Ignorance + Curiosity

For a good stretch, I listened to almost nothing but podcasts. No audiobooks. Hardly any music, even. I’m not clear on why I stopped. But because I stopped, iTunes stopped downloading new podcasts. So last night, when I inexplicably went hunting for a podcast to listen to, I found that my most recent episode of “The Sound of Young America” was from 11/10/09. It turned out to be an interview with Nick Hornby, who still is probably most famous for having written High Fidelity.

The interview is everything that is right about the podcast and its creator. Jesse Thorn is sincere. He’s curious. He’s interested. He can also walk right into awkward conversational moments. These might well derail his interviews. Instead, they seem to help make the interviews more real, more illuminating. Take this exchange with Hornby, who deserves credit for either not taking umbrage or for getting over his umbrage:

Thorn: My wife and I watched “An Education” earlier today and she read the book as well and she said to me, “Well, you could tell Nick Hornby was involved.” And I was like, “Why is that?” And she said, “Oh, you know, like, some people are in it and they’re sort of dissatisfied with what’s going on, and they go through a big long thing, and …” She did not mean any of this pejoratively and I want to make that clear.

Hornby: That’s fine.

Thorn: “They go through a big, long thing, have a lot of adventures, and the biggest thing that they learn is how to be confortable with what they were, rather than how to be a new thing.”

Hornby (laughing): Yes, um, well I would say that’s kind of my subject, and it’s quite a good subject, I think, because it seems to me there’s too much in the culture that teaches us how to be a new thing. And that’s what most books are about. And they have messages. And the message is that you can be a whole, brand-new you. And I think that’s probably particularly true of America. And I don’t really believe that. And I think that the best we can do is make peace with ourselves and who we are and what we’ve got.

Thorn: Was that ever hard for you to do?

Hornby: To make peace with myself and what I was? It’s difficult to answer because I wouldn’t have been able to make peace with myself if I hadn’t been able to write or I hadn’t been able to make a living as a writer. I think I would have been pretty dissatisfied. So once I got published, it was pretty easy to make peace with myself because that was really the ambition, I think, was to be able to support myself through writing.

Thorn: Sometimes I have nightmares about the protagonist of High Fidelity, who’s struggling with this conflict within himself which is essentially is he going to be a guy who makes things or a guy who listens to things that other people made and categorizes them.

OK. You get the idea. I’m not going to transcribe the whole thing. It takes more time than I have, and I’ll probably run afoul of copyright law if I transcribe much more. If you want more, here’s a link to the interview just in case I don’t manage to embed the full audio of the interview right below this paragraph.

The Sound of Young America

Once you’ve read the first paragraph of a story called “The Sock,” you will have read as much Lydia Davis as I have. Here. It’s just 107 words. Go ahead and read it:

My husband is married to a different woman now, shorter than I am, about five feet tall, solidly built, and of course he looks taller than he used to and narrower, and his head looks smaller. Next to her I feel bony and awkward and she is too short for me to look her in the eye, though I try to stand or sit at the right angle to do that. I once had a clear idea of the sort of woman he should marry when he married again, but none of his girlfriends was quite what I had in mind and this one least of all.

That’s on page 129 of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. It’s not my habit to start on page 129. The book just sort of fell open to page 129 when I got it home from the library today. I’d been waiting for it since December. According to the Seattle Public Library’s web site, 54 people are waiting for me to finish the book and bring it back.

Now, about that opening paragraph, those 107 words.

Play along for a minute. Pretend you’re a cop. Pretend you’re at a crime scene and you find nothing but a scrap of paper bearing those 107 words. Now, take a moment to realize all the facts those 107 words give you — the relationships, the histories. Go further, though. Beyond facts. Think of everything you can reasonably surmise about the character responsible for those words. It’s a lot. I’m getting that nice brain tingle that comes from encountering a writer who’s in charge.

Having just used the comments section of somebody else’s post to nitpick about lack of disclosure, I want to pause and acknowledge that my own blog — despite links to this short bio and this hodgepodge about privacy, ads, and links — falls far short of the meticulous disclosure readers get from someone like Jeff Jarvis. If you haven’t read Jarvis’ disclosure statement, you should. It’s really something.

That said, I don’t have much to disclose these days. That is sure to change since I bought a Lotto ticket yesterday. Update to follow. (And really, that’s the point. I disclose when I feel like there’s something to disclose. I try to do it right in whatever post a possible conflict might relate to. My last post, for instance, linked to a newspaper op-ed written by my uncle. In that post, it felt important to mention that my uncle is, well, my uncle.)

Finally, something that is not in my bio: At the giddy behest of my children, I’m growing a mustache all this month. Does that make this blog suddenly pro-mustache? Hardly. While some kind people claim to like my mustache, I don’t. A guy whose band I photographed back in December deemed my mustache “pretty sleazy” and predicted it will only get sleazier by the time February runs its blessedly short course. I agree. But I’m having fun. So rather than skewing pro-mustache or anti-mustache, I think the bias of this blog will continue to be toward doing harmless things — mustache-related or not —for the amusement of grateful children.