Paul Beatty on 'The Sellout', with Lola Okolosie

[Applause] whole is going to give us a short reading token this up and then we will begin our conversation I think I'm gonna kind of just read something from the middle just for a little bit I guess there are more cars in Los Angeles County than in any other city in the world but what no one ever talks about is that half those cars sit on cinder blocks and dirt patches passing for front yards from Lancaster to Long Beach these not so mobile automobiles along with the Hollywood sign the watch towers and Aaron Spelling's fifty-six thousand five hundred foot square foot estate or the closest Ellie gets to approximating the ancient marvels of engineering like the Parthenon Angkor Wat the great pyramids and the ancient shrines of Timbuktu these two and four-door rusted pieces of antiquity stand impervious to the winds and acid rains of time and like Stonehenge we have no idea what purpose these steel monuments serve are they Testaments to the and infirm a hot rods lowriders that graced the covers of custom I'm sorry and Fermi hot rods and lowriders that graced the covers of custom car magazines maybe the hood ornaments and tail fins are aligned with the Stars and the winter solstice maybe they're mausoleums the resting places of backseat lovers and drivers all I know is that each of these metal metallic carcasses means one less car in the road and one more rider on the bus of shame shame because la is about space and here's and here one self-worth comes from how one chooses to navigate that space walking is akin to begging in the streets taxicabs are for foreigners and prostitutes bicycles skateboards and rollerblades or for health nuts and kids people with nowhere to go in all cars from the luxury import to the classified-ad jalopy or status symbols because no matter how shoddy the upholstery how bouncy the ride and how up the paint job the car any car is better than riding the bus Alameda Mar peso shouted and a woman scurried aboard toting one too many plastic shopping bags and pinning her purse tightly to her side with her elbow she made her way down the aisle scanning for vacancies I can spot an L a newcomer a mile away they're the ones who board the bus smiling and greeting the other passengers because they believe despite all evidence to the contrary that having to take mass transportation is only a temporary setback they're the ones sitting under the safe sex ads looking up quizzically from their Bret Easton Ellis novels trying to figure out why the surrounding them are in all white and opulent like the in the book they're the ones who jump up and down like gameshow Prize winners who wouldn't discover that in and out Berger has both a secret menu and a double top secret menu they sign up for open mikes at the Laugh Factory jog along the boardwalk trying to convince themselves that the double penetration scene they shot in Reseda last week is only a stepping stone to bigger and better things many parents brag about their kids first words mommy daddy I love you stop no that's inappropriate ex I'm gonna skip this part sorry it's just some stuff about like where she's gonna sit I could tell from the way they pulled her arms into the ground that the bags were getting heavy that she was barely holding on to her groceries and dreams even though she was exhausted and growing more and more despondent which bumpy rise and fall the worn-out suspension she preferred to stand rather than a sick next to me they come to LA aspiring to be white even the ones who are biologically white aren't white white laguna beach volleyball white bel-air white omakase white Spicoli white Bret Easton Ellis white three first names white valet parking wipe brag about your Native American Argentinian Portuguese ancestry white paparazzi white I once got fired from a telemarketing job now look at me I'm famous white Calabasas white I love LA it's the only place where you can go skiing to the each into the desert all in one day white she held on to her vision rather than sitting next to me not that I blamed her because by the time the bus hit Figueroa Boulevard there were a number of people on board whom I wouldn't have chosen to sit next to either like the insane who repeatedly pressed the stop requested button stop this bus goddamn and I want to get off where the you going even that early in the day stopping a bus between designated stops was the same as asking the flight crew of the Apollo rocket to the moon to stop at the liquor store on the way impossible I feel like you're you know a lot of people say your writings really dense layers of meaning their references sometimes I feel I have to be American or Californian or have lived in Berlin to get them where did you get the confidence to trust in the reader that they would follow you that's a good question um I mean I think a lot of the confidence comes just from having read you know I mean I read so many books none of them have anything to do with me yeah perfectly fine and I'm I think that's where it starts in a weird way you know I kind of enjoy things that have nothing to do with me I think yeah but um if that's what you're asking I think is something I struggled with you know in a weird way if you're taught to read for that and you know for read to be understood in certain ways and uh the story I've been telling I guess because it's about where I got the confidence but it's where I've kind of just figured out to trust myself is I so write poetry and I and after a year I finally wrote a good poem at the end of the first year was going to MFA school in Brooklyn I wrote a good poem really said something I thought was good you have to read the poem and they workshop the poem blah blah blah and there was this kid in the poem it was named I wish I could remember his name but he hated the pump he just was like I don't understand I have no idea what's going on these words mean nothing to me this is just gibberish on the page and it just went on and on I was like and then at the same at end of that year that Professor you know we have a little meeting at the end of the year and she told me I should quit writing ha ya know she said I think you should think about doing something else those were her exact words I got a C+ anyways uh so but thankfully I had a person that I met with every week you know we'd go over my work and he would talk to me this guy named Louisa cough I'm still very close to stay and you know so I told him what this other professor had said he was like yeah you know you're actually trying to do something that no one else has really tried to do before you know and he said something to me that was so helpful as he said people are going to learn to read you and it was one he was saying you know you're writing something that's worth reading were thinking about worth doing this he didn't say that explicitly but it totally helped me out when you said that I was like oh I didn't know that happen you know I thought everybody had to like it immediately or something you know I just I didn't know and so at the end of that summer went by and then that next year I had Allen Ginsberg for a teacher and he said bring in your best poem I stopped from the top so that poem was my best poem same class so same students different professor I read the poem and the same guy who couldn't stand the poem was like I didn't have to say anything about the poem he was like oh Paul's talking about this Paul's doing this Paul's doing that this is so smart Paul was doing this all this kind of stuff and at the end of the class on it dude you hated that poem okay yeah that's exactly what I asked him and he said yeah I was in New York for three months you know I mean so his his ears something happened you know and so for me it wasn't like yeah whatever I do people are gonna figure it out it wasn't that but it was just that a recognition that so much things you know there's a lot of movement you know in terms of what you read just even with me I started thinking about things I read that I don't like things that are read and hated and suddenly like you know this is just so much movement and so that was like an early thing in just me really starting to trust myself and my sister is a playwright and one day we were just talking you know most times people go hope people are so stupid but she said to me you know people are actually really smart and you know I spend a ton of times years reading all these oral histories I love Studs Terkel and I'd read these books and these people are so smart they're so insightful you know they just need to be asked that right question and they use just like teaching you know you start talking about stuff and you go I don't even know I knew that yeah you know and so there's somewhere in there is about the confidence and all that kind of stuff and you know I've been writing for a long time sort of learn to halfway trust myself as a writer and and also to trust you know the people that are here you know the people that are hopefully gonna pick up the book yeah that was a completely selfish question really for me but thank you why was this selfish on your part selfish because I guess as a writer you feel that you you're quite you're not quite sure of how your writing is going to connect who your audience is and why they will be receptive to your work and sometimes there's a voice in there telling you to kind of go somewhere that feels raw or feels like revealing and I sometimes often shy away from that listening to that voice I felt like in reading your work that you hadn't done so and so I think you know I think I think a lot of people are taught to do that yeah you know for whatever reasons you're taught to be appropriate or taught to be not this and that you're taught to pay homage to these and that thing's talk about these things in a certain way and I think people feel that pressure and I think when I started writing I kind of went into it going yeah I'm not doing that you know when I learn you know for my friends and these other discussions we're not doing that you know we're being really honest with each other were being funny you know because we trust each other at some level so it's like that's where I was trying to start it or trying to figure out how to get to you know that we're kind of quiet please so that that first question is linked to my second question so when I was reading all of the novels really I was thinking about the first level that I read was the sellout and it made me think of this essay that read by the wonderful June Jordan I don't know if people here know her but she was a poet and essayist and she wrote this essay about teaching her students her yoona students about black English teaching them that it was worthy of study and what was being lost what was being missed in them not recognizing it in its own right and it felt to me that you were you were doing that work that she was kind of talking about reclaiming that language and saying it is it can be literary and that that to me it made me smile because it felt like it's seen in her essay it seemed like like something that was an impossibility but here we were yeah I mean I don't think that the book is black English yeah no I know what you mean and it's to me it's uh yeah I don't really know how to talk about that but that's one of the many English's that are familiar to me or that I want to explore that you know and so for me I just have a layer of different types of English and a layer of other languages you know in this book there's Latin in Spanish and there's all kind of stuff so for me it's just all the same thread somehow it's like how am I gonna divide that up what color is this section gonna be you know it's like I'm just kind of knitting something a little bit you know I remember early on like in my poetry career I guess I had a career I don't know Chicago but uh I was in a panel and we were it was like a translation panel I know nothing about translation I can't speak any language I can't do anything but and then a guy said to me he was talking about my work and it was like oh you know we're here talking about translation he says the thing about your work is you're doing an English - English translation and when he said that it sounds like nonsense but it made perfect sense to me because I know what he was saying you know I'm taking all these things that are sort of familiar to people and trying to make it sound new sound fresh and hopefully it's like it's my language I mean that's the stuff that's really important to me is the language and the words and stuff like that so what are the things I really enjoyed about all three books is that you're kind of challenging the accepted tropes about black masculinity and one of the ways in which you do that is through the female love interest and I say it feels like you can tell me I'm wrong of these central characters and they are often actually difficult women and you know a lot of these male characters are in some ways frigid should I say is that that fair so you know me he says he's frigid gonna is you know kind of forced into marriage with a mail-order bride and then you've got like blue character Claudia in Slumberland that I really really liked why was it important to you to have these female figures yeah um it's not like it's so important to have the female figures in a weird way it's just that's hard it's hard to talk about um such a good question sorry part of it is I think you used that you talked about like touring the black male trope on its head a little bit and so much of that just comes from people always questioning my masculine for whatever reasons you know women doing it man you know dogs doing it whatever it's you know it happens all the time you know so that's where I kind of start you know from its that it's kind of making fun of my own sense of masculinity first and I think the other stuff just comes like as a natural expression of that and so like in you're talking about Gunnar Kaufman and whiteboy shuffle and there's these two characters in that book Betty and Veronica I don't know if you remember them yeah yeah yeah but like I think they have this conversation about how there's no word for men losing their virginity or something like there's no male equivalent of deflower but again it starts from the language why does this exist here and doesn't exist in this context you know that's where it starts from and so he's asking these questions and they answer in the ways that they answer but it's yeah you know I try to find like symbolism and things that talk about these things without being didactic without being pedantic about it so like with Betty and Veronica you know their sisterhood for me is expressed because they have a geodesic dome like they're wearing the same hairstyle you know but it's connected you know so they have this dude that's a dome over both their heads which I loved because it's funny about black hair it's funny about style all this kind of stuff but then there's a you know there's something there yeah and then they torment them I was really nervous about Betty Veronica test tube Archie here Archie comics okay so I'm just saying it so and it's also that you know that I named them Betty and Veronica for personal reasons but for more social context reasons and and and even with this last book before I start writing at my wife Althea was talking to me about you know female character since she said yeah make sure your female characters have fun and I remember her saying that you know and that's like oh yeah fun cuz fun means so much you know it's such a good word and it's like a thing that we don't think about so you know there's all this cultural appropriation that's because the way I mean characters that people are called characters for us for a reason you know they're not Android's or something you know that's a character but I think part of it is we we seen character so in a limited construct you know and uh this doesn't have anything to do with gender necessarily but just talking to my students about like some of the same stuff and in my head I was like hey what's the most racist thing I've ever read you know and it was in this play and there's a white guy some play about a white guy I don't barely remember I just remember the scene he goes into a ice cream parlor or something and there's this black kid in the ice cream parlor so play from the 70s I think and in the play and the notes or whatever it says something about the black kid and I think that comes up in the dialogue that the black kids IQ is 175 yeah that's the most racist thing I've ever said ever read yeah I mean because it's so forced and it's so trying so hard and you know that he actually believes the opposite at least in my reading of it you know and so it's these kind of weird things that for me are interesting and things to play around with and stuff like that so I wanna talk a bit about race so you said that the sellout that so for those of you who haven't read the sellout the central character me reinstitute segregation although segregation already his town's already segregated but you said that it's not a bleak novel I heard this really yeah I wrote where you set it down and so you said it was wasn't a bleak novel and I I was a bit kind of like taken aback by that because to me it seems like really ambivalent with the kind of state of where we're at in terms of race and so you equate a bent ambivalence with bleakness or yes I'm not it's kind of like when nowhere and I wanted to kind of ask because the the book is about a character taking us back how do you think we measure progressed when we were talking about race yeah I have no idea okay about in some ways it's about like this thing and so for me it's so interesting about some people oh it's bleak other people oh it's actually very optimistic in a weird way it's so interesting to me that different readings that's because I'm ambivalent about everything so when you're ambivalent people project their own stuff on about what they want you know it's their baggage meets my baggage you know so you know the progress thing is for me interesting because in the book there's a there's a sense of you know there's a subtext of psychological progress like this how do we get to self-actualization as people as you know whatever cohorts you want to put under there there's that you know and I just don't really think about that stuff you know it's to me it's it's always up you know just up now to me up tomorrow it's gonna you know it's just because within that are people who know it's up and don't give up you know they just keep doing you know they just they fight they do they don't fight you know they create they do this you know people do what they do that's not necessarily bleak to me you know and I think people talk about this this hit me because I got early on I would get these questions do you ever see an end to racial blah blah blah like some utopia and I'm like well what does that look like for you cuz that's gonna look like completely different for someone else you know but there's this we use these words we talk about this thing like there's this ideal stuff you know the Voltaire talked about this it's the same stuff you know and um so that's the interesting stuff to me is about how it's the same but different or different but the same that's that's that's always really interesting to me you know and so it can be bleak it can be but I think part of that is it's like the book sometimes it's funny sometimes it's not you know I read a passage sometimes everybody's rolling in the aisles I read the same thing people aren't listening no less engaged but they're like oh this is so sad you know I mean so it depends my mood a lot of stuff and so my wife wears this jacket assist work shock on it all the time and that's like really important to me about like when you see images and what you project on that you know and that changes from day to day person a person sometimes so I see what you're saying like you know and then me it's I did this interview I think it was in Italy and a guy put a camera where they were but he put two coats right in front of me and they're completely contradictory like completely and I think I said them back-to-back like I said one thing but that's like how I think that's how I feel that's how we communicate you know and it's hard for us to handle sometimes hypocrisy and contradiction but for me that stuff is so fun it's so real and it makes life difficult sometimes but it's for me not more honest but it's it's it's just part of the fabric you know it's just part of the fact we act like if something's contradictory then it cancels something out that's not the case all the time you know yeah I think in a way in we know that people and people are contradictory and maybe I guess what my question was kind of trying to articulate was the fact that I felt like there was a lot of contradictions in him and I wasn't expecting that because I guess the literature that I choose to go to I'm not going to kind of be thrown into like just how contradictory you live so it felt like an an exercising like really thinking about these issues and yeah thinking about where I'm placed and yeah where I am being contradictory yeah I think when I first started riding like I was talking about trying to fill this thing and contradiction was a part of that you know it's like everything is so soft assured and so false and nothing is like that at least for me and how I experience the world or I experience argument anything and I was like yeah it's not that that's easy necessarily because I think there's a reason for that but for me it's that's not very interesting you know yeah and so that's not something that I've ever tried to do it doesn't really interest me really so part of this like theme of like me seeing the bleak is that I felt like in all of the three novels that I read there was a character who is minor but kind of also significant who decides to choose self-immolation in whatever sort of way because of the weight of racism they just opted out and so I wanted to ask about why this kind of theme of suicide as protest keeps cropping up that's like everybody people say satire they never asked that question it's that time they don't talk about that so it's gonna get bleaker I'm sorry about that but no that's a really good question and some something I think about a lot I'm trying to say with figure out what to say I mean I think Mike was in London actually some some Goldsmiths University called something yeah that's it as I was there a woman asked and stuff a question and she talked about collective trauma you know collective depression collective psychoses you know these things that we don't talk about and that's part of it you know I have a background in psychology or things I think about and then a lot of it's just personal you know from friends that have committed suicide just you know watching things and this this notion of way outs what's utopia like you know all these doors that never seem that really open and so it's just I don't want to say too much but it's something that I think about and and most of the suicide stuff in the book is really based on something that I know so there's this very minor thing where the guy I think it's harm and he writes this note like I'm at I'm in the back and that's like based on god I've never talked about this before was a guy who I didn't know my sister knew him a guy who ran a little art scene in LA in the Crenshaw district and he had committed suicide he just left it no I'm in the back and he was hanging in the bath no yeah I mean it's something I take very seriously even I'm you know talking about it in ways that art can easily be construed as comedic and bleak at the same time I think but it's something I think about yeah I'm not really answering your question no no yeah it's hard not to to talk about it and not give too much away because I want you to go there even with the suicide thing I mean you know I get obsessed with tons of story and I still AM I was obsessed with the notion of kamikaze pilots like what makes you do that what's the societal stuff behind that and I'd read all these oral histories kamikaze fights these letters that they would write the poems that they would write because you're just facing something you've made these weird decisions where these decisions have sort of been made for you and uh and just you know that notion of who commits suicide and why when it's funny this has nothing to do with anything I just feel the need to say it but I remember watching a documentary it was about kamikaze pilots and this woman who made the documentary asked men who had fought in the US Navy and who had been you know attacked by kamikaze missions or whenever on ships about the notion are they crazy this and that and one guy went yeah you know I think if we were losing the war I think they would find Americans who would be willing to do the same thing you know cuz it's always oh this is a Japanese thing never thought this don't know and he said oh man I'm glad that he's he's right or wrong you know I have my own opinion but he's thinking about just being in the other shoe she won the other foot which is something we don't really do very often it was really uncomfortable to go yeah you know what under similar circumstances I might act the same way you know because that challenges something you know anyway sorry no no I like I liked it it kind of it was an embodiment it seemed to be an embodiment of the mental health issues that black people carry wherever they are you know placed in the Diaspora and it just seemed like a way of you kind of characterizing that so I I liked it which is no but just like the fact that you like the morbidity of it in a weird way it's not like you like it or you oh cool people are committing suicide it's like that you know I mean it you this system it I'm out I like that there was at least one character doing them it seemed right so trying to like be a bit more like so there's always obviously people talk about the humor how vicious it is and I think they kind of mean like how how dark it is how it sits next to darkness but one of the ways in which you are darkly humorous is with these characters that are sellouts blackness so you've got comedy you've got swen Hoffman who like he's a character who in the white boy shop or who runs back into slavery because he wants to like put on a really amazing ballet he likes the movement of like the slaves on the plantation which was funny but also like why are you why are you attracted to these figures I'm damaged yeah I don't know it's part of his just like trying to extrapolate on stuff you know so I don't this pops in my head so you know and about my own notions of self-worth my own notions of progressiveness of activism all this kind of stuff and so it's one of those things like you know when I grew up everybody's parent was in the Black Panthers I'm in the Black Panthers I was in the black bears my mom was in the black bear all my Japanese friends they were all samurai you know I mean it's like this this interesting thing you know and that's like what this can't always be true and so like in that same passage that you were talking about I remember thinking about because I'm painting he's got a legacy of relatives that I don't think I used the word sellout but they're all like historical fuck-ups so yeah they're dodgy and I think like the da genus gets overlooked you know in terms of in how we talk about historical figures so I remember not the recent Manning Marable book on Malcolm X there was another book before that kind of no 15 years before that that said a bunch of the same things that mirabile said and that book got trashed you know because he was saying now Malcolm X had the gay experience Malcolm X lied about this not gonna set all this kind of stuff and so everybody was like you can't say this about Malcolm X really and I'm like no that makes me like Malcolm X even more you know cuz he's real you know look at all the that he's dealing with it's just man I'm just like dude you're I really see you now you know I mean like the faults all the the foibles and some of those are for beautiful reasons you know it's like you know that's it just again and some of its is masculinity stuff there's so much stuff that people just aren't comfortable with attaching to their heroes and their idols and all that stuff but I don't think like that necessarily you know so I don't that's a part of it I somehow so it made me think about so there's a there's a moment in the sellout where towards the end where there's a comedy club in this now segregated city town and then the black comic who's like doing a set and he's doing a certain it's to room for the black people but there's a couple in there that are white and he and they're laughing along and me turns to me says something like that this shit's not for you or something you know and they keep laughing and you know really it's not for you and so when I first read it I initially thought oh that's that's the kind of like allegory for the book like actually I'm I'm like the truth like intended audience because like you know a lot of white friends did read it and loved it and found it funny and I was a bit but then me says something like I can't remember the exact phrasing but it is something like you know I wondered who who his or his audience was like his real audience was so kind of and that made me think okay it's not why I thought like they said that was not just for for me and people like me it seems that like in this everyone there's a shot aimed at every type of kind of person who talks about race or who does race work why was it important for you to do that it's just because I'm an basically it's I I don't like being lectured to you know we're being told how to be told that I can't make any mistakes I understand that you know the pressure or playing fields aren't level I get the I get the need to be protected like I understand it but I don't like it you know and I think it starts with my mom never protected me and my sisters at all you know to our detriment a little bit but uh you know we were never everything was open you know she never told us how to be at all you know she let us figure it out you know she's gonna be we didn't have a television we just had her library which was pretty damn good and we just read she never said we couldn't go I mean I've been seeing our movies since ever you know forever and she would drag us to this Japanese theater you know I've been watching you and Kurosawa movie since forever you know so she just never went like this is for you this is just everything's for you you know that's because that's how she is and like so that it's interesting because that incident incident this passage in the book is based on something my sister told me she went to a comedy club there was this zakat I can't believe I'm talking about this I'm giving away all this that I don't like talking about that's ear crud there's a comedian no one's gonna know the guy named Robin Harris he had a little moment like a little thing by my sister in LA he had like this real strong comedy scene going like everyone was going mostly black audiences this my sister went this is late 80s maybe I'm not sure when this was and it was a black Club black neighborhood all this kind of stuff and there were two white people sit in the front and like what happened in the book happened he was like yeah get the out and everybody started cracking up you know this is like when people were wearing Malcolm X on their hats in the States and Spike Lee is the end-all be-all you know all this kind of crap anyways in a justice Spike Lee Park um and then you know he was like get the out there ah ha ha ha is that no I'm dead serious get the out ah you know and then they the people you know you told them like this isn't for you you know and so they ended up leaving and it's like that weird kind of false sense of power like this real momentary thing look how important we are look you know we're in this you know this there's some truth to that whatever truth is there's I can see the need for all that and all that but for me I'm like yeah really you know I don't know what that means necessarily so for me it was like you know the character says cuz he said my sister said he went like this isn't for you and that that phrase makes no sense to me you know that makes no sense I get to decide what's for me and not you no one else gets to decide you know and uh it's not that easy I can talk about that like individually but that was just the thing and and it's like a key like you I mean you picked it up right away it's a key to how you think you're reading the book how you want to read the book you know this whole thing and I think is I mean making a broad vet vastly untrue statement that sort of feels true to me which is this idea like when it comes from a review that my wife read to me the other day I thought another book and but this idea that audiences want what they get you know they want what they expect you know American movies snakes on a plane I want snakes on a plane goddammit give me snakes on a plane you know I mean and then so like I was so pleased to hear you talk about oh it's not what I expected you know if this well I love that you know I love sitting in the movie theater and go whoa I didn't know you could do that you know I love that feeling of just learning something and all that kind of stuff and so I try to sort of duplicate that a little bit you know is about humor so I read a bit of the first chapter of like your collection of essays on african-american humor and you were kind of saying basically I paraphrase in the worst way why don't they make funny so why don't they why don't we have stuff that's funny in in literature why is it so heavy why they're so dry so why is humor like having humor so important to you it's it's not so much the humor I mean it is partly that like I don't write sit down and go I'm gonna write a funny book I don't do that but I know I've learned I just I never thought about it till somebody pointed out to me it's like go why is everything you write so funny I just thought there were things in there that were occasionally funny or something but you've got jokes tons of things I just never thought about it I was just this is just how I write you know and uh yeah because I don't want to be the time for a joke a joke schoo hear jokes come in threes the rule of threes I don't want to do any of that you know so and I don't consider myself like a joke writer or something I don't know it might be fun but just how I see the world you know and again like sometimes the funny is not that funny you know and some of the serious is much funnier than you you might want to think so I mean humor is a part of that somehow and I think a lot of it is you know I was talking about this today earlier is like from Richard Pryor you know I don't know if people know who Richard Pryor is but he I mean he spoke to so many people you know and I think about like when I first discovered him me and my friends listened to those albums and going to college and me and my college friends weren't anything like me at some level love and Jesse just spoke and it's just because and it's the thing like I guess I should've been saying this earlier but people go well how come people in in do you like your book how come people in Australia like your book but as if they wouldn't for some reason I don't know but I think it's part so simple it's like why people like anything it's the vulnerability you know I think people feel that you know and I think you you don't get it very much sometimes like just true you know I'm gonna really fix kind of demean myself in a weird way you know and that's where I try to start from is like I'm trying to satirize not that word but I'm trying to really make fun of myself things that I care about I'm really trying to question myself almost at all times throughout the book you know and I think you know it's that that's why you share I remember reading Austerlitz by siebel and it's like man he's just letting it go you know like there's one of those books where I just learned he's just he doesn't care what I think you know he's just structure language all that he's just letting it go thank you very much [Applause] not questions from you wonderful people don't be shy come on yeah what did you learn from Ellen Ginsberg you know I learned from Alan I learned precision from our you know somebody would write something and he would talk he would say it you know what I can't see this image and it sort of sounds good but it doesn't really mean anything and so I just learned I don't agree with it all the time but I think precision is really really important and you know but I get to kind of define what precision means for me but that that notion of seeing it and you know not just about the sound but all that thing that really stuck with me and Alan was a really generous guy you know if you like to I guess you know he's a pain in the ass too but for any other reasons but um that was one of the things and you know Alan was as full of as anybody else that I've ever met you know but he was very he spread that around even ya know I appreciated that and um and he loved what he did I mean he loved what he did and right before he died he did this thing in the village account or the spot but he read every single poem that he never written like over this like I don't know it must have been at least two weeks it had a night at the spot you just show up and all these people I mean I he had his own universe you know that the people that were around him was interesting you know and but it was about the power of poetry and just that the passion with what he was doing and there was a time where no one could touch out in terms of this stuff that he was right you know and way ahead of his time no no no no yeah I'm trying not to end up in some Club reading in Roma before I died not China it was beautiful Bram but I just want to go out sell family late before before I do that no but I don't I mean I love poetry I read it you know but I just I just don't write it what turned you away from it yeah you gotta be a poet you know it's um they part of it is everyone thought I was a performance poet and I just couldn't show it I just read and sat down but you know no one would just say yeah no I mean but people wanted some and you know history onyx and all this other crap and I was just so part of it was that and part of it was it's gonna sound like I said his self centered somehow but people wanted to attach their wagon to me and so I was the hip hop guy was this like and I was I was just too much and it was too much and the other thing is like you have to read so much when you do poetry I don't particularly write reading very much but I didn't read a lot but I realized I was writing a poem and I wrote a line and in my head I went oh they're gonna like that and it just really raised the flag I was like oh that's not why I write you know that's not but I was really conscious of audience at some point and then I was moving away but that was like a real thing like yeah this is not what I want to be doing you know that might change now I don't know but uh yeah that was part of part of the reason for moving away from hi I've got so much as a question more of a thank you I've read loads and loads of books in my life and I've never really understood satire or irony before and I realized that's partly cuz I've only ever really red white writer irony from situations that I couldn't identify with so I found your book sellout hilarious as well as upsetting and I'd want to thank you because it did it changed my appreciation of literature No thank you so much thanks it's uh was I Hackney and it's the other day this was like the satire word I'm not very comfortable completely fine with the irony word I love that word and it was the this notion you know this because I I realized like for me in my definition of satire like satar's very pointed you know this is a satire of Hollywood you know precedence urges and satire of Hollywood this is a satire of Mark Twain I don't know relations in the south or something and I think I realized that one is if I was to ask people in this book what is what's this book satirizing everybody would have a different answer I think a lot of people would have different answers you know I hear black intellectuals right here white liberals and them another that makes sense to me black intellectuals make sense to me but you know but people have different answers and then one woman said which is every comes up now and then she said she's from Uganda she said yeah this book isn't satire because it's totally true you know I mean and it's like that thing so it's interesting about who its satire for who is it was it not satire for cuz I don't think of it as satire just hopefully think of it as a good you know kind of funny book but uh yeah I don't know but when she said that that really helped me somehow in terms of how I can explain this stuff you've already talked about there's so many amazing references everywhere throughout yeah they're not both it's so dense I just had a question about your process do you sort of think about them before ahead of time and kind of use them as pinpoints or waypoints and go back to them or do you just write going forwards and they come to you what's with them and like so many different references to different things it's just how I how I think you know how I write some of its to there's certain shortcuts you know I mean it's some of it is I'm gonna draw a line here are you gonna cross this you know yeah I don't know it's just I mean there's so much happening in my head at once you know so much happening and on the page at once so much happening in my life at once and you know in psyche we have this phrase the here and now and it's I realized it's like how I tell stories I talk about like what happened two days ago or Althea was here and you know there's just so much happening in the space and so the references help me traverse the space a little bit they're not meant to necessarily shut people out I know that it can have that effect and and part of it is you know when do I choose to explain something when do it when I don't and so this is the story I've been just telling like the past week and a half or so it's just sort of like decision-making in a weird way so I think when I wrote this book like I kind of went in going yeah I'm not gonna whatever it is I'm writing about I'm not starting at this spot where everybody always starts there was a slave it was kidnapped you know all this kind of crap war I had was drunk my dad beat me you know I don't know whatever at this there's some starting point that so many that American literature just always has to start at in terms of you know everything as a dialogue at some level and so I just was like I was like I'm not doing it you know and it comes from and I think I've done this for a long time in a weird way and it comes from a guy who I kind of named drop in the book it's a reference that no one's gonna know because it's personal to me you know it can feel fictional but as long as no one cares you know it doesn't matter and a guy named Bob chin he was like my first mentor and we used to meet at his house and when I was in grad school let's get my doctorate in Psych the administer we'd have these great conversations very intense you know they would get heavy and people would get angry and loose and then like you've all heard somebody goes wait wait we're all human beings aren't we you know and I remember Bob turning to the woman who said in goes why do you feel the need to say that you know that's obvious you know the fact that you can feel the need to say that says something about you kind of don't believe it you need that reminder or something and he was like it's a given let's just have the conversation without having to go back and go oh yeah yeah you're not a monkey oh you know I mean and it's and that was like whoa that was really deep for me because he was like that's where the conversation should be we don't have to go back to these things that always take us back somehow and it's like and it's like a concept that I'm mocking in my voice shuffle like then need to always you know yes we're all you know goods away of something I don't know it's a way of a lot of things deflecting really you know and so I don't know it's so it's I have to figure out where to start what to explain like even the little rascals in the book you know I was like no windows with a little rascal right yeah but it's like you can google me or hopefully the book is good enough or tight enough that at some point you don't give a you get it you know I mean and so some of that just comes from passion from hard work mostly you know so but it's about writing about things that are important to me at some level you know not like earth-changing it's just I want to talk about you know and uh and I think that hopefully that using the word passion well that's not the word I want to use but hopefully that's what kind of crosses that's what gets in and I remember like you know like every now and then you hear don't use these pulp culture references don't do that but part of that is a definition of what's pop culture to whom when you know and I remember reading Dante's Inferno and going oh this book is just jam-packed it's all pop culture - then you know these Pope's these vicars all these politicians that he hates I have no clue who these people are you know but it's it's that energy it's that bigger point that he's trying to make it's not actually not that important it's just a name you know I mean so so I just I use the stuff that's important to me you know and uh and then and then those things those things strike chords with certain people some people doesn't circle chord with some people it does so it's I I realized I didn't realize this I people have to tell me stuff from before I realize it and a woman came up to me Samantha as when I was still writing poetry and she was like it must suck to be you know alright no she was she cuz she said you know everybody only gets 50% of what you're trying to do and I was like yeah that's alright I'm good with that you know I mean and that that 50% is gonna be different for everybody and you know and it's it's all layering and then in the next day two weeks it's like the guy you know summer goes by and your ears open and something hopefully you know so sorry god I'm talking a lot sorry two health questions one is about the process which is your kind of performing tonight and you talked about performing as a poet and I wonder whether you really really like it when you go back into the room where you are solitary and where the writer is generally more introverted and whether that's a side of your life that you really like and then I have another question yeah the first one is that's why I am you know I think I was when I was here last the woman came up to me and she was like you're a much less shy than you were 20 years ago when you just said three words and looks down the entire time but it's cuz I've been teaching you know and the teaching has gotten me to myself but I'm used to hearing my voice a little bit and I'm used to trying to explain some you know get some points across so the teaching is is why really and then you know I just teach I just teach I try you know and yeah I'm I'm a very solitary person yeah just I am by nature and so yeah and this is my process question I got the muddled but when you're in that solitary place you've done your drafting to a certain point they're starting to sound like get out or no I just want to ask about touching people mostly never the number was that rich rush of words and images and ideas can you remember how much cutting you did along the way I'm Brighton I mean it took me five years to write this book you know took a long time so yeah yeah I mean it's hard hard work and I think it's one of the things that I get number Allen's saying this and I got pissed at him he's talking about Ornette Coleman oh it's so natural it come from the store you know it's just like so III bristle sometimes when I hear that man it's just hard goddamn work at least for me and I think for most people and but I work at my pace everyone's pace is different but I think writing is hard it's not something that I enjoy very much so obviously you teach and then you write and you like have this idea in your head and you keep going back to it and you kind of think oh my god it's not happening two years in three years in how do you just like carry on with that first they're kind of the mundane 'ti of it and they're kind of fitting it in when you don't really have the time oh it's a good question um I just you got to sit down and do it you know I kind of treat it like schoolwork in a weird way yeah I remember I wasn't a great student you know but to sit down this is what I want to do and usually it kind of has just welled up to the point where I can't ignore it and uh I don't know that I feel like this might change but I've never started something not finished it you know or I don't write very much and I kind of just write when I think I have something to say you know and I don't write essays very often and you know Kaizen somebody will ask me and if 99% of the time I say no the 1% of the time is I realize I'm afraid to do it like I want to do it but I'm afraid and then I try to do that and usually when I do those those things have there's some growth so how can I do that but um yeah I don't write very much I just don't but when I'm writing I'm just I'm all-in so so talking about the things that kind of when people read the book they were surprising that they didn't expect one of the things that I didn't expect was there I thought some of the descriptions of kind of sense of place we're really beautiful and lyrical and talking about kind of the darkness of the night when the moon goes you know when the moon isn't showing and some really beautiful stuff but I just wondered if well I guess the sense of place is obviously important about the time disappearing off the map but I wonder if you could tell us about kind of why or if a sense of place is important to the novel and what got you thinking about that yeah that's a mirror-like so now I'm gonna say should I talk about such a big drinker but yeah that's um that stuff's really important to me it's like one of the things I was really hard to do to get the book started is to get that weird community like absurd feeling like something could out all this stuff could take place so that mean it's just but it's so much it's just memory and it's it's like I spent a ton of time account but it's hard to talk about really uh but it's so important to me you know it's the place I figured out that I was depressed you know and your press you're kind of hypersensitive in a weird way when you're depressed all the time because there are things that just stick out you know for whatever reason good and bad and uh I have like some little rituals I do when I go to LA little places I go and things that just remind me of good and bad things and were my friends so some of it it's just memory and like just making up what things feel like and trying to be artistic about it you know but I think not in those good books but place for me is at least really important you know it's one of the things I talk about with my students because they never said it anything anywhere it's us all in their head which is fine but turn your head into a place then you know so it's how do I do it it's some of its just making the up some of its research you know figuring out stuff so like in the book the bus stuff so I like yeah you know the bus was so important that's like it's like a pass you get to go and weird circuitous routes which is the way I talk the way I think anyways and what's that like to ride the bus what's it gonna be like how can I combine the bus ride with some other memories and you know all this kind of stuff and yeah I don't know how to answer the question really but um and then you know you you get that romantic you're getting nostalgic about it or you over blow it at some point you know and you try to give a sense of this town I don't know like when you were talking I was thinking about the part where they go up PCH he sees the moon and you can hear all the TVs and a leg click off you know I mean it's like you really hear that but it's my sense of how la works on time when it goes dark when it gets quiet because it's a city that kind of shuts down pretty early in a weird way and it sounded like a late night city and it's you know it's a real Couchbase kind of weird city you know so yeah I can't really yeah you know and it's funny you say that it's like you know I was thinking about this book and uh Rebecca Solnit got a grant at the same time that I did we got the same grant to do she did to this other project she was talking about I don't know what that book is called but it's the map book about in the Bay Area the San Francisco just anybody know what I'm talking about you're not talking about them yes he did this beautiful book she was just talking about mapping being very abstract you didn't really know exactly what she was doing but the way she was talking about maps just stuck in my head and I went oh you know what my books about it's about navigate in LA it's just you know I always loved maps the Thomas guide you know that's a real weird la map I don't know if anybody here is from LA just knows what that you know the Thomas guy I mean it's like a Bible in a weird way still is even with GPS and all this kind of stuff and just like how important that stuff was to me get the Thomas guide every year that's what I live on this block you know it's just sign of these crazy names there's just so much stuff and that just for whatever reason that stuff is just swelled in me and just stays there for some some forbidden Rees on the hunt and haunting me I guess [Applause] you

Channel: London Review Bookshop

Views: 5,715

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Paul Beatty, Man Booker Prize

Id: dM8v6UAPTwg

Length: 61min 5sec (3665 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019