n+1 Podcast

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode34a.mp3 On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Jenny Zhang reads her short story “Why Were They Throwing Bricks?” featured in Issue 28. The story is excerpted from her new story collection Sour Heart. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Dinosaur L, Laurel Halo, and Poppies Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (102.6 MB) An interview with Jenny Zhang n+1 coeditor Dayna Tortorici interviewed Jenny Zhang about “Why Were They Throwing Bricks?” Their conversation is below. Dayna Tortorici: The grandmother’s voice opens the story and carries it throughout. Where did this voice come from? Jenny Zhang: When I was in middle school we did a unit on “Asia,” which was really a unit on China, and every time my teacher made some kind of pronouncement on what Chinese people are like she turned to me and said, “Isn’t that true?” Well, I had no idea if what she was saying was true for 1.2 billion Chinese people. My sample size was much smaller. When we learned about filial piety and the treatment of women in China, she said, “Is it true? The women in your family are forced to be subservient to the men in your family?” I burst out laughing. “Hellll no,” I said. “It’s the total opposite.” I struggled to apply the concepts of patriarchy and sexism to the women I grew up with. As I got older, I recognized that the ways they exerted power and dominance were responding to limits I did not see. My grandmother lived with my family in America on and off. She had a distinctive way of talking because she was partially deaf and had learned to speak louder, more insistently, as a result. I suspected her hearing problems were often employed selectively, strategically—she literally heard what she wanted to. The grandmother in the story ends up being a different person from my grandmother, but I started with this old woman who speaks without hearing. She refuses to be a victim and takes up space—two things feminists historically have encouraged, but sometimes the praxis ends up more annoying than the ideology. DT: You depict the push-pull of repulsion and tenderness in intimate familial relationships so well—here between Stacey and her brother, and both of them and their nainai. Is that a dynamic you think a lot about? What draws you to it? JZ: I’m really drawn to how in close relationships it’s easy to swing in either direction. You know that feeling of spending days convincing yourself that you despise someone, and at the end of it you’re left with this strange affection for them? To think intensely about why you want to pull away from someone is a kind of intimacy. Stacey initially finds her grandmother repulsive, needy, too obvious in her attempts to get close, but after a while, she gives in. It feels good to be so intensely the object of someone’s else focus—it feels almost like true love. Because the grandmother never gets to stay long in America, Stacey is able to emancipate herself from her. Ironically, when her brother Allen is born, she re-enacts that codependency with him. Like her grandmother, she enjoys the feeling of someone needing her, relying on her. At times, Stacey is in competition with her grandmother: she wants to be the one her brother clings to and listens to. She wants her brother to do what she did—break free. Because caretaking is often gendered female, it’s idealized as something that must be done with pure intention, pure goodness. But often we take care of people because we love them and because we want to be needed. Or we think being needed is the only form of love we’ll get. To make other people, especially children, our reason for living is not necessarily good, nor is it some kind of villainous evil. I wanted to shift who we empathize with throughout this story, and make it difficult to hold to a stable judgment of any of these characters. DT: There’s a moment in the story where Stacey sees her grandmother as “laid bare,” no longer a tyrannical, cloying figure but a small woman whose life unfolded within a set of historical circumstances. I have a vague memory of you reading a biography of Mao not too long ago. Did your nonfiction reading influence this character, or how Stacey reflects on her? JZ: I did read a biography of Mao written by his personal physician, and it was very dishy and juicy in the way only biographies of genocidal dictators can be. He was so afraid of dying, and one of the ways he dealt with that was by trying to fuck his way to immortality. The Cultural Revolution was a time of terror, violence, chaos, and death for many, many, many, and the way it is remembered and studied is warped by ideology. On one end, white-supremacist imperialist historians are invested in describing it as one of the worst travesties in modern history, when stupid Chinese people let their country be destroyed by a demonic demagogue. On the other end, Leftist-Marxists cannot afford to see that era as proof of the failure of communism. As a result, there are a lot of stories that don’t quite “fit,” that are lost to the annals of history. One of the stories is that for many women, life changed drastically during the Cultural Revolution, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, and more often, both. The grandmother in this story grew up dirt poor, illiterate, in one of those villages where women have so many children that it makes sense to just name them by order of birth: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, et cetera. After living through two wars and joining the Communist Party, she is given the opportunity to have power—something no woman in her lineage ever had. But at such a great cost. In another world, she would have been diagnosed as having severe PTSD and many other mental health issues, but you know, compassion is for the wealthy . . . In this world, she is an overbearing old woman who thinks her grandchildren will sleep in the same bed as her until they are old enough to vote. As a teen, Stacey only has a vague notion of what her grandmother has been through. To her, her grandmother is simply annoying. The weight of the Cultural Revolution is not something Stacey considers when dealing with her grandmother, and it goes both ways—the grandmother has no idea what Stacey is going through, either. Their worlds are too far apart. A time and place when a young girl could join the army and march through the mountains for months on end is as foreign to Stacey as a time and a place where Chinese people can’t speak Chinese to their grandmother. DT: I love the part where Stacey draws a picture of her grandmother with a dialogue bubble that says, “Kill her! It’s the LAW!!!!!” It’s the perfect expression of how young people perversely wish to make their elders helpless before an outside authority the way they feel helpless before their parents’ authority, even as they don’t actually want anything bad to happen to them. It’s also an example of how first-generation kids who assimilate faster than their parents experience a kind of power imbalance, in which they know “more” about “the world” than the adults in the family do, even though they hardly know anything. How specific to the first-generation experience do you think this is? Do all kids feel this way? JZ: There is a power reversal in how the children of immigrants are often better able to navigate the country they’re living in than their parents. Just being able to speak the language fluently goes a long way toward making a child seem more grown up than their parent. Later in the story, the grandmother has a run-in with a police officer who knocks on the door when she’s alone in the house. It’s very terrifying to be in another country, not speak the language, and have an armed man knock on your door. The grandmother deals with it by hiding a knife behind her back. Her audacity bothers Stacey, perhaps because Stacey is someone who follows the rules. She keeps prodding the grandmother like, “Aren’t you scared? You should be scared.” Something that’s less talked about is how there can be a courage gap between immigrants and their children. Immigrant children may have parents who have crossed land and sea, survived harrowing conditions on the journey over, escaped war, famine, poverty, and hardship to make it in another country. Immigrant parents develop a kind of fortitude that their children do not have to, especially if the parents succeed in making a decent life for themselves and their children. Spontaneity and verve are supposed to be the province of the young, but Stacey, who is young, is far more timid and conservative than her grandmother, who thinks nothing of speaking to a cop with a knife behind her back, or trespassing in someone else’s property and using their things. Just as you said, Stacey, who is often made to feel helpless by her grandmother, perversely fantasizes about what would happen if the authorities intervened. They are the ones who have the power to put her grandmother in her place, so to speak; they can arrest her, lock her up, deport her. But later, when the grandmother does have a run-in with a police officer, Stacey feels pity. She finally sees her grandmother’s confidence is a front. She realizes that sometimes the people who behave the most bombastically are the most vulnerable. DT: What’s your favorite moment in the story, either as a writer or a reader? JZ: I like it when the grandmother re-enacts Allen’s birth and convinces him she gave birth to him, not his mother, and they do this whole bit where he runs underneath her nightgown and then tumbles out and exclaims, “I’m born! I’m born! I’m zero years old.” DT: What was the most difficult part of the story to write or figure out? JZ: This is going to sound disingenuous, but the hardest part was comma placement. I crazily oscillated between wanting to tak

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode33a.mp3 On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Nausicaa Renner interviews Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of the essay “Ghost in the Cloud” from Issue 28, to discuss her spiritual history in relationship with Transhumanism. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Dinosaur L and June West Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (86.8 MB)

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode32.mp3 This episode of the n+1 podcast features an interview with n+1 cofounder Mark Greif about his book Against Everything. Greif spoke with Steve Paulson, of the Wisconsin Public Radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” and the program’s extended interview is being co-released with the n+1 podcast. We thank everyone at WPR for producing this episode. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (106.2 MB)

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode31.mp3 On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Nausicaa Renner and Dan Piepenbring sit down with Paul Grimstad to talk about his essay “Never a Hippie, Always a Freak,” on the life of musician Frank Zappa and the new biographical documentary Eat That Question. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Frank Zappa Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (99.8 MB). Episode Transcript Intro Malcolm Donaldson: Today on the n+1 podcast, associate editor Nausicaa Renner and Dan Piepenbring, editor of The Paris Review Daily, sit down with Paul Grimstad to talk about the life of musician Frank Zappa and his new biographical documentary Eat That Question. Paul’s writing has appeared in print and online in Bookforum, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review Daily. His essay about Frank Zappa, “Never a Hippie, Always a Freak,” appeared recently in n+1. SEGMENT: Paul Grimstad, Dan Piepenbring, and Nausicaa Renner Nausicaa Renner: I think it’s worth pointing out that there are two sides to Zappa’s music career. There is the pop side, with the most famous songs being “Plastic People” and “Valley Girl”— Paul Grimstad: —which he co-wrote with Moon. It’s really her tune, in many ways. Dan Piepenbring: Yeah, and “Bobby Brown (Goes Down).” NR: Right. And that’s the side that people know—his lyrical creativity. PG: Which you described as his disdain for the pop-song form—which, by the way, let’s talk about that. I’m not sure I agree. I do think those songs are dripping with sarcasm, or something like sarcasm, and maybe that is what leads you to think that—“Oh, he clearly hates this medium.” But I’m not sure. I think there’s actually a deep investment in the pop song form as a constraint, and a formal musical commitment to that form. “Hey, what can you do in something as constrained as verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus?” NR: Although in the documentary, he does say that he’s really only doing this side of it in order to fund the other side of it, which is his composing. DP: Which I took issue with. It seemed to me that if his only goal in writing pop music was to fund his more abstruse compositions, couldn’t he have written pop music for other groups, for other acts? He insisted on being the front man in this band for decades, through a bunch of different lineups, and in rehearsing them really hard, and in taking that show on the road, and in framing himself as an entertainer—while at the same time, trying to pose as someone who didn’t really care about that, and who’s just in it for the money. I find it hard to draw the line, when you’re thinking about how much he did or didn’t care about this whole career he had, which is how most people know him. NR: I felt the same way about his politics, not to move too quickly. That he disavowed the political side, he said that he didn’t really want to be seen as a political figure, and yet besides defending the use of obscenity in rock music, even beyond that, he was going to Prague and becoming the new Czechoslovakian— PG: Minister of Culture and Trade! Which I think has a lot to do with Vaclav Havel’s deep love for the Mothers of Invention, which went back to his dissident youth. And the Velvets and the Mothers were bands that stood for a certain kind of radicalism. There’s an interesting distortion in translation there, but Zappa was happy to be paid the compliment of that recognition. DP: It was one of the few instances in that whole documentary where he seemed truly happy. There was an honest acceptance and exuberance that you could see in his face, that in those other interviews was usually— PG: Sour? NR: He arrived in Prague and tearfully, joyfully said, “I want to congratulate you on your new country!” It was a very sweet moment. What do you guys make of this ambivalence between the pop side and the composing side, and the politics and the not-politics? Where is he in there? PG: Let me make one point about music. There’s an interview from 1983, at the Barbican—I think it’s in the film. It’s when he’s in the midst of recording the LSO for some of his more abstruse pieces, his orchestral pieces—which are, by the way, deeply, deeply, influenced in ways that are almost borderline stealing by American modernist composers like Elliott Carter and Edgar Varèse and Conlon Nancarrow, whom he knew quite well and admired a lot. In the midst of being interviewed about what was a rather arduous and torturous experience for him, getting the sounds that he wanted, he’s asked a question by a British journalist not unlike the one that you just asked, which is: What’s it like to switch gears from doing “Valley Girl” to doing a relentlessly difficult piece of modernist orchestral music? And he says that it’s all the same thing—that they’re just different kinds of musical problems. I take him at his word on that. I think he took a kind of almost childlike delight in working with different generic constraints, whether they were songs, whether it was “what can I do in a guitar solo for the next six minutes?” “Here’s the band vamping behind me in some city somewhere in Europe or the US—I’m going to walk out on stage and plug in my guitar with nothing pre-planned and see what I can come up with.“ DP: That said, why couldn’t he just write a 3:30-love song? That’s something he never did in his career, to my knowledge. Every way he approached the pop form was with this sardonic persona very much in place, and he used pop music primarily to satirize, to denigrate. PG: First of all, I would question the view that by not writing a love song, that necessitates disdain for the pop-song form. There’s all sorts of things you can do with song form that aren’t love songs. DP: In his autobiography, he comes down pretty hard on love songs. He says that American consumers and American listeners primarily—or solely—want these boy-girl love songs, and that serves as a constraint for any composer who’s trying to do interesting things with the pop form. Which I think is too hard on the form, and I think that’s excusing what’s to my ears an aversion to sentimentality in his work that— PG: —oh for sure, I totally agree with that— DP: —verges on pathological. I mean, why couldn’t he ever say that he loved someone? Even in the documentary, when his family comes up, he talks about his wife as, “She’s a good boss’s wife.” And then his kids come up, and all he can say is, “Yeah, they like me.” And that just seems so sad to me—that seems like it’s missing out on— PG: I don’t disagree with you, although I think a critique of Zappa’s performance as a father and husband need not lead us to condemn his work as a songwriter. DP: That’s true, except insofar as those failures are evident in certain absences in his body of lyrics. Which makes him a very abrasive figure to me, someone that it’s hard for a listener to form a bond with except as a—I hate to use the word comrade, given his anti-communist leanings— PG: Oh, he’s definitely a comrade. DP: Yeah, as someone that you could get together with, with whom you could throw spitballs at the teacher. NR: What draws you to Zappa, given that it seems like you have a bit of distaste for the aesthetic? DP: At the time it just seemed unlike anything else I’d ever heard. I mean, I was 14 years old. A joke about cunnilingus and rancid Budweiser was going to have me in stitches—why not? And now I just roll my eyes at that stuff. But it was always his technical showmanship and his abilities as a guitarist, and especially as a band leader, that really attracted me. And he could do things in a relatively short span of time in a pop song that I just had not heard other people do before. And rhythmically, the way he played with time signatures—there’s a song that I think you wanted to play tonight, “RNDZL”— PG: I call it “Redunzel,” but I never quite know how to pronounce it. That thing is sick. The opening bars—it’s just astonishing. DP: What’s crazy about it—I always got a laugh out of this as a kid—is that when he counts it off, he just goes, “One, one, one, one.” PG: That’s the moment when the modernism, the Varèse side of things, bleeds into the rock song. And you’re getting rock songs that have timbral colors, that you’re hearing usually in orchestral music. That’s the bit that floors me to this day. It’s almost as if the more leering the sarcasm becomes, and the more condescending the tone of the novelty music or the pop music, the more experimental and formally adventurous the instrumental music becomes. In other words, it’s not like there’s a loss of interest in the purely aesthetic side—that never sets in. In fact, the culminating event of his recorded career was the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt—the leading new music ensemble in Europe—doing The Yellow Shark, their handpicked medley of their favorite Zappa pieces, from the Mothers through the ’90s, and him there (sadly sick by this point) conducting and being involved in rehearsals. So again, if you can say that there’s something inspiring about the idealistic commitment to the work in Zappa, it’s that as an artist he never wavered. Ever. That’s where my sentimentality comes in about Zappa. DP: I agree with all of that. I just think he could have done that without being such a little shit at the same time. PG: Yeah, what was he so angry about? DP: What was he angry about? Why did he insist on putting down the average listener so much? He has this continuing derisive approach— PG: —it’s condescension. I agree, that gets annoying— DP: —to so many of the people who presumably paid to see his shows. As if he was only including this schlocky scatological humor to . . . It is cynical, but I think he clearly also just took too much pleasure in it, and used it, relied on it to such a point that it can’

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode30.mp3 This month on the n+1 podcast, Aaron Braun interviews regular contributor and Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins about his essay in Issue 24, “The Logic of the Beneficiary,” on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Dinosaur L, ESG, Leonard Cohen, Philip Glass Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (65.3 MB). Episode Transcript Intro Malcolm Donaldson: Hi, and welcome to the n+1 podcast. On today’s episode Aaron Braun interviews regular contributor and Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins. Bruce spoke about his most recent piece, titled “The Logic of the Beneficiary,” on Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. Here’s Bruce. SEGMENT: Interview with Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins: So, I’m a supporter of BDS—Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—and I wanted to write a piece supporting BDS. I wanted to write it for n+1—I thought that n+1 was a good place for tormented writing. And maybe being tormented is actually not such a bad thing, given that some of what I feel is tormented. So what I finally wrote was a somewhat tormented piece that starts in favor of BDS and ends in favor of BDS but in the middle goes through a certain period of torment. And I think it was actually good for me, in a sense—I’m grateful to n+1. It was good for me to spend that time in a state of torment and uncertainty, working through some of the more complicated feelings I have, which seemed practically relevant in the sense that on one level, what I was looking for was to try to get at some of the deep and unarticulated sources of resistance among people who I think should know better and do know better. Why don’t people just come out for BDS when it really is consistent with their principles? What is it that’s holding them back? So my sources of torment seem to me a way of getting at some of those sources of resistance in other people—whom I respect a lot and kind of expect to be more on the same side as. Aaron Braun: What was the closest thing you found to a resistance to BDS that didn’t seem to be completely based on some kind of ideological strategy? BR: You know, in a way I wasn’t really interested in the bad motives for resistance. I was only interested in the good motives. And the most obvious one was the argument that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. That is, it seems to me a lot of people that I agree with about almost everything—some of them would hesitate to support BDS on the grounds that—“who are we to boycott anybody?” I mean, look at our history—look at the awful things we did for our nation, how could we possibly hold any other country to a higher standard than that? If there is any boycotting to be done, it should be boycotting of ourselves, which is the position that I associated Chomsky with based on an essay he had written in The Nation. Chomsky has clearly felt this—the idea of people in glass houses—on various occasions in a very intense way. That is, the business of Americans is to be critical of America. There was a certain working through, for me, of that argument. Then the other thing—I’ll get to the point about moral consistency in general—but the other point was definitely part of my own torment and corresponded to something that I found in Todd Gitlin. Todd Gitlin responded to this essay in Tablet, and this was the one thing he liked about the essay. He otherwise thought I was a complete idiot, as people tend to think about people with whom they disagree on issues like this. But the idea is that the passage of time is morally significant, and that it is relevant to the question of the right of return—the third plank of the BDS platform. I do believe, and it was part of the argument of the essay, that the passage of time—alas, uncomfortable as it is to think of—the passage of time really is morally significant, and there is no way one can undo that. That as time goes by, the worst atrocity cannot be dealt with in the same way after ten years or a hundred years or a thousand years. We can all think of examples of things where time has changed our moral reaction. That’s a true thing about this situation, and it’s a true thing even if we know, if we speculate that the Israelis are very self-consciously and deliberately exploiting the passage of time so as to get away with murder, so to speak. So that was very important. And then the third, as I say, is this question of moral consistency. I became interested in Ari Shavit because he seemed to be arguing that in the name of moral consistency, if one is the beneficiary of acts of atrocity in the very specific sense that one’s own life depends on these terrible things, then one is not in the position to repudiate them. That seemed to me very, very important in terms of really deep, unarticulated sources of emotional resistance that would work for people. So again, some of my torment was: okay, so, if that’s moral consistency, then I must be in favor of moral inconsistency, but that doesn’t sound like a very desirable position, and in various other moments in my life I’m not in favor of moral inconsistency! On the contrary, I’m calling out to people to be more morally consistent. So, you see the torment. AB: One of the things I think was so interesting about this piece was that you could see two people—Noam Chomsky on the one hand, Ari Shavit on the other hand—going through these questions about moral consistency. Understanding that all suffering is not equal to a certain degree: it changes, it’s dependent on time and place, and this poses problems of consistency. They could have that same moment and clearly be reflective on that and just come to such radically different—or perhaps not radically, but very different—positions. And I’m wondering what makes that possible, where does the difference lie? BR: It seems to me that it’s not quite so diametrically opposed as one might think, in the sense that in both cases—at least if we associate Chomsky with the people in glass houses argument—there’s a constraint, a limitation, almost a little bit of paralysis that Chomsky feels is imposed on the American, at least to the extent that you have to do the work of criticizing America first. And there’s also a constraint, a much greater constraint on Shavit, who doesn’t really do much criticizing at all. I suppose David Remnick of the New Yorker did say that he was kind of a hero for being as honest about Israeli atrocities as he was, and I don’t know how much credit he deserves. I know that there’s an incredible Israeli novel, published already in 1949, which talked about atrocities committed by the pre-IDF, which has been taught in Israeli high schools. So maybe it’s not quite as new a thing—I’m told it’s been optional on the curriculum of Israeli high schools, but it’s been taught since the ’50s, right, so it’s not as if nobody had been admitting this stuff. AB: And even Benny Morris was considered a revisionist historian. Here was this person airing our dirty laundry, shining a light, saying that no, the war of 1948 didn’t start because the Palestinians conspired with Egypt and Jordan to drive Jews into the sea, there was a plan to expel. And he’s now definitely aligned himself with the more right-wing elements in Israel. So again, being reflective about the element of history doesn’t necessarily lend itself to one political argument versus another. BR: That’s right. It seems to me that, to the extent that this essay struck a nerve—or maybe I’m just flattering myself to think that the world is jumping up and down about this essay—I think there really is something in our historical moment that resonates with this idea: what do you do once you recognize that you don’t speak from a position of moral purity? If you realize that you are stuck forever, inescapably in a situation of moral impurity and then all decisions have to be made on that basis? I think there are a lot of young people, in particular, who would absolutely get that. BR: Let me say something about proximity. That’s another thing that really grabbed me, though it’s something I’d been thinking about anyway because of this book, The Beneficiary, which I’m just in the process of finishing now. There’s a longstanding debate in the theory of humanitarianism about people’s obligations to those who are suffering far away. How much moral significance is there in proximity versus distance? I’ve been trying to think about this, and it turns out to be really, really interesting. There’s a historian of abolition called Thomas Haskell, who argued—and this must have been thirty years ago—that moral obligations are relative to the technology and the social infrastructure that connects the sufferer to the distant spectator, that that changes as the technology and the infrastructure change. This is a crazy idea in a way: that there’s no such thing as an absolute moral obligation to help the person far away, but it depends on how much you want to give up, how far away it is, what you mean by “far away,” what you mean by “proximate.” And of course what he was saying—and it’s become even truer, in the years since the 1980s, when he made this argument—is that a lot of things that seem further away now are in some real way more proximate. Therefore, our obligations to the faraway are also more pressing, and that seems right to me. So it’s certainly a very, very relevant consideration in the case of the people in glass houses argument as applied to Americans and BDS, because nothing could be more proximate to Israel than American policy. Without American money, none of this stuff could have been happening, and if you could shut off that money supply, it would change overnight. So in that sense Chomsky is right—aim by all means at trying to restrict the

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode29.mp3 On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Moira Weigel joins us to discuss her essay “Slow Wars,” about the slow cinema movement in foreign art films, the impact changes in filmmaking and film viewing technology have on the art form, and the nebulous terms of debate in the criticism of slow cinema. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Moira Donegan, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Dinosaur L, Bill Evans Trio, Ravi Shankar Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (79.1 MB). Episode Transcript Intro Eric Wen: Welcome to the n+1 podcast. I’m your host, Eric Wen, and our guest for this episode is Moira Weigel. She has written for n+1 several times and is the author of the new book Labor of Love, which was released in May. Moira was also previously a guest on episode 9 of the n+1 podcast to discuss her essay “Sadomodernism,” about the aesthetics of violence in the films of European directors Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. In this episode, we talk about Moira’s essay “Slow Wars” in Issue 25 about the slow cinema movement in foreign art films. First, I asked Moira to describe slow cinema. SEGMENT: Interview with Moira Weigel Moira Weigel: The phrase “Slow Cinema,” or “cinema of slowness,” is a phrase that seemed to come into circulation—it’s hard to say who exactly used it first, and there’s some debate about that, but it came into circulation around 2003–2004 among curators and film academics. And it was described as this trend where it seemed like more and more films were being made that were not just slow in the sense that they didn’t have action-driven plots, because I think that had been true of art films for some time. Think of Antonioni, think of Chantal Akerman. But these films seemed to be taking it to new extremes, like Belá Tarr’s Sátántangó, the more-than-seven-hour-long film with these many long takes—not all static takes, but these long, long takes. Tsai-Ming-liang would be another example. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a more recent example. It seemed like more and more filmmakers were favoring this aesthetic that was extremely dilated and extended. So that was a term that came into circulation around 2003. I’d say around 2010 in film nerd communities this became more and more a subject of debate, and my piece was about trying to explore the terms of that debate and what they might say about why these changes happened when they did, what they had to do with changes in the material basis of the medium and in the institutions of filmgoing and film watching. EW: So “slow cinema” is basically what it sounds like: it describes films that usually play at foreign film festivals that take slowness to an extreme. In our conversation, we discuss slow cinema in the context of Hollywood and international film festivals, the impact of changes that our filmmaking and film viewing technology have had on the art form, and the nebulous terms of debate in the criticism of slow cinema. We begin by talking about the Jason Bourne film franchise. Here’s Moira. MW: For me the Bourne movies epitomize this mode of filmmaking, and I think for a lot of critics, they’re almost a touchstone or a shorthand for a mode of filmmaking that’s so fast it’s almost unintelligible. I’ve also used the Transformers movies in film class—if you turn off the sound in some of the sequences, and maybe even with sound, it’s almost impossible to tell what is happening. It looks like an abstract art film, and that really interests me because I think—and we can get into this when we talk about the old antitheses or oppositions between low and high art, or what’s easy to comprehend and what demands contemplation—we still usually think of something like the Bourne movies of Transformers 4 on the first side, as mass culture that’s easy, but actually digital editing can get so fast that it’s almost incomprehensible. So that weird blurry boundary is actually really interesting to me. It seems like it’s undoing the distinction or sort of undoing the opposition, which is what I was interested in exploring in this piece. EW: I’m not—I don’t mean to be anti-Hollywood cinema because there’s a lot of Hollywood cinema that I like. But people in the articles and the critics of slow cinema often say that these movies are very slow-paced and boring, but I actually find movies like Jurassic World to be really boring. There are never any real stakes, and you never get any emotional connection with the characters, and you just see these big CGI action pieces happening on screen, but it doesn’t really mean anything. Whereas when I watched, like, A Taste of Cherry, it is this very slow movie—it’s two hours of someone mostly sitting in a car and talking to people in the car. But I actually found that a lot more engaging because there was this real emotional arc to it and . . . I don’t really know if I have a follow-up question. MW: No, I think that’s exactly right. Manohla Dargis is a critic I don’t always agree with, but in her article with A. O. Scott, “In Defense of the Slow and the Boring,” she says, you know, I don’t think Tarkovsky is boring. I think The Hangover Part II is boring. There’s no stakes, it’s just this very predictable dialogue. So again, part of what interests me in these debates around slow cinema is precisely this question of what actually is boring and does it actually map onto slow and fast in the way that we’re used to thinking of it? EW: Right. MW: I think it doesn’t. EW: Well, that was something that I thought about when I was reading some of the criticism. In her article in the New York Times Magazine, Susan Sontag called commercial cinema “lightweight cinema that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention.” But I guess that kind of implies that a good film demands one’s full attention. Do you think that’s true? And what do you think good films ask of their audiences? MW: Well these are big questions. I think I think a good work of art demands our attention. I think that’s what you were just saying; you find Bourne boring because we don’t care and we’re not affected. I think I’m a little bit of an old-fashioned aesthete in the way Sontag is. I think that—again, this is really old-fashioned in a way, but I think good work is moving and it can move you in different ways. It could be that it’s funny, it could be that it’s infuriating, it could be that it’s upsetting, but I think what Sontag is talking about there—and I think I agree with her—is that there’s a certain intensity of experience that is required for a work of art to be art—and definitely to be engaging. I don’t have a lot at stake in flying the flag of art or whether we call things art or not, but I think that intensity that she’s talking about is precisely what you are missing in the Bourne movies that you find boring. You just sort of don’t care. EW: I guess people who go to movies have different expectations of what they hope to get out of moviegoing. So aside from the technology of making a film—capturing moving images on a camera and then presenting them on some kind of screen—do you think that commercial cinema and slow cinema have much in common as art forms? MW: I think there are almost two questions embedded in that question. One is about audience and reception, and one is about production—if anything in the aesthetics of the film are similar. I’m on this book tour for this book about dating, and I’ve been getting asked about dates a lot, and a boy whom I ended up dating for years once took me on a first date to see 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Do you remember that film? EW: I don’t, no. MW: It’s this extremely bleak neorealist film about someone getting an illegal abortion in communist Romania. The abortionist demands that this woman and her friend both have sex with him in this gross hotel room to get this abortion. It’s horrifying. That was the movie about which my sweet economist boyfriend was like, “Oh, I want to impress her! She’s into film! I’ll take her to this art film!” My point is that movies can serve all sorts of functions. It is no way a romantic movie—you would never associate the content of that movie with romance. But socially the function of that movie was that this person who is not a film person was showing his curiosity about film, and I went, so . . . why am I saying all this? In terms of how different audiences go to different movies for different reasons, I think it’s often hard to map that in a one-to-one way onto what the aesthetics of the film are actually like. And in terms of content, I was thinking less about movies and more about video games, which I’ve been thinking about more. I make this joke in the piece, about how my husband—who I threw under the bus with this—got really obsessed with this video game called Euro Truck Simulator, which is literally this real-time game of pretending to drive a truck around Europe. And I was thinking that there is something so perverse in the contemporary economy that upper-middle class people would want to pay money to impersonate a manual laborer doing this really boring job and would find it therapeutic. But it was funny to me because he just happened to be playing this game obsessively while I was writing this piece, so I was like, “How is A Taste of Cherry different from Euro Truck Simulator 2?” A Taste of Cherry wasn’t shot in digital, so let’s take Kiarostami’s movie Ten, which is more recent. These are slow things that use digital imagery, and again the storage medium is really important because part of the thing with these long, long, long-take films is that it becomes a lot easier with a digital camera, and they move incredibly slowly. But one of them we would never consider high art and with one of them, we think its slowness makes it high art. There’s a reality show where it’s like real-time footag

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode28.mp3 On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Kristin Dombek, n+1 Senior Writer, Help Desk columnist, and author of The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism answers your questions about narcissism and selfishness. She’s joined by coeditor Dayna Tortorici. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, Dayna Tortorici, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson, Frances Harlow Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Frances Harlow, Emily Lyver, Dayna Tortorici, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Dinosaur L Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (76.7 MB). Episode Transcript Intro Dayna Tortorici: Welcome to the n+1 podcast. I’m Dayna Tortorici, coeditor of n+1, and on this episode, Senior Writer Kristin Dombek offers the latest edition of her advice column, The Help Desk. Her first book, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, was published earlier this month, and today she’ll be answering questions that touch on some of the book’s themes. Segment 1: Pure Confidence Dear Help Desk, Last week I read Franny and Zooey for the first time. I loved it. At least until I found out that Joan Didion had dismissed the book as “spurious,” and like “self-help copy,” at which point I realized that that was exactly how I had read it. Explaining why she quit the theater, Franny tells us, “just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.” Didion, for her part, wrote much the same in “On Self-Respect,” arguing that a man with courage could live without reputation. I’m inclined to believe that narcissism, in the sense of excessive self-importance and arrogance, is often just a psychological substitute for what Didion and Franny are getting at: real confidence. So my question for you: how do we build that sort of pure confidence, and how do we distinguish it from its less palatable relatives—self-importance, narcissism, and such? Franny Kristin Dombek: Pure confidence. I love the idea, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to describe how to get that, exactly, but I thought I would read Didion’s condemnation of Franny and Zooey. This is a few years after she’s arrived in New York and has finally gotten used to the idea of meeting Democrats at parties. And then she starts talking about Franny and Zooey. She writes: However brilliantly rendered (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogue (and it is), Franny and Zooey is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle-classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls. And earlier, she accuses Salinger of encouraging his readers to look for Christ in their date to the Yale game. That’s what’s wrong with this book. DT: Oh, burn. KD: Totally. You know, the opinions of the Help Desk don’t necessarily represent n+1, or sometimes even me, but I do think that the Help Desk believes it’s all right to use literature and theory and whatever else we can get as self-help. It’s funny to me that it’s Didion saying this—these days, at least, she’s the essayist whom I most see people kind of using as self-help. And especially those two essays. “On Self-Respect,” and “Goodbye to All That,” about leaving New York. I’ve heard people claim New York is only for the very young and the very rich, or that, you know, you should never stay too long at the fair, and these phrases kind of haunt us. And we live our lives—or in my case, test our lives—against them. Like, no, I’m staying too long at the fair and it’s fine. “On Self-Respect,” which you’re talking about, holds up the standard for a kind of solitary confidence that I’ve always been drawn to, but which bothers me. In the place you quote, she writes The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something that people with courage can do without. And the thing that you’re asking about, pure confidence—I think we have this idea that it has nothing to do with the approval of others. If we could only get to that thing, that solitary internal confidence that doesn’t have anything to do with other people, then we’d just be okay, no matter the situation. So I guess I want to point out that what Salinger actually says at the end of this book—and what Didion insults as looking for Christ in your date to the Yale game—is not that you want to find a confidence that has nothing to do with the audience. He shifts it a little bit. He says, you don’t perform as an actress, or in any way, for yourself. You do it—and he and Franny both agree—you do it for the fat lady, right? DT: That’s right. KD: And they both have these images of the fat lady, which their brother Seymour gave them, and we can deconstruct these images, critique them. For both of them, the fat lady is an obviously poor, obese woman who has flies buzzing around her and listens to the radio all day. But I kind of buy Salinger’s point a little bit, in that the specter of narcissism is just the thing that we should never do. We should never do something just because it’s a performance—because we’re going to get attention for it, because we’re going to get acclaim for it—but this can get in the way of the very simple idea that actually, no, you do things for other people. Salinger is bringing in the Christian idea that you do things to reach out to people who may be suffering. For me, the only way to get to a confidence that works in the world—a confidence that’s neither narcissistic, nor attention-getting, nor this impossible kind of constant, solitary, isolated confidence that Didion recommends and that Franny’s longing for—is by acknowledging that you do things for other people. You get experiences, you interpret those experiences, and you listen to other people’s interpretations, and you have to keep doing that over and over and over again, and that’s the only way it happens. Segment 2: Cowardice Dear Help Desk, You know those voices in your head that tell you to break up, even when everything is going perfectly in a relationship? Well, I’m having a problem understanding how the same choice—i.e. to leave or to stay—can simultaneously be described as cowardice and narcissism. For instance, I choose to leave my girlfriend. Is it fear of commitment (cowardice), or is it that I think I can do better (narcissism)? Or if I choose to stay, is that cowardice? (I’m afraid I’ll be alone if I leave.) Or is it narcissism? (She can’t live without me.) I don’t mean this to be a contrived question. This was my situation, and I never came up with a satisfactory answer. So then here’s the question: in a relationship, if cowardice or narcissism can so easily be confused with the other, how can we take intellectual responsibility for decisions that are essentially emotional? Thanks, Skull-fucked in Schenectady KD: I think this is a good question about the relationship between intellectual responsibility and emotional decisions. But I just want to point out that what you’ve done here, Schenectady, is taken two terms that both mean “you suck” and opposed them to each other, so that in both cases, whichever one you choose, you suck. And I’m curious about why you’re doing that. I was researching this book on narcissism for a couple of years and reading many, many, many self-help sites advising people to run from narcissists. And on these websites, narcissism is always opposed to something that’s its opposite. I’ve never heard it opposed to cowardice before, but it’s a kind of word that’s used to police in a way, right? And the way it’s often used to police is by opposing it to something else—like empathy, or naturalness or whatever. So I was trying to figure out why you picked these words and why you made these combinations: fear of commitment, thinking I can do better, being afraid to be alone, she can’t live without me. They remind me of certain stories that get told on those websites about what men and women do in straight relationships. There’s a story that straight dudes are afraid of commitment, and that they’re using women, right? I think I can do better. One of the things that might be going on here is that there’s a story about—I don’t know if it’s a story about masculinity so much as a story about what dudes do that’s creating these impossible alternatives for you, if that makes sense. And I think this also happens in same-sex relationships. I’ve been in both, but it happens for me in straight relationships, where these stories about gender are very strong and they get invoked whether you like it or not. You end up playing with them—switching roles and kind of shaking them up. You kind of have to—that’s what happens, I think, as you love someone. But in these crucial, vulnerable moments when you’re trying to do something very difficult—like leave, or, commit yourself, or whatever—they arise and they fuck us. So I don’t know. I’m speculating wildly because it’s a brief question, but I wonder if that’s part of what’s going on here. All of your alternatives assume not just that you’re a jerk—that you’re selfish—but that this is a decision that somehow has to do with you in isolation. Isn’t the thing about love that the center of your world shifts, that you start seeing your world not only from your own position but also as the other person sees it? That you’re as dedicated to their growth and their thriving in the world as much as your own, and they do the same fo

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode27.mp3 On this episode of the n+1 podcast, we feature Jonathan Griffin, author of the book On Fire, in conversation with Paper Monument editor Dushko Petrovich. On Fire explores the phenomenon of studio fires and how artists recover in the aftermath. This interview was recorded at an event hosted by Rachel Uffner Gallery and Night Gallery in May 2016. Read an excerpt from On Fire here. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Dinosaur L, Anna Domino, Talking Heads Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (78.5 MB). Episode Transcript Intro Malcolm Donaldson: Hi and welcome to the n+1 podcast. On this episode we feature Jonathan Griffin, Paper Monument contributor and author of the new book On Fire. He was joined by Dushko Petrovich in conversation about his book, which explores the phenomenon of studio fires and how artists recover in the aftermath of such a transformative event. SEGMENT 1: Jonathan Griffin reads from On Fire SEGMENT 2: Interview with Jonathan Griffin Dushko Petrovich: The first question I have is about where the fire, so to speak, came from. Where did the idea come from, and how did it change once you started working on it? Jonathan Griffin: I think the first person I spoke to whose studio burned down was Brendan Fowler. I did a studio visit with him in the months after he’d relocated. His narrative was very much about this awful disaster and how he’d kind of moved forward from it. And at the time it seemed that there was something there because of the nature of his work: he’d long dealt with erasure, or with these representations of destructions, these mise en abymes of destruction upon destruction, represented and broken again. So, I had this feeling that it was weird that a fire should happen to him of all people. And I sat on that, and I met Matthew Chambers, who’d shared the studio. His work is less obviously related to those themes, but he’s obviously still dealing with that as well. And then Brendan was very keen to tell me about all the other people whose studios has burned down. For him the really uncanny, significant one was Christopher Wool. His work at the time was really indebted to Wool, and he had the book Incident on 9th Street—a collection of documentary photographs of his studio fire for insurance purposes that Wool then published as a book. So Wool was already thinking about the aestheticization of this event—it was an uncanny event for him. And it seemed like there might be a kind of genealogy here. A year or two passed, and I got to know the artist Anthony Pearson pretty well—my friendship and professional relationship with him was very much based on studio visits. In Los Angeles—I can’t speak for New York, but compared to London, the studio visit in LA has a very different kind of status, and it’s easy and pleasurable to go and spend an afternoon shooting the shit in somebody’s studio. And it’s not even necessarily about their work, but a place, as studios should be, in an ideal world, where we’re not all frenetically busy and exhausted, a place for— DP: I have no idea what you’re talking about. JG: Exactly. You should come to LA. Anthony in particular, loves to be in his studio and look at his own work—he has this clean studio that he’s set and that he installed carefully. He spent about eight months building out a new studio—the ideal studio. He designed it himself and he’d been talking a lot about it, and the day that he moved the contents of his old studio into this building . . . his assistant drove a U-Haul truck through the roller doors, and they were exhausted, so they went home. And the new electrical—which had been horridly put in by the careless landlord—caught fire. In fact it wasn’t even the landlord’s fault. The guy he’d gotten to do it had used a nail gun to fix electrical conduits to the wall, so the nails had gone through the wires. He showed me this empty lot, and it still had some of the walls, and you could see the ducting. It’s like a forensic scene, with all the charring. DP: That one was particularly tragic—just the fact of moving all your stuff into the new space and . . . JG: Anthony’s a photographer—an analog photographer—but his work is very much about unique prints, so he had this archive of negatives and unique prints, which didn’t take up very much space. It all fit in the back of a van, and it could burn pretty quickly. So after that happened, he stopped working that way and—I don’t even know how consciously—he began to make sculptures from Hydrocal and bronze, which is kind of impervious to heat. And he often treated them with this black pigment. I don’t think—and he didn’t claim—that he was making representations of destroyed work, but it was obviously having this effect on his work. So I think that was the point at which I thought, there’s something here. And in the meantime I’d begun to hear about people that it had happened to. So I sort of envisaged an essay—which is what I came to you with—about some of these stories, and I’m so grateful and very glad that I was able to turn it into this short book format because, as I said in the intro, I was able to write a separate chapter on each artist’s story and not to try and shoehorn them into an artificial narrative—which, frankly, maybe doesn’t exist at all. Maybe there’s no sense to this happening. Maybe a coincidence is simply a coincidence. DP: I do like the weird way that it creates this kind of fellowship of loss. I don’t personally know people who’ve had studio fires, but I’ve had the experience of telling people about your book, and very quickly someone says they knew someone or knew someone else, and it brings out the stories. JG: It’s so strange. Every single person I’ve told about the book has had exactly the same response: “Oh, I assume it includes . . . XYZ.” And about 90% of the time it doesn’t. It was never meant to be an authoritative survey—the point is that sadly, it’s this ever-expanding category of tragedy. But when Anthony’s studio burned down, he called Brendan the next day, and though Brendan isn’t someone he knows terribly well, they naturally bonded over the trauma, and they also shared advice over how you practically deal with something like this. The insurance fallout from some of these events is painful beyond belief and drags on for such a long time—it kind of consumed Brendan. Every conversation I had with him was about trying to find this resolution, which was not even about getting money back—it was just not being totally out of pocket. DP: Not to generalize too much, but as a group, artists tend to learn about how to do something right when we need to learn about how to do it, and we count on these oral histories and connections among artists. “What do you do when . . . whatever thing happens?” Your book reminded me of that, and also the weird way in which the supernatural, the random, and the paranoiac bump up against the legalistic, the bureaucratic, the financial. The way that clear, focused questions come into contact with very broad, almost impossible ones—like “should I even be doing this at all?” and “whose fault was this?” and “what did I do?” That must have put you in a pretty difficult position as a writer. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you decided to present these stories once you started getting into them. JG: I found it very difficult to find answers to the questions that the book threw up, as did the artists, but the easiest answers actually came in the form of these supernatural or superstitious intuitions. Like when Anthony says, “How else could I interpret this other than a sign? I was clearly not meant to make this work anymore.” That’s much easier than saying, “should I have had better insurance?” As Brendan points out, even if you have insurance, there are different levels of insurance, and you end up paying so much money that you feel it’s not even worth it. Or you’re paying so little that it doesn’t cover you, and you don’t feel fully protected anyway. DP: The insurance company has always thought more about insurance than the artist has—one of the laws of the universe. On Fire also made me think about the fact that all artists are these solitary—or sometimes two-person—operations. An artist has to function like an organization. One has to archive one’s own work, protect one’s own work, insure one’s own work, find a workspace that works, and so on. And these stories bring out some of the fragility of that arrangement. The loss is felt personally, but I do think that with the artists you’re dealing with, there’s a certain amount of shared loss that happens when we lose a whole archive of someone’s work, or someone’s early work. JG: It’s something you have to come to terms with, especially as a creative individual: unless you’re working collaboratively or as a collective, you’re responsible for your output. For most artists, you want to be the singular author. DP: As a writer, did you feel like, “Oh I’m really glad I don’t make things”? The analogous thing with writing is losing your computer, or losing your hard drive. Did you feel glad that you didn’t have this physical vulnerability? JG: The opposite, weirdly. I don’t think too much about the danger or the fragility of writing. One of the nice things about being a writer is that once you get it out there, it’s kind of impossible to destroy, really, and with the internet, it’s fairly resilient. I totally envy people who make objects, and I used to be an object-making artist myself, which is perhaps why I enjoy being in a room looking at a thing with the person who made it so much. But what did come out of the book is that even artists who have lost their work are not so terrified of losing it all again. What they’re terrified of is

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode26.mp3 Anna Wiener speaks with editor Dayna Tortorici about her essay “Uncanny Valley,” a fictionalized account of her time working in the Silicon Valley tech industry. Anna and Dayna discuss the background of the story and how it became one of the magazine’s most popular pieces. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Dinosaur L, The Smiths, The Clean, Neil Young, Gary Numan, Teengirl Fantasy Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (88.4 MB). Episode Transcript Intro Malcolm Donaldson: Hi, and welcome to the n+1 podcast. In Issue 25, Slow Burn, Anna Wiener contributed her story, “Uncanny Valley,” a fictionalized account of her time working in the San Francisco tech world. Anna talks with Dayna Tortorici, who edited the piece, about how this quickly became one of the magazine’s most popular pieces, and why. SEGMENT: Interview with Anna Wiener Dayna Tortorici: I want to start by telling people about how this article came to be. What’s your story? Anna Wiener: The story that I have been telling people is that I started writing this as a way to entertain you. DT: To entertain me? AW: To entertain you. DT: Me personally? AW: Yeah, you specifically. After you came to San Francisco and stayed with me and sort of saw a little bit of the tech industry and the start-up world . . . I was under the impression, perhaps the delusion, that I was writing these anecdotes for you. But I think you have a different story. DT: I do, I have a little bit of a different story. I do remember coming to stay with you in San Francisco, and I remember going to the coffee shop around the corner and being totally delighted and surprised by the fact that everyone who was working on their laptops seemed to be editing code in public, which I had never seen before. Because in other cities, when people are sitting in coffee shops working on their laptops, they’re . . . I don’t know, writing their novels or their screenplays, or looking at Twitter. And so I came back and told you how amazing it is when things conform to type, because it was all so perfectly clichéd. And then I asked you if you had written about this, and you said you had some stuff stowed away. And then I forgot. And months later, I asked you to review a book about women and feminism and sexism in tech. And to my memory, you said, “Hey, I read the book, it’s fine, but I don’t really have much to say about it. Can I write something else instead?” And then you sent me the first draft of the piece. AW Right. That’s right. DT: Is that correct? AW: That is correct. I guess I’ve deliberately washed that out of my mind. Lean Out is a book of first-person essays by women in tech about working in tech, and it’s very critical. It’s good, but I think I might’ve written to you that it felt like a zine to me. DT: You did. AW: So it didn’t seem like I needed to add anything to that conversation. But I do wonder if writing this piece in the first person dovetails with that project more than I might have acknowledged initially. DT: So then what happened? You sent me the piece. I sent it to Nikil Saval, our coeditor. He was delighted by it because he used to live in San Francisco, and of course when he was writing his book, Cubed, about the history of the office, he visited many tech offices. And he said that the piece was very true to what he had seen. And I think we just . . . ran with it. AW: Sort of. I then rewrote the piece in a fit of anxiety. I wanted to be compassionate to everyone involved. These are people I’m friends with, these are the people that I date—they’re the people I admire and respect. So anything critical felt a little bit like a betrayal. Even though there aren’t that many specific characters in the piece and a lot of them are composites. It’s fiction. So I rewrote it in a much softer tone—it was a little mopier and had longer sections about my failed love life, which was totally off topic. There was some silence after I sent in this second draft, this updated version, which was more about a girl alone in the city than a specific piece about start-up life. My start-up life. And then you sent back a version. You were like, “so I brought this to the editorial meeting, and I cobbled together pieces from both drafts,” and I was like . . . that’s a nightmare. But it turned out a lot better than what I had written. I was really hedging, in your words—trying not to offend anyone, trying not to poke fun without qualifying at length. And so I think you had more of a vision for what this piece was than I did. And for what the value of this kind of writing would be. The value of this kind of writing is not to criticize and apologize. I think you really teased out a voice from the piece. DT: Well, not to be like, “no, you!” but it was all there in the beginning. What surprised me from the jump was that anyone who wanted to write about start-up culture for n+1 would probably be much meaner, would be more likely to paint in broader strokes and just anti-Silicon Valley in the style of, say, Rebecca Solnit. The things you were hedging on were so anodyne. You wrote that all of this was “getting some kids unfathomably rich,” but then you were like, “well, technically they’re not kids, and technically it’s the shareholders who get rich.” And I was like, “Come on. That’s a really good line.” AW: You were like, “that’s exactly what someone drunk and indignant would say.” DT: Yes. AW: Which is true. DT: That’s what I would say. AW: I probably wrote it while drunk, indignantly, so . . . DT: Which is the best way to write. AW: I don’t write drunk. I just write stoned and then email it to myself. DT: Yeah, what’s your . . . This is now a Paris Review interview. AW: What’s my process? DT: What’s your process? AW: Well, Dayna, I portion out six almonds into a small dish for breakfast. DT: Then I take some sour diesel reserve and sprinkle it onto my almonds. AW: And then I meditate for eight hours. DT: I wanted to talk about the response to the piece, because it seemed to catch you by surprise. AW: That’s for sure. I’ve said this before, and I apologize in advance, but I really didn’t think anyone was going to read it. You know, n+1 has a really dedicated niche audience on the east coast—that would be my guess. The fact that anyone was reading it in the first place was surprising to me because I figured that people on the east coast wouldn’t care that much about a narrative about the tech industry in San Francisco, and I didn’t think anyone in the tech industry would ever see it. Which was naive because it was on the internet. DT: People who work on the internet love reading about the internet on the internet. AW: I think that’s true. And also, I think the tech industry is typically represented in one of two ways. The more common one is this snarky, shady, quasi-satirical way that doesn’t really acknowledge that the industry is full of people who, for better or for worse, really believe in what they’re doing. To make fun of it in that way isn’t nuanced. And the other way is through a non-critical tech press, which is boostery—and has to be, because they need access. So for people to read something about the industry that was neither boostery nor mean was interesting, I think. I don’t mean to say that I wrote anything about the tech industry that was definitive. I think there’s a lot of space for people to contribute between those two poles. DT: Can I tell you my theory about why people liked it so much? AW: Yes. DT: This is a completely unsubstantiated theory. AW: That’s the best kind of theory. DT: I think that one of the reasons it hit home for so many people (it’s one of the most widely circulated pieces n+1 has published online, second only, I think, to the Pussy Riot closing statements from 2012) was that you wrote about a group of people who spend a lot of time looking at a screen and thinking very carefully about how they present themselves on the screen and interact with other people on the screen and the entire universe that’s happening inside the screen. So the idea that they are visible to people beyond the realm of the screen catches them off guard. It’s a very simple and sort of naive thing, but just to remember that you’re embodied and that other people can see you in the office with your shot blocks and your baggies of wet meat and the things you say in person “off the record” . . . I think a lot of people didn’t feel seen, in that way. They feel very seen in the register they’re used to presenting themselves in, but not as humans in the workplace. AW: That’s interesting. The embodied workplace can go one of two ways. In a lot of small companies there’s a bit of what we used to call the ass-in-chair metric, where the number of hours you were sitting at your desk was noted. Your physical presence in the office was very important. I’ve spoken to a lot of people—especially a lot of women who have children—who say that it’s hard to work at a small start-up. This is probably true for a lot of different companies, but it’s hard to work at small start-ups because leaving at 5 PM to pick up your kids from after-school programs puts you in a place of scrutiny where people think you’re not doing your job, or you’re not doing your job as well as the people who are in the office until 9 PM. In some ways, you really do need to be seen in these workplaces. But on the flip side of that, I work in a company where more than half of the 550-plus employees don’t report in to the San Francisco office—they don’t work in any office. I work for someone who lives in Amsterdam, and the people on my team are from all over the United States, and I’m in New York right now, and I worked this morning from six until noon. (I don’t think anyone else on my team noticed that that was a sh

/dl/podcast/nplusone_episode25.mp3 This month on the n+1 podcast, we talk about baseball. First, Will Augerot joins us to lay out the statistical qualities of the game. Then, Richard Beck and Cosme Del Rosario-Bell question whether baseball goes beyond group therapy. Hosted by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Moira Donegan, and Eric Wen Audio Engineer: Malcolm Donaldson Produced by Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Moira Donegan, and Eric Wen Graphics by Eric Wen Music from Dinosaur L, Peter Lang, Judee Sill, Kevin Morby, The Feelies, James Chance and the Contortions Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or download the episode (62.1 MB). Episode Transcript Intro Malcolm Donaldson: This is the n+1 podcast. This month, we’re talking about baseball, and we’re talking about talking about baseball. In the first interview, podcast editor Aaron Braun speaks with Will Augerot, our resident Mets expert. And in the other, Aaron sits down with associate editor Richard Beck and business manager Cosme Del Rosario-Bell. Will lays out the statistical qualities of the game, while Cosme and Rich question whether baseball goes beyond group therapy. Here’s Will: SEGMENT 1: Interview with Will Augerot Part 1 Will Augerot: It’s simultaneously a team sport, but each moment and action in a game is discrete, and other than turning a double play, some things like that are more collaborative. But for the most part, each player is on his own. The pitcher is on his own, coordinating with the catcher of course, but the pitcher has to throw his pitch—it’s not the same as a point-guard getting an assist or something like that. And the batter is just there. He’s on his own. Unless someone’s stealing signs and telling him what the pitch is going to be, or something like that. But it’s less of a team sport than other sports, and it’s also more random because you can string together hits. If you get a few hits in a row, maybe you’ll score a few runs, and if you spread the hits out, if you get one hit per inning and you have nine hits in a game, and they’re all singles, you’re not going to score any runs. If you get nine hits in a row, nine singles in a row in the first inning, you’re going to score, you know, seven runs or something like that. And that sort of randomness and ordering of things doesn’t exist in other sports that I can think of off the top of my head. Aaron Braun: No sport does statistics like baseball. WA: Definitely not. And, yeah, statistics are really important. You can look at a box score and recreate the whole game and know everything that happened in that game pretty well, and you can write a play-by-play of the game. You can write a report on the game, just based on looking at the box score, and you couldn’t do that with basketball. SEGMENT 2: Interview with Richard Beck and Cosme Del Rosario-Bell Part 1 AB: How do you feel when the national anthem comes on at a baseball game? Is it something that causes internal dialogue? Richard Beck: Yes. Well, not dialogue—I just, I always dislike it a ton. Most of the time, when I hear the national anthem at a sporting event, it’s a baseball game, because I go to more baseball games than other sporting events, but it has always struck me as a horrible tick of U.S. chauvinism, that the national anthem gets played every time there’s a game played—and not just professional sports but every college sporting event, and I think high school sporting events have the national anthem, too. AB: Yeah. RB: You really have to get down to small children before they’re not doing the national anthem anytime a game gets played. Cosme Del Rosario-Bell: Right. RB: You were talking earlier about standing up vs. not standing up. AB: Yeah, I was saying that my family, historically, has not stood for the pledge of allegiance. CDRB: Pledge of allegiance? AB: Wait, what was I saying before? The national anthem? RB and CDRB: National anthem. AB: See, I can’t even tell the two apart. But that, too. Yeah, anything except for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” because good leftists— CDRB: Great tune. AB: —appreciate and respect Abraham Lincoln. And we would always just go get snacks, except for this one time when my parents weren’t there and I was with my Australian cousin, and he had this strange way that he thought he was being really respectful. The way he explained it was, this is not my country, so I will not stand for it, because it’s not my country. RB: Like not taking communion at a Catholic mass if you’re not a Catholic. AB: Yeah. I mean, I’ve never done it, the communion, but yeah. CDRB: But did he still get yelled at by some Long Island dad? AB: Yeah. And his son was there, too, and it was clearly breeding the next generation of Trump voters. CDRB: The Long Island dad’s son was there. AB: He was definitely showing off for the son— CDRB: Nice. AB: —when he was screaming at us. RB: Did your parents not stand for the national anthem in any context, or was it only at baseball? AB: Yeah, almost in no context. At my sister’s graduation . . . RB: They also sat? AB: Yeah. Ken Burns gave the commencement address. It was so long. RB: Nine parts? AB: Yeah, seriously. RB: Nine hour-long installments? AB: And I was like, seven. I had no time for it. RB: Did your parents get grief for not standing for the national anthem? AB: I think that contrary to the stereotype, they took really strong positions but did everything possible to hide those positions from other people, because they wanted to be able to take those personal stands but still, like, avoid them. RB: But not make a spectacle of them. AB: But not make a spectacle of them. So, yeah, always get snacks during the game, things like that. CDRB: My tactic has been, since I’ve only just recently restarted going to baseball games . . . usually I’m coming from work, and I’m already pretty late, and I like to take notes for the game. I like to do the scorecard, so usually I’m just furiously pretending, or actually putting in the lineups because I didn’t get them in on time. So if somebody looks at me, usually I think—I hope—that they are seeing somebody very dedicated to the sport, just, like, behind. RB: Or just an oblivious nerd. CDRB: Or just an oblivious nerd, yeah. RB: Right. Not a political actor. CDRB: Not a political actor. SEGMENT 3: Interview with Will Augerot Part 2 WA: You can really relive something just by looking at the box score, and it happens less and less, but you’ll see, you know, if you go to Citi Field, you’ll see people with scorecards filling them out, and it’s because they want to remember the game. And when I’m writing about baseball, the most helpful thing for me is baseballreference.com. I can go back and look at any box score of any game that’s happened in the last hundred years, and know what happened, and when and it’s really helpful. I wouldn’t have been able to write those pieces without that resource. And I’m sure that anyone else writing . . . AB: There are all these discrete points of data. This person was batting .260. WA: Yeah. AB: But their slugging percentage was .400, as opposed to like .300. WA: Yeah. AB: And the pitcher was this, and had had a really bad day the night before. Or something like that. WA: Yeah. AB: If it was David Wells, he was probably hung-over. WA: Yeah. AB: Is there a downside to what you were talking about earlier, with being able to, reduce games to numbers? Because usually, when I hear people talking about that, it’s in a negative light. They’ll talk about Statcast, for example. WA: Yeah. AB: And the kind of churning of baseball into numbers and decisions by managers being made based on those numbers. Do you see that as a downside? WA: I can see why someone would think that it’s a downside, that baseball is reducible to numbers in a way that other sports aren’t. But personally I think that the way that it is concrete allows a writer or a fan to create all these fantasies about what’s going on and have fun with it, you know, and I think that that’s why there are all these superstitions around baseball, and all these curses and stuff, because it’s . . . in a weird way, I think that baseball is kind of manageable. AB: So in a way, what you’re saying is that the tendency towards reducing baseball to numbers—which at first glance would, at least to me, seem like a way of controlling, bringing order to something that seems completely random—is perhaps the very thing that kind of fuels superstition and, like, fantasy. WA: I think so, yeah. You know, people who are really into math are really into baseball, and people who are really into writing are really into baseball. AB: Is there something odd about that to you? WA: No. I don’t think so. I think that it might not be the obvious thing, but I do think that it’s somehow transparent and mysterious at the same time. SEGMENT 4: Interview with Richard Beck and Cosme Del Rosario-Bell Part 2 RB: Is singing “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch . . . my recollection is that that did not happen before 9/11. AB: At Yankee stadium, that’s how I remember it. RB: That it didn’t happen before 9/11. AB: Didn’t happen before 9/11. RB: Because now they have—I mean, this is also just because there are so many more sort of special edition caps—but now they have the cap that has the American flag on the side. I forget what holiday that’s for. CDRB: President’s Day, or something. All the holidays. AB: All of them. RB: Well, because now they have a Memorial Day cap, where they do it in camo— CDRB: Right. RB: —which in addition to being obnoxious is just so ugly. It’s unspeakable. AB: Yeah. And they also have the Fourth of July cap, right? CDRB: Oh, where the logo is in stars and stripes? RB: It’s in stars and stripes. And they do a different version of it every year. I don’t think there’s a Labor Day cap. But there’s one that has the flag on the side. AB: If they’re going to do camo caps, they should do the trendier camo that’s like the trees

Most film critics that write today regularly are essentially publicists for Hollywood films. Their criticism is intermingled with this form of entertainment journalism that really has nothing to do with criticism. So a lot of times when you read a film review now, in addition to getting a lot of plot description—which I don’t think is really necessary in film criticism anymore, because everybody knows everything about films before they come out now because of the internet—you get a lot of histories of the people who are in the films or made the films.

"It started as a normal novel about fathers and sons, one of those, so I always knew I wanted to write about fathers and sons. And I thought I could do it in a realist way, tracking a father and a son through a relationship or whatever, and I was completely unable to do that. There were two or three years where essentially, everyday, I would start from scratch. I liked the starting out, I liked having a father and a son in some weird situation, and then I would sort of try to maneuver them in a realist way, and it would fall apart and collapse. After a couple of years of this and feeling crazy, probably under the influence of some other books that had somewhat similar forms, I realized I could just sort of take each of the beginnings and turn them into their own mini story and have the relationship kind of come out of the way the stories interacted with each other."

Sarah Resnick joins the n+1 podcast to talk about heroin, harm reduction, and her essay in issue 24, "H."

This episode of the n+1 podcast goes on the road with Paper Monument co-founding editor Dushko Petrovich to talk about adjunct labor in universities and his new project the Adjunct Commuter Weekly.

On this month's episode of the n+1 podcast, author and contributor Emily Witt joins us to talk about the intersection of technology and contemporary sexuality.

Joining us on this episode of the n+1 podcast is Christine Smallwood, who reads from her short story "Hand Jobs" originally published in issue 22 of n+1, then she stays for a short conversation on writing the story.

On this episode of the n+1 podcast, podcast editor Aaron Braun speaks with Jo Livingstone about intern labor in publishing. Mixed in with their conversation are excerpts from n+1's Labor and Letters Symposium in April discussing the state of labor in publishing today. Nikil Saval moderates the Symposium panel, featuring guests Aaron Braun, Sarah Jaffe, Maxine Phillips, and Maida Rosenstein.

This new episode of the n+1 podcast celebrates the release of City by City. First, co-editor Stephen Squibb talks about the City by City project and why we love writing and reading about cities. Then, Brandon Harris discusses his essay on Bedford-Stuyvesant, the neighborhood's cultural history, and gentrification in Brooklyn.

On this new episode of the n+1 podcast, editor Nikil Saval and contributor Elias Rodriques talk about the Issue 20 Intellectual Situation on privilege and the “check your privilege” discourse. Then, author Alexandra Kleeman joins us to talk about her most recent piece in Issue 21 “The Raw and the Rawer” about fruitarianism and all-fruit diets.