Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The book is a travelogue and a history book and a bit of a memoir. The more I got into it, I found myself wanting to go back and do little bits of history homework.
Really?
I pulled out this "American History in Ballad and Song" Folkways box from the 1960s and there's this whole section on the Civil War and I started looking through that. I really like that your book did that to me. These are sort of obscure things in 2005 to write about and be so impassioned about. But you make all these people in the book characters.
Thanks. You know, one question I keep getting asked is, "Why? Why did you do this?" And that question has just been torturing me.
But it seems so natural to you.
Right! Like, why wouldn't I? The assassinations were so interesting and unique. There were all these greedy weirdos and good-hearted men and interesting circumstances and all these figures in the background doing their own thing. And then the inherent drama of a murder. One day someone's alive and the next they're dead. It's not even murder -- it's just death.
The reason death is so fascinating to us, besides the fact that we're all going to die one day, is just that it's so preposterous and unbelievable. It seems so supernatural, like black magic. It's so fascinating to me. I can't really think of a reason not to be interested in it, can you?
Everybody deals with death in different ways. My way is to think about it all the time and, with this, I was trying to bring these people back to life a little bit. And some people deal with it by not dealing with it, and those are the people who say to me, "When I heard what your book is about, I said, 'Yuck!' And then I read it and I liked it." They just think the topic is so morbid.
Did you get any flak from the people in the big office about the title, about using the A-word?
It is a kind of "Jackass" sort of title, but my people are onboard with me.
But... I was on a Wisconsin public radio call-in show, and an elderly woman called up to chastise me, saying how she remembers the Kennedy assassination like it was yesterday and she was offended by my happy-go-lucky attitude. When I'm talking to someone it's just my natural tendency to keep it light and upbeat and try to not be a drag. When I go on a radio show I don't spend the whole 15 minutes going through my thing about the Spanish-American War.
So I hadn't said any of the sad stuff. And she was so upset with me that I was just joking around. So I loved that call. I was like, "So, you want sadness, you want mourning, you want tragedy? I got plenty of that stuff." And I regaled her for like 15 minutes with the mournful silence of the Abraham Lincoln autopsy, and the sewing bag of Mrs. Ida McKinley, who mourned her husband's death every day of her life after her husband was assassinated. She crocheted her life into thousands of pairs of bedroom slippers while sitting in a rocking chair, affixing her husband's photo to the side of her crochet bag so she could see his face every time she reached for a new ball of yarn.
So you took her to task.
I don't know. I thought it was an excellent question and a good point. I like defending myself. I like being backed into a corner.
I can't imagine that you get backed into a corner that much, though.
Well, that's true. But maybe that's why I enjoyed it. Actually, it's a pretty fractured little country we live in, and the only people who come to see me are the people who would naturally come to see me. It's rare I have any kind of interaction with people who disagree with me, or dislike me, or diss me, so I enjoy it.
I think it's kind of sad that the country is so ensconced in its own little universes and there's no interaction, mainly because of the fractured nature of broadcasting and media. There are so many channels and so many niches. It's perfectly natural that birds of a feather flock together. But one thing I miss about the good old days with local papers, and watching Walter Cronkite and going to bed with Johnny Carson, you had that nationalizing influence of broadcasting where the whole country had these shared experiences and people could talk about them and debate them.
But I'm off track...
We were talking about the A-word...
Right. Well, the problem isn't really the A-word, it's the word that comes after it, "vacation." I know it's a kind of silly title. It's catchy, but it was also a very good shorthand for what the book is about. I didn't want to write some encyclopedic, third-person book about assassinations. I'm very interested specifically in what you can learn by visiting historic sites as much as the thing you're learning about, about what happened there. I certainly recount the events of each assassination but I'm just as, probably more, interested in how those things are talked about and how they're remembered. Or, in Garfield's case, how they're not remembered. He's just so forgotten. And it just really burns me up that there's no plaque where he was shot. I think there should be a plaque.
My only real memory of Garfield was when I was in the fifth grade I picked up the phone, my parents weren't home, and there was a guy on the line who said I could win a barbecue if I told him when Garfield was assassinated.
Did you know?
I didn't know the date but I knew the year. It was 1881.
Wow!
I don't know how I knew that, but I won a barbecue. It wasn't ever delivered. I think it was some kind of scam. But Garfield has always held a special place in my heart for that tiny, tiny reason.
Well, he means the possibility of barbecues.
The possibility, but not the actuality, of barbecues.
Well, that's a lot like Garfield's presidency. He only got to be president for a few weeks, so he didn't really get the full barbecue, either.
