Ephemeral Firmament

Appreciating Melancholy with David Rakoff

My Facebook stream filled today with pictures of and appreciations of the late David Rakoff, who died last night of cancer at age 47, and many of the comments were much like the ones I'm about to make here: I met David Rakoff once, and I can't believe how warm and kind and funny he was, and I felt like we were friends immediately. That's certainly how it was for me. I interviewed David about Half-Empty in late May of 2010, a few months before the book came out. It was the last interview of about fifteen I did in a few days at BookExpo, done not at the convention center like the others but up at the Doubleday offices in Times Square. For David, meanwhile, it was the first he'd done for the book, and the first time he'd talked publicly about the long last essay in the book, "Another Shoe," which is about his cancer, in remission at the time.

Rarely have I talked to an author and had such a strong sense that we were not just talking about the book but having a warm, human conversation. As you can see, David did about 95% of the talking, which is how it should be in an interview like that (and how I prefer all my conversations, interview or otherwise, to go!). But I've had interesting interviews in which I said almost nothing and it really didn't matter if I was there at all. With David, all of his talking and thinking felt intensely engaged with the conversation--in part I'm sure that was because he was new to talking about the book, but I fully expect he was that way all the time. And he certainly was even more curious and friendly after we shut the tape recorder off. I was headed next to reward myself after the expo by seeing Lillian Gish in The Wind at MOMA, and it turned out, of course, that he loved her and the movie but I think hadn't seen it since college. We walked over to the museum together and I nearly convinced him to watch it with me, but I think he was pretty wiped out (he had had surgery just a couple weeks before). But he came into the museum and used his membership card to get my ticket and then said goodbye. I'm still a little taken aback that someone could engage as quickly and openly with a stranger as he did: ever since he's stood as a model to me of how you might live more fully in the world than I often feel like I do.

You can still listen to the interview on Omnivoracious, and I'm glad to see I posted the full transcript there too (I thought I might have to type it in here tonight). My wife and I spent an hour this evening listening to the two interviews with David that Terry Gross replayed today, which are excellent, and I thought that mine wouldn't add too much to them, but I was reminded that though we did talk about his illness in our last exchange, we spent much more time on the rest of the book, talking about the uses of pessimism and, in particular, about one of my favorite words and the way that two cities, Seattle and Los Angeles, embody it. Here's that passage, with my inarticulate questions recorded exactly as spoken:

Amazon: The book itself seems as much a book of cultural criticism, or it's as much an aesthetic philosophy as a personal, self-help philosophy. It's a way of looking at the world that--we used the word "melancholy," which I think is a word that is one of my favorite words and ways of being, and I think it's wonderfully productive just as a way of taking in the world. What does that word mean to you?

Rakoff: I completely agree. Melancholy is ... there's a poignancy about it and there's something very beautiful about melancholy. I mean, you live in Seattle, which has that beautiful gray light which is the light in which I come alive. When the sun goes behind a cloud, I calm right down and I am suffused with this very, very deeply poetic feeling of melancholy.

So melancholy, yeah, it's an abraded emotion. There's some sadness in it but there's a lot of beauty in it. It feels like a very productive kind of state of being. Again, to use the word, it's sort of porous to the world in a way that I think is really fortifying and really important.

Amazon: Yeah. It seems attentive. It's a way of paying attention.

Rakoff: That's exactly it. There are many cultures that have the aesthetic of melancholy. I mean, the Japanese aesthetic has various words, like... It's been a long time since I've been a Japanese major in college, but like, wabi-sabi, yugen. If I recall, yugen might have been an appreciation of the darkness of things, or perhaps it might have been the appreciation of the weathered patina on boards that have been left out in the rain for too long. I can't really remember, but there's all that sort of stuff that appreciates the evanescence and the fact that everything is imbued with its equal and attendant capacity to perish, that makes it that much more beautiful. So yeah, melancholy seems an incredibly important state of being.

Amazon: As a melancholic, do you find Seattle a more interesting subject or, say, Los Angeles, a place you write about in the book, where of course there is no cloud cover but yet seems like an interesting place for you to be?

Rakoff: Well, there is a beautiful kind of melancholy in Los Angeles because of that very chasm that exists between the dream and the reality. I write specifically in the book about Hollywood Boulevard, which is literally a boulevardpaved with dreams. [laughter] It's just so achingly sad and lovely and hopeful at the same time, and you just take it to your heart because the dreams are so outsized and so infrequently realized for people that it really is kind of an amazing place to see.

This stretch of sidewalk is dotted all along the way with these absolute dream palaces. You've all heard of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and we all know about the cement outside, but if you go inside, it is an absolute fantasy inside of Orientalist perfection. It's just crazily beautiful inside and I don't think people really know that. They know it in this very, again, reductive way of, "Oh, it's just a theater for tourists." It's incredibly beautiful.

Or the Max Factor building where he used to sell makeup. Again, it's like a Busby Berkeley number. And the woman who probably came out there to be a chorine in Hollywood movies--she's 90-odd and she's still got a Marcel wave and she makes change for you when you go into the Max Factor building, which is now a museum. So the melancholy of that distance between the dream and the reality seems like an incredibly interesting territory worth mapping, so I do like those kinds of places.

Flipping the Trims into the Bin

As I've gotten older, and more committed to a particular vocation (the exact parameters of which I'm still working out), I've accumulated a few professional paths I can imagine I would have pursued in another version of my life: sleep researcher, Kafka scholar, and, most longingly, film editor. For a movie lover who could not possibly bear the stress nor summon the multi-tasking authority required to direct a picture, it seems the perfect job: take the images created by someone else and craft them, frame by frame, into scenes and stories. (Even though I'm a word person, it's actually more appealing to me than screenwriting--maybe because it seems closer to the heart of filmmaking, while screenwriting has an inherently frustrated relationship to the art.)

Would I be any good at it? I really don't know. My biggest character flaw probably would be that I'm a bit of a (a bit of a?) pack rat in terms of both things and ideas: I can see the potential value in almost anything, from an old cereal box to a poorly framed photograph, as long as they somehow reveal the human hand. That might not be the best quality in a film editor, who doubtless needs to be more ruthless. I can imagine, say, sitting at the editing suite with Terry Gilliam and saying, "Gee, you're right, Terry. That stuff is all fascinating. I think this really needs to be a five-hour movie, no matter what the studio says."

I've posted recently about probably the best-known, and certainly the most theoretically articulate, film editor, Walter Murch, and recently, on the Museum of the Moving Image site, I came across a very enjoyable interview with probably the only other celebrity editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, the three-time Oscar winner indentified even more strongly with Martin Scorsese than Murch is with Francis Ford Coppola. It's a fairly old interview, recorded in 2002 after a screening of Raging Bull, and just before Gangs of New York was released. And for me it covered some familiar ground, since listening to the commentary tracks to Raging Bull (there are tons of them on the deluxe DVD), Schoonmaker's among them, was one of my favorite art experiences of the past few years.

But it still seemed fresh, and really, I could listen to her talk for days. I often say that Scorsese, along with Jonathan Lethem, is one of my very favorite talkers, and Schoonmaker, seen above while working on Woodstock, her first major gig, is nearly as appealing: not quite as analytically enthusiastic as he, but close, and with an unperturbable calmness that you can imagine as a useful complement to his more anxious obsessions. I love the way Marty talks, but I also love the way everyone talks about Marty, since clearly his passions are infectious and draw similiarly passionate and hard-working craftspeople to him.

I usually favor interview transcripts over audio, but in this case I'd recommend the recording, to capture some of her aplomb. I tried to skim back through the transcript for a high point to excerpt here, but I think my favorite moment is this small one, which may or may not translate and is probably better experienced in the context of her larger discussion of switching over--reluctantly but inevitably--to digital editing. She's talking about going back to analog editing on film when she worked on a non-Scorsese movie after she and Scorsese had moved on to digital:

Yes; it was funny, because I found after about a week or so, I was enjoying flipping the trims into the bin, because I always used to know how to do that. You know, you have to do it a certain way, so the end of it will get in.

I just love that little workaday detail, "flipping the trims into the bin," one of the simple pleasures of a craftsperson's life (which could apply to almost anyone who learns to do something well, from parking cars to crafting Excel spreadsheets). Meanwhile, there's more traditionally substantive material in the long interview, from lots of detail about shooting and editing the fight sequences in Raging Bull to why she works so well with Scorsese. Podcasts don't usually fit into my life very well, since I usually can't concentrate on other words while I'm working--I envy my wife and my sister who have more space in their working heads for that kind of soundtrack--but I'm going to go back to the museum's site for more: Errol Morris, Jane Campion, and, yes, Terry Gilliam.

Keeping the Northwest Weird: Talking Blueprints with Ryan Boudinot

"It's a big one," was how my friend Ryan Boudinot used to talk about the novel he was working on, and when I saw it stacked up in front of him at the cafe where he used to write on his lunch hours when we worked together at Amazon.com, I believed him. When I saw, though, how that heap of manuscript pages had been turned into an actual book, Blueprints of the Afterlife (with a gorgeous cover designed by Ryan's friend and former bandmate Nate Manny), it almost seemed tidy and manageable: just (just?) 430 pages and no DFW/Neal Stephenson/1Q84 backpack-breaker.

But that was only until I started reading it, when it expanded into a parallel world that seemed more or less the size and complexity of this one. He's imagined a post-apocalyptic future that resembles our own times in many ways, and even seems to be trying to resemble our times, particularly in the meticulous reconstruction of pre-apocalypse Manhattan that's taking place on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound. It's pleasantly disorienting to try to understand the conditions and the history of this newish society, but you are no less disoriented than the characters within the book, who all feel as if they have had a rug pulled out from under them. But as a reader you have the advantage of Ryan's blistering humor to guide you, as well as his human empathy for his creations, both the hapless ones and the ones who think, incorrectly, that they have this new world under their control.

I was itchy to talk to Ryan about the book, and we organized a reunion of sorts to do so, going back to our old stomping grounds at Amazon to record an interview for their books blog, Omnivoracious. You can listen to our three-part recording over there, and read the full transcript of the interview below, in which we talk about the value of weirdness (and the particularly Northwest varieties thereof), and how you put narrative boundaries on a world in which anything is possible.

Q: How are you with being called "weird"?

A: I take that as high praise. I always have.

Q: Personally, or for your writing? Do you separate the two?

A: Both. No, I remember being called "weird" by a girl in kindergarten and I honestly didn't realize she was insulting me. I thought she was paying me a compliment, so I've always held that word aloft with pride.

Q: One of the blurbs on the book, from Robert Olen Butler, has a bit of a different spin: he says the book is "weirdly compassionate," which actually does describe you pretty well, but if you unpack that phrase, it's kind of an odd phrase. I'm not sure what's weird about compassion.

The Technical Genius Behind The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is still my go-to recommendation for someone who asks what they should read, no matter what sort of book they usually like--I just recommended it the other day, in fact. I really can't imagine someone not appreciating it. It has everything: science, history, race and class, ethical dilemmas, a compelling family history, and a dramatic story of writing the book itself, all folded into one. And when people talk to Rebecca Skloot about the book (as I did, way back before it came out), the talk tends to turn to those big thematic issues, for good reason.

But what is often lost in marveling at the rich story she tells and considering the questions it raises is what a technical tour de force she pulled off. Not in a flashy way: she's not trying to wow you with style, and her boldest move, including herself in the story, seems made out of necessity not vanity.* Rather, it's the sort of technique that succeeds by hiding itself. I remember getting to the end of the book the first time through and looking with bewilderment at the page number: she did all that in 384 pages? To weave all her threads and do them justice (but not overdo them) the way she did is a mark of real skill, all the more impressive in a first book that took so many twists and turns in its development as Skloot was learning journalism on the fly.

So I loved seeing today an interview she did with The Open Notebook that focuses entirely on two questions of form: how she structured the book, and how she decided to include herself in its story. Skloot has been talking nonstop about the book since it came out--and if you've talked to her you know she can talk nonstop--so it's remarkable to see a new interview with her that still feels fresh. You can tell these are questions she's glad to be asked.

The whole piece is worth your time, but here are a couple of my favorite quotes. First, about structure, and one of the places she found a model:

So I started watching a lot of movies structured like that and eventually found my way to “Hurricane,” about Hurricane Carter, the boxer. As I was watching it, I just freaked out because after the first few scenes I realized, Oh my God, this is the structure of my book. Three narratives braided together, a journey, etc. So I storyboarded that whole movie frame-by-frame on color-coded index cards (one color per narrative thread). I’d already mapped my own book out using the same three-colored index card scheme, and I’d mapped out a structure, but it wasn’t working. After I mapped out “Hurricane” I spread the cards out on a bed and put my book’s index cards on top of them, lining up the colors, to see how the film was braiding differently than I was. I immediately realized the problem with my structure was that it didn’t move around in time fast enough. That was the big lesson I learned from movies: that to make this kind of structure work, it has to move quickly. You can’t linger too long in any one time period or you lose the momentum of the other two.

(Those are the index cards in her photo above, which I plundered from TON.) And about including herself, she got some excellent advice which I think applies to many writing (and other creative) situations: follow the resistance.

Pretty early on, when I was struggling with this, I knew this wonderful fiction writer named Albert French who lived right around the corner from me in Pittsburgh. I would talk to him about the story as I was figuring it out. And he kept saying to me over and over again, about the Lacks family, pounding it into my head: “Their resistance to you is part of the story.”

At that point I didn’t know why they were resistant to me. He just kept repeating that. I realized I had to figure out why they were so resistant to me and that doing so would lead me to the real story. Which it did.

 *--I don't mean to say that style is merely a function of vanity. Or, rather, I don't mean to say that style is merely a negative function of vanity. I'm generally pro-plumage.

My Amazon and Jeopardy! Worlds Collide in the Person of Ken Jennings

My first alumni interview at Amazon is live on Omnivoracious now, and it's an appropriate one for the all-Jeopardy!-all-the-time world I seem to be living in for the time being: with Seattle's own Ken Jennings, for his new book, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. We recorded it recently at a restaurant next to Amazon's shiny new South Lake Union campus (about which I sort of feel like Moses might have about the land of Canaan). When I used to do these video interviews with authors at Amazon, I used a Flip (my own Flip, which I had to clear my kids' soccer videos off of beforehand), with my elbow as the tripod--it was nice to see they had stepped up the equipment quality, as well as the use of disturbingly disembodied chef's heads as a backdrop.

Ken, as anyone who read his Reddit riff will not be surprised to hear, was funny and sharp (as is his book), and he was even more so at a packed reading/geography quiz he gave afterwards to a hundred or two Amazonians. That video may never surface online, thanks to his extended riff on unintentionally dirty place names like Dildo, Newfoundland, so you might have to settle for watching the two of us:

Author Interviews @ Amazon: Ken Jennings from Neal Thompson on Vimeo.

One part of the interview that didn't make the final cut concerns one of my favorite sections of the book, his excavation and--finally!--explanation of one of the great mysteries of my adolescence: the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Not the Jazz Age gangland slaying, but a contest that used to advertise regularly in the back of Games magazine, entrancing and bewildering me with its cryptic self-description, which probably went a lot like the one that's on its website now:

Just before New Year's (or as soon as we receive your entry, if between then and Valentine's Day), we'll send you the giant 11x15 100-page-plus 2012 Rand McNally Road Atlas and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre book of instructions. We'll start at the Golden Gate Bridge and motor (vicariously, by map) across the continent to the Statue of Liberty.

Huh? Drive (no, "motor"--that verb carried half the weird power of the thing) across the country on a map, with a special book of instructions? I had no idea with that meant, and I think I vaguely imagined it would be like Milo getting the mysterious box at the beginning of The Phantom Tollbooth. But I never took the plunge and mailed in a check (as I did do for the equally mysterious but colossally anti-climactic Sea Monkeys), and, until Ken reignited those latent synapses of memory, I had completely forgotten about the Massacre (I can't help but say it "Massacree," in Arlo Guthrie's voice--I actually figured the contest's name was inspired by "Alice's Restaurant," but since the game started in 1964, three years before the song came out, that can't be so).

Like me, Ken had been intrigued as a child by the ads in Games without ever entering, but now, as an adult with a contract to write a book about crazy map subcultures, he had a perfect excuse. The Massacre is still running (2012 will be its 48th year), and if it wasn't quite a Sea Monkeys experience for Ken, it's clear it was not quite what he expected. It turns out to be a "map rally," in which you plot your way across the country according to an intricate series of directions that require attention to some pretty arcane and exacting rules to stay on the path. After a few dozen dogged hours, Ken gave up halfway through (his kids gave up earlier), and though he speaks of possibly doing it again, you get the feeling that it's a variety of map-nerdery that doesn't quite, well, map with his own.

I'm just thankful he resurrected and then cleared up one of the forgotten enigmas of my youth (although part of me, like those mapheads who are nostalgic for the time when maps contained great white unknown spaces, will miss the mystery).

P.S. Meanwhile, speaking of Jeopardy!, I should mention, in the unlikely event that there's any reader of this blog who I'm not in touch with otherwise, that the Tournament of Champions starts next Wednesday, November 2, and I'll be playing in the very first first-round game, that day. I may have more to say about it all here when it's done two weeks later, if I have anything left to say about that subject...

Lethem + Dyer = Red Vines + Mr. Pibb

Jonathan Lethem and Geoff Dyer are both among my favorite writers and talkers, in large part for their brilliant self-consciousness about the individual paths they've cleared through the thickets of genre. It won't surprise you that they are longtime correspondents and mutual admirers, but Bomb has gotten them to put an exchange on paper for a change, and for a "limited time" has the whole thing online. (Nevertheless, this will probably be yet another issue of Bomb I've bought because of an interview I couldn't resist.)

They talk about two of Dyer's projects, one old but new to American readers (his 1994 book on World War I, The Missing of the Somme, which just was published here for the first time) and one still to come, Zona, his book-length examination of Tarkovsky's Stalker (which, as it happens, is excerpted in the new Paris Review which just arrived at my house this week, and which I haven't gotten to yet because I immediately started devouring Sam Anderson's interview there with Nicholson Baker and reading good bits aloud to my wife, another fan of Baker--a genre-tumbling artist himself who of course comes up more than once in the Dyer-Lethem exchange).

Speaking of good bits, here's one from Bomb I like, from Dyer:

Now, a point of comparison: it seems to me in some ways that you and I are rather similar. We are both hobbyists, obsessives, inventoryists who have pursued these hobbies and interests outside of academia. That’s the overlap of sensibility. But you have nailed your primary colors more loyally to the novelist’s mast, to narrative fiction. Let me put this distinction another way: you are American; I am English. The American novel is able to accommodate a tendency to digress, whereas I feel the English novel is sort of to one side of where my main enthusiasms are, so I’ve found a way of digressing from the national norm. I throw this out as an off-the-cuff thought, so feel free to debunk. But I honestly, if mistakenly, believe I would have been more thoroughly a novelist if I’d either been born in America or had moved there—as I should have done—10 or 15 years ago.

And, in turn, more cross-pond comparing from Lethem:

This is going to be another English versus American thing for us—you, there, feeling so suffocated and hidebound by weary traditionalism; me, here, feeling so exasperated with the falsehood of a constantly moving frontier and the cultural amnesia that accompanies the myth of innovation: “Make it new!” and pretend you can’t see how it’s really quite old. For me, the useful insight about novels is how deeply even the apparently radical ones rely on the tradition, the old forms, the recipe from Dickens. I like that and find it nourishing. The “conformity,” as you call it, doesn’t irritate me. Bogus revolutions irritate me more.

Enjoy.

Fortnightly Firmament #5: William Gibson Interview Quotes

As I mentioned in my last post, William Gibson is one of my favorite writers to hear talk about his work, and I thought for this fortnight's Firmament, I'd celebrate his new Paris Review interview with a list of ten favorite Gibson interview quotes. These are hardly exhaustive: one thing I quickly realized when I started to dig beyond the Paris Review and my own two interviews with him was that he gives a lot of interviews (at least in recent years), with all kinds of outlets. He certainly says some of the same things from time to time--as you could hardly help but do, especially since he hears the same questions even more often: his line that science fiction is his "native literary culture" (the one in which he was born but may not always remain) is frequently repeated, but no less true or well-thought-out for being so.

But what's impressive is the thought and insight he brings to all of these discussions, no matter who is on the other side of the conversation and no matter how many times he's heard the "are you a science fiction writer?" question (yup, I asked it too). When I talked to him I felt like he would take anything I asked and run with it in ways I didn't expect, while still trying to answer the question. I was lucky enough to talk to him early in the publication process for both Spook Country and Zero History, but I get the feeling that even those interviewers who catch him later still find him doing his best to think through something new while talking to them.

And so the quotes below (and my search of his interviews to find them) are just a sample, and likely not a representative one: they are largely from interviews for his most recent trilogy. They don't include, for example, the Gibson doc from 2000, No Maps for These Territories, which I did see a while back and which largely consists of him holding forth in the back of a car as it drives around North America. As much as the film might try to build him up as a visionary technosage, he comes off there and elsewhere merely as a genial, thoughtful, and freakishly observant person who is too unassuming to really warrant the verb "hold forth" and who claims nothing more than being one writer trying to pay attention to what's going on around him: an anthropologist, as he often says in the interviews, rather than a futurist.

Here is some of what he's noticed (in no actual order, despite the numbers):

1. On what drove him through Neuromancer, from an early (1986) interview with academic Larry McCaffrey:

Panic. Blind animal panic. It was a desperate quality that I think comes through in the book pretty clearly: Neuromancer is fueled by my terrible fear of losing the reader's attention. Once it hit me that I had to come up with something, to have a hook on every page, I looked at the stories I'd written up to that point and tried to figure out what had worked for me before. I had Molly in "Johnny Mnemonic"; I had an environment in "Burning Chrome." So I decided I'd try to put these things together. But all during the writing of the book I had the conviction that I was going to be permanently shamed when it appeared. And even when I finished it I had no perspective on what I'd done. I still don't, for that matter. I always feel like one of the guys inside those incredible dragons you see snaking through the crowds in Chinatown. Sure, the dragon is very brightly colored, but from the inside you know the whole thing is pretty flimsy- just a bunch of old newspapers and papier-mache and balsa struts.

2. On the word, "neuromancer," from the Paris Review interview:

Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped portmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pleasurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled.
    I believed that this could be induced at a number of levels in a text--at the microlevel with neologisms and portmanteaus, or using a familiar word in completely unfamiliar ways. There are a number of well-known techniques for doing this--all of the classic surrealistic techniques, for instance, especially the game called exquisite corpse, where you pass a folded piece of paper around the room and write a line of poetry or a single word and fold it again and then the next person blindly adds to it. Sometimes it produces total gibberish, but it can be spookily apt. A lot of what I had to learn to do was play a game of exquisite-corpse solitaire.

The Art of City Fiction: Delany and Gibson's New Paris Review Interviews

There's a danger that by putting their Art of Fiction interviews with Samuel R. Delany and William Gibson in the same issue (the new one), the Paris Review would be cramming them into a "Science Fiction Special Issue" pigeonhole, but to their credit, the Review didn't make anything more of their pairing beyond pairing them, and, as it turns out, juxtaposing them raises all sorts of interesting echoes, as you might expect from two writers who grew up nearly at the same time and have crafted major careers on the borderlands between SF and literary fiction. (Gibson has a nice aside about his early reading: "I was a teenager, just thirteen or fourteen, reading novels Delany had written as a teenager--that was incredible to me.")

I'm more of a Gibson man than a Delany one at this point, and consider Gibson one of the most reliably fascinating interviewees around (see more here on that later). I came to him relatively late, after reading Neuromancer years ago and not particularly tapping into it, when I fell in love with Pattern Recognition, the first book of his recent Bigend trilogy. Though I've had Triton and Dahlgren on my shelves for years, meanwhile, all I've read of Delany is the first half of his memoir, The Motion of Light on Water, which I put aside, if I remember it right, mainly because I was overwhelmed by his precocity: teen novelist, composer, and even husband, which seemed so distant (and perhaps demoralizing) to a late bloomer (at best) like me. Of his identities that are different from mine ("black" and "gay" most traditionally prominent among them), the one I found hardest to bridge as a reader, at least on first introduction, was "prodigy." I've found it a lot easier to connect to Gibson's small-town teen ennui and, later, the bohemian indolence and reticence of his twenties.

As I said, the echoes between them are endless, but I thought I'd highlight two replies to similar questions, about cities, which are of course one of the great subjects of non-spaceship SF (and of literary fiction as well). The full interviews, by the way, are not available online yet, but the new Summer 2011 issue in which they are found is worth getting for their sake and you get stories by Gates, Lethem, and Barrodale, and poems by Cathy Park Hong and Lia Purpura I'm still enjoying figuring out, and part two of four of Bolano's war-gamer tale, The Third Reich, as well.

Interviewer: In your writing you seem fascinated with cities and the contact they provide. Where does that come from?

Delany: Doubtless from living in them. I was born in Manhattan. I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block. Probably that means it was more crowded than Calcutta or Singapore or Yangon--places we think of as inhumanly crowded today. The city gets you used to crowds, used to people relating to one another in a certain way, like strong and weak interactions between elementary particles. The strong interactions only come into play when the particles are extremely close, less than the distance of a single atomic nucleus. Those are the interactions readers want to see in novels. At the same time, paradoxically, cities can be dreadfully isolating places. The Italian poet Leopardi wrote in a letter to his sister, Paulina, about Rome, that its spaces didn't enclose people, they fell between people and kept them apart.

And Gibson:

Gibson: But the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner was to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadn't been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps--just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that's just life--it's not science fiction, it's not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city of the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.

Interviewer: Cities seem very important to you.

Gibson: Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn't really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities--that's when it all got really diverse, because you can't do cities without a substrate of other technologies. There's a mathematics to it--a city can't get over a certain size unless you can grow, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can't get any bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don't have efficient sewage technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera. 

 

Self-Portrait in Someone Else's Past

I am very thankful that not many people were taking pictures of me in the mid-'80s, but those that do exist look pretty much exactly like this, right down to the Sox painter's cap with the nicknames ("DEWEY," "JIM ED," "BIG FOOT") stacked around the sides (and to the nonexistent bicep).

This photo, though, is of the sports nut of my cohort who made good, young Bill Simmons, circa 1985, from Jonathan Mahler's profile in this weekend's Times Magazine, which I have to say didn't really add much more to my understanding of the man than reading one of his columns would have, much as I loved Mahler's book on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, The Challenge. (The curious can check out my interview with Mahler and one of the heroes of his book, Lt. Comm. Charles Swift. It's one of my favorites, and it also set a never-to-be-broken record for most bodies crammed into our old, tiny "studio" space at Amazon.)

How will Simmons's new Grantland project at ESPN turn out? It launches tomorrow, but the early sample articles they've had up for a while, well, point out to me how hard it is to extend the Simmons brand when Bill Simmons is not doing the writing, although Katie Baker's Knicks piece gets pretty close. Worth noting, meanwhile, that they decided to lead the preview with two pieces by women, despite (or because of) Simmons's proud gender Neanderthalism.

BEA Sure Goes Fast When You're Not There

For the first time in what seems like forever but is more like six or seven years, I didn't join the thousands discussing and demonstrating the death and life of books at BookExpo America this week. I don't miss the stress of preparing, but I do miss the camaraderie and the city and especially the last few years of interviewing as many fascinating people as I could fit into my schedule. One interview I would have loved to take this year: Jeffrey Eugenides, for The Marriage Plot (coming in October), although based on his statement at the big author breakfast--that there are no galleys yet because he was still tweaking the book until the day before--I'm not sure I would have had anything to read beforehand. But The Millions does have an "exclusive" look at the opening paragraph of the novel, which is of course catnip to any book nerd, like me, currently in the middle of a thoroughly thought-out home-shelf reorganization:

There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters.

I'm afraid the best I can do, 3,000 miles from the Javits Center, is shamelessly mine the archives again, to bring you one of my favorite BEA interviews, last year's talk with William Gibson on Zero History, the final entry in his loose recent trilogy set in the more or less now (which he called, at least to me, the "Bigend Books"). Gibson, you won't be surprised to hear, is just a treat to talk to: in his Virginia-to-Vancouver drawl he thoughtfully takes your questions in places you didn't expect. (And, as I mentioned in my BEA roundup last year, he also shared, off-camera, his admiration for the pantsuit tailoring of my previous interviewee that morning, Condoleezza Rice.)

We talked long enough that I split the interview up into four pieces for posting on Amazon. Listen as you like below, but here are a few choice quotes, all of which are already in my commonplace book. From section one, in response to a question about whether he seems himself as an author as more like the passive Milgrim or the string-pulling Hubertus Bigend (two of the characters from the trilogy):

Hubertus's mode of operating actually in many ways resembles my authorial mode, in that he advances his business through allowing more or less random individuals to pursue their own courses. If he sees someone interesting, even passingly interesting, he'll hire them and set them some almost random task. He keeps doing this, and every tenth one produces something of value.

And here, from the third section, on why he loves Twitter (he's very active at @GreatDismal):