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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
That must have livened up the party. What about readings?
I've never been in a fistfight at a reading.
No, I mean, do you like them? The mood at most readings usually reminds me of attending some sort of family event.
I don't attend very many. And I've never done that many. When I did, I used to puke beforehand, though I don't do that anymore. They're just basically unpleasant for me. When I'm trying to read aloud I blow up these pages as big as I possibly can but still usually after a page and a half everything goes dark and I have to start making things up. So it's very difficult. And also I just don't like the whole idea of performing.
So you're not part of the whole New York writer scene?
No, no. Back in high school when I got into punk rock, even the punks rejected me and didn't want me around. I've never been part of any scene. I know a few writers in town, but we don't sit around and talk about writing. I tend to avoid the company of writers. I know some very, very nice ones, some really wonderful people. But for the most part, they're just obnoxious horrible people. Especially in New York. There's so much backbiting, so much one-upmanship. It's a very ugly, very competitive business. They're always going into print badmouthing other writers, badmouthing their contemporaries -- I don't do that. It's tough enough to just get by, just to make it anyway. There's no point in trying to build yourself up by gutting someone else.
I heard you on a radio show the other day -- do you like radio? It seems like the sort of thing you must be used to, talking to people without seeing them.
As long as it's not a call-in show. Those are nightmares. Those shows just kind of collapse around me. For "Slackjaw" I did this call-in show in Madison, Wis., and there was dead silence the first half of the show, and then there was call after call after call -- mostly people telling cripple jokes. Then you had people calling in weeping over lost wives. It was a disaster. Even my dad called in. He was like, "Hi son, we're going to see you in a few days, right?" He was just calling to check in and I said, "Dad, I'm on the radio," and he said, "Yeah, I know, I'm listening to it." The whole thing was a disaster, but what was funny was that a couple minutes after the show the producer came out and came right up to me and said, "That was the best show I've ever done."
I was doing a call-in for my novel "The Buzzing" a while ago, which is about a fourth-rate newspaper reporter who ends up covering the kook beat. There's a conspiratorial subtext to the story, so every conspiracy nut in Urbana, Ill., called in -- I mean, they're at home, they don't have anything else to do, they're conspiracy nuts. So on the show we're talking about UFOs, we're talking about Kennedy, we're talking about AIDS, we're talking about 9/11, every conspiracy in the world. And I'm just there trying to tell people about my novel.
I did one for this current book and I started getting calls because people heard that it's a spiritual book. It isn't, but the host read the back cover quote about the book being "Buddhism for Drunkards" ...
Doesn't the back cover also have the line "Whenever I hear the word 'spiritual' I reach for my revolver"?
Yeah, that's on this book, too. So the host reads that and suddenly all these people call in asking questions about the soul. I tried to tell them, "I don't know about that, it's just a bunch of funny stories." I mean, I don't think it's anything more than a metaphor we use to explain human behavior, but what do I know? Then another caller asks a complex question about Buddhism, and I'm like, "I don't know ..."
Have you read a lot of other people's memoirs?
No, I don't really. Nowadays because of the eyes I listen to a lot of books on tape and so mostly I listen to a lot of crap -- thrillers and mysteries and horror novels. In general, the people who do the audiobooks tend to only go after those that they know will sell a bunch. So as a result you get the bestsellers.
There's been an explosion in memoirs over the past 15 years. Everybody has a story to tell about some awful misery that they've been though, or a story of their life as a professional hockey player, or whatever. Lots of mountain climbers have written memoirs, it seems to me. I have not paid much attention to them but I know that they're out there. I guess I took it as evidence of what an awful, whiny nation of navel-gazers we've become.
What do you think about people in their mid-20s writing memoirs? The type that tend to boil down to "I drank a lot, I did a lot of coke ..."
Sure, and that's certainly what I did. To be honest, I think putting out three memoirs before the age of 40, which is what I did, is insane, it's asinine. But that's just the way things turned out. There's a quote from Thomas Pynchon's book "V" where he says essentially you should never write a memoir until you're absolutely certain when you're going to die. Because if you write one before, who knows what magnificent things you can do during the rest of your life? Or if nothing else happens to you, how disappointing would that be?
Mostly the what I call "Oh my God, I have a horrible disease" memoirs are at a point where they're very whiny and very victim-oriented and very self-centered. But on the other hand, sometimes when I'm riding on the train or walking down the street, if I feel particularly generous toward the world that day, I look around and think, All these people have got some sort of big story of their lives to tell. So we do all have stories. I just don't think all of them should be published.
