Latest / The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast / Episode 91: Digressions with Mark Haber

Transcript

Episode 91: Digressions with Mark Haber · The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast

0:12
SPEAKER_03: This is the MOOCs and the Grimes Podcast.
0:14
SPEAKER_03: Hello, everybody.
0:15
SPEAKER_03: This is Trevor.
0:16
SPEAKER_03: And happy birthday, Paul.
0:20
SPEAKER_03: Paul, it's your birthday today.
0:22
SPEAKER_03: Happy birthday.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: Happy birthday, Paul.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, guys.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can't think of a better way to kick it off than talking to two of my favorite people about books.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: Early birthday present.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Always good to have a birthday on a Saturday.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's exactly.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: My wife's birthday was like three Saturdays ago.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, it's always good to it's an extra bonus, as you said.
0:42
SPEAKER_03: It is for sure.
0:43
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
0:44
SPEAKER_03: Thanks, guys.
0:45
SPEAKER_03: And that that voice everybody is hearing,
0:47
SPEAKER_03: even though you'll know who it is,
0:49
SPEAKER_03: because it'll be in the show notes and in the title of the podcast.
0:52
SPEAKER_03: It's our good friend, Mark Haber.
0:53
SPEAKER_03: Mark, how are you doing?
0:54
SPEAKER_03: Thanks for joining us.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm doing I'm doing great, Trevor.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for asking.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: And good to see you and Paul.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: And I'm doing well.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:02
SPEAKER_03: Wonderful.
1:03
SPEAKER_03: For listeners,
1:05
SPEAKER_03: if you're relatively new to the podcast,
1:07
SPEAKER_03: maybe you haven't gone back and listened to our episode.
1:11
SPEAKER_03: dedicated to discussing New Directions, publisher New Directions.
1:16
SPEAKER_03: Our guest in that episode was Mark Haber.
1:18
SPEAKER_03: And I love that episode.
1:20
SPEAKER_03: It was such a fun discussion.
1:22
SPEAKER_03: So much fun.
1:23
SPEAKER_03: Oh, man.
1:23
SPEAKER_03: One of my favorites.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: One of my favorites to have you back.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: And not that Mark needed street cred,
1:27
SPEAKER_01: but that was where he established any street cred that was missing by talking about
1:31
SPEAKER_01: his New Directions tattoo,
1:32
SPEAKER_01: which is one of the coolest things I've ever heard of.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: People would,
1:35
SPEAKER_00: after that episode,
1:36
SPEAKER_00: people would see me across the street and just kind of look and nod and be like understanding,
1:40
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:40
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:41
SPEAKER_00: we get it.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: You got the cred.
1:43
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: Remind me before this episode's done,
1:45
SPEAKER_00: it's a tiny anecdote,
1:47
SPEAKER_00: but it's the most Mark thing I think I've ever done,
1:51
SPEAKER_00: which was something I did three days ago.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: And it just, it's very emblematic of who I am and I can do that whenever.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's a very Mark Haber little story that ties into New Directions in that episode.
2:02
SPEAKER_03: So very cool.
2:03
SPEAKER_03: Well, we'll save that as just a little bit of a tease, but not for too long.
2:08
SPEAKER_03: Not for too long.
2:09
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
2:11
SPEAKER_03: Let's start with a little bit of what we've been reading.
2:13
SPEAKER_03: We're all excited to talk about books.
2:15
SPEAKER_03: And of course,
2:18
SPEAKER_03: we're here to talk to Mark about his latest book,
2:21
SPEAKER_03: Lesser Ruins,
2:22
SPEAKER_03: just came out this past week.
2:24
SPEAKER_03: And
2:25
SPEAKER_03: We'll talk about that.
2:26
SPEAKER_03: We'll talk about, you know, who knows?
2:28
SPEAKER_03: We're pretty digressive at the best of times.
2:32
SPEAKER_03: And this is going to be one of the best opportunities to be digressive when we're
2:35
SPEAKER_03: talking about a very digressive book.
2:39
SPEAKER_03: But first things first, Paul, what have you been reading?
2:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I have been reading the new one by Julia Alvarez, The Cemetery of Untold Stories.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: The copy I've been reading is from Charco Press, but I know there's another one out in the US.
2:53
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it's such a great little book, fittingly all about an author and writing and stories.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: A lot of it is about the idea of,
3:04
SPEAKER_01: as an author or anyone else,
3:05
SPEAKER_01: the stories that you never get to tell and how they kind of haunt you,
3:09
SPEAKER_01: what to do with them.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: And so the main...
3:14
SPEAKER_01: The main narrator,
3:15
SPEAKER_01: I would say there's a few,
3:16
SPEAKER_01: but the main one is is an author who has this friend who almost is driven mad by
3:21
SPEAKER_01: these stories that she can't tell.
3:23
SPEAKER_01: So it's a really fascinating book.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: I thought I would just read real briefly from the beginning just to give you a
3:27
SPEAKER_01: little taste for the way she writes.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: So it says Alma once had a friend,
3:32
SPEAKER_01: a writer who for years before she died,
3:33
SPEAKER_01: relatively young,
3:34
SPEAKER_01: was always talking about this one story she had to write down.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: Over the course of their 30-plus year friendship,
3:40
SPEAKER_01: Alma's friend became quite famous,
3:42
SPEAKER_01: winning major prizes,
3:43
SPEAKER_01: garnering important interviews,
3:44
SPEAKER_01: awards left and right.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: A TV movie based on one of her novels was in the works with well-known names,
3:49
SPEAKER_01: even Alma,
3:50
SPEAKER_01: not a big Hollywood person,
3:51
SPEAKER_01: had heard of.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: And yet her friend dismissed those achievements as incidentals.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: The real deal was this one story that would not be hurried.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: The story possessed her.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: She could reel off its characters, complete with their names and histories.
4:04
SPEAKER_01: Periodically,
4:05
SPEAKER_01: they compelled her to go to one or another part of the world,
4:08
SPEAKER_01: a gravesite in Sweden,
4:10
SPEAKER_01: a fishing village in Liberia,
4:12
SPEAKER_01: the outer islands off South Carolina where she bought a house and lived for a spell.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: These characters had secrets she was listening for,
4:18
SPEAKER_01: and the reception was better in some places than others.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: Their voices would break through until she'd lose the connection,
4:24
SPEAKER_01: and it was time to move on to some other place.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: So it goes on like that.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if either of you have read anything by her, but she's a wonderful writer.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she's U.S.-based, but her family moved from the Dominican Republic, and so a lot of this...
4:41
SPEAKER_01: the writer ends up moving back to like kind of their family area and the Dominican
4:44
SPEAKER_01: Republican basically builds this.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: It's like part cemetery, part art museum, I guess, dedicated to these stories.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: And she literally buries some of the stories that she's not going to be able to tell.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: And then there's some magical realism that's happening.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: And anyway, it's, it's a really fascinating book.
5:01
SPEAKER_01: I'm really enjoying it so far.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm about two thirds of the way through.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: Sounds marvelous.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: I, I,
5:07
SPEAKER_00: I kind of vaguely know about that book, but Charker does such great stuff.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: Oh.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, being an ex-bookseller now, it's like I see stuff.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh, I'm so behind.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: It's not like I'm at Brazzo's anymore, so I'm not surrounded by it all the time.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that looks great, Paul.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: It really is.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: And I was going to say,
5:22
SPEAKER_01: one of the things,
5:23
SPEAKER_01: I love the new direction you've taken,
5:25
SPEAKER_01: obviously,
5:25
SPEAKER_01: with your career.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: But I do miss Mark Haber,
5:28
SPEAKER_01: the bookseller,
5:28
SPEAKER_01: sometimes,
5:29
SPEAKER_01: because not that you don't still have great taste,
5:31
SPEAKER_01: but I used to love when you would post or I would reach out to you like,
5:33
SPEAKER_01: what should I read?
5:34
SPEAKER_00: I know, no, seriously.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I miss it myself.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: I really do.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: There's definitely aspects of bookselling I deeply miss.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah.
5:42
SPEAKER_03: The thing that's still fun,
5:43
SPEAKER_03: though,
5:43
SPEAKER_03: is you still read and you're still so enthusiastic about the books you're loving,
5:50
SPEAKER_03: whether it's something brand new or something like last year.
5:55
SPEAKER_03: um, going, going around and getting people to read D H Lawrence is the rainbow, you know?
6:00
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: That, that, yeah, I was not expecting to, I don't know what got me to go.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: Let me just try this.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: Something, someone said something that was in maybe even a movie.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: And, um, I'd read a book as much, much when I was much younger and, um, I couldn't get over the, yeah.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: So I've just been telling anyone that will listen to read the rainbow.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: So wonderful.
6:21
SPEAKER_03: Well, I saw that that book was coming out in the US and was all gearing up to buy a copy.
6:27
SPEAKER_03: And then I saw that Charco was publishing it too.
6:30
SPEAKER_03: And I thought, oh, I'll just get the Charco one.
6:32
SPEAKER_03: But I haven't ordered it yet.
6:35
SPEAKER_03: I tend to do my Charcos in a big bundle.
6:37
SPEAKER_02: Smart.
6:39
SPEAKER_03: I'm saving money.
6:40
SPEAKER_03: saving up for another big bundle of charcoals to, to come.
6:44
SPEAKER_03: So I'll get to it for sure.
6:45
SPEAKER_03: I'm excited about that one.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: When you can, you definitely should.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: And just to be clear,
6:48
SPEAKER_01: it's part of their untranslated series that,
6:51
SPEAKER_01: you know,
6:51
SPEAKER_01: it's still Spanish or Spanish language based poets,
6:55
SPEAKER_01: but this particular one,
6:56
SPEAKER_01: since it was written in English as part of their untranslated,
6:58
SPEAKER_01: but yeah,
6:58
SPEAKER_01: it's excellent.
6:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
7:01
SPEAKER_03: All right, Mark.
7:03
SPEAKER_03: I understand that you were prepared for this question this morning.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: I had a feeling.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: I had a feeling.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm a friend, but a longtime listener, so I just had a feeling.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: So I did just finish,
7:14
SPEAKER_00: and I think maybe someone,
7:17
SPEAKER_00: one of you may have read this,
7:18
SPEAKER_00: but I just finished Thomas Gonzales' Fog at Noon by Archipelago.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: Archipelago?
7:24
SPEAKER_00: It's funny.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: I'll say archipelago and archipelago both waiting for someone to say, oh, it's this way.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: And every time I've done it, people shrug and go, I don't know the right way to say it.
7:33
SPEAKER_03: Paul knows the right way.
7:35
SPEAKER_03: We've had many discussions.
7:37
SPEAKER_03: He corrected me.
7:38
SPEAKER_03: I used to say archipelago and Paul one day was like, if you say archipelago one more time.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: It's done.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: We're finished.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: So archipelago.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember it going quite like that.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I mean, I don't know.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: Somebody can correct me, but I've always understood it to be archipelago.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm 99% sure that that's... I think it's a tomato-tomato situation.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to go with archipelago now.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: So I just needed one person to say, no, this is how you say it.
8:05
SPEAKER_03: I can be that person.
8:06
SPEAKER_03: I am a convert.
8:07
SPEAKER_03: I am there.
8:08
SPEAKER_03: Wonderful.
8:09
SPEAKER_03: Archipelago.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: But no, Fog at Noon is a really wonderful book.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: I've read his – he has two other books in English,
8:17
SPEAKER_00: one by Pushkin and then his early one before this was –
8:22
SPEAKER_00: I think it was called Dark Light, maybe?
8:24
SPEAKER_00: Distant Light?
8:24
SPEAKER_00: Distant Light, thank you.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: And he's interesting because he's a contemporary Colombian writer,
8:28
SPEAKER_00: but he also spent time living in New York.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: And Distant Light mostly takes place in New York.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: It does go back to Columbia at some point.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: And this one also has kind of flashbacks in New York,
8:38
SPEAKER_00: but every chapter is told from a different character.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: And then it returns to kind of, there's only about four narrators, so it returns to different characters.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: And it's about a relationship, a marriage or a divorce.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: And it's just a really he's a really excellent writer.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: I really like it.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: And then I just started reading Living Things.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: by Coach House Translate.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: He is a writer from Madrid, but I think he lives in Argentina now in Buenos Aires.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: And I think this is on one or two like lists, maybe translation lists.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: And this just kept getting, kept going across my radar.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: His name is Munir Hachimi.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: And it's really, really good.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's really smart.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: He's a very, not very, but he's a young Spanish writer.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: So Living Things is, I started it last night.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: So I'm only about 20 pages in, but it's excellent.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh, cool.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: And then what I'm going to look forward to,
9:33
SPEAKER_00: I may just take this to Germany,
9:35
SPEAKER_00: is it's a Wakefield book,
9:38
SPEAKER_00: which is Vacated Landscape,
9:39
SPEAKER_00: which just came out.
9:41
SPEAKER_03: They do such good work.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: It's just the aesthetic.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: Even if I don't love the book,
9:46
SPEAKER_00: I've got to have it because the novella I wrote recently,
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Ada,
9:51
SPEAKER_00: I was trying to kind of in a way imitate a Wakefield book,
9:54
SPEAKER_00: and I didn't get anywhere near it.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: But that's what I do.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: I try and imitate, and then it just comes out as me anyways.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: Um,
10:01
SPEAKER_00: so,
10:01
SPEAKER_00: uh,
10:02
SPEAKER_00: but I,
10:02
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
10:02
SPEAKER_00: so this is something I'm looking forward to,
10:04
SPEAKER_00: you know,
10:04
SPEAKER_00: there's stuff's always kind of avant-garde and experimental and,
10:08
SPEAKER_00: um,
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Wakefield's one of those presses where,
10:11
SPEAKER_00: um,
10:11
SPEAKER_00: I used to jokingly say it would come to new directions,
10:14
SPEAKER_00: the manuscript and they go,
10:15
SPEAKER_00: that's a little too experimental for us.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: Give it to Wakefield, you know?
10:19
SPEAKER_00: But it's the kind of stuff like the biographies of a Wakefield author would be like,
10:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
10:23
SPEAKER_00: was was an opium addict and a farmer in Belgium in like 1912 and died at 40 from,
10:28
SPEAKER_00: you know,
10:29
SPEAKER_00: from experimenting with light bulbs,
10:30
SPEAKER_00: you know,
10:31
SPEAKER_00: like,
10:31
SPEAKER_00: that sounds right.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: That's a Wakefield author, you know, just really pushing the limits.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: And some of them are alive.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: This author, Jean Lacoux, he was born in 1945.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: He's still living.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: So anyways, that's what I'm looking forward to.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: Nice.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: That sounds really good.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: Tomas Gonzalez is great.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: I have not gotten to that one yet, but I did read his other one from Archipelago.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Distant Light was really moving.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, really, really beautiful.
10:57
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
10:57
SPEAKER_03: I have that one, but I have not read it yet.
10:59
SPEAKER_03: Paul got me on it a few years ago.
11:01
SPEAKER_03: I ordered it.
11:02
SPEAKER_03: It's almost that time of year again, the Harvard bookstore warehouse sale.
11:07
SPEAKER_03: Everything's like $2, and so you end up spending way too much money.
11:13
SPEAKER_03: But I got a deal.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: I got a deal.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: Honey, I promise.
11:17
SPEAKER_03: This could be for Christmas.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: And my birthday.
11:20
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
11:23
SPEAKER_03: Well, I started a book last night, too.
11:25
SPEAKER_03: I finished several books this week.
11:27
SPEAKER_03: And so last night I found myself sitting there thinking, well, I'm actually reading a few other ones.
11:31
SPEAKER_03: But what do I want to start next?
11:33
SPEAKER_03: And because it's the Halloween time,
11:35
SPEAKER_03: I decided to start a book that I've been kind of eyeing for a little while.
11:39
SPEAKER_03: It came out last year and got several reviews for being like a very literary
11:47
SPEAKER_03: vampire-ish kind of horror novel.
11:50
SPEAKER_03: But more an examination on life and all that.
11:53
SPEAKER_03: But it sounded really interesting.
11:56
SPEAKER_03: And when I picked it up and read the first few paragraphs,
12:00
SPEAKER_03: I was very intrigued because I just loved the imagery.
12:05
SPEAKER_03: I loved the writing.
12:07
SPEAKER_03: And it is Jacqueline Holland's debut, The God of Endings.
12:13
SPEAKER_03: Um,
12:13
SPEAKER_03: either of you,
12:14
SPEAKER_03: any,
12:14
SPEAKER_03: that's not going to show you the picture very well,
12:17
SPEAKER_00: but I remember that cover from,
12:18
SPEAKER_00: uh,
12:18
SPEAKER_00: being a brassos.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:20
SPEAKER_03: How is it really good so far?
12:22
SPEAKER_03: I thought I might read just a few paragraphs just to get a taste because today in
12:27
SPEAKER_03: the mail,
12:28
SPEAKER_03: I am getting the new copy of,
12:30
SPEAKER_03: of,
12:31
SPEAKER_03: uh,
12:31
SPEAKER_03: Melville by Rodrigo Faison.
12:33
SPEAKER_03: I can't wait.
12:34
SPEAKER_03: And so I was like,
12:35
SPEAKER_03: I'm not going to get very far in this,
12:38
SPEAKER_03: but last night I just kept on reading,
12:39
SPEAKER_03: you know,
12:40
SPEAKER_03: I thought,
12:40
SPEAKER_03: Oh,
12:40
SPEAKER_03: wait for my son to get home from his date.
12:43
SPEAKER_03: And he got home and went to bed and I'm still out there reading, you know, so it was, it's good.
12:48
SPEAKER_03: But I'll give you just a sense.
12:50
SPEAKER_03: It says, this is a start.
12:53
SPEAKER_03: When I was a child, the dead were all around us.
12:57
SPEAKER_03: Cemeteries were not common in the early years of the 1830s.
13:01
SPEAKER_03: Instead,
13:01
SPEAKER_03: small,
13:02
SPEAKER_03: shambling family graveyards butted up against barns or sprung up like pale
13:06
SPEAKER_03: mushrooms at the edges of pastures in the yards of church and school and meeting
13:11
SPEAKER_03: house until eventually you could look out across the village,
13:15
SPEAKER_03: see all those gravestones like crooked teeth in the mouth,
13:18
SPEAKER_03: and wonder who the place really belonged to.
13:21
SPEAKER_03: the huddled and transient living, or the persistent dead.
13:25
SPEAKER_03: That's beautiful.
13:28
SPEAKER_03: I thought it was so good.
13:29
SPEAKER_03: Oh, that is really beautifully written.
13:31
SPEAKER_03: But it starts back in like the, I don't know what year it is exactly.
13:36
SPEAKER_03: There's some reference to the Salem witch trials of like 100 years before.
13:40
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, it's somewhere in the 1600s, late 1600s, early 1700s.
13:46
SPEAKER_03: Wait, did it actually say it in that opening paragraph I just read?
13:51
SPEAKER_03: Except the 1830s, yeah.
13:53
SPEAKER_03: So, okay, maybe the 1830s then.
13:57
SPEAKER_03: I think it goes back farther, but anyway.
14:00
SPEAKER_03: And,
14:00
SPEAKER_03: you know,
14:01
SPEAKER_03: tuberculosis starting to kill off whole families and people starting to think,
14:06
SPEAKER_03: well,
14:06
SPEAKER_03: there's...
14:08
SPEAKER_03: What is this curse?
14:09
SPEAKER_03: Are the dead coming back?
14:11
SPEAKER_03: It's that kind of traditional story for the origin of vampire myth and all of that.
14:19
SPEAKER_03: But...
14:20
SPEAKER_03: It's going to, I'm assuming, take us to the real place.
14:23
SPEAKER_03: But yeah, I thought the first chapter, which is what I read last night, was just lovely and intriguing.
14:27
SPEAKER_03: And then the next chapter, it goes to 1984.
14:31
SPEAKER_03: I haven't started it yet.
14:32
SPEAKER_03: So I'm like, okay, I'm in.
14:34
SPEAKER_03: But I'm also, I know that when Melville comes, I'm going to,
14:39
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to dive right in, you know, it's Paul's birthday.
14:42
SPEAKER_03: I got to celebrate somehow.
14:44
SPEAKER_03: And that's, that's what I'm going to be doing.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: You're my blessings for that celebration.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's, that's great.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: I emailed,
14:52
SPEAKER_00: uh,
14:52
SPEAKER_00: Rodrigo and I email quite a bit and,
14:55
SPEAKER_00: uh,
14:55
SPEAKER_00: and I congratulated him on his book publishing day being the same as mine.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: And, uh, he, uh, he's, he's just, he's such a sweet guy.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: So that's awesome.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: And just, you know, obviously incredibly talented.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, just next level.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: So,
15:09
SPEAKER_03: Well,
15:10
SPEAKER_03: and not that this is,
15:11
SPEAKER_03: you know,
15:11
SPEAKER_03: as important,
15:12
SPEAKER_03: but speaking of aesthetics of like Wakefield,
15:15
SPEAKER_03: Open Letter Books covers,
15:17
SPEAKER_03: like this is an amazingly intriguing and I think beautiful cover.
15:21
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
15:23
SPEAKER_03: I love it.
15:24
SPEAKER_03: And I love the work that they're doing.
15:25
SPEAKER_03: Like next year, they've got that kind of dual cover Attila.
15:29
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
15:30
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
15:30
SPEAKER_03: Coming out and it looks beautiful.
15:32
SPEAKER_03: And yes, they're doing really great.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they've always done they've always done great stuff.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, some of their covers.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about Melville.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: I want to say that it's the same cover kind of, you know, made into English as the Spanish cover.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: But Rodrigo Frazan's son, young adult son, you know, late teens, early 20s does his covers.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: So the invented part, all of those, his son did the Spanish covers.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: And then the American ones,
15:57
SPEAKER_00: if you go on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or somewhere and look at the covers in Spanish,
16:00
SPEAKER_00: which you may have seen,
16:02
SPEAKER_00: his son did those.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if he did all of the design,
16:05
SPEAKER_00: the photography,
16:06
SPEAKER_00: but he was kind of the digital creator of his cover.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: So the open letters are inspired by Rodrigo Frison's son, which is great.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: But anyways, go on, I'm sorry.
16:17
SPEAKER_03: Oh, no, no, that's awesome.
16:19
SPEAKER_03: And we'll get into some conversation about...
16:21
SPEAKER_03: younger sons and their, their talents or obsessions here, maybe in a little bit.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
16:29
SPEAKER_03: Oh, well that, that's what I wanted to share about that book.
16:33
SPEAKER_03: You know, it's that time of year.
16:34
SPEAKER_03: So I thought some people might be interested.
16:36
SPEAKER_03: I took out a whole stack while I was like, I'll go wait for our son.
16:39
SPEAKER_03: I took out a whole stack of books to,
16:41
SPEAKER_03: to look through and decide,
16:42
SPEAKER_03: do I read the Emposium for example,
16:44
SPEAKER_03: or,
16:45
SPEAKER_03: or the new Louise Erdrich and,
16:47
SPEAKER_03: Um,
16:47
SPEAKER_03: this is the one I landed on because I just thought that opening paragraph was so
16:51
SPEAKER_03: compelling and I'm glad I did.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a, that was a beautiful passage.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, each of you, but that, that, yeah, that was a really great passage.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, I was going to say one other thing about that too, and it's going to skip my mind so we can move on.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I will just say about Melville is that someone at open letter that works there.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: It's not Chad.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: That's how I'll say it.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: thinks that Melville is maybe their favorite Frison.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: So I will leave it at that.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: See, you're doing it again, Mark.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: See all these teasers,
17:19
SPEAKER_00: but it also,
17:20
SPEAKER_00: I think works as a great gateway to Frison if someone hasn't read him.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: So that's great.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:27
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
17:28
SPEAKER_03: OK, well, so you have I want to let listeners know a few things, Mark, so that they can get to know you.
17:36
SPEAKER_03: They've heard about you plenty on our on our podcast because I bring up your books
17:40
SPEAKER_03: and quite often because I'm often thinking about them long after I've read them.
17:46
SPEAKER_03: Of course, with Lesser Ruins coming out this year and I've read it twice.
17:50
SPEAKER_03: So it was, you know, again, been on my mind.
17:53
SPEAKER_03: And,
17:53
SPEAKER_03: um,
17:54
SPEAKER_03: so they,
17:54
SPEAKER_03: they know a little bit about you,
17:55
SPEAKER_03: but I'm very anxious for them to know where you're going to be.
17:59
SPEAKER_03: You know,
17:59
SPEAKER_03: you mentioned a few minutes ago when I'm in Germany,
18:02
SPEAKER_03: I'd love to,
18:03
SPEAKER_03: for them to know why you're there and what what's going on with all of that.
18:07
SPEAKER_03: And I would love also for you to, um, uh,
18:11
SPEAKER_03: Just introduce yourself a little bit.
18:13
SPEAKER_03: We'll get into your books and why I think they're tremendous.
18:17
SPEAKER_03: And it isn't just because of our friendship.
18:20
SPEAKER_03: I know a lot of writers.
18:22
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
18:23
SPEAKER_03: I don't put them all on my top 10 list at the end of the year.
18:26
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:28
SPEAKER_03: So, but yeah, please go ahead and introduce yourself for those who are like, yeah, I'm all in.
18:34
SPEAKER_03: Let's hear about it.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: So I was a bookseller for about 11 years at Debrazzo's bookstore in Houston.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm not a Texan by birth or anything, but I was a transplant, my wife and I.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: And before that, I'd written a collection of short stories called Deathbed Conversions.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: The last story in that collection was called Melville's Beard.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: Oh, we've got a theme now, Melville.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: And that was actually translated into Spanish by the serendipity of bookstores.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: Two young Mexican gentlemen, Efron and Marco, were shopping at Brazos on a road trip from Monterey.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: they bought my book and about a month later they emailed me and said,
19:14
SPEAKER_00: we'd love to translate these stories.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: Cause they always wanted to buy books that were local,
19:18
SPEAKER_00: wherever they went,
19:19
SPEAKER_00: they would,
19:19
SPEAKER_00: they would go on road trips to museums.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: And so they go to bookstores like what is a local writer and being as self-serving as I am.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: No, I said, well, I did write these and I am local.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: So there you go.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: But so I did that.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: And,
19:32
SPEAKER_00: and now I work as the director of marketing at coffee house press along with an old
19:37
SPEAKER_00: colleague from Brazos,
19:38
SPEAKER_00: Laura Gravlin,
19:38
SPEAKER_00: who's works in publicity and,
19:40
SPEAKER_00: marketing publicity is very much yin and yang hand in hand uh and ostensibly it's
19:45
SPEAKER_00: it's just kind of another version of book selling you're just trying to through
19:48
SPEAKER_00: different means you're not on the floor of a shop uh get people interested and
19:53
SPEAKER_00: excited about about the books um in this case obviously a vested a more vested
19:57
SPEAKER_00: interest because we're part of the published publishing house um
20:01
SPEAKER_00: But no,
20:01
SPEAKER_00: and then my debut novel was through Coffeehouse Reinhardt's Garden,
20:06
SPEAKER_00: which was really the first time I'd written something of great length that I was
20:10
SPEAKER_00: proud of.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: I love my short stories.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm proud of those, but nothing that was as sustained.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: And I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was 17 or 18.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: So when I
20:19
SPEAKER_00: wrote Reinhardt's Garden, I was probably 46.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: So it took a lot of stumbling and failing and persistence to,
20:27
SPEAKER_00: as they say,
20:27
SPEAKER_00: find your voice and find the way I wanted to tell stories.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: But once I wrote Reinhardt's Garden,
20:32
SPEAKER_00: it was like this kind of floodgate opened and I kind of saw,
20:35
SPEAKER_00: oh,
20:35
SPEAKER_00: this is the way I'm trying to tell stories,
20:38
SPEAKER_00: which was influenced by a lot of Latin American writers and European writers,
20:42
SPEAKER_00: and I can name many of them.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: But it also brought my own kind of unique way of seeing the world and absurdity and
20:49
SPEAKER_00: kind of being a child of the Coen Brothers films into that style of writing,
20:54
SPEAKER_00: I hope.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, not derivative of anyone in particular, its own thing, I hope.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: And my second novel, St.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian's Abyss came out during the, I always, I look at it now, this started about a week ago.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: Reinhardt's Garden was pre-pandemic, about four months before COVID.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: St.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian's was COVID.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: And now this one is kind of, you know, post.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: I know people are still obviously getting sick, but it's obviously much, much better.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, and yeah, and then my third novel just came out this week, uh, lesser ruins.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And I think each book,
21:25
SPEAKER_00: uh,
21:26
SPEAKER_00: shares a certain unique viewpoint and aesthetic and a style,
21:29
SPEAKER_00: but I also think they're their own thing.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Um,
21:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm just starting to work on something now and I'm doing the thing that I've not
21:35
SPEAKER_00: really done before,
21:36
SPEAKER_00: which is,
21:36
SPEAKER_00: um,
21:37
SPEAKER_00: catching myself and saying,
21:38
SPEAKER_00: Mark,
21:39
SPEAKER_00: you've done that before and you're good at it,
21:40
SPEAKER_00: but it's easy.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to challenge myself and do things I haven't done before.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
21:45
SPEAKER_00: Not to say Lesser Ruins wasn't challenging because I'd say two thirds of the way through,
21:50
SPEAKER_00: I put it down and actually started writing a novella,
21:52
SPEAKER_00: Ada.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: And my wife, which are very, very different books.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: And my wife said, Mark, finish the thing you have been working on for like three years, finish it.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: So it's not that Lesser Ruins came easy, but it's weird.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: It's a labor of love.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: So it's not that it's easy, but it's also, it's like a happy challenge.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: It's something that's hard, but also not hard as far as like, you know,
22:15
SPEAKER_00: you know, filing your taxes hard.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: So, um, yeah, so that's me.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: And I'm,
22:20
SPEAKER_00: I'm,
22:20
SPEAKER_00: uh,
22:21
SPEAKER_00: I live in Minneapolis where coffee houses is based and yeah,
22:25
SPEAKER_00: I was just recently invited as a guest professor.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh,
22:28
SPEAKER_00: they do it every term,
22:29
SPEAKER_00: winter and spring,
22:30
SPEAKER_00: two times a year to fry or freight university in Berlin,
22:34
SPEAKER_00: um,
22:35
SPEAKER_00: to be their,
22:36
SPEAKER_00: their kind of author residence and teach a workshop,
22:39
SPEAKER_00: a writing course,
22:40
SPEAKER_00: uh,
22:40
SPEAKER_00: one day a week,
22:41
uh,
22:42
SPEAKER_00: and I have some office hours and the rest of the time I'll be kind of left there.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Like, we want you to focus on your work.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, you're going to let me do that.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: Because free time,
22:51
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:52
SPEAKER_00: for anybody,
22:52
SPEAKER_00: especially writers hard to come by in these last three books slash four,
22:56
SPEAKER_00: because of my novella,
22:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:58
SPEAKER_00: I wrote those while I was working full time.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: So,
23:01
SPEAKER_00: And that's not saying, oh, woe is me.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: I don't have children.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: And so people have it much, much harder than me as writers.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: But it also wasn't extremely easy.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: So I'll still be working, you know, kind of remotely for Coffeehouse while I'm in Berlin.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: But I'll actually have a lot more free time to work and research and do things that
23:22
SPEAKER_00: I want to do,
23:23
SPEAKER_00: explore the cafes of Berlin.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: But it's very prestigious.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: When I looked at other authors that had been invited and were doing it,
23:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
23:29
SPEAKER_00: Laszlo Krasnohorkai,
23:32
SPEAKER_00: Joshua Cohen.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: I keep wanting to say Richard Ford.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: It's not Richard Ford.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: Admittedly, he's a huge writer.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: People love him.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: And I've not read him.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: thank you, Richard Powers.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: People,
23:48
SPEAKER_00: I know,
23:48
SPEAKER_00: are Bayer Keaton,
23:49
SPEAKER_00: and I've wanted to meet him for years,
23:51
SPEAKER_00: and I just have not,
23:52
SPEAKER_00: he's one of those writers I've not gotten to,
23:54
SPEAKER_00: so Richard Powers.
23:55
SPEAKER_03: It's your chance, Paul, by the end of the episode.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: I know, I know, I know you're a big fan, Paul.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: So it's just really prestigious.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: Chloe Arijiz, who's a Mexican writer based in London, who is a friend, and I love her work.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: I really, really love Chloe Arijiz, and, uh,
24:10
SPEAKER_00: Lina Morane that Diek Wellen publishes.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: So just really writers that I admire.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: So to be kind of considered part of that in Germany,
24:19
SPEAKER_00: my books are translated many languages,
24:21
SPEAKER_00: not German,
24:22
SPEAKER_00: was very,
24:23
SPEAKER_00: very,
24:24
SPEAKER_00: was an honor.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: So I'll be there for three months from November, December, January.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: I'll leave like the first week of February and come back.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: And I'm excited.
24:34
SPEAKER_03: I think that's going to be so fun.
24:35
SPEAKER_03: I'm excited to hear about it.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: I'm really, really excited.
24:39
SPEAKER_01: So you'll come back with thousands of pages of manuscript, right?
24:42
SPEAKER_00: I know, really.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: I know.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: Well, I told Ulrika and it's funny because I am trying to slow down intentionally.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: Like I've,
24:49
SPEAKER_00: I've done these things at a pace and I think part of me always had something to,
24:54
SPEAKER_00: not always,
24:54
SPEAKER_00: but I felt like I had something to prove.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: Like,
24:58
SPEAKER_00: I've got these things in me and I want to,
25:00
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want,
25:00
SPEAKER_00: you know,
25:01
SPEAKER_00: you do a book and people maybe like it and then you want to be like,
25:03
SPEAKER_00: well,
25:03
SPEAKER_00: it's not a one-off.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: I promise.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: Like I've got, I've got stories, I've got talent.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: And,
25:08
SPEAKER_00: um,
25:08
SPEAKER_00: I think all artists have that thing with the ego where you want to prove,
25:11
SPEAKER_00: look,
25:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm not just this,
25:12
SPEAKER_00: this,
25:13
SPEAKER_00: this little fly by night.
25:14
SPEAKER_00: I really have something to say and I'm really passionate about what I do.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: And I'm starting to kind of go, you know, Mark, you've done what you have to do.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: Just do it at your own pace.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: Um,
25:24
SPEAKER_00: But that being said, I don't feel like I rushed Lesser Ruins either.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: So I don't feel like I rushed it,
25:28
SPEAKER_00: but at the same time,
25:29
SPEAKER_00: I don't feel like I have anything to prove except to myself.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:35
SPEAKER_03: Well, and I can definitely say they're different.
25:40
SPEAKER_03: And I think this might be a fun opportunity,
25:43
SPEAKER_03: if we're ready,
25:44
SPEAKER_03: to maybe look back at the books that came before.
25:47
SPEAKER_03: I apologize.
25:47
SPEAKER_03: I have still not gotten a copy of your collection of short stories.
25:51
SPEAKER_03: But I keep thinking I need to get those and read them.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: I'll send them, yeah.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: No,
25:54
SPEAKER_00: I think Coffeehouse is probably going to publish them in a new edition in a few
25:59
SPEAKER_00: years with the stories I've written since then added.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I love it.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: which would be great.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: New cover, maybe a new title.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, that's up to Jeremy Davies, but I'm extremely proud of him.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
26:09
SPEAKER_00: I wrote that and then there was a gap of maybe eight years where I didn't write
26:13
SPEAKER_00: because A,
26:14
SPEAKER_00: I was trying to find my voice and I was teaching middle school and then high school
26:17
SPEAKER_00: and moving and just,
26:18
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:18
SPEAKER_00: life basically.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: And it takes those years sometimes of patience.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: And I see these writers that become very successful in their twenties, even their thirties.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I don't envy that.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm really glad I had to kind of
26:32
SPEAKER_00: live in LA and wait tables and work at a better,
26:34
SPEAKER_00: and just do,
26:35
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:35
SPEAKER_00: kind of do the stuff I had to do because,
26:37
SPEAKER_00: um,
26:37
SPEAKER_00: uh,
26:38
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: It just, I, I'm more centered as far as, you know, um, priorities and things like that.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: But, um, but yeah, we can absolutely do that.
26:45
SPEAKER_03: Well, so the first one I read from you was your first Reinhardt's garden.
26:50
SPEAKER_03: Again, love the cover.
26:52
SPEAKER_03: I mean, come on.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: I talked about the cover at my lecture in Berlin.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: The cover comes up because of Cesar Aira and Johan Regundus, the landscape painter.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:05
SPEAKER_03: Which I didn't know until you told me, but there must have been some something there.
27:10
SPEAKER_03: I certainly thought of Ira when I was reading it.
27:13
SPEAKER_03: Not not because that's an intention.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:17
SPEAKER_03: But just the episode in the life of a landscape painter,
27:20
SPEAKER_03: this this journey through this,
27:23
SPEAKER_03: you know,
27:25
SPEAKER_03: landscape that seems like it could just engulf you.
27:30
SPEAKER_03: And I loved it,
27:32
SPEAKER_03: but I didn't realize until you told me that the cover is deliberately pulled from
27:37
SPEAKER_03: the very landscape painter that we're following along with in Ira.
27:43
SPEAKER_03: But this book captured me from the very start.
27:47
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, 1907, journey through a South American jungle.
27:54
SPEAKER_03: And then the wonderful, euphoric...
27:59
SPEAKER_03: You know, happy digressions into melancholy, of all things.
28:06
SPEAKER_03: I'm like, oh, man, you make melancholy sound so like the best thing ever.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I guess, according to Jackoff, cocaine helps.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: It makes melancholy a lot better, but...
28:18
SPEAKER_00: No, I honestly, I love, and you know, this is not ego aside.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: I love that book.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm so proud of it.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: And I'll always have this sweet spot for it.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: And everyone around me, my wife, people at Brazos, they really do prefer St.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian's.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's because it's broken up by chapters.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: But I always, I mean-
28:38
SPEAKER_00: I love St.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian's, don't get me wrong.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: And it's, I mean, it's sold probably five, six more times copies than Reinhardt's Garden.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: But Reinhardt's Garden is just like you say, it's in my sweet spot, Trevor.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: It's got the things I love, Latin America, Europe, the past.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it's to me, I think objectively it's a better book, but that's just me.
28:57
SPEAKER_03: some fun little digressions to like side characters in the lives of a famous author,
29:03
SPEAKER_03: you know,
29:03
SPEAKER_03: Tolstoy and all that.
29:04
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
29:05
SPEAKER_03: There's so much going on, but if you don't mind, I would like to read one thing.
29:09
SPEAKER_03: So Jack off, um, you mentioned him.
29:11
SPEAKER_03: That's one of the, you know, that's character here.
29:14
SPEAKER_03: Um, and,
29:15
SPEAKER_03: this is at the, toward the start of the book.
29:17
SPEAKER_03: It says,
29:18
SPEAKER_03: Melancholy,
29:20
SPEAKER_03: which doesn't say anything,
29:21
SPEAKER_03: but hints at everything,
29:22
SPEAKER_03: trenchant enough to make the greatest of men,
29:25
SPEAKER_03: Jakov,
29:25
SPEAKER_03: for example,
29:26
SPEAKER_03: abandon all sorts of sundry life choices to dedicate their souls to the study and understanding,
29:32
SPEAKER_03: and perhaps,
29:33
SPEAKER_03: when all is said and done,
29:34
SPEAKER_03: the grasping of the singular anguish
29:37
SPEAKER_03: A person stricken with melancholy isn't stricken by grief or depression,
29:41
SPEAKER_03: Jackoff often mused,
29:42
SPEAKER_03: feelings that emerge from concrete and palpable incidents like the loss of a limb
29:48
SPEAKER_03: or a loved one or a long,
29:49
SPEAKER_03: hard-fought illness.
29:51
SPEAKER_03: No, he insisted, melancholy is a state of mind tied inexorably to a person's capricious nature.
29:58
SPEAKER_03: As such,
29:58
SPEAKER_03: all the great artists and philosophers and musicians,
30:01
SPEAKER_03: in fact,
30:01
SPEAKER_03: the greatest historical examples,
30:03
SPEAKER_03: like his beloved Wagner,
30:05
SPEAKER_03: have suffered,
30:06
SPEAKER_03: withstood,
30:07
SPEAKER_03: and thus grown stronger and more singular from melancholia.
30:13
SPEAKER_03: Just so much fun.
30:14
SPEAKER_03: I've highlighted it repeatedly.
30:17
SPEAKER_03: I love Reinhardt's Garden.
30:19
SPEAKER_03: Again, the sweet spot.
30:20
SPEAKER_02: Me too.
30:21
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
30:22
SPEAKER_03: And then you come out with St.
30:23
SPEAKER_03: Sebastian's Abyss.
30:25
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
30:25
SPEAKER_03: With a cover that I, it is, it is remarkable.
30:30
SPEAKER_03: I love the cover of St.
30:31
SPEAKER_03: Sebastian's Abyss.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: And shout out to Kyle G. Hunter, the book designer.
30:37
SPEAKER_00: He's, he does Monica Ojeda's like Jawbone.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: He does a lot of coffee.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: So go on, go on.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: He's, he's great.
30:45
SPEAKER_03: And,
30:45
SPEAKER_03: and this one also a sweet spot,
30:47
SPEAKER_03: you know,
30:48
SPEAKER_03: European art and this,
30:52
SPEAKER_03: this friendship that is not a friendship,
30:55
SPEAKER_03: but is between two old art critics,
30:58
SPEAKER_03: one of them dying and the other one going to,
31:01
SPEAKER_03: to see his friend who has become his enemy.
31:06
SPEAKER_03: The, again, just that sweet spot of, and my favorite paintings are Dutch Renaissance paintings.
31:12
SPEAKER_03: And so there's so much fun in here.
31:14
SPEAKER_03: And so I loved the whole book.
31:17
SPEAKER_03: I read that one a couple of times in like the period of a couple of days.
31:22
SPEAKER_03: I still remember I went to one of my son's soccer games and I'm like on the
31:26
SPEAKER_03: sideline reading these wonderfully frenetic digressions about art and friendship
31:34
SPEAKER_03: and
31:34
SPEAKER_03: And I loved it.
31:35
SPEAKER_03: So I got to admit, even though you were kind of saying, hey, my best book yet is coming out.
31:40
SPEAKER_03: It's Lesser Ruins.
31:42
SPEAKER_03: When you kind of said it's a it's contemporary setting, you know, and and all that, I thought, oh, yeah.
31:49
SPEAKER_03: Am I going to like it as much?
31:51
SPEAKER_02: Of course, yeah.
31:52
SPEAKER_03: I love a lot of contemporary setting books, but Mark has always been hitting my sweet spot.
31:58
SPEAKER_03: And you had another idea of a translator in Brazil.
32:01
SPEAKER_03: I lived in Brazil, up in the north of Brazil.
32:04
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, you just know what I want to read.
32:10
SPEAKER_03: But I was a little bit nervous that I might not like Lesser Ruins.
32:13
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
32:14
SPEAKER_03: But I loved it.
32:16
SPEAKER_03: Again, from the first...
32:18
SPEAKER_03: Horribly devastating, but also funny opening paragraph.
32:22
SPEAKER_03: Well, paragraph is the wrong word.
32:24
SPEAKER_03: Opening page.
32:25
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
32:27
SPEAKER_03: I, I loved it.
32:28
SPEAKER_03: It is, it is funny.
32:30
SPEAKER_03: You said it,
32:31
SPEAKER_03: you said a minute ago that it wasn't easy to write,
32:33
SPEAKER_03: but there's a facility that you had,
32:35
SPEAKER_03: but I can't,
32:35
SPEAKER_03: I kind of also imagined that maybe,
32:37
SPEAKER_03: I don't know,
32:38
SPEAKER_03: the,
32:38
SPEAKER_03: the emotions in this one really got to me,
32:41
SPEAKER_03: the grief,
32:42
SPEAKER_03: the,
32:43
SPEAKER_03: the dealing with not just personal grief,
32:45
SPEAKER_03: but you know,
32:46
SPEAKER_03: generational societal grief.
32:49
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
32:50
SPEAKER_03: This is a, you know, it is, it is wonderful.
32:54
SPEAKER_03: I've, I've,
32:55
SPEAKER_03: I've said it before.
32:56
SPEAKER_03: I reviewed it this past week, and it was hard to write about because I'm like, I'm not doing anything.
33:01
SPEAKER_03: I'm not able to say what I want to say, but I loved Lesser Ruins just as much as the other two.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: And what you wrote was beautiful.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, it was, it was, no, it was wonderfully, you know, it was really, really good.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: In fact,
33:15
SPEAKER_00: my publicist every week sends me a list of what's happened in the last week,
33:18
SPEAKER_00: just for a few months while the book is out and yours was there with the review,
33:21
SPEAKER_00: which I was like,
33:21
SPEAKER_00: I know I've already read that,
33:22
SPEAKER_00: but,
33:23
SPEAKER_00: um,
33:23
SPEAKER_00: but no,
33:24
SPEAKER_00: no,
33:24
SPEAKER_00: it was,
33:24
SPEAKER_00: it was,
33:25
SPEAKER_00: it was wonderful.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: And,
33:26
SPEAKER_00: um,
33:27
SPEAKER_00: one thing I'll say is just that,
33:28
SPEAKER_00: um,
33:29
SPEAKER_00: and I'm kind of noticing this as you're speaking,
33:31
SPEAKER_00: but yeah,
33:31
SPEAKER_00: there is that marriage between,
33:33
SPEAKER_00: um,
33:33
SPEAKER_00: Great joy and great sadness or melancholy, like in Reinhardt's garden.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: And then again,
33:37
SPEAKER_00: in lesser ruins where there's where there's it's almost bipolar in a way,
33:42
SPEAKER_00: but you try and make it seamless.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: But there's I think we'll get into it.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: Marcel's rants about house music.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: I wanted that to be exuberant and bursting with joy because,
33:53
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:53
SPEAKER_00: it's music and music is,
33:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:54
SPEAKER_00: often it's very joyful.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: You know,
33:58
SPEAKER_00: eclipsed with,
33:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:59
SPEAKER_00: the narrator's sadness and grief,
34:02
SPEAKER_00: which I think,
34:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:03
SPEAKER_00: Marcel,
34:03
SPEAKER_00: the son is obviously trying to avoid as well.
34:05
SPEAKER_03: But yeah.
34:07
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
34:08
SPEAKER_03: There's so much to talk about.
34:10
SPEAKER_03: It is a rich, rich novel with with lots of digressions.
34:13
SPEAKER_03: You published an essay on digressions yesterday.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: Yesterday.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:18
SPEAKER_03: That I read and really enjoyed where you're not saying this is the only way to write,
34:22
SPEAKER_03: but that there is so much going on here.
34:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:25
SPEAKER_03: With these digressions.
34:27
SPEAKER_03: For me, it didn't, you know, the book is digressive.
34:30
SPEAKER_03: But again,
34:30
SPEAKER_03: we have a narrator who on the first page is already avoiding the subject,
34:36
SPEAKER_03: though he says it,
34:37
SPEAKER_03: the first words are the very subject.
34:40
SPEAKER_03: You know, I've read it before on the podcast.
34:43
SPEAKER_03: And by the way, you mentioned Joshua Cohen being one of your predecessors.
34:48
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
34:48
SPEAKER_03: About halfway through the book, I listened to the Netanyahu's, which he reads.
34:53
SPEAKER_03: Oh, wow.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know he read it.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:55
SPEAKER_03: About halfway through the book, I started hearing him be your narrator here.
35:00
SPEAKER_03: It just, it worked.
35:01
SPEAKER_02: I love it.
35:02
SPEAKER_02: I love it.
35:03
SPEAKER_03: But it starts.
35:05
SPEAKER_03: Anyway, I think she's dead.
35:08
SPEAKER_03: You start it right there.
35:09
SPEAKER_03: There's the, the, the grief there.
35:11
SPEAKER_03: It's his wife, you know, and, and, and yet she,
35:15
SPEAKER_03: the very next word is trying to distance and like make it, you know, but, but...
35:21
SPEAKER_03: And though I loved her,
35:23
SPEAKER_03: I now have both the time and freedom to write my essay on Montaigne,
35:26
SPEAKER_03: an essay requiring not only extraordinary focus and intellect,
35:29
SPEAKER_03: but also time and freedom,
35:31
SPEAKER_03: time and freedom being necessary for the composition of my essay on Montaigne.
35:35
SPEAKER_03: Since freedom,
35:37
SPEAKER_03: specifically financial freedom,
35:38
SPEAKER_03: will provide the means to set my plans in motion,
35:41
SPEAKER_03: meaning the time required to visit the libraries,
35:44
SPEAKER_03: universities,
35:44
SPEAKER_03: and archives vital to finish the book-length essay I vowed more than 20 years ago
35:48
SPEAKER_03: to complete.
35:49
SPEAKER_03: It's your first sentence.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
35:52
SPEAKER_03: just a couple of words about the, you know, his wife's death, which was, you know, about a week past.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: About a week before.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:01
SPEAKER_03: And, and yet all that other stuff after it.
36:04
SPEAKER_03: And I, I just, I again was like, this is fantastic.
36:08
SPEAKER_03: The digressions felt like such a part of the humor and the structure and,
36:13
SPEAKER_03: and all these other,
36:14
SPEAKER_03: other subjects that tie into it,
36:15
SPEAKER_03: but also central to our narrators.
36:20
SPEAKER_03: Very, the, the very,
36:22
SPEAKER_03: thing that we're kind of exploring here.
36:23
SPEAKER_03: I, again, just love it.
36:25
SPEAKER_03: So.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: And one thing I'll say, and then, and then we definitely went, we want Paul to get in.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: I know Paul's like listening.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: No, is that I really was concerned with making sure that he didn't come off.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: I wanted him to be,
36:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
36:39
SPEAKER_00: he,
36:40
SPEAKER_00: he's very myopic and obsessed and very self-centered,
36:42
SPEAKER_00: but also wanted him to be sympathetic.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: So I, the, the, one of the challenges I had was that he,
36:48
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want him to be so jaded.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: I was like, yeah, she's dead.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: Now I can do my thing, which maybe in an earlier book of mine could have been funny.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: Like, Oh, he doesn't even care.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: She's dead.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: And that's not at all what I was going for.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: Obviously.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: that he cared deeply about her.
37:00
SPEAKER_00: In fact,
37:01
SPEAKER_00: she was kind of how he saw himself in the world,
37:03
SPEAKER_00: which is how,
37:05
SPEAKER_00: you know,
37:05
SPEAKER_00: when I wanted to kind of get the tone of this book,
37:07
SPEAKER_00: I could just imagine,
37:08
SPEAKER_00: you know,
37:09
SPEAKER_00: God forbid losing my wife because we've been together 18 years.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: And the way we see each other and we kind of go through life,
37:16
SPEAKER_00: and this is for a lot of couples,
37:18
SPEAKER_00: is kind of through that,
37:19
SPEAKER_00: you see yourself how they see you in a lot of ways,
37:22
SPEAKER_00: right?
37:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh, when you're in a, in a long relationship.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to make sure that there was that space for humor,
37:28
SPEAKER_00: but also that,
37:29
SPEAKER_00: uh,
37:29
SPEAKER_00: you know,
37:29
SPEAKER_00: that this is a person that's hurting and he,
37:31
SPEAKER_00: he absolutely loved her and he misses her.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't something where he's like, Oh gosh, she's that proof.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: Now I can work on my, my, my book.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: You know,
37:38
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want that to be,
37:39
SPEAKER_00: uh,
37:40
SPEAKER_00: because I mean,
37:41
SPEAKER_00: I guess you could make that funny,
37:42
SPEAKER_00: but I think that's kind of low hanging fruits.
37:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, it means spirited and that's not what I was going for.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: Obviously.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: So, um,
37:50
SPEAKER_01: No,
37:50
SPEAKER_01: it definitely,
37:51
SPEAKER_01: I would just say like all of your characters in all the books,
37:54
SPEAKER_01: like you said,
37:55
SPEAKER_01: there's a version of each of them that could have been very different.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: But you're so good at injecting that humanity and making them sympathetic,
38:02
SPEAKER_01: even though sometimes if you just saw them on the surface,
38:04
SPEAKER_01: there's not a lot of sympathetic traits there.
38:07
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, like, for example, much of Lesser Ruins to me felt like he was kind of...
38:13
SPEAKER_01: unmoored by the death of his wife and he's chasing distraction or trying to find
38:18
SPEAKER_01: things to fill the gaps.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: But some of the breaking parts were where he's pacing through his house,
38:22
SPEAKER_01: but he always avoids that certain part of the closet and things that remind him of
38:27
SPEAKER_01: his wife.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: So even amidst these rants and this frenetic energy,
38:31
SPEAKER_01: you can tell there's like this throbbing pain that he's just kind of like trying to
38:36
SPEAKER_01: distance himself from.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'll just throw that in there that absolutely the empathy for him and the
38:43
SPEAKER_01: you know, the humanity flows through all the time.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: That's great.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: That's good to hear really is things, Paul.
38:48
SPEAKER_03: I think that's such an important found, maybe even a great foundational part of our whole conversation.
38:54
SPEAKER_03: Cause we'll,
38:54
SPEAKER_03: you know,
38:55
SPEAKER_03: I don't want,
38:55
SPEAKER_03: we're not going to spoil the book for people who,
38:58
SPEAKER_03: you know,
38:58
SPEAKER_03: it just came out.
39:00
SPEAKER_03: Um,
39:00
SPEAKER_03: but we'll probably talk about some of the funny things,
39:03
SPEAKER_03: you know,
39:03
SPEAKER_03: certainly get into coffee and electronic dance music.
39:06
SPEAKER_03: I want to hear more about that.
39:07
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
39:08
SPEAKER_03: But the humanity here is key.
39:11
SPEAKER_03: Um,
39:12
SPEAKER_03: And even your more,
39:14
SPEAKER_03: you know,
39:14
SPEAKER_03: your recent short story that was just published in the past month or so,
39:18
SPEAKER_03: How to Read Kafka.
39:20
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
39:21
SPEAKER_03: Is it in the Southwest Review?
39:23
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
39:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
39:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
39:25
SPEAKER_03: What an unlikable protagonist, you know, narrator that we're following along here.
39:32
SPEAKER_03: And yet by the end.
39:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
39:35
SPEAKER_03: There's so much pain there.
39:37
SPEAKER_03: And that's something that I love about,
39:39
SPEAKER_03: you know,
39:39
SPEAKER_03: my favorite authors tend to be able to help me find humanity in people that I don't,
39:45
SPEAKER_03: I'm not looking for it,
39:46
SPEAKER_03: you know,
39:47
SPEAKER_03: not just unlikable people,
39:49
SPEAKER_03: but people that I just,
39:50
SPEAKER_03: you know,
39:51
SPEAKER_03: don't,
39:52
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
39:52
SPEAKER_03: You know,
39:52
SPEAKER_03: I think of William Trevor being able to instill humanity in the people who you
39:56
SPEAKER_03: don't know who are on the other side of the cafe,
39:58
SPEAKER_03: for example.
39:59
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
40:00
SPEAKER_03: And you do a fantastic job of putting those into these.
40:04
SPEAKER_03: Otherwise, you know, people I'd want to maybe set up some pretty good boundaries.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: And going to like to the narrator and Schmidt and St.
40:14
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian's Abyss, because we're all we all have different faces and we're all complex.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: We're not just black and white.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: And when I was writing that book and, and,
40:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to shortchange St.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: Sebastianism.
40:25
SPEAKER_00: I love that book.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: I'm super proud of it,
40:27
SPEAKER_00: but there is that part of me that some,
40:30
SPEAKER_00: I am a bit of an elitist,
40:31
SPEAKER_00: but I always say I'm an elitist apologist.
40:33
SPEAKER_00: So I'm like, I just, I think this is better than that.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: However, I mean, I think there is art after 1906, but I think this is better than that.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: However,
40:42
SPEAKER_00: I celebrate someone enjoying something that I maybe don't think is very good,
40:46
SPEAKER_00: but,
40:47
SPEAKER_00: and,
40:47
SPEAKER_00: and it's also,
40:48
SPEAKER_00: it's art.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: So it's very subjective.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: So someone can get that and can say that's better than that.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, but,
40:53
SPEAKER_00: even though you've got five degrees and you teach at the Tate, who are you to say that?
40:58
SPEAKER_00: So,
40:58
SPEAKER_00: but there is that part of me in Schmidt that says,
41:01
SPEAKER_00: you know,
41:01
SPEAKER_00: kind of sticks my nose up at certain things.
41:03
SPEAKER_00: And I have a foot in each world where I'm like,
41:05
SPEAKER_00: well,
41:06
SPEAKER_00: if someone gets a joy from something,
41:08
SPEAKER_00: whether it's just a sugary drink,
41:09
SPEAKER_00: disney pop song then they're happy they're not hurting anyone but there's also that
41:14
SPEAKER_00: part of me that says well you know a big mac is not kobe steak i'm sorry they're
41:18
SPEAKER_00: different things and you can't say that this is is not as good as this because this
41:22
SPEAKER_00: is clearly better um so there's those two things battling that was something i was
41:26
SPEAKER_00: trying to tackle and um and saint sebastian's abyss but to lesser ruins yeah i want
41:31
SPEAKER_00: people to be um characters to be complex and and be mixed just like we are as
41:36
SPEAKER_00: humans
41:37
SPEAKER_01: And I'll just say,
41:38
SPEAKER_01: you mentioned Ada earlier,
41:41
SPEAKER_01: and I realize that that's not out yet,
41:42
SPEAKER_01: but that's yet another example.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: You were kind enough to send us an early copy,
41:46
SPEAKER_01: and that's a perfect example of another character who,
41:48
SPEAKER_01: on the surface,
41:50
SPEAKER_01: is horrifying.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: But by the end, you feel a true sympathy.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: You're so good at that.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: You expose all the warts and all the bumps and everything bad about them,
42:01
SPEAKER_01: but you're also able somehow to instill
42:04
SPEAKER_01: these traits that we can all relate to.
42:06
SPEAKER_01: Like with him, you know, I have nothing in common with that guy.
42:09
SPEAKER_01: Right.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: I know.
42:10
SPEAKER_01: But like at the same time, you could feel these connections.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: And you guys can talk about eight as much as you want.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean, because by the time it comes out, no one's going to go, oh, but that podcast in 2024, you know?
42:23
SPEAKER_03: Well, hold on.
42:23
SPEAKER_03: I promised I'd be able to read it this week.
42:26
SPEAKER_03: But I lied, I guess.
42:28
SPEAKER_03: It's okay.
42:29
SPEAKER_03: I know.
42:29
SPEAKER_03: So I've got it right here.
42:31
SPEAKER_03: Again, I've said it before.
42:33
SPEAKER_03: I'm so excited for it that I can't quite bear to sit down when I know that in five
42:39
SPEAKER_03: minutes I'm going to get called away.
42:40
SPEAKER_03: Right.
42:41
SPEAKER_03: Take your time.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: No, we are inundated with books, with stuff, with everything.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: So whenever someone's like,
42:50
SPEAKER_00: oh,
42:50
SPEAKER_00: I read your book,
42:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm so grateful because there were so many other things pulling at our attention
42:55
SPEAKER_00: besides having children,
42:56
SPEAKER_00: besides all the other great books,
42:58
SPEAKER_00: media,
42:58
SPEAKER_00: Netflix.
42:59
SPEAKER_00: politics.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: So read it when you get to it.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: There's no reason to apologize for it.
43:06
SPEAKER_03: And I know,
43:07
SPEAKER_03: I know,
43:07
SPEAKER_03: you know,
43:07
SPEAKER_03: that I believe anyway,
43:08
SPEAKER_03: but yeah,
43:10
SPEAKER_03: you know,
43:10
SPEAKER_03: maybe,
43:10
SPEAKER_03: maybe,
43:11
SPEAKER_03: maybe Paul don't spoil it,
43:12
SPEAKER_03: you know,
43:13
SPEAKER_03: but I'm excited to hear that though.
43:16
SPEAKER_03: And it makes me kind of think another part of,
43:18
SPEAKER_03: of lesser ruins that I just think you hit such a great balance is the relationship
43:24
SPEAKER_03: of the narrator with his now dead wife.
43:27
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
43:27
SPEAKER_03: Because that could be,
43:30
SPEAKER_03: That could have been idealized, their relationship.
43:34
SPEAKER_03: It could have been that we realize he was kind of horrible, but she was perfect.
43:39
SPEAKER_03: And now he's lost that.
43:41
SPEAKER_03: And it's not.
43:44
SPEAKER_03: Even in their relationship, you can tell he recognizes...
43:47
SPEAKER_03: I'm failing who I want to be is, is not who she thinks I am.
43:53
SPEAKER_03: And she herself is not really aware that this work that he's been doing that she
43:59
SPEAKER_03: thinks is leading up to something like she doesn't see him the way that he hopes to
44:03
SPEAKER_03: be like,
44:04
SPEAKER_03: it isn't a perfect relationship and he didn't lose like the,
44:09
SPEAKER_03: the perfect soulmate,
44:11
SPEAKER_03: but they still have that connection.
44:14
SPEAKER_03: deep connection that the loss is just as real.
44:16
SPEAKER_03: Like I love that you make that not an ideal that he is now lost.
44:21
SPEAKER_03: It's not paradise lost or anything, but it's nevertheless gutting and feels so real because of that.
44:27
SPEAKER_03: So yeah,
44:27
SPEAKER_03: this,
44:28
SPEAKER_03: this way of,
44:28
SPEAKER_03: of showing the warts and all,
44:30
SPEAKER_03: but also the beauty of these things is wonderful.
44:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
44:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:36
SPEAKER_00: He's, in many instances, looking back when she was alive, he's very selfish and he knows he is.
44:40
SPEAKER_00: He's like, I know I took over her office.
44:42
SPEAKER_00: I know I did these things that were wrong and I knew it at the time.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: But I was just thinking about myself, even at the time I knew I was being selfish, but I had to do it.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't a perfect marriage.
44:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, no marriage is, but it was still, it was perfect for them.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
44:58
SPEAKER_03: Yeah,
44:58
SPEAKER_03: and the horrible,
44:59
SPEAKER_03: you know,
45:00
SPEAKER_03: the way it must have been because of what she was going through,
45:03
SPEAKER_03: even the relief had to have been there.
45:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
45:06
SPEAKER_03: That part of it is over.
45:07
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
45:09
SPEAKER_03: Again, just a wonderful balance.
45:11
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
45:13
SPEAKER_03: Now,
45:14
SPEAKER_03: I don't want to,
45:15
SPEAKER_03: you know,
45:16
SPEAKER_03: if people have specific things,
45:19
SPEAKER_03: I don't want you to feel like you're tethered to my train of thought.
45:23
SPEAKER_03: But...
45:24
SPEAKER_03: There is, beyond the narrator and his wife, we've already brought up Marcel, the son.
45:31
SPEAKER_03: You talked about Rodrigo Frison's son being kind of part of that, creating his book covers.
45:38
SPEAKER_03: That's not what we have here, but we still have a son who has a passion for something artistic.
45:45
SPEAKER_03: Marcel is very into...
45:47
SPEAKER_03: Electronic dance music and the... Oh, Mark, talk about funny and fun rants.
45:53
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
45:54
SPEAKER_03: But rant's the wrong word.
45:55
SPEAKER_03: It's more of this because it comes out as so frenetic and insistent.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
45:59
SPEAKER_03: Like I have so much to say.
46:02
SPEAKER_03: I want you to get at it.
46:05
SPEAKER_03: How did you learn that much about electronic dance music?
46:08
SPEAKER_03: Is this your passion that you were able to finally put voice to?
46:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, in a way, part of it is.
46:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you brought this up because the few reviews that have come out so far
46:17
SPEAKER_00: haven't really touched upon the dance music aspect.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: So I love all types of music.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot.
46:24
SPEAKER_00: But I definitely love electronic music, especially house music.
46:28
SPEAKER_00: which a lot of people are like, well, what's house?
46:30
SPEAKER_00: And there's, of course, 40 different genres of house.
46:32
SPEAKER_00: We're going to get off this podcast.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: There'll be two micro genres and like soul that just started in South Korea.
46:38
SPEAKER_00: So I read a ton of music criticism and this could be mainstream ones like Pitchfork and Stereogum.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: It's a great website.
46:46
SPEAKER_00: I actually think of in my acknowledgements called Resident Advisor.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: That's just strictly writes about electronic music.
46:52
SPEAKER_00: And the writers are amazing.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: And they're not doing it for glory.
46:55
SPEAKER_00: They're not doing it to try and get a book deal.
46:57
SPEAKER_00: They're just passionate about dance music.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: And so I would,
47:00
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to say steal and rip off,
47:02
SPEAKER_00: but I would find phrases and reviews of music and be able to take it and kind of
47:07
SPEAKER_00: turn it into what I wanted to use.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: So I read a lot of reviews about music, dance music in particular.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: And
47:15
SPEAKER_00: The way I kind of... Writers write about art.
47:19
SPEAKER_00: I was trying to write about sound.
47:21
SPEAKER_00: So I wasn't trying to write about the club scene.
47:23
SPEAKER_00: There's really... I mean, it's referenced because it can't be avoided with Marcel.
47:27
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to write about like a club at 2 a.m.
47:30
SPEAKER_00: in Berlin or anything like that.
47:32
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't trying to capture DJ culture.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to write about sound and music.
47:37
SPEAKER_00: And so reading music criticism was huge because I could find the words I needed to do that.
47:43
SPEAKER_00: So...
47:44
SPEAKER_00: My research or what I did for those passages,
47:47
SPEAKER_00: which I do love,
47:48
SPEAKER_00: was really just kind of engulf myself in reading a lot of like album reviews and
47:53
SPEAKER_00: essays about dance culture and music culture.
47:57
SPEAKER_00: And that was how I was able to kind of, and I wanted him to be wrong.
48:00
SPEAKER_00: I love characters who can be right, but can also be wrong.
48:03
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's their truth, but not the truth.
48:07
SPEAKER_00: So he goes off on Fortet,
48:08
SPEAKER_00: you know,
48:08
SPEAKER_00: toward the end,
48:09
SPEAKER_00: this artist Fortet,
48:10
SPEAKER_00: who's an English,
48:11
SPEAKER_00: you know,
48:12
SPEAKER_00: musician,
48:12
SPEAKER_00: producer,
48:13
SPEAKER_00: DJ.
48:13
SPEAKER_00: and loves him.
48:14
SPEAKER_00: So I was telling a couple of people, I'm like, I like Fortet.
48:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't like him like Marcel does.
48:18
SPEAKER_00: He's fine.
48:18
SPEAKER_00: But so I wanted him in certain points to be wrong.
48:21
SPEAKER_00: So if someone,
48:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
48:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
48:24
SPEAKER_00: is really into music or is a producer and a DJ and reads it goes,
48:28
SPEAKER_00: that's,
48:28
SPEAKER_00: that's not right.
48:29
SPEAKER_00: That, that, that beat that you said that never happens at that music.
48:32
SPEAKER_00: I'll be like, that's fine because it's Marcel and he's a young kid and he's learning.
48:36
SPEAKER_00: So I wasn't trying to actually have to be correct all the time.
48:38
SPEAKER_00: It gave me great freedom to just go,
48:40
SPEAKER_00: he's going to rant and he's going to say things that he thinks are true and maybe they're not.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: And that's okay because this is what he's passionate about.
48:47
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I really wanted those things to be, um, frenetic and, um, ecstatic.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: And you can bring in all these great words.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I just love saying Norwegian space disco because it exists.
48:58
SPEAKER_00: It's real.
48:59
SPEAKER_00: There's a documentary about it.
49:00
SPEAKER_00: It's great.
49:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's really fun music.
49:03
SPEAKER_00: And, um, and yeah, so I was able to kind of explore these things that I really do love.
49:07
SPEAKER_00: And I do love, um,
49:09
SPEAKER_00: electronic music.
49:10
SPEAKER_00: And I love all types of music mostly, but that was something that was fun to explore.
49:17
SPEAKER_01: I was going to ask something else related to the other like coffee and things.
49:20
SPEAKER_01: But first I would just wanted to say some of those parts with Marcel,
49:23
SPEAKER_01: I really loved the humanity and like,
49:26
SPEAKER_01: it was kind of heartbreaking because there's that disconnect because they're both
49:29
SPEAKER_01: forms of grief.
49:30
SPEAKER_01: And so,
49:31
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:32
SPEAKER_01: the narrator is very much trying to avoid distraction and he's going off on these
49:36
SPEAKER_01: rants about how the modern world is always pulling you away from what you need to do.
49:39
SPEAKER_01: And you're always getting notifications.
49:40
SPEAKER_01: And then his son says,
49:42
SPEAKER_01: is into something very specifically designed around electronica.
49:45
SPEAKER_01: And he's constantly bombarding him with calls and voicemails.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: And it's such an interesting disconnect because in some ways,
49:53
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:53
SPEAKER_01: he's missing the point of his son is using this to try to reach out to him.
49:56
SPEAKER_01: They're both grieving in different ways.
49:58
SPEAKER_01: And he's telling him about something he loves.
50:00
SPEAKER_01: And yet the dad is like, Oh, I got another 20 minute voicemail about electronic dance music.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: And I just thought it was beautiful, but also it's,
50:09
SPEAKER_01: so true and so real about the way that like generational or just these different
50:13
SPEAKER_01: people going through things and trying to connect in different ways,
50:16
SPEAKER_01: but just failing.
50:17
SPEAKER_01: I really love that part of it.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
50:19
SPEAKER_00: And in that lesson,
50:20
SPEAKER_00: the narrator wants to give his son,
50:21
SPEAKER_00: but he's like,
50:22
SPEAKER_00: you can't teach someone that following your passion will eventually break your
50:25
SPEAKER_00: heart because that's something you learn on your own.
50:28
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to tell him, I mean, my father is,
50:30
SPEAKER_00: Um, what is a attorney's retired, very pragmatic.
50:34
SPEAKER_00: And I was 17, 18 when I want to be a writer.
50:36
SPEAKER_00: And my dad, you know, as a responsible father said, that's great, Mark, but what do you want to do?
50:41
SPEAKER_00: What are you going to do with, you know, that kind of thing.
50:43
SPEAKER_00: And,
50:44
SPEAKER_00: and,
50:44
SPEAKER_00: and so I think the father was as retired,
50:47
SPEAKER_00: you know,
50:48
SPEAKER_00: professor,
50:49
SPEAKER_00: but he wants to follow this thing.
50:50
SPEAKER_00: And he sees his son kind of doing the,
50:52
SPEAKER_00: the kind of a similar obsession,
50:54
SPEAKER_00: but with something different with music.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, no, you've got to, you've got to learn on your own that the world will break your heart.
51:01
SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
51:01
SPEAKER_00: to become a famous DJ who can pay their bills and travel the world,
51:06
SPEAKER_00: you know,
51:07
SPEAKER_00: it's like winning the lottery.
51:08
SPEAKER_00: It's like, it's becoming like a self-sustained writer.
51:10
SPEAKER_00: Like you can write and also that's how you support yourself.
51:13
SPEAKER_00: That's very rare.
51:15
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
51:16
SPEAKER_00: And there was this disconnect where they, they were so similar and they don't even see it.
51:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
51:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you talked a little bit with us before too, like another thing,
51:25
SPEAKER_01: tangent that you go off on quite a bit, and this is coffee, which it sounds like that is something else.
51:29
SPEAKER_01: But like,
51:30
SPEAKER_01: yeah,
51:30
SPEAKER_01: coffee in general,
51:31
SPEAKER_01: or some of these other things,
51:32
SPEAKER_01: Montaigne,
51:32
SPEAKER_01: like,
51:34
SPEAKER_01: is it all based on your own interests when you're writing a book?
51:37
SPEAKER_01: Do you decide if I'm going to spend this much time researching something,
51:39
SPEAKER_01: it better be something I'm interested in?
51:40
SPEAKER_01: Or sometimes is it something you don't know anything about and you just go off,
51:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
51:44
SPEAKER_01: kind of sight unseen?
51:46
SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit of both.
51:47
SPEAKER_00: That's such a good question.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: So honestly, for a while, I thought...
51:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm not really that interested in Montaigne.
51:54
SPEAKER_00: I've read many of his essays, or at least a handful, not a lot.
51:58
SPEAKER_00: A couple of people have messaged me going, how much Montaigne do I need to know to read your book?
52:02
SPEAKER_00: And I said, zilch.
52:03
SPEAKER_00: He's kind of a catalyst.
52:06
SPEAKER_00: I honestly, early in the book, was thinking I might change it to William Blake.
52:11
SPEAKER_00: But then I realized William Blake is way too interesting.
52:14
SPEAKER_00: I would actually – it would become a William Blake book because William Blake was –
52:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
52:17
SPEAKER_00: he was a mystic.
52:18
SPEAKER_00: I agree.
52:19
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely.
52:21
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I think he's going to come into the book I'm working on in a kind of indirect way.
52:27
SPEAKER_00: But I realized that Montaigne, brilliant essayist philosopher, the fact that his life was –
52:33
SPEAKER_00: colorful in the fact that it was in the past.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: So that you've got that snapshot of what the world was like.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: And I read a lot about his life.
52:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, he didn't live a super exciting life.
52:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was very great.
52:45
SPEAKER_00: He ended up having a Chateau.
52:46
SPEAKER_00: He was able to have a lot of leisure time in his latter half of his life.
52:50
SPEAKER_00: And right.
52:50
SPEAKER_00: He never wanted for anything.
52:51
SPEAKER_00: Um,
52:52
SPEAKER_00: but the fact that I didn't find his life super exciting was actually better because
52:56
SPEAKER_00: then I could invent things.
52:58
SPEAKER_00: Like if I wanted to invent things about William Blake, I'm like, well, he's kind of just done.
53:01
SPEAKER_00: He's talking to angels in his backyard in London and he's already really exciting.
53:06
SPEAKER_00: So I think Montaigne being, um,
53:09
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to say bland,
53:10
SPEAKER_00: but not being someone I could delve into and find things that are eccentric,
53:13
SPEAKER_00: that I could invent my own things,
53:15
SPEAKER_00: was actually better.
53:16
SPEAKER_00: So I used him kind of as a signpost of my character's obsession,
53:20
SPEAKER_00: my narrator's obsession,
53:21
SPEAKER_00: and being able to have a foot in the past where I could kind of explore whether
53:25
SPEAKER_00: it's the plague or whether it's...
53:27
SPEAKER_00: You know,
53:27
SPEAKER_00: this fictional Russian duelists that are crossing through through France as he's
53:31
SPEAKER_00: escaping the czar.
53:34
SPEAKER_00: But no,
53:34
SPEAKER_00: I really I did not have a fascination with Montaigne in as far as he's he's a great
53:41
SPEAKER_00: essayist and a great humanist.
53:43
SPEAKER_00: And his essays are really great.
53:45
SPEAKER_00: But I know there's people that understand him more than I do.
53:48
SPEAKER_00: and like him more than I do, which I think is actually good.
53:51
SPEAKER_00: It's a healthy admiration without saying,
53:54
SPEAKER_00: because I think it would end up becoming a book about Montaigne.
53:57
SPEAKER_00: And of course, Montaigne is merely the excuse for the book, if that makes sense.
54:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
54:02
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
54:02
SPEAKER_03: Makes total sense.
54:03
SPEAKER_03: We don't learn a ton about Montaigne because the narrator can't seem to get it, get beyond that hurdle.
54:11
SPEAKER_03: And I love that aspect of it.
54:13
SPEAKER_00: And some of it is real, like his brother did die of a tennis injury in real life.
54:18
SPEAKER_00: Back then, you know, his brother, I think tennis balls were not quite as soft.
54:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
54:22
SPEAKER_00: Maybe they were solid concrete, but his brother, I was reading a biography, was injured.
54:27
SPEAKER_00: They were probably in their 20s, and I don't think the injury healed or something happened, but
54:32
SPEAKER_00: I mentioned early in the book that his brother died of a tennis injury,
54:35
SPEAKER_00: which is like one of my favorite anecdotes about Montaigne,
54:37
SPEAKER_00: he says.
54:38
SPEAKER_00: And that is something I use.
54:40
SPEAKER_00: So there is a lot, like all my books, fiction mixed with a nonfiction, like a tapestry.
54:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
54:45
SPEAKER_03: It's actually kind of tough.
54:47
SPEAKER_00: It is.
54:48
SPEAKER_03: I'm reading these, you know, Marcel talk about a certain, you know, band.
54:52
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, is that a real one?
54:53
SPEAKER_03: And I go look it up and lo and behold, it is.
54:56
SPEAKER_03: But, you know, a lot of the places...
54:58
SPEAKER_03: that he got like the Horner Institute oh man yeah I love by the way those passages
55:03
SPEAKER_01: of the reading room and thank you thank you yes so Mark with great power comes
55:08
SPEAKER_01: great responsibility I just want you to know I bought Montaigne based on this book
55:12
SPEAKER_01: so you should have told me before that you didn't even like care about it I'm like
55:15
SPEAKER_00: no no but I do I do and also no no I know and I mean the magic is that is that you
55:20
SPEAKER_00: might read some essays and become a lifelong Montaigne fanatic or
55:23
SPEAKER_00: Or you might read some and go, Mark, go to page 500 on this Penguin edition and read that essay.
55:28
SPEAKER_00: It will blow your mind.
55:29
SPEAKER_00: So I'm kind of putting the responsibility back on you.
55:34
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'll take it.
55:35
SPEAKER_00: Make me love Montaigne.
55:36
SPEAKER_00: No, no, I do.
55:38
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
55:39
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, we're all sitting here sipping coffee, too.
55:41
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's you said that is a genuine obsession of yours.
55:44
SPEAKER_01: So that is very true.
55:47
SPEAKER_00: Yes, but it was also just like Montaigne and dance music.
55:50
SPEAKER_00: It was a really great opportunity to explore fine roasts and types of beans and things like that.
55:57
SPEAKER_00: like the,
55:58
SPEAKER_00: the,
55:58
SPEAKER_00: the beans I've always loved in the last 10 years,
56:01
SPEAKER_00: um,
56:01
SPEAKER_00: since I've really started kind of really buying the beans,
56:04
SPEAKER_00: whatever that I make has been Ethiopian.
56:06
SPEAKER_00: So there's that part of me where I think the narrator loves beans from Ethiopia,
56:09
SPEAKER_00: but I was able to explore and find this rich culture,
56:12
SPEAKER_00: uh,
56:13
SPEAKER_00: and,
56:13
SPEAKER_00: and,
56:13
SPEAKER_00: and coffee,
56:14
SPEAKER_00: whether it was in the middle East or cause I wanted to have this kind of,
56:17
SPEAKER_00: uh,
56:18
SPEAKER_00: uh,
56:18
SPEAKER_00: Matthias and arts compass was a huge influence on this book and,
56:21
SPEAKER_00: and find this influence that was very international.
56:24
SPEAKER_00: So it's,
56:25
SPEAKER_00: There's a quote early in the book from a poet, a Middle Eastern poet who doesn't exist.
56:33
SPEAKER_00: And it's almost like painting where I want to put little colors there.
56:36
SPEAKER_00: So I want to have,
56:37
SPEAKER_00: I want to mention,
56:38
SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
56:39
SPEAKER_00: Saudi Arabia,
56:40
SPEAKER_00: or I want to mention different places so that there's this feel of international,
56:44
SPEAKER_00: you know,
56:45
SPEAKER_00: coffee.
56:45
SPEAKER_00: So much of it is popular and originated in the Middle East and Northern Africa.
56:50
SPEAKER_00: So I was able to tie in.
56:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, Rambo being a coffee dealer, which was also true in North Africa before he died and all this stuff.
56:58
SPEAKER_00: And you go down coffee and you find all these things that become really rewarding.
57:02
SPEAKER_00: And of course, Balzac, it's, it's infinite.
57:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's, it's, uh, he's no, it was a notorious coffee fiend.
57:08
SPEAKER_00: So, um, so yeah, it was really a lot of fun to explore.
57:11
SPEAKER_00: And also I'm definitely a huge, huge coffee fanatic.
57:15
SPEAKER_00: So.
57:16
SPEAKER_03: Love it.
57:17
SPEAKER_03: I love that you call it the sensuous dignity of the custom.
57:21
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
57:21
SPEAKER_03: Talking about making it coffee, and I'm like, oh man, that really strikes the right note.
57:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a real floral note with a little...
57:31
SPEAKER_00: a little melon.
57:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's funny because this is how, what a, what a nerd I am.
57:34
SPEAKER_00: There are times,
57:35
SPEAKER_00: not recently,
57:36
SPEAKER_00: but I remember four or five years ago where my wife and I would be going to bed and
57:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm just like,
57:41
SPEAKER_00: I am so excited to,
57:42
SPEAKER_00: to think about,
57:43
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be making coffee in the morning.
57:45
SPEAKER_00: She's like, you're insane.
57:47
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, but I'm really looking forward to it.
57:49
SPEAKER_00: Just the, the whole routine of grinding and smelling it and not quite being awake.
57:52
SPEAKER_00: And then that first sip and, um, and I'm like billions of people.
57:56
SPEAKER_00: So, um,
57:57
SPEAKER_00: you know,
57:57
SPEAKER_00: when you search something on your phone or your computer,
57:59
SPEAKER_00: it starts,
58:00
SPEAKER_00: you know,
58:00
SPEAKER_00: so suddenly you're getting all these,
58:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
58:03
SPEAKER_00: uh,
58:03
SPEAKER_00: well,
58:04
SPEAKER_00: advertisements,
58:04
SPEAKER_00: but also,
58:05
SPEAKER_00: um,
58:06
SPEAKER_00: articles about coffee.
58:07
SPEAKER_00: So,
58:07
SPEAKER_00: um,
58:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm like most people I'm,
58:09
SPEAKER_00: you know,
58:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm not an outlier,
58:10
SPEAKER_00: but I don't think it had been written about the way that I kind of did it in a way.
58:13
SPEAKER_00: And there's great books that have coffee in it.
58:15
SPEAKER_00: So.
58:16
SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's, it's a fantastic element of the book.
58:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
58:19
SPEAKER_03: And I have a quick, quick, quick question aside, kind of a side note.
58:22
SPEAKER_03: So last year,
58:23
SPEAKER_03: Paul and I did an episode on winter reads and,
58:26
SPEAKER_03: and I brought up,
58:27
SPEAKER_03: you know,
58:27
SPEAKER_03: just the,
58:28
SPEAKER_03: the luxury of being able to sit down for a
58:34
SPEAKER_03: gets cold.
58:35
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
58:36
SPEAKER_03: My wife bought me this mug here where it's hooked to, you know, an app to my phone.
58:42
SPEAKER_03: So I can sit at whatever temperature and it stays there.
58:44
SPEAKER_03: It is the most amazing thing because you know,
58:47
SPEAKER_03: you're always at the end starting to feel like you need to rush it.
58:50
SPEAKER_03: And I, and, and I don't have that feeling anymore.
58:53
SPEAKER_03: And I'm curious, is that part of the experience for you?
58:58
SPEAKER_03: You know, would that detract having it be perpetually the right temperature for
59:02
SPEAKER_03: Is that something that detracts from the fleeting nature of that euphoria?
59:10
SPEAKER_03: I'm just curious if that would enhance the experience or actually be a detriment.
59:15
SPEAKER_03: Now, I have loved it.
59:17
SPEAKER_03: But how would our narrator feel?
59:18
SPEAKER_03: Like, is it degrading all of a sudden to introduce modern technology into this beautiful ritual?
59:26
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think he's above it.
59:28
SPEAKER_00: I think he would actually really appreciate that.
59:29
SPEAKER_00: And that's honestly such a deep question because, you know, you're starting to get very philosophical.
59:34
SPEAKER_00: And it's true because it's like,
59:35
SPEAKER_00: there's something,
59:36
SPEAKER_00: I love that marriage as we've talked about between like great sadness and great happiness.
59:40
SPEAKER_00: And that's like, that's life.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: Life can be so joyful and it's amazing, but it ends.
59:45
SPEAKER_00: And coffee, you make that cup and you're sipping and you're like, Oh, I can see the bottom of the cup.
59:50
SPEAKER_00: It's good.
59:50
SPEAKER_00: This is in, but, Oh, but I've got that next cup to look forward to.
59:53
SPEAKER_00: So, um,
59:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
59:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, coffee, a cup of coffee, a warm cup of coffee is definitely can be a symbol for life.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, you know, now we're going to the cliche is the cup half full kind of thing.
1:00:04
SPEAKER_00: But but it's true.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_00: No, I think my narrator would be happy with that technology, actually.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_03: Well, I am, too.
1:00:11
SPEAKER_03: I am, too.
1:00:11
SPEAKER_00: So, yes, you're going to have to email me with that.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_00: We'll do.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_00: We'll do.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_03: It's been it's it's been amazing.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_03: I drink so much more now.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_00: And don't think I've not looked up coffee shops in Berlin.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_00: So, and it's, it's got a huge coffee culture, so I'm going to be in a good place.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_00: I just missed coffee week in Berlin.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_00: Like last week they had coffee week,
1:00:32
SPEAKER_00: which is where you go around,
1:00:33
SPEAKER_00: they do classes and testing and stuff like that.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so pretty fun.
1:00:37
SPEAKER_03: Oh,
1:00:37
SPEAKER_03: well,
1:00:38
SPEAKER_03: once you're settled in over there and you've established your place and you then
1:00:42
SPEAKER_03: have to go back and visit,
1:00:43
SPEAKER_03: you have to make it during that time so that you can,
1:00:46
SPEAKER_03: you know.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_00: I can see it again.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_00: Also to tie in,
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: if you want,
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: we could talk about how coffee in a way is also,
1:00:53
SPEAKER_00: without giving anything away,
1:00:54
SPEAKER_00: kind of the downfall of his career indirectly or directly.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_00: But I love the fact that, I don't know, I was really trying to use coffee.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, as much as he drinks, I don't think realistically,
1:01:08
SPEAKER_00: 15 years into his teaching career, he's really going to get that much of a buzz.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_00: Although,
1:01:12
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:01:12
SPEAKER_00: he's making Turkish coffee in the teacher's lounge and then he makes the,
1:01:15
SPEAKER_00: he buys the espresso machine.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_00: But, um, but that obsession kind of leads to some, some bad, uh,
1:01:22
SPEAKER_00: instances or, you know, incidents.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_01: Which is a bit of a theme throughout all of your books, obsession leading to, yeah.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_01: The parts about him in the teacher's lounge and stuff are both so funny and also
1:01:34
SPEAKER_01: like so,
1:01:34
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
1:01:35
SPEAKER_01: heartbreaking is the right word,
1:01:36
SPEAKER_01: but like you said,
1:01:37
SPEAKER_01: you can kind of see it going off the rails.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_01: but it's also so endearing and funny at the same time.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: It's such a tricky balance.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_03: It wouldn't be endearing if you were the other teacher.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_01: No, it wouldn't.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_03: And that's where,
1:01:47
SPEAKER_03: that's part of why it's so heartbreaking is we're getting to know him as a person
1:01:51
SPEAKER_03: and see his insecurities and his desire to be,
1:01:54
SPEAKER_03: to be seen as a person,
1:01:56
SPEAKER_03: but also his kind of maybe not resentment's probably the wrong word,
1:01:59
SPEAKER_03: but his recognition that leads him to distance himself,
1:02:02
SPEAKER_03: that others don't care about him.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_03: And that he's a bit of a, a bit of a,
1:02:08
SPEAKER_03: You know, I don't know what the right word is, but he's not their favorite is my impression.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_00: No, he's playing symphony music really loud.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: And he's and he's like, you know, he's like a know-it-all.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_00: I can see him stirring the whatever the coffee in the teacher's lounge making Turkish coffee.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, you wouldn't know anything about Victor Hugo.
1:02:23
SPEAKER_00: And I think as the reader, I think the humor, a lot of it hopefully comes from.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_00: the audience being those other teachers in a way and just going,
1:02:30
SPEAKER_00: Oh,
1:02:31
SPEAKER_00: this guy's off the rails,
1:02:32
SPEAKER_00: but also being a little bit of that narrator going,
1:02:34
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:02:35
SPEAKER_00: but you guys are just,
1:02:36
SPEAKER_00: just,
1:02:36
SPEAKER_00: just,
1:02:36
SPEAKER_00: you wake up every day,
1:02:37
SPEAKER_00: you do your thing.
1:02:38
SPEAKER_00: And you know, where's your will to be weird.
1:02:40
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this guy's a little bit off the rails.
1:02:41
SPEAKER_00: So hopefully there's a bit of sympathy and maybe there's a foot in each world.
1:02:45
SPEAKER_00: So the foot in each world is,
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: I'm so glad you said that because that's definitely what I felt is like you said,
1:02:51
SPEAKER_01: you can totally empathize with the teachers because we've all been around that guy and,
1:02:55
SPEAKER_01: But I think we've all been that guy.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
1:02:59
SPEAKER_01: And to your point,
1:03:00
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to live in a world where there's not anybody who is obsessed or has a
1:03:04
SPEAKER_01: passion that they're just like going on and on about like as irritating as it can be.
1:03:08
SPEAKER_01: Thinking of a world where there's just a bunch of vanilla people kind of just
1:03:11
SPEAKER_01: droning through their lives and not really feeling that is pretty sad,
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: too.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:03:16
SPEAKER_00: You kind of need those maniacs and those obsessives.
1:03:18
SPEAKER_00: And I wouldn't want to be his next door teacher.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_00: But I would love to be like the teacher maybe down the hall or in a different wing,
1:03:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:03:24
SPEAKER_00: and you pass him once in a while.
1:03:26
SPEAKER_00: Hey, how's your Montaigne book going?
1:03:27
SPEAKER_00: But, yeah, and I think I do derive – You know how to really get him.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: I know.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_00: What?
1:03:35
SPEAKER_00: I do love that humor of other people watching a person go off the ring and go, what is this guy doing?
1:03:41
SPEAKER_00: You know, just going like – like, you know, they're kind of stirring their senka or whatever.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: Their Folgers are going, I got to get back to, you know –
1:03:49
SPEAKER_00: economics, like whatever, dude.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_00: So, um, yeah, I definitely love that.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_00: That it's a great, um, avenue for, for comedy.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for sure.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:03:58
SPEAKER_03: Well, not, not to, not to bring us down necessarily.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_03: Um,
1:04:02
SPEAKER_03: I I've read several reviews of lesser ruins and I don't think,
1:04:06
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I've even read one that explicitly brings up his friend Kleist,
1:04:12
SPEAKER_03: um,
1:04:14
SPEAKER_03: I'm sure there's a few out there.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_03: Not really.
1:04:17
SPEAKER_00: There's only been a couple reviews.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_03: I guess I'm thinking also on Instagram.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_03: You've got a lot of fans and people who are posting on it.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_03: And I think it's because we don't want to spoil that aspect of the book.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_00: She's my favorite character, yeah.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_03: we get to know him and pretty early because he's repetitive because you've got this great rhythm.
1:04:36
SPEAKER_03: We know about the coffee,
1:04:37
SPEAKER_03: we know about the music,
1:04:39
SPEAKER_03: we know about the grief that he's going through and that always adds layers.
1:04:43
SPEAKER_03: But part of the fun of this is that repetition that he'll,
1:04:46
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:04:46
SPEAKER_03: you think he's finally moved away from something and vroom,
1:04:49
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:04:49
SPEAKER_03: he,
1:04:49
SPEAKER_03: his mind has taken him right back.
1:04:51
SPEAKER_03: But Kleist, um, you know, we, we, we learn more and more and more about her,
1:04:57
SPEAKER_03: And her grief and her views on,
1:05:00
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:05:00
SPEAKER_03: you've got all these great minds thinking about their passion,
1:05:05
SPEAKER_03: like,
1:05:05
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:05:05
SPEAKER_03: Marcel with his music,
1:05:07
SPEAKER_03: our narrator with coffee.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I would say Montaigne, but it's coffee, right?
1:05:13
SPEAKER_03: And then you've got Kleist with sculpture,
1:05:16
SPEAKER_03: but also with just being able to raise above mediocrity with art.
1:05:21
SPEAKER_02: Right, right, yeah.
1:05:22
SPEAKER_03: There's so much to her.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_03: And again,
1:05:25
SPEAKER_03: I don't want to spoil it either,
1:05:27
SPEAKER_03: but I just wanted to bring out that that emotional aspect to this novel,
1:05:32
SPEAKER_03: and it might not,
1:05:33
SPEAKER_03: I don't want to also be so vague as to mislead people.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_03: It's not like there's an affair, you know, this is not his lover.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_03: No, no.
1:05:40
SPEAKER_03: It's a colleague that...
1:05:42
SPEAKER_03: talks to him and especially on a stormy winter night,
1:05:45
SPEAKER_03: they,
1:05:45
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:05:45
SPEAKER_03: he gets to know her and her story a little bit and he shares it with us and the,
1:05:49
SPEAKER_03: the relationships that he makes with everything there.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_03: Well,
1:05:54
SPEAKER_03: that you make,
1:05:54
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:05:55
SPEAKER_03: uh,
1:05:56
SPEAKER_03: are very,
1:05:57
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:05:57
SPEAKER_03: that's the book could have been just about our narrator and it would have been wonderful.
1:06:02
SPEAKER_03: Right.
1:06:02
SPEAKER_03: This does add a different layer to it that, uh, thank you.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_03: Really?
1:06:06
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm, I'm,
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: Really glad you brought up Clive's Trevor.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: I definitely wanted to talk about her.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_00: No, she's a huge part of the maybe maybe my favorite invention or character.
1:06:16
SPEAKER_00: I really because she tells a lot of kind of unadorned truths,
1:06:20
SPEAKER_00: painful truths and her rants against stupidity.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_00: I was writing this very early into a certain president's office.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_00: tenure.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_00: And that was really,
1:06:31
SPEAKER_03: so after our podcast episode,
1:06:34
SPEAKER_03: we recorded with you that you're like,
1:06:35
SPEAKER_03: I got to go write something about stupidity.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, not at all.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_00: But there was a certain person in office and,
1:06:42
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:06:42
SPEAKER_00: and I still stand by the fact that she says this painful truth.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_00: And I, I, I would love to be proven wrong that stupidity is the strongest element in the universe.
1:06:50
SPEAKER_00: It
1:06:53
SPEAKER_00: And so I was writing this early.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I started Lesser Ruins just before the pandemic.
1:06:58
SPEAKER_00: And we all know it was a very dark time.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_00: Whatever your politics are,
1:07:02
SPEAKER_00: there was a certain person in office,
1:07:03
SPEAKER_00: there was riots,
1:07:04
SPEAKER_00: then there was a global pandemic,
1:07:05
SPEAKER_00: which our parents,
1:07:07
SPEAKER_00: our grandparents,
1:07:07
SPEAKER_00: maybe our great-grandparents had lived through on the Spanish flu.
1:07:11
SPEAKER_00: But it was a really, really dark time.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_00: And it just seemed like stupidity kept winning.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_00: So it really was, as much as she's talking about a different time,
1:07:20
SPEAKER_00: It's that idea that,
1:07:21
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:07:21
SPEAKER_00: we can't seem to get better and learn from ourselves and that,
1:07:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:07:24
SPEAKER_00: history repeats itself.
1:07:26
SPEAKER_00: So she was talking about World War II and the Holocaust.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_00: But I also didn't want it to be a first person account of the Holocaust because I wasn't there.
1:07:35
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to speak for anyone that was.
1:07:37
SPEAKER_00: So it's actually removed by two people.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_00: You know, Clice is talking about her mom.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_00: And so her mom is telling our narrator, so our narrator is telling the reader.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_00: So it's twice removed.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_00: We're hearing about events through someone who's heard it from their mom.
1:07:53
SPEAKER_00: So it's removed two times over, I guess.
1:07:54
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to have those layers because I didn't want it to be any firsthand accounts.
1:08:00
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted it to be there, but in a very vague way.
1:08:02
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want it to be...
1:08:05
SPEAKER_00: There are some mentions of a concentration camp and some German soldiers, etc.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to do it in a way that wasn't so... I don't know, not even campy, but direct.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_00: And I also wanted it to feel very universal because...
1:08:22
SPEAKER_00: of things going on in the world today.
1:08:24
SPEAKER_00: There's a lots of people that are,
1:08:25
SPEAKER_00: are being killed by genocide by this and this,
1:08:28
SPEAKER_00: and I'm not a political writer,
1:08:29
SPEAKER_00: but I wanted to show in the way that,
1:08:32
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:08:32
SPEAKER_00: it's not just Jewish people.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_00: It's, it's Palestinian people.
1:08:35
SPEAKER_00: It's Chileans.
1:08:36
SPEAKER_00: It's,
1:08:36
SPEAKER_00: it's all of us suffer from,
1:08:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: people that want to have power and,
1:08:40
SPEAKER_00: and,
1:08:40
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:08:41
SPEAKER_00: uh,
1:08:41
SPEAKER_00: uh,
1:08:42
SPEAKER_00: have,
1:08:42
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:08:43
SPEAKER_00: have no humanity for, for, for their fellow humans.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_00: So it's, it's very universal.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to feel universal, not just, um, Oh, it was, it was Germany in Eastern Europe in the forties.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_00: No, it's, it's still happening now.
1:08:54
SPEAKER_00: That kind of thing.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_03: It's, it's, it's fantastic.
1:08:57
SPEAKER_03: And, um, I, I have, I'm putting in a bookmark here because I want to talk about that layering thing.
1:09:05
SPEAKER_03: Um,
1:09:05
SPEAKER_03: but it's going to take us on to talking maybe a little bit about your crap,
1:09:08
SPEAKER_03: your rhythm and all of that.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_03: And so I wanted to make sure Paul,
1:09:12
SPEAKER_03: or,
1:09:12
SPEAKER_03: or,
1:09:12
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:09:12
SPEAKER_03: if you guys wanted to talk a little bit more on Kleist or they don't want to just
1:09:16
SPEAKER_03: turn us around immediately,
1:09:17
SPEAKER_03: but I do want to note,
1:09:19
SPEAKER_03: I've got a,
1:09:19
SPEAKER_03: another question for you.
1:09:20
SPEAKER_03: That's pending.
1:09:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_00: And anything you, do you want to talk about place to Paul, please?
1:09:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: no,
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:09:27
SPEAKER_01: I could talk about Kleist,
1:09:28
SPEAKER_01: but I was actually going to bring up something else,
1:09:30
SPEAKER_01: if you don't mind.
1:09:31
SPEAKER_01: Please, please.
1:09:32
SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite lines of the entire book that just stopped me in my tracks,
1:09:35
SPEAKER_01: and it was by Kleist,
1:09:36
SPEAKER_01: and it was building bulwarks against the inevitability of death.
1:09:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:41
SPEAKER_01: When I read that,
1:09:43
SPEAKER_01: and it was in reference,
1:09:44
SPEAKER_01: I think,
1:09:44
SPEAKER_01: specifically in this conversation to literature,
1:09:47
SPEAKER_01: if I remember right.
1:09:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:48
SPEAKER_01: Reading to build bulwarks against the inevitability of death.
1:09:51
SPEAKER_01: But I was just blown away, not only because I think there's a lot of truth
1:09:56
SPEAKER_01: That's a dark way to look at literature, but it's, I mean, there's some absolute truth to it.
1:10:01
SPEAKER_01: And Trevor and I have talked about that in other episodes,
1:10:03
SPEAKER_01: but also just the,
1:10:04
SPEAKER_01: all these obsessions of your various characters and all of us living our lives,
1:10:08
SPEAKER_01: the idea of building bulwarks,
1:10:09
SPEAKER_01: like distraction,
1:10:10
SPEAKER_01: um,
1:10:12
SPEAKER_01: you know, hobbies.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_01: I just thought that that was absolutely beautiful.
1:10:15
SPEAKER_01: And so I just wanted to mention that because it was by Kleist who said it.
1:10:20
SPEAKER_01: But I think right before that is a huge section that's all about the love of literature.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_01: It's one of my very favorites.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_01: And I was just going to say, like, your books always send me chasing other books, like even St.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_01: Sebastian's Abyss, even though it's not specifically talking about a book.
1:10:37
SPEAKER_01: It
1:10:37
SPEAKER_01: Call to mind TJ Clark's The Sight of Death,
1:10:40
SPEAKER_01: which I've mentioned before,
1:10:41
SPEAKER_01: just the obsession with art and somebody who spends days scouring,
1:10:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:10:46
SPEAKER_01: a painting and looking at every little detail,
1:10:49
SPEAKER_01: like just the intellectual curiosity of your books and the ability to send me down
1:10:53
SPEAKER_01: all these rabbit trails is one of my very favorite things about them.
1:10:55
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:10:56
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:10:56
SPEAKER_00: Well,
1:10:57
SPEAKER_00: what I really love,
1:10:58
SPEAKER_00: and I think that's because that's who I am,
1:11:00
SPEAKER_00: is this kind of the undying passion for art.
1:11:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, and I think a lot of my characters have that.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_00: And of course, I use it as a means for maybe comedy or entertainment.
1:11:10
SPEAKER_00: But that's something I share with either it's Kleist or Schmidt or Yakov is this kind of uncompromising.
1:11:20
SPEAKER_00: I use this word a lot by myopic kind of single minded passion for entertainment.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_00: And that could be art, meaning music or literature or sculpture.
1:11:30
SPEAKER_00: And I think because a part of us and,
1:11:33
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:11:34
SPEAKER_00: the three of us can,
1:11:35
SPEAKER_00: I think,
1:11:35
SPEAKER_00: agree that's definitely a big part of us.
1:11:36
SPEAKER_00: I don't think to that extreme, but that's something I love to kind of focus on because, you know,
1:11:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
1:11:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:11:42
SPEAKER_00: it is in a way we do build these things to kind of avoid the inevitable,
1:11:46
SPEAKER_00: but also what a beautiful way to go through life,
1:11:49
SPEAKER_00: you know?
1:11:49
SPEAKER_01: I know, that's exactly right.
1:11:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I hinted at it.
1:11:52
SPEAKER_01: If you don't mind, I'll just read a quick passage.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_01: This is preceding that, and it kind of ties into what you were just saying, I think.
1:11:58
SPEAKER_01: It says,
1:11:58
SPEAKER_01: I began seeing Montaigne not only as the greatest philosopher and humanist in history,
1:12:02
SPEAKER_01: but also the greatest writer.
1:12:04
SPEAKER_01: and i recalled my early love of jules verne and later stendhal and a serious
1:12:07
SPEAKER_01: reader's interest in literature follows a nomadic path i suddenly think finishing
1:12:11
SPEAKER_01: my coffee a path which winds through a person's life leaving a trail of imagined
1:12:15
SPEAKER_01: events more palpable than the supposed actual invoking both history and geography
1:12:20
SPEAKER_01: perspective and sentiment because my montaigne phase was due to my interest in
1:12:24
SPEAKER_01: jules verne meaning france meaning french literature which later meant flaubert and
1:12:29
SPEAKER_01: duras and zola
1:12:30
SPEAKER_01: all in conversation with one another whether they knew it or not whether they want
1:12:33
SPEAKER_01: it to be or not the entire literary firmament illuminating the dark vault of
1:12:38
SPEAKER_01: existence baudelaire for instance or machado de assis also for instance iris
1:12:44
SPEAKER_01: murdock or joseph roth as other instances because they go on and on the instances i
1:12:48
SPEAKER_01: mean they never stop
1:12:50
SPEAKER_01: passionate reading,
1:12:51
SPEAKER_01: ecstatic reading,
1:12:52
SPEAKER_01: a tree with untold branches,
1:12:54
SPEAKER_01: and Fernando Pessoa,
1:12:55
SPEAKER_01: I think,
1:12:55
SPEAKER_01: a reluctant angel,
1:12:56
SPEAKER_01: Gogol with his religious mania,
1:12:58
SPEAKER_01: and epileptic Dostoevsky,
1:13:00
SPEAKER_01: all of these 19th century Russians,
1:13:02
SPEAKER_01: in fact,
1:13:03
SPEAKER_01: each more obsessed with their suffering than the last,
1:13:05
SPEAKER_01: all in conversation,
1:13:06
SPEAKER_01: and all,
1:13:07
SPEAKER_01: to quote Kleist,
1:13:08
SPEAKER_01: building bulwarks against the inevitability of death.
1:13:11
SPEAKER_01: Like that, that was like, I was just like running out of ink to underline that passage.
1:13:15
SPEAKER_01: It was so amazing.
1:13:15
SPEAKER_00: Can you tell me what page that is?
1:13:17
SPEAKER_01: Oh, sure.
1:13:17
SPEAKER_01: I just, I'm sorry.
1:13:19
SPEAKER_00: This is,
1:13:19
SPEAKER_00: I'm like,
1:13:20
SPEAKER_00: I want to,
1:13:20
SPEAKER_00: I,
1:13:21
SPEAKER_00: I,
1:13:22
SPEAKER_00: I really,
1:13:22
SPEAKER_00: I've,
1:13:22
SPEAKER_00: I've,
1:13:23
SPEAKER_00: I've learned the part I'm going to read at my,
1:13:24
SPEAKER_00: at my two events I'm doing in St.
1:13:26
SPEAKER_00: Holland and Houston.
1:13:27
SPEAKER_01: I literally just, oh, good.
1:13:29
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
1:13:30
SPEAKER_00: And, and so I, I know that page very well, but,
1:13:33
SPEAKER_00: I read the proofs and the galley so many times.
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: I've worked so hard on this book that I've not read the finished from cover to
1:13:41
SPEAKER_00: cover because I'm just – I'm burnt out.
1:13:43
SPEAKER_00: But I really love that passage too.
1:13:45
SPEAKER_01: I do too, yeah.
1:13:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but whenever you – I just closed it, of course, so give me a second.
1:13:49
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you by the end of it.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you got it.
1:13:52
SPEAKER_00: But no, and that's kind of how I am.
1:13:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what's great is that we're never going to run out of books.
1:13:59
SPEAKER_00: They're always going to be, it's endless.
1:14:00
SPEAKER_00: And so it's an embarrassment of riches, but that's how it was for me.
1:14:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, writers and books introduce you to other books, you know?
1:14:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:14:11
SPEAKER_03: On that, Paul and I have also talked about great titles.
1:14:14
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yes.
1:14:16
SPEAKER_03: I was going to bring that up.
1:14:18
SPEAKER_03: You might appreciate this.
1:14:19
SPEAKER_03: In Bolaño's 2666,
1:14:21
SPEAKER_03: the part about the critics and where they're talking about Amalfitano and all the
1:14:25
SPEAKER_03: books he's written,
1:14:26
SPEAKER_03: I'm like,
1:14:27
SPEAKER_03: those are imaginary,
1:14:27
SPEAKER_03: but I want to read those books,
1:14:30
SPEAKER_03: those titles.
1:14:31
SPEAKER_03: I want to read that author's oeuvre because you can see the – just because of the titles.
1:14:38
SPEAKER_03: you,
1:14:38
SPEAKER_03: you spent a lot of great titles on this book because of,
1:14:43
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:14:43
SPEAKER_03: that that's what our narrator is really writing.
1:14:46
SPEAKER_03: There are all these great titles that sound so good.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_03: Um, does that, does that make you nervous?
1:14:52
SPEAKER_03: Like, are you like, Oh man, I, I ran out of, um,
1:14:55
SPEAKER_03: of these titles or are you wanting to write some of these books i know they're all
1:14:59
SPEAKER_03: about montaigne but at the same time they're so evocative and so i mean throughout
1:15:04
SPEAKER_03: and i love that um it you know even here at the start i'm looking at the galley but
1:15:09
SPEAKER_03: the title page that has all the other titles going in the background yes and i just
1:15:14
SPEAKER_03: think man there's so many great
1:15:17
SPEAKER_03: There's so much promise there of these other imaginary books that still somehow light up the mind.
1:15:23
SPEAKER_03: I love it.
1:15:23
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:15:24
SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
1:15:25
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, that's something I love, too.
1:15:26
SPEAKER_00: And when I was talking about books,
1:15:27
SPEAKER_00: which Paul just wrote,
1:15:28
SPEAKER_00: what you brought up about the titles is the one thing I think what I love most
1:15:33
SPEAKER_00: about literature,
1:15:34
SPEAKER_00: honestly,
1:15:35
SPEAKER_00: and it's the word possibility.
1:15:37
SPEAKER_00: So just like Bolaño with those titles,
1:15:40
SPEAKER_00: the fact that they don't exist,
1:15:41
SPEAKER_00: but the possibility that they do and that they're there somewhere.
1:15:45
SPEAKER_00: But I just had an idea when you were saying that, Trevor.
1:15:49
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, Sufjan Stevens and he was going to do that album per, you know, per state.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:15:54
SPEAKER_00: I should do a book for every title.
1:15:55
SPEAKER_00: That should be – and then like three years from now, oh, Mark gave up.
1:15:59
SPEAKER_00: He only wrote Splendor at Night.
1:16:01
SPEAKER_00: He's a failure.
1:16:02
SPEAKER_01: He only did Michigan.
1:16:03
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
1:16:04
SPEAKER_00: He only did Michigan.
1:16:05
SPEAKER_00: No, it's funny.
1:16:06
SPEAKER_00: But titles, this is going to sound so –
1:16:09
SPEAKER_00: It's going to sound like a mean, like, you know, falsely modest titles come very, very hard for me.
1:16:14
SPEAKER_00: I don't think of titles very easily.
1:16:17
SPEAKER_00: So coming up with all these,
1:16:18
SPEAKER_00: I didn't care if they were,
1:16:19
SPEAKER_00: I wanted some of them to be very,
1:16:21
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:16:22
SPEAKER_00: over like his,
1:16:23
SPEAKER_00: his obviously,
1:16:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:16:24
SPEAKER_00: Montana,
1:16:25
SPEAKER_00: the lugubrious cherubs.
1:16:26
SPEAKER_00: I wanted that to just be, Oh my God, get over yourself.
1:16:30
SPEAKER_00: But I think some of those titles are really good.
1:16:32
SPEAKER_00: So I wanted him to do the whole range.
1:16:35
SPEAKER_00: But no, there are some Splendor at Night I love and Vacant Tenants.
1:16:39
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if they'll ever be used.
1:16:41
SPEAKER_00: They might just be relegated to that.
1:16:44
SPEAKER_00: But titles in general don't come easy for me.
1:16:47
SPEAKER_00: But the author, do you know Adam Elric Sachs?
1:16:50
SPEAKER_00: He wrote like...
1:16:52
SPEAKER_00: yeah he uh he and i are are you know are kind of you know we email each other we we
1:16:56
SPEAKER_00: admire each other's work and he read lesser ruins and his big thing he wrote it a
1:17:01
SPEAKER_00: beautiful effusive email to me and i don't want to pull it up and read it because
1:17:04
SPEAKER_00: you know i don't have adam's permission but he really took to the idea of all the
1:17:10
SPEAKER_00: um all the titles that's what he stuck to is like mark all those titles through the
1:17:14
SPEAKER_00: book it became this this almost obsession with uh like naming things and
1:17:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm not giving what he said justice,
1:17:20
SPEAKER_00: but he really was kind of fond of the incorporation of all those fictional titles.
1:17:26
SPEAKER_03: Do you mind if I read just a few from this?
1:17:27
SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh, please, please.
1:17:29
SPEAKER_03: So,
1:17:29
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
1:17:31
SPEAKER_03: you said Splendor at Night,
1:17:32
SPEAKER_03: but there's Underling's Lament,
1:17:36
SPEAKER_03: Resonance Solitude,
1:17:39
SPEAKER_03: Garden of Anguish.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_03: And,
1:17:43
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:17:43
SPEAKER_03: because they're all stuck together here,
1:17:45
SPEAKER_03: some of them,
1:17:46
SPEAKER_03: as I'm trying to read them,
1:17:47
SPEAKER_03: I'm like,
1:17:47
SPEAKER_03: does that go with the other one or not?
1:17:49
SPEAKER_03: But Ghosts of Babylon, I mean, you know, they're...
1:17:55
SPEAKER_03: The Naked and the Sacred.
1:17:56
SPEAKER_00: Sounds like a Norman Mailer book.
1:18:00
SPEAKER_03: Pastures of Afflictions, God's Incense.
1:18:03
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's just like, I don't know.
1:18:05
SPEAKER_03: And the thing is, too, they all kind of sound like a 20th century European continental author's work.
1:18:13
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:18:14
SPEAKER_03: And it's just, I don't know, it's very evocative.
1:18:18
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:18:19
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:18:19
SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you just like a little sneak peek at how the sausage is made.
1:18:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:18:24
SPEAKER_00: we're,
1:18:24
SPEAKER_00: we're at the,
1:18:24
SPEAKER_00: like the last mile of being done with the book and I don't know where I came up
1:18:28
SPEAKER_00: with it,
1:18:28
SPEAKER_00: but I think it was just sitting there.
1:18:29
SPEAKER_00: I'm like underlings lament.
1:18:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh my God.
1:18:32
SPEAKER_00: And so I went in and I scratched out some other lesser title, obviously.
1:18:35
SPEAKER_00: And I put in,
1:18:36
SPEAKER_00: and I,
1:18:36
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:18:36
SPEAKER_00: I emailed the,
1:18:37
SPEAKER_00: the,
1:18:37
SPEAKER_00: the copy editor and I said,
1:18:39
SPEAKER_00: can we switch this one for underlings lament?
1:18:41
SPEAKER_00: That was, that was like a last minute title.
1:18:43
SPEAKER_00: So, but I was like, Oh, that's such a great weird title.
1:18:45
SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
1:18:46
SPEAKER_00: you know, underling is such a cool word.
1:18:48
SPEAKER_00: And were you,
1:18:49
SPEAKER_03: were you part,
1:18:50
SPEAKER_03: was it your idea to put the playful thing on the back flap of the finished one
1:18:54
SPEAKER_03: where it has your list of,
1:18:56
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:18:56
SPEAKER_03: it's Mark Haber's author.
1:18:58
SPEAKER_03: on the back and it has your book lesser ruins,
1:19:00
SPEAKER_03: but then it has crossed out faceless tenants,
1:19:03
SPEAKER_03: splendor at night,
1:19:04
SPEAKER_03: underlings lament.
1:19:05
SPEAKER_00: That was one of our production editors in the front page with all the titles.
1:19:09
SPEAKER_00: So a lot of things like that,
1:19:11
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:19:12
SPEAKER_00: come to me and it like,
1:19:13
SPEAKER_00: so I got the,
1:19:14
SPEAKER_00: the,
1:19:15
SPEAKER_00: the digital galley before they,
1:19:16
SPEAKER_00: they go to print.
1:19:17
SPEAKER_00: There's all these steps of course.
1:19:18
SPEAKER_00: And I saw that front page with all the titles and lesser ruins and bold.
1:19:21
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Oh my God, that's amazing.
1:19:24
SPEAKER_00: So no, I cannot take credit for that at all.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_00: But I love it.
1:19:27
SPEAKER_00: I think it works with the book perfectly.
1:19:30
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it's really great.
1:19:32
SPEAKER_03: What was your idea to thank the Horner Institute for their... I love that.
1:19:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
1:19:39
SPEAKER_00: what I do each book,
1:19:40
SPEAKER_00: I think I told you,
1:19:40
SPEAKER_00: each book I give it just a little bit of wink for the next book.
1:19:43
SPEAKER_00: This started only with the last one.
1:19:45
SPEAKER_00: So St.
1:19:45
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian's and the Acknowledgements,
1:19:47
SPEAKER_00: I thank the Horner Institute because I was already starting to write Lesser Ruins.
1:19:50
SPEAKER_00: So
1:19:51
SPEAKER_00: In the Acknowledgements of Lesser Ruins, I think a location in Ada.
1:19:55
SPEAKER_00: So in the Acknowledgements at the very end, it's right after Cancab, which does exist.
1:20:00
SPEAKER_00: And I was in Spain.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_00: I do think a place that is a location in Ada.
1:20:04
SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
1:20:05
SPEAKER_00: Somewhere in Europe.
1:20:07
SPEAKER_01: We talked about Mark's street cred at the beginning.
1:20:09
SPEAKER_01: I think that's another, just a baller move by him to kind of like flex in front of all the other authors.
1:20:14
SPEAKER_01: Like he has so many titles that he can just like reel off like 200 and he's not even going to use them.
1:20:20
SPEAKER_00: I know.
1:20:21
SPEAKER_00: Give us something.
1:20:22
SPEAKER_00: Like I said, titles really do come.
1:20:25
SPEAKER_00: Lesser Ruins wasn't the title for a long time.
1:20:27
SPEAKER_00: And I did incorporate it as a title he thought he would use at the end until later either.
1:20:32
SPEAKER_00: At first,
1:20:32
SPEAKER_00: it was going to be,
1:20:34
SPEAKER_00: even though it's the title of a Truman Capote book,
1:20:36
SPEAKER_00: he has a book called Other Voices,
1:20:37
SPEAKER_00: Other Rooms.
1:20:38
SPEAKER_00: And it was going to be called, the working title for about two years was Other Voices.
1:20:43
SPEAKER_00: Because it's a song by LCD Sound System.
1:20:45
SPEAKER_00: And I love LCD Sound System.
1:20:47
SPEAKER_00: And it's like the second track on their album.
1:20:49
SPEAKER_00: most recent album like five years ago um and then my wife wasn't a big fan i ended
1:20:54
SPEAKER_00: up going well it's fine but it's a little kind of generic um not for a song title
1:21:00
SPEAKER_00: lcd just for a book title and then and then i don't know i don't know how less
1:21:04
SPEAKER_00: ruins came up but i it clicked and then i was like well that'll be one of the
1:21:08
SPEAKER_00: titles he throws out at the end that kind of make it come full circle but it was
1:21:12
SPEAKER_00: eventually i mean for a while it was called other voices so
1:21:18
SPEAKER_03: two things like I said I'm putting in these bookmarks but I think I'm going to go
1:21:26
SPEAKER_03: with just one of them for right now you had a story that you said at the start you
1:21:31
SPEAKER_03: know the most new is it more tattoos and is it those of these all of these titles
1:21:36
SPEAKER_03: like on you know on your shoulder or something just title after title exactly I've
1:21:41
SPEAKER_00: got every Caesar Ira title down my spine
1:21:45
SPEAKER_00: I'd run out of space no matter how tall I am.
1:21:47
SPEAKER_00: No, I mean, I've kind of given, I've loaded up the story and it's not, it's just very on brand for me.
1:21:53
SPEAKER_00: As I told Daniel, who's flying and Daniel painted me in conversation for my launch.
1:21:59
SPEAKER_00: Basically, Juan Imar has a new book out from New Directions and he wrote that book yesterday.
1:22:05
SPEAKER_00: He was a big influence on Ira,
1:22:07
SPEAKER_00: actually,
1:22:08
SPEAKER_00: a Latin American writer who's been dead a long time,
1:22:11
SPEAKER_00: but he has a new collection coming out or it's out called Tin.
1:22:14
SPEAKER_00: So me being absolutely on brand, what do I do?
1:22:17
SPEAKER_00: I go to the bookstore in St.
1:22:20
SPEAKER_00: Paul that I'm doing a launch at on Tuesday.
1:22:23
SPEAKER_00: I called them yesterday.
1:22:24
SPEAKER_00: I said, hi, I saw it's on your shelves.
1:22:27
SPEAKER_00: Could you hold a copy of Juan Imar's tin?
1:22:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm going to be in on Tuesday.
1:22:31
SPEAKER_00: I'm, I'm actually, I'm the author doing it.
1:22:33
SPEAKER_00: And they're like, Oh, are you Mark?
1:22:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, yeah, they're like, Oh, we're excited.
1:22:36
SPEAKER_00: My buddy who works there, we're going to be hosting it.
1:22:37
SPEAKER_00: We're really excited.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and we'll hold, we'll hold the book for you.
1:22:41
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
1:22:41
SPEAKER_00: That's my own brain.
1:22:42
SPEAKER_00: Mom was like called to hold a new direction.
1:22:46
SPEAKER_03: I love it.
1:22:47
SPEAKER_00: My book launch.
1:22:48
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, never, never stopped.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_00: So I just thought that was very, very on brand.
1:22:53
SPEAKER_03: That is awesome.
1:22:54
SPEAKER_03: I love that.
1:22:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:22:55
SPEAKER_00: So they'll have my new directions book waiting when I go do my launch.
1:22:58
SPEAKER_03: Amazing.
1:23:00
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:23:00
SPEAKER_03: That is really good.
1:23:01
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:23:02
SPEAKER_03: Well,
1:23:03
SPEAKER_03: final thing for me,
1:23:04
SPEAKER_03: and I'll make it quick,
1:23:05
SPEAKER_03: but we've talked about so many fun things,
1:23:09
SPEAKER_03: and I'm maybe a little bit worried that now I'm going into some area that's maybe
1:23:13
SPEAKER_03: less fun for you.
1:23:14
SPEAKER_03: But I'm curious.
1:23:16
SPEAKER_03: We'll make it fun.
1:23:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:23:18
SPEAKER_03: It's your rhythm and your repetition, even within sentences, but throughout the book.
1:23:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:22
SPEAKER_00: I love craft talk.
1:23:23
SPEAKER_00: I love this.
1:23:24
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah.
1:23:24
SPEAKER_03: So, I thought it was...
1:23:27
SPEAKER_03: I wanted to find a passage that I thought maybe showed this in a short frame.
1:23:33
SPEAKER_03: And it's one about Tanner, you know, the creator of the Tanner Room at the Horner Institute.
1:23:45
SPEAKER_03: And absolutely, you know, again, just so much fun with that.
1:23:49
SPEAKER_03: But it's talking about the actual,
1:23:50
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:23:51
SPEAKER_03: well,
1:23:51
SPEAKER_03: the actual,
1:23:52
SPEAKER_03: the historical Tanner,
1:23:54
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:23:54
SPEAKER_03: that did all this.
1:23:55
SPEAKER_03: And it says traumatized by the carnage at Vicksburg,
1:23:59
SPEAKER_03: Tanner,
1:24:00
SPEAKER_03: ashen faced and dour,
1:24:01
SPEAKER_03: decades of alcohol addiction rippling in his wake,
1:24:04
SPEAKER_03: bought the hills and forests that would become the Horner Institute in 1873,
1:24:09
SPEAKER_03: as well as the accompanying lake in order to watch birds in solitude,
1:24:12
SPEAKER_03: because even back then,
1:24:14
SPEAKER_03: meaning 1873,
1:24:16
SPEAKER_03: Elevated individuals were looking for escape,
1:24:19
SPEAKER_03: meaning searching for mental Saharas,
1:24:21
SPEAKER_03: because already the world was becoming noisier and faster.
1:24:25
SPEAKER_03: Already society was finding ways to encroach upon slow thinking,
1:24:29
SPEAKER_03: meaning finding ways to impair slow thinking or dismantle slow thinking,
1:24:33
SPEAKER_03: to intrude upon contemplation and discernment,
1:24:36
SPEAKER_03: meaning finding excuses to have one's thoughts interrupted.
1:24:40
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:24:40
SPEAKER_03: just the repetition of meaning the way,
1:24:42
SPEAKER_03: and he,
1:24:42
SPEAKER_03: and he does this throughout,
1:24:43
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:24:44
SPEAKER_03: I think of,
1:24:45
SPEAKER_03: um,
1:24:46
SPEAKER_03: uh,
1:24:46
SPEAKER_03: of him doing this and you're able to,
1:24:48
SPEAKER_03: to have these beats and this rhythm that never is distracting.
1:24:53
SPEAKER_03: And you talked a bit ago about wanting to show the layers with like Kleist,
1:24:57
SPEAKER_03: this story's coming secondhand.
1:24:58
SPEAKER_03: You even do this with the,
1:25:00
SPEAKER_03: he said,
1:25:01
SPEAKER_03: she said,
1:25:02
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:25:02
SPEAKER_03: kind of things that,
1:25:03
SPEAKER_03: that it punctuates in a book that,
1:25:06
SPEAKER_03: that is often flowing.
1:25:08
SPEAKER_03: Um,
1:25:09
SPEAKER_03: And I'm wondering,
1:25:11
SPEAKER_03: first off,
1:25:12
SPEAKER_03: I don't know how you do that because to have this repetition,
1:25:16
SPEAKER_03: which could be mind numbing in others' hands,
1:25:21
SPEAKER_03: actually become part of the forcefulness of the prose,
1:25:25
SPEAKER_03: the beats that compels us to continue on.
1:25:29
SPEAKER_03: And even though there's the repetition,
1:25:31
SPEAKER_03: there's usually a little bit of a nuance that just twists things just a little bit.
1:25:35
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:25:36
SPEAKER_03: And yeah, I'm I'm I'm curious how much of this just flows because it's who you are.
1:25:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:25:42
SPEAKER_03: Or how much of this is I need to add some more.
1:25:46
SPEAKER_03: I said she said or something like that.
1:25:50
SPEAKER_00: No, this is such a great question.
1:25:51
SPEAKER_00: One thing I will say is that I started,
1:25:53
SPEAKER_00: as you mentioned,
1:25:53
SPEAKER_00: when you read the opening at the very beginning,
1:25:56
SPEAKER_00: the third and fourth word in the book are I think.
1:25:58
SPEAKER_00: So I'm already starting that beat.
1:26:00
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, talk about where commas are important.
1:26:03
SPEAKER_00: I was really worried that I would have to change the beginning because I didn't
1:26:06
SPEAKER_00: want it to be like he's holding her pulse and going,
1:26:08
SPEAKER_00: she's dead,
1:26:09
SPEAKER_00: I think.
1:26:09
SPEAKER_00: Like now she's dead, I'm thinking.
1:26:12
SPEAKER_00: And I'm showing throughout the book, he's going to think or she said or he said.
1:26:15
SPEAKER_00: So I start from page sentence one, the first few words.
1:26:19
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to introduce that refrain of I think.
1:26:23
SPEAKER_00: And if it's the past tense, I thought.
1:26:25
SPEAKER_00: So I was talking about this with Chad Post.
1:26:28
SPEAKER_00: A lot of it, most of it really is not intellectual.
1:26:31
SPEAKER_00: It's very intuitive.
1:26:33
SPEAKER_00: So a lot of it is like rhythm and cadence and finding the language is how does it feel?
1:26:38
SPEAKER_00: I need it to feel good.
1:26:40
SPEAKER_00: And even though I'm the writer, I'm also a reader.
1:26:42
SPEAKER_00: So hopefully I can judge when I'm going about it the wrong way or when I'm going
1:26:47
SPEAKER_00: about it too long,
1:26:48
SPEAKER_00: like a repetition.
1:26:49
SPEAKER_00: And
1:26:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm also trying to find,
1:26:52
SPEAKER_00: especially in this book,
1:26:53
SPEAKER_00: where I find a motif and I might rant on it for a while and then I'm off to the
1:26:58
SPEAKER_00: next motif.
1:26:59
SPEAKER_00: So Mental Sahara is pretty much throughout the book,
1:27:01
SPEAKER_00: but other things like stupidity,
1:27:03
SPEAKER_00: that motif,
1:27:04
SPEAKER_00: that repetition is just in one section.
1:27:06
SPEAKER_00: And I go through different repetitions of things because to do that for like 300
1:27:10
SPEAKER_00: odd pages would be not interesting and kind of cruel to the reader.
1:27:15
SPEAKER_00: And not where my mind would want to go.
1:27:17
SPEAKER_00: So there are these repetitions throughout the book.
1:27:20
SPEAKER_00: But on a sentence level, it is something that it comes natural to me.
1:27:24
SPEAKER_00: It comes also because I'm a great fan of Thomas Bernhardt.
1:27:28
SPEAKER_00: So I'm indebted to him for kind of this style, which many writers have kind of adopted.
1:27:33
SPEAKER_00: And that's something I wear proudly.
1:27:37
SPEAKER_00: And if you ever read Out of Sheer Rage by...
1:27:41
SPEAKER_00: Jeff Dyer, which is him trying to write a book about D.H.
1:27:44
SPEAKER_00: Lawrence.
1:27:45
SPEAKER_00: He's very indebted to, at least in that book, to Bernhard.
1:27:49
SPEAKER_00: So to answer your question, it is something that I do intuitively.
1:27:53
SPEAKER_00: I don't think about it too much intellectually because I want to see how it feels and how it sounds.
1:27:58
SPEAKER_00: So when I do it...
1:28:00
SPEAKER_00: No, that's it.
1:28:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:28:01
SPEAKER_01: I was going to say,
1:28:02
SPEAKER_01: do you read out loud or do you,
1:28:04
SPEAKER_01: do you ever speak it out loud or talk to your wife or something like that?
1:28:06
SPEAKER_01: Or is it all happening inside of your head?
1:28:08
SPEAKER_01: Like when you read it out loud?
1:28:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:28:10
SPEAKER_00: I think I kind of murmur and I'm one of these people.
1:28:13
SPEAKER_00: I know someone said,
1:28:13
SPEAKER_00: Oh my God,
1:28:14
SPEAKER_00: that's like,
1:28:14
SPEAKER_00: that shows that you're a dumb person,
1:28:16
SPEAKER_00: but I move my lips when I read quite a bit.
1:28:18
SPEAKER_00: And I remember once someone,
1:28:20
SPEAKER_00: and maybe it was just a joke,
1:28:21
SPEAKER_00: but it's someone's expense at,
1:28:22
SPEAKER_00: Oh gosh,
1:28:22
SPEAKER_00: well they move their lips when they read like that.
1:28:24
SPEAKER_00: So they're not good.
1:28:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, Oh, okay.
1:28:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, cause reading and writing, it's weird.
1:28:29
SPEAKER_00: It's a very physical thing for me.
1:28:31
SPEAKER_00: I think you can see it on the page.
1:28:32
SPEAKER_00: It's very, very physical.
1:28:34
SPEAKER_00: So even when, um, and obviously it's very intellectual.
1:28:36
SPEAKER_00: So even when I'm sitting and writing,
1:28:38
SPEAKER_00: I'm obviously,
1:28:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm,
1:28:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm,
1:28:39
SPEAKER_00: my mind is I'm doing something very,
1:28:41
SPEAKER_00: very active.
1:28:42
SPEAKER_00: Um,
1:28:44
SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to go back to your question.
1:28:47
SPEAKER_00: I do read out loud to myself.
1:28:48
SPEAKER_00: I do read passages to my wife as I'm working on it.
1:28:51
SPEAKER_00: Not all the time, but little bits, especially if I do something I'm especially proud of.
1:28:56
SPEAKER_00: I think the bit where Kleist is talking about bonfire night, I'm especially proud of.
1:29:00
SPEAKER_00: And the one guy that reads his,
1:29:02
SPEAKER_00: Horrible shit and then hangs himself.
1:29:05
SPEAKER_00: I love that bit.
1:29:06
SPEAKER_00: I love her bit about her husband and falling off the Alps when he's trying to see
1:29:10
SPEAKER_00: if they're rising or falling.
1:29:12
SPEAKER_00: There's particular parts I remember writing and reading to my wife.
1:29:15
SPEAKER_00: But reading out loud when it's done, I think is hugely important.
1:29:19
SPEAKER_00: And that's how you can gauge if it works or not.
1:29:22
SPEAKER_00: There's other authors I've heard that say,
1:29:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:29:24
SPEAKER_00: it's not done until they've kind of read it out loud to themselves.
1:29:27
SPEAKER_00: So that is a huge part of it, because like I said, it's as intellectual as it feels.
1:29:31
SPEAKER_00: A lot of it is very intuitive and a lot of it is, you know, it's art.
1:29:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm not I'm not doing a study of the economics of the, you know, of the Russian Republic.
1:29:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm just trying to make something that's very, very I really do think of in terms of painting.
1:29:47
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not an artist in any sense.
1:29:48
SPEAKER_00: But like painting, I want a little blue here.
1:29:50
SPEAKER_00: I want a little green there.
1:29:52
SPEAKER_00: And that even comes into the issue of repetition and things like that.
1:29:57
SPEAKER_00: And back to what you asked,
1:29:58
SPEAKER_00: Trevor,
1:29:59
SPEAKER_00: I try to,
1:30:01
SPEAKER_00: and also this goes to what I was saying with digression,
1:30:04
SPEAKER_00: and then I'll stop talking,
1:30:06
SPEAKER_00: is digression to me is also very natural in that I start to tell something,
1:30:11
SPEAKER_00: and then I'm like,
1:30:11
SPEAKER_00: oh,
1:30:12
SPEAKER_00: like when he's talking about the coffee manual that he got with the espresso machine,
1:30:16
SPEAKER_00: I start to talk about a real espresso machine that exists in Italy,
1:30:20
SPEAKER_00: and then I look it up,
1:30:21
SPEAKER_00: I'm like,
1:30:21
SPEAKER_00: okay,
1:30:22
SPEAKER_00: and as I'm writing,
1:30:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm like,
1:30:23
SPEAKER_00: I start to digress naturally.
1:30:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going, let's talk about the manual, about the manual.
1:30:27
SPEAKER_00: And suddenly I have two pages of absolute digression about the manual and I've made
1:30:32
SPEAKER_00: it fun,
1:30:33
SPEAKER_00: I think,
1:30:33
SPEAKER_00: and entertaining.
1:30:34
SPEAKER_00: And he talks about a fictional Italian actor that endorsed it.
1:30:37
SPEAKER_00: And I've created this little mini kind of world in a digression.
1:30:41
SPEAKER_00: And then I can get back to the other digression, the main digression, not the side digression.
1:30:46
SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of how my mind works.
1:30:47
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I really think of writing a lot of it as like improvisation.
1:30:51
SPEAKER_00: And there's days when you hit the wall, you're like, I can't really, what I invented is not very good.
1:30:55
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't ring true or whatever.
1:30:58
SPEAKER_03: Well,
1:30:58
SPEAKER_03: and to maybe bring it back to beyond just the how do you do this in the craft and such,
1:31:04
SPEAKER_03: which I find fascinating.
1:31:05
SPEAKER_03: I'd love to talk all day about that kind of stuff, too.
1:31:09
SPEAKER_03: But there is something that this is additive to the book and to the humanity of this character.
1:31:15
SPEAKER_03: um that you can see his brain spinning you can see his agitated state of mind yes
1:31:22
SPEAKER_03: you can see what animates it you can see what he tries to avoid and you can see
1:31:28
SPEAKER_03: these digressions as being ways to get away from something and then things that
1:31:34
SPEAKER_03: pull him back i mean you it it's it's just again so powerfully done thank you and
1:31:43
SPEAKER_03: and it
1:31:48
SPEAKER_03: I've read a lot of other books that kind of have these digressions and such too.
1:31:52
SPEAKER_03: And a lot of them can get a little bit tedious or boring or whatever.
1:31:56
SPEAKER_03: And it just didn't for me.
1:31:58
SPEAKER_03: I'll let you know that.
1:31:59
SPEAKER_03: It always seemed additive.
1:32:02
SPEAKER_03: It always seemed fun.
1:32:03
SPEAKER_03: I was always pulled along.
1:32:06
SPEAKER_03: And even when it wasn't fun, it felt invigorating to be alive and to be thinking about these things.
1:32:11
SPEAKER_03: And so, you know, again, just well done.
1:32:13
SPEAKER_03: However, that means so much.
1:32:15
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:32:15
SPEAKER_00: Because that is my fear.
1:32:16
SPEAKER_00: Like after St.
1:32:17
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian's Abyss, which in my mind, I know everyone, there's bigger writers that sell
1:32:21
SPEAKER_00: tens of thousands of books,
1:32:22
SPEAKER_00: but for what I'm trying to do,
1:32:24
SPEAKER_00: it was very successful and I'm so proud of it,
1:32:27
SPEAKER_00: is I was worried that this might be a little bit of a wall because of the dense text.
1:32:31
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to be like, yeah, but it's very inviting.
1:32:33
SPEAKER_00: It's very, I don't want to even say conversational, but it's very accessible.
1:32:37
SPEAKER_00: And the other thing I'll just say about the rants is that like when he's ranting
1:32:41
SPEAKER_00: about Russian translations in his class,
1:32:43
SPEAKER_00: He's not talking about that.
1:32:44
SPEAKER_00: You can tell how agitated and frustrated he was because he just wants to be away
1:32:50
SPEAKER_00: from the students at his desk with a cup of coffee working on his Montaigne book.
1:32:53
SPEAKER_00: So even when he's talking about really, really intellectual things, that's not what he's talking about.
1:32:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:32:58
SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much, Trevor.
1:33:01
SPEAKER_01: And you talked about, you know, the connection with art, the splash of green here, splash of blue there.
1:33:05
SPEAKER_01: But I also think,
1:33:06
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:33:07
SPEAKER_01: the repetition and the building of some of these loops that you use going back to music.
1:33:13
SPEAKER_01: I feel like there's a real connection there because I'm thinking of like,
1:33:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a huge electronic dance music person.
1:33:19
SPEAKER_01: Bjork, you know, she wrote that song Hyper Ballad.
1:33:21
SPEAKER_01: And at the beginning, it has these...
1:33:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:33:25
SPEAKER_01: lines and things that repeat,
1:33:26
SPEAKER_01: but throughout the whole song,
1:33:28
SPEAKER_01: there's like each verse it'll build,
1:33:30
SPEAKER_01: it'll add new layers.
1:33:31
SPEAKER_01: And I feel like there's a connection there with like this whole idea.
1:33:34
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you did it on purpose,
1:33:35
SPEAKER_01: but I think with like music and in particular,
1:33:38
SPEAKER_01: some of those electronic songs where as it goes,
1:33:40
SPEAKER_01: it starts to ramp.
1:33:41
SPEAKER_01: Marcel would be so proud right now.
1:33:44
SPEAKER_00: No, it's so true.
1:33:44
SPEAKER_00: You know what?
1:33:45
SPEAKER_00: I really,
1:33:45
SPEAKER_00: in a way,
1:33:46
SPEAKER_00: maybe I thought of that passingly,
1:33:47
SPEAKER_00: but that's such a good point is that the story gathers effects and details and
1:33:52
SPEAKER_00: riffs as it goes along.
1:33:53
SPEAKER_00: And that's what a really good nine-minute house track does.
1:33:56
SPEAKER_00: It starts very simple,
1:33:58
SPEAKER_00: maybe just a drum machine,
1:33:59
SPEAKER_00: and then there's a cymbal,
1:34:00
SPEAKER_00: then there's a hand clap,
1:34:01
SPEAKER_00: and by the end of the nine minutes,
1:34:02
SPEAKER_00: you've got all these things.
1:34:03
SPEAKER_00: So that's a great, great parallel, a great metaphor.
1:34:08
SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
1:34:09
SPEAKER_00: And that wasn't actually intentional, but I can see that they're kind of parallel.
1:34:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, the other thing I wanted to say, and I know I'm yapping, but is about Matthias and art and compass.
1:34:18
SPEAKER_00: The reason that book is,
1:34:19
SPEAKER_00: is also a big influence is because he writes in that book a ton about classical music,
1:34:25
SPEAKER_00: which doesn't interest me a lot,
1:34:27
SPEAKER_00: but what it taught me is that in other books have taught me is.
1:34:30
SPEAKER_00: The reader doesn't have to love that topic as long as they love the language.
1:34:34
SPEAKER_00: So I didn't like you liking or dislike,
1:34:37
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:34:37
SPEAKER_00: being indifferent to electronic music wouldn't hinge if,
1:34:41
SPEAKER_00: if the writing is good and it carries you,
1:34:43
SPEAKER_00: it,
1:34:43
SPEAKER_00: then it won't matter.
1:34:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, that's what I was hoping.
1:34:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:34:46
SPEAKER_03: So, Oh, and you succeed.
1:34:48
SPEAKER_03: You know, Paul and I have talked about on another episode,
1:34:52
SPEAKER_03: The things that we're just naturally attracted to that are going to,
1:34:55
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:34:55
SPEAKER_03: sometimes even bad writing can make us still be intrigued by it or enjoy it.
1:35:00
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
1:35:01
SPEAKER_03: Our affinities and compass for me.
1:35:05
SPEAKER_03: I love classical music and I love just being in that world.
1:35:08
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:35:09
SPEAKER_03: I,
1:35:09
SPEAKER_03: I bet again,
1:35:10
SPEAKER_03: I kind of mentioned I was maybe a little wary about lesser ruins because it's contemporary.
1:35:14
SPEAKER_03: And then it, you know, it talks about his son who's into electronic dance music and such.
1:35:19
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, well, that's not, that's, that's not one of my affinities.
1:35:23
SPEAKER_03: Right.
1:35:23
SPEAKER_03: But,
1:35:25
SPEAKER_03: It was intriguing.
1:35:26
SPEAKER_03: It had me looking and listening to these songs because, yeah, I just loved the enthusiasm.
1:35:31
SPEAKER_03: I loved the language that presented it.
1:35:34
SPEAKER_03: So, yes, you succeeded.
1:35:36
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
1:35:37
SPEAKER_00: And, of course, Compass is one night in a man with insomnia who's sick or thinks he has a bad diagnosis.
1:35:43
SPEAKER_00: And this is a day or so.
1:35:44
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how long Lesser Ruins is, but it's the same thing.
1:35:47
SPEAKER_00: It's a person not going anywhere, and yet his mind is going everywhere.
1:35:51
SPEAKER_03: So, yeah.
1:35:52
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:35:53
SPEAKER_03: Well, Mark, you've been very generous with your time with us.
1:35:56
SPEAKER_03: It's such a pleasure.
1:35:58
SPEAKER_03: It's such an absolute pleasure.
1:35:59
SPEAKER_00: I will.
1:36:00
SPEAKER_00: I will.
1:36:00
SPEAKER_00: And I appreciate your enthusiasm and your friendship and just what you bring to the
1:36:04
SPEAKER_00: to the landscape of writing and literature and people that are into books.
1:36:09
SPEAKER_00: You guys are not to be cheesy, but just an absolute force for good and inspiring.
1:36:13
SPEAKER_00: And I appreciate that.
1:36:15
SPEAKER_00: And so do many, many listeners.
1:36:17
SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
1:36:18
SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you.
1:36:19
SPEAKER_03: And good luck.
1:36:20
SPEAKER_03: Again, you've got these events coming up.
1:36:23
SPEAKER_03: Beyond leaving for three months to do something just so exciting, you've got your book launch.
1:36:30
SPEAKER_03: And congratulations, but also good luck with all the events that you'll be hosting.
1:36:35
SPEAKER_03: Again, thanks for giving us some of this time.
1:36:37
SPEAKER_03: It's my pleasure.
1:36:38
SPEAKER_03: Because it's got to be busy and sometimes maybe even a little bit exhausting.
1:36:45
SPEAKER_03: I found today's conversation delightful and I, and I felt your enthusiasm, Mark.
1:36:49
SPEAKER_03: So thank you.
1:36:50
SPEAKER_03: If you had to fake it, you did a fantastic job.
1:36:52
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:36:53
SPEAKER_00: And what I'll just say is that, you know, like I would look up October months ago.
1:36:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh my, when I knew I was going to Germany, like, okay, the book comes out a book event here.
1:37:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm flying to Houston where I haven't been like eight and a half coming back
1:37:05
SPEAKER_00: packing three days later,
1:37:06
SPEAKER_00: leaving,
1:37:06
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:37:07
SPEAKER_00: my,
1:37:07
SPEAKER_00: my wife to go to Berlin.
1:37:08
SPEAKER_00: Um,
1:37:09
SPEAKER_00: um she's joining me for like like 10 days or two weeks in the holiday so i didn't
1:37:12
SPEAKER_00: get to see her but um but yet all the time i've spent writing this it's it's to be
1:37:17
SPEAKER_00: able to have these moments and enjoy it so this is the fun stuff yeah so no this is
1:37:21
SPEAKER_00: this is not uh put i'm not put upon at all i'm so glad you're getting so much
1:37:25
SPEAKER_01: recognition it's well deserved we've been huge fans for a long time and i know it's
1:37:29
SPEAKER_01: been building but i feel like right now is that i'm seeing you everywhere so i'm
1:37:33
SPEAKER_01: happy to see the zeitgeist finally caught up with you and i just enjoy it and it's
1:37:37
SPEAKER_01: well deserved
1:37:38
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:37:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:37:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:37:39
SPEAKER_00: last thing I keep saying that,
1:37:40
SPEAKER_00: but that the Becker Rothfield piece on the book was like,
1:37:45
SPEAKER_00: wow,
1:37:45
SPEAKER_00: I was so honored and flattered because she's a really good critic.
1:37:48
SPEAKER_00: I've read her book of essays and she wrote about the new one, but she incorporated all three books.
1:37:55
SPEAKER_00: And she kind of said what I say to my wife begrudgingly sometimes, like,
1:37:59
SPEAKER_00: I feel like I've kind of invented a color.
1:38:01
SPEAKER_00: Not in an arrogant way, but... And I stole this from The Edge.
1:38:06
SPEAKER_00: Because The Edge... No, from Bono.
1:38:08
SPEAKER_00: Bono said years ago, you know, The Edge invented a color.
1:38:11
SPEAKER_00: With his guitar, you hear that first drum, you're like, oh, that's The Edge.
1:38:14
SPEAKER_00: And you hear Radiohead steal it and Coldplay steal it.
1:38:17
SPEAKER_00: You might not like the color.
1:38:18
SPEAKER_00: You may hate it.
1:38:19
SPEAKER_00: But The Edge, inevitably, in the tapestry of music, kind of did a little thing.
1:38:22
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I feel like I'm kind of doing that with American.
1:38:25
SPEAKER_00: I don't think...
1:38:25
SPEAKER_00: And then Becker wrote and goes, you know, he's doing something that really no one else is kind of doing.
1:38:29
SPEAKER_00: I think Adam Ulrich-Sacks is doing some other writers are doing it, but we're doing it in our own way.
1:38:34
SPEAKER_00: It's not to say I'm better or worse.
1:38:35
SPEAKER_00: But anyways, that that essay review was really, really fulfilling.
1:38:42
SPEAKER_00: I was really great.
1:38:43
SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah.
1:38:44
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:38:46
SPEAKER_03: All right, well, I think my dog was barking because my book came, Melville, Rodrigo Frison book.
1:38:53
SPEAKER_00: Nice, auspicious.
1:38:55
SPEAKER_03: I've also got Ada here.
1:38:56
SPEAKER_03: So again, to go celebrate Paul's birthday.
1:38:59
SPEAKER_00: Yes, happy birthday, Paul.
1:39:01
SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
1:39:02
SPEAKER_01: You guys, if you go read and drink some coffee, you'll be celebrating along with me.
1:39:06
SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
1:39:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that is the way to do it.
1:39:08
SPEAKER_00: No, have a great birthday.
1:39:09
SPEAKER_00: And Trevor, enjoy.
1:39:10
SPEAKER_00: And both of you enjoy the books.
1:39:12
SPEAKER_00: And thanks again for everything.
1:39:15
SPEAKER_03: Yes, thank you.
1:39:16
SPEAKER_03: Everyone, we'll be back here in a couple of weeks.
1:39:18
SPEAKER_03: We mentioned last time we did our podcast on essays that we couldn't finish.
1:39:23
SPEAKER_03: We had so much to say.
1:39:24
SPEAKER_03: Too many digressions.
1:39:25
SPEAKER_03: With our next one.
1:39:28
SPEAKER_03: Too much about Montaigne.
1:39:29
SPEAKER_03: Paul just kept on going on and on and on about Montaigne.
1:39:34
SPEAKER_03: All right.
1:39:34
SPEAKER_03: Thanks, everyone.
1:39:35
SPEAKER_03: We'll see you soon.
1:39:36
SPEAKER_03: Bye-bye.
1:39:38
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening to this episode of the MOOCs and the Gripes podcast.
1:39:42
SPEAKER_01: You can follow the MOOCs and the Gripes and get show notes and book and film
1:39:45
SPEAKER_01: reviews at moocsandgripes.com.
1:39:48
SPEAKER_01: On Twitter, you can find Trevor at MOOCs and Paul at Bibliopal.
1:39:53
SPEAKER_01: You can also get information about future shows on our Patreon.
1:39:57
SPEAKER_01: If you'd like to donate to the show,
1:39:59
SPEAKER_01: anything and everything,
1:40:00
SPEAKER_01: even a dollar a month,
1:40:01
SPEAKER_01: helps and is deeply appreciated.
1:40:03
SPEAKER_01: You can become a patron at patreon.com slash MOOCs.
1:40:07
SPEAKER_01: Until next time.