Of literature Thomas Carlyle wrote, “All that mankind has done, thought, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.” No critic in American life today does more to excavate that magic within texts than Lev Grossman.  A native of Lexington, Massachusetts, Grossman came from a voraciously lettered home.  His father Allen Grossman has published eleven books of poetry and essays, and until 2005 taught in the English department of Johns Hopkins University.  His mother Judith Grossman has published two works of fiction, taught creative writing the University of Iowa, and was chairman of liberal arts at Mount Ida College in my hometown of Newton, MA.  Lev’s sister Bathsheba is a sculptor specializing in computer-aided 3D models; his twin brother Austin is a video game designer and author of the superhero novel Soon I Will Be Invincible.  The pile of degrees amassed by the Grossman nuclear family could sink a small canoe.

Yet amidst his clan, Lev has garnered a unique and avid following among readers patrolling our cultural outer limits.  He published his first two novels Warp and Codex in 1997 and 2004 respectively, with the latter becoming something of a hit.  Yet it has been The Magicians, his 2009 novel of young spell casters grappling with their supernatural abilities and raging hormones at a school for sorcerers called Brakebills, that has jettisoned him to the New York Times bestseller list and forefront of the fantasy genre.  While The Magicians is unabashedly a tale of wizards and dungeon monsters, it’s no obtuse missive scrawled onto a twenty-sided die.  Grossman has penned a Narnia-style odyssey that begins in present-day Park Slope and is as accessible and topical as it is epic.  His characters have read Harry Potter, and find their own sudden confrontations with the supernatural to be all the more fantastic because of it.  It is both an adventure yarn and a journey into the act of reading, examining what it means to be captivated by fiction, just as the quest of its reluctant hero Quentin Coldwater beckons.  It is a work of humor, veracity, and imagination, which expands our expectations for what fantasy can be, while wearing time-tested geek love on its sleeve.

This referential candor and linguistic immediacy carries over to Grossman’s daily grind.  While conjuring fiction, he doubles as one of America’s premier cultural detectives, as a senior writer for TIME Magazine and author of the popular TechLand blog on TIME.com.  Grossman’s August 23^rd cover story profiling author Jonathan Franzen (the first novelist to make the cover since Stephen King a decade ago) has been the talk of the literary world for a solid month.  Buzzing praise for Grossman’s incisive analysis of Franzen and his new novel Freedom is well deserved, spotlighting the critic’s inquisitiveness and amour for the inventive

In conversation Grossman is articulate, candid, and engaged.  His enthusiasm for his likes and impassioned damning of his turn-offs is infectious.  He peppers his thoughts with French phrases, obscenity, pop minutiae, and words like “exciting”, “fantastic”, “great”, and “amazing”, uttered with animation as his cognitive bells and whistles go off all at once.  If Borges had grown up with Gauntlet and Zelda as his labyrinths, he might sound something like Grossman.  Lev and I met last Thursday at the boozy and cavernous Berry Park on the cusp of Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  Over beers and foosball, Grossman held court on life as a critic in corporate America, an old school dork suspicious of nerd culture’s recent embrace by the masses, and a recently married father to a ten-week old daughter.  What follows is my frank and unabridged conversation with a well-read fellow, who as both arbiter and artisan voraciously extols that which we used to call pulp fiction, and today call an empire-in-progress.  Here now, the wit and wisdom of a man in the running for the title of Coolest Geek in Town.

NC: You’ve just come from California.

LG: Yeah, I just had this wandering period where I went to a conference, then I went to go talk to [cyberpunk pioneer, author of Neuromancer] William Gibson.  I was supposed to come home after each stop.  They kept getting longer, longer.  Then I went to LA to talk to David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin about the Facebook movie they’re doing, The Social Network, which was totally great.

NC: Were you a big Gibson fan growing up?

LG: I was.  That was like, primal.  The circle is now closed: I’ve met William Gibson.  I should commit ritual suicide, and that would be complete.

NC: When you’ve interviewed folks in the past, has anything surreal every happened in the midst of one of the conversation?

LG: I’m trying to think of what a hair-raisingly bad one.  Mostly they’re just bad in ordinary ways.  I interviewed Jack Nicholson; we didn’t really hit it off.  Like, at all.  He’s been famous for fifty years, and I wasn’t up to the level of adoration that he possibly would have been more comfortable with.

NC: Where do you write?  What tools do you write with?  Do you have certain methods, habits, rituals?

LG: I think everyone does, mine are just more boring than most.  I write on a laptop.  I have a major dependence on caffeine, so I drink a lot of espresso.  It’s location independent for me.  For a while I was obsessed with this particular chair in this coffee house in Park Slope.  If someone was in that chair… well, fuck, that was it for that day.  And this skinny guy was always in there, typing on his laptop.  Everyday I’d get there and it’d be like, “Ugh, curses!  He’s in the chair!”  It took me a while to realize that he was Jonathan Safran Foer.

NC: Wow.  Great minds…  or asses, in this case.

LG: Great chairs.  That kind of broke me on rituals, cause he kept fucking me on mine.  He lapped me: I think he was writing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at the time.  Really nice guy.

NC: Is the act of writing fiction for you different from writing non-fiction?  Do you approach the work differently?  Do you write differently?

LG: They are really different.  It’s horrible to say, but for me, non-fiction… it’s a little bit automatic now.  There’s none of that throat-clearing and stutter stepping involved.  I’ve been writing non-fiction for forty hours a week on deadline for so long.  What are those marks people make when they’re getting ready to kill themselves? Hesitation marks?  People tend to take a few extra before they go in deep for the jugular.  I don’t even bother with those anymore.

NC: Once it’s time to file, you’re passed out on the bathroom floor.

LG: Exactly.  With fiction, it’s much more difficult.  It’s more mental preparation.  A solid hour of playing Scrabble on Facebook.  I really have to sink my way into the trance.  It happens very slowly.  I wish it were otherwise.

NC: Talk about your enrollment at Harvard and later Yale.  You recently wrote a bit about the experience of living both on your blog.  In what ways does it compare or contrast to the Brakebills experience?

LG: There must be a connection, though it’s a measure of what a poor student I am of my own work that it did not occur to me until after I’d finished writing the book that it might it have something to with going to Harvard.  I should take that out of my author bio: I feel as though it’s a fact that requires explanation and is less meaningful than it first appears to be.

NC: Or that people are interested in the novelty of this rivalry between the schools.

LG: I worry that it renders me unapproachable in some way.  That it causes people to think I am a) smarter than I am, and b) more of a dick than I am.

NC: A fancypants.

LG: I mean… works for TIME, went to Harvard and Yale… how much do you want to punch that guy in the face?  I want to punch him in the face.  And he’s me!  One of the reasons I wrote about it on the blog was to ask, “Who must these people think I am?”  For better or worse, shaping some sort of authorial persona has become an important part of the writer’s job in the present era.

NC: Much of The Magicians seems to be about the fragility of adolescence colliding with adult self-determination of one’s role in the world.  Do you recall early experiences from youth that made you want to be a writer, or times when you realized you were becoming one?

LG: My upbringing was slightly odd in that both of my parents were writers. To begin with, they’re both English professors.  Beyond that, my father’s written, what, a dozen books of poetry?  Possibly more.  My mom’s written a novel and a book of stories, and a bunch of stuff that she will publish but hasn’t yet.  So it was disappointingly un-rebellious to think about becoming a writer.  It’s a bit of a fait accompli.  It was not a foregone conclusion that I’d be a writer, but it was in the top three choices in the multiple choice question of What Was I Going to Do. That said, it took me a surprisingly long time to become a writer of any kind.

NC: What were you doing prior to writing?

LG: I had a very shitty period.  I blew out my whole twenties, basically. In a stunningly unproductive way, doing really un-fun things.  Like temping.  And going to graduate school.  And being a web producer.  I couldn’t settle on a career, but I had no money, so I had to work, and I sort of roamed at random.  It wasn’t until I was about thirty that I got serious about writing, and began writing things that I was really happy with.

NC: While in your twenties, were you still engaging nerd culture?  Reading fantasy, science fiction, comic books, and the like?

LG: I was.  I didn’t have any sense of why I was, or what they meant to me. It’s fair to say I was in some emotional denial of the strong emotional attachment I felt to these works.  When I was in graduate school, it just seemed very weird that I would be in the halls of the Death Star of high culture, and that I would be there reading rebel tracts.  I remember spending literally my last dollar on Ender’s Game. I was going through that period that generally all people go through where they have between zero and twenty dollars in their bank account. And I remember zeroing it out, because I had to have the paperback, not even the fucking hardcover of Ender’s Game.

NC: When did you know that you’d completed The Magicians, and what was your state of being upon completing it?  Did you have an ending in mind?

LG: I did have an ending in mind.  I always knew what the ending would be. It’s very true, this over-quoted quotation from somebody, that writing a novel is like driving cross country at night: you can see twenty feet ahead of you in the headlights, and you know that you’re heading for the coast, but everything else in between is totally blackness.  I knew I was heading for the coast, and I completed a first draft in almost exactly a year flat.

NC: Was there a day wherein you realized that you’ve just written a novel?

LG: Sort of, and I want that to be the case.  But that feeling is disrupted by my obsessive, pathological need to not take any satisfaction in anything I do.  And also because my first drafts are very rough, just scratch.  It’s like, you dash out these scenes, you say basically what happened, then later you layer in the thoughts and feelings of everyone who was there and the little details that they saw.  It’s a slow process of accretion: I wish it was some dramatic stroke of the pen, but it isn’t really.  I was making changes up until a few months before the book came out.

NC: Did you have a particular audience and/or reader in mind when writing The Magicians?

LG: Initially it was just me.  I was really depressed when I started writing it, and like all depressed people I was completely self-absorbed.  It was this document that I was creating to make myself feel better.  Only later did other human beings enter into the equation. I think it was also [written] for myself at seventeen: at a time when my life seemed totally unsustainable, and my chances of getting into Narnia were just vanishingly small, leaving me nowhere to go.  I would say those two people, Lev at thirty-five and Lev at seventeen were the only two people I had it in me to direct the book at.  I think it takes a certain calmness and sense of self-worth to think about offering things to other people.  [Laughs] Maybe Jonathan Safran Foer has that.

NC: Of The Magicians you told The AV Club, “it was like… I’d decided to write something in my mother tongue. I’m fluent in fantasy.”  What are the calling cards of the genre for you? What is it about fantasy that you find natural, organic, comforting, if those are accurate accounts of what you feel for the form?

LG: I think that’s accurate.  Like a lot of people, like maybe most people, the books that taught me to understand narrative and understand what novels were, were fantasy novels.  Narnia obviously, Tolkien, T.H. White, Anne McCaffrey, Fritz Leiber, Piers Anthony. That cluster of writers… you don’t read things obsessively at a young age for years and not have them be setting down really deep grooves and neuron structures in your brain.  They taught me a lot about the grammar of novels, how they’re structured, how they feel, and what they do for you. And a major thing they did for me was comfort.  It’s difficult to say what fantasy is now, especially now that people are now screwing around with what it is in such interesting ways.  The first and greatest standard will still be the same standard used for porn, which is that you know it when you see it.  I feel I know fantasy when I see it.

NC: Which Supreme Court Justice was it that said that?

LG: I think it was in the Ulysses case.  Was it the Ulysses case, or was that something completely different?

NC: I think that, like most things in life, it was either James Joyce’s or Larry Flynt’s.  [Editor’s Note: it was neither.  The phrase is attributed to Justice Potter Stewart, from his concurring opinion in the 1964 case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, which dealt with charges of “public display of obscene material” leveled at a Cleveland theater owner for having screened Louis Malle’s 1958 film The Lovers. – NC.]

LG: [Laughs] There’s very little in between those two.  But it’s really interesting, what fantasy is, because it’s really not science fiction, and really not like science fiction.  The placing of those two things in the same bookstore aisle, seems to me more and more a bizarre cultural accident, rather than on any level correct, typologically.

NC: Or just two things that happen to be bought by a number of the same people.  Where for you do fantasy and science fiction diverge?

LG: Fantasy and science fiction as we know them, in the modern sense, were born in the early twentieth century in the same moment as literary modernism.  They would almost have to be a response to the calamitous onset of what we think of as modernity.  Urban life, mass media, mechanized warfare, electric lighting, the automobile: all those things arrived at once, more or less, in the same historical movement.  People born in the late nineteenth century and growing up in the twentieth century saw their world completely transformed.  So I feel these literary genres, of which I include literary modernism among them, as a reaction to that.  And I think of fantasy as a way of trying to think about what was lost in that transformation, in the onset of modernity.

NC: Is it a callback to folklore in that sense?

LG: Yeah.  And it’s profoundly nostalgic, of an era in which we had some organic relationship to the landscape around us, and the artifacts that we carried and worked with.  Whereas science fiction was a more direct, concrete reckoning with the tools that we had built, and that were then in response rebuilding us.  And you see this incredibly nostalgic strain in modernism all the time.  I think it should be identified as a fantasy strain.  Ten million literary scholars would probably disagree with me.

NC: You told The Village Voice last year, “There’s no fantasy in the Library of America. For some reason, they won’t touch it. But they should.” Which authors or works of fantasy in particular should academia be touching?  Likewise you told The Los Angeles Times last year that you aim to treat “popular fiction with the same sort of critical tools you bring to literary fiction and see what comes out — which is often important truths.”

LG: [Laughs] God, you must have spent really horrible, grinding hours reading interviews of me.  It’s funny though, I do keep an eye on academia.  My wife is a professor at Princeton in the English department.  I don’t see it changing.  I don’t see a swelling up of interest in fantasy literature.  [With pause] I’m hesitating in an effort to not say something that will cause some blogospherical explosion [Laughs]. I think in the decade we’ve just lived through, there are definitely works of fantasy that deserve to be classed as masterpieces.  I think Fritz Leiber’s work is strong and interesting enough.  Ursula Le Guin, I take nothing away from, but her Earthsea books are more YA, and I don’t think the Library of America does YA. It’s a serious question: if I think the academy should be doing fantasy, what fantasy should they be doing?

NC: One who gets brought up a lot of late is George R.R. Martin, particularly his Song of Ice and Fire series.

LG: Yes.  TIME Magazine called him the American Tolkien.

NC: [Laughs] Did they?  Some guy at TIME Magazine said that?

LG: [Laughs] Yes, that was me.  I believe it.  He’s a bonafide genius, that guy. That work is truly important.  Should he finish it, I would guarantee him my vote for the Library of America.  He’s gotta finish it, but what he’s done there is truly astounding.  And I think of people like Kelly Link, who’s a fantastic writer, totally canon ready.  I don’t know if they do short stories in the Library of America, but either they should, or Kelly Link should write a novel.  Then we would be all set.

NC: As a critic yourself, you may resist the urge to respond in print to a review of The Magicians, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask for your comments on Michael Agger’s review of the book in the New York Times. In particular his closing missive, which reads, “Perhaps a fantasy novel meant for adults can’t help being a strange mess of effects.  It’s similar to inviting everyone to a rave for your 40th-birthday party. Sounds like fun, but aren’t we a little old for this?”  Similarly, on Bookforum, Matthew Shaer wrote, “Grossman has written both an adult coming-of-age tale-rife with vivid scenes of sex, drugs, and heartbreak-and a whimsical yarn about forest creatures.  The subjects aren’t mutually exclusive, and yet when stirred together so haphazardly, the effect is jarring.”  Why do you think certain critics found these two qualities dissonant, and why might that pairing have been more accessible or rewarding for others?

LG: Haphazard, that’s what stings!  Haphazardly!

NC: For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t characterize anything in the book as such.

LG: [Laughs] Oh, don’t apologize for them!  Those reviews were frustrating for me, the Times review in particular, because it was so prominent.  Publishers Weekly was also a pan, but a different kind of pan: they didn’t go that route. Those critics are seeing a division where I think there is none. They’re seeing a division that exists in retail categories.  But when you look at the actual reading behavior of adults, they consume young adult fantasy and grown up fiction indiscriminately.  Half the people who bought Harry Potter were over eighteen.  Movies like those of the Lord of the Rings are massive smash hits.  That division doesn’t exist in the mind of readers, it exists in the mind of critics.  And like most things that exist in the minds of critics only, it will fade away eventually. Probably sooner rather than later.

NC: As one who approaches the genre with unfair stigmas, I was surprised to find the fantastic elements carry a ring of truth.  Particularly in the first hundred or so pages, the book is a straight up Brooklyn coming-of-age story, and the infusion of magic into the verite is treated with a genuine realism.

LG: Growing up, that distinction seemed very real.  There was a time when fantasy seemed much more separate than it is now.  You’re what, fourteen, fifteen years old?

NC: [Holding up nine fingers] I’m this many.

LG: I’m forty-one.  The first half of my life happened before Harry Potter. The idea of a fantasy novel being a mass phenomenon did not exist. Rowling made visible to everyone the fact that there was a mass audience for fantasy, and an audience that intersected with the audience for serious fiction.  I don’t think that was known before.  It seems glaringly obvious to me now.  I shouldn’t blame any critics for being slow to adjust to that reality, because it’s amazing.

NC: Much of this book, to the surprise of a wary fantasy reader like myself, is not about magic, but about what life is like as a young person in New York, and those who roam the city without that flicker of lightness.  It’s perhaps also about the search for purpose and aspiration, and the fulfillment of one’s talents.  I’m reminded of the schoolmaster Dean Fogg telling his prized pupils on their graduation night that he thinks they’re able to be magicians because some part of them is unhappy, and they are able to channel that pain into something powerful.  Which sounds eerily like what it is to be a writer, or artist of any kind really.

LG: Yeah, very much so.  I should demur, but it was really close to the surface for me.  The Magicians is a thinly veiled metaphor for the writing of The Magicians. Because as I was writing it, I was feeling that I was striking a rich, hot vein that I’d never been able to find in myself before.  I had written before: I had written two novels before that.  But they came slowly and rather coldly.  Writing The Magicians felt like doing magic: I suddenly felt that I was speaking words of power and consequence.  That sounds really naff when I say it, but I really felt for the first time that I was saying things that mattered, and that’s a deeply magical, exciting feeling.

NC: You’ve talked about being particularly fond of fantasy which offered its protagonists escape from their present lives, via adventures to a new land, new role, new reality.  Without being overly intrusive, what did you find dissatisfying about your life or surroundings at that time that made escape so appealing?  What required a quest?

LG: [Laughs] This is like that part of The Breakfast Club where Ally Sheedy says, “My home life is dissatisfying.”  I was going through a very difficult passage, personally and professionally.  My career was stagnating.  Also, I was going through a divorce.  I was getting ready to be divorced.  I was pre-divorce.  I was realizing that I was in a relationship that was very wrong for me.  That really sucked. It sucked doubly because we’d just had a baby.  And if I was going to leave this relationship that was totally destroying my personality, it would mean moving out of the house where my young daughter lived.  And that was awful, just awful.  So I thought I’d write a fantasy novel.  [Laughs] But the thing that made it work was that all that horrible toxic reality just kept sneaking in around the edges and bleeding into it. When Quentin goes to Brakebills, he thinks all his problems are over, and yet they’re just beginning.

NC: According to your blog you’re approaching an October deadline for a sequel to The Magicians entitled The Magician King.  If you’re willing and able, what do you have in store for The Magician King, either in the way of plot, or simply to say what thematically was on your mind in penning a sequel.  Are there books or other works of art that you have on your mind as you conclude?  Tokens of inspiration or beauty?

LG: I have a pretty complete outline of the sequel, and I’ve got a rough cut of about three-quarters of it, a hundred thousand words, whereas The Magicians was a hundred and forty-five thousand.  It’s not a coming of age story. You know, it’s horrible to invoke the genre that it actually falls into, because what I think is good about it is that it sort of annihilates that genre and what we know of it.  But it’s a quest, it’s a hero’s journey, and as such it draws on some very different sources. But the touchstone is still C.S. Lewis, in particular The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  Whereas The Magicians was something of an extended riff on The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, this book is about the Dawn Treader, but also about other epic journeys: very much the quest for the Holy Grail, so Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur as well as T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.  It very much invokes The Odyssey.  A lot of Alice in Wonderland.  And then a bunch of less respectable stuff.

NC: How does writing a sequel differ from writing the first?

LG: There’s a lot that feels familiar.  “Oh yeah, writing a draft that sucks, I remember this now.”  But I mean, I have a contract for this book!  The Magicians, I spent four years on, with no assurances of any kind that anybody would ever read it.  There was a stage every day of the composition process which began with, “You complete fuckhead.  Why are you sitting here typing this stuff into your hard drive?  No one will ever see this.”  People will probably see the new book.  I already got partially paid for it.  And I have a deadline.  I’ve never had a deadline in my life before, for fiction.  This novel’s actually due, which is just crazy.

NC: There’s a turn of phrase you used in your recent profile of Jonathan Franzen for TIME, in which you say that he “punted his deadline”.

LG: Yeah.  Franzen.  I mean, that guy gives hope to writers everywhere, in that he writes… I mean, of that kind of prose, I’d rather read his work than anyone else’s.  And yet, it seems to be no easier for him than it is for anyone else.

NC: He calls it miserable work.

LG: I didn’t even print the full-length, 5.1 channel version of that.  That guy sits there, and he beats himself up, and just drags the shit out of himself.  It’s really cool that he does it, ’cause it’s really hard for him.

NC: Let’s talk about that profile, if we can for a moment.  In the piece, you call Franzen the “most ambitious” living American novelist.  I’m wondering how you define an ambitious novelist, what you would say ambitious fiction attempts to do.

LG: What did I mean by that?  I wrote it, it must have meant something.

NC: It’s an interesting word to choose.  It’s not as though you said “Best American Novelist”, though the actual phrase you bestowed was “Most ambitious, and one of the best.”  Ambition suggests striving for something.  It doesn’t even necessarily mean that it achieves what it sets out to do, but does suggest challenging aspirations, or a desire to be great.

LG: On some level, he’s trying to break off a larger piece of the world than any other writer I can think of.  When you read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, a writer whose strengths are equal to Franzen’s, you know that the definitive book about the Jews establishing a homeland in Alaska has been written.  That’s going to be the definitive account of that subject.  But it somehow carves out a smaller slice of the world than what Franzen does in The Corrections or Freedom. Franzen doesn’t write domestic novels, or novels about economic catastrophe, or financial malfeasance, or sexual eccentricity.  His novels are about all of those things at once.

NC: Maximalist was a term bandied about to describe him in the wake of The Corrections.

LG: Yeah, and it’s a word I hate, because it describes a lot of books I don’t like. [Laughs]

NC: And I don’t think his objective is to be the most American of Americans.  James Wood had that line about hysterical realism that “knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being”. Franzen if nothing else has created some vivid characters, and consciously stays close to them in the prose.

LG: I feel a kind of egotistical performance in some of those maximalist novels that for some reason I don’t feel in his work.  I feel like there’s maximalist shit in there, but it’s because he can’t help it, not because he wants to show people that he can.  I eschewed the world “best” consciously, because I don’t know what that would mean now in fiction, if it ever meant anything.  You’ll note that on the cover, which everyone quotes as “The Great American Novelist”, it actually reads: “Great American Novelist”.

NC: [Laughs] That does seem a distinct phrasing, and carefully chosen.  How much input did you have on this cover?

LG: I didn’t write the cover line.  But I was called into a meeting, where it was on display, and I said, “Yeah.”  You know, “That’ll do.”  [Laughs]  “I approve this message.”

NC: One last thing I wanted to ask about the piece was Franzen’s reference to Kierkegaard’s idea of busyness: the possibly trivial doodads and habits that we fill our day with.  Franzen cites it with regard to all of our modern technical wonders, and his aim to write a book that can compete for consumer affections with those technologies.  How as both a reviewer of both books and new technologies do you reconcile these two interests?  Does one habit balance out the other?

LG: I am really interested in technology, and wonder what relation it has to my interest in books.  There are two things to say about it.  First is that if you’re going to be a novelist with interest in contemporary life, which is the only business a novelist should be in, one has to have a pretty strong layman’s grounding in our technology, because that’s so much of what’s happening to us.  It’s so important, for example, to know what an iPhone game does to someone’s brain, so that you can write a novel that stands up to that.  I play a fuck ton of Fieldrunners on my iPhone.  And yet I also read.  Having both, I often think, “Ought I to play a game now, or ought I to read this sensitive and lyrical novel of verse?”

NC: They’re not necessarily in competition with one another.

LG: They’re completely in competition with one another!  When NetHack came out for the Palm, I stopped reading for three months.  And it was pretty fucking sobering.  It reminded me that novels must do something that iPhone games can’t do for the brain, and that’s a serious challenge.  Some of those games are extremely compelling.  I had to delete NetHack eventually, because as it turns out, it’s better than any novel written!  I would have never read again! [Laughs]

NC: How do you balance the roles of critic and novelist?  Are there critic-fiction writer hybrids whom you admire or model yourself after?

LG: It’s a pretty narrow field.  The practical answer is that it’s really hard.  I’m having to take more and more time off from my job, and eventually probably will one day shift to some kind of contributing editor role.  I just can’t keep up a full-time job and write novels. It’s just not possible.  Walter Kirn is an ass kicking reviewer, and also writes good novels.  Franzen is a great reviewer, and hardly ever does it, cause why would he?  His critical prose is fantastic: he has that in common with [novelist, essayist, and longtime friend/rival of Franzen’s] David Foster Wallace.  But there’s something pretty uncomfortable in balancing the roles of critic and novelist.  Because to become a good novelist, you have to decide what the ultimate fucking novel is going to be.  Then try to write that.  When you do that, most other novels become like dross to you, and not very interesting.  You cannot be that Catholic-minded reader that you should be.  Those two gears are just too far apart.

NC: How often do you read for pleasure?

LG: If I look in my bag, what have I got?  (While rifling through a messenger bag and removing several books from it) Cleopatra… Stephen Hawking [‘s new book The Grand Design]… [Jean-Christophe Valtat’s new novel] Aurorarama… a book about an insane 19^th century French serial killer… those are all non-pleasure.  It’s another reason to take a leave of absence.  A lot of authors I know don’t especially try to read fiction when they’re trying to write.  I’m the opposite: I have too.  I constantly consume novels when I write. But I have to be careful about which ones I pick.

NC: Are you concerned they’ll influence your prose, that you risk imitating them?

LG: Oh yeah.  And some of them are just awful, just terrible!  I can’t write for a day after reading them.  I won’t name them.  There’s no possible way you could bait me into naming who I’m talking about.  They get into your skin, and you have to sweat them out before you can do anything.  Basically, when I’m writing, I read C.S. Lewis and I read Franzen.

NC: Then to return to Franzen briefly: what is it like for you to interview someone who you so admire, and is one of only two authors welcome when you’re writing your own fictions?  It could be rewarding and/or immensely surreal.

LG: It was heavy.  Completely surreal.  It’s an occupational hazard.  If you read that L.A. Times profile, you’ll note that shortly before finishing the first draft of The Magicians, I went to Edinburgh and sat down with J.K. Rowling.  It’s profoundly odd, and a historical accident that I’m brought together with these people.  [Franzen’s] work is iconic for me.

NC: The Magicians is epic in scope: without spoiling too much, it covers the entire college experience of its characters, and a good deal of post-matriculation action as well.  Had you known the book would become the success that it did, would you have structured it any differently? Do you envision Quentin’s life as a series of books, like those of Narnia or Harry Potter?

LG: Maybe.  The idea of doing a sequel never occurred to me until basically the book was locked; that is, the manuscript had been typeset and copy edited.  I’m glad I didn’t think about it, as I would have probably done something really stupid, like saying, “Oh that’s pretty good, I’ll save that for the sequel, and just throw in some other shit here”.  I’m still really leery of the word “sequel”.  Novel series’ tend to be shitty, and there aren’t that many that are worth reading.

NC: Is it more of a separate entity that shares some of the characters?

LG: That’s the kind of thing I tend to say, but fuck: it’s a sequel. There’s no getting around it.  The original book was partly based on a chapter and a half in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, another iconic writer who bizarrely I have met.  The protagonist is a wizard who goes to a wizard school.  My original plan for the novel, which I constructed in 1996, before Harry Potter had come out, was to do half the book in this school and set it in a school of magic, which at the time seemed incredibly original.  Eight years later it seemed pedestrian and cliché.  So I always think [Quentin] also spends an incredible amount of time in magic school, whereas everyone else says, “Why did you just hurry him through magic school?” at a chapter a year.

NC: To return to The AV Club for a moment, you also talked about an urge for nerd culture to return back to the underground. You said, “The nerds won, and in winning, we kind of lost.”, with the idea that blockbuster comic book films and other mainstream celebrations of nerd culture are sullying that which is personal and enjoyable about being a nerd: that the subculture is in danger.  This is also the subject of a time piece you wrote just under five years ago now entitled “The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth“.  What is it about outsider status is vital to the kinds of fictions nerds are drawn to?

LG: It’s a good question.  And I do feel uncomfortable with nerd culture having gone to being just… culture.  It’s become less weird.  In doing so, it’s lost some of its essential power.  When there’s so many dollars out there, mathematically it’s necessarily that some people will start writing movies, et cetera, for the purpose of making money rather than doing cool shit.  And you know, the cultural machinery gets all screwed up.  When someone makes a big studio movie based on Dungeons and Dragons, they will put the wrong person in charge of it.   Once that much money is involved, the wrong people start making the decisions. And there are rare exceptions.  It’s amazing that the Lord of the Rings movies were as good as they were.  It’s amazing that the first Spider-Man movie was as good as it was.  Iron Man. But there are way more misses than hits.  At a certain point there are so many misses that you just stop caring.  I was almost heartened by the fact that Scott Pilgrim [vs. the World] flopped.  When I heard they were doing I thought, “Weird Canadian graphic novel about an unemployed and not very talented indie rocker: if they take that from us, then what else do we have?”  Then they gave it to Edgar wright, a genius, and made a fucking amazing movie.  It’s horrible to say this, but I almost felt happy when it flopped.  It felt like, “We can have it back.”  If it’s a success then we don’t own it anymore.  But now, the rights revert to the fans.  It doesn’t go mainstream.

NC: It was amazing to read pieces about it on the web that contain such vitriol, not even so much for the film itself but to the people who might like it.  I read a number of things that said this box office proved that studios shouldn’t be catering to nerds, and that this lack of returns will take nerds down a peg.  Which makes me wonder, “How did they get up a peg?  How did they ascend the totem pole in first place?”

LG: There’s this moment of fear where you ask, “Am I one with the Big Gulp drinking, SUV driving, Abercrombie and Fitch wearing masses?” Then it flops and you think, “Thank god.  I am screwed up, and misshapen, and different after all.”

NC: Is there something rebellious or contrarian about nerdiness?  Is it satisfying because it’s against the grain?

LG: Yeah.  Definitely.  I talked earlier about how both my parents were writers, and how that left me little to rebel against.  But one thing I know for sure: they hated science fiction and comic books and fantasy. If there was any way that I did rebel it was in taking those things as my source material.  My brother did the same thing.  He wrote a novel about superheroes.  There was a tiny little bit of “Screw you, dad!” in that. [Laughs] Not that my dad cared.  But that was our rebellion, such as it was.

NC: You’ve done a little work out in the fields of late, appearing as a guest at a number of sci-fi and fantasy conventions.  I’m wondering what it’s like to attend these functions not as a fan, as you may have in the past, but as one of the distinguished folks signing autographs. What has it been like to be engage your readers and devotees?

LG: I’m surprised that I’m not surprised by them.  The people who are into it are just fucking great.  It’s really easy to talk to them, and I’m a chronically socially anxious person.  But there’s a reason they would like something I write, and that’s that we’re in a sense the same type of people.  I’ve never been that involved in fantasy fandom, because it’s a social thing and I’m kind of anti-social.  I read books as a way to avoid other people, not as a way to talk to them.  But I’ve gone to conventions within the past couple years, and I can’t deny that I’ve had a good time.  There’s a lot of drinking at those conventions, so that really helps.

NC: The scantily clad costumers perhaps don’t hurt either.  Well, maybe some of them do.

LG: There was a woman who came to a reading I did in a homemade Brakebills uniform, complete with short skirt.  She’d taken it a step further.

NC: It’s a visualization of what previously exists only on the page and within the imagination.

LG: It was completely awesome.  The fact that she would care enough about it to go home and do sewing is deeply validating.  And also kind of hot.

NC: Are there aspects of nerd culture that are newly exciting to you at the moment?  Is there anything dorky that’s particularly scratching you where you itch, and maybe which still feels private and off the beaten path?

LG: Oh yeah, lots of things.  Do you read web comics at all?

NC: A little bit.  I’m mostly an Achewood kind of guy.

LG: Achewood is fucking unbelievable!  So brilliant and weird.  I put that as the #1 comic of the year a few years ago, which I think really befuddled time readers.  That stuff is just radical and interesting and really powerful.

NC: I do wonder how many people are reading it, or strips like it.  It feels very private, but that probably is largely because of how I’m ingesting it online, without talking about it much in the social world.

LG: He’s been doing this for seven, eight years.  Web comics are exciting. There’s a lot of good fantasy being written right now.  It’s a really good time to read fantasy.  People are doing things in the genre that have never been done.  Nerdcore hip-hop, that stuff is really exciting and funny.  There’s a lot of rich, raw stuff going on.  It’s a good time to be a nerd.

NC: To switch gears towards your other gig: what is the role of the book critic today, and how has it changed in the last twenty years?

LG: It’s really different.  There was a time not long ago when opinions about books were a scarce commodity.  Now we have an extreme surplus of opinions about books, and it’s very easy to obtain them.  So if you’re in the business of supplying opinions about books, you need to get into a slightly different business.  Being a critic becomes much more about supplying context for books, talking about new ways of reading, sharing ways in which it can be a rich experience.  Reading James Wood’s reviews, while I rarely agree with them… watching his mind interact with a book is really exciting, and teaches me new, interesting ways to read.  That’s very rewarding, and a vital thing to do.  I don’t walk away from his reviews with recommendations about what to buy.    It’s funny, that book [Wood’s How Fiction Works] now comes in paperback with a quote from me on the front cover.  I really like his work, he’s great.  Though I sometimes think I like his reviews for different reasons than he likes his reviews.  I haven’t read his novel, and really want to.

NC: On Bookworm he once talked about how he was humbled as a critic by writing a novel. He talks about falling into the same tropes and bad habits he’d previously criticized others for, almost as if he was watching himself outside of himself, seeing fingers type cliché dialogue and hackneyed characters.

LG: He’s a really good guy, and so happy to slag off his own novel.  The only other thing I’ll say about being a critic is that there is still one great fight for me to get into, and that is promoting the works of genre writers.  Because genre writers really are today’s avant-garde, doing what’s exciting and interesting, and there are not that many critics willing to acknowledge that in mainstream publications.  So if I can go into TIME Magazine and promote the work of Chris Onstad, my work is done and my life has meant something.

NC: It’s like a New Hollywood situation of the 1970s, wherein great directors young and old made their best films within the perimeters of “low-art” genres: detective and gangster stories, slapstick, sci-fi, Westerns, and so on.

LG: That feels fair to me.  When you look at The Godfather, which is totally unclassifiable, in the same way that Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is unclassifiable.  That’s a really good analogy.  I will now steal it for a feature and make it all my own.  [Laughs]

NC: Speaking of work: what does a day in the life of TIME‘s book and video game critic look like?  Are you primarily writing from home?  Do you have an office at TIME‘s building?  Are you scribbling notes from a safe distance at local arcades?  How did you get the job, and how has it evolved over time?

LG: I didn’t start writing reviews until I was twenty-nine, so I was pretty ignorant of what critics did with their time going in.  I don’t read at work, I mostly do that on my own time.  You’ve got weekly deadlines. I’m only embarrassed to say this because it disqualifies me from ever complaining about my work, but I really do spend a lot more time working on fiction.  I go to a lot of meetings.  Periodically I have to write things like picture captions.  Somebody has to write the table of contents in the front every month, and occasionally it’s me.  So it’s not a fantasy camp where you’re writing reviews all the time.  And I write about other stuff.  I do technology.  I go to work at 10:30, I leave around 6:30, and in between I spend a decent amount of that time writing about books.  But there’s also other stuff.  When you write a piece, you have to write the headline, the subhead, picture captions. You talk to the photographer about what you think it should look like. You argue with the photo editor about what it should look like.  You argue with another editor about how you don’t have enough space.  You argue about whether you can say the word “Dude” in TIME Magazine.  You worry about whether you can say hella cool.  “Is hella a word?  It’s not in the OED, but it’s part of American vernacular.”  You have a lot of time consuming arguments, and they actually are that trivial.  You wouldn’t believe it until you see it.  There are magazines where it’s different.  The New Yorker I think is different.  [Laughs]

NC: You’ve been there since essentially the beginning of the online journalism boom, culture magazine startup sites, major changes to what we know as freelancing, and the blogosphere’s onset.  Does it effect your work?  To what degree are these changes discussed and analyzed at a major news magazine?

LG: Part of it is just stepping up your game.  You suddenly realize when you read some of the book blogs on the web that you, as the book critic for a national magazine with a circulation of three point something million readers, you’re really not all that special.  There are people out there who are shit hot writers, really fucking great.  Do you ever read The Awl? Some of the prose on that site is really fucking good.  I learn stuff from those writers all the time.  Suddenly you realize that you’re really not special.

NC: You have a ten-week old daughter named Halcyon.  What irreversible effects has she had on your psyche to date?  Has she affected your writing?

LG: It’s funny; I started The Magicians just after my first daughter Lily was born.  It gets you into almost a competition with one’s wife, who’s just a produced a child, which I cannot do.  I’m like, “I can’t make a child, but at least I can make this!”  [Laughs] It’s also just really emotional.  All that male, stoic crap that one indulges in a lot of the time kind of goes away when a baby arrives. You get weepy and expressive and loving.  It’s kind of a good time to be writing.  I know it’s opened me up emotionally in this weird way. When I had Lily… I realize now there’s no way I could have written The Magicians without her.  It’s dedicated to her, partly because I couldn’t have written a half-decent book before having a child.  A lot of people can. Franzen doesn’t have any children.  He just didn’t need to go through that.  Turns out I did.

NC: What advice would you give to the aspiring novelist, and in what ways might it overlap or differ from the advice you’d give a young critic?

LG: To critics I just say to blog.  If you can’t find anyone to publish your stuff, just blog.  Editors are only interested in people who have an individual voice.  Very few people do.  It’s just vanishingly rare to find somebody with a coherent personality and a voice as a critic. Even if you’re putting it on your blog and that’s it, you can show it to an editor and they’ll hire you.  There are so few people who are good at writing criticism who are good, and so many who are bad.  The thing for novelists is never, ever give up.  It’s such a mistake to give up. I went to Harvard.  There were a lot of talented people, a lot of them with more talent than me, who never were published.  And it’s because they weren’t willing to go through the ritual humiliations that writers go through.  The constant rejection.  Being forced to go back to your work and improve it, make it better, and learn from your mistakes.  They became lawyers or doctors, producers or screenwriters, even though they did things I could do things with words that I could never do.  All I tell writers is to never give up.  Oh, and read everything!  God, I can’t fucking stand writers who don’t read other writers.  They’re not into reading, they’re more into their own stuff… it’s just not possible.  You have to be fluent in what other people are doing to be doing decent work yourself.

NC: At the risk of getting maximalist in closing: while it’s tough to know what era we’re living in, are there recurring themes, modes of writing, patterns of speech that you feel are particularly indicative of our present literature?  Do you have any guesses as to how history will remember the last decade or so of fiction?  What would you like future generations to retain, either in themes or works?

LG: For me it all has to do with genre and narrative.  I think we’re still struggling to be postmodern.  At least in the realm of literature, I think we’ve yet to move past modernism.  With the way in which modernists took apart narrative, disassembled it, and interrogated it, I think we’ve been struggling to put it back together.  And we’re finally doing it.  And the way we’re doing it, I think, is by integrating the structures of genre writing into literary fiction.  When the modernists held sway, narrative went away.  It went to live in genre fiction, and I think we’re re-embracing it now.  That’s where the exciting stuff is happening now.  That’s why I say that genre is our avant-garde: they’re doing the stuff that I find thrilling.  Just looking at fantasy: Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Susannah Clarke. Look at Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which I think is one of the early masterpieces of the 21^st century.  It’s a science fiction novel.  That’s where the vital stuff’s happening: where genre and literary fiction meet.  I say it over and over again, but that’s what feels true and exciting.

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In 1997, Starlee Kine, then a bookstore clerk living in New York’s East Village, was interviewed by This American Life’s Paul Tough for a segment about her tumultuous relationship with her neighbor “Helga”. This chance meeting changed Kine’s life forever: then a dramatic writing major at NYU, she became a devout fan of the renowned NPR radio digest. Two years later she was working as one of the show’s interns, and soon after became one of the its producers, working on air and off to lend her unique voice to some of the program’s most beloved segments. In her radio reportage, Kine offers a refreshing brand of enthused honesty on subjects as varied as Long Island’s corporate psychics, the world’s slowest car chase on record, fatal hospital negligence, and her lifelong encouragement of her parents to divorce.

Her work, be it behind the microphone or on the page, is marked with dignified self-reflection. In addition to her latest piece for This American Life (an April 2009 performance that appears on the show’s live concert film Return to the Scene of the Crime), Kine has in recent years been a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, American Public Media’s business watch Marketplace, and her longtime colleague Jonathan Goldstein’s CBC Radio One program WireTap. She’s taught classes in radio at 826 NYC in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, served as a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and co-created The Post-It Note Reading Series, a collection of staged reading events with illustrator Arthur Jones.

Her latest collaboration with Jones is a barn burner: issue ten of The Thing Quarterly, a self-professed “object based publication” and brainchild of visual artists John Herschend and Will Rogan. Each edition of The Thing is curated by a different collaborator: Miranda July, Jonathan Letham, and Kota Ezawa are among those who’ve made their own editions. Starlee’s issue is a marvel of attractive simplicity: a brown cardboard box containing a text-laden cutting board, an essay of “Crying Instructions” by Kine, and a locker poster illustrated by Jones of British actor Dominic West’s beloved character Jimmy McNulty from HBO’s magnum opus, The Wire. Needless to say, in Kine and Jones’ rendition, McNulty weeps.

In May, Starlee and the Thing’s editors celebrated issue ten’s release with a uniquely staged reading at the Crosby Street outlet of the Housing Works bookstore in lower Manhattan featuring an onion cutting tutorial and an acting teacher offering the packed audience crying lessons. Kine and I spoke about the reading, The Thing, and an array of other topics last month at the locally loved Five Leaves restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We were joined at our outdoor seating by Starlee’s kind-eyed dog Oh Papa, named after an exclamation uttered three times over the course of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Like his owner, Oh Papa proved gracious, patient, funny, and eager to speak his mind.

NC: I wanted to initially ask how you got involved with The Thing.

SK: I subscribed because I saw it on Miranda July’s website. It said that she was doing something for The Thing. I went on their site and subscribed blindly: it was nothing yet. I remember Miranda July’s was the first that came in the mail, and it was very exciting. It was the window shade, and then the second one was the hat. They all come in these mysterious brown wrapped things. It seemed cool and I wanted to be a part of it. I wrote them an e-mail saying that I had an idea, but I didn’t know anything. It was so mysterious, you went to the website and it didn’t have anything, maybe their names. They wrote back to me right away and they were super-friendly. They didn’t like the idea that I had, but they wanted me on board. That was two years ago. Around then I was issue 7 or 8, and they were like, “In a year your Thing will be out,” and that turned into two years.

How did it end up being a cutting board, and how did crying end up being the subject matter?

I had a bunch of ideas, wrote them all down, then called John and ran them all by him. I was really nervous, I didn’t know if he’d like any of them. I wanted it to be really awesome, and I was really intent on it being a household object. It’s just so hard to find cool meaningful objects for your house that you buy for everyone else, so I wanted there to be meaning to it. I worked on this whole list, ran it all by John, and I almost didn’t mention the cutting board, it was at the bottom. And that’s what always happens: someone else can always see your good idea better than you can. I had my top five, and then a couple stragglers at the bottom. He liked the cutting board the best. We knew we wanted text on there, and I always knew it was gonna be about a heartbroken relationship. I started writing the text, and once onions came up, we knew it made the most sense. I really wanted to give the best bang for your buck, and have as many things in the box as we could. One of my ideas was this very elaborate puzzle that involved an egg beater, a cheese grater, and a spatula. I wanted them to fit onto each other to make this coded message, so I had this idea of fitting the handle of an egg beater into this cheese grater, then turning it to reveal these hidden letters on the spatula. I wanted a game: I like games. Then I wanted it to be a cooking show, with instructions, this whole instructional thing, and the idea of “crying instructions “came out of that.

You were initially not even going to tell the editors about your cutting board idea. I’m reminded of your piece on This American Life in which you work with Phil Collins where you had written but discounted lines for a love song which Phil ultimately really took to. [In an August, 2007 episode of This American Life entitled “The Break-Up”, Starlee enlists Collins to collaborate with her on a break-up song entitled “The Three of Us”.]

Yeah, the bottom of the crazy pile. It was very similar to that, where some outside expert came in. That was the outside musician, while with this John was the outside conceptual artist who could zero in on what would work.

Do you like collaboration? When does it work or not work for you?

I love collaboration, if it’s with somebody who I trust. If it’s with someone I don’t trust I hate it. The whole reason I wanted to do The Thing was cause I didn’t want to be alone, or do a project on my own anymore. I wanted something taken out of my hands that would be a very tangible object. I remember John wrote back and was all, “You can write an essay for us,” and I was just like, “Please, please, anything but an essay, please let me make something if I can.” I knew I wanted an essay component, but I so badly wanted to not be alone, do something with someone else, and have something very real to show for it in the end.

(Oh Papa approaches a fellow dog who also obediently sits in the tightly wedged outdoor seating.)

SK: Oh Papa…

FELLOW DOGOWNER: My dog’s coming to check you out. What kind of dog is he?

SK: He’s a mutt.

FD: So beautiful. [To Oh Papa] You look like a woodland creature!

SK: I know.

FD: Doesn’t he look like a little fox? So pretty.

Alright, awesome. So I’m wondering about the act of cutting onions, and how that may be a cathartic experience, given that you’ve said this is a board upon which only onions should be cut. Do you remember how that came to be the object’s purpose?

I was looking for a household object, for something everyone uses. So much of my stuff ends up being about…. well, so many of my objects are haunted. Like I live in this apartment, and I feel like this bummer about New York is that you have to stay in places that you should probably get out of because they’re drenched with these memories. I have a pretty good apartment, but it’s kinda haunted in that way. I have a pretty good, prominent kitchen: it’s the biggest room in the house, so I think I was zoning in on kitchens. We didn’t really get into it, and it kinda goes away now that it’s been executed, but initially I wanted it to be that you were cutting into the words, which is pretty violent. I wanted it to be something that strikes force, like you were attacking the memories or else they wouldn’t go, so I think a cutting board makes sense. I like that you have to destroy it in order to move on.

At the reading you mentioned wanting this object to be used, and that ideally over time the words will become illegible.

In the crying directions I say that I want it to be cathartic. I would beg everyone who gets it to use it, though I know they won’t, cause they’re collectors. Whoever subscribes to The Thing are these very cool, particular people. I had this very clear vision of people opening it, then displaying it. There was a post on this blog from someone who said they thought about framing it and hanging it up on the wall, so I thought that I just had to say, “Please kill it. Destroy it. Ruin it.”

I wanted to ask about the idea of writing “crying instructions”. If not to ask for a literal explanation of “instruction” and what that means to you, then to ask if the social etiquette of how, when and why we cry was something that interested you in making this piece.

Kinda. I guess I was thinking that it’s good to cry, especially about lost loves, and that maybe this would be a little extra helping hand. The board’s supposed to help, that’s why it’s gotta be an onion. Then John pointed out that in The Tin Drum, there’s this awesome, awesome, super awesome chapter called “The Onion Cellar”, about this bar where people go to get onions so that they can cry. And from there it turns into this orgy.

[Laughs] And why wouldn’t it?

It’s really awesome. So good. It really gets to the heart of why you need to cry. I considered putting an excerpt of it in there. I myself have no problem crying, unless it’s in front of a crowd. I can’t fake cry, which is what that whole demonstration at the reading was about. I can’t pretend to do it, but I can cry. So I thought it might help someone who’s never cried over someone else. There’s actually this old acting trick to have an onion in your hand. So I wanted to give permission and say that it is okay. I do think it’s healthy. And I thought that ideally, crying while cooking would be awesome. You’d become a big sobbing mess.

Do you like to cook?

I’m just neurotic. It came from this genuine place of feeling haunted. Like I have a really hard time cooking unless it’s for other people. I love the idea of cooking, it seems very soothing. Like there’s lots of foods I don’t like. Like raw tomatoes make me really upset. I think I would be a really good baker. But I don’t like it unless it’s for other people, which I guess is why I need my own board.

Prior to this issue of The Thing, you talked in a 2001 This American Life piece about the art of child actors crying in classes you took as a kid. In particular, you cite one boy who got the role of Eddie Munster in a Munsters remake, and how he was a renowned fake crier.

Jason Marsden. He was an amazing child crier. I remember it vividly. I never came close. I was really shy, and I think I was the oddball in my acting classes. My sister and I were from the suburbs, driving to these classes, in it without really being in it. They were big time. I don’t know if he made the cut, but I did interview Jason for that piece. He’s doing voiceover work now. Anyway, we lived in a suburb of L.A, distant from that world, and we had a bad agent.

What makes for a bad child agent?

She couldn’t find us anything. I really think it was a front for something else. It was like, technically we had an agent, but she never called and I feel like after a while we never heard from her again. She was a scam artist, but also, we weren’t really that good. Our teacher was good, he was for real. Joseph Gordon-Levitt credits him a lot.

On the subject of performance: how did your recent Housing Works reading come to fruition, and what did you think of it?

It wasn’t that big of a deal. But there had been a lot of build up after waiting for two years for this cutting board to exist. I really like doing readings, so there’s always a lot of preparation that day. It was exciting because we went to this crying teacher’s house. We tried to make a video of it, and my friends were setting up cameras, running up her stairs. Afterwards it always feels like you just got married. You were the center of attention, and then you feel horrible the next day. Not physically horrible, but I thought about all the things I would have done differently. It’s a weird feeling.

Every time I get married, there are things I wish I’d done differently.

That’s what people say the day after their wedding, that they feel awful because they’ve been stared at so much. I don’t mind being the center of attention, but it becomes about being in control of all the elements. I felt so out of it the next day. A wedding is twelve thousand times more intense, your life essentially has led up to that moment, and you’ve prepared for a year for it. But for The Thing, there’s always a launch for the new issue. Normally they have a party, and people come sign it, but I knew I wanted to have a cooking demonstration. Originally it was gonna be a full-on commercial. I don’t really know much about cutting, but I really like sweets, so originally I was gonna cut sugar cubes or something. But then I realized I wanted other people in it. Once we knew it was gonna be at Housing Works I decided that we’re gonna call Arthur, we’re gonna call David [Rees, cartoonist and creator of the Get Your War On comic series] and David [Lipsky, author and magazine journalist]. I did the curatorial friends thing. Originally I wanted it to be a simple onion cutting demonstration, but in April I was in Hawaii for this work thing, and I got taken to Benihana’s. Benihana’s has this whole show that they do, and this cool onion thing that they do.

The volcano.

Yeah. So I walked around New York looking for a Benihana’s. There’s one listed in Times Square, but it’s not there, so I didn’t make it. I wanted to go and have them show me the onion trick, but by then I had decided that I also wanted to have an acting teacher there, so I aborted the Benihana’s idea. That was something where the next day I thought that maybe I should have gone for it. The problem with one-off shows is that you only get to do it once. But then we got excited about the acting woman: I called up my friends and they all gave me their acting teachers.

She was quite good at getting everyone’s guard down. Sometimes events calling for audience participation can be hard in that it’s a “tough crowd” scenario, or a “too cool for school” situation.

Yeah, she’s awesome, all my friends love her. Earlier in the day I’d gone to her house, and she’d given me this whole crying lesson, which was basically like therapy. I liked it. I’ll never do a traditional reading again. Arthur and I have our series because readings tend not to be that great. Even the best authors tend to not be that fun.

The onion cutting demonstration was particularly interesting. It reminded me of Martha Stewart on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, with you in the role of Conan and this chef guy as Martha, in that what made it enjoyable was your growing exasperation with him and with having to cut an onion so precisely. The live spontaneity of it spoke to me. It seemed like you enjoyed performing for the crowd in a way that a lot of writers don’t.

Yeah, I love it. I’m actually really obsessed with Conan O’Brien lately. He’s so great, so awesome. In the last of week before he went off the air, I felt this intense longing, of wanting to be a part of something meaningful, and actually feeling left out, and wanting to have contributed to this thing in some way.

I did too, in this completely irrational way. In that I’ve had never had any interaction with him, yet still felt a personal allegiance to him and urge to somehow help, as if his show was a cause of sorts.

For me it was about wanting to be a part of some cultural artifact. I get really overwhelmed when I think about comedy. I like lots of things about it, but I don’t always know how to participate in it as much. It does seem nice to have the chance to keep generating ideas every day on a schedule. I love performing, but it always feels like I’m performing a pilot or something: when you do a one-off thing, the next day you wonder about how you don’t get to hone anything. So it’s very spontaneous when you’re on stage, but then it travels into the air and it becomes tough to know what to make of it. The onion cutting is such a blur to me, holding this sharp knife up there.

Your three co-performers did very well in their own right. As I listened to him I realized that I recognized David Rees’ voice from his appearance on The Best Show on WFMU. And David Lipsky’s reading from his new book about his road trip with David Foster Wallace was excellent. But I wanted to ask in particular about Arthur Jones, who contributed the locker hanging of McNulty from The Wire crying. I’m curious as to what the genesis was for it being Dominic West.

I love McNulty. I love cute boys, and enjoy stuff with cute boy faces. I remember originally I wanted it to be four different cute boys crying in their own ways. Like James Franco cries in this one way on Freaks and Geeks when he breaks up with Kim Kelly and then shows up at her door. He’s crying and then just slaps up against her. Then there’s also this video on Youtube of Christian the Lion, who is this lion adopted by two tall skinny boys. You see their crying catch in this special way. But for McNulty I had this idea of him crying on the train tracks in season four, after he’d mistakenly let the kid who killed Wallace in season one get killed himself.

Bodie.

Right, Bodie.

(Oh Papa suddenly barks at a couple passing by. A woman sitting nearby yells “Hey!” in an effort to kindly but firmly reprimand him.)

FIRM WOMAN: [to Starlee] Sorry. I could feel myself yelling at my own dog at home there. It’s like a reflex.

SK: No, that’s great, thank you. Please. He’s getting… what kind of dog do you have?

FW: Beagle. [to Oh Papa] He’s a sweetheart.

SK: So anyway, I had this image of McNulty crying on the train tracks with Bunk. I called up my friend, who also draws, and she’s really good at gauging this. She’s really intuitive with cute male boy looks, just tuned in, and when I said “How about a crying McNulty?”, she just went off and got really excited.

Something about the juxtaposition reminds me of your nickname Queen Choptifah, which is your moniker on Twitter that came from a piece you did on This American Life with Jonathan Goldstein about comedy, and the idea of possessing comedic “chops”.

No one ever remembers that one.

No one? That piece stood out for me amongst all of the work you did on the show, in part because of the great rapport you and Goldstein seemed to have with one another.

There are so many episodes of This American Life. I forget them. You just forget: there have been thousands of stories on that show. I’m lucky that people remember the Phil Collins one. It’s lucky that something about it got snagged. Otherwise they float out there. There are so many good stories on there that no one ever talks about.

Within the “Crying Instructions”, you talk at some length about the movie Garden State.

Writing is kind of organic. You start writing and begin to understand stuff about yourself that you didn’t understand before. I started writing the instructions knowing I had to get to the onion. I sent it to John and asked if it was crazy that I was writing about Garden State in this essay. He said “This is insane, I love it!” I remember starting to read about the movie to refresh my memory, and that fight [in the film’s climax between Zack Braff and Natalie Portman’s characters] was very resonant in my mind. Later in the Housing Works reading I talked about Good Will Hunting, and my embarrassing memory of that movie was running into my boyfriend on the street and telling him I’d just this great movie, and how much I loved that Matt Damon brings up A People’s History of the United States. It’s now so embarrassing, and shows how young I was, but I still like the movie and think it holds up. But when I watched Garden State again, looking at clips online, reading it, I couldn’t believe how bad it was, thinking this was so hilarious and so much worse than I ever thought. I remembered that tear drop so vividly, but all the other details are so crazy, She [Portman] just dances around, it’s just horrible in every possible way, which made it that much more embarrassing that I fell for it every step of the way. It’s a real pleasure to be able to describe a bad movie in such a serious tone. I have this idea for a radio show of people describing movies they either love or hate in real time. I think it’s really soothing to listen to descriptions like that. I want it to play at midnight and have these long, really long descriptions. I think it’s really interesting to hear what people pick up on in a movie when describing it. Arthur is the best at it. Like I don’t know if you’ve seen Palindromes, Todd Solondz’s abortion comedy.

His “abortion romp”, if you will.

It really is like that. It’s like reading about the second Sex and the City movie, where you can’t believe that this was really filmed.

Garden State was a movie I saw only once, in it’s theatrical release, and hadn’t thought about at all since. But your description of it immediately flooded back my memory of seeing it right before I went off to college. I remembered feeling manipulated by it throughout, until the final scene got to me, and I was stuck in this guilty jag of crying that felt irrational, and which I thought I was too smart to be engaging in as an eighteen year old who wants to see through everything.

It seems solid, and seems as though everyone has a strong opinion of it, like it’s relatable despite not being good. There’s a near universal reaction, people like you remember seeing it, there’s a shared cringe factor, and it was a hit, too.

Years ago you had a radio piece about loving TV reruns, particularly Boy Meets World, a textbook example of mediocrity in action. Is that a similar situation for you, wherein a corniness or lack of quality precedes comfort? Would it be seductive for you to work on a sitcom, for example?

Making a sitcom nowadays is less seductive, though working on TV right now is very seductive. I wouldn’t want to work on something bad if it was bad for ironic reasons. I feel like I could throw myself into a show, but the problem with working on something bad is that everyone hates working on it. Like, Law and Order is the ultimate comfort TV. Comfort TV has different levels of badness that fulfill different levels for me. But now that it’s leaving the city, everyone is starting to miss it, and that’s another thing like the Conan feeling where I wish I’d written something for it or been a part of the experience of making it. But Law and Order is different than say, Boy Meets World.

Fair to say.

Law and Order is like an antidepressant to me. There’s something that it taps into. I don’t have a TV right now, but there’s something I really like about having live TV. I use the internet to watch the good shows, but I also use it to watch the bad shows so that I can feel like TV is happening. I wish the internet could just be running in the background the way TV does. There’s a show my best friend and I watch that is such insane garbage. I’m like, current on it. I need to have the good with the bad. I feel like the Boy Meets World time of my life is so special, in Chicago, before the internet had TV on it and before I had cable. What they didn’t say in that piece is that a bunch of us from This American Life didn’t have cable, so we started watching Good Times reruns every night at 11. We watched it as though it were current TV, and we’d call each other in our apartments and be all…

“Are you watching this? Can you believe what’s happening?”

Seriously. We all got really into it, saw the first episode, saw it end. So cool and special, and no one else in the world could talk to us about it, because you had to be in Chicago that year watching TV at 11. And Good Times wasn’t on long enough to have like, a bad seventh season. It could be dark and strange throughout. I ended up flying back to California during a break for This American Life, and I remember coming back and telling Jonathan, “You’ll never guess who was on the plane!” His first guess was Thelma from Good Times, and that’s who it was. I went up to her and told her I loved her, and I was freaking out. It was me and the security people. Like everyone who was older, and then me just freaking out over Thelma. Literally his first guess, because we’d been watching this weird show.

Comfort is sometimes a double-edged sword that people associate with complacency. When you make a project like this one for The Thing, is the idea of comforting someone on your mind?

Kinda. I hope it does. I don’t think comfort has anything to do with complacency. I love it and crave it. It’s like when you find someone whose stuff you relate to. Every writer I like, artist or filmmaker I like… it’s usually because they tap into something that makes the world seem bigger and that is nourishing. That to me is the ultimate comfort, understanding that the world can be bigger than you fear it is. With the cutting board, I felt like if I was going to enter someone’s home, I wanted to have a purpose and reason for being there. People say “The Break-Up” story with Phil Collins comforts them, which I didn’t set out to do, but that’s nice if it does.

At Housing Works you proposed that the writing inside the issue is almost from the perspective of the cutting board. You earlier talked about having a “haunted” apartment of belongings that have been left behind. Is the consciousness of objects something you’ve long been interested in?

I’ve always had a hard time creating a home. It doesn’t come natural to me. Some people are really good at it. I have taste, know what I like, know what my style is, but it’s hard for me to buy stuff that doesn’t have a meaning. It feels like I’m cheating if it isn’t already saturated in meaning. Homes are always filled with such highly meaningful objects that it’s impossible to look at them and not see a story. Even when I go to IKEA, I get so stressed out. Everyone gets stressed out at IKEA, but I have to rationalize everything, and every thing has to be tied to my life in this ridiculous way.

Maybe that’s the next step for IKEA. A gently used section of slightly worn furniture.

Maybe.

A waiter jogs past the outdoor seating, causing Oh Papa and a small poodle to begin barking at him, then at one another. Oh Papa soon recedes as Starlee calms him, while the poodle’s rages on, its yelps growing increasingly shrill for a few more moments before relenting.

But it’s funny, my parents weren’t very good at home stuff either. My dad was an architect, so my sister and I would move from one weird house he was building to another. My parents were bad at very normal things, like unpacking, so my sister and I would have all our toys put into boxes. But then we never unpacked them, so for years we had boxes of toys we never saw. My sister and I one day ventured into the garage and found all these toys from like two years before, our most treasured toys that had just never been unpacked. We were so excited, but then by the end of the night we were so overwhelmed by them that we decided they were creepy. We got really sad about it, and decided that we couldn’t go back to that part of our lives, even though it was only two years earlier. We called it “The Spooks”, and every time that we got that feeling we called it that, this feeling of not being able to go back again. So I always think that may be why I have all these feelings projected onto objects.

A lot of what you discuss in your work is highly personal and introspective. You are the protagonist. It’s your voice on the radio telling stories from your real life. Do fans of yours then feel that they know you very well? That could be presumptuous at times, but also very intimate and rewarding.

I don’t know. People Facebook friend me a lot, and I always accept. I’m sure they do think they know me well in many cases. And I put it out there.

In keeping with the personal and direct, I want to ask about “The Rundown”, a method for conversation you invented for the Little Gray Book Series in a performance that later aired on NPR. “The Rundown” is essentially about embracing candor, minimizing small talk, and “having the conversations you want to be having” rather than conversations you’re having due to social etiquette. Do you buy into it as a daily practice, or as something you employ regularly?

The Rundown came about because it was something Jonathan pointed out that I was doing to someone one day at a party. The original version of that was the first performance I ever did. It kinda kickstarted everything, in terms of doing live stuff. But yeah, I’m pretty candid, and I do believe everything that I say in the piece. I wish it would take off, though I feel like I’ve kind of abandoned it. I could have been a motivational speaker and changed the world. Well, not change the world, but I do want small talk eliminated. But I don’t work in an office anymore, so I’m not subjected to it as often. Nowadays the dog park is the place for small talk. Or clothing stores.

I remember being unemployed two years ago, and having a dog that I would take to a dog park. It amazed me how often it seemed like the casual conversation came around to people asking me why I didn’t have a job, and asking what could be done about this. Even when they were nice about it, it was mortifying to have to indulge this kind of chatter every day.

That conversation wouldn’t happen today, now that no one has a job. I feel like nothing’s talked about in the dog park. It’s like, the bleakest part of my existence. I left New York for a year, and don’t know if I’ll live here in the future, but a big reason for leaving would be to escape the dog park. When I’m there… it’s come to feel like a Sartre play about eternity.

No Exit… Except a Small Gate That Doesn’t Latch Well.

It’s like, nothing is interesting, nothing comes out of it, I don’t even think [Oh Papa] has that good of a time. I lose my ability to converse in there. I don’t want to Run anyone Down, because I don’t want to know anything, because then I’ll get a dog park friend, and I don’t want that all of a sudden. I truly wonder how you solve the dog park problem, because it’s stifling to me.

Has the Rundown helped you interview people?

It probably helped me interview Phil Collins.

He gets very personal in that piece.

He does. He was game, he was ready to go. That was not the power of editing, he was ready right away.

He wears his heart on his sleeve. There’s a similar quality to your work: if not solely on the subject of romance, your interests and passions always shine through. What’s capturing that interest these days? What is exciting you presently?

I really liked Lost. I liked that finale. I like partaking in big mainstream cultural events. I got really into it. I’m relating to Jack a lot these days. I’m feeling like I want to go back to the island too. It took on a profound quality where I got really sad before it ended. I’m as addicted as everyone else, but the internet can feel so… I liked that the internet helped it exist, and that both TV and the internet could co-exist and make the thing better. I’m also really into the Marina Abramovic show [a retrospective of the performance artist’s work coupled with new works that ran through May at New York’s Museum of Modern Art].

When you say you want to go back to the island, is that a tangible place?

Chicago.

Why is Chicago that place for you?

Well, I’m also writing a book about self-help, and every time I go to a workshop, it’s kind of like the island. It’s like a suspended reality where people learn a lot about each other in a brief period of time and then go back into the real world, and feel like they can’t go back to that weekend because it wasn’t real. But it’s Chicago for me because I lived there when I was working on the radio, and I didn’t really like living there at the time, but now I really miss it. Everyone leaves Chicago, or so it seems, everyone I know has moved away. And we leave because it seems like everyone else is moving. But if everyone stayed, it could maybe be the greatest city on Earth. On the island all they care about is getting out, until they leave and then realize they need to get back.

What makes for its potential to be the greatest city on Earth?

Well, it isn’t really. I think that just comes from it being a more innocent time. Anyone who knew me in Chicago that reads this is gonna roll their eyes, because when I was there, all I did was complain about it. It just felt like a very creative time, where I knew everyone who was working on the show, but also a lot of other people doing interesting things. I met Arthur there. It’s not very expensive, but it’s not like living in Kansas. You still get to be in a city. The art shows were really awesome. Everyone was making something, but it didn’t feel like Portland where it’s all crafty. It was the right mix of artists and regular people. The sensibility felt different than it does here [in New York]. Here there’s so much that you have to do, that you don’t always get the chance to actually make stuff. Plus you could have houses, which was nice. A friend who knew a bunch of us who worked on the show said that the old archived shows are like this time capsule of our friendship at the time, and of so many of us working on the show at the same time.

The working title of the forthcoming book is It Is Your Fault. Is it fair to call it a book of self-help guidance, or is it more a book about self-help movements?

It’s a book about the industry of self-help. It’s about taking responsibility for yourself. Not to be too serious about it, but I find the ideas of responsibility and accountability to be really exciting. I originally thought of that title while George Bush was president. That makes it sound really serious, but actually the title’s been around for so long that it was really a combination of George Bush and Ashlee Simpson from when she was on Saturday Night Live. They reminded me of the same person, cause she got caught and yet I knew she wasn’t gonna go away. [Simpson was caught lip synching during a live performance on SNL in October, 2004 when a mistimed, incorrect vocal track began to play before she had even raised the microphone to her mouth – NC]. It’s like Sex and the City 2, in that no matter how big the garbage is, everyone who makes it will be fine. I kinda want accountability: if you make something bad, there should be consequences for it. Ashlee Simpson should have gone away. She should have never been heard from again, ’cause it’s ridiculous. George Bush should obviously face consequences. Then in self-help, a lot of it is about blaming your parents. That’s the point: it’s your fault, unrelentingly. Deal with it. I was raised in a lack of accountability kind of way. I’m not that disciplined. Consequences are important, mainly in cultural and political stuff. Like I just heard what these writers wrote about John Edwards.

Game Change?

Yeah. And it’s very, very rare to be able to say, “I will never hear from that person again,” especially in politics. His particular mix of things that he did is such that we will never hear from him again, moreso than someone like Clinton getting a blow job in a bathroom. It’s interesting to me that [Edwards] is the one who’s inexcusable, and I agree, because we all agree that he could have destroyed our world forever. Like if he’d been able to get through, and then we’d found out about all of it, Republicans would run the country for a hundred years. George Bush is a huge one in that nothing he did had any consequences. We’re the ones suffering. His life is not even dented. I guess I just want some element of sheepishness. Like Sarah Jessica Parker in an interview saying, “Yeah, it’s not very good.” Cause now I’m the one who’s embarrassed for her. Because I like Sex and the City. I think it’s a good show.

Shia LaBoeuf recently stated publicly that he doesn’t think that the Indiana Jones and Transformers films he starred in were as good as he’d hoped they would be, and noted that he feels obligated to be honest about them so that filmgoers can trust him when he’s doing press junkets in the future. That in a way goes back to the Rundown, in that it’s advocacy for candor.

And I’m someone who, if I made a good thing into a bad thing, would then feel bad about it. I’m always surprised that they aren’t more conflicted or embarrassed, in that it can’t feel good to put garbage out there. You’re still a human being. Like, Sarah Jessica Parker once got rich off of a good show. It’s not like her career at this point can be destroyed, so how awesome would it be if she owned up to it?

Before we go I wanted to ask, if only for myself as a big fan of the Mekons, about the TAL piece you did with the band’s frontman Jon Langford where the two of you compose a band made up entirely of musicians who placed listings in Chicago want ads in search of bandmates. I was giddy listening to it, and found it touching. How did you meet Langford, and how did the idea come together?

He was a friend of the show, though I initially didn’t know him or anything about it. He was a friend of Sarah Vowell’s, I think she brought him down. That was a really fun episode, where everything on the show came out of one day’s worth of want ads.

It’s a great theme. The whole thing is a very tight, well-oiled sixty minutes of radio, and something of a high water mark for the program.

It was a special one where different contributors all flew in to Chicago at different times, and we put down a big pile of classifieds. Jon Langford, I love that man. So clever, so quick. Then we went on a tour that year for the live show, and brought half of the Mekons, the electric violinist from the piece, and the theremin player, Eric, who said it was one of the highlights of his life. It was so magical: he got his own hotel room, he loved touring with the boys. His wife was like, “Don’t cheat on me!”. This guy is seventy-seven years old. Those are like, the most magical experiences of my whole career. I listen to that one and think how amazing it was that these things just came together.

Have you had other opportunities to bring seemingly disparate forces together? You had talked earlier about liking collaboration and I wonder where else you may have had interesting experiences with it.

I do. Arthur and I talk about it a lot. I like putting together shows, but it’s rare that they come together to meet your expectations. That’s why I liked the Housing Works show: everyone had a good component, and I knew who I was gonna put in immediately. In the end I feel like all I ever think about is the last scene in Rushmore, where everybody comes together to watch this play. It’s very Muppet Movie too in that way, where everyone’s in the theater. In college it used to bring me great pleasure to combine groups of friends too, to test the waters and see who can mesh with each other, and creatively I’d like to continue doing that more.

Without showing your hand, are there shows you have in mind or in the works?

I think anything that can keep me from doing a blog would make me really happy.

Why no blogs?

I’m a really slow writer, and blogs are something that feel chaotic for me. I need something that’ll calm me down. Making a cutting board is calming to me. It’s so minimal.

In closing, as you work on a book about accountability or a lack thereof, I’m wondering who or what are some beacons of hope for you on the subject: models of accountability who are willing to say “Mea culpa” when necessary, who are in one way or another doing their job and maybe even doing it well.

There aren’t many. Politicians quit all the time, but only when they’re told they have to. I kinda liked the aftermath of Kramer’s thing, that was pretty cool. And I thought David Letterman was pretty cool in the way he handled his situation this year, that was pretty awesome. There’s a lot written about how being on stage is therapy for him, and how that’s the place where he can be truthful. It didn’t seem like he was just trying to save himself. On the other hand Jay Leno is like the least accountable. He’s just so gross to me. But Kramer I liked, because he really did have to pay his penance on that one.

Just to bring this full circle, who did I see on line in front of me while waiting to go into the Marina Abramovic show? One Michael Richards.

Did you follow him in?

No, he was with friends, and seemed a little shell shocked. Though it was interesting to see so many people in the museum approaching him for autographs and pictures.

I totally would have followed him in.

NICK CURLEY has seen a comrade take squirts of flaming vodka to the eye in the midst of a Benihana dinner. Follow this awesome, awesome, super awesome casualty of war at twitter.com/therealcurley.

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In an age of information influx, we seem drawn to the places online where the Internet simplifies, streamlines, and presents small wonder in bite-size portions.  And yes, I did consider using "byte-size portions" before thinking better of it.  Just as the haiku emerged from the need to reflect upon the changing seasons and man’s relation with nature in premodern Japan, we too seek little profundities that might sum up our era, and our engagement with a rapidly developing world. 

Enter "Six-Word Memoirs", a succinct sensation created by SMITH Magazine.  Founder and Editor-in-Chief Larry Smith credits the idea to a conversation he had in 2006 with Senior Editor Rachel Fershleiser about Ernest Hemingway.  Hemingway was once challenged to write a six-word novel.  Smith says he and Fershleiser were bouncing around the Hemingway legend when Fershleiser googled the phrase "Six-Word Memoir" and found nothing. The next day, Smith added the Six-Word Memoir project to the site’s story project roster, asked a few famous writers to contribute to get things rolling (from a plane in Indonesia, Elizabeth Gilbert offered: "Me see world, me write stories"), started hyping the notion on this new thing called Twitter—and thousands and thousands of short, short life stories began to pour in to SMITHmag.net. As blogging was becoming a cottage industry, Smith began to think about longtime inspirations like Studs Terkel and This American Life in a new light.  "All my life, the stories I wrote that people reacted to were personal narratives," says Smith.  "Now everyone wants to make their own media."  Smith also recalls the resonance of the New York Times "Portraits of Grief" series in the wake of 9/11: "This is the biggest story of our time, and you would see people reading these personal stories, memoirs really, and everyone on the subway is sobbing.  It made you feel like everyone’s story is worthy."   

Such was our climate earlier this century: as my friends and I fell under the Internet’s spell of downloadable Jawbreaker records and flirtatious instant messaging, Larry Smith was waiting for the rest of us to catch up.  "I was working at Yahoo! Internet Life, which was like the people’s Wired," says Smith. "And I love Wired.  And you know, I have good instincts.  I listen and watch people."  Larry’s early collaborations with Twitter from its inception is but one example of his knack for his ground-floor vouching: Six-Word Memoirs were one of the first big hits on what Smith remembers as "this thing that everyone thought was crazy where you’d type a hundred and forty characters into your cell phone."  Even in his pre-SMITH Mag salad days, Larry sensed a tide turning: "Back then I remember, my designer for some reason thought that the word "blog" came from "log", as in a wood log.  But if you were there at Yahoo! back then, you could not miss that it was coming.  People have always wanted to fly.  Then came the airplane and suddenly they could.  We’ve always wanted to communicate this way, now we have the tools.  So the Internet is this great equalizer."

"Wired" would be a fine word to describe Larry’s demeanor: from the outset he is a welcoming, enthusiastic host who bounces in his chair and taps his fingers while talking.  Like a kid bringing garter snakes to Kindergarten, he is eager to show and tell.  In particular he is today psyched about a demolition derby he’s just covered in Odgen, Utah for ESPN Magazine, and another one coming up in Washington that he’ll actually be taking part in.  "I’m not telling my Jewish mother about it until it’s over!" says Smith.  His desk is either a sandbox or a Zen garden: a wide open glassland of crisp white pages interspersed with family photos, an equal mix of sports and computer magazines, comic books, a marked up copy of Bit Literacy by Marc Hurst, and a whirlwind of bottles left behind by a wine critic with whom Smith has recently been sharing his Chelsea office space.  With Larry clicking away rapidly at his desk between bites of lunch, the result looks like a lo-fi remake of Minority Report with a Michael J. Fox lookalike cast in Tom Cruise’s role. 

When he speaks, Smith illustrates his points by pulling up his favorite contributions by SMITH Mag users, and articles like his colleague Heidi Pollock’s 2001 pieces about blogging and its potential to revolutionize journalism.  In pursuit of the morsels for which he’s clicking around on his Macbook, he spouts off exclamations of "Where’d she go?" and "Ah ha!"  He touts the work of writers and projects he admires and shares a kinship with, like PostSecret and Found, Stephen Elliott of The Rumpus, and Dave Eggers, with whom he worked on the now famous/infamous Might magazine of San Francisco.  "What I admire about Eggers is that he’s constantly reinventing.  He chooses not to take the easy road, always giving back, and does great work with young people." 

Without warning, Larry leaps from his desk to show off his wife Piper Kerman’s much buzzed-about prison memoir Orange is the New Black.  He pauses to recommend the Middle Eastern food cart parked below his office.  Then he’s up again, proudly busting out a laminated grade school folder: "My nephew’s classroom sent me this book," he says.  He opens to the first page and points to his nephew Noah Michaud’s contribution to the class’ half-pint medley of Six-Word Memoirs.  It reads: "Eight years old: combed hair twice."  Not long after, Smith digs into a cabinet for some bookmarks made by Beth Carter in promotion of a reading she did at a bookstore in her native Missouri hyping her contribution to SMITH Mag‘s latest tome, released this January entitled It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.  "[Blogging] has gotten both more and less professionalized," says Smith.  "Some people start and blow it off, but many are approaching magazine journalism, people like Seth Godin.  Is journalism just Men’s Health, or is it also Timothy Ferris doing experiments on himself and collecting his own data?"  The idea that we’re not only choosing our words thoughtfully when expounding personal narratives, but also exchanging information in this way further thrills Larry.  "If something’s happened with a plane on the Hudson, or Obama wins the Nobel Prize, I will probably know very quickly by going onto Six-Word Memoirs." 

Uniting all of these joygasms is the sense that Larry wants to celebrate the work of others, credit them for jobs well done, and offer a forum and due diligence to new writers sporting unconventional wisdom.  "Making a mess can be interesting," says Smith.  "This is a wildly new time: exciting and also messy."  For an editor whose magazine shares his name, Larry is notably selfless in his ambitions for the site.  He explained to Gothamist in 2007 that calling it Smith was suggested by a friend largely in reference to "smiths", as in those who craft something. "I’m more of a community builder than a journalist," says Larry.  "What we’ve created is a community."  Through Harper Books, SMITH Mag has published four volumes of Six-Word Memoirs in the last twenty months, with more forthcoming.  Each compiles primarily site-user contributions with a dash of famous folks here and there.  "You would think people would hold back," Smith notes.  "But then we get memoirs in like, ‘After Harvard, had baby with crackhead."  Notable among the Six-Word Memoir titles on the docket is Six Words on the Jewish Life, which Larry dubs "316 amazing six-word stories on the amazing, inspiring, and perplexing life of Jews." 

Despite being an apparent optimist, Smith is candid about the hardship realities of a publishing industry enduring growing pains in a new medium: "When you take passion over money, I think you come out ahead.  When I was younger, I used to say that, but now I think I can really believe it.  We have a populist vibe, or perhaps democratic is the better word.  I’m the kind of guy who has more fun at a good barbeque than a cocktail party.  I didn’t get into this to go to downtown parties I don’t really want to be at to begin with."  Implicit in such talk is the candor of someone seemingly removed from cynicism, unafraid of the cornball within.  If Smith is not the kind of savvy smiler who both rode the tech bubble’s cresting wave and stayed afloat in the wake of its post-Startup blues, then he’s certainly doing a marvelous impression of one.  "It’s not easy to be a Jewcy or a SMITH," says Larry, "but passion is contagious."  Even established curmudgeon technophobes like American Splendor creator Harvey Pekar are susceptible to Larry’s contagion charm: "We got Pekar to tweet, which the media loved.  It’s great: Pekar calls, mumbles something into the phone, and then Jeff [Newelt, SMITH Mag Comics Editor, and fellow Big Jewcy] posts it." 

Much of Smith’s hopefulness stems from a youthful audience: teenagers are among the most active and prolific writers of Six-Word Memoirs: many were collected in a 2009 collection entitled I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets.  The teachers of these upstarts aren’t far behind them in content output.  "We’re reaching schools in ways I hadn’t expected.  I think like 25% of our readers are teachers or librarians.  You’re a forty-four year old librarian or insurance person.  You can go to SMITH, and write, and it may not be amazing, but it’s published.  We curate the community by encouraging community."  Moreover, it’s a community soon to cross borders, as new translations of Six-Word Memoirs’ books are soon to be published in Japanese and Spanish. 

Years ago Smith once wrote a six-word memoir of his own for a bio on SMITH Mag.  It read: "Big hair, big heart, big hurry."  When asked if he felt that memoir still applied, he nods with gusto.  "That one was from 2007, and I’m in more of a hurry than ever.  But now I also like, ‘Threw spaghetti at wall: some stuck.’  The temptation to conclude a feature about Smith with a six-word memoir of the experience is irresistible.  Yet profound brevity, as Larry and his seventeenth century Japanese counterpart Basho would tell us, is not as easy as it looks.  The perfect Tweet or schoolyard zinger read like quantum mechanics: the smallest cog setting off a chain reaction towards infinity.  So then: "All’s well that ends well?"  "The best is yet to come?"  "Fake it ‘til you make it?" I shake my head and prod away at the Backspace key.  Then, like a hammer smacking an anvil, an apropos tribute to a world-class appreciator like Larry strikes:

"Thanks for the Halal cart tipoff."

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Find whatever Bar Mitzvah after party Myq Kaplan is going to and ride wingman as he blows your mind with slam dunk observations on the film Final Destination, vegans as "environment eaters", his self-professed "spectrum of dorkery", and that anti-drug ad where a dog asks his owner to stop smoking pot.  A master’s degree in Linguistics from Boston University put to epic use. 

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Molly Surno enters a Greenpoint bar with a small swagger.  She’s among the surprising number of talented visual artists who as a kid trained to be a dancer.  It’s visible in her manner: she sways when she walks, and illustrates words with careening open hands.  She applies this same mercurial movement to mixing media: Surno’s skill as a curator and artist is taking proverbially uncoupled dance partners and keeping them in step. 

Each edition of Molly’s film series Cinema Sixteen showcases experimental short works by radical filmmakers from the medium’s outskirts.  Live music from modern acts plays throughout the screenings, complimenting the film while remodeling it into an entirely unique experience.  The Balkan cacophony of the Veveritse Brass Band score works by Russian animator and disembodied insect enthusiast Wladyslaw Starewicz.  Post-punk rattlers Lycaon Pictus play over Polish director Piotr Kamler’s 1982 sci-fi cityscape Chronopolis, one of the first films to ever contain CGI.  Nick Yulman and the Mechanical Bone Orchestra rock upon George Melies’ L’Homme Orchestre from 1900, in which a ghostly ensemble literally springs forth from the body of their bandleader.  These screenings are a call-and-response between old iconoclasts and current innovators from Brooklyn and its brethren cities, which Surno dubs "an umbilical cord of places that people gravitate towards for unusual life experiences, wherever there’s a hungry art community."

For Molly, where one sees a film is crucial to the experience.  In contrast to the often isolating movie experience of a multiplex or Netflix, she’s sought out unique venues for her screenings, such as the most recent edition of the series where films where screened in a nook under the Manhattan Bridge.  Her interest in the concept was partially inspired by seeing Wu-Tang Clan wunderkind the RZA scratch on a turntable over Max Fleischer cartoons at an amphitheater at the Los Angeles Film Festival, controlling the film and his improvised score simultaneously.  Surno additionally cites the soundtracks to the films of Kenneth Anger, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Fando y Lis, Werner Herzog’s collaborations with Popul Vuh, and Scorsese’s use of oldies as personal favorites.  She screens shorts only, primarily works printed on film that incorporate the handmade processes she’s interested in.  "There’s something very postmodern about taking something old and putting modern music to it," says Surno. 

Upon gaining experience working for the Tribeca, Amnesty International, and aforementioned L.A. Film Festivals, Molly forged her rendition of Cinema Sixteen at Starr Space in Bushwick, one of those dying breed spaces now on sabbatical that was as apt to house baptisms and Quinceañeras as it was to present far-out film and music.   The idea scratched many where they itched: three hundred people packed their way into Surno’s first Cinema Sixteen event.  She has since staged happenings in Austin, Portland, and Chicago, with upcoming debuts in Los Angeles on July 22^nd and Mexico City this December.

In talking to her, you learn fast that Molly is a Los Angeles native who grew up in a bilingual Spanish-English home.  Her work, be it in film curation or her own photography, is concerned with homesickness, the cultivation of America, and the withering of localized coterie in the Internet age.  "Our communication is exciting, and I’m completely engaged in it," says Surno.  "But I’ve always felt like an outsider.  There’s no word for it in English, but I do think sometimes we’re nostalgic for things we never experienced, an America we never took part in."  She is fond of Tom Robbins’ sentiment that "There is no loneliness like American loneliness."  Moreover, she is unconcerned with the nomenclature of how to define someone like her who combines old media with new.  "I think it’s silly.  I’m so influenced by collage, and think these   things are all extensions of one another," she says of any pressure to have a professional title more specified than Artist.

In keeping with its reverence and preservation of the kind of experience that in previous generations cultivated events, Surno’s Cinema Sixteen derives its name from New York’s illustrious film history.  "It’s that legacy of New York that gives it its bones," says Surno.  The husband and wife team of Marcia and Amos Vogel in 1946 saw Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and were so moved by its uniqueness that they devoted themselves to creating a film society which celebrated the avant-garde movies that were yanking on the medium’s waistband.  At its peak, their original "Cinema 16" club sported seven thousand members, and was among the first places John Cassavetes and Roman Polanski screened their earliest amateur films.  Surno recently introduced one attendee of one of her Cinema Sixteen screenings as a member of the original club: the "glowing but freaked out" fellow received a standing ovation from an audience of two hundred. 

In addition to her curatorial deftness, Surno is an accomplished still photographer.  A project entitled The Smallest Canvas, chronicling life in New York salons, earned her a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Panel and subsequent seat on their board.  "The feminist mantra is that the private is political," says Surno.  "Nail art was never seen as a legit art form.  Nail art is private, but it becomes a platform for your political self."  Likewise, her series The Glittering World is a candid, often ominous collection of reportage from the Miss Trans World Indian pageant that made her an honorary member of the Navajo nation ("the glittering world" being the tribe’s name for the era of history in which we currently live).  Upon going out to a bar with some pageant entrants, one of the establishment’s patrons proved particularly taken with her.  "These guys, they go to these places looking for trans women.  He was going, ‘Oh my god, you’re so passable!’  He was freaking out!"

When asked of her objectives for her future photography and Cinema Sixteen, Surno speaks with reverence of scenes from Giuseppe Toranore’s 1988 feature Cinema Paradiso, in which a Sicilian village congregates to watch films with shared wonder.  As anyone who’s ever had a transcendent film-going experience can tell you, there is something otherworldly about sitting in the dark with strangers watching lights flicker profoundly.  "Ambitious people tend to be fascinated by mortality and rituals," says Surno on the subject of film as invocation.  "The migration of people between cultures is often about separation from rituals, like arranged marriage.  We want independence and individuality.  And there’s a freedom to that, but also a loneliness."  Surno cites Moviehouse Brooklyn and Union Docs as simpatico peers in the creation of her brand of fellowship.  But she stresses that such experiences are fewer and farther between than they should be in a city as film-fanatical as New York, particularly compared to those found in Los Angeles venues of her youth like the Mayan and Hollywood Cemetery theaters.  "New York is in constant threat of losing its wildness," says Surno.  "We all came her looking for something, not to pay high rent and eat gourmet burgers.  You want to connect to an alternative community." 

Community is an operative word for Molly: she uses it often, and with conviction.  Truthfully, she has a knack for making many words big: there is an unforced enthusiasm to her cadence that takes a tattered word like "Absolutely" and causes one to wait in suspense for the second-half "lutely" to arrive.  It is the kind of candor and assurance I have witnessed only in those who love their work.  "It’s not pretentious," says Surno of the Cinema 16 experience, "even if I show pretentious films."  Much of Surno’s charm stems from confidence: that rare trait among us that rests between good intentions and arrogance.  "I want to help create magical instances," says Surno, "ones that can’t be outsourced or recreated, where you are participating in the experiences." 

Just as quickly as she pirouettes in, Surno is gone, on to the next stage.  Without egotism or spotlights, she seems a decisive moment onto herself, an original that cannot yet be replicated, with goals that don’t fully translate for YouTube.  Like a pirouette, great moments of montage are fleeting: they enter the psyche fast and remain there, even when we don’t know why.  Just so, despite or perhaps even because of the bright future ahead of Surno, it seems that if you blink, you might miss her.

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Get ethereal with this author (dubbed "the Joyce Carol Oates of Brooklyn" by the Huffington Post) of much blogged-about novels Instant Love, The Kept Man, and her latest The Melting Season, a road odyssey of two women on the run to Las Vegas, where they ponder what to do with a briefcase full of money, then bed celebrity impersonators portraying Paul McCartney and Prince.  Attenberg?  More like All Thattenberg!

You can follow her exploits daily at her blog.

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Behold the frontwoman of Air Waves, who Dan Deacon last year dubbed his "favorite band" of the moment.  A SUNY Purchase alum and Greenpoint resident, Schneit’s hushed voice beautifully pairs with the band’s pastoral twang, like some backroads version of Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker raised by Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek’s characters in 3 Women.  These are wistful jams worth seeking out, to be consumed with a mango lassi or Quaaludes.

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