Category / interview

by Edward Champion

Eric Schlosser (The Bat Segundo Show #515)

In the mid-20th century, nuclear missiles were maintained with flimsy safeguards and rapidly failing technology. How close were we to DR. STRANGELOVE? And how safe are we today? We talk with investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, the author of COMMAND AND CONTROL, to discuss our remarkably reckless military history, which culminated in several close disasters, and what this means in an age driven by terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

Eric Schlosser is most recently the author of Command and Control.

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Author: Eric Schlosser

Subject Discussed: The 1980 nuclear missile accident in Damascus, Arkansas, drug use among the military after the Vietnam War, the Titan II’s continuous deployment even after it was unsafe, Fred Iklé, efforts to point out safety shortfalls in the military, the lack of locks on nuclear weapons, Permissive Action Links, Robert Peurifoy, Curtis LeMay, the real-life inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay’s bellicose attitude, 1960s defense culture, alternative perceptions of LeMay, LeMay’s attention to detail, checklists and operating procedures, a giant nuclear arsenal intended as a deterrent, limited vs. total war, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, the influence of male attitude on deterrents, what we needed from LeMay during the Cold War, the risks taken by Strategic Air Command officers, recent safety mishaps with U.S. nuclear missile units, responding to speculation that LeMay wanted to start World War III, the history of the the Strategic Air Command, why the Command and Control system couldn’t factor in human exhaustion, how the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union caused unreasonable labor for servicemen, the difficulties of accounting for all nuclear weapons, Robert McNamara’s belief that mad decisions were logical at the time, the 1978 Titan II accident in Rock, Kansas, why there were so many mishaps with Titan II oxidizer, the RFHCO suits (and the astonishing wear-and-tear on this protection, which wasn’t replaced in many cases), blame directed at the workers, how systemic problems contributed to an unrealistic and bureaucratic view of Air Force servicemen, putting men into dangerous systems with defective gear, black electrical tape used to “secure” suits in missile silos, loose arming wires that permitted bombs to drop, an atomic bomb that nearly went off in North Carolina in 1961, the missing atomic bomb still entombed in Nahunta Swamp, the H-bomb accidentally dropped on Spain in 1966, why America’s military infrastructure still relies on aging B-52 bombers, the 1968 Thule Air Base B-52 crash, the importance of morale within workers who are tending to the most dangerous machines in the world, Kissinger’s efforts to get rid of the Titan II, the Single Integrated Operational Plan, Eisenhower’s deadly arbitration between the Air Force and the Navy, how the Strategic Air Command kept SIOP details away from Kissinger, bureaucratic rivalries, William Odom’s briefing on the SIOP, the interplay between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the lack of a direct line between the United States and the Soviet Union through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the effect of nuclear policy on diplomacy, miscommunication and unreliable back channels, the present nuclear risk in South Asia, the recent terrorist attack in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, the Peshawar church attack, Edward Snowden’s findings about the United States’s lack of information about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, conflict between India and Pakistan, why deterrence theory doesn’t apply to religious fanatics, how storage facilities are prime targets for adversaries and how this is a serious problem in Pakistan.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Much of the missile culture that you describe in this book is, to say the least, remarkably unsafe. You have this Arkansas Titan II mishap at Launch Complex 374-7 — the so-called Damascus accident — that forms the backbone of this book. It all hinges on a socket wrench that is dropped down a silo and pierces this fuel tank. And if that isn’t enough, you have oxidizer that permeates around the station, causes 22-year-old David Livingston to die and several men to be severely wounded. You have procedures that aren’t followed. You have the Propellant Transfer System team violating this careful two man policy, where you have two keys turning at the same time. We often see that in the movies, but this was, in fact, the policy during the mid-20th century and onward to activate the missile. So this leads me to ask. How did the Launch Complex adopt such a far from cautious approach to daily maintenance duties? How much of this was systematic? And how much of this was human error?

Schlosser: You know, our military was in pretty rough shape after the Vietnam War. And it’s a forgotten fact now because we have our precision-guided munitions and we go to war with one country after another. And we seem so completely dominant. But after the Vietnam War, there was major underinvestment in the military. There were terrible morale problems. Huge percentages of our troops in the Army came back addicted to heroin. And there were remarkably high levels of illegal drug use even in the Air Force. So in the book, I write about guys smoking pot on the missile site. Launch officers who have responsibility for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles smoking pot. In the book, I go into guys who are busted with LSD and cocaine who had nuclear weapons responsibilities. And that was part of the bigger culture of the ’70s. There was really poor morale. The Titan II missile that’s at the heart of this story was obsolete. It was supposed to be taken out of service in the late 1960s. In 1980, it was still on alert. It was leaking all the time. They didn’t have spare parts. So the accident I write about is precipitated by somebody dropping a socket in a missile silo and the socket pierces the skin of the missile. But in many ways, this weapons system was an accident waiting to happen. And in my criticism of some of the procedures in the 1970s and early 1980s, I really don’t imply a criticism of the ordinary servicemen who worked on these weapons systems. On the contrary. The book is about the incredible heroism of ordinary guys put in custody of nuclear weapons at a remarkably young age. I’m getting old enough now. So when I think of a nineteen, twenty, twenty-one year old person having custody of a thermonuclear weapon, it takes me aback. And those guys again and again in the Cold War had this responsibility. Maybe some of them were smoking pot. But most of them were quite serious about not wanting these weapons to go off and about making sure that we were safe from attack from the Soviet Union.

Correspondent: What’s fascinating is why so many young and inexperienced greenhorns would be given such responsibility for these missiles. I mean, that’s what boggles the mind. Especially since there were several other accidents. The B-52s that you have dropping bombs that thankfully didn’t have charged warheads. I mean, this is very serious. This isn’t asking regular people to go ahead and mop up the floor of a hangar. This is our system. And I’m wondering what conditions allowed this to perpetuate for so long, notwithstanding the heroism that you depict in your book.

Schlosser: The accident that is the central narrative of the book — the Titan II accident in Damascus, Arkansas — was unquestionably linked to understaffing, to poorly trained personnel, shortage of spare parts, an obsolete weapons system. But I write about many other accidents in the book. And in those accidents, they had extremely well-trained personnel. They had the most modern weapons imaginable. The best systems in place imaginable. But one of the big themes of the book is that we’re a lot better at creating complex technologies than we are at controlling them or managing them. And it’s hard to think of a machine that doesn’t mess up. From your toaster oven to your laptop to commercial airliners to commercial nuclear power plants, no matter how sophisticated the people and no matter how well-trained, it’s just beyond fallible, imperfect human beings to create something that’s infallible and perfect. And when you’re talking about nuclear weapons, you’re talking about the most dangerous machines ever invented. So it makes sense that those machines and the complex technological systems that manage them would mess up occasionally. But the consequences of one of those things screwing up is a lot more than if your toaster oven freezes up and catches on fire in the kitchen. And one of the reasons I wrote the book was, firstly, I thought the story of this missile accident was just unbelievable. And I thought the heroism of the guys who tried to save the missile was unbelievable. But I’m just trying to remind people that these things are out there. There are thousands of nuclear weapons right now that are ready to go. And people my age — I’m 54; I grew up in the Cold War — remember what it was like to live with this dread that there might be an all-out nuclear war any day. But half the people who live in the United States either weren’t born yet or were small children when the Soviet Union vanished. And there’s a historical amnesia. And most people just don’t realize these weapons are there. Now I’m not trying to create an existential dread in anybody. I’m not trying to create late night anxiety. But this is really important information. And people need to know it.

Correspondent: Well, even in the 1950s, you have this guy named Fred Iklé. He disseminates this RAND report on nuclear weapon safety and he outlines all the motivations that would cause someone to disobey orders and set off a nuclear weapon. His reports were disseminated, as you point out in the book, to the highest levels of the Air Force and the Department of Defense. You’ve got this guy Bob Peurifoy. He points to numerous safety problems as well. Your book, as we have established, documents several incidents in which safety is sacrificed for ease of intercontinental ballistic missile use in retaliation. Why was the top brass so recalcitrant against safety? Why were they so interested in taking shortcuts? I mean, it seems to me that it goes beyond a cultural problem or an institutional problem and into just pure recklessness.

Schlosser: Yeah. And that top secret report by Iklé was really cool to read. I mean, it was looking into the ways that not only mechanically these weapons could go wrong, but I think in one section of the report there’s a catalog of derangement, which is looking at what sort of psychological problems airmen might have that would lead them to deliberately set off a weapon, deliberately steal a weapon. And at the time that Iklé was writing, literally there were no locks on our nuclear weapons. There were no coded switches. So a pilot who wanted to take a weapon could just fly to the target in the Soviet Union, in the Eastern Bloc, or even in the United States and just drop it, if he or she wanted to do that. And Iklé’s report was important in one respect. It really encouraged what you’d think would be a no brainer, but nobody had thought of doing. Putting locks on the weapons. The locks that were eventually put on them — these coded switches called Permissive Action Links — they were effective. But to someone who really understood the innards of the weapon, in a few hours, they could just disable it. Robert Peurifoy is one of the heroes of the book. He’s a weapons designer at one of the weapons labs: the Sandia National Laboratories. He realized in the late 1960s that our nuclear weapons just weren’t safe enough and that during what is called an “abnormal environment” — I mean, you could argue that the whole history that I write about in the book is an abnormal environment. But at the weapons labs, they refer to abnormal environments as a fire, a subversion of a weapon, a plane crash, a lightning strike.

Correspondent: Amazingly, no acronym.

Schlosser: Right. He realized that our weapons were not safe enough in these abnormal environments. But it took him like a twenty year bureaucratic battle to get modern safety devices put in the weapons, which we now have today. But you would never build a nuclear weapon today in the United States without these sorts of safety devices. Ultimately, at the heart of the problem, firstly is a sort of bureaucratic mentality. Someone said recently to me, “If you want to understand how bureaucracies work, it’s better to be wrong than be alone.” So it takes somebody with some personal courage to stand up, willing to buck the bureaucracy, and be alienated from everyone else as a result. And there also has been since the very first nuclear weapon was deployed an internal contradiction, a tension between wanting the weapons to be as safe as possible and wanting them to be as reliable as possible and available for immediate use. If you wanted the weapons to be totally safe, you would never fully assemble them until you’re about to use them. But if you want to use them within 45 seconds or a minute, you need to have them fully assembled on top of the missile or inside the bomber and ready to go. So in the book, I talk about this internal tension between always wanting to be able to use the weapon and never wanting it to go out by accident. And again and again, throughout our nuclear history, the military preferred always to never. And some of it I can understand. These bomber pilots knew that if they got the order to go bomb the Soviet Union, they would be flying into an environment that no pilot had ever flown into before. Missiles would probably have already hit the Soviet Union. They would be flying into this atomic wasteland, in many ways, to drop their bombs and they were probably on one-way suicide missions to do so. And yet they were willing to do it. And it would be a bummer for them if they risked everything to take out a Soviet Union airfield and that weapon turned out to be a dud because there were too many safety devices on it. Having said that, I would have voted for greater safety. Robert Peurifoy, the Sandia engineer, felt like we could make the weapons reliable enough and still make them much safer. And eventually his view prevailed. But it took…

Correspondent: Decades.

Schlosser: Almost two decades. And I think it really hurt his career. He wound up being a vice president at this weapons lab. But he was ostracized. It hurt his career. And I think it was enormously stressful for him to live with this constant knowledge that one of our weapons might detonate and be trying to fight the system to make them safe. And he prevailed. But it was a pretty stressful job.

(Loops for this program provided by 40A, petitcrabe, Nebraskaboy12, chefboydee, danke, and mejiam, .)

The Bat Segundo Show #515: Eric Schlosser (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Alissa Quart (The Bat Segundo Show #514)

In the second of two related programs devoted to the American epidemic of gravitating to mainstream culture in an age of limitless choice, we talk with REPUBLIC OF OUTSIDERS author Alissa Quart about how outsiders and iconoclasts have been appropriated by institutional forces. Why have we shifted to a culture hostile to original voices? Why is it all about being liked? And how does cosplay, transphobia, animal rights, and Mad Pride fit into all this?

Alissa Quart is most recently the author of Republic of Outsiders. This show is the second of two related programs devoted to the American epidemic of gravitating to mainstream culture in an age of limitless choice. (You can listen to the first part: Show #513 with Kiese Laymon.)

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Author: Alissa Quart

Subjects Discussed: George Lucas as “independent filmmaker,” how the presumed amateur mediums of YouTube and Kickstarter have become dominated by established figures, Amanda Palmer’s exploitation of musicians, Marina Abramović’s exploitation of dancers, Tilda Swinton marketing herself as an outsider, problems with the term “maverick,” the problems with Dave Eggers’s “selling out” rant, why resisting “selling out” has declined in the last ten years, Branded, OK Soda, how alternative cartoonists defied corporations, the decline in ad parodies, Yahoo cracking down on Tumblrs with sexual content, the flat self, how the lack of privacy destroys existential possibilities, the online exhibitionist impulse, Marie Calloway and easily deciphered pseudonyms, the relationship between the professional and the amateur, the rise of Etsy, T.J. Jackson Lear’s notion of antimodern dissent, people who strive to be featured sellers, false feminist fantasies, stealth capitalistic wish fulfillment, how physical space of hobbyists is appropriated by digital companies, handmade status, parallels between Etsy and freemium video games, addiction to Candy Crush Saga, Team Fortress 2, Netflix as an elaborate scheme to mine entertainment data, the narcotic state of false entertainment empowerment, vegans and fake meat, sanctimonious parallels between an animal rights activist telling you to watching a stream of slaughterhouse videos and a supermarket chain which claims that it slaughters animals humanely, crying over a field mouse dying, animal rights futurists, how prescriptive dichotomies develop into mainstream tropes, morally ostentatious ideological positions, The Icarus Project, the fine line between being eccentric and in need of help, bipolar writers, Mad Pride, a thought experiment concerning healthcare, whether or not it is the outsider’s to constantly resist, nontraditional settings for psychiatric care, Wikipedia’s transphobia against Chelsea Manning, transfeminists pointing to the assumption that the decision to have children is an assumption for all women, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, blind spots of mainstream feminists, gender distinctions at Barnard, young people and privacy*, Snapchat, how outsider ideas become mainstream, a Comics Alliance review of Heroes of Cosplay, cosplay as the professionalization of fans, the Tron Guy, how body image is becoming more Hollywood with professional cosplay, Vimeo auteurs, viral videos about broken subway steps, corporations that use images of people against their will, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Star Wars Uncut, contemporary collective filmmaking of today vs. truly independent filmmaking of the past (John Cassevetes, et al.), how tastemakers saved Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, the entitled fan critic vs. the designated gatekeeper, the decline of auteurism, mumblecore, documentary collectives in the 1960s, designated advocates vs. fan advocates, Kickstarter and behavioral economics, what a true outsider is, Sublime Frequencies’s Alan Bishop, the discipline of only being influenced by the sensibilities you cultivate, Pitchfork, taste as the last recourse in a world with too much information, how the word “curator” has been inverted, Maria Popova, the obligation to be outsider in some way, NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour, Lev Manovich’s idea of data streams, and the limited cultural scope of hyperniche groups on Twitter.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: When George Lucas made Star Wars Episodes I through III, he declared himself an “independent filmmaker.” Even though he was self-financing these movies for many millions of dollars. I also remember in 2011 when Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gorden Levitt were singing “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” and they released this to YouTube. They faced a great deal of criticism. YouTube is the amateur medium. Well, now we’re in a totally different ball game these days. Now we have crowdfunding. We have Spike Lee, Zach Braff, Veronica Mars on Kicktarter. And these people say, “Hey, it’s okay.” And what’s even more astonishing is that people are more accepting of this. And maybe, just to start off on what we’re dealing with here in terms of insiders and outsiders, why do you think that independent filmmaking has changed so that we now accept these people moving into the turf previously occupied by outsiders and people who were scrabbling together various resources to make different, eclectic art?

Quart: Well, I think right now we’re seeing coalitions of insiders and outsiders in a single person. So you have someone like Spike Lee, who is doing a Kickstarter campaign. He may have raised it by now. He was trying to raise $1.4 million. And then you have Amanda Palmer raising something similar on Kickstarter. Even more. And then you have actual true outsiders, or people who would have defined themselves as outsiders for many years, also using these same media. And it becomes, as I write in my book, a “republic of outsiders” — some which are arguably relying on their fans too much.

Correspondent: To the point of exploiting them, as Amanda Palmer is. “Hey, we’re going to have professional musicians play for free.” Which she’s received a lot of understandable flack for.

Quart: And I just saw recently Marina Abramović — the performance artist who had a big show at MOMA, quite famous. A dancer was complaining about being exploited for her labor in a crowdsourcing. Now there’s highbrow artists who are getting in on this kind of fan/star collapse and also monetizing the labor of people who are non-stars.

Correspondent: It’s interesting. Because I saw recently that Tilda Swinton went to Russia and is presenting herself as a total outsider. Of course, there’s her famous exhibit where she’s basically sleeping there. We’re now seeing a situation where mainstream people, or people who have dabbled between mainstream and outsider type of art, now feel this overwhelming need to define themselves as a rebel in some way. And yet they’re still reliant in many ways upon corporate cash or mainstream sources.

Quart: Or ordinary people’s cash.

Correspondent: Yes!

Quart: Or a friend’s cash.

Correspondent: And with crowdfunding. Yes.

Quart: Or a friend’s labor. And in a sense, the traditional selling out, where you’re relying on a corporation, can start to seem somewhat more innocent.

Correspondent: Well, why do you think that identifying yourself as an outsider is now a fundamental part of being? We can all sort of see through it. Especially when one tracks the general tenor or some artist’s voice. So why is this such a big thing these days?

Quart: Originally I was going to call this book either The Maverick Principle or Mavericks. And then there was the 2008 election. Sarah Palin and John McCain calling themselves “mavericks.”

Correspondent: “A real maverick.” Yes.

Quart: And then at some point Obama was even called “renegade.” So I think it’s really interesting. There’s a lot of use of language of the rebel/renegade. But part of what I did in this book was that I tried to include as many people who I considered — and I use this word advisedly — authentic outsiders, as well as people who are in this inside/outside thing like Amanda Palmer.

Correspondent: Sure. Well, one piece of writing you don’t actually include in the book, that I feel is actually germane to this argument, is Dave Eggers’s famous “selling out” speech, which he gave to The Harvard Advocate. And I still see it crop up all the time on Tumblr, where people constantly post it. And he basically says, okay, so the Flaming Lips appeared on 90210 and they performed their popular songs. But who cares? And he says, “Hey, I take money. Considerable thousands of dollars from Fortune Magazine. But I’m giving that away.” But what’s interesting about this, and what no one actually seems to think about in considering the Eggers rant, is that he’s not willing to hold himself accountable for how being indoctrinated in that kind of mainstream situation is going to affect his outsider nature or is actually going to compromise it in some way. And I’m wondering why this is such a compelling piece of text even almost fifteen years later, after it was originally disseminated. Why do you think people are still clinging to this notion of being an outsider or wanting to justify the fact that we’re all ensnared in this trap of having to…

Quart: As I said, the term “selling out,” which I considered an honorific when I was growing up. Or the opposite. Not selling out was honorific. Selling out was a terrible thing to do. I think the paradoxes of the term “selling out” have collapsed. And so you see people not even recognizing what that means. Now I’m going to start sounding like an old fuddy-duddy. But it’s not really a term that people really use or judge themselves by. It’s seen as a compliment. “Oh, I got Doritos to use my content that I created. Even though I’m just a fanboy.” Or “I got the latest hip-hop artist to use my remix in an advertisement. I’m so great.” So I think one of the reasons this document may hold appeal is that it’s a smart, well-heeled person kind of explaining what a lot of people are experiencing and addressing, if there is any, their lingering doubt. Is this a problem that I don’t even have this lodestone of selling out/not selling out anymore?

Correspondent: Why do you think that the notion of “selling out” became — when do you think the stigma was deflated? I mean, is this probably the last ten years, would you say?

Quart: I could feel it. I wrote a book. It came out in 2003.

Correspondent: You did.

Quart: Branded. And that to me was like — I didn’t even know it then, but I was seeing all these adolescents — I called it self-branding — who were defining themselves by the products they were consuming. Like “I am Coke. I am Pepsi. I am Abercrombie.” And I thought to myself, “Wow, this is just a teen thing.” But then the more I looked into it, these kids were growing up. And they were going to similarly retain that kind of identification. So I think a lot of it happened in the ’90s. It happened during the consolidation of corporations. It happened with the faltering economy. So people didn’t feel that they had the courage necessarily, even if they wanted to. To not define themselves by status markers. So I think there’s a multitude of factors that went into it.

Correspondent: You think people wanted to belong? And not really finding an absolute group, they turned to what corporations had to offer?

Quart: Yeah. I think it was just a surround sound culture. I mean, it is right now. We live in a screen culture where there’s endless pop-up ads, where our data is being mined. Where if I check out a jacket on a site, I’ll be seeing that jacket reappearing endlessly on my browser with every site I visit. In the early 2000s, when I wrote Branded, the line between advertorial and editorial in teen publications was collapsing. And that itself was a cause for dismay in media critic circles. And I wrote about it. “Oh no. They’re getting these advertising giveaways that are masquerading as magazines for teenagers.” Now everything they read carries promotional content. Magazines themselves are promotional entities. Again, the paradoxes of what selling out means have collapsed. And given the difficulties of the magazine and newspaper businesses right now, people don’t even focus on this that much. What content carries a commercial valence and which doesn’t.

Correspondent: But there was a time — like I think, for example, of OK Soda, where Coca-Cola hired Dan Clowes and Charles Burns to make this hip kind of design. I love this story. And they basically took the money and ran. I mean, there used to be a more honorable way of taking corporate money and pissing in their face.

Quart: Well, I think what you’re talking about is subversion, or subvertising. Remember all those terms that people used to use, and I loved? They don’t seem to be around so much anymore. Remember there was that moment. Well, it starts with MAD Magazine. Ad parodies? I mean, I don’t even see ad parodies anymore. It’s kind of weird.

Correspondent: Yeah! There used to be a rich culture in the ’90s and even in the early noughts. They were still, I think, flourishing even after September 11th. But I think something happened. And I guess I’m trying to ask you, Alissa…

Quart: What happened?

Correspondent: What was it? It probably, as you say, was post-2008 economic problems.

Quart: Some of them. 9/11 is a pertinent moment. Because you saw our President telling us to go shopping. It wasn’t “Have courage! Batten down the hatches!” It was “Go to the mall!” This is the way to be American. That was just one of many data points on that journey towards becoming an American shopper, not an American citizen.

Correspondent: One thing you didn’t really write about in this book that I think is possibly germane to this conversation is Tumblr. I mean, here is a situation where people think they’re being alternative on Tumblr. And very often, I see that they’re actually tailoring their posts so they can be liked or favorited and reposted elsewhere. And then on top of that, we had Yahoo recently purchase Tumblr. And they’ve started to quash down on certain blogs that actually have sexual content. And — I call them the Tumblrettes — the people who work at Tumblr, they scurry away when anybody has a more outsider or traditionally pugnacious reply in response to a cultural ill. Do you think that sometimes mediums such as Tumblr enable our worst impulses?

Quart: I mean, if we’re talking about companies buying other companies, we see that all the time. We see Goodreads being bought by Amazon. I guess in the ’90s, they would have called it mini-majors. Remember when independent studios were being bought? Miramax or Sony would purchase an independent company. Well, you see that happening a lot with companies that would be offering alternative platforms, that would be bought by companies that don’t offer those platforms. What happens, I guess, is that eventually there’s a neutralization of content. That’s another way in which outsiderdom is controlled.

Correspondent: But I think people have a choice to limit themselves or put themselves into some position where some moderating force is going to discourage them from truly expressing what’s on their mind. Clearly, there is something to be said about people’s choice of expression. I mean, they’re consenting to this. It’s not just evil corporate forces. And I’m wondering why that is.

Quart: I think, in the past, you used to see science fiction movies where people’s souls would be sucked out of their bodies by alien beings. And now we give away our information for the price of a five dollar badge online. For a sale item. There’s just such a level in a certain way. I call it the flat self. I mean, this isn’t in my book. But it’s something that I see a lot. And I guess it’s one of the incentives for writing a book like this, for people who are less flat. But for people who are willing to give away their information, their data — even the reaction to the fact that our information is being obtained against our will by all these companies and by our government. People are like, “Eh? Sure! I’ll give that away for 10% off!”

Correspondent: Well, what would be the typical flat self? Or I suppose a pernicious flat self? Since we’re on this particular metaphor. It seems to me it’s kind of an evolution of the dyed hair craze of people. As I grew up in San Francisco and Berkeley, you’d see people with dyed hair and punk T-shirts and they’d all look alike. Possibly more alike than a sea of corporate navy blue suits.

Quart: Well, there’s lots of ways to be a flat self. I guess what we’re talking about here is people who have, in some ways, are afraid and have succumbed to just a commercialized self that doesn’t have an interior life. So if you don’t think you have much of an interior life, the only thing you’re afraid of is if you’ve done anything wrong that people will see. You don’t really care about protecting the nature of your subjectivity. That’s not something that you’re concerned about.

Correspondent: A lack of an interior life is possibly part of this problem?

Quart: Perhaps. Or a lack of an interior life that you care about preserving.

* — Our Correspondent misstated the exact statistic. We regret the error and hope that the above link will set the matter straight.

(Loops for this program provided by Kristijann, 40A, ferryterry, and Boogieman0307.)

The Bat Segundo Show #514: Alissa Quart (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Norman Rush (The Bat Segundo Show #512)

In this wide-ranging 70 minute conversation, we talk with acclaimed novelist Norman Rush about revolution, James Joyce, Botswana, his friendship with Thomas Disch, why his characters are seduced by quacks, and countless other subjects.

Norman Rush is most recently the author of Subtle Bodies.

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Author: Norman Rush

Subjects Discussed: Keeping a personal existential view of the world on one paper, utopian democracy, allusions to Ulysses in Rush’s work, Vico Cycles, the importance of the 2003 Iraq War protests (and why they have been forgotten), whether forms of liberalism have any legitimate application in the 21st century, the importance of physical space in Rush’s fiction, people who preserve language vs. people who are terrified of originality, how people express themselves, the origins of “in your wheelhouse” and “traveling fight,” comparing various drafts of a “plaid underpants” section in Subtle Bodies, carrying something in your head vs. writing it down, unsuccessful attempts to outperform geniuses, the specific cocktail chatter that led Elsa and Norman Rush to become Peace Fund co-directors in Botswana, draft resistance, amnesty, how an anti-establishment stance can you lead you into an establishment job, the virtues of insouciance, working with editor Ann Close at Knopf, invaluable oddities, personal aversions to semicolons, dialogue and punctuation, singing prose out aloud, Rush’s bygone ukelele skills, resisting the essayist and journalistic in fiction, Sherlock Holmes pastiches, being an anti-minmialist, the carefully designed reading pace of Mortals, limited word use in Botswana cable transmissions, why America is now crazier than Botswana, the three cartons of notes that Rush brought back to America, spending 15 years in the antiquarian book business, exquisitely unknown incidents in the history of the Western Left, the failure of the Socialists to come together on an antiwar platform in 1914, Rush’s stubborn focus on being an experimental writer and a poet in his early days, the anxiety of influence, measuring yourself against the impossible, the origins of Karen in “Bruns,” Patrick van Rensburg, having an indomitable vocabulary, how much Mating‘s Karen was influenced by Denoon, how Rush got to know his great literary friend Thomas Disch, being a genuine man of letters, Manhattan’s financial hostility to writers, finding creative ways to live in Brooklyn, parenthood in Subtle Bodies, connections between Nina in Subtle Bodies and Nan in “Near Pala,” ancillary subjects that propagate during writing, tales of masculine sadness throughout literature, David Foster Wallace, the limited makeup of today’s literary audience, Lena Dunham’s appreciation for Mating, comparisons between Mating and Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, characters defined by reading allegiances, the manuscript as a bomb, writing down what people have on their bookshelves, the sangoma in “Official Americans,” Morel in Mortals, why Rush’s characters are seduced by or drawn to charlatans, Rush’s father, religion and theosophy, the foundational aspects of what you are, spiritualism as an unavoidable part of being American, Rush’s “Americanity,” motives for burning a passport, why optimism is essential, parallels between Subtle Bodies and the great Edgar Wright-Simon Pegg film The World’s End, ideologues and the absence of identity, nostalgia as a panacea of anxiety, turning tropes into foundations for serious art, Rex from Mortals, flailing aspirants who write for The Awl, middling educated types, fiction as a place for failed forms of the self, dummy experimentalism, sections from Mortals that were dropped, cave art, the differences between expatriates and Americans who stay home, James Wood’s observations about Ray Finch’s interpretation of Joyce’s “The Dead,” the courage to inhabit an unseemly perspective, the reading Rush did while working as an antiquarian bookseller, fiction with numbered paragraphs, Hume’s influence upon Subtle Bodies, writing a book without a sustained perspective, the Kalahari Desert, the advantages of being overwhelmed with life you are not acquainted with, describing the landscape with waning movie metaphors, young people forced into scavenging from culture, the messianic qualities of 20th century Hollywood stars, the future of narrative, balancing the personal and the political, the importance of recognizing the evils of the world and not to be a fool, people who are increasingly duped in the digital age, facing an unreadable future, the Internet and political activism, and the future of social democracy.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I was curious about this. You were showing me these series of Venn diagrams that represents your existential view. I’m amazed that you could fit this all on one paper.

Rush: Well, actually, I’d need a much larger piece of paper to get the whole thing on. This is about current feelings about the way the world is going.

Correspondent: Are they negative or positive?

Rush: I’d say they could be described as apocalyptic, but in a piecemeal way. I’m not looking for a big bang, but I think serious trouble is coming. And I’ll explain what I mean by that in describing a lack of fit between what the evolved political institutions of our advanced capitalist world, capitalist republic, can deal with and the scale of the problems that are presenting themselves autonomously, outside of anybody’s control.

Correspondent: Well, maybe one way to kickstart this is to tie in a sentiment in Mating with what is going on in Subtle Bodies. In the early Circe-like part of Mating, you have Nelson Denoon’s speech for his solar democracy, Tsau. “Everything we want in a society is what we find brought out in people and the moment of insurrection. Spontaneity! Spontaneous hierarchy!” There are exclamation marks after all of this. “Self-sacrifice! Staying awake all night! Working until we drop! Audacity! Camaraderie! The carnival behind the barricades.” Well, in Subtle Bodies, you have this compound called The Vale. It’s a sprawling place. It’s just outside Kingston. It’s the home to activists. It’s reminiscent in some ways of the Martello Tower at the very beginning of Ulysses. And, in fact, you actually compare it to the Winchester Mystery House. As a South Bay guy, I got that little reference.

Rush: Oh, you’re South Bay.

Correspondent: Yeah. So my question to you is, well, based on what you were expressing earlier, to what degree was this your way of exploring a Vico Cycle in which America is caught within a perpetual moment of insurrection?

Rush: Well, that’s very acute. This is about one of the last flashes of the revolutionary impulse to make a significant change. In this case, stopping the impending invasion of Iraq. So it’s not about making a New Society in the old sense. In the way that Denoon was talking about. But it’s about a much more reduced yet still large objective. And that is basically a negative one. But stopping something from happening.

iraq2003

Correspondent: Well, it’s interesting. Because that Iraq War protest in 2003 is often forgotten by many of the people, like the Occupy crowd. I mean, there were regular people who attended these series of protests. And it’s kind of been swept under the dustbin of history. Is this one of the motivations to explore this in fiction?

Rush: Absolutely. And in fact, it was in its time the largest international demonstration in history. All countries, all over the West. Not only here. And it represented a high watermark of emotion left over from the Vietnam War, which had, in the minds of oppositionists, been stopped by exactly this kind of direct action and mass protest. And, of course, well, I don’t want to give away the end of the book or remind people too much about the history of it. But yes. And that’s another thing. I think the book is working with a kind of fading historical appreciation of what the last twenty or twenty-five years have really meant.

Correspondent: Well, let me ask you something. I mean, if societal ideals — as are represented in that Nelson Denoon speech — if they are constantly replenishing themselves in this new musk of want, what is the present state of revolution? How can fiction provide an answer or encourage or empower people to commit revolution?

Rush: Well, don’t hold back from the big questions. I mean, that is the question. Every serious writer is implicitly or explicitly asking that question. What is it that I’m writing about? What does it have to do with the seemingly autonomous evolution of increasingly less propitious circumstances to make change? And the answer to that is the central and most compelling question, it seems to me, for people who write novels which incorporate serious politics and political thinking into them. The answer keeps revealing itself as you write and as things change. I mean, one of the things that seems to be happening — one reason that this is such a fascinating and, in a way, dumbfounding moment — is that the three great propositions about how we should organize the world and life — that is to say, socialism, followed by its variants, social democracy, followed by neoliberalism — have all in their own ways collapsed and don’t exist as real options anymore. They carry on their shells. There’s a shell of socialism existing in pockets and enclaves around the world. There’s a kind of zombie social democracy operating mostly in Western Europe. And there’s neoliberalism, which is in a state of what you have to call a dispensational crisis. Because basic problems like inequality have not been solved. And in the meantime, coming from the outside is this continual costs in the environment of the systems we built.

Correspondent: But at the same time, Marxism has a lowercase m in Mating. So has there ever really been credence to any of these political systems? Why do we continue to gnaw at them if they are unimplementable in everyday society?

Rush: Oh sure. Actually with the ongoing collapse of socialism, the Socialist Project, one of the standard responses to that — and it’s happened in the past many times — is to take the socialist idea and incorporate it in tiny pieces. Tiny little enclaves. Make it work. Make a pilot model. Make it tiny. Make it small. That’s sort of what Denoon is up to.

Correspondent: I wanted to also talk with you about how space functions in your book. In Mating, you have this wonderful passage where Karen describes love as moving from one room or apartment to another, and each subsequent room or apartment is bigger and better. Also, we learn in Subtle Bodies that the Vale’s large space has become unwieldy, especially when you’re trying to snag some yogurt for breakfast. But what you just said about how America is compartmentalizing itself and how social democracy is doing that reminds me very much of the episode where Nina enters this closet and she hears these two men and you write, “She had gained nothing by putting herself in this predicament.” And I’m wondering if this is your wry way of suggesting that figurative space is the only space that we can trust in fiction, in life, or in politics.

Rush: That’s an interesting way to look at it. Actually, this is a case of her burning desire to know everything taking over her good judgment. And as a character, she is determined to know everything she can to relieve the unmerited suffering she sees of her husband’s milieu. So she puts her nose into everything in the place that they live.

Correspondent: In Mortals, Ray complains that “affray was one of those words that was vanishing from the language.” But in Subtle Bodies, you have Ned almost terrified with the imperfection of a pickup line such as “I stand here lonely as a turnstile.” Nina also says, “A pleasant despair of the region of the loins.” And she claims to be quoting something. But actually you can’t place the quote. So one must assume that it’s original in some sense. If your books represent in some way a history of the way that Americans express themselves, and I think we can say that they do, why do you think your characters have moved from preserving word choice — and, of course, we have the word games as well in the early days of these characters. Why have they moved from preserving language to being terrified of the original expression? I mean, why is this of interest to you? I’m curious.

Rush: I’m interested in knowing the way that people express themselves. What lasts and what doesn’t. It’s kind of a Darwinian process that has always seemed interesting to me. For example, why do we now say that something that is within your competence is “within your wheelhouse”? “In your wheelhouse.” Now the odd thing about that is, first of all, I don’t know where it started.* But it certainly has taken over every conversation. And I was unable, and Elsa too, to recall what preceded it. What did we say when were saying to someone that he was out of his field of competence? Or in it? What did we say? Not “his line of work.” No, that’s not quite right. But there is a kind of occlusion of ways of expressing states of being and possibilities that happens. And it’s happening faster now because the media are so ever present and so tightly connected to everything. It happens fast. But I ask you. What did you say before you said, “It’s not in my wheelhouse”?

Correspondent: “Not in my purview,” I guess. I don’t know. “Not in my bailiwick.”

Rush: “Purview” is not quite right. Because this has to do with competence. “Bailiwick” is closer. But anyway, ponder it. I don’t have an answer myself.

travelingfightCorrespondent: I mean, this leads me to wonder. There is one point in this book where you have a “traveling fight” occur. And I had never actually heard the expression “traveling fight.” And I became so obsessed with that notion of a fight moving from one place to another. And the only place I could really find it online was from a 1970s article in the Toledo Blade.

Rush: Oh my gosh. (laughs)

Correspondent: So this is interesting. They are so determined to use that term “traveling fight,” which comes from a place that they’re okay with. And yet when they’re actually trying to riff on their own phrases, they don’t want to relive the pleasure of those word games in their early lives. Also, I’m just curious about where you first heard “traveling fight.”

Rush: I can’t tell you. I know that it came up in some place along the way in my life and I’ve carried it around as a description. And then suddenly, when I needed it, there it was.

Correspondent: I found an early draft of the “plaid underpants” moment in Subtle Bodies between Ned and Nina that was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. [NOTE: We have reconstructed Rush’s compositional revisions in the graphic at the end of this capsule.] What was curious about this is that the dialogue you have is almost the same, but there’s some interesting description in this early draft where Nina is a little more willing to judge Ned. The sentences here are “In the seventies, the boys had lived in a jokey plenum. Now a kind of fitful replay was emerging among them, extending even to Karl, who had a brain.” And in the book, you’ve added this passage where Nina describes how she likes “the permanent delicate subliminal trembling of the room.” And this leads me to ask you. To what degree are you discovering these characters in the early drafts? Has it been your practice to severely cut the degree to which your characters dwell on the past and concentrate on the present moment you are bringing to life as you’re writing it?

Rush: Yeah, that’s part of my struggle against saying everything. And you may know that the way I’ve proceeded in the past with books was to write a dossier for each individual character, so that I knew the life of the character up till that point and sometimes beyond. Just for my own reference. And that was a helpful way to proceed. But I do more of that in my head now than I used to feel I had to do on paper. But yes. I have cut down in favor of moving the action so that I can get to the next big thing.

Correspondent: Well, in terms of carrying something in your head versus writing it down, why do you think you’ve always had that packrat tendency to say everything? I mean, I’m looking here and, on the table, you have this massive and quite intriguing collection of files. So why do you think you need to say everything and you need to get it all down?

Rush: I could tell you part of the answer to the extent that I think is true, but there’s more to it. At the very heart of it, of course, there’s got to be something like fear of not having, knowing what you need when you need it. But on top of that is laid another impulse that I have when I write. And that is — it’s a kind of crazed Platonism. Because once you start a book and you set up your characters and you set up the situation and you discern the argument that is going to lie at the base of the structure, you — at least I’m speaking for myself — you have a sense that this is a copy of a perfect realization. There is a perfect working out of the plot. A perfect resolution. A perfect rhythm. Everything. There is a perfect embodiment. End point. Embodiment of the things that you set out to say. And that’s what I want to do when I set out. And this is all kind of philosophical more than I like to admit. But I’m looking for something that is like a realization like, oh say, Kurosawa gets in The Seven Samurai. When you get to the end of the uncut version, when you get to the end of that, you have fully and absolutely experienced what was intended from the very first scenes of the book to the end. Or the opera. Tosca. Or Ravel’s Boléro. At the end of it, you have had everything. It has completed itself. And I think it’s probably a self-destructive kind of impulse to be subject to. But that’s me.

Correspondent: Is it something you grabbed from Joyce?

Rush: Joyce is another example. Ulysses is. And that’s why there’s so much extra stuff in Ulysses. Because in his own not completely formed way, I see him as aiming for the same thing and achieving it in thunder.

Correspondent: But you’ve never really sought out to have Botswana reconstructed from the bricks you laid down in Mortals or Mating.

Rush: No. I thought I would never know enough really as a five year resident and student of an extremely complicated and interesting culture. I would never know enough to do that. That will be the work of some writer from that country in some time. But yeah, I was always very conscious that Botswana was a set in which I was privileged to place my people and my problems.

* — A Way With Words, a casual call-in radio program devoted to word origins and language (I have been a regular listener of this agreeable low-key show for more than a year and recommend it), proved instructive in answering this question on its March 5, 2011 installment. The term “wheelhouse” comes from baseball. According to the Dickson Baseball Dictionary, it involves swinging a bat when the ball is in your crush zone. A 2010 Daily Finance article reveals nautical origins. Its popularity in the last three years (which is on the downslide) can be traced to an episode of Glee, in which Darius Rucker told another singer that a song was not “in his wheelhouse.”

* * *

An earlier draft of the “plaid underpants” episode in Subtle Bodies was published on October 23, 2011 at the Los Angeles Review of Books. This has allowed an unanticipated glimpse into Norman Rush’s compositional approach, when we compare this earlier draft against the published version. Note how Rush’s dialogue remains mostly unmodified. But his description has undergone significant revision. Rush was kind enough to discuss this at length on the program. (Please note that Rush’s additions are in boldface. His deletions are in strikethrough.):

rush-revision8

(Photo: Wyatt Mason, permission through Random House. Music: Kevin MacLeod, “As I Figure.”)

The Bat Segundo Show #512: Norman Rush (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Maggie O’Farrell (The Bat Segundo Show #511)

In 1976, Britain faced the greatest water shortage of the 20th century and the feelings are eerily resonant of current climate change. How can fiction make sense of all this? We talk with Costa-winning author Maggie O’Farrell about her latest novel, INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE, discuss how research often springs from personal experience and the idea of the disappearing patriarch, and get into the thorny realities of families.

Maggie O’Farrell is most recently the author of Instructions for a Heatwave.

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Author: Maggie O’Farrell

Subjects Discussed: People who went crazy during the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, John Cleese’s determination to commandeer a cab, how strange weather transforms communities, unusual nostalgia for the 1976 UK drought, whether fiction can prepare us for the insanity of the human race, families on their worst behavior, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (and the bizarre critical controversy, how to present character without ascribing to historical touchstones, taking down narrative scaffolding, prejudice against the Irish in the 1970s, baking bread, keeping the domestic life compartmentalized from a writing life, how writing a book in present tense permits the reader to confront folkways and mores of the past, how novelists can convey and acknowledge behavioral changes over the past, Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, when historical novels transmute into accidental essays, too much detail, avoiding beanbags and other kitsch items in 1970s fiction, the raw material of a first draft, women who disguise their dyslexia by memorizing stories, the privilege of reading, literary couples who avoid homicidal impulses when reading each other’s work, having a harsh critic for a husband, surprise plot revelations, familial traits that are passed down, resisting and acknowledging qualities originating from your parents, the fine line between transforming real material into something imaginative and using personal experience, fiction that comes from what you don’t understand, paying attention to children’s disabilities, visual stimuli and curiosity, John Banville’s aversion to research, reading memoirs of British feminists and journalists for inspiration, the pub bombings of 1974, how first-person accounts can help a novelist to get inside characters, inspiration from bedsit living arrangements, family disappearances, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Elena Seymenliyska’s perspicacious review in The Telegraph pointing to the spate of recent novels with disappearing men, Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, masculinity defined by disappearance, living in a world in which everyone is spied upon, the romance of walking away from life, seeking dominoes in narrative, and the problems with gender generalization.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: My understanding is that this book was inspired from people going a little cuckoo roughly around the nigh unpronounceable Icelandic volcano. And I’m wondering how you got form Eyjafjallajökull — I think that’s what it is — to 1976. Just to start off here.

O’Farrell: Well, I had planned to write a completely different novel. It was going to be historic and sweeping and intercontinental. And I started doing a lot of research for that. And I did put a little bit of pen to paper. But then it was funny. It was a bit like radio interference. I started getting these snatches of conversation. Images of a family arguing in a kitchen. It was very, very hot in this kitchen. Very, very humid and very close. And it was annoying. Because I actually wanted to concentrate on my other book. But this family wouldn’t shut up.

Correspondent: They wouldn’t shut up? Families often don’t shut up.

O’Farrell: Exactly. I find that too. And then what happened — this was the tipping point. It was, as you say, the unpronounceable volcano in Iceland erupting. And the whole of Northern Europe just came to a standstill. It was extraordinary. There were no flights leaving. Nothing arriving. It was just lockdown.

Correspondent: You heard the story of John Cleese?

O’Farrell: Yes!

Correspondent: That was crazy!

O’Farrell: That’s one of my favorite stories.

Correspondent: He absolutely had to go home.

O’Farrell: Only he though. Only he would do that.

Correspondent: Which is insane.

O’Farrell: I was living in London at the time and my normally pretty sane neighbors were just ranting in the streets about flights they missed or holidays cancelled, visitors who never arrived. People were bulk buying bread and milk. It was this really weird panic which set into the whole of Europe.

Correspondent: Something to replace the Cold War scare. (laughs)

O’Farrell: (laughs) I guess so. And people were commandeering taxis to drive them from Paris to Madrid. It was really crazy town behavior. And I became slightly obsessed by it. I watched all the news reports. And every time I heard someone talking about it, I would listen in. And I kept thinking, “Well, this reminds me of something.” And I couldn’t think what it was. I couldn’t place it. And then, one day, it kind of came to me. It was the heat wave of 1976. And I don’t know if this was a big deal in the States. But it was certainly a huge deal in Britain and Ireland. You know, it was one of the big defining features of the decade, really. I was four at the time. And this made a huge impression on me. It kind of forms the basis of some of my earliest memories. I think it was one of those situations where the whole country pulled together. We were all in the middle of this huge drought, this huge heat wave. And that kind of unified spirit hasn’t really been called for since the Blitz. Where everybody got stuck here and we had standpipes in the street and nothing coming out the taps. We didn’t have any bars. No hose pipes. Nothing. And everybody had to fill up their own quota every day from the tap in the street. And it’s odd. People who’ve lived through it never forget it. And they all talk about it endlessly. Which for a novelist is a gift. Because I had to saddle up to people and say, “What do you remember about the 1976 heat wave?” And out this stuff would come. And it’s always amazingly personal. That was the other really interesting thing. People would talk about getting divorced and having babies or what happened to them or the kind of games they played as a child. For a novelist, it’s an amazing key to unlock all these incredible stories.

Correspondent: How did you start talking to people about what they experienced in 1976? Did you just ask around? Start from friends? Use the Internet? What happened?

O’Farrell: Yeah! There wasn’t a huge amount on the Internet, actually. Which was interesting. There were a couple of photographs and a couple of people talking about it and a few sort of newspaper articles about the time.

Correspondent: This was one of those particular moments that people hadn’t actually chronicled online, but if you went to the right places, you can get them to talk about it.

O’Farrell: Absolutely. It was one of those things where I’d just say to people, “I’m thinking of writing something about the ’76 heat wave,” and total strangers would start to tell me incredibly personal stuff. One woman I never met before started telling me about how she started having an affair with her next door neighbor. (laughs) Which is gold dust, of course. It was an amazing — I don’t know what you’d call it — catalyst to people telling you stuff.

Correspondent: Do you find that people tell you very personal things because you’re a novelist? I’ve talked with novelist-journalists before and, the minute they hang up their journalistic hat and once things get going on the novelist front, suddenly it’s like, “Well, I’m a novelist. Oh, I can’t possibly use the material in any way.” (laughs)

O’Farrell: (laughs) I think people are probably very wary. Rightly so actually. Because novelists are ruthless creatures. We will eat anything.

Correspondent: They’ll take anything.

O’Farrell: We’ll take something. We’ll just nick it. You have to realize that.

Correspondent: I know you ransacked me right before you sat down.

O’Farrell: (laughs) Oh yes, definitely. It’s all written down on a notebook. No, I think people are quite wary. But certainly, for some reason, and I’m not quite sure why, with this heat wave in Britain, people suddenly spill their guts out to you.

Correspondent: Well, there are a number of things that cropped up in relation to the heat wave. Number one: just how parallel it is to climate change right now. But simultaneously, this also leads me to wonder — and maybe we can talk about this — how fiction may actually be the best medium to discuss how humans are going to change their behavior as we have more floods and hurricanes and rising ocean levels. I mean, maybe the novel is the way to start preparing ourselves for the insanity of the human race. What are your thoughts on this?

O’Farrell: Well, possibly. I don’t know. I don’t see anyone really preparing themselves at all in any way, actually.

Correspondent: (laughs)

O’Farrell: I think we’re horribly unprepared and we’re just taking an ostrich approach to the whole issue. But I think that was one of the strangest things about researching the novel. That all this anxiety about the drought and the lack of rainfall and the dry reservoirs was in a time before anybody had heard the expression “climate change.” Nobody had even — I don’t think anyone had even heard of the ozone layer. It wasn’t discussed. It wasn’t an issue. That’s all I could think of was when I was researching it. And looking through, I found the government policy that they rushed through Parliament in 1976. And the government’s fear and panic is absolutely prevalent in that document. It’s amazing. You can feel it from the very pages, you know. They were really worried. They were worried about civil disobedience and riots over water. They had all these contingency plans in place conscribing help from the army in case there would be civil unrest. So you could tell they were really anxious. But the big question in my head, of course, the whole time was thinking, “Well what would it be like now if this happened?” Because people would be terrified if that happened.

Correspondent: Well, we’ve had a number of hurricanes here and so forth. So there’s a little bit of that. But it is interesting that here you are looking at other turmoil as represented from what people are telling you in terms of their own personal stories and as reflected in the news articles that you looked at and the government documents that you consulted. Yet this is ultimately about domestic conflict. And I’m wondering if keeping some of the extra turmoil to the distance was more of a concern for you in concentrating on these lives. Was it literally just the kickstarter to getting in these characters? To really open up their feelings? Or what?

O’Farrell: Well, I was quite interested in something that would bring together that was largely estranged growing up. Siblings, two of whom haven’t spoken to each other for three years. Putting them all and squeezing them all back in the house, the small house in which they grew up, and back into the roles they don’t fit in anymore. The family sequence that doesn’t fit anymore. I was interested in the idea of what would bring people back. Why would they have to come back? And I suppose, just to ratchet up the tension, to use this heat wave. Because it really is a melting pot with them all squashed in together. It’s like a crucible. They can’t leave the house because their dad disappears. In the first pages of the novel, the father, the patriarch, walks out and he doesn’t come back.

Correspondent: It’s been noted by several authors and several philosophers that, when you get a bunch of family members under one house, they are going to probably be on their worst behavior. I’m wondering if that might have also been one of the appeals. I mean, I know you do this continuous first draft going forward and plowing through — no plan — for all of your novels. And I’m wondering if crowding people together is going to create natural conflict or what?

O’Farrell: I think that’s inevitable. I think families are always going to be irresistible to a novelist. Because first of all, we all have one, whether we like it or not. We all come from someone. And I think also they are a kind of melting pot of different types of personality. I’m sure there’s a mathematical formula that, if there are five people in the family — you know, my math is appalling. Is it 25% different relationships? Well, you know, Freud said that every sibling has a different parent or a different mother. Every relationship — the mother has a different relationship with each child. The child has a different relationship with each other. And I think the interesting thing, for me anyway, about getting older is that you think those relationships are set in stone. But actually they’re not. There are pressures of adulthood — careers, marriages, children, mortgages, various disappointments — that exert pressure on you as a person. And those sibling relationships, and that ordering, can change and alter. And suddenly the kind of younger sibling may not want to be treated like a baby anymore. She might want to stand up for herself and say, “You know, actually, I’m an adult now.” But I think families are particularly bad about catching up with the way people change. They expect you to stay the same. But of course you don’t.

Correspondent: I have a corollary to my other question about a larger conflict of a heat wave in relation to — I believe it’s Aoife? Do I have that pretty close?

O’Farrell: Very good. Well done. Very few people get that right.

Correspondent: So Aoife — and now everyone who’s reading the book and who happens to listen to this can now know exactly how to pronounce her name! She’s drawn into this artsy New York world of 1976. Now typically, when you have a novel dealing with this world, the world itself almost becomes this separate character. Most recently we had a very notable novel here — Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers — in which critics here have been fighting on both sides of the coast. It’s kind of ridiculous. It’s gotten away from the novel. But the point is that there is this kind of political character or this sociological character that comes with the territory in writing about this period. So much happened. But what is fascinating about Aoife is that we really get to know her day-to-day dealings when she is working for Evelyn, when she is running errands. She’s trying to deal with dyslexia. And she’s trying to basically feel this broken landscape. So you’re focusing here on the nuts and bolts of the characters obviously. But I’m wondering: were you ever resisting the impulse to really have a wave of time and place, of New York, subsume Aoife and the other characters who she’s dealing with here in New York at any point during the writing? Or were you pretty much saying, “No, this is nuts and bolts. This is character. This is no nonsense. That’s what’s important. Why should this be defined exclusively by time and place?”

O’Farrell: Well, I think, as a novelist, you have to make a decision about what’s going to lead a novel and what your novel is about. I didn’t want to write a “state of the nation” book. I didn’t want to write a book so much about the politics of the 1970s, either in London or New York, which are the two locations in the book. And certainly they come into it, of course, inevitably. If you’re writing about a city, particularly about that — because I think the ’70s was a decade in both Britain and New York that was a very difficult decade for a lot of people. There was a lot of social problems, economic problems. A lot of political instability certainly in the UK. And I think you have to make a decision. And I wanted this novel to be a very, very small focus. I was almost challenging myself. I think with every book you’ve got to set yourself a new challenge. And the book I wrote previously was very, very wide-ranging. It covered fifty years in time. It went all over the world. I wanted a contrast to that. I wanted something — a very, very tight lens, a very, very tight focus. Almost the classical unities of one place.

(Loops for this program provided by Dj4Real, petitcrabe, danke, Kristijann, 40A, and mffinke.)

The Bat Segundo Show #511: Maggie O’Farrell (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Travis Nichols (The Bat Segundo Show #510)

How do you sustain a 220 page novel told from the perspective of an online troll leaving an endless blog comment? We discuss the poetics of abuse with Travis Nichols, seductive caesuras, family members who disown you by email, and the largely illusory idea of self-declared misunderstood geniuses.

Travis Nichols is most recently the author of The More You Ignore Me.

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Author: Travis Nichols

Subjects Discussed: Comparing smells in Washington DC and New York City, Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder and The More You Ignore Me as epistolary novels, digital narcissism, the difficulties of writing novels with a wide swath of perspective, the benefits of coming from a deeply singular place, lathering yourself into a George Hamilton-like frenzy, the medium vs. the solitary voice, finding a way into the head of an abhorrent character, @AvoidComments, the remarkable amount of text generated by commenters, contending with trolls while working as editor at The Poetry Foundation, the freedom (and lack thereof) that comes with specific forms of writing, ruminating on why some people type so much online, when extreme behavior is rewarded, averted vision and the Pleiades, Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, “oppressed” people swimming in white privilege, the self-declared outcast, teachers who guided Nichols into considering the wider world, privilege and exclusion, writing about something insane and not taking it with you into your regular life, family members who disown you by email, Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries, the adventurous nature of Coffee House Press, readings where you bomb, qualities shared with theater and literature, laughter within the head, why the worst poems go over very well in front of bar audiences, craven desperation for approval, intense listening, the importance of pursuing the idea, Anselm Berrigan blanking his mind out by writing zeroes and ones, how to quiet a mind, working at Bailey Coy Books, not leaving the house, listening to singers who don’t sing in English, Princess Nicotine, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, linguistic phrases and online formality, baroque language, Literature Subreddit, the sentiment held by certain online types that literature after World War I is worthless, War and Peace, Thomas Eakins, Clint Eastwood talking with a chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention, artsplaining diction, Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” seductive caesuras, balancing breaks and relentless formalism, willfully not giving the reader any space, online harassment of women, Anita Sarkeesian being harassed for speaking her mind, threats against Lindy West, early reaction to The More You Ignore Me, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa, women readers and literature, and whether it’s possible to tell the whole truth in fiction today.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Nichols: With The More You Ignore Me, there were some very particular people that I was dealing with on an everyday basis because of my job at the Poetry Foundation. But they were essentially harmless. They were basically having fun with reputation and inventing characters. But I found myself trying to interact with a person. Because there was a rule of thumb that everyone would say: “Well, you wouldn’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.” And I was like, “Oh, right. So you’re going to take that tack and you’re going to lose.” Because there’s all these other people who are saying everything they would never say. And, one, they’re having so much fun. Sort of. It was a really dark kind of fun. It seemed like it was painful. But there were hints of real inventiveness. There would be actual interesting thought. But then, of course, they couldn’t let it go. There’d be something like — I’m sure you’ve had this. The amount of text that’s being generated is remarkable. So that’s one thing. “God, that’s amazing. Some people can type that much.” But then also there are a number of ideas and some of them are almost there. And so, in probably a really shitty way, I thought, “Oh, well maybe I can look at that and try and make them into something that I can take as good.” Totally insulting to those people that they’re not doing it well and I would do it better, but I can own that. Because I think that they weren’t doing it very well. And then I thought, No one would ever actually want to read a 220 page book, which this novel is, unless it was doing something more than just being your standard comment. So I thought, There is a form. To get to what you’re asking, there’s a form there that allows for a lot more than many of the other forms that we have. Like I actually think that with a lot of poetry and with a lot of fiction, there’s not a lot of freedom to do this, that, or the other. That you get a lot more freedom.

I mean, if you look at slash fiction or you look at a lot of other kinds of online writing, they don’t give a fuck about what the form is. They have this amazing freedom. One, because the audience is there or not there. But also there’s some part of the frontal lobe that might be missing which just allows them to not check themselves. And I thought, “Oh, well, that could be really remarkable to try and go with.”

Correspondent: Or the Internet encourages them to speak in this unfiltered, raw, feral, atavistic at times mode.

Nichols: Right. And you’re rewarded by how extreme you can be. But then also the ultimate trolling is that you say something provocative to get a conversation going.

Correspondent: Some would call it a rise, as opposed to a dialogue.

Nichols: Right. Definitely. And the tragedy of this narrator in The More You Ignore Me is that he is sort of trying to do that, but he doesn’t allow anyone else to speak. So there’s no discussion that happens. And one of the things that I found interacting with other people like this — and also not just online; offline; everyone has these people in their lives — is that you can get worried. Like I have felt that I’m coming across with this person, my relationship with this person, I’m not being a good person. Because I’m getting this reaction. And it took me a long time to realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with me. That it has everything to do with this other person. They, in some ways, don’t even see me. I’m being steamrolled and just assimilated into this person’s psychosis a lot of times. And so one of the things I was trying to do with this narration is just to show that it starts out very much really about someone else. Could there be something that’s more about someone else than a wedding? I mean, that seems like that’s supposed to be about these people truly. And then, as it goes, those people are totally obliterated and then they’re gone by the end. It has nothing to do with them. And so that’s what I found over and over again. And now I see it. And I think, Right. This. You think that if there’s a comment on a post that’s about Obama’s judicial nominations or whatever, you’re like, maybe I’ll learn about the nominations. And you’re like, Oh no. I’m going to learn about this person and his, almost always…

Correspondent: Or you’re going to learn about some really terrible part of the national fabric. As we learned recently with the whole Zimmerman verdict. I wanted to go into this a little further by looking at both books again. The central voices in both of your novels, they latch upon a random target. In the first book, Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder, it’s this woman named Luddie. She’s in this photograph, as you describe “black eyes, black hair, black dimples, black dress.” And in the second book, this most recent one, it’s a random wedding site and later the cooking website. They have little, if any, direct correlation to where these unnamed characters are in the present. And I’m wondering if this is your way of taking a look at the way we approach truth, either through letters or through a blog comment, that we’re likely to say the darkest and deepest things that are on our mind if we approach everything indirectly. Or was this just some sort of natural crazy salad? That any way you actually went into this, you would have this madness.

Nichols: Oh wow. That’s a great question. I definitely think that you or I get at a more accurate picture of the world indirectly. Maybe you know the answer to this. I remember reading this idea about the Pleiades. That you cannot look at them directly. You have to look at them sideways. Er, just glancing and that’s the only you’ll actually see them. Is that true?

Correspondent: Yeah. I believe so.

Nichols: Great! So that’s there. It’s like the Pleiades. Um, I’ve thought that often. And I was just about now to say that. And I thought, Maybe that’s not true. So great. At least between us, that’s the way it is. I mean, I think that there’s one thing that was really formative just in probably, I guess you could say, my adult writing life, when I got my shit together and really felt like I was finding a certain way in which the limited skills that I have are able to be used effectively in communicating what I want to audiences, is Jack Spicer’s, uh, poetry, but especially his book, After Lorca, in which he writes letters to Lorca, who’s dead, and talks about the idea of the programmatic letter of one poet writing to another in order to describe his poetics or her poetics, but also just as a way of — he calls it the wastage of the poem that’s the real thing. I think he probably knew that he was being funny because the letters; well, some are better than the poems. Sometimes.

Correspondent: He was also a wide outcast for a long while, which creates a connection with this particular narrator.

Nichols: Yeah. There’s a lot of Spicer in there. I mean, it’s almost like — it’s sort of camping up an idea of Spicer. Because he’s very sane. And I think there are moments of real clarity in The More You Ignore Me‘s narrator. But, you know, there’s a lot of stuff where you really start somewhere where you’re like, okay, I can really go along with that. And then by the end of even a sentence, you’re like, “No, that’s not where I would go with that.” And I think I was interested in the idea of this outcast, the writer as an outcast or the poet as an outcast. Or someone who wasn’t made for these times. And so then we seem to be a nation of outcasts in that way, where it seems that if you go on anything there is, there’s this sort of dominant narrative that shows up and then you have all these things under it, which is all these people disagreeing and fighting and saying, “This is just the mainstream media’s version of it.” There’s all these people who feel disaffected even and often most than these people who are often in power. There’s the backlash Republicans. People who are so swimming in white privilege that they’re not able to see that they are and they feel besieged by the fact that this isn’t the country that they feel like they grew up in or some idea that they have. That all these people that I’ve romanticized, being writers and poets and artists, who seem like they’re outside the mainstream, but then a lot of them when I look back on them, “Oh, well, they’re all straight white men. They’re all people who came from basically middle-class background.” A lot of them were really rich, it turns out. If you look at the history, especially of postwar American poetry, it’s arguably a history of Harvard undergrads. And so it becomes this very weird thing where people try to own their outsideness to an absurd degree. And so I wanted to sort of take that from A to Z with this narrator a little bit. Whereas I think in the first book, that narrator felt and was genuinely outside of things a little more. God, when I say that, it sounds ridiculous. That he would be more outside than this guy.

Correspondent: No. I think — let me see if we can steer the train on track here.

Nichols: Please do.

Correspondent: You’re saying that this narrator emerged in some sense from ruminating upon self-declared outcasts or people who were labeled outcasts. People like Jack Spicer, who came from the exact same place that every single other great mind came from. I’m wondering at what point this was a kind of — I don’t want to say ideological thrust, but in what way did this idea help to ground your narrator? The notion of outsider/insider. The notion that, for all of his claims of being banned or of wanting to go ahead and change the world, he was given the exact same privilege that everybody else did.

Nichols: Yeah. I mean I think that he’s also coming from this very — a little bit of this Southern Baptist idea or a certain kind of Christianity that really loves conflict. Because they see it as “Well, Jesus was persecuted. You must be doing something right.” Or Winston Churchill’s “You can judge me by my enemies.” And there’s a lot of that in literary culture. And a lot of that especially in the arts, who are like, “If you get people upset, then you must be doing something right.” And I agree to a point. There’s also like, “No, well, actually there are people who are genuinely disagreeing with you that maybe you should pay attention to that viewpoint and reconcile your behavior.” But instead it gets people to hunker down into the sense of self and entitlement. Like every genius was misunderstood at one time. Most likely. That doesn’t mean that every misunderstood person is a genius. So you have all these people who are taking all of the outside trappings of being an artist and claiming that that makes them an artist without any of the inside. And so this guy is not an artist. I mean, he’s a frustrated artist. But he can’t figure out where he went wrong. And he won’t admit really that it was him that went wrong. Like it’s something that he had all right. But it turns out that everybody else was wrong. And that is definitely not an unfamiliar place for me. Especially coming out of the poetry world, where you really feel like that the things that you value are not valued by the wider culture. And you can be in the little scene that celebrates itself and feel like, “Oh right. We all do really good…” Like Jack Spicer now. Everybody knows about him. So it’s not interesting anymore. But then as soon as you step out into any other kind of world, I mean, no one gives a shit at all. And not only that, but it’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they actively dislike what you like.

Correspondent: I think what you’re talking about here, especially with blog comments, is the fine line between being a genuine iconoclast who can in fact change her mind or adjust views and be engaged in a dialogue and someone who is a full-bore troll, who is incapable of that. Who has to erect some mythical status to justify why they continue to express themselves. And in this case, I’m curious if at any point during the writing of this, you saw this guy more in the first category. Where he was getting pushback from people who didn’t want to hear his perspective when it was legitimate. I mean, did you see him in that mould at any point? But it seems to me he clearly moves more into the second, the more custom troll. But I’m wondering if you considered the first.

The Bat Segundo Show #510: Travis Nichols (Download MP3)

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