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“I didn’t realize we were bragging”

Maybe I’m the last to know about David Rees. He’s the guest on the latest episode of Brad Listi’s “Other People” podcast. He turns out to be very funny. If you ever hear me attempt to droll up a conversation by saying “I didn’t realize we were bragging,” you will know it’s because I stole the line from Rees …

REES: Well, first of all, I never had any kind of sports memorabilia on my wall. Wasn’t really my scene. I did have some pretty amazing Lamborghini sports-car posters on the wall because I went through a phase where I was obsessed with Italian sports cars.  

LISTI: I had a Porsche.

REES: You literally had a Porsche? Or you mean a poster?

LISTI: No. I had a poster.

REES: I was gonna say. It must be nice. I didn’t realize we were bragging. Yeah, I used to have two Izod button-down shirts.

The interview also features a surprisingly elaborate dialogue on the aesthetics of phone numbers. And there’s still about 25 minutes to go.

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TÓIBÍN: You get a sense that it isn’t merely grief-stricken, that underneath it there’s some edge of dark laughter. So it has that in common with Jeffrey Eugenides, and I’m really interested in this because I can’t do it. [LAUGHS]

TREISMAN: You can’t laugh about misery.

TÓIBÍN: No. If I put misery in, it’s misery. And I long for this, and I wonder how it’s done. I keep looking at it.

- Colm Tóibín and Deborah Treisman, introducing the latest New Yorker fiction podcast. This month’s story: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “The Children’s Grandmother” from the 11/25/1950 issue.

“I found myself getting weird in a hurry”

And just like that, Brad Listi’s “Other People” podcast yields yet another blog post. Here, from the 9/28/2011 episode, is writer Ron Currie, Jr. describing the downside of fleeing winter Maine for the warmth of Puerto Rico to spend three whole months writing feverishly — a word which here means “40,000 words in a month”:

Because I was working so much, I would go three or four days at a time without actually speaking to anybody. … It’s sort of an occupational hazard as a writer that by it’s very nature it’s isolating. That’s what we do. We lock ourselves in a room, and we splash around in the shallow end of our own psyches, basically. But when it’s that protracted, I mean, I found myself getting weird in a hurry — like to the point that I had to force myself to go out every fourth or fifth night and actually sit down and engage somebody at a bar, like make a point of talking to somebody.

This is also the second episode I’ve heard in which Brad (half-jokingly? seven-eighths-jokingly?) advances the theory that prison would make the ideal home for a writer. Here, from the 9/22/2011 episode, is Whip Smart author Melissa Febos reacting to the prison-as-the-ultimate-writers-colony idea:

We’ve chosen this life, as writers, that requires that we be able to ignore so much … It requires, like, this vast solitude of mind, which is such a terrible thing to choose for yourself — or such a difficult thing to choose for yourself — that I wish that it would be easier sometimes. So it might sound masochistic to fantasize about going to prison, but it’s not about the whole rape and shanking thing. It’s definitely more about, like, less options.

It’s good to get both “fantasize” and “rape and shanking” in there because it’s, of course, pure fantasy to think that a prisoner has fewer distractions than, say, a writer with a weakness for peeking at Twitter. I suspect — no, I’m sure — that Brad knows this. He’s just using the idea of prison to illuminate the difficulties of fitting a writing life into the rest of life.

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This show is going to be about the authors, about them, about them as people. … I want to know who they are, what their childhoods were like, what’s going on, what happened yesterday, why they’re wearing what they’re wearing, things like that. I want to know what they eat. I want to know what makes them enraged. And I think that if we get to know them as people better, we’ll know better whether or not we want to read their stuff.

… this show is about perpetuating book culture by letting people know who these writers are and by having intimate conversations in which they reveal stuff. That’s the idea. I want candor. Don’t you want candor?

- Brad Listi from the intro to the first of what has now become fifty episodes of his “Other People” podcast

Listi conducts leisurely interviews. Conversations, really. If you’re antsy, they’ll make you antsier. I’m not antsy. They’ve made me happy. In the past few days, I’ve listened to — and appreciated — his interviews of …

* Roxane Gay

* Maud Newton

* Emma Straub

* Jonathan Evison

Evison, it turns out, gets up at 5 a.m. to write. For all of us who wish we managed to get up and write that early, here’s what Evison told Listi:

It’s all about discipline for me and keeping on a schedule because each day I stay on my schedule I just become more and more productive. It’s more like conditioning yourself, like an athlete or something. If I can get up at five in the morning, the first morning I may not really get cooking until 6:45. But like by the seventh or eighth morning of doing that, … I can get there quicker.

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If you ever think you’re about to get murdered—like seriously murdered—and then it turns out that you’re not about to get murdered, it’s really fun to get drunk afterwards. That’s what I learned. I was very happy to be alive, and I was very happy to not be alone in those woods.

- Brad Listi, concluding a story he told as part of the introduction to his interview with Cheryl Strayed.

Strayed, a novelist and memoirist who recently revealed herself to be the “Dear Sugar” advice columnist, said something during the interview that I agree with completely:

I just believe in story. And I do think that a lot of times the problems we have in our lives have to do with the way we’ve told ourselves the story of ourselves. So, you know, if you’re locked into thinking, you know, a particular relationship is miserable, and it sucks, and here’s all this stuff wrong with it, in a lot of ways, if you do want to kind of overcome that as a couple, you do have to rescript how it is you’ve cast your relationship or how it is you’ve framed each other.

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I first met Montaigne when, some twenty years ago in Budapest, I was so desperate for something to read on a train that I took a chance on a cheap Essays translation in a secondhand shop. It was the only English-language book on the shelf; I very much doubted that I would enjoy it. There is no one in particular I can thank for this turn of events: only Fortune, and the Montaignean truth that the best things in life happen when you don’t get what you think you want.

- from the acknowledgments section of Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

I owe my own awareness — and unlikely devouring — of Bakewell’s book to this episode of the BBC’s “Great Lives” podcast. You’ll get the gist of the formula that makes “Great Lives” great by reading part of the BBC’s summary:

Championing his life is the surgeon, scientist, broadcaster and politician Professor Robert Winston and providing expert witness is the writer Sarah Bakewell …

Each episode has a fan and an expert and a host who’s as skeptical or as encouraging as he needs to be to keep things honest and fruitful.

I’ve listened to a couple dozen of the 159 episodes available for free online. The shows on Marcus Garvey, Mary Stott, Petra Kelly, Winston Churchill and boxer Jack Johnson were especially memorable.

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The same kind of banal thinking which in literature produces nothing worse than incoherent books and tedious plays can, when applied to architecture, leave wounds which will be visible from outer space. Bad architecture is a frozen mistake writ large. But it is only a mistake, and, despite the impressive amounts of scaffolding, concrete, noise, money and bluster which tend to accompany its appearance, it is no more deserving of our deference than a blunder in any other area of life. We should be as unintimidated by architectural mediocrity as we are by unjust laws or nonsensical arguments.

- from Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness

He goes on:

We should recover a sense of the malleability behind what is built. There is no predetermined script guiding the direction of bulldozers or cranes. While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better.

Because I reached this passage a few hours ago, it was still fresh in my brain when I listened to “The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet,” a radio doc that “takes a hard look at (San Francisco’s) UN Plaza when it was really at its worst and asks the question, is there a point where the good intentions and idealism of a design become so removed from reality, that it actually borders on negligence?” Check it out the next time you’ve got 31 minutes and 17 seconds to spare.

I heard it thanks to “99 Percent Invisible,” a truly great podcast. Most episodes are admirably short — short in the I’ve-listened-to-all-40-episodes-in-the-last-two-days sense. If you don’t have 31 minutes and 17 seconds, go listen to the substantially shorter “A Cheer for Samuel Plimsoll.” Or try this one about movie title sequences.

Skylight Books Author Reading Series

Since I just linked to a Skylight reading, I figured I’d post a link to Skylight’s podcast, where you can hear many more readings. Skylight is in L.A. I’m not. That I know about Skylight at all boosts my opinion of the Internet.

A writer I’d never heard of started following me on Twitter. I Googled the writer’s name and found a reading she’d done at Skylight. I listened to a podcast of the reading. Then, scanning the list of podcast episodes, I found recorded readings by some names I recognized: Emma Straub, Edan Lepucki, Janelle Brown. Seeing Janelle Brown’s name caused me to send the following email to my college roommate:

Um, did I know Janelle was a novelist? Her name, which I hadn’t thought of in ages, came up on a podcast I was listening to.

Janelle, you see, was last spotted (by me, at least) valiantly visiting the affront to the Uniform Building Code that I shared with the recipient of the above email. We called it “the shack.” It is the second-grossest place I’ve ever slept.