?
00:10:29
Speaker
well find finding somewhere new i a m any story that i've done i've taken subjects were incredibly well documented uh... most the time the kind of people where editors will say what's left to do on that person and my job is to find something new my of finding something that people have been staring at their whole life and it could be an interview or themself i interviewed aro morris who i think most people regard is one of the best interviewers whoever lived
00:10:56
Speaker
And I wanted to understand why does he have the fixations that he has? Could it be down to some early childhood trauma kind of thing? And the moment we were there, we were someplace new where I could feel the guard was dropping. We were getting less sort of boilerplate answers, because he's got a lot of stock answers. He's incredibly bright. He's incredibly thoughtful, but he's worked through a lot of the problems that I think most interviewers present to him.
00:11:26
Speaker
So I like to just have a conversation where people don't know where it's going, but they feel comfortable sort of writing it out to see where it's going to go. And I think most interviews I find are sort of like, I think I opened my book by saying,
00:11:43
Speaker
The subject of most interviews is that you can't learn anything about people from an interview. And I think that is the subject of most interviews. So I try to avoid that, if at all possible, and find revealing things. Go places where people have been spending their whole life sort of investigating something, but miss something really glaring.
00:12:09
Speaker
and not confront them with it, but invite them to go further into that. I think I've tried to do that with every person I've ever spoken with.
00:12:22
Speaker
So what is your approach to that? In what way are you able to reach that level of depth that you're after and that essentially everyone else is after because they're saying like, well, you can go for it, but I don't know if you're going to get anything. And sure enough, you end up doing exactly what you set out to do. So what is your approach to reaching that level of depth?
00:12:45
Speaker
I think trying to revisit things from a unique angle with Mike Tyson, it's what is he famous for, for being a victimizer. That's what we knew about him. He's gone to prison for rape. He is one of the scariest people ever presented to the culture with what he was doing.
00:13:06
Speaker
But I wondered, maybe it's a complete construct of somebody who imagined this scary person because of what a perennial world-class victim that they were. And when I thought about that, I thought Tyson is sort of confessing and revealing himself over and over and over again with terms that lead to sexual abuse that he'd endured. And what I found was, despite the guy being in the public eye,
00:13:33
Speaker
like few people ever in history. He's probably one of the most documented people who's ever lived. He's been famous since he was 17, 18 years old. We're talking 30 years now. Nobody had ever asked him if he had experienced sexual abuse at any point. I read his memoir very closely. Random House sent it to me to review.
00:13:54
Speaker
And in one little throwaway comment, he mentioned that somebody did abduct him, and in his words, attempted to molest him. And then he never returned to it again for the rest of the book. So in the year after that was published, finally I got to him for an interview with Amazon, and nobody had ever even thought to ask him that question about what happened.
00:14:17
Speaker
I thought it was one of the more revealing things because if you think of him as a sex abuse victim it does open him up in a kind of entirely new light and I mean it's difficult to broach that subject a lot of the reporters I spoke to said well the reason why nobody's brought it up is you have to sit across from Mike Tyson after you've asked that question and who knows what he's gonna do so it took some tact to get there and
00:14:42
Speaker
But it's just an example of how in 30 years has nobody thought to ask him that given that he spent years and years and years before he went to prison for rape in numerous prisons around New York where this kind of thing is notorious for taking place.
00:14:59
Speaker
He was a bullied kid, he was helpless to stand up for himself for most of his lifetime. I think that's an example of trying to find something new, a way in, and there were clues, but it's just allowing that person then an opportunity to go further into that subject. The weird thing with that interview is after he did tell me it was true, while I was typing it up the next day, he gave a radio interview the next day.
00:15:30
Speaker
volunteered the information without any prompting. So clearly it was on his mind. And yeah, so I wasn't the one to scoop that story in terms of the public's awareness, but I just think it's an example of something really astounding and strange that in 30 years nobody would ask a question that I think was quite a Rosetta Stone into who he was.
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah, and it could be a lot of people also maybe just didn't care. They just wanted to talk to the machine who could just knock people out and they just want to talk about sort of the mundane acts of just pure boxing, which I know if you're really in the sport, it's not mundane. That's not what I mean. But you know like something that just goes far deeper than the black trunks and the red gloves.
00:16:19
Speaker
I think like you hit maybe it was just like, you know, people want to people have an idea of Mike Tyson. So let's just like feed into the same old idea. But like you were at it, like, wait, there's something more here. And why not? Why not just talk about it and get this open? Because it's going to be far more interesting than anything you've ever heard before.
00:16:39
Speaker
Well, and I think it's, I mean, I agree. I mean, there was a narrative that was shaped. I think largely he contributed to it. But again, I couldn't understand why the popular narrative was this guy's an animal, a monster, a victimizer. And yet somehow he's like, that's okay. Like that's, that's a headline. But the fine print of him,
00:17:01
Speaker
was a lot more interesting that nobody seemed to be talking about which is how do you stay relevant for 30 years stay on the front page and the back page again and again and again and endlessly surprise the culture while the culture never seemed to surprise him that doesn't happen accidentally might happen accidentally once or twice but not for three decades with like a culture with our attention span so it seemed like there was a lot more intelligence at work
00:17:29
Speaker
and instinctually just a preternatural ability to surprise us, to read where we were coming from and go left or go right to new places. And, by the way, to supply better quotes than any writers are writing about him.
00:17:49
Speaker
I think he delivered some of the best quotes of any athlete. If Hemingway was writing Tyson quotes, I think we'd refer to them as some of the greatest quotes that any character ever spoke. They're better than Tarantino could come up with.
00:18:05
Speaker
But we always thought like, oh, he's just behaving this way because of his bizarre pathos or whatever. I didn't believe that for a second. They seemed tremendously calculated. They were always beautifully timed. So I just thought there's a lot more to this person and why not deal with him instead of in the popular narrative that he's an idiot, deal with him as
00:18:27
Speaker
At somebody who's been the most brilliant self-marketer, I think that exists. I think you could say something similar with Donald Trump. I don't know how intelligent he is. I've spoken to a number of people who've interviewed him or been around him. But obviously, instinctually, in remaining relevant, instinctually taking people down, he's as smart as they come.
00:18:50
Speaker
on the tenth on the ten ferris show uh... podcast use talking to scott adams who's the creator of the dilbert cartoon and uh... he's like he kind of uh... scott adams kind of schooled a little bit and hypnotism as a result he's been wickedly fascinated with donald trump because he's using very very subtle hypnotic cues and kind of jumping on certain things that is kind of like
00:19:18
Speaker
just kind of like subtly swaying people in his favor and it's kind of like goes to your idea like there is there is a sort of uh i i don't know if it's sinister but you could see it as sinister or a little bit of conniving thing going on there where you'll take a little thing and just kind of spin it in such a way that it it does get certain people into a trance
00:19:41
Speaker
And so Scott Adams is just like, you know, wildly fascinated with this guy. And I think goes to what you're saying. Like, there's probably far more intelligence behind him. You don't get to be that wealthy without being at least halfway intelligent. So I imagine that there's a lot more going on behind the curtain than we realize.
00:20:03
Speaker
well i think there's i think this is the gross overestimation of intelligence in the first place there's no correlation between intelligence and judgment there's no correlation between intelligence and wisdom or insight so right away to be divorced from those other three uh... kind of conflicts with our basic understanding of what intelligence is but yet intuitively we know
00:20:27
Speaker
Bill Clinton, no matter how intelligent he is, being a Rhodes Scholar, is making incredibly stupid decisions when it comes to sex or exposing himself to scandal or destroying the Democratic Party, Al Gore's chances, et cetera, et cetera. We're working with something else that's really the rudder for what's leading his life.
00:20:49
Speaker
And it certainly doesn't have much to do with the man's intelligence because nobody's questioning that. So that's another thing that I've tried to do with this work is to reach people not with great ideas necessarily. I try to find the best ideas that I can, but to emotionally arrive at places that resonate deeply.
00:21:11
Speaker
And that's advertising, creating an emotion in somebody or music. That's what's gonna really stick, not some great idea or little conversation starter at a water
Personal Obsessions and Insights
00:21:22
Speaker
cooler. That's all well and good. But to make this stuff last, make somebody feel something that they didn't expect to feel. And Trump does that. Trump makes people feel something. Tyson definitely makes people feel something. Lance Armstrong created probably
00:21:41
Speaker
The biggest narrative that any athlete is ever come up with with the cancer jesus routine you know you can come back from this terrible illness that's affected every family in the world and you can come back better. You can come back even stronger well i think that's the that's a billionaire sorry billion dollar.
00:22:02
Speaker
Narrative that he was selling to people just by buying a wristband They were part of that philosophy and I think it was enough of something people wanted to believe in and buy into that You know, they dismissed all the evidence that was tearing down the rest of him, you know, yeah
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah, people want to be a part of a tribe. And the yellow bracelet certainly created enough artifice behind what you say is like the inexplicable evidence behind winning seven tours in such dominant fashion. But it's like that almost clouded the judgment because you want to believe that it's all true.
00:22:39
Speaker
But in any case, you were talking about interviewing Toulise, Harold Morris, Mike Tyson, these really big, big figures. I wonder what, I know if I were to interview someone like that, I would just be terribly nervous and anxiety ridden and biting my nails for 24 hours straight. But I wonder how you feel approaching interviewing these Titanic figures.
00:23:04
Speaker
I definitely have fits of nerves internally, but I think my thing with it is it's almost more personal in the sense of the juice for me with journalism is not money or recognition. My ego isn't tied into that. My ego is tied into access.
00:23:26
Speaker
And I feel like I want access to people who really intrigued me. I'm so obsessive that these – I mean all of these people we're talking about are obsessives. They're all addicts to something. They're extreme cases. And so I feel like – it's kind of like – I guess a good example would be
00:23:45
Speaker
My brother was a skinny guy who picked a lot of fights. He would pick on much bigger people, usually defending somebody else. He would stand up to bullies. It always astounded me how somebody so much smaller could instill fear in bigger people. I asked him about it and he said,
00:24:05
Speaker
If you meet somebody like that with 100% willpower, you're 100% invested in going all the way, fighting them, they know that they have to meet you at the same amount of willpower or else they're gonna back down. And so when I was meeting Mike Tyson, he could recognize that I was the most obsessive person that he's ever met in terms of wanting to meet Mike Tyson.
00:24:32
Speaker
because the guy had literally saved my life when I was a kid, reading about his story and hearing about his bullying and that kind of thing. So I was coming at him, I think, with two things. One, that I was just as obsessive and, you know, I think you have to be crazier than Mike Tyson to have him be your hero at some point. Certainly not an easy thing to admit to women who are prospective girls you want to date and that kind of thing.
00:24:58
Speaker
And I just think with with these other people like I'm not interviewing anybody where it's even strictly even partially sort of a Professional perfunctory kind of thing. I'm obsessed with what these people do and I think it shows when I meet them. It doesn't mean I'm like some raving lunatic when I encounter them I'm not but I think that they can
00:25:22
Speaker
You can recognize, like an addict can recognize another addict and I just adore the access of meeting these people and I think that that
00:25:33
Speaker
Offsets in a lot of ways just the intrinsic nervousness of oh, I might fuck this up or it's it's a boring question or you know, I I want it to be the best interview that they've they've ever done and I've put as much energy as I possibly could and in many ways I feel like my whole life has been preparation to
00:25:55
Speaker
make it something interesting, you know? And so some of these people afterwards, when an Errol Morris gives you his phone number and just says this was fun, and it's gone four and a half hours after his secretary said you're gonna have one hour, so like make the most of it, it gives you a little bit more confidence to try with other people to create your own thing rather than the sort of paint by number effect that might feel like the safer way to do it.
00:26:22
Speaker
And I'm not somebody who sort of bats for average. I want to swing for the fence every time. And I don't mind striking out. This is an industry where you're going to strike out most of the time, probably a lot worse than in baseball. But when you feel that crack of the bat igniting with somebody else, and it's all about chemistry with the person. It's not you being great or even them being great. It's just in that moment in time
00:26:49
Speaker
that you're off and running and you're just somewhere special. There's no place that I would rather be. I didn't understand when I first got into boxing writing and you tend to fight. These are people who've devoted their life to covering boxing. You'd think they'd be thrilled that they get paid to go to fights. Most of them look miserable. Some have a lot of contempt for what they're covering. Journalists are a pretty mean breed.
00:27:16
Speaker
I think there's a saying that I forget who said it. It might have been Huntress Thompson, but whatever happens to a pimp, no matter how awful, it's always funny because it's a pimp. I know it's the same thing. If you go on YouTube and watch compilations of journalists, especially TV journalists, having terrible things happen to them, it's always funny, always.
00:27:42
Speaker
And you wonder, why is it? And I think it's because, A, there's this tremendous hypocrisy that they're doing some kind of wonderful service to humanity by reporting the truth. But the other thing, as you recognize very quickly, is that human tragedy is just a commodity to these people. They're thrilled if there's blood that they can report and lead with it on their news station and get better ratings. So I'm aware that there's something ugly about what we do, parasitic.
00:28:12
Speaker
Often, even worse than being parasitic is we devour the hosts of everybody devouring. I try not to do that, but I still feel a certain repulsion to what I do in meeting people.
00:28:28
Speaker
spending five days with a boxer and he gets somewhere really dark that's new about suicidal impulses or abuse that he's endured and then you report it and you do the best you can to make it connect to people in a meaningful way to give compassion for all the people who risk their lives getting in the ring and show people who are off stage, who are the family members and friends and the community of these people, but there's another party that's just like
00:28:58
Speaker
The worse this goes, the more people are going to connect to it. The more people are going to connect to what you're trying to say about it. You're just like, I can't root for that to happen. I like this guy. I like his family. I like his children. I was doing something more constructive.
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's that I've never been the type of person that I couldn't be like a beat news reporter, like going to funerals, car accidents, fires. I know some people get all kinds of jacked up about that.
00:29:35
Speaker
But for me, it just doesn't appeal to my sensibility, that swoop in, swoop out. It's very like, it just doesn't, European, I have a feeling you have the same kind of feeling in that, you know, you at least want, if you're going to be that quote unquote, the parasite, you're gonna drain them of their story and then tell it in as fair a way as possible, but for sort of your own gain in a lot of ways.
00:30:02
Speaker
But I just couldn't do it in such a way where it felt like you were just hovering over this carry-on and then just feeding on it and then taking off for the next buy line. I imagine that you kind of feel similarly in that sense. Well, it is a high-wire act because when I listen to Talish talk about
00:30:27
Speaker
that there's dignity with everything that I do and all of the subjects that I've reported on, I've done it with dignity and I want them all to feel, you know, kind of feel good after they've read my story and the way that they've been portrayed and I think, well,
00:30:43
Speaker
It's good for you, it's good for them, is it good for us? Most people are not dignified. I'm sorry to say. That's well and good, but it almost seems like kind of a Victorian value system. I'm not big with Hunter S. Thompson the way that he's mainly gained his popularity with the drugs or
00:31:09
Speaker
You know, just that whole cartoonish image with other celebrities stopping over in Woody Creek. I don't care about any of that. I find that depressing. But his early stuff, looking into the Hell's Angels, and again, recognizing something that was right in front of everybody that nobody else saw, that the Hell's Angels are not an aberration from American society. They're a byproduct of it.
00:31:31
Speaker
Then we're somewhere new. Then I get it. Just like Donald Trump, Donald Trump is not an aberration of this society. He is a direct byproduct of democracy becoming pro-wrestling. Donald Trump looks just as good in Vince McMahon's WWE wrestling ring, screaming to a mob as he does now, sort of on the pulpit.
00:31:51
Speaker
just quoting the bible whatever and that's you know it's become a reality show so. He fits in very well whereas these other sort of career politicians look kind of silly and they look boring and it's not as good.
00:32:09
Speaker
copy and that's what it's been reduced to is the bottom line is just ratings. That's why he brings it up again and again and again. I've sort of noticed and identified the same thing with boxing in the art world is that in the art world, the biggest thing that the art market has given us culturally in the last 50 years is the market itself, not any great works of art.
00:32:32
Speaker
just the market, just making the people who own these things have it go up in value for them. But is it any better for it in terms of for the rest of us? I don't think it is. And similarly in boxing, you know, I'm covering Pacquiao Mayweather, the fight of the century, one guy's making almost $300 million. Is it a good fight? No, it's terrible. Yeah, it's worthless. And yet,
00:32:56
Speaker
There's just this bizarre haywire thing going on in the culture where all we care about is the box office. We don't care about if it's any good what's being shown. That's very strange because I think there was much more of an understanding of what value meant. Now all value is is just how much does it cost.
Cultural Critiques and Observations
00:33:16
Speaker
That's scary to me. I love Andy Warhol but I think
00:33:21
Speaker
As much as his shrewdness in understanding the culture allowed him to flourish, I think it also destroyed it. Somebody like him becoming as mainstream accepted as he is. This is one of the weirdest people imaginable. Michael Jackson weird, where there's another guy who's openly singing songs called Keep It in the Closet, and then people are shocked that he's a pedophile.
00:33:50
Speaker
you're like he is screaming it to you he's jumping on stage grabbing his crocs and keep it in the closet and then we're kind of taken aback with all these children he's been carrying around he can barely kiss a grown woman anywhere so it always just makes me question not the weirdness of some of these people flourish but the society that allows them to flourish and i think that that's a
00:34:15
Speaker
That's a very common narrative in most of my work is that the real monster is not the so-called monsters that are on the stage, but it's us paying them unbelievable amounts of money and attention and saying, oh, this has nothing to do with us. I think it has everything to do with us. It's a perfect reflection of us, a perfect canary in the coal mine of our society.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot to chew on there because it goes to, no one cares about authenticity anymore, it's about artifice. And I think like you were saying, whether it's many, whether it's Pacquiao Mayweather or bullfighting in the 21st century now, you're dealing with a lot of
00:35:03
Speaker
Just a lot of conflicting stuff on the surface that are that are like deep is deeply reflecting of sort of like who the people are consuming this tainted product On the field or in the arena, you know, oh I agree and I mean One of the hopeful things that I get from this is like if this was enough
00:35:27
Speaker
If going to the movies, what do I see? What are the movie trailers? I went to see The Revenant last night. What are the movie trailers before? One after another, it's America blowing itself up.
00:35:38
Speaker
Right? It's some sort of attacking us or some natural disaster, on and on and on. It's us fetishizing, destroying ourselves. So it makes me think like, and I mean the amount of gambling addiction, alcoholism, drug dependence, illicit or pharmaceutical, on and on and on. People are really struggling to cope. It's really hard right now for people to cope. They're following the so-called blueprint of like the pursuit of happiness
00:36:07
Speaker
And yet there's so much frustration and pain and guilt and suffering. So what are the movies offering? Distraction. What is TV, the culture offering, distraction? So it's hopeful to me.
00:36:24
Speaker
That if this was enough that people would actually be happy with it and clearly they're not which tells me that there's still a deep yearning for something meaningful and impactful that they're reaching for and so I don't know that's why.
00:36:41
Speaker
Somebody like Hunter S. Thompson, it's so interesting to me because I just think he's in the tradition of George Orwell and Mark Twain, this incredible voice of commentary about what's going on. Look at how he diagnosed 9-11. He forecast exactly where it was going before anybody else did, and this was a very
00:37:02
Speaker
destroyed version of Hunter at that point. But now he's just a clown. To most people who care about him in the culture, he's just that Uncle Duke, the cartoon character, come to life. And that's shocking to me, given the breadth of work and insight that he offered.
00:37:23
Speaker
Yeah, and getting back to something you said earlier about being an obsessive person, I get a sense that you do a tremendous amount of thinking about whatever it is you want to sink your teeth into.
00:37:44
Speaker
almost meditate over and really sort of swim in it. So to what extent do you, when you're in the throes of some sort of a project that really raised your hackles in a way, like this is something I want to dive into. To what extent are you just thinking about it before you do any sort of writing or reporting?
00:38:04
Speaker
Well, I try not to think about it, and I try to think I always have no idea how to get started. With almost every project I do, I get tremendous anxiety of where the hell do I begin? So where I begin, which is a lot easier for me, is to know I'm probably going to end up with 10,000 words somehow with each one of these things that I do, which most of the time I do arrive at. So I want to read one book for every 1,000 words that seemingly has nothing to do with what I'm writing about.
00:38:34
Speaker
This just loosely tangentially connected so if it's bullfighting I want to read about the Napoleonic Wars when he went into Spain I want to read about the Civil War I want to read about all the Spanish masters that are in the Prado. I want to read about The current economic climate in Spain so already we've got a lot of places in reading that what the hell does this have to do with bullfighting and
00:39:01
Speaker
Well, it has everything to do with bullfighting because bullfighting is at the heart of a cultural past that Spain is trying to get rid of while other people are trying to cling to it. Then you look at Spain invading Mexico, like invading the Mayan culture, like the legacy of Spain, how it affected the world. And so I try to bring, by the end of it, I've read 10 books that I hadn't read before about this subject.
00:39:29
Speaker
I just find that drawing from all of those sources leads to a lot of ideas and connections that become interesting pathways to enter into bullfighting and make it accessible for people who either know nothing about it or are total experts on it. That both of them can listen to me because I'm not saying here's
00:39:52
Speaker
I'm for this and here's my defense of it. Not go lawyer with it, but just offer this kind of confection of a couple of months of really frantic research into it and finding these parallels in ways that I think
00:40:09
Speaker
just haven't been there before. So again, we're somewhere new and the somewhere new isn't something I'm telling you is right. It's just observing stuff. It's just sort of writing these different, these 10 books waves into how there seems to be a kind of
00:40:26
Speaker
musical connection to the ostensible subject. So you're getting some counterpoint. You're getting some harmony. And both of those are not things that you expected. And then I think it's just holding the reader's hand to the end, promising something and then delivering it. Like you have to deliver on what you promise or people are going to be annoyed. Like why did I have to invest 25 minutes in that thing?
00:40:51
Speaker
But taking them somewhere new that requires some of their agency that they have to choose to get there. Like what Steinbeck said at the beginning of Cannery Row, that there are some delicate creatures in the sea. You can't just extract them. You have to offer them something that they themselves willingly climb onto. And I think you have to do that with the readers. You have to want to offer a reader the best that you have.
00:41:15
Speaker
You know, not have contempt for the reader, try to prove your erudition or education, but really try to offer them the best that you have possibly learned about the subject or thought about it and be excited to sort of, I think Nabokov said, like, you start off with the reader on opposite sides of a mountain and you want to embrace them on the top of it. Have that journey. And I just think that's a beautiful concept. And it takes a while to get there where, you know, you find your own confidence that
00:41:45
Speaker
You think that they're going to embrace you when you get on top of the mountain. That they're not going to be like, I just spent 25 minutes on this. Fuck you. Instead of thinking that they're going to come up there and say, I've got a few stories to tell you after that. And that's my favorite thing. I want more stories. I want to keep going with this. There's no end to this. And just like the research that seems to organically flow from an assignment takes me somewhere completely new for the next year.
00:42:16
Speaker
And I got a sense from the bullfighting piece that it was, as much as it was about old Spain and new Spain and a country at odds with itself, that it was also, in a lot of ways, kind of like a story about time and our relationship with time.
00:42:36
Speaker
And I wonder what your relationship with time is, if you feel like it's something you wrestle with, or you feel like it's, shoot, it's getting away from you, or I gotta step on the gas because shit, we're gonna die soon. I wonder what your relationship to that is, because I felt like that was kind of a theme to me pulsating under that piece.
00:42:56
Speaker
That was the first thing I wrote about it is it was completely a study of time. That was the first idea that I jotted down about what bullfighting was about because the first time I saw it, I was 18. As I was writing that story, I just turned 36. Half my life ago was when I first saw this.
00:43:14
Speaker
Where did that go? Because it sure seemed to go by a lot faster than the first 18 years. So why is that? Is it just because from second grade to third grade, a year is a much larger block of the total that you've inhabited? Or is it what you're doing in that time? It's an interesting question of how you move through time versus how time moves through you. And bullfighting is about death. It's right up front. It's right up front that
00:43:43
Speaker
you know how
00:43:45
Speaker
Something is being led to the slaughter in front of you, no veil. It's totally honest and upfront. Somebody told me about bullfighting. There's far more horrors that go on every day at a McDonald's than has gone on in all the bull rings in Spanish history. It's so true. None of us have any problems walking ... I mean, we do going into a McDonald's, but you know what I mean, because you don't see the suffering that's gone into just a happy meal.
00:44:14
Speaker
So I was confronted the first time I saw a bull fight with when death came into my awareness at like eight years old. Oh my God, my dad's going to die. My babysitter was in a car accident where five of her kids died and she had to get a lobotomy to deal with the trauma, which was done in those days.
00:44:36
Speaker
I'm witnessing my grandmother dying of cancer, slow death. All of it just washed over me as I'm watching this condemned animal and I'm thinking, is it meant to elicit this kind of emotional, spiritual catharsis because I'm being overwhelmed by these things. You talk to a lot of people who've been bitten by it and they say, of course it does. That's the design of it.
00:45:02
Speaker
Because you have the bull who's meant to inhabit a human being's futile struggle against death. This is just a calling card to a fate that awaits all of
Themes of Mortality and Curiosity
00:45:13
Speaker
us. And the man in the bullfight...
00:45:17
Speaker
is meant to play the role of death. So all your sympathy is meant to be with that bull and the matador has to earn your respect, earn your sympathy so that you're rooting for him because you know that bull has no chance. After 15 minutes he can kill a couple more matadors after the first one and they're still going to shoot him.
00:45:37
Speaker
That was just the idea that somebody would come up with that idea going back hundreds of years to where bullfighting was on horseback and it was rich people trying to show their valor chasing around a bull in preparation for fighting other men on horseback and that kind of thing. One of the guys was knocked off the horse.
00:46:00
Speaker
A bull pinned him and was about to kill him and somebody jumped out of the stands and waved his sombrero in Ronda to try and lure the bull away and he did it several times and people were like, this is way more interesting than what we were just watching. What the hell is going on here? And that guy Pedro Romero substituted his hat for a cape. That's bull fighting.
00:46:24
Speaker
and suddenly a so-called sport that was only fought by the wealthy for poor people was fought by poor people for the wealthy.
00:46:39
Speaker
I don't know, it's surprising things about it that it's, I love something, I love anything that the more you learn about it, the less you understand. That's something that's really gratifying and beautiful for me and I'm sure for somebody else is tremendously frustrating and a waste of time. But for me, that's where intellectually my real passion is, is insatiable curiosity about things that pay that dividend of
00:47:09
Speaker
every time you return to it, you find something new. And I'm very much a re-reader of books, because I keep finding the author laughing at me saying, oh, you just got here now? And I thought, well, I've read you five fucking times. I'm sorry, I'm trying. I'm reading all the references you're referring to. I don't know what took me so long, but yeah, I'm here now. And then next you come back to it, and it's all over again. Yeah, it's been there the whole time, you idiot. You should have caught it the first time.
00:47:37
Speaker
Absolutely. Alluding to what you just said about being just endlessly curious, you had a nice little passage in the bullfighting piece with Hemingway about people's obsession with him and also how he's grown to be this interesting figure, but above all he was an interested figure.
00:48:04
Speaker
always outwardly watching so then he could internalize everything and then tell the proper story. I think it sums it up in that sentence right there and also just hearing you talk about it, but what influence has at least the
00:48:22
Speaker
the tower, the zen of Hemingway had on you in that he's an experiencer going out there to tell these stories. I kind of feel that in your work. I imagine that he's had a tremendous influence on you in that sense.
00:48:36
Speaker
He did. I think he's hopelessly misread. I think that I was never interested in going out trophy hunting. I barely touch alcohol. None of that kind of thing. I'm not out there trying to prove my masculinity. I don't want to be a fighter. I learned how to box so I wouldn't have to fight. I haven't had to have a fight outside of a ring since I learned how to fight. To me, that's a success.
00:49:00
Speaker
So it's very different than him. Our demons are very different, he and I. What I love about him philosophically, that I think is him at his deepest, is all the short stories, and I think most of the novels, come back to the same theme, which is reaching back for a past
00:49:21
Speaker
that reaching back to his youth, to Michigan, to this place where it was this Eden, and then wondering where the towns are burnt down, or the transportation has changed, or the whole setup of it has been eradicated and transformed. Progress, progress, the thing we never question in our society, unless you're the Unabomber.
00:49:45
Speaker
And then once he does question it, we say he's insane, right? Because progress, who could question progress? There's another part of Hemingway that's saying, was it really there? Was it really as good as I remember it? I don't know. And that suspicion, that endless suspicion in yourself, are you romanticizing it? And where's the next place to go? I mean, Hemingway was hugely influenced by Mark Twain. And my sense with him going to Cuba, what largely took me to Cuba was,
00:50:13
Speaker
that America's most famous writer, why is it he can't find America in America anymore? Why does he have to go to Cuba for it? And so when I went there in 2000, I mean, I've always been obsessed with America as somebody who's not from here, was why am I finding the 1950s wet dream of America that's long dead in the United States in Cuba thriving?
00:50:39
Speaker
um... and they're not anti-american any of these people that i'm meeting like it was just so so fascinatingly fascinatingly strange and bizarre and conflicting with what the popular narrative was and so with with hemmingway again that there was that sense of this huckleberry fin wanting to find a river that nobody else was fishing in that that i just thought was very beautiful and sad and tragic and um...
00:51:07
Speaker
You know, I think early on the book, the book of his that's most affected me, which again ties into American politics, I think in an interesting way, was For Whom the Bell Tolls, which the protagonist in that, Robert Jordan, was cited by both President Obama and who he was running against, John McCain in that election, as their favorite hero in literature.
00:51:29
Speaker
And I thought, well, that's strange. What an odd intersection that both these guys with so many opposing political views were so inspired by the same guy, this very left-leaning character who was fighting a losing battle in a foreign country.
00:51:46
Speaker
I love that Hemingway, I love his ability to exist in the ambiguous. I love that it took him 10 years to deal with his father's suicide and then finally delving into it in that book, as I say, with what can be gained from fighting in a losing battle.
00:52:08
Speaker
Again, we're back to bullfighting. We're all going to die, and so what do you want to do about it? What does your life mean? The thing with bullfighting is ostensibly it's about death, but it has nothing to do with death. It has everything to do with what's brought to life while facing death.
00:52:27
Speaker
And that endlessly interests me because it confronts me with every person I care about why they're doing what they're doing because we're all the Titanic. We're all thinking we're going to end up at some destination that we're not going to end up at and there's some iceberg waiting for us that we're going to collide with.
00:52:47
Speaker
You know, all of us. Yeah. And so... And we can't change course. We're gonna hit the damn thing. We're gonna hit the damn thing. So, you know, do we come up with some ideology? You know, do we philosophize about it? You know, are we screaming rats trying to find not enough lifeboats? Or are we those guys on the deck who are like, you know what, what are we here to do? We're here to play music. So let's not bother scrambling. Let's do what we're here to do with the time that we have left.
00:53:17
Speaker
And that's not my natural inclination. My natural inclination is probably to put a gun to my head going, oh my god, I don't want to deal with freezing water and non-lifeboats and all these crazy maniacs scrambling. But at my best, what I'd like to be is that guy who just takes the violin and starts playing. And I think writing for me is the only thing I can do where I feel like
00:53:42
Speaker
I'm applying that with my own relationship with the time that I have left is communicating my relationship to the world and what I care about. And in that piece you wrote this great sentence referring to one of the bull fighters who was in some ways disabled. He didn't have quite the motor skills that you would associate with a bull fighter.
00:54:10
Speaker
and you said he bluffed his way into the life of his dreams, and what I loved about that, I thought of you because you have a very unorthodox path in journalism, and I wonder if when you were writing that sentence, or maybe it was subconscious or something, what was the degree of relation to that sentence? Not that you bluffed yourself, I don't want me to say,
00:54:37
Speaker
you've conned us or into something. I think your talent speaks for itself, but I wonder if there is any element of, oh, you've come at it from such a different angle that you have entered this life and telling these stories that you deeply want to tell, but you've come at it from a different level, so in a sense, that sentence I feel applies to you in some ways. Oh, I completely think it's a con.
00:55:03
Speaker
And I mean, by the same token, who are the people that I loved growing up? Who are my heroes? Bobby Fischer never went to school to learn how to be a chess player.
Individuality and Non-traditional Inspiration
00:55:13
Speaker
Orson Welles never went to film school. Van Gogh didn't go to art school. Hemingway didn't go to college. They just did it.
00:55:20
Speaker
It just fucking did it and the fact that they did it on their own terms revealed their own individuality and i have more bias than anybody i've ever met. To see people come into flower as individuals that's what i want i don't want you to become.
00:55:36
Speaker
Some people have written me to say, I want to write like this piece or whatever. No, write like you. I want to see what you have. I want your loot. I don't want you trying to be Fitzgerald or Hemingway or any of these other people. I think it's a problem with writing schools, and I'm not opposed to them. If you get benefit from it, great. But I think there's a problem in learning how to think and learning how to learn.
00:56:02
Speaker
I want to see where people are going to go on their own like Orson Welles telling an Oscar-winning cinematographer, Greg Toland, here's what I want you to do with the camera. And Toland says, I don't know how to do that. Nobody's ever done that before.
00:56:21
Speaker
Well, good. Go learn it. Do it. And Wells was asked about that. He was asked about why everything looks so fucking different with what he does. And he said, well, there's a joke about a guy who goes to the doctor and says, I have a headache. I have a headache every day. And the doctor says, well, just go through your day. What do you do? Well, I get up at eight in the morning. I have orange juice. I have breakfast. I do some push-ups. I throw up. I say goodbye to my wife and I go to work. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:56:51
Speaker
You throw up every day? Yeah, doesn't everybody? And Wells' response was, with the way he sees everything, doesn't everybody? And I think that that's just, for me, it's just so magical that there are people who allow that to happen. You know, where sometimes it happens with an athlete, where
00:57:10
Speaker
A guy who's a fencer will just be like, you know what? I'm going to do this left-handed for the rest of my life. Fuck it, and becomes the best ever sort of thing. Those are the people who woo me, who inspire me. I wasn't any good at doing it at the conventional path.
00:57:30
Speaker
was succeeding. I wasn't trying to do something different. I just failed again and again and again. I was failing every creative writing course that I took and you know teachers were quite nasty about what I was doing and at a certain point you give yourself permission to be you and to try to find
00:57:49
Speaker
You know, what you have to say, what your music is that you can offer. A lot of people go to their graves without their music ever being heard. And I don't know that mine is better than anybody else's, but I was damn sure I wasn't going to waste time trying to play somebody else's music.
00:58:07
Speaker
I wanted to see what mine would be. And by the same token, I'm just as selfish and greedy of wanting to hear other people's, which is why I'm trying to find people, interview people, and every subject that I focus on, I try to find all the experts. It's not like I think I'm the only expert. I think I'm the least qualified. I just think I'm totally addicted to the subject. So I go out of my way to try and recruit these people to offer their insights.
00:58:36
Speaker
and their wisdom on it and hoping that I can offer the reader something that they can't find anywhere else because all the writers and artists that I adore, JD Salinger was saying, fuck you to the publishing world, but his readers said, you know what?
00:58:52
Speaker
We can't get what this guy's offering anywhere else. We don't care what critics are saying. We don't care that he won't market his stuff or put his picture on the book jacket or do interviews or go on talk shows. We just can't get this anywhere else. That's something that I value, I think, almost more than anything else from humanity. That's what redeems humanity for me is when people allow themselves to be who they are.
00:59:18
Speaker
Yeah, I was listening to a panel at a conference a few years ago. It was just on the personal essay. And one guy, I forget his name, but he said something like, what's great about when the essay is really, really humming in all cylinders, and it can be a piece of reported journalism too, but that's like a ticket into that writer's mind.
00:59:41
Speaker
And I always love that, because when I read, say, David Foster Wallace talking about cruises, or the main lobster festival, or the 2000 political campaign, it's just like, how fun is it to be with that mind for that period of time, however long it's gonna be? And you're alluding to it right there, it's just like, where can we get those, we can't get those minds anywhere else, they have to be who they are, and then we get to join them, and isn't that lovely?
01:00:09
Speaker
Absolutely, and I think that there's a through line with that that we're talking before about journalism being parasitic. I think the same thing is true with critics that they can't exist without the art being made. They need to piggyback on it. I'm not saying that Hemingway didn't write some books that I think were terrible, and the critics definitely agreed with me.
01:00:32
Speaker
You can learn something from criticism. Some of my favorite writers are critics. Robert Hughes, in his art criticism, writes better ideas, more passionate feelings that are expressed about art in terms of his understanding than I'm getting anywhere else. I love critics who are trying to find something, not just make a name for themselves, but I think
01:01:00
Speaker
It's interesting to be in a world where every time I go to the Metropolitan Museum, who is the artist who all the people want to clamor around? It's Van Gogh. He's the one they're taking all these selfies with, and usually they're not even looking at the paintings. Well, take the selfies, and often they'll take pictures of themselves looking at a painting that they weren't actually looking at, which is a particularly weird selfie.
01:01:26
Speaker
But then I go to Cuba and I'm looking at these guys, these athletes who are turning down millions of dollars to sell themselves on the marketplace and I think, why isn't this more interesting to people? Because Van Gogh was trying to sell his stuff, right? Like he was failing. But these guys are going beyond that and they're not selling it. They're saying, fuck you. Like what we're doing is more important than just selling it. And similarly, like I'm going to Mexico at the end of the week.
01:01:57
Speaker
There's a matador I'm going to see, Jose Tomas, from the article that you read. He hasn't allowed televisions to film him in 16 years. He just says, you know what? Fuck you. Well, wait, we have all these monetary concerns. We need it to be televised so that we can pay you. I don't care. Fuck you.
01:02:15
Speaker
So the only like whatever I'm going to see there, there'll be a few people with their phones filming or whatever, but it's not going to be shown the way everything else is shown that has enormous value to people like tremendous monetary value. And I find that so fascinating and so much more interesting.
01:02:34
Speaker
How did you get access to him for this if he's kind of, I guess, not a recluse, but somewhat of a, I don't know, I doubt he's on the Salinger end of the recluse spectrum, or the Bill Watterson end. But how did you get access to such a titanic figure in bullfighting? You know, 16 years without granting an audience, really.
01:03:00
Speaker
Well, I don't know that I have access to him directly at all. I know a photographer who's been close to him, and while I was in Pamplona over the summer, I did meet a close circle that was kind of the offspring of Hemingway being in Pamplona in the late 1950s. There were people who knew him back when he was going to Pamplona. When Hemingway killed himself, he had tickets to go to that year, San Fermin, in 1961.
01:03:28
Speaker
It was quite interesting how the connective tissue there, but I met some of these guys. One of them was 80 years old and some of them were younger guys writing books about bull fighting who know far more about it than I do. I just said, is this guy in your view as good as people are saying? The ones who'd seen him fight made the point that when people say he's the greatest one who ever lived, it's because when you watch him, you just can't conceive of anything being better.
01:03:56
Speaker
I quite love that in the same way that I like when Beethoven did his ninth, a lot of other composers would go from eight to ten of their own symphonies because they didn't want it compared to the ninth.
01:04:10
Speaker
It's a primary color. Leave it alone. I just leave the comparison alone because it can only look bad. There's just something about that with any character that I'm remotely interested in what they do. I'm interested in excellence anywhere. Excellence in any field is something that's going to intrigue me and fascinate me.
01:04:33
Speaker
The better you are, the more danger you're accepting, the closer you are to getting killed. I can't think of anything else that's like that. Floyd Mayweather is the best boxer in the world, but that also means he's the safest boxer in the world.
01:04:49
Speaker
whereas Jose Tomas is the greatest matador, maybe, who ever lived, and he's more in danger of getting killed every second that you're watching him than anybody else. And that's just such a fascinating contradiction to me that I can't get it anywhere else. So I found out that he was fighting in Mexico.
01:05:11
Speaker
was able to sell it to Glenn to get them interested to do a second bullfighting story in six months which is a huge favor I think to me that ended and when the tickets came on Mexican Ticketmaster at like two in the morning it sold out in probably five minutes or something but I was able to get five pretty shitty seats and try to lure Hemingway's grandchildren who were going to come and
01:05:39
Speaker
Booker prize-winning author DBC Pierre was somebody I invited who I've corresponded with for a long time Somebody's been a real mentor to me When the chips were low as as they were for him He was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and then the first book he wrote was the Booker Prize winner So it's very inspired by that as a kind of patron saint that maybe maybe there's some way out of this hole that just seemed to be getting deeper and deeper and
01:06:04
Speaker
And then somebody I interviewed was Wright Thompson, who's written a couple of wonderful pieces for ESPN Magazine about bullfighting as well. And he's quite a Hemingway junkie himself. So I just thought, try to make this as interesting as possible for, well, I guess, A, myself. Selfishly, I thought this would be a really fun circle to watch this guy, maybe for the last time. He's 40 years old.
01:06:29
Speaker
And for a reader, this is going to be pretty unusual. I have no idea where this is going to go. Yeah, I think for the greatest bullfighters, the only way to go out is on their shield, so to speak. So are you expecting that this guy could be cheating death in a way that he's never cheated death before?
01:06:53
Speaker
100%, 100%. And there's no reason not to think it, because the last five years he's put on since he had children, I mean, he's gotten even more reckless. And the description I heard that might be the title of the piece was, he has a style of bullfighting that nobody's ever done before, which was described as the statue in the storm. Yeah, that's it. There's no other title.
01:07:19
Speaker
No, it's beautiful. I'm just rereading a lot of stuff now. I bought a handful of bullfighting books and the bullfighter you were referencing earlier, Belmonte, who not just had some physical problems, he was a full-on cripple. He couldn't run, he couldn't jump.
01:07:37
Speaker
No, I mean, it just has even more than boxing in terms of being exposed for who you are, for what you stand up to, for what you stand for. Bullfighting is like another dimension entirely. I mean, I often think about it in terms of like magic, that it's so interesting to me with magic.
01:08:00
Speaker
It doesn't matter what the secret is that you have, because if I tell you what the secret is to a trick that's dazzled you, you go, oh, whatever, that's it? It's the trick that you use it for, right?
01:08:12
Speaker
You have to keep those secrets. Those secrets are worth money for other magicians. Whereas in bullfighting, it's the same kind of adrenaline rush and wonder, but there is no secret. The secret is the guy's about to die. The guy has a horn coming at his heart and he's sitting there.
01:08:33
Speaker
calmly, like even bullfighter's bodies are not like athletes. It's like they've been forged in just trying to be elegant in the face of death. What an incredibly weird purpose for a physique to be shaped by, but it's true. They look like male dancers in the ballet.
01:08:57
Speaker
You know, they're built like that and in the arena, that's exactly what they're doing is dancing with the bull and dancing with death. Yeah, there's not even, I mean, it's funny because the word in Spain for bullfighting, it's not actually bullfighting, it's torrere. It's like there's an expression, bullfight life and it's not
01:09:19
Speaker
You can't fight a bull. The word has no translation in English what they're doing, which is also quite appealing to me. It's another one of these primary colors. When it's good, and most of the time it's not good, you just can't get what they're doing anywhere else. It makes your mind and heart soar in a way that just nothing else I've ever encountered does.
01:09:49
Speaker
very nice to you and tell you what bring a year you've been very generous with your time i have a lot of stuff i still wanna ask you but i want to uh... but i want to be respectful of your time so i'll let i'll let you know maybe we can have a part two at some point i'm i'm happy i've got another half hour if you do yet all you have got some yet that i definitely have an extra half hour so it's um... you know it's let's keep on going on
Overcoming Challenges and Personal Growth
01:10:14
Speaker
You referred earlier, you had some, in some creative writing classes, you had some nasty teachers who undoubtedly like gave you, kind of put you down and probably even discouraged you from pursuing a career in letters or even a hobby in letters. So what was it between your ears that made you wanna keep going in the face of that criticism?
01:10:39
Speaker
There were two teachers. One was very shitty. She flunked me from creative writing because I didn't really like the rules that she laid out, so we had kind of a confrontation. And the other teacher, who was aptly named Miss Champion, she was a die-hard feminist.
01:10:59
Speaker
you know not a very happy teenager so because i knew she was a feminist i wanted to piss her off and now that i was anti-women but i was just anti-authority so that was my way in to sort of needle her and she said you know i see you reading these books i've never seen you read a female before and i said why i don't i just don't think there is good and she said okay and she went to her desk she wrote a list down she brought it over
01:11:25
Speaker
Jane Austen, Blixen, I think there were six other names that were in there. Marguerite Dureau, Alice Monroe,
01:11:39
Speaker
I don't remember the exact names anymore. She said, go read these, come back to me and repeat what you just said. So I went home, spent the next three days reading them, came back to her and I said, I was completely wrong. I was completely wrong. These were incredible. And it was the first time that a teacher had confronted me in a way that was constructive, challenging me beyond a stupid
01:12:03
Speaker
knee-jerk bias and She allowed me because I'd failed English to skip skip a year
01:12:10
Speaker
And it just, it was the first time I was just really interested in learning because for many years I've just been closed off. I come from a family of readers, but my rebellion was to read nothing, play video games and all that kind of thing. But after getting involved with boxing and I mean, literally going to a boxing gym and a library to places I'd never been before on my own.
01:12:34
Speaker
I went to them both on the same day after hearing an interview with Mike Tyson talking about bullying. I've been obsessed with both ever since. That was the major catalyst and largely that teacher just sort of doing what happens to so many people.
01:12:54
Speaker
being there to nurture you and to guide you a little bit and challenge you. And so that woman, very kind, sweet, bright lady, I owe her a lot.
01:13:07
Speaker
Yeah, she gave you the nudge in the right direction and probably even the confidence to carry on. I imagine that if enough people tell you no, you're gonna start to believe them unless you're extremely headstrong and borderline delusional. But it's like, someone probably saw that talent in you and were like, you know what, we just need to, he's just given the right push on the ice and then his own momentum will let him sort of carry him across the pond.
01:13:34
Speaker
well there was a there was a in the creative writing class that i failed i wrote about going into the slum with the boxing gym was that i went to like there was some exercise right for ten minutes about whatever you want and so the ten minutes i wrote about being very scared walking through this drug infested sort of
01:13:53
Speaker
Zombieland area in Vancouver where you had to, I could have taken the bus but I wanted to walk through it. I wanted to get over my fear. I was so overwhelmed by cowardice and fear but I wanted to face it. I didn't know if I would get over it or anything but I just had to
01:14:11
Speaker
more afraid of being afraid or something like that. And when I wrote about it, most cities, I mean Vancouver certainly, but I think it's true of many cities, they die in their heart first. So the heart of where Vancouver started was where it had really decayed and become rotten.
01:14:28
Speaker
And the neglect was so overwhelming. So I wrote about that experience. And by far the best student in the class, after we were forced to read these things publicly, and I hate talking publicly, I'm a terrible public speaker, a girl in that class who was easily the most gifted approached me after. And she just said, I'm so jealous of what you just did and your talent. And for whatever reason,
01:14:56
Speaker
I thought, I never have to ask permission anymore to do this, ever again. And I never did. I didn't care how many hundreds of rejection letters I got sending manuscripts off to publishers when I finished my first book when I was 18, 19 years old. I never had any doubt that this is what I would do. I didn't know if I'd make money at it, and it certainly took a long time before I did.
01:15:23
Speaker
I think when I finally landed a book deal, the editor was like, I know your background and your background certainly isn't the background of most of the people that we publish. Did you ever think this would happen? And I said, well, yes and no. Part of me thought I'm throwing a Hail Mary, but I also thought this is all I know how to do. I have no plan B.
01:15:46
Speaker
And there is a certain vitality to people who are that way. Would I want my child to be that way? No, like I definitely wouldn't. I would prefer some security because I understand how difficult it is. And moreover, my immense gratitude is to the people who helped me and a recognition of how lucky I was. It was luck that made a lot of stuff happen. But at the same time, to be lucky, you have to be close.
01:16:15
Speaker
And to be close was I worked very hard. So that's my own algebra with this kind of thing. But I owe a lot to that girl because I was very envious of her talent. I'm not an envious person. She was very gifted, and she had a voice. And she was such a command. She was this very precocious person that I just thought, if she appreciates something I'm doing, I don't think she's wrong.
01:16:44
Speaker
Even though I had doubts, I'm just gonna allow myself to have permission to do this now. So I never worried about getting permission after that. And that woman is Karen Russell.
01:16:57
Speaker
Oh, I remember her first name. I don't remember her last name any longer. Oh man, that's too bad. It would be good to probably just catch up and say like, hey look, the product, all this great writing that I'm doing now is a product of you saying that I had talent.
01:17:15
Speaker
Part of me doesn't want to remember because the other thing that sticks to my mind about her was her saying, my mother told me that you are really ugly and you'll never get a man because of how ugly you are, but you're very smart, so focus on that. My parents had said, you're really ugly. What parent says that to a child? Good God. I think that's why I don't want to remember her last name.
01:17:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And so, all right, so kind of get into some like routine type stuff. What time do you typically wake up and then what do the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day look like?
Daily Routine and Passion for Stories
01:17:56
Speaker
I get up the same time to write as I used to when I was boxing as an amateur, which is four o'clock in the morning because I wanted to be like Mike Tyson and run across the city every morning, which I did for many years.
01:18:07
Speaker
and i've continued it by getting up uh... getting up before uh... trying not to smoke my first cigarette because i only smoke three cigarettes a day and so
01:18:19
Speaker
I always have that terrible anxiety when I get up. My armor and weapons against the anxiety is smoke a cigarette and I have an old Cuban copper coffee maker where the water rises up through the coffee.
01:18:43
Speaker
It has a kind of orgiastic look to it, like you can watch it sort of fizzling over, so I find it always amusing and pleasurable. In Cuban cinema, very often they use it as like a quick cut when a girl is climaxing. They'll show coffee being made. Forever have had that association, so maybe I'm trying to think of...
01:19:02
Speaker
creating some sort of environment of fertility. Coffee, a cigarette, I am surrounded by an avalanche of books I have on my desk that I use for research and notes everywhere.
01:19:19
Speaker
I'm a very messy person when it comes to writing because from the chaos, I like to extract new stuff. And also, I think that desperation of, you know, are you going to do it? You know, that's never left me that fear. I never feel like I can coast. I always feel like I have to work harder than than anybody else. So it's a very athletic mentality that it's, you know, you against someone in a lot of ways.
01:19:49
Speaker
well i mean i'm you know i'm dutch i mean i'd like then go it's what i like about on this you know how do you approach painting approach it like a farmer get out there at sunrise go home at sundown you know and i'm i'm from peasant stock so i don't work you know i go outside if i go outside for a cigarette and i can't smoke indoors anymore because my cat doesn't typically appreciate uh...
01:20:14
Speaker
Who do I see? I see guys cleaning gutters. I see people delivering pamphlets at four o'clock in the morning. Like, who are they complaining to about their grind? So my thing is, I'm writing for a living. I'm supporting myself, you know, killing what I hunt as far as selling stories to places. And would I rather, I've done some shit jobs. I've done some menial labor. This is a lot better than that.
01:20:41
Speaker
What is the nature of that hunt for you? How do you track down your stories? It's another thing where there's a lot of rejection pitching to editors.
01:20:56
Speaker
for the first time in my life i have a resume i'm not running away from in terms of where i've been published that i can actually approach an editor and say like hey i've i've been published in esquire and i turned down random house to do a book deal and and that kind of stuff thinking that that might we can actually have a conversation where it's not that horrible you know please consider me but i could pull this off sort of thing like that's that's gone but um...
01:21:25
Speaker
It is still very much a challenge. The stuff that I like is to surprise people and it's hard to sell editors on that because what's the easiest thing to sell? Something that's familiar. I don't want to do what's familiar. I want to do what's unusual or strange. I meet a guy who's the second smartest man in the world in terms of IQ tests and he's out of work. I want to do a whole profile of him trying to find a job.
01:21:52
Speaker
That's what really interests me, unusual subcultural characters and seeing how they're not that strange that we can identify with a lot of things going on with them. That's tricky to sell to an editor and there's definitely, for as many good people as there is in selling stories, there's a lot of places feel like country clubs.
01:22:19
Speaker
There's an exclusive kind of feel. So I've tried to always just focus on the positive with that. Never take it personally. I try with any writers who ask me for contacts or that kind of thing to always help people out because I've always been helped out by a lot of very established writers. I need to come from a positive place with what I'm doing rather than
01:22:42
Speaker
negativity or anger or trying to make something right. Those are impulses in me that just lead to bad results. I try to sell people on things that really excite me and I think this all comes down to seduction.
01:22:58
Speaker
The number one ingredient in being a good seducer is being seduced, being a sucker. I'm a sucker for these stories. All these people that I'm writing about, I'm obsessed with them. I adore them. I'm enthralled. I'm their biggest fan. I'm the one who wants to read this story more than anybody.
01:23:19
Speaker
And I'm just trying to find ways from that central feeling to now how can I make this for everybody else to how can I really think about where they're coming from so that for 20 minutes of their day they're going to feel singularly like I've reached them with their problems and their concerns.
01:23:37
Speaker
and ease their burden for a little bit of time. And that takes a lot of energy to try and think where people are coming from who are totally different from me. Like all writers, we're in a big bubble from how most people live. So I try to not live my life like a writer. I don't spend time with other writers. I don't like people like me who feel like flies on the wall of our own life. I like
01:24:04
Speaker
regular people who are not overly self-conscious, you know? I like meeting those people, which is probably why I really like boxers, because boxers and Cubans, because both of those people... Cubans, I mean, we're speaking about a pretty broad breadth of different kinds of people.
01:24:22
Speaker
What self-consciousness has not been invented in cuba yet when people talk primitive that's the only thing i've ever seen is primitive in cuba is just how. How natural they are and it's nothing to say that they're so intelligent and complex but there's just a.
01:24:42
Speaker
I think like Blixen said about animals, why we love animals so much is they live themselves to the full. You know, you love your dog looking at you, he is himself to the full. And I think people, especially people in the United States and even more so compounded tenfold in New York, that's hard. It's really, really hard in this society to be yourself to the full. Everything is encouraging the opposite.
01:25:10
Speaker
you know, to conform and be like everybody else or just, I don't know. So yeah, sorry. Oh, no, that's great. I wonder, you say you're 30, 36 years old. Yes. Right now. So what advice would you give to your, you're not too far removed from it, but you're about your 30 year old self.
01:25:36
Speaker
30? Maybe even go a little bit farther back, say 25, maybe like 10, 11 years ago. What would you tell that, Bryn? I'd say try to find another sport besides boxing. I might tell myself that about horse racing.
01:25:52
Speaker
Well horse racing horse racing can work boxing is just kind of well Yeah, but then again no barrier to entry was why I kind of went into boxing. It's kind of like horse racing, too Yeah, yeah, so if you don't have any passport to get in you have to find a country that doesn't require a passport Yeah, so in that sense no, I'm okay with 25 year old Bryn sticking with boxing Cuba
01:26:19
Speaker
Cuba was a very hard sell, but the good thing was that Americans couldn't really go there, so very quickly people were willing to offer some deference to what I was doing that I don't think was justified or earned. It's just that I'd been writing about it so long it was easier for like an ESPN magazine to be like,
01:26:41
Speaker
Hey, you seem to have done some interesting stuff over here. We can't send our reporter over there. So maybe you could give him all your material for free and you'll, you know, we'll mention that he got some of his reporting from you. And I was like, no, that's not going to happen. Because if you're doing a Cuba issue, that means you need some stuff from Cuba and you haven't been there. And I have been there. And I've talked to some pretty interesting people, some of which are not there anymore. So in that sense,
01:27:10
Speaker
You know it the number came up on the roulette wheel like I chosen double zero or something and for a number of years it was like I don't know if you're writing about sports or this is anthropological what this is this is just this weird kind of impressionistic thing you're doing.
01:27:27
Speaker
And then Cuba started getting more topical. It started getting more, we need something about this. So I had a lot of ammunition ready in the chamber to fire at that. And so when that opportunity happened after, you know, I was giving a talk actually a couple days ago about this, I gave a lot of stories to Salon about Cuba for free.
01:27:52
Speaker
you know, four stories that they didn't pay a dollar for. And they'd say, well, you're going to get a lot more people looking at it. I hate the idea of giving work away for free more part of that for other writers who work hard, who have rent to pay, who are not getting paid for what they're doing. Oh, it's good publicity. It's good exposure. I hate that that kind of thinking. I it's I have total antipathy towards the concept of internship. Fuck that slave labor, like pay somebody they have to pay.
01:28:22
Speaker
So, in my case, unfortunately, a random house did knock on my door to publish it, on the basis of it being published in Salon. So, I did become that exception.
01:28:34
Speaker
Now had I not been in Salon at all, had I been like, no, fuck you, I deserve to be paid for this, maybe I wouldn't have had any of the opportunities that I did by virtue of being published with where I went ultimately with Macmillan. I don't know. So as I say, it was very fortunate and lucky. I made those choices to get it in there. I pushed it hard to get it in there, but it was just,
01:28:58
Speaker
a gamble. Some of these gambles you get lucky with and some you don't.
Success, Values, and Networking
01:29:03
Speaker
It's hard for me to imagine a parallel universe even if I had 10 or 20 where I wouldn't have failed every time. I think I got very lucky in this one that I currently inhabit. When you think of the word successful, who comes to mind? That's a good question.
01:29:25
Speaker
mean currently successful or could be a could be anyone it could be your it could be your north star like someone who keeps you on track that or alive that um is like yeah that's that's who i aim for that's my that's my true north i think a big guiding force for me of just being dazzled by his
01:29:47
Speaker
devotion to art and also being rewarded commercially was J.D. Salinger. Most people who cite J.D. Salinger love the Catcher in the Rye. That's my least favorite of his stuff. I was far more interested in the latter work he did that got more spiritual
01:30:04
Speaker
where at first read I thought this guy has cracked up like everybody's saying and then again coming back to it a couple years later and going no I think this guy's going somewhere completely new and the idea that he's going somewhere new where he could fall back on doing a sequel to The Catch and the Rye is very interesting and very inspiring that he
01:30:27
Speaker
is going somewhere alone where talk about not having mentors, not having guiding star. He's going off on his own. He's swimming in deep waters and this guy doesn't have to. He can publish in the New Yorker whenever he wants. He can publish anything he wants. Critic proof as well. I mean, how many writers are critic proof? Very, very few and yet he's going, eventually just saying, why do we need to be published at all?
01:30:57
Speaker
Why do I need this? I don't. I want to write every day, but I don't need to be published. That was all thrilling to me. And I guess there were parallels with Bobby Fischer, kind of. Fischer seems to me like a JD Salinger character, almost more than a real person. And I know about all the anti-Semitic lunacy that went on later, but I just meant earlier on creating
01:31:24
Speaker
She should go through some of that guy's games. I was a big chess player as a kid. I hustled chess for a while, not terribly well, but I tried. He was an artist himself. You go back to some of his games, some of them are just like Jose Tomas, except it's on a chess board.
01:31:44
Speaker
I was very interested by people who sort of dared to be something extraordinary in terms of allowing themselves to be who they were. Now, again, I'm not advocating what Bobby Fischer became denouncing the United States during 9-11 and his Jewish heritage.
01:32:06
Speaker
I like people who go that way. I've always been interested in them. I was always of the philosophy that if I can pay my rent
01:32:17
Speaker
and have the freedom. My only real luxury is that I like to eat out. Now, I don't like to eat out at nice places, but I don't want a car. I don't want to own an apartment. I'm not a materialistic person. I'm not in New York because I can't live anywhere else. I was here because it was very useful in that my subjects were always coming through New York. That was not true in Vancouver.
01:32:40
Speaker
Any person in the world who's doing things that the world cares about, if you get them on the phone, within six months, they're passing through New York. Then I was like, all I have to do is hijack them. All I have to do is just make sure that they'll say, yes, I can give you two hours. Then I need to find places that would be willing to pay me. Finding an Amazon saying, well, if you can get Errol Morris, boom, okay, I can try to do that.
01:33:09
Speaker
And, you know, making, yes, the easiest decision for people, I think it comes back to, you know, Gay Talisa, the very clever thing with subjects that like interviewing people is like going on a date. And one thing that I, you know, early on, I didn't have a lot of confidence in dating, but I was always like getting rejected by a homely girl feels just as bad as getting rejected by a girl you're madly in love with. So why not just go for the ones you're madly in love with?
01:33:36
Speaker
Go for the ones who are out of your league. That's the kind of girl that I want, one who's out of my league and that's the kind of character that I want, one who's way out of my league. What business do I have meeting this guy and then finding them and making something happen from it? That gives me my excitement and my thrill. I'm not doing drugs, I'm not drinking, any of those things. My drug is that.
01:34:02
Speaker
So I would like to do more of that and get more access to those people and then share those stories with people, hopefully, so that I can hear even better stories from other people. That's success to me, because as I say, the access is, for me, the thrill.
01:34:19
Speaker
I think that's a perfect place to end our conversation, Bryn. That's a good piece of advice and a great definition of success, I think. One last thing, where can people find you on the Internet? I'm on Twitter at Brynissio, B-R-I-N-I-C-I-O.
01:34:41
Speaker
The Domino Diaries and some of these interviews with Errol Morris and Mike Tyson are also on Amazon, the Kindle single series. And there will be a story, I think on Wednesday, about Scott Norwood and Buffalo and the Buffalo Bills 25 years after the missed kick.
01:35:02
Speaker
Fantastic, and I'll be sure to link up all that stuff in the show notes for this so people can find your work and get, if they're not acquainted with your work, get acquainted with it, and if they already are, then they can dig in with the x-ray goggles and read the stuff with closer eyes because it's well worth multiple reads, not just one. So in any case, thank you so much for carving out time of your day here, Bryn, and maybe we can do another part too down the road when you've got some more work coming out.
01:35:31
Speaker
Absolutely. I look forward to it. Fantastic. Well, thanks again and take care. Thanks, Brendan. Take care. You got it. Bye-bye. That's all folks. Thanks again for listening. My two calls to action or share this with someone you think will enjoy it and subscribe to my email list at BrendanOmera.com. That's it until next time on hashtag CNF.