Get Lit with All of It - Patricia Lockwood

do [Music] welcome to all of it we got all of it all of it all of it our guest is secretary madeleine albright brian cranston tank and the bangers barry jenkins cecilia kinan bulger aaron lee carr esperanza spalding gideon glick helen yoyoyemi fab five fred benga akanabe bernay brown tony goldwyn tandy newton welcome to all of it thank you so much for joining us is so fun tomorrow we're here every day 12-2 impromptu concert i love it i love it i was there for the love of it you must tell the truth i'm sure everyone's perspective is unique there's a lot of truth about the pain of being an immigrant but they're jokes we find the funny it's our strength at what point do you think women's healthcare will stop being a political issue when half of congress can get pregnant run out of words but we do what we do we don't have noteboards so we got to trade twos so we straight twos i was just really dope groove and allison was so nice to meet you hey everybody welcome to our march get lit with all of it book club event with patricia lockwood and her novel no one is talking about this if you've been coming to our virtual events we've been doing them for about a past the past year welcome back if you're new to our book club welcome we're so happy to have you let me tell you a little bit about myself i'm allison stewart i host all of it with allison stewart on wnyc live weekdays from 12 to 2. and we love books on our show i always say our show is about music art everything we're kind of culture curious that's how i put it but we do love books and we've had this book club for a little over the year and it's been tremendous amount of fun because not only do we talk to really smart cool authors we also it's kind of more like a book party and we always have music involved in our shows and so tonight we are really excited because john darnell of mountain goats will be joining us performing a couple of songs there's a connection between him and patricia we'll get to that in a little bit but and we also want to tell you to stick around to the very end of the event because we're going to announce our april book and the hint there is nobel prize so stick around for that but first here's the big number 5 319 of you checked out a copy of no one is talking about this courtesy of our partners at the new york public library so let's talk about this book patricia lockwood and the protagonist of no one is talking about this have a few things in common both these women saw their careers take off when something they posted went viral patricia and our protagonist also shared some heartbreaking tragedy losing a niece before her first birthday due to complications of proteus syndrome the two experiences from the backbone of her novel and we are thrilled to have patricia lockwood with us i'm allowed to call you trisha though right yes and that is actually perfect that is just what i want excellent thank you so much for being with us we really appreciate it yes thank you so much for having me and for choosing this book i don't think well maybe i've been chosen for a book club before i was chosen for a friend's family book club and she told me they were reading my book and then she never said anything about it again that was for priest oh i want to know more about that story yeah i'm like there must be more well they knew me when i was in high school so there was definitely a history there and a pro private things were most likely discussed yeah but this is this is a big one this is very exciting to be chosen for this i usually don't start book club interviews with the most obvious question but i'm truly truly curious about the title of the book yes so this is sort of um it was kind of a little bit of a meme it's something that people say a lot on twitter or as i call it in the book the portal there is a lot of times a tweet where someone is trying to point our attention to something that in fact everyone is talking about everybody knows what it is and has been saying a lot about it actually and they'll end the tweet with like no one is talking about this exclamation point um and it's just kind of like a way to point to the importance of what you're talking about it's in the same vein as things like thread and that sort of thing that kind of convention that we've always seen but it felt sometimes these conventions or even these memes do have this this broader meaning um this is this sort of profundity i think and i felt that in this title i called it that for a while and then i tried to change it to people on the sun and we decided that we couldn't do that it was just to i think they really wanted me to go with something that the headline could be everyone is talking about this so it was absolutely not an option that we would change it marketing was like there's no way we're keeping no one is talking about this our narrator she's always the narrator did she ever have a name she did actually and she had a really very specific name it was rachel because when i conceptualized the book very specifically um we were moving apartments and i was hiding from my husband and making him do all the work i was reading a book called mrs caliban by rachel ingles and i sort of just saw the book the beginning of it at least at that time and because i'm not very imaginative i thought well i'm just going to call this lady rachel for now and i remember actually when i read a long section of it at the british museum which is something that also happens in the book at the very end uh when i sent the london review of books the script they were like who's this woman rachel you left a couple instances of this lady's name rachel in here and i was like no no take that out that's it's just we're not calling her that anymore did the other characters have names as well no uh they never did which i think spoke a little bit to kind of a self-centered quality to it you know when you go into the portal you do just become like a a pure eye really um or pure experience i think of of your own narrative and you're just flowing down this space you don't necessarily think about what things or people are called i did have people say they were like the husband doesn't have a name someone walks into the room that person doesn't have a name and it's like yeah you're you're just in the portal that's what you're doing it's like a little ghost coming in and out of the room when you're doing that thing our narrator how much can we trust our narrator in this book i think we can trust her quite a bit actually i think that she's probably um unable to lie maybe in the way that i am unable to lie so there are things in the book that are fictional but i as a person and i envision this for for my narrator as well like if you ask me a direct question i will tell you the absolute truth catholic hand to god and i'll even give you a little extra information that probably you didn't even ask for like it's it's a really really bad trait to have i went into a bar one time with a friend and we uh had forgotten our ideas and we sat down at the bar and he asked us what we wanted and i looked at him and i was like neither of us have our ids you cannot serve us and my friend was like what come on like you have no chill what is wrong with you what is your problem you just that's what i'm like i just offered it up i was like i do not have my id and neither does she like neither of us can have a drink so that's that's kind of the the person we're talking about here so there's the book you know it's interesting a friend of mine i said you have to read this book it's really great and they were reading the first half and i really love this book this is great and then he said to me the second half i just got a tweet this is a text that said the second half when you were writing the book how did you think about putting these two two parts these two very different parts but at the same time they sort of have a similar i mean they have the character the narrator in common but they're very different but they feel right together i guess i'm asking how did you do that yeah no no it's a good question and i think it's because the second half is largely autobiographical much more so than the first half you know they're definitely things with dildos in the first half that aren't true mom if you're watching but the second half that break i experienced it as a rupture in time really uh but there was sort of something i had tuned myself to do when i was writing about the portal which is that i was observing everything like the little downy hairs you know on on like the forehead of the internet really and i was still doing that but it was turned to a real-life situation and then it was actually turned to a person who needed my attention and who needed my care who needed my eye and i felt like it's maybe what i had been developing that eye for so i just really began to compulsively write about my niece when she was born and before that when my sister was pregnant and i told my sister that i was writing about her and i said i i can't stop i feel it as a physical response something i ought to be doing so that i don't lose any of it and maybe that's the thing that was animating the first half of the book too the desire to not lose any of it i didn't where does it go if we don't write it down why does your protagonist spend so much time in the portal aside from the fame what does she get out of it this is this is a good question too and i think for me and and some other people who use the portal in this way i think we get stuck in it um i'm a person who for long periods will experience hyper focus um i stim a lot i'll read for periods of 10 11 hours there's something that neurodivergent people actually experience some of them called inertia which is not just always the inability to start something but the inability to stop something so if i'm doing something a lot of times i cannot stop doing it if that makes any sense and so i think some people with add um you know people who are on the spectrum people who have sort of different uh like cognitive setups i think sometimes just find themselves in this place and not really leaving it but that being said i think it's also set up to um to sort of uh exact this from people who don't have those issues too so it is being set up to turn us into little rats who are going for the dopamine palette um all of these apps are pretty much designed in this way so even if you're not a person like me who you know can read a book for 10 hours and then can read the internet for 10 hours i i think that you can end up doing that stuff too because it's been designed that way i remember interviewing somebody once and they said only silicon valley and drug dealers call the people who call people users for a reason it's really true it's true and now they're all kind of like looking nervously around like was that us like were we the guys who did this like oh for a while you know we were like these guys on on the the white horses riding into town to like reinvent buses and stuff like what you don't want that now that's not something you want no right is that no longer a good thing um but yeah i think i think that's what they were trying to do it was it was designs that would use this product you know as much as possible like as many hours of the day as we could early on in the book the narrator she even questions why she spent so much time in the portal and she says it had something to do she knew with child chained up in the yard her great-grandmother an imaginary invalid had kept her firstborn son chained up to a stake in the front yard so she could always see what he was doing through the window how is that story of abuse and trauma connected to why she spends so much time in the portal online so this is this is autobiographical too um i was told that story as a child and there are other things i think that happen in the first book uh the first half of the book her autistic cousin for instance that she's still seeing with a child's eyes maybe she's not necessarily thinking about them as abuse and she's sort of just presenting them you know as this story i was told when i was a child that i haven't examined more deeply but i just always had that image of my uncle pete who also became a priest which is a very nice little detail um just you know sitting there and he's chained up i think because you know my great-grandmother was worried about what what the world meant to him you know what what what it could represent to him in terms of danger she wanted to be able to see him at all times but it also meant that he watched the world in a different way you know if you were sitting on that patch of grass that had been granted to you it meant also that he learned to watch in a different way let's talk a little bit about your writing style do the fragments come to you fully formed yes basically yes when they're good they come to me fully formed if i find that i'm really really overworking something it probably needs to be chucked out um i think it's a lot like poetry where a good line will arrive in the way that a good joke will and it's just absolutely like that it's it's a physical response it comes out of your mouth almost whole um and it doesn't seem like it could have been written any other way so the ones that that come out that way are usually the ones that stay and the ones that i'm just like sitting there with that lump of play-doh just working and working it while it gets worse and worse and worse those are usually the ones that you have to let them go you know you feel that you're pouring your sweat and your blood into those but it's also like you're also working over them so hard sometimes because they're not working so just let them go just let that ugly thing be what was one that you worked over and you worked over and you just couldn't quite make it work in this particular book well this is funny now i don't think this would work in any book but when i was revising the book i did have first active coronavirus um and then like a little bit of a postcoded period where i was not mentally completely on my game um and i decided in this delirium that i needed to include this anecdote about uh traveling the protagonist traveling with her sister to scotland where they peed together next to rob roy's grave and really nothing else happened so they're peeing together next to rob roy's grave and you know the the narrator's husband you know asked her like why these people came to visit rob roy's grave like why did they bring him flowers lay stones on on his headstone uh like what exactly did rob roy do and the narrator is like he did everything he did it all he was rob roy and i thought at the time that that was the most profound thing that anyone had ever come up with and i weeks i worked on this for weeks and i was obsessed with working in the peeing next to robbery's grave thing and then i was like oh wait i have corona virus so let's not we're just not going to ever talk about that again there are a couple things in there actually there are like two more coronavirus things that are in the book and only i will ever know what they are and i'll take it to my grave with me to my robbery grave fair you shared the rob roy i will not go farther you know obviously as a poet you you love words and even with the fragments not even with the fragments are beautifully put together and clearly you've worked on them and they've even if they've come to you perfectly formed you've figured out what order they should be in what rhythm they should you know who with what they should be paired with um but it's interesting about words and language we uh it says on page 63 why are we all writing like this now because a new kind of connection has to be made and blink synapse little space between was the only way to make it or because and this was more frightening it was the way the portal wrote and then on page 70 was it better to resist the new language where it was stole defanged co-opted consumed was it better to text thanksgiving titties be popping to all your friends on the fourth thursday of november so what was it that you wanted to explore about language it's it's so interesting after hearing you describe really having to work and massage these fragments and then to think about the way you you write about and your narrator thinks about language i think that i think people talk about twitter about the portal as like a jumble of of meaningless fragments thrown together um but i think we experience tremendous meaning in the portal and i think that the meaning comes through that contrast that juxtaposition i think we are experiencing a narrative in there that is supplied by the way those those fragments lie against each other i think it's different for every other person and it's different every time but it is a narrative it is some kind of meaning and i knew all the way back like to when i started that of course i wanted to write about the language that is what we have been doing there that's what we were doing there at the very beginning when twitter was good in 2011 in those days where it seemed like we were building something something together and it was absolutely collaborative and if we were starting to sound a bit like each other it was in a way like we were a collective like we were some sort of comedy team who was all working in tandem and i liked that a lot because i think that's how language happens and i think it's how new language happens and i think at the beginning of all new language there's people talking about how crappy it is basically right or how it isn't it it isn't real it's not the stuff that you can write books out of you know that it's it's not as good as what we had before and i think it is always as good as what we had before because it's what we use to speak to each other so i wanted even in the second half of the book to show that she still thinks in that language that she even like talks to the baby in that language that she wants to read the baby wikipedia um all of these things that make up the new fabric of her life those things are real it is a real language and she can use it to talk to people and i want to remind our viewers that you can put your questions in for patricia so we'll get to them in about the next five ten minutes uh we do we hold our book club pro in the weeks prior to this live event on instagram and we are always putting up questions and having discussions so we asked our listeners whether they thought the protagonist should quit the portal entirely 69 said yes 31 said no so 69 said yes it's the perfect internet number you couldn't have engineered it more beautifully it's the sex number i can't even believe how good that is i mean yeah she should probably leave right it is this very funny thing where people are like do you have the same relationship with twitter as you previously didn't it's like no i don't think anyone has the same relationship with twitter that they previously did but i am you know there now because i'm talking about a book that i've released and it's kind of a thing you have to do um so yeah i think the 69 are probably right on the money i would like to hear more from that 31 because they might be even more online than me let's talk about the second half of the book when we see the protagonist with her sister who's learned the child is grow has this condition known as proteus syndrome which your niece has uh prettysyndrome.org describes it this way protease syndrome is a condition which involves atypical growth of the bones skin and head and can lead to a variety of other symptoms the condition is caused by a genetic mutation in akt1 an important gene that helps to regulate the growth of cells in this book this is based on your real niece lina and you write about her this is for lena who was a belle yes why was that a good description of elena so uh her name is perez elena she's my lane i'm sorry my beautiful girl no you're perfect and it is because uh there was a moment where my sister and i discovered that she responded to music when she was in utero and the first time it ever happened was the it was like the the negulesco overture for the um for the movie how to marry a millionaire and she started really responding to the horns and i thought well there's really something to that so i started playing her all this old um musicals uh soundtracks and she loved the song um if i were a belle from guys and dolls she responded to it she would cycle her legs she would pump her arms and she was experiencing sheer complete sensory excitement the the only way she could experience those things that that kind of feeling is if you brought them to her she wasn't going to you know just start hearing a song out of nowhere on her own we realized at some point that we had to bring her these things like flowers that we had to show them to her uh lay them in her lap really uh and show her the things of the world so yeah and that to me that pure responsiveness it was not just about the song but it was about her that she was a bell just swinging back and forth and ringing and ringing you write about lena lina elena i'm so sorry you're fine you write about lena in the acknowledgments you were not here to teach us but we did learn what did you learn i mean everything there was i write in the book that it was something like the feeling of travel that you were put back in your body again that you were the the slap of your souls on the payment pavement and you were you know the palms of your hands that you were your eyes experiencing these new sights so you were interpreting the world for her so you were seeing all those things again you were seeing the meaning of them and you were thinking about what they meant to you um again she was she was like a flower she was something that that needed air and needed water and and needed love and you represented those things and the education was just bringing them to her and and so you would see them yourself again for the first time we asked our readers if they had heard of proteus syndrome before this novel 86 said they had not heard of it so for many people if this was an introduction was that on your mind and on your radar as you were writing this part of the book very much so and i think that that was the reason too that a lot of that was so factual because i'm not going to make up something you know about a real syndrome that exists that people live with um but yeah so we experienced like a tremendous real world education about it and then there there of course are real world organizations like the proteus foundation who really taught us things and there is a conference that people go to you know most of the people who are living with proteus are our kids and teenagers and when they can and it's not a pandemic you know they get together they meet each other you know they take pictures together and that's something we would have wanted for lena you know and my sister got to go um after elena passed and it was very very meaningful for her it has been very meaningful to turn people to the organization um to to talk about my specific niece and say that you know this is the work that the proteus foundation has been doing and you know like maybe like throw a dollar their way if you enjoyed this or if you felt like this was something that spoke to you because i think you know it's it's like how else do you get the word out i think most people's point of reference has been the movie the elephant man uh because they they believe that he may have suffered uh from proteus syndrome it was beautiful to hear you describe wanting to take your niece out into the world and and the and the protagonist does as well they want to take the child out and have her experience the world but they start to realize the narrator starts to realize the world can be a scary place because people can be horrible in the book it says a teenager on the night time fairy snuck his phone over her shoulder to take a picture of the baby in her special stroller though by that time it seemed baffling she didn't look that different from other babies did she he was taking pictures because of her sweetness her freshness not because he was going to post them right is the internet frightening is the portal frightening for your narrator now as someone who got so much from it and was so devoted to it maybe in that way possibly in that moment but i think what the narrator is experiencing and what i experienced myself was sheer bafflement again because when you speak in terms of education there is also something that is the education of the eye when a doctor tells you about a syndrome when your doctor says you know this is what proteus syndrome is don't look it up what they mean is that you'll you know go to google images and that you will potentially experience a moment of shock because you're registering something that is not what you expect but when you were talking about individuals when you're talking about people you know when you're talking about your own niece the eye is educated she is herself that is how she looks she is beautiful and i think it's so important later that what the narrator realizes too is that it wouldn't frighten her it wouldn't frighten her um you know after the child has gone to put her picture in the portal because then people would see her that that is the sort of continuance of her and that in fact what she wanted at that time just was for people to see her so no i think that she isn't frightened i think that again she sees the portal as a place where people could meet that child what do you think is the biggest piece of knowledge that the narrator learns in the second half of the book uh i think it is just there's a moment where the narrator her husband is calling to tell her about a news story about people um you know enemies shooting a word into someone's brain through radio waves and she's like oh my god like can they do it with any word and he's like yeah any word and she's like maybe something like that is what happened to me that someone just shot the word love into my heart that it is just that word this this this not even just her name but just the word love love love and i thought actually of john um who is going to play for us you know he he has he has that song i sang some of his songs to lena there are these things you know like i i knew john in the portal um i knew his music separately from that and that's something that i brought to her you know i have to bring up humor this is a heart let me take a hard right here uh because there are you know it's a thoughtful book it's an emotional book i got emotional reading that one passage but it's also like snort funny yeah in parts of the book truly it's not funny um do you have to craft the laughs as well or are you a naturally funny person i think probably it's a little bit natural yeah and it's almost too fast actually you're like do you really think about what you say before it comes out of your mouth like if it doesn't come out on the split second almost instantaneously there's a part of pre-study where i talk about this with my mom and i tell her that it's like pun lightning which is what strikes my mom and she suddenly has the perfect pun for a situation it happens that fast it's just like this physical thing a split second thing um and i think that that's even harder to craft you can work poetry into a line but i don't think that you can really work the laugh in that way tricia are you ready for some audience questions i am ready for audience questions yes all right this is from katherine hi i was surprised the dog twins comment went viral do you have theories about why thank you so your narrator this is the tweet it goes viral yeah i like that question because it's a little bit like i don't buy that that went viral um so yeah that's actually never anything that i tweeted i needed something that was plausibly a tweet that could go big and tweets that go big are sometimes things that almost don't mean anything so i was like it needs to almost mean nothing but have that special ring to it uh and of course one of the real jokes of the book is that she becomes famous just on the basis of this single tweet you know it's like she's traveling the world she's going to australia simply because of canada uh be twins i don't know if in real life if i had tweeted it if it would have gone viral in the same way as say me at tweet because it did not have a cat pic attached to it or something like that but i mean that's for the future to decide really we were the ones who were there you might know perhaps that you know that it rings false but maybe people people of the future might not were you surprised when your piece rape joke this is an acclaimed poem essay if anybody hasn't read it you should read it were you surprised when it went viral i don't really know that i had an idea that poems could go viral then this was sort of before you know there's like a time of like instagram and twitter virality for this kind of thing um it might have been one of the earlier examples of that so no i had not thought about that at all um it was very overwhelming and it was also when i was living with my parents in the period depicted in pre-study so i think if you know if it hadn't been in a situation where i already had a lot else to deal with that i probably would have been very laser focused on the situation but as it was i was like you know what i gotta you know go on a road trip with my mom now so it's fine but no i i did not expect it at all um yeah and it was really my first experience with that that sort of not fame but just something being ever present or now when i'm introduced um you know at festivals and conferences and things like i'll be introduced that way which always throws you out of it a little bit because you think oh yeah that is how people know me nancy asks how do you feel about the monetization of personal information on the internet yeah i would say that that's something that we weren't seeing as much in those days i speak about as being the good days i mean way back when when you started out as a blogger you remember when like the first bloggers put ads on their blogs and that was this very controversial um decision it was like what is what the mommy bloggers are doing is that okay um but it may just be something to do with the vehicle i mean i have written a book about my niece i've written a book about my family so that's also a form of monetization you can say that something is a higher art than another thing but yeah it may just be a different vector this is from instagram what about ken hi hi patricia love the book just wanted to ask what has your online routine been since you finished the book and do you look at your time spent differently now i think that i do um you would you would think maybe that quarantine would be the perfect time for me to absolutely make the final dive into my phone where i never come out on the other side and they're like where did she go there's just a little grease spot on the ground here where's trisha but no because i got covered i didn't i was like wait a minute whoa i don't want to be here that's not something i want to be doing and it was already starting to be true you know after after my niece passed away and you do see you know it sounds like corny or it's you know it's very overused language but you do see that certain things are more important that you know this it is important to be in your body sometimes doing the necessary and the crucial things but for me in terms of you know the daily routine of the internet the only thing is that i just can't look at twitter first thing um especially so i would say when trump was in office but like even now you can't look at it first thing because it it takes over your brain for the day it sets the topics and that's what you're going to be thinking about and it's going to be a thing where it's like do i have to i was like trying to figure out today who chet hanks was and i was like you know climbing backward through the and i'm like who is this guy does he even look like tom hanks what's going on with him what's a white boy summer i don't understand any of this so i think that sometimes people just stay in the portal because like if you're out too long you miss that stuff and then you have to scramble for information when you sign back in but if you go on first thing that's your brain for the day it's done caitlyn asks did anything personal inspire the first half of the book the fame the notoriety from your experience or was it just meant to satirize our current moment so no a lot of that was autobiographical as well particularly the travel items rob roy might not have made it in but many other um travel things that came about because of um priest daddy and my other writing a lot of those were real uh travels around the world and things like that um and there are as well family elements that that are autobiographical it's really just more i don't know so you're sort of she's kind of this dispersed personality right she's not just herself she is other people she's other people's viewpoints she's like whole arguments that sets of people are having so it's not just about like a singularity it's not just about a single person in that sense it can't be entirely autobiographical because it's something that we all created together it's it's all of us forming this personality this is rachel rachel coming from another the narrator coming channeling in through a question um what is a question about the book that you haven't been asked yet you would like to be honestly my brain is so wiped i've done like 50 interviews at this point and if there is a question out there that hasn't been asked about the book i do not know what it is um so sadly now if i think of one later i'll post it on twitter but i i do feel like and the questions have been really good i feel like the conversations i've had about the book have been very good but yeah i don't like to borrow trouble and think of questions that people can ask me later i myself suggested so have have has it been hard at all to talk about your niece no that has been wonderful i think it was the fact that the promotional push started like right around uh january 6th so i was talking about all this at basically the most stressful um like hair falling out of time that you could possibly think of but there was you know a moment in the first couple of interviews um where i was kind of feeling out my way and like i told you before i pathologically tell the truth and i thought i can't maintain some fiction where i don't say which things are true or which things really happened i wanted to talk about what really happened i did an interview with the new york times and we just got so stuck we were just looking at each other trying to have this real conversation and then afterwards i emailed her and i was like i think that i just the whole time like wanted to show you her picture because if we had been together in real life in a park or something or like getting drinks i would have just showed you my phone and i would have showed you her picture on my phone and so i was able to break through after that i think because i think that is what i really wanted i really wanted to talk about her that hasn't been hard at all what's next for you what are you working on it's funny i did in these early um insurrection interviews i like lightly mentioned that i was working on some short stories and then it came out in all these like pieces about me that i was working on a collection of short stories was there something that you'd like to read about yourself we can throw it out there now i was like you know what i guess i i'm committed to write a collection of short stories now and all of us are going to get to read that in four years something like that but it might be true it might be true we'll see so patricia we're going to ask you to stick around yes for our musical guest because as i as you if you know about our book club we try to have our musical guests and our books sort of intertwine and make sale so with john darnell of mountain goats you actually tweeted about him we're going to say on the whole tweet portal thing you tweeted on september 10 2015 at 105 a.m what were you doing i mean i was drunk is what i was but you tweeted most people will tell you that music is bad but tonight the way the mountain goes played it it's not i met you that night yeah hey how's it going that's amazing i'm a huge fan of this book and her work that's that's incredibly moving for me that's awesome no that that night in 2015 was after that concert that you gave in lawrence kansas the solo show right it was just me yes it was just you um you played way down in the mine you played werewolf gimmick uh you played a bunch of stuff and we talked afterwards um yeah yeah we hung out on it was on the college campus right yeah it's absolutely big it was a huge these solo shows sometimes they'll book you in a very august sort of room you know and then other times like i think the night before i'd been in like st louis in a rock club it's kind of disorienting but that was like huge glass walls and stuff and i'm never going to feel like i belong no but it was incredible it was there was those were fun shows i think heather mcintyre was opening for yes she was yeah and she's an impossibly talented amazing performer uh like yourself hard act to follow but uh but but but it's also very inspiring the tour was somebody who like you go well you better do something good heather just played so yeah but it was fabulous and i think i was supposed to be interviewing you for like the local paper but probably at that point you had done like a ton of interviews so we didn't finish it and part of your stage banter that night was like man when you're doing these interviews and someone asks you a question like this and i'm like chilled to the bone in my seat and i was like oh my god he's talking about my interview well it was so she just asked you is there anything you want to be asked if you said you did like 55 and like you know when people ask me that way i'm like i'd like to be asked if i'd like to go if i'd like right now would you like to go to the bathroom would you like a sandwich john you asked me that i would say thank you yes i'd like to go rest now i think it was something about um you know like a process or like inspiration or something like that and i think maybe i put on my robe and wizard uh hat um joke that's like how do you write your song something like that i put on my robe and wizard hat but yeah in these interviews i am asking like and i'm answering a lot of times you know like how i do this which is a very like well yeah i put on my robe and wizard hat you know it's funny i have come to to enjoy that question more than i used to because i now i think there's a lot of defensiveness when i was younger about what you're processed like well i don't actually know that's why i can't answer that because yeah and also because i don't want to break it down i don't like to look in mirrors i don't like you know i'm not a hater of other people's selfies but as for me i do not i don't want to self regard i want to be in process right so i don't like to sit back and go what did i do and was it good or not i sort of want to be in flow you know that's my style and then later you know later i could look at it but but now i'm a little more open to the idea what do i actually do do i have any routines that might be useful i like the idea of being useful with answers that that that makes interviews fun or more fun that's like fun it's more fun it's way more fun to be useful yeah i think somebody got some use out of it that makes me feel like my day was good so yeah i think if you think about it that way that's that's been a better way but yeah you do i think that there's something about like if you enjoy like existing in the mystery then you can get almost like a little bit prickly sometimes with some of these questions which feel very like personal like like they're trying to see something very nude about you you know that even you necessarily don't want to look at really yeah well and then often so like i mean i don't keep a count but like when the question is verbatim what's your creative process like it's like well it's like i wake up and then there's a whole bunch of stuff happens and then somewhere in there maybe i catch this wave you know but other times but other times i know i have to do something so i just i mean it's like it's just too vague a question it's like asking somebody how do you kiss you know yeah well well i've never figured it out really so it's not but no my process is just like now because i have a beach oh it's beautiful though it's like point it's getting kind of satanic what do you think is it getting a little bit satanic yeah i could i mean if everybody serge tankian is the guy they say i look like i happen to really like that guy so i'm into that but there's also some like evil looking dutch portrait of some dude from the 16th and 7th completely the guy looks like oh this is a guy with some skeletons you know not even in his basement just on his kitchen floor i went to an amazing question oh yeah i have a question sorry i'm doing this tremendously and now i know what questions not to ask um john tell them yes is there something that you wanted to ask patricia about this beautiful book um you know this is a dumb question but uh but i'm curious because i think everybody who reads this book and you know not to not to not to flatter you on camera and stuff but like this is a book that as you're reading it's one of those books that for husbands this is this is a terrible book to give to a husband because the husband like me will then start to read every other page out loud and his poor long suffering why oh he's reading all those books and he has to read the whole damn thing out very much oh my god listen to this so but here's the thing it's like it's very much a call and response book there's the first half which is largely riotously funny and even when it's even when it's like you know shocking and you know makes you interrogate whether you're living your life right there's actually a religious attract that's one of my favorites called how then shall we live how then shall we live yes very much in this book is how then shall we live we do live like this and are we living wrong right the questioning posed and the second half largely says well yes largely we are but there are also blessings in that that that that play out in desperate circumstances right that we wouldn't be able to find a pathway through as you know we'd be missing out on some blessings uh but which part of the book do you like better i know it's a brutal question but but like do you have a part where you go that you feel prouder of right where you go there that's what i do that's what i'm good at where you feel a little spider you know is it in the first half of the second half i feel like i i do feel proud of the first half and sometimes when people have been asking me things in interviews and they read part i'll like laugh out loud that is but the second half to me is my life everything is there and i feel that she is there she is intact there so it's not even a question of having it be my favorite i feel like she is just alive there when i go back into that part and sometimes i read it over and i'm like you failed you didn't get in everything there are things that you didn't get in and then i speak to people and they're like i see her you know i know what her personality is like i was speaking to my mother after she read the excerpt in the new yorker which is from the second half and she said i remember everything and it's just what it was like there was only one thing that you missed which is that you would how we missed her breathing after she was gone you could always hear her breathing everywhere in the house she had tracheomalacia which is a floppy airway so you could always hear her and you always knew where she was and then it was gone but sometimes if you went into a room really fast it was like you would still hear it you would still hear it somewhere up near the ceiling and all of us had it and i couldn't work it in and maybe that is just something that is personal for us but yeah yeah but you did so much work in that second half uh which i think i mean the thing is when i saw the second half was not going to be full of laughs it was part of this like i mean this first half was really strong stuff that's right take this turn i hope you know but but then it gets so deep and so good and i think that's one of the things you actually do really well is that after she dies um absence is what defines death like the moment of death actually is often quite you know you're even though you're not ready for it it leaves this emptiness that you didn't know how to describe until it comes to existence right and so it's the absence that really is where the grief lies right it's like the shock of the moment that you predict it's almost it takes so long to parse that but it's the empty space you know left it's that's hard and you really do an amazing job of sketching the outline of that space it's such a good book i really admire it so deeply it's a it's an accomplishment thank you john thank you yeah trisha thank you so much for being our author this month we had such amazing response from our listeners it was cl i was getting choked up again very it's a very moving story your story is very moving and i really appreciate all of your candor and your good spirit tonight thank you so much for having me and break a freaking leg jd thank you very much so john we're going to play one of your songs first the song all right fired not by one of patricia's tweets by a different tweet let's talk about it on the other side this is picture of my dress here at a truck stop in new mexico [Music] just before dawn somebody's grandma behind the wheel of a big rig pulling in with her headlights on we smoke a cigarette as the sunrise runs right someone's got to break the quiet she says what are you doing here anyway and i smile and say you never guess she holds it up for me my skinny white shoulder straps and well i i take a picture of my dress i take a picture of my dress i'm here in the bathroom [Music] of a dallas texas burger king and mr stephen tyler is on the overhead speakers man he doesn't want to miss a thing back there at the counter blending in with the lunchtime crowd trying not to laugh out loud i eat half my crispy chicken club [Music] i get extra mayonnaise it's a mess i take the other half back to the parking lot with me pop the trunk [Music] and take a picture of my dress i take a picture of my dress [Music] it still looks good i only wore it once nine years ago nine years seven months it may be a long time before the highway [Music] relents and finally sesame i'm gonna have to chase down [Music] something special that you stole from me it may be hiding in the sunset or in distant corners of the dawn maybe it's gone but i say some prayers above the engine [Music] i bless everything there is to bless run out of gas in the middle of nowhere anywhere and then i stand there by the roadside smiling i take a picture of my dress i take a picture of my dress i take a picture of my dress [Music] and john darnell of mountain goats is still with us so we were actually just having a great conversation about what we like to read yeah you show our readers what you what you're are yours which you're you're into this is my new finder's elio guterrini and this is uh i went on um libris i think it's a early new directions hardback not that early uh but the 50s um but look at the directions series so there's this list of other books in the series and i'm totally addicted to that like oh what else is there i could have all of them if i wanted to collect them i'm a bad collector but still half of them were by people i've never heard of and then the others are by like sartre kenneth's rex roth raymond canoe boris pasternak but also um you know giuseppe berto a book called the works of god now this was good enough for new directions in 51 so i bet it's an interesting book you know that's that's my i'm a huge book junkie as far as like i like to know if it's a little byways of books and sub imprints and stuff like that that's that's sort of my zone how have you been how have you been dealing with your have you been getting your fix during covid when i mean going through bookstores is one of the great pleasures of life well yeah and especially i live on tour so so i i can tell you where i go to detroit i go to john king books i've ever been to john kenny like you know i go to portland and i go to powell's place i've been going to since the 80s everybody knows about pals but then like last time i was in vancouver uh can't uh bc i i found like three bookstores on one walk and they were all so good you know and this is what i do i mean all these the books behind you the shells behind you that's a bunch of mine but these are things i pick up around the world um but now i you know i order from my local from the regulator and i encourage everybody to do this is like support whoever your bookstore that you want to see around when we're going to stores again um but i do also uh uh an online thing called a libris that that is a it's you it connects with used bookstores right and uh and and you can find anything on there in all kinds of conditions and that's where i got that i read video and i was like well i'm gonna read the rest of these guys books so i got them and then they'll probably like there's a good chance that i don't actually read that for another five years or maybe ever but but there's a an essay by um god who is i want to say it's garcia marquez i'm not sure about how it's not about whether you read the books it's that when you have books they all represent possible versions of yourself you know like there's there's the me who's reading that one and now knows something about that you know and especially non-fiction books i never even finish him i'm a fiction guy you know but uh but i have all these non-fiction books i think oh yeah maybe someday i will be able to tell you something about that yeah i think if you go into someone's house in the no books you just should leave oh yeah no it's got a guy i don't believe in deal breakers but like as far as people talk about and i think well you know look people who aren't at all like you also have something to share but if you do go into a house there's no books that's that weird vibe completely you know we were talking to trisha earlier and i know uh before the whole event started we were all talking a little bit or you guys were talking and i was eavesdropping and talking about the internet when and twitter when it was a place you'd want to be a place maybe you'd want to check first thing in the morning as opposed to knowing that you shouldn't for your mental health yeah you know and i'm curious because because you've been a musician for a long time how when you think about the internet and you think about its impact on music and on your livelihood yeah what's been positive what's been negative well i mean i met my wife on a mailing list you know back in the in the days of mailing lists so uh so and that was before that was like right before what i think was called the the eternal september do you know this term i don't tell me so in the first years of the internet um of usenet right and mailing lists every september the discussions that you've been having all summer that were kind of great would just go to hell and it would be because a bunch of people had gone to college right and they would arrive to the discussion going i got this one i know this one right and and pick fights and get in fights and didn't know how to sort of be in the flow right and and that was every september and then then suddenly all the colleges were online and the whole discourse became the eternal september you know where it's like now it's just going to be like this all the time the number of people buying in every month is so huge they'll never get back to this but the thing is that's an elitist position and i don't believe in that position but it's a gatekeeping elitist position and and and this is similar to like it does feel like twitter was at one point a point where there was a cool kids club doing a cool thing but i'm very suspicious of any claims that the scene was once cool and now it's not right um because it's sort of like there's a line in ecclesiastical thinking that like you know if you want to find a perfect church go join it but understand that as soon as you join it it's no longer a perfect church right and uh and that's the you know this thing is like yeah it was twitter was a little cooler when when there was less stuff going around but at the same time like as a tool for for broadening knowledge of social justice and stuff like that it's done over the past couple years way more good than it was doing what it was some of us making some really funny jokes that didn't get ripped off by people for their instagrams and stuff you know it's now if you make a good joke you probably just love the copyright notice so that's depressing you know because the older twitter crew would never have been one of those jokes and now it's like there's this whole industry of stealing content you know yeah but at the same time i mean i think the social justice aspect of it and raising awareness you know anti-racism work uh anti you know pro-union work all that kind of organ organizing on twitter raising of consciousness even though you know there's aspects of that where you know people you know sending a bunch of people after somebody would before everything's known that that can result in things where where everybody at the end goes well none of us were at our best there really so but at the same time you know when when videos of police violence go viral and and it results in accountability or theoretically some justice we hope you know that's a huge positive and it's for sure worth trading the cool times we had for you know right so i always try to think about that i'm always you know because i come from music scenes and music scenes all go through this period of eden where it's like this scene is the coolest and you always know and it won't be the coolest somebody a couple people are going to find it it won't be as cool as it was but that's okay because maybe those people will start bands that are great even if the scene sort of suffers you know this sort of that's the flow i sound like a hippie i'm a hippie it's all right for prohibiting around here so you put up two albums in 2020 yes and they sound completely different yes one was recorded on a boom box and the others with the full band uh how did it feel to kind of go back to the sort of origins like stripped down boom box just you it was a lot of fun it was you know we were talking uh in the previous segment about self-consciousness and that's like that's one reason i don't like to do anything that sort of already has a backstory if i can help it you know it's like so so going back to the boombox sort of there's a point of comparison there i'm older and i'm a better songwriter now but that comes at the expense of the immediacy of these you know those early recordings when you hear me do you play music yeah a little bit yeah okay so you know what the four is going for the tonic to the four yep in those early recordings when i go to the four i have i have columbus syndrome i'm like look what i discovered it's like i am the first person alive to play this g after a d am i amazing or what you know and that was my vibe then every time i would go to the floor i feel like i found god you know well i mean i still feel that way about the four but it's not that feeling of like what have i done i can do it too i can play this thing you know and so so sooner or later once you once you you trade you trade the joy of your own personal discovery for expertise and that's that's a common story right and it's a story that is why a lot of bands first albums are their best ones because that's when everybody can't believe they're doing the thing you know uh but uh but so there's one reason i didn't go back for a long time but when we got home from recording it was clear to me that we wouldn't be going out and we plan i mean this is our day job right i there's seven of us who draw a paycheck from this and i feel a profound sense of responsibility to them i'm i'm you know i'm i don't like the not the boss but i'm the i'm the masked head i'm the face at the front of the ship you know uh for better or worse and um and so i felt like you know i gotta do something that gets us a little bit of money you know before we go back out on the road in three months that was my thinking so well it didn't work out that way but but uh i want you to i realized i didn't say the names of the albums when you say them for our our viewers so oh yes i want to i want to hear these what are they the one that we were recording uh before we came home was called getting into knives um although at the time it was called as many candles as possible and it turned out that jane steiberry had an album called all the candles in the world and i was like okay well i can't call it that then you know i kept the song title but i was like so i named it for getting into knives which it turned to me is a much better album title anyway so is it fortuitous accent there um but uh uh but so yes so when i got home uh i got out my old boom box for people who don't know my work uh or our work but the mountain votes began when i lived in employee housing at metropolitan state hospital and i was i had a big court case to pay off but i was still making a decent living for the first time in my life and i didn't have a tv uh it was not a decent living to buy a tv but at least i want to buy a boombox so i started just recording these i wrote poetry at the time i started setting my phones to very simple chord progressions and singing them out loud and uh and i discovered the immediacy of recording the boombox and sound of the tape was really pleasing to me and that's how over time that snowballs into it becoming my job there are people for whom those early recordings have a charm and a depth and a power that can't really be matched once it becomes a more uh complex and more tailored sort of thing because they're all those are all recorded within seconds of having been written or they're recorded during the writing right so i got an idea most of it's there maybe i'll ad-lib the last line you know and uh and you know i was really into that was also the days that the golden days of lyricism and and rap was fairly new and we're buying 12-inch singles i was transcribing this is the nerdiest thing you're ever going to hear about i would buy an nwa or eric b or kim 12 engine transcribe with my typewriter the lyrics to see how they were doing because for poets that was the time man those were very those were writers you know really you know and it was it was incredibly inspiring to me because i wanted to study poetry in college and it's like to me these guys were playing with the sorts of rhythms that i was interested in with you know long 14 beat lines and stuff and so i transcribed those and i would try to write my own poems and then send them these simple tunes right and uh and then that went away over time we became a band we started working in studios and when i got home i had an idea for a new album there was no reason to really do anything but get started on it so i started tracking to the boombox and i wrote one on a monday and then the next day i wrote another one and i thought well and this is how my brain works i thought well what if i just keep doing this until i have 10. i'll do one a day [Laughter] like if you're in the zone you can do that you know it's like i do think for me not for everybody maybe but for me the more i work the more i'm liable to work well eventually it takes a pretty heavy toll on my mental health and on other people's ability to tolerate me right because you get into this writing and creating at any level is narcissism to some extent and it doesn't tend to make good people of us right we have to most artists i think have to work if they want to be good people to incorporate that goodness part of themselves into the part that's standing here going you know i mean if you want to be on a microphone anywhere there's something about you that says hey i'm cool i have something to say uh that even people who know who have no interest in my success can benefit from it's like there's a degree of ego in there right and so i'm always trying to grapple with that um but uh but when you get into that zone for me anyway the more i work the more i'm gonna produce if i do it for two or three weeks my brain gets to boiling and i won't be able to sleep and uh i've never really chased it longer than that because it gets really unhealthy inside there but uh but it feels good at the time i mean if it's it's a low-level mania i think so you i'm sorry that my sentences are so long i'm very i'm enjoying it i you i do want to get two of our things and before we play your song you wrote a novel called the wolf in the white van is that right wolf in white men i have never been white man right behind me here's the italian edition of it uh it's called and then i also have the french version let me just mutilate that one uh le lu don la camioco yeah that was the first one the second one was called universal harvester did you try to write during covid did you try to sit down and write another novel oh i mean i've been working on a novel for the past five or six years so yeah i've been it made it so much harder because i have two children um so normally they go to school and i go to my office right well that came to a grinding halt and i'm still i'm literally you can't see this but on the floor now is the stuff i'm revising i'm i'm in the home stretch on that book and i'm really excited oh wow uh i'm working on it every day but i'm not getting the kind of eight-hour days i would get if i was going to the office it's like this is my home office but there's two children out there right and and also there's a video game there's a magic the gathering program on here that can be very distracting so funny the way you talk about they're out there there's children out there they are they're right there they're always friends i know you i know you love them uh you were kind enough to send us another track this one is called short song about the ten freeway is that old song is that pretty much self-explanatory so i mean this is i was talking about the the the the how those old songs were about urgency right just the urgency of the writing i mean it's like one thing that i liked and again it's like i was a by the time i recorded this i'm studying english at pitzer and i'm deep in theory i'm thinking about what is writing all these kinds of things you know what you know what why does one write all these questions you sort of stop asking yourself once it's your gift and you just do it but i was like i i wanted a song to bear evidence of its own creation right i wanted you to be able to hear how it felt to be writing it right that is not really in literature that's usually not going to be good but in song it can get there right so you can you can do something i mean obviously an improvisational jazz that's what it's about it's like you do something and it's never been done before and it will never be done the same way again but the people who are in that room get to hear it and i had an idea of being able to do that in this sort of cross-section of poetry and music that i was working um i mean the lyric is quite simple but uh but i feel like when it gets to the resolve uh it goes to this to this g and for me that g was huge at the time it's only like a minute and a half long so it is john darnell thank you for being with us tonight oh it's a pleasure i it's it's a it's a real honor to be with you you know i i i can't say i grew up with you but like watching uh you do the 92 election and stuff like that is like i know your work you put in really good work at the you know and uh it's an honor to be with you thank you that's so kind let's take a listen to short song about the 10 freeway [Music] evening came on like a big red wing and the dying sun spilt its colors on everything and as the night came on it burst into song [Music] you scraped your car up against the guardrail and god is present it's a sweeping gesture but the devil is in the details [Music] so [Music] so thanks to john darniel of mountain goats for those performances and of course to patricia lockwood for being our get lit with all of it march author so we're about to announce our april tomorrow april can you believe it we're about to announce our april book i have to thank a few people because we have good manners around here from the new york public library a big thank you to tony marks brian bannon andrew medlar they are the folks who work to get the ebooks into your hands every month hold on your hands your screens from the green space shout out to jennifer cam ricardo and david they make this look beautiful each and every month and from team all of it the team that produces get lit megan ryan jordan lost and simon close they bring it to you all month long and they work really hard on these virtual events now to our april author the writer was a 2017 recipient of the nobel prize in literature you might know him from his seminal novels the remains of the day and never let me go his latest novel was published in march and it's already a new year times bestseller npr has called it a masterpiece we're going to be reading clara and the sun the story follows clara an artificial friend waiting patiently in the shop to be purchased all the while taking information about the humans around her finally clara is selected by a teenager named josie and taken home to live with her and her mother it's there that clara learns josie is ill and that josie's mother might have another purpose for clara's role in the family the guardian calls clara and the son brilliant and a masterpiece that explores what it means to be not quite human drawing its power from the darkest shadows of the uncanny valley new yorkers head to wnyc.org get lit to find out how to borrow an e-copy from the new york public library and then mark your calendars for 6 p.m it's different our usual time is 7 p.m but 6 p.m on monday april 26th this will be our virtual event with kazua ishiguro until then follow us on instagram all of it wnyc happy reading and i'll see you next time be safe you

Channel: The Greene Space at WNYC & WQXR

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Id: Hw9Lui4X7CI

Length: 71min 55sec (4315 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021