~Post and Q&A by Kester
Make no mistake, I’ve enjoyed a lot of books in my lifetime. I would say that I enjoy the majority of the books I read, and I read a lot of books. But it’s a rare thing to discover an author whose voice moves me, whose thinking challenges me, whose writing taps into a sort of “Yes! That’s true!” that has me using exclamation points (and I don’t use exclamation points; I think they’re lazy). Dostoevsky does this for me. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. David Foster Wallace. Still, it’s not the sort of thing that happens every day.
It happened this past month. One of our marketing folks asked me to read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead and write a blog about it. Sure. Why not? I do this sort of thing all the time.
I wasn’t far into the first essay before I experienced that “supposedly fun” feeling that I hadn’t experienced in years. The more I read, the more convinced I became, this was one of those voices, one of those thinkers, one of those writers. This was someone touching on the things that are true, and drawing from a plethora of varied sources and subjects in order to do it.
When this same marketing person asked if I’d be willing to interview Sullivan as my blog entry, I was equal parts nervous and excited. I checked the tape recorder more times than was necessary. I made sure the battery on my phone was fully charged. I found a quiet room. I forgot to set the speakers in the room to “don’t allow calls” until a co-worker made a storewide page and Sullivan asked, disconcertedly, “Is that you?” All in all, I needn’t have worried. John Jeremiah Sullivan (who quickly had me calling him J.J.) was easy-going and accessible, as transparent in conversation as he is in print. He was one for long pauses (note the …), but it felt less like him crafting the “right” answer and more like him giving the answer some thought. Again, it’s this thoughtfulness that sets his work apart. He may also have been pausing to smoke. He made it clear, at least once, that this is indeed what he was doing. We began with some talk about Austin, how much he was looking forward to his visit, and how much we were looking forward to hosting him. I told him how much I had connected to the book and said:
Kester: The subject matter in Pulphead was so varied; how much of that is your being assigned a specific subject and how much is your choosing a subject?
JJ: It’s almost always a negotiation. I’ve been really lucky to have these editors, over the years, who’ve become actual friends, and so we’re just always talking about pieces and what we’re gonna do. And it’s in the course of those conversations that the ideas and assignments evolve. In a lot of cases, I can’t really tell whose idea it was. It’s all this back and forth until finally the coin drops, and you’re on a plane. It’s often very abrupt…
Kester: Is that a problem, so much variety in an essay collection?
JJ: Not for me. The narrator of those pieces—even though he speaks with an “I”—is such a conscious contrivance. And since I’d always thought of him as a character (not as “me”), that made it natural to think of the book more like a novel, a non-fiction novel. Meaning, it didn’t seem weird, for him to be having disconnected adventures and thoughts, which aren’t necessarily linked at the subject level in the way some people prefer for essay collections to be. In a novel, if you have a character go fight in a war in a foreign land in one chapter, and the next chapter he’s back home working in a nursing home or something, you’re not gonna say, Hey, that’s weird! Or, “Why didn’t you keep him in one place the whole time?” You accept that these were two different things that happened to the same character. That’s how I think about the separate essays. They’re chapters.
K: I loved that about it. It does that sort of “I’m gonna have a conversation about music and then I’m gonna have a conversation about faith and then I’m gonna have a conversation about family,” and all those things are linked, all those things make sense as part of a larger conversation.
JJ: Yes, because it’s one consciousness—the narrator’s—being impinged upon by the different events, and he wants to work them out, to make a whole. He’s trying to draw a map of his imaginative world, which, when you think about it, is the only world we have to exist in. And so he furnishes it out. He explores crannies.
K: You write about Michael Jackson or hanging out with cast members from The Real World or an attending an evangelical Christian music festival. Other writers, tackling similar subjects, tackle them with a kind of, if not condescension, some degree of snarkiness, but yours, while still painfully honest, has a real pathos and earnestness that avoids being ironic and jaded.
JJ: The word “honest” makes me nervous, because I guess I’m hyper-aware of the levers of manipulation that are moving in some of those pieces. But maybe there is a kind of honesty to it…I feel like I’m a pretty heavily ironic writer, in a lot of ways. The irony is pitched differently. I like to surprise the reader with irony, rather than saturate them in it…At the same time there’s something legitimate about what you’re saying, because I do take care to maintain a relationship of trust with the reader, a contract, and to be clear about what kind of truth claim is being made and what kinds aren’t, when it comes to external realities. I’m of the camp that non-fiction loses a lot of its power when it fails to do that, when it gets cute with the facts. It gives away a certain charge that it possesses, and that fiction lacks. It’s not the facts themselves, that are lost. I accept that we can never really reach them, that the very word “fact” is a social agreement. Instead it’s the drama and tension, which, in the greatest non-fiction, comes from the writer’s own straining after factual accuracy. It’s not “the truth” we’re talking about, in other words. It’s the desire to be as factually un-wrong as you can be. And when I feel that a non-fiction writer isn’t possessed by that desire, I get bored. I start feeling like, I’d rather read fiction (because if we’re going to play fast and loose with the facts, why not go all the way?) … Of course, I say all these things knowing full well that there’s a hoax piece in my book (“The Violence of the Lambs,” about a coming war of animals against mankind), but as you’ll have noticed, if you read it, the readers know everything they need to know, by the time the last sentence arrives. It was very important to me, in that piece, to maintaim overall transparency. Otherwise the victory was cheaply won.
K: I have worked, in the past, as a pastor and so the first essay in which you attend the Christian music festival, that…that’s a subculture that it’s incredibly easy to mock. Even as a Christian, I have to be careful not to be dismissive of that subculture, and I appreciated the care you took to not do that, even in sharing your own back story of Christian faith. Transparency is the word you used, and I think it’s the right one. And I think it makes for better writing and it makes for a better story.
JJ: I think what you say about that subculture being easily mockable is very true, and I had to unthink my own reflex to mock it. History helped me, as it always does; by the time I came to write that piece I’d learned about the Great Awakening and I’d learned about Pietism, and I knew that this tradition you and I were a part of—if you were a pastor, I’m sure you experienced studying the Bible, very intensely, in small groups—it was a very ancient thing that was going on there, in a way that transcends the whole crazy, right-wing, born-again whatever. So, you see, it was no stretch to give it dignity. I didn’t have to give it anything. I had come to see real dignity in it, even though I’d left it. I was grateful to it for things it had taught me. Maybe it was good that I waited until these ideas were implicit before I tried to write that piece, because, as you suggest, it could easily be a middle finger.
K: Is it easier to write about something more personal to you or something like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or Guns N’ Roses?
JJ: Well, all writing is really hard for me. My editors could tell you some shameful stories…To the point of producing boils, y’know? But there have been a few things in my life that have come out in a trancelike state. ‘Violence of the Lambs’ was one. Strangely, the One Tree Hill piece was another; I was writing a totally separate essay for Joel Lovell at GQ—I can’t even remember what it was about—and we were sweating the deadline and everything, and suddenly late at night, one night, I started writing this other piece. Stupidly! But 48 hours later, it was done…It’s often dependent on whether I need money; how fast or slow it goes.
K: Maybe “easier” isn’t the question so much as: which do you find yourself more drawn to? Do you prefer to write about something like your apprenticeship to Andrew Lytle or your brother’s near death experience or something more like the Katrina piece or Axl Rose piece?
JJ: That feels unanswerable to me. Not even trying to be coy. The only question I can apply that thinking to is, What I’m gonna do next? And it seems like I’m going in the tendency of…more outward…more travel. I’m really excited about this new gig with the [New York] Times magazine, because I just want to abuse the access that the words “New York Times” can give you, not to abuse it, but to use it for all it’s worth. I want to see some far-out people and places. Get up close to things and events that are of real consequence, then try to see if I can bring something forward from all that essay writing, maybe a different kind of observation.
K: Are there places or people that you have in mind?
JJ: Here’s a perfect example of how it happens in dialogue, because Joel Lovell and I have been going back and forth, the last couple of weeks; “what’s gonna be the next thing?” I’m supposed to go to Rio to write about the slums that are in the hills around that city. There’s a Cuba story…But then there’s also this R.E.M. thing, which would be totally different. So, there you have the two channels in the book, one “pop” and one not.
K: How do you approach the R.E.M. thing?
JJ: I think the idea is to try to say something about why they mattered and, for me, it would be partly a childhood thing, a piece about the 80s. When I was 11 years old, my brother went off to college…y’know, I was still a child and I worshipped him and would listen to whatever he told me to, and that’s what he brought home—that first summer back—Chronic Town and Murmur…Y’know, I would love to just…(sighs deeply) Through no fault of their own except maybe stubbornness, R.E.M. did a pretty good job of making themselves annoying and fairly tedious in the last 10 years of their career—some tasteful people would not say that, but I would. So, this would be the task of the piece, to try to cut through that somehow.
K: Sadly, that’s a widely shared experience; there being a long period of time where they very much mattered, and then there coming a time where a new album from them didn’t mean much at all. I certainly shared that experience. And it was a sort of jarring experience.
JJ: They were a perfect example of “death by technical proficiency.” Once they learned how to make a pop song that would go over huge on the radio, once they figured out that there was a formula for that and started doing it on a level that was high enough to keep them from wanting to shoot themselves, they just started doing it, and did it well (often wonderfully)…but man, the thing that existed before that, the feral thing…I mean, the other day I was listening to 7 Chinese Brothers on headphones, y’know, off of this remastering, and it was like…Jesus, this is the real deal. This came out of Georgia in 1980-whatever. It seemed unthinkable. And I’d like to write about what happened to that, over the course of the next thirty years. Not in a clichéd sense of “selling out.” Just: what happened to it?
K: Speaking of coming out of Georgia; one of the things I wanted to ask you about, as someone who spent half my life in Chicago and the other half in Texas; I’m curious as to whether you think of yourself as more of a northerner or southerner.
JJ: I think of myself as a real deracinated nowhere person and don’t feel much of a regional attachment anywhere, except a sort of doomy, sentimental one toward the South that has to do with family history and stuff. Mostly, it’s my lack of any feeling like that that makes me interested in regionalism. I see it abstractly. I’m looking in through the window at the feast. The Lytle piece is maybe a specimen of that; it’s a southern thing that’s coming from outside.
K: That Lytle piece aches in a really beautiful way.
JJ: It’s sad, isn’t it. A lot of pieces in the book are really melancholy. It’s weird, last night I read the One Tree Hill piece and everybody was laughing, but afterwards at the wine and cheese thing this woman said to me, “That is a strangely melancholy little essay,” and I said, “I totally agree.”
K: Before we go, last week we had Chuck Klosterman in for a signing event and he and I were discussing your work and he said, “He’s so good it sort of bums me out.”
JJ: Are you serious? I never had any idea that Chuck Klosterman even knew who I was. That’s very cool, I have major respect for that dude.
K: I wondered if there was anybody else among current writers that you feel that way about.
JJ: I’m certainly capable of feeling that way about different writers, especially if my own work is going poorly…One person that gives me a kind of envy is David Grann, at the New Yorker. I feel like, if I’d been a better person in my last life, I might have been David Grann. He’s one of the very last people doing that pure, old-fashioned thing that only the New Yorker can do, that story where you think, “this is as finely crafted as great novels I’ve read,” yet you also know it’s been fact-checked to the teeth. And it’s electric.
K: His essay on the Texas death penalty case-
JJ: Oh my God…
K: I was opposed to the death penalty before I read it, but by the time I finished that essay I just about threw the book across the room, I was so angry.
JJ: Very powerful, persuasive stuff. And as I understand, it did have an effect.
K: He’s a great example of what you were saying before about robbing writing of its power by getting fuzzy with the facts, because he never does, and his writing is consistently powerful.
JJ: More powerful. That’s what I was trying to say. Your sense of his urgency, to get as many of the facts as he can and to make the most sense of them that he can…it creates a suspense, because immediately, the dog’s tail goes up… Elif Batuman is somebody else that I would put on that list. I often see her say things I wish I’d figured out how to say. Do you know her stuff at all?
K: I don’t.
JJ: B-A-T-U-M-A-N. The first name is E-L-I-F. She’s a Turkish-American woman. She published a book last year, from the same series that Pulphead is in, about Russian writers; her encounters with and studies of different Russian writers. She also wrote a piece, several years ago, for the magazine N Plus One. It was a review of a Best American Short Stories collection. She got at some problems of contemporary American prose (tonal, technical problems that are indicative of deeper things), and did it with a microscope, in a way that is rare.
K: I love to hear you talk about your own writing and others’ this way. I feel like writing as craft is a thing that people don’t talk about as much anymore, the way you would talk about woodworking as craft.
JJ: Yeah, there is so much craft in it, y’know?…At the same time, it brings you hard up against the distinction between craft and art; craft won’t get you all the way there. In the end, there’s a leap.
With that, the formal interview ended, but the conversation continued. Like two friends that say goodbye and then walk each other to their cars. J.J. and I went on to talk about our kids and our families and being yourself as part of a unit and making compromises without being compromised and how fine a line that can be. He shared some child-rearing wisdom from James Baldwin and then we really ended the interview, as both of us had to go pick up our kids.
Pick up a copy of Pulphead and then come out to the event on the 14th. You won’t be disappointed. You may discover a new voice that sounds something like a kindred spirit.
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