Writers Bloc Presents: Martin Amis and Steve Martin | November 17, 2020

hi all and thank you for tuning in to tonight's program featuring martin amos and steve martin i'm andrea grossman the founder of writer's block now in our 25th season we know that fiction tells the truth inside story is what martin amos calls a novelized autobiography so martin gives us truth with the illuminating force of fiction it's a beautiful dive into his relationships with his larger than life friends such as saul bello and christopher hitchens his wives his women and family from the moment we open it martin welcomes us in hands us a drink and with humility starts his story he integrates some contemporary literature into the narrative including his own and in some of the most haunting passages talks to us about dealing with the death of loved ones while he's at it he writes a love letter to literary culture i've never read anything like it i love this book as intended it feels as if martin is speaking directly to me without looking away urging me to understand the fragility of life call it a novel call it whatever you want inside story is a beautiful achievement suffused with warmth compassion and so much humor yeah martin amis is really funny this is not a contest people but if pressed steve martin might just write funnier cartoon captions than martin amos that hasn't been proved yet we'll have to see for his new book a wealth of pigeons which is right here steve has collaborated with the new yorker cartoonist harry bliss harry drew the pictures and steve came up with the captions as well as some of the ideas for the art it was a revelation for me to discover that these drawings and one-line captions are like very short stories yes a picture might be worth a bunch of words but when those few words are written by steve the pictures seem to be worth a lot more tonight you'll have questions please email them to us at reservations writer's block presents dot com and we will try to address them i urge you to visit our website to direct you to those great books chevaliers has signed book plates from steve and from martin i would suggest that they make a great holiday gift by the way and while you're thinking along those lines please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to writer's block to keep these events going thank you so much and now here's steve martin and martin amos hello hi hello martin um i'm just going to start by um saying a little story martin and i met can you hear me asked me to unmute but i was already unmuted i've been unmuted for years um anyway um martin and i met about 25 years ago in london and had several dinners together and since then we have maintained a very very close friendship by not communicating at all in fact this is the first time we've talked at about 20 25 years now i don't see martin am i supposed to am i gone i don't hear anyone oh there he is okay thank you thank you um now one other thing about doing an an interview about something you've written or something you've made that i've always found uh uh complicated is you've worked on this thing you've perfected it and now you're going to be asked questions expecting to reinterpret it do you find uh interviews about your books delightful painful or illuminating um all three uh um but but it's not um by definition uh onerous because you yourself have not quite at this stage have not quite worked out what you were trying to do um it does take a while to surface what you're intending can you just start by explaining a couple of things so i've i've read the book i've read some reviews of the book interpreting interpretation of the book all wonderful and it's explained as an autobiographical novel or is that an equivalency of auto fiction which i uh you just use in the book yes it is yeah i mean i've i've written a memoir that covers a lot of this grant and um i didn't want to go back to that you know uh i was born in 1949 etc um so i thought it would be like i can't think of any novel that pitches itself knowingly as a autobiographical i mean it's a huge genre now called life writing uh water or auto non-fiction um the gardening column you know to the in any way to the astrology page i mean uh it didn't exist um before d.h lawrence about a century ago and why let me ask a question why did this catch on and become a genre and and also part two is its advantage to autobiography either over it or equal to it well there's more there's room for more art the trouble with the memoir is that it's given to you and i talk to other novelists who who've written in mars um including our friend salman rushdie and um we agreed that it came at about twice the rate of fiction i mean write 40 pages a month rather than 20 lucky and um i thought well this will be if you're interested in amazed that anyone is who isn't actually in the profession but um i'm very interested in the philosophy of fiction and what it means and how far away from it how are you just as you are a philosopher comedy um as well as being a practitioner there is we'll get to the uh the philosophy in the book which i it is interspersed with practical guidance on writing and you also uh explain your own book in a way in that you know in the chapter headings you can you can see how it's how it's laid out i mean the first part part one interspersed with the essays called guideline and then you do another you know part of the novel auto novel then guideline again sort of helping the reader also helping a writer uh understand uh but how did this how did that shape come about where you have there's five parts in the book then then they're interspersed with essays whatever you want to call them sort of practical essays and then there's more romantic and emotional essays or storytelling what made you do that or know know how to do that um you just um it is mysterious and norman nailer who talk more balls than any other writer who's ever lived um was incredibly shrewd about the the fiction and his book about the art of fiction is called the spookier is it and it's a terrific book and i felt he was he'd been staring over my shoulders i worked for the last 30 or 40 years um but it it is this um malleable form lawrence again said you can do what you like with it and i i wanted to place myself in this uh intercessionary role between the writer and the the reader um i think that's an underexamined relationship the writer in the reading incredibly important and yeah there's some great quotes which i have which i'm going to find because there are some great quotes about the writer and the reader but did you find that the shape of it was in your head before you started or did it evolve as you were writing those uh hard work you have to have the shape um it's uh it's a great assurance to the reader that that the writer knows what they're up to um and that they're in command because it's this is what terrifies the the neophyte writer who's just starting out with just to go back a while in time just rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and there it is and you can write there's no one stopping you from doing anything um and you realize in that instance um how horrific it would be to live in a country where free expression is not again closely guarded you know well as a performer i know it's possible to fake confidence but as a writer i don't think it is possible to fake confidence unless you have a different view well um confidence is something yeah i i've always had it um and i wonder if that's to do with being the son of a writer but um and also having a stepmother who's very distinguished novelist um if then there would be a lot more children of writers than there are i mean much better bet to have a coal miner as a father then statistically it's much more conducive to writing but i think you know what came to me very early was the the conviction and the enthusiasm for this would be my life and i that came on me when i was 20 21 and um that if we mean it that brings a lot of confidence it seems like you have it backwards in a way because normally to have one's father uh be a great writer or a great whatever is intimidating to a child and they and classically seem like go somewhere else uh so they're not in competition how did that manifest itself well um i've had conversations with dimitri nabakov and with adam bello for instance my two most admired writers and they they both um talked about it in such a way that i wanted to tell them after a few minutes say you're too old me you've got to do it when you're very young then you're crazy and stupid and brave go ahead if you leave it even a few years then you will be um trammelled by self-consciousness and every sentence you write will you'll have 10 objections to it in your head right charge on and was was your inclination to write fueled by your father or you admired him or you just loved writing do you love the words or is it all those things you know all those things and i i i was 14 or 15 before i discovered what kind of writer my father was and my stepmother was and um they could have been writing western's uh translation for all i knew but i sort of thought they were they were writing what is summed up in the anthony trollope novel the title of his magnum office which is the way we live now that was their subject and that's what i wanted to write about and it seemed to me tremendously worth doing how do we live now you know and it renews itself for every generation did you find a facility with words and sentences and paragraphs uh was it inherent or did you get it from reading um well reading would be a huge part of it it was never inherent to have that quality attributed to the to the koran and and to the constitution of inherency and cannot even be questioned um but when i look back at my first only two novels um they're embarrassingly crude i think um you mean your first published novels well that's the same thing okay yeah okay but i didn't know if you had something you put in a drawer um i just did it and that that was the great luck was having having the absurd arrogance to do that right i have a question just before we uh there's this this little term you used uh in the book essentially during the i'd say fictional part you called called you're talking about a writer and you called a a smirk novel yeah can you talk a little bit about a smirk novel because i'm sure i write them [Laughter] well there's only one i i mean navikov parodies the smoke novel in the lolita the lot and the marvelously serenely self-absorbed narrator refers to things like um perhaps i have been sufficiently stressed the effect on all women of my striking some brutal good looks wow yeah i think that every day i must be a smart person uh i want to ask you you talk in the book about having started a autobiographical book called life i think i have that correct and you abandoned it and i'm curious why what transformation it made or did it or did you start afresh to come to this what what made you abandon life and changed into this book yeah it was called life colon a novel it's very pretent but this was 20 years ago when i had my first go at it and um [Music] among the things that were inhibiting me was the fact that they were both well sorbelo and christopher hitchens were as they say very much alive at that point and one of the hazards of being a life writer which i don't think of myself as being is that you you're worried about being sued um himself was harassed by the police for obscenity famously um and seminally because thereafter it became possible to write about the things he was prosecuted for but also for the libel and so fellow himself um used to have sleepless weeks before the publication of a novel in case that happened and he would get friends who appeared in the novel to sign waivers promising they would never litigate um a very uh worldly consideration when publishing a novel rather uncomfortably worldly in my view so that's part of the transformation is to cloak uh named figures in this iteration of it or well no i if if i were writing conventionally in this mode i would call sorbello you know solomon melo or something oh yeah um the well-known people in the book are given their full names right go ahead i just wanted to um and that from what fellow writers have said i was i didn't think about it much of the time but um it doesn't the narrator and the author are sort of hovering around the book in a way that i haven't at a distance that i haven't seen before and you are actually a figure named figure so you could possibly sue yourself yeah uh now in in the book you have uh correct me if i'm wrong three major authorial relationships not counting your father you have philip lark and you have saul bellow and christopher hitchens now do you is that accurate to say yeah do you feel you were born into them at exactly the right time um could it have been replaced if you were born 10 years later by three different people mentally that's psychotherapical but no because they're then they're of their time but they're also of my time and i you know philip larkin was the one i read first and he was a figure from my childhood and occasionally my youth and adulthood um and then christopher was a hitchins was a lifelong friend and we grew up in parallel as often happens you know had got married at the same time had children at the same time got divorced at the same time got remarried at the same time had additional children at the same time so one of those tandem friends um with whom you discuss all these life changes um so i i i don't think that that configuration could be repeated it was just lucky right um can you talk a little bit about christopher hitchens because he is woven through this book uh seriously and you know you each of these authors you talk about larkin bellow and hitchens all represent loss in the book and to describe the loss very well in [Music] warmly but not uh in a corny way it's it's very moving but you're at a distance from it with the exception probably of christopher hitchens i'm fascinated by him and it was he the kind of person you talked with every day you just had an ongoing rapport um it did get to be every day um yes not just when he fell ill in 2010 but um you would no he would report in every day he was a a strident figure with his uh it's not atheism it's anti-theism i think i read that in your book was he did he suffer from abuse by people did it affect him and um after one skirmish that was uh all over the newspapers for a few days i i i called him and i was on tour and i called him and i said you know how how are you and he said uh man i'm living in a world of pain because wrong was so unpopular and um people think that that he took up these contrarian positions um to stir things up and um or that he enjoyed controversy but um he was dependent as we all are on the approval of his peers right um he did something he suffered horribly from the invasion of iraq which he'd championed and gone on the road for a way that i never understood but he was um christopher was wrong regularly he did right from the start when he was atrocious and he went on being atrocious until his last words you never went to christopher for common sense there are dozens of extremely talented and intelligent journalists and controversialists who who have common sense to burn you know but that was not what you went to christopher you went to him for intellectual drama um and it it that was just how he was that was just his temperament and temperament as i'm sure you know is is is directly linked to facility and talent in that um and to your whole direction as a writer um you know are you tolerant are you whimsical are you orderly you know these things all appear in one's book well by the way his his story is woven so beautifully through the book from beginning to end and uh i love the quote he said about chemotherapy oh i have it here i'll i'll find it in a minute oh yes in a room with chemotherapy whereby you sit in a room with a set of other finalists you quoted that but i want to talk about specifically about the book for a second and i'll start with this uh i'm going to have to name drop here i was talking to salman rushdie one time many years ago probably 20 years ago we were talking about book interviews and he said you know when i do an interview about my book i think gee it would be so much better if you just opened the book put your finger down on a sentence that said tell us about that sentence i said already it would be a better interview and so i i didn't really do that but i i found some beautiful sentences in the book that maybe you want to talk about and maybe you don't this is uh one is a beautiful sentence about childhood and you're you're uh in your apartment room somewhere and you hear the sound of children's laughter outside the window as i recall and you said the sentence is what was that what was solitary child song something like a ventilation of happiness eliza for now was not letting off steam but letting off happiness she was singing in the garden um and uh it it just haunted me that that this the childish state fills you with uh with that kind of exaltation and it's so apt i mean i have a seven year old myself and i thought oh i've heard that sound before yeah um and it's something that that uh goes unoccurring to you throughout your life that that things that that thrilled you as a child become inimical as you get older for example birthdays many happy returns we say but many diminishing returns is what we mean as i'm sure you've already experienced the other thing is snow um i used to go to sleep lusting for snow you know dreaming about snow and was so thrilled when it fell but now when i walk wines and see snow i live you know with settled hatred that an enemy i thought had forgotten me all the things you have to put on the clothes and the boots and anyway that's great i have another sentence here which takes us into another direction this is sort of during the this is during the novelistic part and you're describing a woman as she walks toward you he says all right she was lightly blondes the auburn hair had been recently and professionally prepped it now lay in moist coils and runnels and there was the business suit and the business shirt and the business shoes but the face itself was not business-like not cunning not even particularly shrewd just sensible and amused she took four or five steps in his direction and her walk with its looseness and ease told him something about something new about her body she liked it which was a very good start now this gets into a description of sex and appeal and uh men viewing women in a certain way and i don't know you you talk about later where the rules had slightly changed about other other things and but this feels right on the money accurate you know um yeah but i do i was about to launch in at that stage in the book into into saying why writers can't write about sex well you do talk you say that three things a novel a novel really can't do well is uh religion dreams and sex and i was going to argue and say well this is kind of sex i know what you mean you mean descriptive sex is difficult in a novel i'd love for you to talk about those three areas well nabakov said of sex he said um nabakov said as general advice it's not talking about sex and in fact there's there are no swear words or even bodily words in navajo but he said as advice to young readers young writers caress the detail but don't do that when you're writing about sex then then you you're owning up to your own uh quirks and uh your own uh susceptibility to the perverse and um the thing that um religion and sex what they have in common is a lack of universality and although you want to stress individualism in the novel of course you do a lot of stress character and all the rest but you have to try and keep the universal in view and with dreams for instance we've all had the one where you because you're taking a public exam and for some reason you're in the nude and um and your pen has just run out of ink etc hey you're turning me on but we've all had that one and the flying one and the monster one but otherwise once a dream gets going i seem to be walking down this then it changed into an um the universal and religion [Music] there was a great quote uh from uh henry james you said uh he said a quote a dream loser reader cited dream in a dream he's a reader yeah all right and yeah i think um that's what's wrong with kafka is that it's all it's all a dream and it it works beautifully in the short stories as dr johnson said nothing odd will do long story strange as it likes but when it's 400 pages then it becomes it becomes like nonsense first and and you your appetite is limited you have a a description of of loss i talked about that before with christopher hitchens but also you talk about i don't know if it was your mother and your father or a mother or a father but i love these quotes the death of a father kicks the sun upstairs and then about your about the mother you say the loss of a mother with the death of the mother the son goes skyward too clutching the banister and more or less of his own volition but he is seeking his childhood room and his childhood bed two very different responses to mother and father they're very different kind of people um yeah and that was what happened to me and a lot of writing is assuming what happens to you as universe that you everyone's feelings um but i i felt a sort of stiffening of the backbone when my father died and i felt a deliciousness when my mother died no couldn't cope with it um um one going back to christopher hitchens for a second i love this you described as a person who kept two sets of books uh one is romantic incendiary and the other is the beaumont can you explicate that a bit no i mean he was um he was a socialist and also a socialite yeah and uh the first time he was on american tv there was a a terrible little um chance that he was interviewing him who said with a sneer as if he was saying the word leper he said are you a liberal meet raven and christopher said no i'm a socialist and uh everyone was aghast you could tell and but um but that's he never modified that position um despite being very well informed about all all the disasters and famines and terrors of being of the socialist system you know um i'd like to talk about writing a bit uh there's kind of three areas i got from your book one is the concept of anti-elitism one is the use of the subconscious and the your quote is a frictionless verbal surface because there are passages in the book that are really just straight pure great advice for writers how how does uh first let's talk about the subconscious well you you talk about that in your book and um yes i do i believe in it deeply yeah it's a very mysterious force and it's what um melee was talking about in the spooky art it it is cleverer than you and gives you ideas and puts things in your book that you that you need to cut but sometimes you you reach for it as if for a life bill um and your subconscious subconscious has anticipated that need that you will need this minor character to perform some menial task um and it's a year or two ahead of you and you have to catch up with it um mine is eight hours but a year or two is a good one good good for you sometimes it's a year or two you sometimes have to sleep on sleep on it and sleep on it more than once um but you you learn to humor your own subconscious i mean this is probably what you're talking about that when you when you arrive at a roadblock when you're writing i now sweep away from my desk and i go and do something else um usually read but then my legs will take me back to my desk and i realize that the problem has been fixed not through work of mind this was the back of the mind um and it's it means that a force that really does feel supernatural is there to thwart you or to help you depend and it feels incredibly real it doesn't feel like something you're imagining no it seems yeah yeah i find sometimes if i hit a roadblock is to clearly pose the question to myself what the problem is and then 24 hours later sometimes the solution just uses oh you know while you're making a sandwich not that i've ever made a sandwich but i want to talk about this a very important a topic for sorry i've interrupted you an important topic this anti-elitism that is very current and popular in america today and you discuss it in terms of uh writing if you want a reminder i can read uh this is so beautifully written i'll read it you say are there anti-elitists when they go to the doctor or when they board a plane or when they hire a lawyer or an electrician or indeed a hairdresser show me a sphere where we exalt the ordinary the inexpert the amateurish the average i know when what well and this is this is now called populism um and we have a very average could hardly call him that a president uh fighting the bouncers as he's you know led from the from the hall um and whenever i heard the phrase president trump for the last four years um i was also you're kidding you know i mean um but they what they loved about him was that he talks like them i went to a trump um rally and they exalt in in the lack of distance between them and their thought processes and those of trump um they like him being a lockout and a brood um because they can you know feel they're often you know superior to trump in all ways but they they just love that amateurishness and it doesn't apply to any other area of life but it seems like we're in a it's taking a deadly form of the denial of uh science and doctors exactly and um and i mean there was a just to be let me digress just for a minute please vote against logic and reason at the early uh 20th century that went right through to the mid 20th century and stalin and hitler and others never used the word reason without giving it an adjective like cowardly [Music] pews and animus you know um and that and they burst free from from reason and it's tremendously empowering for a while because um anything seems possible and trump um as we saw with trump it works for a while and then the ground turns to marsh land beneath your feet and nothing means anything and truth loses its value and this was dramatized in the in the case of hitler he fooled chamberlain at munich by just lying and jamie came back and said a week or two he said i i just couldn't absorb the fact that i was being lied to by a head of state um it has the power to astonish and um and it is effective but only for a short time and this might this be something you write about in the future well um the reason that that reason lost its force was because of what hitler called the jewish science sciences of uh cosmology einstein um the subconscious specifically in the case of freud and sociology max faber and others um which seem to suggest that life wasn't this logical empirical procedure that we'd all assumed it was that life was weird and therefore truth was malleable um and trump is he's just following his temperament but um but he has reduced americans to to sort of shakiness about truth and verifiability and all those other staples of reasonable thought this is this will be kind of a blending of topics because i'm still still fascinated by the mechanics of writing and you have a passage you talk about three inappropriate uses of words uh from other other literature do you want to talk about those you want me to remind you of them or do you recall them i think i do yeah and it also brings up the question of decorum i bought three history books that i was looking at looking through them and the first instance was a book about hitler saying that hitler felt quote unquote upbeat after his in the alps the second quote was that the satire was a very strange must have been a very strange genre when it appeared and um you know early uh early readers of the modest proposal must have swift must have been gobsmacked right and and and the third one was uh it was actually kaiser wilhelm the first um is commended by one historian for having the smarts to use bismarck to do all his foreign policy and as a writer reader you're reading that and it is it sort of amusing amusingly inappropriate or does your inner uh school marm come out and want to slap him on the wrist my inner everything comes out not just an acronistic but it also offends decorum which um had his declines literary meaning is something like the opposite of its um conversational meaning it has to do decorum in conversation has to do with politics um and good manners and all that but um in literature it just means suiting the words to the meaning the tone of the words to the meaning and when i when i think about people being gobsmacked in you know 17 um just imagine the conversation you know how did you how did lady leticia how did you find the reading from jonathan's jonathan swift um modest proposal well frankly sir i was called smack i mean i don't think collapses i guess it's the idea of being taken out of the book you're reading by reading an inappropriate word or a word that's uh uh anachronistic in a way localistic yeah you know you know something's gone very wrong indeed when you start imagining the the writer the historian in these cases um you start to imagine him at his desk and you begin to wonder what kind of mind um who does this writer think he's pleasing when he says upbeat and gobsmacked and smart um i suppose there must be one reader in a hundred or a thousand who will give a complicit layer when he sees some you know recent colloquialism in print but um but all the rest will veer back in disgust you have some comments there's one thing i want to discuss we're getting a little short on time but about cultural appropriation you have a very brief paragraph about it in the book i could read it or you could talk about how you feel about it um well i um i it's much on my mind because i'm writing about race in america at the moment short stories and um i'm definitely appropriating something because i've never lived through on the other hand i've written two novels about the holocaust and i'm appropriating that but cultural appropriation is what the novel is um you're taking an experience that isn't yours and you're trying to inhabit it and imagine it that's what the novels um so telling you what you can and can't do because the the greater principle is that that fiction is freedom of course it is um it wouldn't be there if it wasn't you know this is this is you and you never give an inch of freedom away and i will i would apologize for if i upset people but um i'm not going to stop doing that that would just that cancels the whole of anglophone literature if you um if you prohibit that um i found it telling i'm just watching the time loop i think we're fine uh i know we're gonna take some questions uh at the end of the book you you've opened the book you've kind of talked that this is going to be your last book you have said that somewhere in so many words and then the very last paragraph in the book it says goodbye my reader i said goodbye my dear my close my gentle now that is a real goodbye and then you have an afterthought an addendum a postscript and a post post script haven't quite stopped and now you tell me you're writing uh two other books on the holocaust and something else well i've already written the two books on the holocaust oh okay i'm contemplating a third if i live long enough um i know what i said was that i won't write another long novel it's just it even if you're um if your powers are still there it's a very exhausting thing to write a long novel you have to keep it all in your mind right when you begin a novel you you enter this very wide entrance um and by the time you you're done you you come out as if from a manhole with an audible pot because you've you've you've constrained yourself with all these patents and themes and so on and um it gets torturous and so chekhov said late in life that everything he read seemed to him not short enough that does come over you as you age yeah what's up bellows quote about auggie march uh when we were talking about how um it's it's it's sort of silly to say what's this novel about and someone asked saul said i mean what's the adventures of orgy march about and he said it's about 200 pages too long it's a good joke to end with but i want to just jump back for one thing because we were talking about your uh birthdays and strangely there's a cartoon in my book that is a a hospital room with a baby just having been born the doctors are there and the mother and father are there and the nurse is holding up the baby to the doctors and the baby says this is my best birthday ever should i ask andrea we were going to ask some questions i'm worried about time i always uh being a performer i like shorter rather than longer although this is incredibly fascinating are you there to step in andrea andrea is here to step in i have lots of questions that we've received so many um just a two minute break just to go to the bathroom you can have a two minute break well maybe quicker than two minutes two minutes intermission uh you know there's a uh just you know there's a thing i grew up with um you know i grew up in the 50s and there was a thing that was legitimately sold called a traveler's friend and what it was was for drivers and it was a tin can fancy tin can that wrapped around your leg with a tube that went up inside your pants so drivers did not have to pull over to use the restroom clearly that was not around in martin's milia no he didn't know about it but we won't tell him either should i how fascinating was that it was so fun it's so fun but i have why while martin is otherwise engaged why don't i ask a question that's come in for you well we have a lot of questions for you too um steve have you ever entered the new yorker caption contest under under an assumed name and have you ever won you know what i haven't and i'll tell you why first i think the the results are already so good i i don't feel competitive but also because i've written for the new yorker you know i have this sort of waspy guilt that i would be breaking i would be breaking a rule you can't enter if you've written if you work there if you do this if you do that so i have this kind of a pre manufactured guilt about trying to enter it i do try to come up with them occasionally and i always thought they were fabulous you know one of my favorite books is uh the new yorker published it maybe i don't know how many years ago 10 years ago but it was book cartoon a book of cartoons that were in the new yorker that no one got and they had the writer explain it and it was a nice you know uh 200 page book filled with cartoons that people said huh which is very much i'm finding it's a very big part of cartooning is the huh it's almost essential because nobody's huh is the same to in the same response to a certain cartoon they might love it and then somebody else will go huh yeah um yeah i mean uh wait and i have um okay on that same subject i thought i heard him martin is back you know what i'm gonna go to we'll go to martin and then i'll try to find that other thing martin um in response to your comments about populism and anti-elitism are you i'm adjusting okay boris johnson was a classic student at oxford yet he acts like a buffoon um anti-elitists embrace him can you explain not only the appeal but his self-abasement um that's perhaps too much i don't i i'll quote um clive james the late great clive james who said um these are all basically differences in taste um and this goes uh especially for trump it's called the barry manilow law and he said everyone everyone you know thinks barry manilow is absolutely terrible but everyone you don't know thinks he's great i think that puts it all in proportion because people you don't know are astronomically outnumbered by the people you do um and this is just a taste you're never going to understand um and i have certainly been feeling nothing else but that for the last four years or more um boris johnson's appeal um he's he's just a pompous windbag he's educated but he's still basically stupid okay um martin did saul bellow give you the same kind of intellectual drama that christopher hitchens did um well more imaginative imagine a state of drama in that i would read him and feel elevated and stimulated in a way that christopher often uh he often had that effect on me but um but saul was seldom addressing himself to sort of to questions of uh common sense and logic he was in a different realm um steve when you write cartoon captions is it like uh writing jokes for stand-up or how does it differ completely different first of all you know jokes for stand-up are integrated into something uh they're a part of a larger piece um another great distinction is also you're talking to someone you're talking to an audience or i'm talking to marty short and a joke on stage for example is something you can refine you do it one night and then you refine it the next night you refine it but a cartoon is done it's almost done at the very moment it's conceived and you don't really have even a way to try it out you sh you know i mean in the book we have illustrations of me showing it to my wife showing it to my daughter and finally showing it to my cat yeah you know but there's really no uh you're talking about a singularity it's a little single thing and you know the book has 150 cartoons in it so it it takes on a different life uh it's a very different thing it's a it's completely it's not instantaneous although sometimes the cartoon occurs instantaneously but after two hours of thought yeah it's very different it's really fun to not have to depend on a response immediately you know yeah well we should we could we could have a long discussion about comedy and what's it for and what is it and what is laughter we i don't i wish i'd seen um some explanatory essay about this because i i can't i can't explain it i can't always explain it having to do with irony or um something hidden from you that is suddenly revealed and it usually is deflationary um this is good uh nietzsche said uh a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling now that that that is a brilliant description of a sick joke um but a normal joke is uh is exposing stupidity [Music] and that that is it's cooler there in a way and uh what say it again i didn't hear that last word it's more elitist than a sick joke um i i have never been able to put my finger on it because i know jokes work 50 different ways you know some are just because they're kind because they're nice sometimes they're tough you know i mean i can make i i can in my show i can make fun of marty short and he can make fun of me and it's so benign and it's almost as though you're saying wouldn't it be funny if i said this to marty short you know you do that you do that in this book with harry bliss you and harry have you know back and forth about what's funny and what's not right in the cartoon it's hilarious well i talked to carl reiner once he was about to go on stage for the director's guild and he had hosted it every year for 20 years and he's right he's about to go on stage and i said what are you going to do what are you going to open with he said i don't know i said as a professional comedian i said what are you talking about you don't know he said i don't i don't know what i'm going to say i just go out and say what they're thinking say what they're thinking see what they're thinking what the audience is thinking what is this um it's a it's a same in in in writing that um you're anticipating a response and which refines your response it is um what is the word i mean it is synergy you know it's a combination of things we have time for a few more ask martin because he's the uh he's the big figure here yeah um martin this book is a lot more gentle than your others why the difference in tone for inside story i'm well why is never really anything that occurs to you why am i doing this um it's like you don't develop you just look at the implications of what you've done already and follow that um it i guess it's it's to do with me getting older and more forgiving and not feeling that i have to judge and uh and poor spawn on any anything but i i'm sure steve found this because his book has the same quality you also discover whether you have grudges whether you have things that rank or in you whether you're sour and that just emerges naturally from your from your nature it's not a decision it's a sort of evolutionary change what drew you to saul bellow over philip roth for example why did bello speak more to you than philip roth well philip ross spoke to me piercingly in one novel fortnight's complaining which is by many magnitudes his best novel in my view um but otherwise i i think it's he's rather an effortless writer you can see him straining for effect um and and there's a sort of i don't know i with sorbelo i just felt that his words weigh more they they weigh in higher density than anyone else is very much including philip rob um steve i do have one for you if you'll indulge us um and i love i love this question so there you go um salman rushdie told you know said he wished that people would just open a page and point so uh somebody wrote in about um the myth of sisyphus fact okay this is one of the funniest cartoons in the book although i have many favorites so can you talk about the myth of sophistication you know uh as we know just the myth of sisyphus is here she's pushing up a rock and it keeps rolling back and keeps pushing up the hill and can't go to the top uh sort of a metaphor of life i guess but you know my my wife uh whom i've been been together with for you know 17 18 years we met because she was a fact checker at the new yorker and she would fact check my comedy pieces which sounds strange but she also used to fact check poetry and you know she had to fact check paul muldoon's poetry which can be very oblique you know with very esoteric references and should say did you know that in so and so wales the stell is actually labeled 1802 you know something like that i'm making that up but she was fact checking my comedy pieces and i kind of fell in love with fact checking i didn't know much about it i thought you know facts of fact and when i was writing my own memoir i i so deeply enjoyed the fact checking element which was involved calling other people for their memories and also going through my stack of memorabilia i just used to take things receipts throw them in in cardboard boxes and i could go through and they would be chronological because they were just stacked over time so i could find a hotel receipt you know from 1972 and i could i remember my girlfriend mitzi was with me and she had photos of et cetera i started searching all that out so anyway myth of sisyphus i just was thinking of fact-checking and i thought of the myth of sisyphus and i thought okay the rock is really paper mache the grade is ten percent not forty percent he his real name is manny he works uh 40 hours a week with the weekends off he has a stand-in you know i just it was just a play on fact-checking i guess and and harry drew it so beautifully you can feel the sinewy muscles on the guy pushing the um boulder up the rock uh it's one of my favorite cartoons in there too well it's a tragic myth that of sisyphus right and we all feel like sisyphus it's not fact-checking i i'm all for fact-checking and um nothing's always welcome but no suggestions about style please yeah if james again he'd had a bruising session with not just the fact-checker the new yorker but the stylistic um uh counselor and he said i he said it flashed into my mind but uh and i rejected it because it was cruel but what i wanted to say was listen if i wrote like that i'd be you well there is a difference between fact checking and editing and editing can is is also i love editing but that's where you find those sentences like gee what what a what great way to take the fun out of a sentence yeah no that that you you everything in you resists that but fact checking now you may not use to go with the fact checker but um it's nice to know if you're factually wrong see and because your book is a novel martin you don't need fact checkers right that's right there you go you got out of that easily um i want to thank both of you so very much this is so fun and i hope that we can bring you back soon to writer's block because it's so great and i you so much i really enjoyed myself great to see you again martin great to see you and um we have one of these every other night yes yeah all right thank you everybody oh and go to um go to our website so that you can get links to these great books and remember the holidays are coming so what could be better anyway thank you and we'll see you soon bye-bye thanks a lot thank you bye-bye

Channel: Writers Bloc Presents

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Id: evb6dr9zBNY

Length: 69min 26sec (4166 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020