Dylan Foley's Writer Interview Forum

Henry Alford's Witty Take on Modern Manners in "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?"

2012-01-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

The Newark Star-Ledger

Sunday, January 08, 2012, 7:23 AM

In his wry and witty new book, “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners” (Twelve, 244 pp., $24.99), the investigative humorist Henry Alford travels from Japan to the awkward New York party scene, exploring the meaning of modern etiquette in an era of constantly chirping BlackBerries and semi-literate e-mails.

Alford sets out to convert the masses to observing good manners, one rude person at a time. He trains his sly guns on catty e-mails and Facebook-friending quandaries, but below the humor is a quest for basic decency in these overstimulated, stressed-out times. Comic chaos breaks out when Alford sets himself up as an etiquette counselor without credentials, then later gives tours to foreigners, instructing them on truly brutal New York manners.

Alford, 49, spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a café in Manhattan.

Q. What was the “a-ha” moment that made you write about manners?

A. The book started five blocks from here at the Gourmet Garage on 7th Avenue. The girl at the register dropped my apple on the floor, said nothing and put it in my bag. I was irritated. I said, “I’m sorry.” She said nothing. I said, “No, I didn’t mean for you to drop my apple like that.” I went home, I cogitated and I thought, “I’m going to keep doing this because it makes me feel all warm inside.” I wrote an op-ed piece about it, then got a book deal out of it. Every book has a creation myth, but this is not a myth.

Q. Doesn’t reverse politeness, when you correct another person’s bad manners, take too much energy?

A. It does take too much energy. You get nothing. I’m slightly ashamed of it. I still do it all the time. It’s a defense mechanism and possibly a form of therapy. It’s largely about me because people don’t usually get the joke.

Q. Why is there such a dearth of good conversation at parties nowadays and an unwillingness by most people to communicate in social settings?

A. Whenever I try to chat someone up at a party, I am always made to feel like I am hitting on them. I think people’s reluctance to talk at parties happens because we are just not a culture that understands that the point of going to a gathering is to talk to people you don’t know.

Q. Do you think that your intense interest in manners is related to age?

A. I hope not. I bristle at the idea, only because it seems like a form of conservatism. Maybe I am being naive, but I think the issue of decorum and decency is as important to an 18-year-old as it is a 50-year-old man. I think that manners can be a kind of generosity.

Q. In one hysterical chapter, you set yourself up as an etiquette counselor, even though you aren’t licensed to practice. Why did you do this?

A. I think that (“Miss Manners” columnist) Judith Martin does an admirable job, but I don’t think writing a manners column is that difficult. There is no accountability. Columnists rattle off their advice, we never hear how the situation ends, then onto next week’s column. I felt if I was going to make these assertions about manners columnists, I had to walk the walk. I tried to give manners advice where there was actual accountability.

Q. What was your advice scenario to your friend Tom?

A. My friend Tom had a one-night stand with a man named Jess who was still in the closet. Tom continued to chase Jess. The etiquette issue here was to not do anything that would cause emotional havoc for this closeted guy. Tom was totally deluded. He wanted to go to the restaurant where the guy worked. My victory was to make sure Tom warned Jess he was coming to his workplace.

Joseph Epstein Explores the World Behind Our Backs in "Gossip: the Untrivial Pursuit"

2011-12-25T06:49:00.000-08:00

In his witty new book of essays “Gossip: the Untrivial Pursuit”(Houghton Mifflin, $25, 242 pp.), Joseph Epstein gleefully tackles the taboo subject of what we say behind other people’s backs.

Epstein explores the social and even biological benefits of gossip and writes about the great gossips of history—the vicious Louis de Rouvroy in the 18^th century court of King Louis XIV, the all-powerful columnist Walter Winchell and even the editor Tina Brown. Epstein examines how Tom Wolfe destroyed the composer Leonard Bernstern’s public image by making him look like a buffoon, how the media consciously mixes gossip and news with putrid results and how the Internet is “a vanity press for the demented.” For Epstein, the joy in gossip is exposing individuals’ crude contradictions and pummeling false pieties, though gossip trashes marriages and cuts down social rebels. He quotes one ruthless trafficker in gossip as saying hypocrisy “is the only modern sin.” Epstein’s gossip runs thick, but the book’s insights are penetrating and diverting.

Epstein, 73, was the editor of The American Scholar. He spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Evanston, Illinois.

Q. You admit to enjoying gossip, as well as receiving and transmitting gossip. Why did you want to write about it?

A. Writers are always looking for good subjects. I came to this book because I was asked to give a talk on celebrity at the University of Virginia. I realized that without gossip, celebrity almost doesn’t exist. More of the world is now gossip. More of journalism is now gossip. There has been a shift in decorum. People now give details they wouldn’t give before.

Q. You note that there are intense social benefits from gossip. What kind of gossip do you enjoy?

A. Vicious gossip doesn’t interest me. There is gossip that details people’s foibles, hypocrises and pretentions. That to me is the most delicious gossip. I don’t know if I’ve committed any vicious gossip in this book. I did not write this book saying, “I’m going to get that S.O.B.”

Q. Where does the viciousness of academic gossip come from?

A. There is that famous quote, “Why are academic arguments carried out with such intensity? Because the stakes are so low.” When I worked at Northwestern, I noticed the petty rivalries. In academics, the pretention rates are very high. There is a high degree of disappointment among these characters. They were so good at school. They thought they would create great books and become inspiring teachers, then neither happened.

Q. You hammer a recent past president of the National Endowment for the Arts as a power-grabbing, middling poet. Why?

A. I don’t hate him. What I was doing was skewering his pretentions. I met him for lunch when he was up for the job. “I have this Jeffersonian sense of public service,” he said. Complete bull. He was really saying, “I want this job for it will give me power and advance my career.” I would have had much greater regard for him if he had said that, instead of putting Jefferson on his side.

Q. You also take the New Yorker writer Lillian Ross apart for exposing her five-decade affair with the married editor William Shawn. Do you think Ross’s motivations were revenge?

A. I think she was morally clueless, especially with Shawn’s wife and children still being alive. It’s “Look at me, I’m still alive. Look at who I’ve been bonking with gusto.” This goes back to decorum. Fifty years earlier, her book would not have been published. Her book was the betrayal of all betrayals, for Shawn was a great editor who specialized in not being known. The nature about what we gossip about has changed greatly.

Q. With gossip flooding into the mainstream media, do you think that modern journalism has been irreparably corrupted?

A. I don’t think it is irreparably corrupted, but it is widely corrupted.

Art critic Robert Hughes on His Personal History of 'Rome'

2011-12-11T18:19:00.000-08:00

Newark Star-Ledger
Sunday, November 13, 2011, 7:10 AM

In 1959, the Australian art critic Robert Hughes was a 21-year-old student on his first visit to Rome. The city blew him away, from the Spanish Steps to the Coliseum, where gladiators fought each other to death 2,000 years ago.
Fifty-two years later, Hughes has written “Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History” (Knopf, 500 pp., $35), in which he gives readers a fluid look at the Eternal City — from the founding myth of Romulus and Remus to the bloodthirsty Roman Empire, the medieval period, the Renaissance and present-day Rome. In Hughes’ intensely intimate view of the city, he delights in Julius Caesar being the biggest slave trafficker in Rome and the church murals of saints being tortured to death. Hughes muses on the relic hysteria of the Middle Ages, when every church had to have a drop of Jesus’ blood and the foot of a saint, and Michelangelo’s brutal journey to finishing the Sistine Chapel.
The 73-year-old Hughes was Time Magazine’s art critic from 1970 to 2001. He spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Manhattan.

Q. Imperial Rome was incredibly filthy, with garbage and excrement piled up on the street, as well as dead horses. How did the residents dispose of their chamber pots?
A. They would throw the coarse terra cotta pots out the window. There was a law saying that if you brained a passer-by with a night urn, you’d have to pay for their medical fees and lost work time.
Q. Santo Stefano Rotondo is a church famous for its murals showing how ancient saints were sliced, diced and broiled on their way to martyrdom. How did these murals affect you?
A. Being a once-practicing Catholic and suddenly being immersed in this Roman iconography, this stuff was very upfront, showing the hopes and fears of the church. They were much more vehement than the Catholic representations that I knew in Australia.
The murals were meant to be gory, to provoke pity and terror. I’ve thought of it as a Sistine Chapel for sentimental sadists. There is flogging, drowning and even cooking saints in boiling oil, like a Trastevere artichoke. Santo Stefano isn’t one of my favorite churches because I never really liked the art.
Q. If you were taking a nephew to Rome for the first time, what would you insist that he see?
A. I’d insist that any nephew should come with me to the important Baroque monuments. I’d definitely start him off with Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th century masterworks, including the Barcaccia Fountain and the Cornaro Chapel. Rome is truly a Berninian city, par excellence. What Bernini is attempting to do is to ramp you up into a state of wonder, saying, “If this can’t do it, nothing can.”
Q. Can you tell me about the physical and emotional toll that the painting of the Sistine Chapel had on the great artist Michelangelo?
A. He wrote a poem where he said, “I’ve grown a goiter at this drudgery.” Michelangelo experienced fatigue, frustration and inspiration while painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Q. At the end of the book, you go on a rant, comparing the Rome you first saw in 1959 to the Rome of 2011. Now, the museums and churches are swamped with tourists. How can you view art in Rome now?
A. Well, the historical sites are almost inaccessible, but by going repeatedly to them, you can have meaningful visits. The only way you can really appreciate a work of art is in relative silence. I don’t mean there should be an enforced silence, but the artwork should have an opportunity to talk directly to you. You can get this only by going to the same sites multiple times.

Charles Shields on the Complex and Tortured Kurt Vonnegut in "And So It Goes"

2011-12-11T05:55:00.000-08:00

In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, a science-fiction writer named Kurt Vonnegut published a surreal novel named “Slaughterhouse-Five,” based on his experiences surviving the firebombing of Dresden during World War II and satirizing the absurdity of war. The book made Vonnegut, a grizzled journeyman writer pushing 50, into a “counterculture guru” and one of the most famous authors in America.

In his scintillating biography, “And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life” (Holt, 528 pp., $30), the writer Charles J. Shields follows Vonnegut’s path from an unhappy childhood in Depression-era Indianapolis to the horrors of World War II and his struggles as a writer. Writing the first Vonnegut biography, Shields adeptly sifts through a mountain of material and interviews with Vonnegut’s family, friends and rivals to create a complicated portrait of an impoverished hack writer who became a prominent author and national cult figure. Vonnegut was a crank, was principled, and was both a miserable father and an inspiring teacher, while being battered by lifelong depression up to his death in 2007. Shields argues persuasively for Vonnegut’s place in the American literary canon.

Shields, 60, is the author of “Mockingbird,” his acclaimed biography of the novelist Harper Lee. He spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by phone from his home in Barboursville, Va.

Q. Why did you decide to write a biography of Vonnegut?

A. I was in college in the late 1960s. I was draft eligible. The Vietnam War was going and “Slaughterhouse-Five” broke over like a storm. All of a sudden, there was a book that reflected our bewilderment and disorientation, and confusion over our duty. We were required to sign up for the draft, but we would say to each other, “Would we fight? And for what?” The book addressed all that.
I was surprised that there wasn’t a biography. Vonnegut had been writing for 50 years and had 14 books in print. What man was behind these books?

Q. You explore the many layers to Vonnegut’s personality and his hypocrisies. What did you find?

A. His kids often said that he could be a cruel and scary father. Vonnegut was a man who was an aggrieved person. When I first interviewed him, I was amazed that Vonnegut, who was old enough to be my father, had such issues with his own long-dead father.
Vonnegut was forever on the cusp of full adulthood. That is why he related so well to his readers.
When I met people who knew Vonnegut, I felt like I was getting reports on different people. One person would say, “He was so witty and asked me about my writing.” Another would say, “I think he was loaded during his lecture.”

Q. Mental illness and depression play a big role in this biography. How?

A. Vonnegut was both intrigued and deeply worried about mental illness. He thought it might have something to do with creativity. When he finally went in for counseling, he said to his son, “I hope they don’t talk me out of being creative.” Vonnegut was also worried about passing it on. He saw both his mother and son crack up. He wondered: Was it a curse or a gift?

Q. You had great access, interviewing five of his six children and dozens of other people, but his son Mark stopped you from quoting Vonnegut’s letters. Why?

A. I never got a reason. The word that came down was just “no.” It might have been because Mark Vonnegut had an unsatisfactory relationship with his father. He might not have wanted to open old wounds.

Q. How do you view Kurt Vonnegut after writing about him for five years?

A. Kurt? I’m very fond of him. I admire his devotion as a writer. Most people in his situation would have given up. What he did was an inspiration, and he might inspire other writers, showing you have to pay your dues.

Please check out my interview with Kurt Vonnegut's son Mark on his memoir that came out in late 2010:

http://dylanmfoley.blogspot.com/2010/12/mark-vonnegut-on-coping-with-mental.html

Mark Vonnegut on Coping with Mental Illness

2011-12-09T21:33:00.000-08:00

In 1971, Mark Vonnegut published his memoir “Eden Express,” a blistering account of his three mental breakdowns in the late 1960s, set against the backdrop of social unrest and hippie communes. The son of Kurt Vonnegut, America’s great cynical novelist, Mark Vonnegut recovered and became a beloved doctor outside of Boston.

Four decades later, Dr. Vonnegut has published “Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So”(Delacorte, $24), a memoir dealing with his bipolar disorder diagnosis, his work and his turbulent relationship with his famous father, who would matter-of-factly mention to his children that he might kill himself. In the 1980s, Vonnegut had his last mental breakdown and found himself restrained in the same Massachusetts hospital were he taught medicine. Vonnegut’s account of his recovery, his family and maintaining his mental health is a humane look at his own situation, as well as the patients he treats with compassion.

Vonnegut, 63, is a practicing pediatrician, and spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Milton, Mass.

Q. After four decades of swearing off another book, why did you write this one?

A. I wrote the introduction to my father’s book of essays “Armageddon in Retrospect” and liked it. I realized, “I can write pretty well.” My wife and friends have been telling me for years that I should write another book.

Q. How do you compare your experience with a crewcut Harvard psychiatrist in the late 1960s and managed care today?

A. When my psychiatrist and I were in charge of my care, each appointment cost $100. He didn’t have to verify my insurance. There was not a quality-improvement criteria like there is now. He did not have to assign a diagnosis. I am faced with this in my own practice. My true diagnosis for a kid may be “School is not his thing.” I can’t say that. It has to be “attention-deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity.” I cannot get paid unless I give him a diagnosis.

Q. How did your medical colleagues handle your fourth breakdown in the 1980s?

A. There were several sessions between my nervous partners and my psychiatrist. My partners would take me out to lunch, then for grand rounds at the hospital, making sure I was okay.
Q. How does society handle mental illness now, compared to when “Eden Express” came out?

A. It is still stigmatizing. People who can pass for normal do. The thing that is different now, and that will help us deal with mental illness better, is the fact that the mentally ill are no longer warehoused. We now have a day-to-day awareness that mental illness exists.

Q. How was it growing up with Kurt Vonnegut as your father?

A. It was both inspiring and terrifying to have him around, to have him talking to himself, banging on the typewriter and sometimes swearing. He was a big guy, 200 lbs. and six-foot-three inches, who could sometimes be very nice and sometimes be furious because he couldn’t write.

There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, “It’s okay to be an introvert, but I don’t want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.”

I came across these photos of my father as a teenager. He was smiling boy, always with his arm around a girl. I’ve come to see him as a sweet nice kid who went to war. He was beaten by Nazi guards, he almost starved to death. In Dresden, he pulled dead bodies out of bomb shelters. I think he had post-traumatic stress disorder. It was after the war that he became able to write with depth. It became easy to forgive him, but also he’s not around to pick on anymore.

Please check out my interview with Charles Shields' on his fascinating and tortured portrait of Kurt Vonnegut:

http://dylanmfoley.blogspot.com/2011/12/charles-shields-on-complex-and-tortured.html

Chinese Writer Yu Hua on His Biting Essays in "China in Ten Words"

2011-11-27T06:35:00.000-08:00

Newark Star-Ledger

November 27, 2011

Yu Hua is one of China’s most prominent writers, author of the modern classic novels “To Live” and “Chronicle of a Blood Merchant,” which examine the horrific abuses in Maoist China and the corruption of the present day.

In his sublime essay collection, “China in Ten Words” (Pantheon, 228 pp., $25.95), Hua explores his often spartan childhood during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s and the rampant corruption of modern China. Hua starts each chapter with a thematic word. In “Reading,” Hua looks at the period after most literature had been burned by zealots. In “Writing,” he reads sexually explicit posters that attacked local “fornicators.” In “Leader,” he remembers the absurd Maoist cult of his childhood. In “Bamboozle,” he turns his intellectual guns on the present-day culture of lies and swindles that threaten to undermine Chinese morality and social order. Hua’s account is a readable and engrossing look at the perils China faces, with deep roots in the trauma of the past.

Hua, 51, spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from the Pomona, Calif., office of his translator, Allan Barr.

Q. You address the tortured history of the Cultural Revolution and the greed and corruption of modern China with mostly amusement, but write about moments of sheer horror without editorializing. How did you create this voice?

A. Because this is a work of nonfiction, my approach to writing it was different from my novels. I considered the importance of keeping this book grounded on a realistic level. Rather than making a polemical case, I felt it was more important to tell a vivid story and then let the story speak for itself, rather than to add a layer of commentary.

Q. During the Cultural Revolution, you grew up in a China almost completely stripped of literature. How did you cope with this?
A. A lot of real literature had been burned by the Red Guards in bonfires. All that was left was the poetry of Chairman Mao and the works of a writer named Lu Xun. When your reading is limited to the works of two writers, it is very dry, arid and unappetizing. We were terribly keen to read other books, but the few remaining books had been read by many people and were missing many front and back pages.

Q. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, you and your friends became street toughs, harassing people who were selling cooking oil coupons on the black market. In one case, you mercilessly beat a young farmer. How do you view this attack 35 years later?

A. Often, people don’t have ideas of their own and are very affected by their environment. I was proud back then to be catching people who were selling coupons. I look back at (the beating) as very shameful. It was part and parcel of living in that society, where the environment shapes your values.

Q. You have quipped that “revolution” in the modern China means evictions and greed. There is now tremendous wealth and tremendous poverty in China, with little sympathy for the 100 million destitute Chinese. What warnings do you have for the new China?

A. These trends are all effects of what happened in 1989. In the wake of the suppression of the democracy movement, efforts at political reform came to a standstill, whereas economic reforms and changes accelerated. In a society where there is a lack of political transparency and an autocratic control of resources, there are bound to be all kinds of abuses that take place against that backdrop. Chinese society is like a huge box of explosives, a bomb waiting to go off. All that is missing is the fuse that would lead to detonation. There are two roads for China — democratization or revolution. Democratization should be the better one, because it will be incremental. Revolution would create disruption and turmoil.

Chang-Rae Lee Skewers American Overconsumption in "Aloft"

2011-11-25T11:20:00.000-08:00

I dedicate this interview to "Black Friday" and the fistfights at Target and Walmart. As a nation, we are swimming in junk.

The Denver Post
March 28, 2004 By Dylan Foley

Chang-rae Lee may be the patron saint of literary novelists who write about emotionally shut-down men. In his acclaimed 1995 debut novel, "Native Speaker," Lee created a Korean-American corporate spy struggling with his ethnic identity and his place in the world. In "A Gesture Life," Lee explored an elderly man trying to forget the war crimes of his youth.

In his third novel, "Aloft," Lee follows Jerry Battle, a semiretired Italian-American landscaping contractor living on Long Island. On the surface, Jerry has everything he needs, from his material wealth to the plane that he uses to fly above the suburbs that are his home. But the cracks quickly show in his facade, with his inability to communicate with all the people he loves - his elderly father, his two adult children and his ex-girlfriend Rita.

"People have asked me about this," chuckled Lee as he discussed his emotionally blocked narrators in his publisher's office in New York City. "I feel it is dramatic the way people like Jerry Battle or Henry Park (of "Native Speaker") go through the world, always mitigated by their inability to express themselves. For me, there is something absolutely dramatic about someone who wants to feel and does, but somehow can't do the things that allows himself to communicate."

As the novel progresses, Jerry is faced with several crises, from the financial ruin of his son, Jack, to the potentially fatal medical condition of his daughter, Theresa. Underlying the present worries is the memory of the tragic drowning of Jerry's Korean wife, Daisy, 20 years before. In "Aloft," Lee has crafted a beautiful novel that is both tragic and humorous, examining a modern family in suburban America.

"Part of Jerry's problem is he's quite self-absorbed," said Lee. "It is his extreme lazy-heartedness. His heart is there, it's beating and he wants to feel vital, but everything has to come to him. He can't initiate the action. Somehow life has to shake him. He needs an intensity, a sharpness."

At 38, Lee is aging gracefully from his role as literary wunderkind, who, at age 29, wrote the mature, finely crafted "Native Speaker," into a respectable academic. He wore a tweed jacket and wool slacks to the interview. He teaches creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues include novelists Toni Morrison, Edmund White and Joyce Carol Oates. He lives in Princeton, N.J., with his wife and two daughters.

As "Aloft" evolves, it becomes a modern version of Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons." Three generations of the Battle men can't relate. Jerry's father, Hank, looks down on Jerry because he didn't work as hard as he could in the family business. And Jerry was never enough of a role model for his son, Jack.

Lee made Jerry a man on the cusp of 60 for specific reasons. "Many of my friends' parents are Jerry's age, around 60," he said. "In the society we live in, it is the new middle age. They are thinking about retiring, but they have so many choices. They have enough health to pursue second lives."

Today's 60-year-olds are wedged between elderly parents and immature adult children. "They have grown kids who aren't as grown as the previous generation," said Lee. "Because of medical advances, they have elderly parents who are ailing. It seemed to me that this is the time of life for a guy like Jerry Battle, where everything should be coming together, but he has never had more responsibility. Everyone is pulling and prodding him. In terms of a figure in our culture, that is a guy I haven't heard about yet."

For Jerry, flying is a great means of escaping intimacy. "His hobby of flying was the perfect activity for him," said Lee, "both metaphorically and literally. It spoke so neatly to how he wanted to be in the world, but outside of it, too."

Lee was born in Korea and raised in the Westchester suburbs. He decided, however, to set the book in America's first suburbs of Long Island, the ultimate destination for working-class strivers from overcrowded New York City.

"They are the classic suburbs, engineered and planned that way," Lee said. "They are based on privacy and cloistered neighborhoods, so that there is not the kind of commonality, interaction or any of those things we associate with communities. The lots are big enough in that upper-middle-class way that you don't see your neighbors. That's the site of the American dream, as a postwar dream."

It may have been the isolation of the suburbs that helped destabilize Daisy, Jerry's dead wife.

"The suburbs are the worst place if you are an isolated immigrant," Lee said. "The suburbs give no comfort to people who aren't comfortable with themselves. There's no place to meet people. With Daisy, for me her tragedy is not her mental illness or her ethnicity, it is her isolation. That isolation is shared by a lot of women in the suburbs. Women who didn't grow up in the suburbs but who live there have a lot of problems."

Through Jerry's monologues, Lee explores how the overconsumption of the American suburbs has infiltrated all of American society. His son Jack's 6,500-square-foot house makes for a prime target.

"People are making as much money as they can and getting as much space as they can so they can shut everyone else out," he said. "In Jack's house, he has a kitchenette in the master bedroom because it is too far to walk downstairs. Our tastes are getting overrefined. There is a breakdown to the limits of what we own, find comfortable and necessary. Each generation is more invested in 'stuff.'

"If I have any grand idea about this book that is not spoken yet, it is that the suburban life is now our life," he explained. "It is even in the city. If you walk down Fifth Avenue (in New York City), it is just a big outdoor mall."

Despite the gloomy predictions, both novelist and interviewer found themselves laughing uproariously about $1,800 faucets for the home and how all classes seem to crave granite kitchens. "We are starting to reach a point of saturation, where individual consciousness is defined by Nike and bottled water," Lee said.

(ALOFT By Chang-rae Lee, Riverhead, 352 pages, $24.95)

Q&A: Dave Isay on "Listening is an Act of Love"

2011-11-24T21:31:00.000-08:00

Newark Star-Ledger
December 2007

14,000 Voices as Historical Record

In 2003, radio producer Dave Isay and a group of six people set up StoryCorps, a nonprofit with the lofty goal of recording the life histories of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary Americans. A radio booth was built and opened in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The premise was simple: two people would go into the booth with a facilitator, and one person would interview the other for 40 minutes. The interviewee would be given a CD of the interview, and another copy would be archived at the Library of Congress.

Isay and his crew have struck audio gold. In the four years the project has been in existence, booths at Grand Central and Ground Zero, as well as a two mobile recording booths, have captured 14,000 interviews from people around the country. The booths have captured survivors from the World Trade Center attacks, veterans of the civil rights movement, children of the Depression, homeless people, cancer patients and many more.

In his new book, Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps (Penguin Press, $25), Isay has edited and presented 50 interviews of great magnitude and grace. From an American veteran who cannot let go of the ghost of a 14-year-old Hitler Youth soldier he killed in Europe in combat to a young man expressing the love he feels for his grandmother who saved him from horrible child abuse, the stories are vivid and riveting. They cover love, death, forgiveness, hope and other aspects of the human condition. From a father accepting the loss of his 10-year-old son to an alcoholic desperately trying to stay clean and a depressed missionary in Los Angeles accepting kindness from a street prostitute, the stories form a history of America as it is now.

Isay, 41, was raised in New York City and educated at New York University. By his early thirties, Isay had become one of America’s most prominent radio documentarians, from his shows “Ghetto Life 101” to “The Sunshine Hotel,” which chronicled one of the last Bowery flophouses. He is the author of “Our America” and “Flophouse” and is married to the investigative reporter Jennifer Gonnerman. Isay spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at the StoryCorps offices in Brooklyn.

Q. What inspired the StoryCorps project?

A. I’ve been a radio documentary producer for about 20 years. StoryCorps came out of that work. I did a documentary 15 years ago with these two kids in the projects of Chicago. I gave them tape recorders and had them record their daily lives. It became “Ghetto Life 101,” which was the first nationally broadcast citizen-recorded documentary. The microphone gave LeAlan and Lloyd the license to ask people the questions they’d never asked before. In many ways, “Ghetto Life 101” was the beginning of StoryCorps.

Documentaries have traditionally been about creating this work of art or this educational piece that benefits a lot of people in its playing or broadcast. StoryCorps turns this on its head. It is really about changing people’s lives by giving them a chance to participate. We live in this culture where we are surrounded by so many computer screens and Blackberries. StoryCorps is about turning off the screens and looking each other in the eyes. This project is really about taking time out to remember what is important in life, that the stories of the people around us, our families and friends, the people on the subway near us, are valuable and important. It tells people that they matter. These stories make me want to get up in the morning, and remind me how precious it is to be alive.

With “Flophouse,” I’ll never forget the experience of bringing the galley of the book into the flophouse, and one of the guys started dancing through the halls, shouting “I exist, I exist.”

Q. You have set StoryCorps up as a self-perpetuating, money-losing organization. How?

A. StoryCorps is a crazy idea. Each interview cost $250 to make. We give it to you for $10. If you have no money, you get it for free. We lose $240 an hour in every booth We give new meaning to the word nonprofit. We have 14,000 interviews now. There will be many more than that. We are trying to turn this into an American institution and a social movement. For us, StoryCorps is about the experience of the booth, about two people who care about each other, to look somebody in the eye and to tell them you love them by listening. The mission of StoryCorps is to honor and celebrate people’s lives by listening

Q. Did you have any difficulties in the first several years?

A. When we launched the project, it was a very simple idea, but it didn’t fit into any foundation’s (grant-giving) guidelines. Nobody had tried to do anything like this before. When we got about three months into the project, we were within several weeks of running out of money, laying everyone off and closing the project down. At the same time, it was extraordinarily successful. I could see it was working. I’m like a junkyard dog. There was no way I was going to let this thing die. A couple of individual donors stepped up and gave us enough money to get back on our feet, so I could find some foundations to support us. The first 18 months were rough.

There is no fat at StoryCorps. We are trying to build a foundation on which we can grow into a national institution. Everybody who participates in StoryCorps becomes a StoryCorps alumni. We have roughly 30,000 alumni. This organization started with seven people and a budget of $500,000. Four years later, we are now 80 people and have a budget of $6 million. When we have millions of alumni, we hope that there will be some donations ot sustain us, to see to our mission, which is to make StoryCorps accessible to everyone. I’ve done some obscure projects, but this book is all about StoryCorps getting a foothold in mainstream society. I have my fingers crossed.

Q. How did you choose and edit down the 50 stories?

A. A couple of thousand stories were transcribed. What I’ve always tried to do as a radio producer was to be the vehicle through which people tell the story, their stories the way they want them told. It’s about taking something and shaping it, honing it so it becomes the essence of what people are saying in the booth, and the poetry of what people are talking about.

Q. Have you had any “Jerry Springer” moments in the booth?

A. We haven’t, knock on wood. It’s almost like there has been a protective glow around the project. Anything can go wrong, but nothing has with 14,000 interviews. That’s because we take it seriously and the participants take it seriously. People travel hundreds of miles to go to the StoryCorps booths. It takes courage. With the 9-11 stories, we see firefighters who have not been to therapy telling their stories. It is not self-indulgent. They see it as leaving their story for posterity, for future generations. This idea of many voices painting the picture of what we are becoming as a nation, this important historical record, is enough to force some people into the booth.

Rat Watching in Lower Manhattan with Robert Sullivan

2011-11-24T20:04:00.000-08:00

The Denver Post

May 16, 2004

By Dylan Foley

Be still," whispered author Bob Sullivan, as he stopped suddenly like a wilderness scout in a garbage-filled alley in New York City. "Can you hear the rustling?"

The sound was like the wind in the trees and it was coming from a massive pile of trash bags. All of a sudden, a rat jumped out and ran along the curb, across the alley and into an abandoned lot. The bags were alive with rats. "You can tell that the rat hole is in that lot," Sullivan said triumphantly.

Sullivan is obsessed with rats. Starting in 2001, he spent a year hanging out in a trash-filled alley in lower Manhattan, watching a colony of rats feed and mate. Along the way, Sullivan explored the history of America's most despised residents, the exterminators that try to kill them and the symbolism of the vermin.

The resulting book, "Rats: Observations on the History and Habitats of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants," quickly moves beyond one group of rats, examining what rats represent to humans in terms of fear and loathing. Sullivan has developed an engrossing, eclectic work by writing a quirky homage to Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" and the nature writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Sullivan digs deep into his rat alley and finds out that Eden and Ryders alleys, an ancient L-shaped passageway near Wall Street, may have been the site of the first battle of the American Revolution. He crosses the country in search of the Elvis of rat control. Sullivan holds rats up as a mirror species: They live with us and they eat our garbage. What can we learn about ourselves by looking at them?

In a freak sleet storm a week before spring started, Sullivan took a writer to Theater Alley,not far from ground zero and the open pit that once was the World Trade Center. The goal was to watch the rats feed.

Sullivan's last book had been about a Native American whale hunt in Washington state. "When I did 'A Whale Hunt,' everybody was talking about how great whales are," said the 41-year-old writer. "What is the opposite of a whale? That's rats. This is a creature that is truly abhorred by man.

"You look at rats, which are so hated by us, but the only reason they are here is because of us. The term used by biologists is commensal, which means 'eats at the same table,"' said Sullivan. "The indicator of wildness is a grizzly bear, which needs 100 miles to roam on its own. The indicator of city and man, of intense human population, is the rat. They are also in the suburbs. They are everywhere there are people."

Steam billowed up through sewer grates as the rats carried off bits of office workers' breakfast muffins from the garbage. "Rats symbolize all the dark things," said Sullivan. "To me, rats are about fear. People are afraid of them.

"Supposedly, I am a nature writer, so I was trying to write something that was not nature, not 'natural,"' he said. "I wanted to see if I could switch the greatest nature writers, Emerson and Thoreau, to writing about rats. The great thing about Thoreau is that everybody thinks that he is going into the woods to commune with nature. He was also going into the woods to figure out how to live in society."

Sullivan got night goggles and a stool, and several nights a week, he watched his rats. He tried to trap them and failed. He met with exterminators. He investigated a company that makes giant inflatable rats used by striking unions at demonstrations. He communed with the rats from dusk to dawn.

"Understanding how an alley works takes time," said Sullivan, giving pointers on rat watching. "The rats get food from here," he said, gesturing to the garbage. "Their nest is over there," he added, pointing to the abandoned lot. "Anyone can become a rat expert if they take the time. The hard part was getting to know the context of the alley, the history."

Sullivan, however, is no stranger to offbeat nonfiction. He is the author of "The Meadowlands," a chronicle of New Jersey's most famous swamp, and went from mob body dumping grounds to burning garbage piles. During the writing of "A Whale Hunt," he lived in a steel shack during the winter, reading Melville's "Moby-Dick" as his only entertainment.

In his new book, Sullivan goes on glorious rat tangents, from anti-Chinese plague hysteria in San Francisco to Harlem rent strikes where rats were used as political weapons. "Tangents are everything," said Sullivan. "You walk into a rat alley and you say to yourself, 'What am I doing here? Where am I going?' I was hoping to see a tangent. The way rats run is kind of like a tangent. They scatter. If you put your foot down, they go all over the place."

After three years watching rats and traveling the country to study the people who try to destroy them, Sullivan came away with a healthy respect for rats. "It's always fun to see them again," he said. "They do a great job at being rats. They know how to survive. Everybody wants to get rid of them, but they stay. Don't get me wrong, but there is a little bit of elegance in how they have slipped themselves into this vile niche."

As the sleet pelted him in the garbage-strewn alley, Sullivan waxed poetic. "When rats run, their tails don't seem to touch the ground," he said. "There is a beauty to that."

Eric Schlosser's "Reefer Madness"

2011-11-24T19:05:00.000-08:00

The Denver Post

June 22, 2003

By Dylan Foley

In 2000, Eric Schlosser's book "Fast Food Nation," an exposé of the unhealthy practices and filthy working conditions in the fast food business and the meatpacking world, was published to great acclaim. Schlosser documented the fat-saturated foods that Americans eat and the dangerous, low-wage conditions that workers in those industries toil under.

Now Schlosser has turned his formidable investigative journalism skills to examine three American black markets - pornography, marijuana and illegal labor. The new book, "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market," is an articulate, often gripping exposé of these three areas.

The three essays in the book showcase three sides of Schlosser's writing. There is the activist/policy journalism in the title essay, "Reefer Madness," that examines the barbaric drug war against the cultivation and sale of marijuana, where nonviolent drug offenders can be given sentences of 20 years to life, and murderers are set free to make room for them in our nation's prisons.

The second part of the book, "In the Strawberry Fields," is about the harsh conditions in the California strawberry fields. Schlosser examines the innocuous basket of strawberries and reveals the blood and physical agony that goes into each pint of fruit from illegal Mexican laborers.

The third essay, "An Empire of the Obscene," shows Schlosser's abilities to build a long, engrossing profile, recording the epic, 40-year career of Reuben Sturman, as he developed his pornography empire. Sturman was a colorless businessman who popularized the peep show and successfully fought obscenity charges for decades, but was brought down by a dogged Internal Revenue agent for his aversion to paying taxes.

The "Reefer Madness" piece has its roots in a brilliant 1994 article that Schlosser wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, which followed the case of Mark Young, who was involved in a major marijuana drug case in Indiana. Young only introduced the main conspirators, but he received a life sentence, while the major defendants, because they turned state's evidence, received much lighter sentences.

The drug laws vary wildly from state to state. In New York, possession of an ounce of marijuana can lead to a $100 fine. In Louisiana, it can mean a 20-year sentence. Then there is the comedy of America's anti-drug critics. Congressman Dan Burton from Indiana had pushed for legislation mandating the death penalty for drug dealers. When his son was arrested for transporting 8 pounds of marijuana, however, he received house arrest and community service, not death.

Schlosser keeps a tight, cohesive argument on the drug laws. He is able to present an articulate case for decriminalization. "A society that can punish a marijuana offender more severely than a murderer is caught in the grip of a deep psychosis," writes Schlosser. "It has a bad case of reefer madness."

Schlosser flexes his investigative muscles in "In the Strawberry Fields," showing that sharecropping is alive and well in the California strawberry business. Major agribusinesses routinely exploit Mexican laborers. Strawberry pickers are offered the chance to become farmers, and are immediately placed in debt to the large strawberry growers. The small farmers do the backbreaking labor while constantly facing bankruptcy.

In his long piece on the pornography industry, Schlosser details the history of economic sex over the past 40 years. He documents how the morality campaigns against pornography have failed. He focuses on the Meese Commission, set up by Ronald Reagan's attorney general, Edwin Meese, which used fraudulent claims to try to prove a link between pornography and violence.

Meanwhile, Sturman was making money hand over fist. As the government tried to get him, American consumption of pornography rose drastically. In 1985, 79 million hardcore videos were rented. In 2001, the number of porno rentals was 759 million, and the pornography industry was estimated to be worth $8 billion to $10 billion a year. Mainstream media conglomerates such as AOL Time Warner have a stake in the porno business, and big hotel chains such as Marriott show dirty movies in their rooms.

The motivation to buy pornography, according to Schlosser always has remained the same. "Largely fueled by loneliness and frustration, the sex industry," he writes, "has never suffered from a shortage of customers."

One of the failings of "Reefer Madness" as a book is that Schlosser tries to present it as a thorough analysis of the American underground economy. He basically takes three very different, very strong magazine pieces that started in Rolling Stone and The Atlantic and presents them as an investigation of the black market. The three pieces are very powerful and worth reading, but are not a comprehensive view of the American underground markets.

With "Fast Food Nation" and now "Reefer Madness," Schlosser has established himself as one of the best investigative reporters in America. Whether he is dealing with horribly abused illegal alien workers or people trampled by the drug laws, he handled his subjects with wit and compassion. Schlosser gets to the heart of his subjects.

(REEFER MADNESS: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market By Eric Schlosser, Houghton Mifflin, 304 pages, $23)

Donna Tartt on Her Exquisite Second Novel "The Little Friend"

2011-11-24T13:50:00.000-08:00

The Denver Post

December 22, 2002

By Dylan Foley

In 1992, Donna Tartt burst onto the American literary scene with her debut novel "The Secret History," a beautifully written story of a murderous society of classics majors at an elite Northeastern college. The book sold a million copies, Tartt was lionized as a new literary star and her keen intellect and a preference for dramatic black outfits made her a media darling.

In the past 10 years, little has been heard of Tartt. Rumors swirled she had bought an island and was living like the James Bond character Dr. No or that she suffered from horrible writer's block.

Tartt actually was writing her second novel "The Little Friend" (Knopf, 557 pages, $26), the tale of 12-year-old Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, a tomboy who lives in a sleepy Mississippi town, where her family has been devastated by the murder of her only brother Robin. Part "Treasure Island," part "Harriet the Spy," it is a demanding novel, full of exquisite images of dying Southern gentry and the class and race turmoil of the 1970s South.

Harriet picks out Danny Ratliff, a local speed addict, as the man who murdered her brother and stalks him with a stolen cobra.

"It is difficult to write a second novel," said Tartt in an interview at a Japanese tea room in New York City. "The way I dealt with it was by trying to write a completely different type of book, taking on new challenges and working on different questions. There is a different idiom in the book."

The 38-year-old Tartt is a tiny woman, with dark hair and light green eyes. She cuts an intimidating presence because she is always impeccably dressed, but she laughs easily and enjoys talking about her new book.

The idea for "The Little Friend" started evolving when she read a footnote about snakes. "I was finishing up the first novel and I was checking my Greek quotes," said Tartt. "Snakes are part of the Dionysian ritual. This footnote said this tradition survives today in the hills of Kentucky, this religious practice of handling snakes. There was a real sense of 'My god, I live quite close to the only place in the world where something like this is still practiced.' This was definitely part of the new book."

For Tartt, her writing process is very old style. "I write by hand," she said. "I write in these spiral composition notebooks, like the ones I used to have in school. They have to be big fat ones, because I write big fat novels. When I can't find a notebook, I'm like Medea, storming through the house: 'Where's my notebook?"'

Tartt's fictional town of Alexandria, Miss., is in the throes of post-civil rights changes, where the old Southern culture is giving way to new housing developments. The dying aristocracy that Harriet's family comes from watches as race relations change. Then there are the Ratliffs, the poor, white criminal family that is cooking methamphetamine in their backyard.

"In the 1970s when I grew up," said Tartt, "you have two things going on - the very slow, ritualistic way of the tea parties, the garden club meetings, then you have the bulldozers coming in and building strip malls and highways. Someone made the comment of making the Ratliffs speed addicts. It was right - the new (world) was about getting it in, getting it done, and driving fast cars."

Raised in the tiny town of Grenada, Miss., Tartt went to the University of Mississippi and Bennington College in Vermont. She lives in Manhattan and on a farm in Virginia.

Though Tartt was mentored by the legendary Mississippi writer and editor Willie Morris, she wasn't influenced by Southern writers. "As a child, I read Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Conan Doyle. The only Southern writer I read much was Edgar Allan Poe," said Tartt. "I learned my craft from those early books, partly because I like 19th century novels better than 20th century writers."

Tartt's childhood reading had a major influence on the new novel. "When I was a little girl, my favorite books were really for boys," she said. "It struck me that if Jim Hawkins (in Stevenson's "Treasure Island") had been a little girl, he would have acted differently. Little girls are craftier, they play with their cards closer to their vests, they hold grudges. I thought it would be interesting to see how a little girl would react."

In "The Little Friend," Tartt develops strong female characters, including Harriet's grandmother, Edie, and Gum, the matriarch of the outlaw Ratliffs.

They are both tough women who come down hard on their families. "It is valid and true that it is a book about two grandmothers who are different socially and culturally, but who have similar attributes," said Tartt. "This is a book about the matriarchy."

Harriet and her young friend Hely expose themselves to a lot of danger in the novel. "My compass, what I used when I felt I was getting off track in the book, was the terror of being a child, when you are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Tartt. "Children don't have any weapons to use against adults, except evasion - running away, lying and hiding. They can't meet in direct combat."

The drug writing in the book is some of the best in the novel. At points, the reader can feel trapped at the table with the paranoid Ratliff brothers as they are strung out on meth. "In Faulkner's time, they would be moonshiners," said Tartt. "Today, they would grow marijuana or make speed."

Tartt found her drug material in odd places. ``The Internet is an amazing thing," she admitted. She found the website for the Washington state outlaw press Loompanics, known for its antigovernment books. The rest became literature. ``I used Uncle Fester's 'Secrets to Methamphetamine Manufacture,"' she said. ``I am a very big fan of Loompanics."