fallen down the rabbit hole of Paris Review author interviews

Ray Bradbury

INTERVIEWER

Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not? 

BRADBURY

Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. 

 BRADBURY

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself. 

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever used a computer? 

BRADBURY

Up until my stroke, I used a typewriter. An IBM Selectric. Never a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. Why would I need another typewriter? I have one. 

INTERVIEWER

Most would argue that a computer makes revising a whole lot easier. Not to mention spell-check. 

BRADBURY

I’ve been writing for seventy years, if I don’t know how to spell now . . .

INTERVIEWER

Do you write outlines?

BRADBURY

No, never. You can’t do that. It’s just like you can’t plot tomorrow or next year or ten years from now. When you plot books you take all the energy and vitality out. There’s no blood. You have to live it from day to day and let your characters do things.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?

BRADBURY

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Joan Didion

INTERVIEWER

By now you’ve written at least as much nonfiction as you have fiction. How would you describe the difference between writing the one or the other?

JOAN DIDION

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. You have no notes—or sometimes you do, I made extensive notes for A Book of Common Prayer—but the notes give you only the background, not the novel itself. In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

INTERVIEWER

What misapprehensions, illusions and so forth have you had to struggle against in your life? In a commencement address you once said there were many.

DIDION

All kinds. I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it. I began with a literary idea of experience, and I still don't know where all the lies are. For example, it may not be true that people who try to fly always burst into flames and fall. That may not be true at all. In fact people do fly, and land safely. But I don't really believe that. I still see Icarus. I don't seem to have a set of physical facts at my disposal, don't seem to understand how things really work. I just have an idea of how they work, which is always trouble.

Jonathan Lethem

INTERVIEWER

You can’t imagine experiencing a crisis of faith.

LETHEM

Crisis of faith? But that’s not where the writer lives. He lives in sentences, in fictional architecture. Look, anyone seeking ontological meltdown can easily find it in the attempt to write. Many have. The need to fall apart is well indulged in this line of work.

INTERVIEWER

What were you afraid to do?

LETHEM

I’d be afraid to not be funny, afraid to not be charming. You can only do so many things. This is something I’ve come to understand: there’s a strict ecology on a given page. Those things that people feel are missing from books are missing because they are crowded out by other things. Not because the person wouldn’t have liked to also do them. Once you’ve devoted a lot of energy and attention to accomplishing certain things, that’s where your energy has gone. It’s a zero-sum game.

Most recently I’ve let go of a certain kind of lean efficiency, a devotion to structure. To plot. The fact is, almost every writer I ultimately find most important to me is hugely digressive, and largely uninterested in any plot that can be admired for its exoskeletal integrity.

Tobias Wolff

INTERVIEWER

What’s your writing day like?

WOLFF

Boring, if you’re not me. I take a walk or go for a swim, then go to work, eat, take a walk, write, come home. I never go to movies about writers because writers lead very boring lives if they’re actually working. When I was a kid and saw these pictures of Hemingway on safari or fishing in Idaho, or Fitzgerald in Paris, I thought, What an exciting life writers must lead. What I didn’t know is that’s what they do when they’re not writing. What’s exciting is finding a word that’s been dodging you for days, or deciding to cut something you’ve spent weeks on. The excitement’s in the writing. It doesn’t offer much in the way of drama, I’m afraid. Routine becomes invaluable to writers, and that’s why once they hit their stride, their biographies make very poor material.
Think about the way other people work—lawyers, for example. They get up from their desk, they walk into the doorway of the office next door, and say, Hey, do you remember that Warthog v. Warthog case from two years ago? and they talk about it, and that’s work. They go out, meet clients and take depositions, they have meetings where they discuss strategies for pursuing a particular case—it’s a very social profession. I wonder how much of their time is actually spent dead alone, producing hard solitary thought for hours a day. That’s what writing is and in that way it’s very hard work and it absolutely requires all the conditions that make one a bore: You have to be alone a lot, you have to be rather sedentary, you have to be a creature of routine, you have to fetishize your solitude, and you have to become very, very selfish about your time.

 WOLFF

I respond to something gracious in the writer. That doesn’t mean nice, or kind, or consoling, though it can have that effect. It has to do with a certain courage and verve and even sense of play in facing things as they are. If there’s no grace to be found in things as they are, then you’ll have to find it in things as they aren’t, and you know what Yeats wrote about that: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

INTERVIEWER

Is that writing’s purpose, then, to present a gracious reality?

WOLFF

I don’t know that writing needs to have a purpose in that sense. Think of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, or Kenny Barron and Charlie Haden’s Night and the City. To the extent that I can feel the presence of grace—the operation of some kind of grace in the world—I often feel it in music like this, where the words God or revolution or even soul are not to be heard. And what does music accomplish, after all? Can it be said to offer a plan for improving us, can it be said to give us new political visions, can it be said to make an argument for this or that faith? No. It is a good purely in itself, and that is a sufficient justification for its existence.

 John Irving:

INTERVIEWER

Some people say you write disaster fiction.

IRVING

Such things don’t happen? Is that what they mean? You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above. I am sick of secure and smugly conventional people telling me that my work is bizarre simply because they’ve found a safe little place to live out the chaos of the world—and who then deny that this chaos happens to other, less fortunate people. If you’re rich, are you permitted to say there’s no poverty, no starvation? If you’re a calm, gentle soul, do you say there’s no violence except in bad movies and bad books? I don’t make much up. I mean that. I am not the inventor I’ve been given credit for being. I just witness a different news—it’s still news, it still is just what happens, but more isolated and well-described so you might notice it a little more clearly.

Transient pleasures, drastic measures.

I had read Falling Man by Don DeLillo and was not impressed.  It's a story about a marriage breaking apart in the aftermath of 9/11, but has just too many scattered segues into trying to form a plot. However, I decided to give his fiction another try, as I had admired his writing style, as well as the authors he'd influenced, for many years. Enter White Noise, which has an infinite setup for each of its sardonic passages, such as the end of chapter 1: "I am chairman of the department of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill." Set in the late 80s, as far as I can tell from the book publication date and the prevalence of station wagons, it follows a college professor, his exercise-obsessed wife, and their brood of children from failed marriages through a Midwestern winter full of radiation waves, the airborne toxic event, and dealing with the side effects of our media-saturated world. Jack, our narrator and Hitler expert (who doesn't speak German), leads us through lengthy descriptions of his world, his disguises, and his personas, while finally reaching my favorite chapter, on page 293 out of 332, a Socratic discussion about the individual's fear of death with his colleague Murray. 

Murray is a New Yorker who has traveled to this quaint little college town to study the American essence of culture. He's fascinated by the mundane, by all this white noise that surrounds us, that creates in us this fawning consumerism as a repressed, unconscious sort of mannerism: expressway traffic, fast food environments, ATMs, and of course, supermarkets and televisions. Television is ''the primal force in the American home, sealed-off, self-contained, self-referring, a wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages, like chants...Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.'' This concept is reflected in Jack's life as there are phrases that pop into almost every conversation he has with his precocious children. The TV is always on in the background, swirling in their dreams, with its incantations of "Toyota Celica" for his daughter, or listing side effects of mind-dumbing medications for him as he strolls through the living room.

The events in this town seem to happen in waves, rolling back onto previous lives and looking into future apocalyptic ones. Every discussion is laced with ominous undertones, unvalidated emotions, and a sort of hurtling toward fate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Socratic method-esque discussion that Jack and Murray have while strolling along the college campus:

Murray: "Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?"
Jack: "What good is preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious, quivering thing.
Murray: "True. The most deeply precious things are those we feel secure about. A wife, a child."
Jack: "So how do I get around fear of death?"
Murray: "You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. Technology creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies."
Murray, continuing with other ways to get around the fear of death: "There are two kinds of people int he world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage, or whatever it takes to be a killer. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions."
Jack: "Are you saying that men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others?"
Murray: "It's obvious...The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life."

Though the technology of the 80s was not even half as impressive as today's gadgets and advances, Murray was expounding upon the timeless debate of the good and evil in any invention. Technology has brought us life-saving antibiotics and revolutionary surgeries, and it has also brought us bullets and drones. It can aid us both in the creation of our self-focused lives, and in the destruction of ourselves and our world.

LQ-Salinger

"Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion."

Regina's Song - book quote

"Hugging doesn't have anything to do with that," Twink replied. "Every house should have an official hugger- no questions, no comments, just hugs. A few good hugs can take away acres of lonesome. The people with the notepads don't understand that. They talk and talk and talk, and it doesn't do any good at all. What we really need is hugs." She sighed then. "A hug lets us know that it's not really important to you that we're crazy, and that you like us all the same. That's all we want."

Regina's Song, David and Leigh Eddings

Ways of Seeing, by John Berger

from "Ways Of Seeing" by John Berger




"A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others.

By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste...indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance of what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it. That part of a woman's self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not "permissible" within her presence. Every one of her actions-- whatever its direct purpose or motivation-- is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object-- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight."

in which i take a short break to share my bookreading quote journal highlights with you, my dear reader

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About Mil Millington (British)

(looking for keys) I'm a single degree of enraged frustration away from continuing the search along the only remaining path, which is slashing open the cushion covers, pulling up the floorboards and pickaxing through the plasterboard false wall in the attic.

A tragedy is the tale of a person who holds the seeds of his own destruction within him. This is entirely contrary to my situation -- everyone else holds the seeds of my destruction within them; I just wanted to keep my head down and hope my lottery numbers came up, thanks very much.

Presumably because I spent a previous life beating tiny puppies with thorny sticks, I had been cast into the Library at the University of NorthEast England.

After a few minutes, I noted from my PC screen - "You have 217 new e-mails" - that the server must be up and running again.

I never see [his face] anymore as he has had his face craned over his GameBoy at a permanent 45 degree angle since a little past his 5th birthday.
Jon is emotional and introspective, Peter carefully focused on learning how to kill a man with his thumbs.

Ursula: In what way, may I ask, can two bedrooms feel like three?
Pel: On an emotional level.
It's a nice place and it's eighteen thousand pounds. Eighteen. Thousand. Pounds. There are some houses that are actually on fire that cost more than that.
Ursula: Okay. But I want you to know that if anything goes wrong it'll be your fault. I'm holding you responsible.
Pel: Just so long as you're holding me, my darling.

Ursula: I'm pregnant.
Pel: Phew, thank God. I was beginning to think all of that sex was for nothing.

--a real estate agent tearing hundreds of pounds from our hands for doing next to nothing then laughing brayingly into our upturned faces before striding away to push small children into canals.

I'm not really a thinking ahead kind of person. (Though if you want someone to brood over the past, I'm your man).

Job interviews are unfalteringly horrid, but internal ones emphatically more so. For a start, all the sustaining fabrication that is normally the essence of interview technique is denied you as everyone knows precisely what you're like. You're also wearing a suit but aren't creating any smart impression; everyone knows you normally turn up looking like a week-old lettuce.
(during interview) I made little quotation marks with my fingers, the motion simultaneously waving goodbye to my immortal soul.

Improvement Day was a time set aside for all those Learning Center staff to meet without the pressures of day-to-day work. Everyone despised it with a sulfurous passion. Last year, because the date of it had leaked out in advance, Bernard arrived to find almost everyone had called in sick or reported they had a domestic crisis.

I was sitting in the office preparing some student usage figures that were part of the department's monitoring process (these are rather important for planning purposes, so I was putting quite a bit of effort into inventing convincing numbers).

(grocery store) The woman in front of me took some separators from their special slidey groove and divided her shopping into three eight-item-or-less chunks. I literally stopped breathing. There's a hypnotic quality to insouciant depravity on this level.

Roo shrugged. "It's hardly a great surprise that they (married couple) don't argue. I think you'll find that to have a personality clash people need to have personalities."

(parent-teacher conferences). Pel to Ursula: We're not going to ask to see their teaching qualifications again, it's embarrassing.
Ursula: Did I tell you what Vanessa's been doing at work?
Pel: Not for almost a day. The uncertainty has been playing on my mind.

(sex should not be described as "fun") The one thing guranteed to stop sex dead in its tracks is a laugh. Well, arse to that. Most stuff isn't fun; the world is eighty percent misery, suffering, injustice and gnawing existential bleakness. A further seventeen percent is sheer, suffocating boredom.

(ab-roller) This was still, like all exercise, deeply, deeply boring.

As I understand it, a midlife crisis is when you feel that your life is slipping away from you; you've achieved nothing and Death is starting to tap his foot impatiently. Well, I've felt like that since I was about seven years old. I am immune from a sudden attack of midlife crisis, because I've been having one since before I hit puberty.

mafioso guy: What's your phone number?
Pel: I laughed. No...mobile phones are for wankers.

Ursula: Who's moving in then?[as renters]
Pel: Just some women.
Ursula: Why women?
Pel: Um, their genes, I suppose.

(car chase) Looked like it was going to be a bit of a laugh, obviously, but then slipped imperceptibly into a seemingly ceaseless and harrowing dance with death during which I was only able to keep my sanity by focusing on the struggle to avoid soiling myself.

Love and Other Near-Death Experiences (same author)

"It's easy to be brave when you're suicidal, isn't it?"

Rob: "I mean, you read books. You're 'bookish'. Aren't books and sex pretty much an either-or choice?"
Elizabeth: "A notion that could only possibly have gestated in the low-ceilinged brain of someone who doesn't read enough books. Just think of Emily Bronte, for example: psychotically bookish -- but was there ever a woman screaming out so loudly for a good shagging? I even suspect that's why Wuthering Heights carries on decades too long rather than sensibly drawing the curtains a little after Cathy's death. It was Bronte saying, 'Look, I'm simply going to keep on writing this stuff until someone comes and shags me raw.'"