Category: interviews

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This fictional Paris Review Interview with “Constance Eakins” is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor’s Tongue. Here’s a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics:

Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer?

Eakins: No, I always wanted to be a writer, even before I was born. My first story was what I like to call an image-story. When I hadn’t yet learned how to speak, my dear mother would give me a parcel of rusty nails, which I used to draw abstract shapes on the walls of our home.

I: How do you know that these were stories? I mean, doesn’t every child make drawings if given some sort of writing implement?

E: They were image-stories and if you went to look at them now they would make you weep from the beauty of their narrative swoop.

The classic nuts and bolts…

I: When do you begin writing each day? As soon as you wake up?

E: Yes, when I wake up in the morning I always have the desire to sit down to write. The first thing I do is write down my dreams, then I get to my fiction, poetry, theater, film scripts, monographs, critical essays, and journalism—in that order. But then I constantly am receiving telephone calls, gawking fans come up to my house, friends try to visit, and I am all the time interrupted. Somehow I manage to keep on writing.

[via maud newton]

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

From an interview with Christian Landers, he of Stuff White People Like:

We have a generation of white people who want nothing more than to distance themselves from being white. They need to believe that the earth is being destroyed by evil white people, culture is ruined by the wrong kind of white people, and that history’s sins were committed by distant relatives. And so by eating at ethnic restaurants, travelling, trying to save the world, you can say that “I’m part of the solution, if everyone were like me, the world would be so much better.” I think that attitude lends itself to pretty easy satire.

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I like this bit from an interview with Ellen Lupton, talking about common design pitfalls: “My students avoid printing out their work, to save time and money, but then they are disappointed that it doesn‚Äôt look good. I explain to them that everything looks good on the screen, because of the glowing light and the way we are constantly adjusting the scale of the image to suit ourselves. The same layout may die on the printed page.”

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Nick Hornby interviews David Simon, of The Wire fame:

There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time—hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor—but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually.

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From Nathan Ihara’s review of the Paris Review Interviews, II: “the art of the interview requires something very different from a mere investigation of the mechanics of fiction. Leave theory and technique to the essay or manual. An interview is a wonderful art form, similar to a one-act play, with an unswerving goal: to expose a human being.”
I really enjoyed Paris Review Interviews, I. I’ll see if I can get my hands on this latest one.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

An interview with Alex Ross:

I thought I had no choice but to write about the 20th century; it’s such an extraordinary body of work that is relatively little known, especially in terms of your average educated person who can tell a Picasso from a Jackson Pollack and has read widely in contemporary literature and knows the great books of the 20th century, but will freeze up when you mention Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The thing is, they know the music, they know the sound of the music‚Äîthey’ve been exposed to it in one form or another on film soundtracks, in concerts, or on CDs‚Äîbut they don’t necessarily know where this music came from, and how it all fits together, and how one composer affects another or reacts to another.

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Bonobos are in the news again. A while back there was a an article about bonobos in the New Yorker. And in the current issue of The Believer, an interview with primatologist Frans de Waal, who is gently criticized in the New Yorker article. It’s a good read, aside from lousy economics in the third section. The best part of the interview touches on moral emotions, and what we misconceive about morality & Darwinism. De Waal makes the distinction:

We’ve been fed a bogus “Darwinian” position for thirty years, one that confuses the way evolution works with the things that evolution produces. Because the way evolution works, yes—it’s a nasty process. Evolution works by eliminating those who are not successful. Natural selection is a process that cares only about your own reproduction, or gene replication, and everything else is irrelevant. But then what natural selection produces is extremely variable. Natural selection can produce the social indifference you find in many solitary animals. But it can also produce extremely cooperative, friendly, and empathic characteristics.

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An interview with Michael Cook, who explores municipal drain systems and other subterranean infrastructure.

Even people I know who self-identify as urban explorers aren‚Äôt at all that interested in undergrounding ‚Äì especially not in storm drains. A lot of them just don‚Äôt see the actual interest. It‚Äôs not a detail-rich environment. You can walk six kilometers underground through nearly featureless pipe—and there‚Äôs not something to see and photograph every five feet.

Cook has plenty of wonderful photographs and logs of his trips at Vanishing Point.