Author, publicist and partially involved narrator Robert Pranzatelli joins the show to celebrate his amazing new book, PILOBOLUS: A Story of Dance and Life (University Press of Florida). We talk about the origins of the legendary Pilobolus dance company, his transformational first experience seeing them in 1997, the workshops he took with them and the friendships they engendered, and the "itchy fingers" moment when he realized he had to write their history. We also get into Pilobolus' unique melding of improvisation and dance technique, the joyful challenge of describing their dance pieces on the page, the importance of capturing the time capsule of Pilobolus' '70s roots (and covering All The Affairs, along with the friendships and fallings-out), how Pilobolus was taken seriously by dance critics long after audiences flocked to them, the company's through-line in its 50+-year history and how they managed to continue the tradition of something that was based on overthrowing tradition. Plus we discuss Robert's history as a writer, how Metal Hurlant & Moebius blew his mind as a teen, how he became a book publicist at Yale University Press, his narrow-focus mode of reading, his greatest eBay score, why he got choked up while reading a text he sent Pilobolus' artistic directors after a performance, and more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter
The Virtual Memories Show
Episode 594 - Robert Pranzatelli
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and we're here to preserve and promote culture one weekly conversation at a time. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show through iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play, and a whole bunch of other venues. Just visit our sites, chimeraabscura.com/vm or vmspod.com to find more information, along with our RSS feed. And follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at VMSPod. Well, I am headed into the holiday weekend here in the US. Plan is to spend July 4th at a get together with my old pal who have been doing these Catskill fire tower hikes with this summer. If you've been following my newsletter, you know all about that stuff. And then bug out for Toronto for a long weekend after that. Sort of, well, we've booked it already, but it does seem like the right time to get out of the country. I'll put it that way. And while we're up there, I'm gonna record a couple of new episodes, see some friends, hit some great restaurants, maybe check out some galleries and then even just chill out a little. And walk in a park or something. In the past, Amy and I would go up every year for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, but times have changed or I've changed. And anyway, I figured it'd be nice to go up to Toronto without having a whole event going on, make it all a little more intimate or less packed, I guess. But that's me and my travel log, which I'll fill you in on next week when I get back. For now, let's get to this week's show. My guest is Robert Pransatelli, who is the author of a wonderful new book, "Pillabilis, A Story of Dance and Life." It's from University Press of Florida. And, well, it's a absolutely phenomenal history of the "Pillabilis Dance Company" or "Dance Troop" or "Dance Theatre," as they call themselves early on, as Robert will tell us. "Pillabilis" is, well, the group, not the book, difficult to describe. Their site sums it up kind of succinctly. "Pillabilis" is a rebellious dance company. Since 1971, "Pillabilis" has tested the limits of human physicality to explore the beauty and the power of connected bodies. That really doesn't prepare you for what they are visually and what they are in motion. But what they do kind of needs to be seen to be believed, but you can get really close to that by reading Robert's book. See, while he does a just masterful job of capturing the history and the stories and the key moments in the development of the group, from its roots on Dartmouth's campus in 1971 to appearing in the Oscars in 2007 and all the global reach they've had, he also evokes the strange, surreal, and we'll say almost inhuman dance numbers that "Pillabilis" performs. And the book is filled with these gorgeous descriptions of their routines and what they mean. And they're accompanied occasionally by a photograph, but not too often. Most of it is just left to the imagination and the verbal movie that Robert creates and the physicality and the humor, the staging and the fluidity of it all. They totally come to life on the page. Now, as I mentioned, "Pillabilis" has been around more than 50 years and the book also goes into the dynamic among the founders, how they created new performances, how they transitioned away from performing into artistic director roles and fragmented and came back together in different ways and how the company sustained itself all this time. And Robert really goes deep on what it takes to keep "Pillabilis" going creatively and as a business. While he's still bringing us the human story of the performers and their times and, again, the depictions of their art, but also the process of creation and his own relationship with the company since he, well, his first experience seeing them in the '90s and then attending a couple of their workshops and everything that flowers out from there. Oh, also, as he will point out, the book includes the affairs. We'll just leave it at that. But "Pillabilis" is a magical book. It is beautifully written. It really captures, I was gonna say, it captures a unique phenomenon, but maybe it's capturing several phenomena. There is, like I say, the act of creation, the birth of this dance troupe that is not exactly dance as it's starting, but something different, what it took to discover an audience and what a miracle it is to continue through time the way they have. So go get "Pillabilis," a story of dance and life from UPF, University Press of Florida. Now, I'll point out, I have zero connection to this world. I posted a newsletter a year or two back about how embarrassingly little I know about dance to the point at which I met one of Balanchine's favorite ballet dancers and did not recognize her name, which I admitted to her was going to be embarrassing when she told me who she was. So I wouldn't have come across this book, but Robert reached out and I'm very thankful that he did, and we talk about that in the show too, but he did this because we've been in touch for years over at his day job where he's a book publicist at Yale University Press. And I can't even count the number of authors that he and his colleagues have connected me with for this show. In fact, after we wrap up, I do need to hit them up about a couple of the authors who have books coming out this fall, but throughout he and his colleagues have really connected me with a lot of great authors. And sometimes it's my outreach, a lot of times it's theirs. In this case, I'm glad that it wasn't a Yale book, but Robert reached out anyway. So here's his bio. Robert Pransitelli is the author of a number of essays published by the Paris Review and other literary journals and a longtime staff member of Yale University Press. And now the virtual memories conversation with Robert Pransitelli. (upbeat music) - So tell me about the origin of palabolas, of your palabolas in the book. - The origin of how I became interested. - Yeah. - I know it's in the beginning, but you know. - Yeah, so I saw palabolas for the first time, I think it was 1997. And it was at the Schubert Theatre in New Haven. I was working at the Yale University Art Gallery at the time. And I got a voicemail message that day, I had never heard of palabolas, and I got a voicemail message from a colleague who had gotten, she had gotten a message that there were some seats available for that night's performance at the Schubert. And as an arts organization in New Haven, the arts organizations sometimes would share with each other if there were last minute things available. So I was, like everyone else on the staff, told that if I wanted to go to the Schubert Theatre and see this dance company called Palabolas, there were tickets available. So I was very excited because I had seen dance, live dance only a few times in my life, years earlier. And I had found it very exciting, but frankly, I had also found it sort of beyond my price point as a young person who is something of a starving artist type. So I had never gone to a lot of live dance. And I thought, wow, this is a great opportunity, modern dance. And I called the colleague and said, I would love to be one of the people who went. And she said, well, do you know what they do? Do you know who they are? And I said, no, I've never heard of them. And she said, well, you know, it's modern dance. Do you like modern dance? And I said, yes, I've seen modern dance. I've seen the Joffee Ballet. And she said, no. And modern dance. And I said, well, what are they like? And she said, this is an older person, an older woman. And she said, well, they go on stage and they sort of do their thing. And she said, but it's good, they're good, they're good. And you'll probably like them. If you like modern dance, you'll probably like them. So I went to the theater with zero expectations. You know, no knowledge of what polyples was or what they did. - And 1997 is not much of an internet era to go looking things up like we do nowadays. - That's right, exactly. And so it was the perfect way to see them. It happened to be their 25th anniversary year. The program was fantastic. The second half of the program had two amazing pieces back to back. One was Nomen, which was new at the time and has since become a classic in their repertoire. And the other was Day Two, which was one of their all time crowd pleasers. So I was bold over. And after the performance was over, the dancers came out and sat on the edge of the stage and took questions from the audience. And one of them was this young guy, probably 24 years old, who was new with the company and who had been, I mean, they were all amazing to watch, but he had been quite remarkable and had it. Something of a different kind of energy about him than the others, which I think came from the fact that as I later learned, he had a background in martial arts rather than dance. But that was Matt Kent. And he was the most extroverted and the most chatty. So he answered a lot of the questions. I was sitting in a balcony in my early 30s thinking, wow, this is an amazing kid. To me, when your nine year age difference is nothing later in life. But when someone's in the early 20s and you're in the early 30s and you think you're pointed toward the beginning of middle age, it seems like a big difference. So I didn't think I had anything in common with him or whatever, seeing him again or anything like that. But I was so enchanted by Plabolas that I felt like there was this energy there, this mysterious energy I had never quite encountered before. It was a combination of things that was different than really one of the best nights I ever had in a theater. And so afterwards, I did look them up on this new thing called the internet and there wasn't a lot out there. But I found a little bit here and there and I discovered that I guess it wasn't then but a few years later, they started publishing the calendars, these wall calendars. And so I started to have these calendars on my wall and I saw them again, I guess around 2002, something like that, and all the dancers were different by that point except Matt was still there and he was the dance captain. I was like, oh, that's that guy again. So fast-forward some more and I discovered from looking at there, they had a very rudimentary website at that point. - Geosities days. - Yeah, very, very rudimentary. And they were, they were starting to offer summer workshops. And so this is in the early 2000s and I was very interested. And here's a part that I skipped over that's not in the book, which is the first time I tried to take a workshop with them, it didn't work out, it wasn't going to be taught by Matt, it was actually going to be taught by somebody else. And I was trying to take it just because I wasn't focused on Matt, I was focused on pull out of us. And I ended up not being able to just take that workshop because they really were, they didn't have accommodations for people to stay. It was a week-long workshop, but they were assuming it would only be local people who attend at that point. They didn't realize they were onto something that people would fly in from other parts of the world for these workshops, at that point they didn't know that. So that fell through and I was very disappointed. And then a year later, I saw that they were doing a workshop again and that it looked like there were some local inns that were offering housing. And I thought there might be a way for me to do this. It was also a logistical challenge for me because I don't drive. And so there was also the whole thing of how do I get to a rural part of Connecticut and get around in West Connecticut. - Connecticut being one of the most deceptively spread out. - Yeah, it's a terrible one to go drink 'cause it's always the, oh, I'll go to Connecticut and then you realize, no, that's like two hours away in the same state and it's really not that big. But anyway. - Yeah, well, and having grown up in New Jersey as you did, I expect everything to be right next to each other. - Right. - And to be connected by lots of roads that are, anyway. So that second attempt, I saw on their website, it was being taught, the workshop was being taught by Matt and Emily Kent. And I was like, oh, it's that guy again. That would be so cool. But it was too late for the registration, and already filled up for that year. So that was the second time I missed it. But they said, you know, they usually announce them early in the calendar year. And so I could sign up for next years and if, you know, like wait six months and sign up next. So I was very determined to be the first person who signed up for the next year's workshop, which was also taught by Matt. Now, I mean, that's the one I talk about in the book that I described going to. And I found immediately, I had this sense that these two people were, they had a sense of humor and a sensibility. And I just thought, I want to be friends with these people, which is sort of, you know, you can't go to a workshop as a paying customer and expect the instructors to want to be your friends for the rest of their lives. That's a little presumptuous. So somehow I crossed that line, gradually that little taboo. And it worked and clicked. And they're two of my very dearest friends that are like family to me now. And we've been friends for many, many years. And their eldest son, who is now 16, is like a living clock for me of how long I've known. Because Emily was nursing him when during that first workshop. He was a newborn. So that's the story. And what was the moment of, yeah, I should do their, what we'll call this a biography. I suppose it was history. What was that moment of, this is actually a book I need to write. - So that started with me thinking I wasn't gonna do it. I have a wonderful colleague who you've probably dealt with. - Interactive with, yeah. - You've probably interacted with her. - I never say met when it's only virtual, but you know, that's okay. - Yeah, yeah. So one of my colleagues at Yale University, press is Liz Pelton, who is a dancer herself, in addition to being a book publicist and an avid reader of dance books. And she was excited to hear my tales of the public's workshops I took, because I eventually took multiple workshops and how I became friends with Matt and Emily. And at some point, a few years in, and I think it may have been after I got something published on the Paris Reviews website, she said to me, Robert, don't you realize you should write a book about Palabas. You've like, you know the people, you're fascinated by the subject, you've got the writing credentials now. And I thought, no, no, no, I can't do that. It's way too big a subject or too big a project. Plus, I don't wanna risk putting pressure on my friendships. I don't wanna, I don't wanna take the chance that it'll do something weird to my friendships. These are such precious friendships. And so I resisted the idea for, I don't know, a few years, a couple years or however long. And then what happened was in 2016, Renee Jowarski and Matt Kent were promoted to artistic director. And I had become friendly with Renee as well over the years. And I realized that there was a way I could tell the story since they were becoming the leaders artistically taking Palabas forward, that would justify me focusing on their stories as dancers through the years as dancers, which is in the second half of the 50-year history of Palabas. And it would make sense to use that as the through line because they end up leading the company at the end of the book. And I started to see all kinds of ways that the narrative lines could crisscross. Renee had started her career with Moemix, which was founded by Moses Pendleton, who was one of the founders of Palabas. And so that brings Moses back into the story when Renee has those years. I just started to see all the writer in me, the storyteller, the novelist, saw all these lines crossing. And I realized there was a book there that nobody else would write, that there were lots of people who could write a good book about Palabas, but nobody was gonna write this book about Palabas. And I really liked what this book could be. And that was when I got what I call itchy fingers, which is my name for when I have an idea. And I think I gotta pick up the pen and write it down or I'm gonna lose it. And so I called Matt and I said, Matt, I have an idea for a book and you're the only person in the world who can veto it. And I said, I don't wanna do this if it would jeopardize our friendship or put pressure on our friendship because our friendship is more important to me than any book I could ever write. And he knew that was a big statement because everyone who knows me knows my writing is the center of my life. So he said, no, I think you should do it, but I have to ask Renee because she's my partner in all of this. And so he asked Renee and she knew me and liked me and said, yeah, let's see what comes of it. So that's how I started. - And it's a book very much of, I mean, you're coming at it from that end point of Matt and Renee and yet the book throughout is continuity, lineage and an ongoing issue of my legacy and what the founders created, what things changed into how it can sustain itself now beyond the 50 year mark. I mean, your very discovery of them is only halfway through their life, 25 years into what's now 52. What was the toughest part of doing all that trusting and corroborating the old stories? How much of it was, boy, how much weight am I adding to these different tensions and dynamics from people from 40 years ago who might have an ax to grind? How tough was the research, I guess? - Yeah, it was surprisingly not that tough. And that was a pleasant surprise. One thing I will say is I had heard most, I mean, most of the skeletons that were buried in closets, those closets and those doors had been opened to me by people I knew. So I went in thinking, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to talk about this or get people to talk about that or-- - And you realize you can get in the shut up about it. (laughing) - No, it wasn't that, but it was, it was that, I mean, there were some people who chose not to participate, who didn't give me interviews, but that was fine because I had a subject that had so many people involved and so many pieces to talk about and so many angles that it wasn't, and the other thing was that some of the people who did not talk to me had given interviews, extensive interviews that were, some of which were published and some of which were in scholarly archives that I could access. So I had discovered that for anyone who I did not talk to, someone else had asked all the questions I would have asked. So that was fantastic. In terms of your original question, they're like, what was tricky to negotiate or to kind of deal with, I will say many people who I had never met, but who I was given an introduction to via email and who I then called for an interview, I was surprised by the number of people who basically started the conversation by saying, you know about the affairs, right? You are going to write about the affairs. There seemed to be a kind of impatience or annoyance on the part, and this was including dancers of subsequent generations. People who just, I think, felt like, if you're gonna tell the story of Palabos, someone finally has to acknowledge that there were interpersonal craziness that was going on. (laughs) So that was there, and then another big moment was-- - You do cover it, by the way, without making a salacious. I mean, as somebody who was born in 1971, I understand some of the, we'll say fluidity of fidelity. The marriages, also, they were having this relationship, but it was 1976, so that's-- - Right, and that was a point that Martha Clark made to me. She said, and I quote her in the book, she said, we were creatures of a time capsule, and we talked about that subject, Martha and I, about she was the only participant in the affairs who I really talked to about the affairs, and she was very gracious and very generous in talking to me about it, and she had hesitations about it, but she said, if you contextualize it, make the point that don't make too much of it, and make the point that it was part of the time, it was the times we were living in. We were creatures of a time capsule, and when she said that sentence, I thought, that's the quote, you know, that says it all, and I think she told me she's happy with the book, so I feel like I got it right, I feel like I got the right balance on that. - It's a complete aside, but there's also something to be said for remembering what it was like when you were young, hot, and having affairs, that maybe it's not so bad to reflect on those days, but you know, once upon a time, this was a crazy world we were living in, and-- - Well, the great moment for me was when Matt took me to meet Martha, he took me to her house to meet her, and I will say, she probably doesn't know this, but I was a little nervous meeting the great Martha Clark, and she answered the door, it was a beautiful spring morning in May, and she answered the door and said hello to Matt, and she looked at me and she said, have we met before? And I said, no, I don't think we have, and she said, ah, previous life, and it was this wonderful sort of immediately putting me at ease, and then we sat in her garden, her lovely garden behind her house, and we sat at this table, and she turned to me with a big smile before anything else, and said, so, I assume you know about the affairs, and I just thought this woman is so generous that she's throwing that elephant out of the room, that she's not making me struggle to figure out whether I can bring it up, so that was, and that was an off-the-record conversation, that first conversation, but it was wonderful, and it was-- - It's at the stage, for a-- - It's at the stage, because she sounds like a very good, I don't wanna just say source, but voice doesn't add the book. - And we had some wonderful phone conversations afterwards that were on the record, and we, she was fantastic. Another person who was fantastic was Lee Harris, who was the person who was in Paul Obelis for a couple of years at the very beginning, and then he left to have a very successful career in computer software, but he cherishes his memories of those college years in Paul Obelis, so that was the second half of his college career, I think, that was being in Paul Obelis. So he was a fantastic source, because he remembered stuff more vividly than someone would for whom there's 50 years or 30 years or 20 years of stuff all blurring together. - Yeah, that makes sense. And how tough was it kind of recreating the Dartmouth of the early '70s, and getting the vibe, getting the mindset, and trying to frame it in a way that a contemporary reader's not gonna freak out, "Oh my God, they just let women in, "and they were treated like this?" - Yeah, yeah, I didn't, I think, I didn't overthink that. I think the only thing that was a question was, how much do I wanna digress into historical context and talk about the surrounding era, the surrounding situation? And I tried not to, I tried to let that seep in or slip it in very slightly here and there and let it speak for itself, and assume the reader knows that 1970 was 1970. And there's a couple places, I think it's in maybe not the Dartmouth chapter, but maybe the next one, one of the next chapters when the early Paul Obelis is taking off, and I talk about comedy in the 1970s. There's like a paragraph where I mention all the, well, the sort of major comic elements in pop culture in the '70s in the US, and how it was a time when that was so central to our entertainment industry, in a way even more than it is now, and Paul Obelis was funny, that was part of why they became so popular, they had some pieces that were really funny. - You bring up that tension of what it took for them to be taken seriously by dance critics. It seems as though they got the idea over the first couple of years, but there were still those dismissive, these aren't dancers, they're athletes who are posing in the end. - In acrobatic mind truth. - Yes, that's Irene Croci's term. - But who eventually comes around, who recognizes it as well. - The thing that people often forget about the Irene Croci quote, it is sort of a famous quote that she called them an acrobatic mind truth, but that's often quoted out of context, and the context was her saying, they're not a dance company, they're an acrobatic mind truth, and I wouldn't want them to be anything other than what they are. It's something like that, I'm paraphrasing, but it was embedded in praise, not dismissal. So then that always gets forgotten. - Of course. - But yes, but what were you gonna-- - Just that sense of, I mean, we're gonna talk genres, comics and everything else at some point here, but that sense of gatekeeping, that the critics would look at something like, no, no, that's not our world, because those people are doing something different. - I think it was less, I think it was less gatekeeping by anyone. I think there were two things going on. Anyone outside of the dance world didn't care about that stuff. - Sure. - They just found it entertaining. Within the dance world, there were people who felt, this is not dance because there's, for most dancers and most dance companies, they come through a process in which they are steeped in so many rules and technique, and specific, they've devoted so much of their lives and physical pain, too, along the way, to mastering these techniques that you have to have to be considered valid. And then someone comes along and they're not even pointing their feet out the way that you're supposed to, or whatever the rules are, and it's something that some people have a big bias against that, like, why are these people getting all this credit for being a great dance company when by what I spent my life learning, they're not a dance company. So I think, and the other thing to remember, is that when Palabas started, they called themselves Palabas Dance Theater, and the word theater was in there partly to make the distinction. And to say it's dance merged with other things. - And it puts me in mind, you point out early on, when they're bringing in, when they're auditioning people, that trained dancers were not doing as well, because they were used to imitation, as opposed to improvisation, that they needed people who could come up with things, as opposed to replicate this move, which a trained dancer is very, very good at, but it doesn't necessarily have the spark to create something of their own, and to trust that process of creation. - Yeah, and the combination that Palabas evolved into was the guys who brought all this physical, athletic stuff, and not a dance background, and they thought much more freely, and flexibly about what these pieces could be. They could be anything. And then Alison, who had been their teacher, and who had encouraged them to think that way, she had a background in dance. She also knew the other half of it, and Martha had been a dancer prior to ever encountering Palabas, and had been, she had studied under a who's who of every important person in the history of dance. It was amazing, her mental rolodex of the people she's known is stunning, but Alison and Martha, when they joined, they brought all this technical knowledge and dance awareness, and so there was, they were much more finished. They were fine dancers. The guys were great movers, and there was, as Martha says, I think I quoted her in the book saying, there was a tension between those two things, and that was what led to the, became the signature of Palabas. - And it provides a framework, once you, you know, it can and can't be done, versus what shouldn't be done. - And also when you add two women to an all male group, the narrative possibilities multiply. - As we discussed earlier. - One of the fascinating things to me throughout the book is that we'll say the nature of creation. I mean, you work from some of the videos they had of creating certain processes, as well as their sort of testimony about it, the sense of what it takes to make something, and then to figure out what things work and what things end up becoming, you know, not one offs, but you know, fall out of the repertoire. - It creates the difficult feat, which you manage to pull off of describing dancing. You know, using words or conveying this in words without having, when you have images, obviously there's still, we don't see what the motion is like. And I deliberately did not watch any Palabas videos while reading the books. I didn't want the... - Yeah, it's interesting. - It's interesting. I've been hearing there are two schools of thought on that. There are people who are doing exactly what you did, and there are other people who are telling me they had so much fun going back and forth, looking at videos at, you know. - Only afterwards. It was all after. I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna take his depictions." It's like reading Peter Sheldon's art criticism where you don't need to see the art itself. You can get Peter as you bring up at one point with the New Yorker not having photography at that point, where everything had to be painted in words. Tell me about the challenge of pulling that off. - I'm so glad you asked that question because that was, that was the thing that I, it's funny, I wasn't that worried about the interpersonal dynamics and that stuff, navigating that stuff, which is the thing that most people say, "Oh, were you scared?" And having to deal with the personalities or whatever. That didn't bother me. What I was concerned about was writing about the dances in a way that would not be technical, dry, overly analytical. How do you write the, how do you describe these dances without writing something that sounds like it will only interest a scholar or a dance student. And might not even really interest that, for honest. (laughs) So I made a discovery. I don't know exactly how I made this discovery, but somehow I made this discovery. And it was that I could describe the pieces as if I were telling the story, like the piece itself exists in a completely nonverbal form. I have to transfer it into an exclusively verbal form. And that means writing it as if I'm transcribing someone's dream, you know, someone else's dream. And which is great because so many of the plot pieces are dreamlike and very lyrical. And I discovered that if I described them as if I were writing a little prose poem, like I thought of it as making a little miniature for the ones that were, you know, that I write a long paragraph or a couple long paragraphs describing. Martha's fabulous Vienna Loust House, that piece, which is, it is like a crazy dream. That was so much fun to write. It was like someone giving you a short story where you don't have to invent any of the stuff. You just get to choose the language to describe it and construct it. So it really appealed to that part of me that writes poetry and fiction because it was like I was making these little miniature pieces. It felt like a new art form to me. And then putting them in place in the right spots in the chapters. I found it very satisfying. And it also came along in a way that sustained me because I was spending a few years writing nonfiction and I wasn't really writing fiction during this time. I wasn't really writing poetry. And anything in the book that enabled me to use those muscles, so to speak, was very refreshing to me. It tapped into something I wanted to be able to use. - Did you run any of those by members of the company? - I allowed, well, first of all, I will say I had access to Renee and Matt. He was directed many of these things countless times. So I had the videos to access. I had them to access. And then I did allow them to read the finished manuscript before it was published. And I told them, I can't promise to change things that, you know, based on what you suggest, but I certainly want to take into account anything that you feel. And what came back to me were only technical corrections, factual corrections of the descriptions of dances, a couple of things here and there. Oh, we actually do it this way rather than that way. So that was what came back. Neither Renee, nor Matt, nor Emily asked me to change one thing about how I present them, which I thought was quite wonderful and a real example of how these are not people who have the kind of eos where they're trying to spin their public image or any, you know, there's still-- - There's a warts and all vibe throughout the book. - Yeah, and everyone in this, everyone I talked to was on the rare, rare occasions when I would say, are you sure you're okay with me putting that in? They would say, yes, it's what happened. - Somebody needs to know this after I'm gone. - Yeah, it's, again, to me it's fascinating. Like I say, the history, again, there's poetic creative moments that are there, the act of creation. As you document it as best you can, you know, what it was like to get the nature of that taking place. And then to see how it becomes, not commodified, but replicable and how it becomes something that you can send different companies out performing. I will say one of the areas I'm concerned with, largely because I'm dealing with a shoulder issue that made the drive up here, not so much fun. The comparative lack of injuries you bring up throughout the book, there are people who occasionally have to leave because of a neck injury, foot toe, et cetera, but-- - I'm sure that could be a whole separate book. - Yeah, that was my thing. I'm sure people are getting hurt a lot more than he's letting on and doing some of these things. But yeah, it was interesting, you know, partly because they still come off as almost magical people, especially after watching some of the other video and thinking, okay, I've got this full conception of what their lives were like from Robert's book, but the physicality of it still has an almost weightlessness when it's on the page and, you know, in reality, it's seeing that it almost maintains that weightlessness when you see how they're moving these bodies in space. A, it's incredible, B, that see fantastically strong. C, again, I can't understand how they're not all on the injured list at this point, but-- - Right, right, right, it's amazing. - The drive home will be, you know, a challenge too, but, you know, now I'm energized by conversation. So one of the things that also fascinated me about them and the creative process is, and I'm sure it's something that you've paid attention to, the literariness of them. It's not simply that they're making puns for the titles and concepts that they're working with. There seems to be, from the original, from the founders onwards, a deep readingness and a wide readingness, starting with the very name of the company, but that sense of finding inspiration from a library, basically. - Yeah, I think Moses had a lot of that right from the beginning, I think he was in English major, among other things, and Robbie Barnett is a fantastically literary-minded guy. His father was Lincoln Barnett, a very prominent writer of his time, and Robbie, I mean, when Matt brought me to visit Robbie at the beginning of this project, we sat on Robbie's patio talking, and he was, you know, we showed up and he was like, in the middle of reading a volume of the Library of America edition of James Baldwin, or you know, and I brought him some books, and you know, he's a very literary guy. They all are, I mean, they're all incredibly well-read, intelligent, super-intelligent minds, the founders, and one of the things that, I think it was Charlie Reinhardt, the founder of the American Dance, or former director of the American Dance Festival, who is now in his 90s. I did speak to him, and I was actually at Martha's suggestion, I spoke to him, and he said one of the things he wanted to point out that he feels people miss, or don't understand about dancers, is that, you know, most dancers now come out of college programs, university dance programs, and they're incredibly smart, they're incredibly well-read, and there is this stereotype of dancers as pure intuition, kind of non-intellectual, kind of like beautiful animals, sorry, that stereotype, and dancers do have that quality as well. They have that intuitive animal in touch with their bodies in a way that's different than other people, but they're also, for the most part, highly, highly intelligent, well-read people, you know, so that's, but I wanted to bring that to the book because as a writer, even though I wanted to be transparent at the beginning of the book, showing that I was a fan of blahblas that I was drawn in, I'm not really a fan who wrote a book, I'm really a literary guy who wrote a book. I think of it as an artist writing about other artists, and so that was important to me, and there are a number of what I would say are probably hidden literary influences. I think of the book as a kind of life-writing, which is a term now that's used to describe a genre of writing that's associated with Virginia Woolf and a lot of other 20th century writers, and life-writing encompasses biography and memoir and letters and diaries and auto-fiction, all different kinds of writing that tries to capture life in certain ways, and I felt that that was what this book was about in a lot of ways. It was about the balance between art and life and trying to capture that vitality in both. So, to me, it's a literary work as much as history or anything else. - And in the Kenhouse Guardian, auto-fiction way, you bring yourself in. I mean, you start with your experience with pillables and the introduction, but by part three, you're part of the story. - I sneak in, yeah. And that's, I mean, here's a really pretentious literary reference for you. - By the way. (laughs) - I think every good student of American literature learns that the most famous partially involved narrator in American literature is Nick Caraway and the Great Gatsbyger, and that's where you learn, if you learn it, that that's a narrative technique. And I use myself as a partially involved narrator in this book, and I was very careful not to put in anything about myself not in connection with pillables. There's no digression, right? 'Cause I hate the bait and switch thing where people sometimes will say, "I'm writing a book about such and such," and they'll be a little bit about what the book is extensively about, and then there's lots and lots of them writing their own story that you didn't realize you were buying. So, I didn't want to do anything even-- - No, you don't like that. - Just fall into that trap and the slightest here. - Yeah, so, I was very careful to use myself and my experience in ways that I hoped would bring the reader in feeling a greater sense of proximity to pillables and seeing how pillables, not only functions, but also how pillables can affect someone's life if you are close to them, if you're part of that community, if you become connected. So, that was a very deliberate narrative strategy and it was, I wanted to frame the book with the story of my friendship with Matt, but not a privilege sense of that or anything. - Yeah, yeah, not overdo it. And it's like, Matt, I mean, you even bring up a moment of a comic artist recommendation that kind of spurs them a little on a project that is never put off as, oh, look at me, being a big contributor to pillable is more the, oh, here's a little, here's a thing that I've gathered and maybe it's going to be someone else. - Here's the kind of stuff we talk about is really, that's the idea from my point of view. - From your time as an audience member, as a workshop participant, and then as their biographer, we'll say, how's pillable has changed your life? - Ah, ah, that's very interesting. - You can break that down. How does it change your view of yourself, your view of your body? - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, so there's, I think there's a couple different things. - There's a lot of that question. - Yeah, there's a lot, I mean, you could take that question in a lot of ways. The one you mentioned was my view of my body, that's definitely part of it because the first workshop was revelatory to me because I was a kid who was the 98-pound weakling, scrawny, you know, non-athletic, very non-athletic kid. - I'd say join the club into a high five, but we probably missed because we're a couple of nerds, but we don't. - Right. - And so, you know, that wasn't a great trauma to me. But it was something that, as an adult, getting into middle age, the idea of taking that first workshop was a little intimidating. I thought, what is this gonna be like? This might be one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. And remember, too, I didn't know at that point what Matt was really like. I had seen the movie "Last Dance," which I talk about in the book, "Fantastic Documentary" by Mira Bank. And Matt is in that a lot. And I had the DVD, which had some, like, bonus stuff that had profiles on the dancers. So I thought I had a little bit of a sense of him, but he gets described in the film as intense. And, you know, that's a word that can be a compliment, but it can also be a euphemism sometimes for someone being difficult or, you know, temperamental. And so I thought, I don't know what he's gonna be like. Maybe he's gonna turn out to be the gym teacher from hell. You know, who knows? So I was, of course, very pleasantly surprised when I got there, and, you know, not surprised, just happy. But I think that experience for me was... It was very powerful because I came back from it feeling like, hey, I did it. I did this physical thing. And, you know, with all these people who, you know, who are way more able to do that kind of stuff. And that's, I think why I went back subsequently and took additional workshops, because I was talking to somebody about it who said that her husband had a similar experience that when he was middle-aged, I think he joined a group of bicyclists or something. You know, it was some physical activity, some athletic activity, that it gave him something that he felt he had missed earlier. And I remember, I think it was maybe the third workshop that I took. I actually did a few things that were more rough and tumble than I had ever allowed myself to do before. And I was in my forties, and I knew that, like, this is the only time I've been in. There's only time I'm gonna be here. It all goes downhill from here, so I'm doing this. But it was very, there was something very satisfying, very therapeutic, it was like putting a piece of a puzzle into place that had been missing. You know, you felt more complete afterwards. A sense of not having to be the intellectual, Robert. Oh, that's interesting. I'll say, I took up running at 47 and joined a group of guys, 20 years older than me, most of them. And on and off, I do other exercise now. But we'd spent a couple of years. They'd run 30 miles a week, four times a week, blah, blah, blah. And I realized I didn't have to be Gil. I mean, you know, I had the personality, but we were just there. We would talk, but it would be about water heaters and the plain tree commission in their town and the Yankees bullpen and things like that. And I realized they don't care what a podcast is. Only one of them is pharmaceutical experience. We're not talking about day job stuff. And that sense of, okay, I get to be a body for a while and not have to be the, not just the mind, but the persona, I guess. You know, how much did you feel that sense of, I'll say escape? I think I may have had moments of that. I think, I mean, part of Plable's workshop is, and part of the reason I think it worked so well for me is that it's not only about being physical. It's also about making stuff up. Right. And so the writer in me was finding a new way of writing, so to speak, you know, because there's a lot of editing that goes on, right? So you're making these pieces, you're coming up with ideas. And so I wouldn't say that my intellect was that largely turned off because you're also discussing pieces that other people make and analyzing. So it's a mix of things. But definitely for somebody like me who didn't spend as much time, you might say living in my body in this full away, even just going into a studio for five consecutive days where you're going to be, you know, warming up, doing stretches beforehand and then doing these various group exercises and then breaking into smaller groups and making, you know, there's just the being physical, consciously physical all day long was that was a really nice experience for me. And leave you regretting not doing that when you were 20s? No, I think... I think... I think... No, I just think it was a things happen when they're meant to kind of an experience, you know? What did you learn about interviewing? Oh, interesting. I want to because I'm still trying to figure this out. Well, I'm going to tell you, you may be shocked when I tell you this, I didn't record the interviews. I figured, when you mentioned doing it on the phone, a lot of people don't record phone conversations, they just write down and I know that's a different vibe. There were a couple of tapes involved. When we visited Robbie at the beginning, we taped it, but I didn't tape it to quote from it. I taped it because he was one of the first people giving me background on the history of the company. Yeah. And so, but most of what I did was, I took notes by hand while talking to people on the phone, and he asked me the question, "How writing the book affected my perception of plavos?" Was that it? How the experience with them changed your life. Oh, yeah. That'll work too. Yeah. Well, what I was going to say was I think the thing that changed my life about plavos was just the degree which they inspire me. But one interesting thing that happened while I was writing the book was without thinking about it that much, I began looking at them more like an author writing a book, as you would imagine, through a lens that was not necessarily more critical in the sense of being a harsher judge, but more critical in the sense of wanting to pick up on all the details that I needed to filter and think about. And after I had finished the book, last year, last summer, I went to see plavos at the Joyce, and at this point, the book was in the publishing pipeline. And so, it was past the point where I was going to change anything. And so, it was the first time I had gone to see plavos in a few years without those other filters. Sure. Yeah. And after the performance, I sent this text message. Well, I'm going to read you. I sent this to Matt and Renee and Emily. I'm just home from my day in New York. The matinee was fabulous. Sometimes, as I sit in the audience, I watch plavos as a long time admirer, a friend, an author who has done a lot of research, or as a fellow artist with a sympathetic but critical eye. But this afternoon, I watched plavos a different way, a way that I haven't in a long time. I watched like a kid with a naive excitement, delight, and enchantment. It was like falling in love all over again. The little girl sitting behind me with her mom didn't want the show to end, and neither did I. Being part of the exuberant standing ovation gave me joy, as did the whole show. I am so proud of all of you. I'm so proud of all of you on stage and off. You bring so much wondrous energy into the world. I love it. I love you. I thank you. And I wish you the most gigantic of congratulations on the completion of this amazing tour. And Matt texted me back, "Best text ever." So that was it. So you're the second guest in three episodes who started to cry, which I feel like I'm bringing out on people now. I'm not super happy, but that's all you. I had to--that surprised me, actually, that I got a little-- my voice wavered a little. But I think that happened because it sums up something that's so totally at the center of my heart. That text message really kind of goes straight to the point, which is why I read it. And I also will say that in the book I had to, because there are so many intense moments of maybe emotional, you know, clashes or, you know-- Those flare-ups, those flare-ups. And by dramatic moments, we'll say. And at a certain point, I had to, as an author, say, "Do I want every chapter to include someone crying?" Maybe we have to have a little-- a little selectivity. We have to be a little bit selective about what we-- you know, where we have the tears. Did you worry about the scope of the book? There's that line from Moses near the end. Moses Pendleton, when you speak to him, when you're working on the book, where he says, you know, this book, it's about American history, basically, that the entire story of Palavulus could-- A, do you agree with that? B, you know, were there directions that could have gone where, yeah, it's going to turn into 600 pages instead of 200? Yeah. Someone could write an enormous book. I mean, it could have-- you could write an enormous book that no one would publish. No one would want to reheat. That's part of the worrying about the scope of the book. And so, yeah, I did-- I didn't-- I set a limit, I think, at some point, of 100,000 words. And I stuck to it. And it wasn't that hard to stick to it, really. But one of the keys to that is the structure of the book, which is the chapters, as you know, have numbered subsections. And that allows me to do jump cuts from one subsection to the next, skipping over periods of time and not having to do all the laborious transitions of everything that happened in between. And that's yet another literary device. I really stole it from Speak Memory, Nabokov's memoir. Yeah. You know, I thought, that's what I need to be able to-- He was blind if I take this. I need to just jump through to the things that I want. And so that's how I managed the question of distillation. And also, a lot of it is just personal selection of what I interested me the most, what I thought was most important to include. It's funny, because I think my first exposure to them was the Oscars, where they did the shadow presentation, which you then reveal was actually prerecorded and not even done live. But writing about that phase, where things become more corporate for Palavolis, where the founders are transitioning out, if not already gone. There's an ongoing tension that are out this book of Art and Commerce, and again, who owns creation versus the ability to perform it, I guess, that I found absolutely fascinating. And I don't know how much of that you knew going in was going to be a theme of this, that it was going to be the-- Yes, this is joyous, but we have to pay tickets, by tickets to attend this, and there's a whole business structure behind it, and how does that-- what does that tension like, I guess? Yeah, I'm keeping in mind that you come from a publishing world where everything is as great as a book is, there has to be that sense of, you know, going to sell. I don't think I thought about that as a major theme going in. I think I knew it was there. I was more interested in focusing on the art, but also felt I had to acknowledge the realities. So I talked about that, and certainly when Palavolis decided they could no longer function without an executive director, and they brought in Edemark Obovius, their executive director, that was a major, major turning point for Palavolis, because they were acting differently. You know, they were fundamentally changing the way they ran things. The fallout from that was that Allison Chase ended up leaving. But Robbie Barnett had that great line. You know, we made our last decision as a collective or as a group. We made our last decision as a group to stop making decisions as a group. And it has a kind of, I don't know, kind of a poignant echo to it in a way. But I think that was a sea change in the history of the company. And it took many, many years for that to play out in different ways and different echoes. And I think there was a gradual stabilizing, and I think a greater stabilizing now that, you know, after his tenure ended, and Renee and Matt have sort of, I think they've kind of brought the culture of Palavolis, the internal culture of it, a little bit closer to what it was while keeping a lot of the things that were gained during those years. Yeah, I don't mean it in a disparaging way, by any means. It was a necessity, as we mentioned in the beginning, a sense of continuity, lineage. You know, how do you continue something? Well, it also, how do you continue the tradition of something that was based on overthrowing tradition? Yeah. That's the conundrum. You know, if you're known as the company that does things differently and then you're successful for five decades, how do you proceed and honor the tradition while if the tradition is to not honor traditions too much? In the case of Palavolis, of course, they do have a kind of vocabulary of their own that they've created over the years, so that's probably the through line. But I remember Renee and Matt went through a period where they were asking the question a lot, "What makes a Palavolis piece a Palavolis piece?" And my answer to them was, if the two of you tried to make a piece that was as unpalablous as possible, it would still end up being a Palavolis piece because you've been steeped in Palavolis your entire adult lives. It's going to, don't worry. It's going to be Palavolis. And you show the artists who leave because they want to pursue something else and how it still informs some of the other, especially with the founders, when they start branching out, either they're making a sort of continuation under their own light or they're pushing back against it so hard that they're kind of trying to create the opposite. You sort of describe some of Moses Pendleton's subsequent work with MOMEX, that this couldn't be Palavolis and yet it couldn't be without, you know. It's stuff I find fascinating in terms of how one achieves an artistic identity and then perpetuates it and walks it away. I also do think, I guess this ties back to what I just said about Renee and Matt making things that are inevitably going to feel like Palavolis. But I feel that it's true with artists generally that I talk about in the book the fact that I've always been drawn to artists who are very eclectic and versatile and keep changing their style, whether it's a pop band like Blondie that goes from pump to disco to reggae and rap and other things, or whether it's Mobius, the graphic novelist Jean Giroux, changing his style from one project to the next, all that morphing. And yet there's always a through line. It's always still that artist. And I think that the older I get, the more I become aware that artists have, there's a certain way in which you'll never completely get away from, or nor should you feel you need to get away from some set of through lines that are going to be there without you trying to put them there. Because the ones you're not trying to put there are probably the ones that are the most true to who you are. So what are yours? Besides poetic prose, which we've tried to talk about. I obviously love the wit and visual, the marriage of wit and beautiful visuals. That's part of Palavolis and it's also part of the other kinds of art that I love. I'm wearing this shirt that has this picture on it of a naked guy, a drawing of a naked guy, standing with his arms apart and his eyes closed. And it's from a piece of artwork that was created, I commissioned it, by an artist who goes by a name on Smith. And I commissioned it for a couple of privately printed books that I did a couple years ago of fiction. And the reason I'm mentioning it in this context is that I think this image for me has come to be a symbol, or maybe even like a talisman for my preoccupations as a writer. Because it's an image of someone who might be dreaming or might be in a trance. He might be creating some idea of himself. He might be transcending something, yet it's a very sensual image because it's a naked body. So it's dreams, it's creation, it's the physical and spiritual or mystical, all of those things. And that's in my fiction and it's also a direct bridge to Palavolis, my interest in Palavolis in this book. So that's kind of encapsulates for you some of my obsessions, I guess. I don't know if obsession is the right word, preoccupations, whatever. Area is a focus. You don't get through lines, I think, holds a line. Yeah, that does hold up in a non-value judgment place. Working in book publicity for a long time and now being the guy who has to publicize a book. Palavolis is his own, but being the author, I guess. How different is that for you? What's it like sitting up and instead of setting up an interview with an author and some schlump from New Jersey, actually having to sit across from the guy? It's fun, it's nice. There's a little bit of feeling like, "Oh, it's my turn now, I get to do this." And getting some nice reviews was, I mean, I've had, I'm sure, thousands of reviews across my desk as a book publicist over 20 years. I've seen the whole gamut of everything you can get from the best to the worst. And I know how rare it is in today's world to get reviewed at all and to even get a handful of reviews. And so far, I've had exclusively good reviews, knock on wood that that will continue. And a really good review in the Wall Street Journal, which I know is like, you know, because of what I do for a living, I know that that is like you won the lottery sort of. So it's been great. Tell me about your literary background, where the books began for you, be how you ended up in the rule that you're in. Oh, okay. So when you say how I ended up in the role, do you mean in my professional life? Yeah, we'll talk about the lessons in another role I don't know about. Well, I mean, I'm also a writer. Yeah, I know there's a way to. Yeah. I mean, I think I was always a pretty bookish kid from an early age. And I think I was drawn to language very early. I mean, I have this memory that might sound a little crazy that when I was a, before I could even read, when I was like a toddler, one of my earliest memories is my parents would leave the newspaper on the ASIC in the living room. And I would stare at the headlines and I would look at the different letters of the alphabet. This was before I knew the alphabet and I would see that certain shapes were the same. And it was like a code I was trying to crack. And years later, as an adult, I was at a party and I met a guy who dealt with early childhood education. And he said, oh, that's called pre-reading. That's what kids do. It's not like some weird thing that it was only me. But I think what was interesting about it was that for me, it was accompanied not just by curiosity, but by a sense that this was like something I had to unlock that was going to be a big thing for me, like a key for me. So I don't know if that's unusual or not, but it's interesting to me that that's one of my first memories. And then I went on to be a reader and writer from pretty early on. And how it led me to my professional life was that by the time I was in high school, I wanted to be a writer. By the time I had gone through college, I was thinking about working potentially in the publishing industry. I did an internship at a little publishing house while I was still in college my last semester. And then I applied for some jobs. I lived in New Jersey, as I may have mentioned, and I went to college in New Jersey at Drew University. And I lived in that area for a few years after college, and I applied for a couple jobs in publishing at commercial trade houses. I didn't get those jobs, and this was the early 1980s, and I didn't realize that most of those jobs went to kids who had wealthy parents who could afford to have. My version of that story is finishing grad school. Not too much debt, but moving back to New Jersey 1995 and trying to find publishing work in New York City. And my father's disparaging ethnic slur about what the pay was like. It was either $16,000 or $18,000 a year for these editorial assistant roles that was just went off into trade magazines and business to business. And then became a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. But I have this, and that's what's important. But yeah, the economics of it, I didn't realize what that meant. You can do that job if you've got family money to keep you going. I wasn't worldly enough to know what a trust fund baby was, and I didn't know that the literary industry and the publishing industry really, you know, that was just taken for granted. And those days, that was part of how it worked, that the entry level people, most of those jobs went to people who had, they were set up basically already, and forget it if you were a person of color or anything like that. You didn't even see any, it was almost nobody in the industry like that. So I decided, but that wasn't what put me off. What put me off was, I felt that if I moved to New York and I tried to be a writer, while working and publishing or anything else, I would burn out on it. And I thought, I don't want to set myself up to burn out on this and then give up. So I did a lot of temp jobs for many years, and I would save up my pennies and I would take time off and be a writer full time for a little while. And I would collect a lot of rejection slips because I was very naive and unrealistic about what could be published or not, out like most people. At a certain point, I realized that I loved writing and I was going to keep writing, whether I could ever get published or not, that I was just, even if I was just some crazy person writing his own stuff. But I still wanted to write things that were not just for me. It wasn't like I was going to retreat and just keep a journal or something. I still wanted to make art. So, I tried this in that and I had a friend from college who went to Yale Divinity School and I came up here to visit him. And I looked around at all the architecture, this isn't a point when I'm probably in my mid 20s, and I looked at all this Gothic architecture, college Gothic architecture. And I thought, this would be the closest I could get to living in Europe without going to Europe. I just loved the ambiance. And I thought, I'm going to move here as an experiment because it was either going to be New York, which I thought would be overwhelming. Or it was going to be like a small college town, but big enough to be walkable so I wouldn't have to have a car because living in New Jersey, of course, I had to have a car and I didn't like driving. So, I moved here as an experiment thinking the New Haven was going to be a little chapter in my life. And one thing led to another and I stayed. And I started, eventually I started working at Yale and I eventually had that job at the Yale University Art Gallery for several years. And that was doing development work, so it was fundraising, but it gave me a really interesting perspective on how organizations in higher education in the art world and, you know, different entities make things happen, how they, you know, and also how donors think and who gives money for what reasons. It was a real education. I didn't want to do it for the rest of my life, but it was a kind of gave me a bird's eye view of a lot of things I wouldn't have known about otherwise. And the bottom line was strategic thinking. I mean, it was a lot about strategy, why people do certain things, why they choose to support certain things, how you go about approaching people diplomacy. All of which, interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, are transferable skills for a publicist. So when I decided to leave, I left the art gallery and I had a kind of, I had created a kind of self-funded sabbatical year for myself where I just worked on my writing. I was still pretty out of sync with what could really get published, you know, but I was improving. And I decided it was time, at that point I was in my late thirties, and I thought it's time, now it's time to go into publishing. If you can't read them, join them, you know, you gotta, I gotta learn, if I'm ever going to get published, I have to get inside. It's like the spy who infiltrates the enemy spy organization and discovers that all the people in it are from his organization, and they have infiltrated it. Anyway, and that they can't actually accomplish anything, but I thought, do I go to New York or do I stay in New Haven and try and get a job at Yale? And, and then I thought, well, what if I stayed in New Haven and got a job at Yale in publishing, you know, and then I would be able to go into the publishing industry and still walk to work for my apartment. So I did a lot of networking, which I didn't know how to do until I had had that experience working in development. Which I think is a superpower, networking is a big, so I did lots of networking, and I, and I got a job eventually at Yale University Press in the publicity department, working with fantastic people from whom I knew from the job interview on that I was going to learn so much from these people. And there are basically three people there, in addition to me, with whom I've been working ever since. I mean, we've got more than 20 years. Elizabeth Alton, who I mentioned earlier, is one of them, Heather Durea, Brenda King. I mean, these people are fantastic with what they do. And, and so that has been a hugely educational experience, and one that enabled me to work with, you know, books by people like Ivan Brunetti, the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel laureate, who's one of my, he's become one of my favorite contemporary authors. I get to work on the on the proof related publications we do, including an annotated edition of In Search of Lost Time, which is fantastic for me because I'm a Christian. So, you know, it's the original Moncrief as revised by William C. Carter, and Bill Carter's revision is wonderful. He peels out all of the Britishness, because this is an American edition, and it's very interesting because when you read it, as it was published before, you didn't think about it having a British lens, but it does because all, you know, every time we would say will, it says shall, or something like that. You know, it's those kinds of slight changes, but the cumulative effect is to make it feel like you're reading a 19th century British novel. And when you read it in Bill's revision, it doesn't sound American particularly, but if you're an American reader, it sounds more European and not British. It sounds, to me, it feels more like you feel like you've gotten closer to Bruce's voice. It's almost 20 years since I've read it, so I figure I do need to go back, and yeah, because I used to say I wouldn't read it before I turned 50, and then something happened in my early 30s where I decided, yeah, I think now's the time, and, you know, but yeah, need to return to it. And your mentions of Mobius, as well as Osmis, we'll say, cartooning illustration of you because it has a very, in a good way, comics vibe. Tell me about your comics history. Oh, my comics history. Well, I grew up reading books like Lots of Kids, and it was mostly the era. I mean, I grew up in the 70s, I was born in 1963, so I grew up in the 70s, was in high school in the late 70s, graduated high school in '81, so that just gives you the time frame. And so I was growing up in the age of the Marvel Superheroes and DC Comics heroes, and that was mostly what I read. And then at a certain point, I felt I had kind of outgrown it. But one thing that I read avidly in my teens was Heavy Metal magazine, which was the oddly named American version of the law, which means Screaming Metal, which is the French magazine that was founded by Mobius and three other guys in France. And the biggest draw, aside from the fact that it was labeled as, you know, you had to be 18 years old to read it, which sold it to every four years old. I had to have it. The big draw was Mobius. His stuff was always, in my opinion, the best thing in the magazine. So I was definitely a Mobius fan early on. And then when I did kind of give up comics for a number of years, one might think of as a misguided attempt to be more grown up. And so at some point, I think it was, I really think, now that I think about it, I have to say it was when Yale University Press decided to publish an anthology of graphic fiction, cartoons, and true stories, which was the first anthology we did with Ivan Brunetti, which my friend John Kalka, who was the literary studies editor at the time, had this great idea to do this anthology. He was inspired by the mix weenies volume that Chris Ware had edited that had been very successful. He thought it's time for a university press to do this, to recognize this art form. And so he called Chris Ware and said, "Would you do one of these for us?" And Chris Ware said, "No, but I know the guy who should." And it was Ivan Brunetti. And I went to Small Press Expo to sit at a table with Ivan to promote this forthcoming anthology. And that's when I met Ivan. And at the table next to us, there were some young guys who were students of his. One of them was on Smith, who I connected with at that point. And later, he became a collaborator and friend over the years on various projects. But I then, after that anthology came out, it reconnected me to indie comics, which I had read some underground comics as well when I was younger. But it reconnected me to how great that world could be. And I didn't dive in, head first, and read lots and lots of stuff. But at some point, I don't know the timeline exactly, but at some point, I pulled off my shelf some collections of Mobius that I had from years earlier and became like reawakened. Yeah, Mobius. And the thing that then also happened, again, I don't know exactly how many years I'm spanning here, but at some point, I decided I wanted to revive my dormant abandoned French. And I decided I wanted to revive it only by doing pleasurable things to revive my French. And one of those pleasurable things was going online and discovering that Mobius, who was still alive at that time, was publishing these wonderful late career works that you couldn't get in English. They weren't being published in this country. And there were these beautiful editions that you could order from his website, his sort of self-published stuff. Mobius editions. And so I started sending away for these beautiful books in French, and I would linger over them. All the more excused to linger over these beautiful pages as I tried to figure out what the work has been. And it was a great way of reviving my interest in French. And so it was Mobius. And then pretty soon, I thought, "Well, the greatest French professor in history is Tintin." So Liz Aventre de Tintin. And I appreciate you using the Anglo-sized pronunciation there instead of seeming even more cultured. So I found eventually the greatest eBay purchase of my life, which was an entire set of Tintin in French in the hardcover, large format, the larger size edition. And well, I got the whole thing for like a hundred bucks or something. I mean, it's a ridiculously good deal. It might have been more than that. It might have been cursed. It was quite a fine, quite a fabulous deal. And so I've got a shelf that's... Most of my graphic novels are Tintin, Mobius. And there's a Belgian graphic novelist I love named Max de Pradegas, who I've written about for the powers of David. I've read a piece of yours. And I love Max's stuff. And I read his stuff. So I'm very... I'm very like tunnel, almost tunnel vision focused on just a few. I'm sort of the same way with my literary taste in general. I have my... I have my favorites, my little pantheon, and I mostly stay in it. My assumption... I should be going the opposite direction of me where I have to do 50 of these shows a year because I'm under some strange self-compulsion like this. And therefore, I'm reading things I would never, like your book on Palable has never come across in my day-to-day life. And then there's the, "What is Gil do in his spare time?" He spends last year reading the entirety of Pinchin over again because he's in that mode. And, you know, finding other things that are areas of focus for you. But now it makes sense that your day job is getting exposed to so many different books and having to publicize different books that extra-curricularly focus is probably a really good thing for you. Yeah, that's an interesting observation. It's true. And you're saying it to me after I've just sat through multiple days of launch meetings for being presented dozens and dozens and dozens of books, including ones that I won't be the publicist for, but it's a lot to take in. You know, it is true. When you work in publishing, you're dealing with a big list. And also, I will say, some people listening to this won't know this. Yale University Press is quite different than most university presses. We're a lot bigger, and we publish close to 400 books a year. So it's not quite the same creature as you usually think of when you think of a university press. Most of them are quite small staff, maybe a few dozen books a year. We're in this space that is midway between a university press and a trade house. And one of the things I discovered while searching for a publisher for my book was that it raised my appreciation of what we do because the trade houses now in 2024 have really become completely by the numbers. It is. The editors really aren't allowed to acquire anything that is niche that is going to sell in the low thousands rather than in many tens of thousands. So if you have a book about taking care of your lawn and everyone in America or a lot of people in America have lawns, then there's a chance they'll write your book. But it is quite numbers driven, really, really numbers driven. And the university presses, not the one I was published by, but some others, many of them want things that are what I would call hyper scholarly. There are a lot of university presses that really want things that are targeted to a tiny, tiny specialized market of academics. It's a $150 hardcover. And so the number who are in the middle, some of them independent presses, some of them larger university presses, some of them university presses that just have a slightly different mission. There's this sort of dwindling island of places that know how to do smart specialized books successfully and want to. And that is really a great thing, a precious thing for our culture, that as I look back on my career at the university press, it makes me really happy that I was part of that. Second, the last question. Do you have the nonfiction bug? Of course, kind of a one off. I know you're going to keep writing with your fiction and poetry, but yeah. No, I think this, I wouldn't say it's the last nonfiction, but I don't think, I don't at this point imagine myself doing another extensively researched kind of nonfiction book because the reason I wrote this one was because Plabos became such a part of my life. I mean, as I read that text message earlier, and my voice was getting wobbly, I thought, "Oh, this is revealing, isn't it?" And once in a while you have those moments. So, as I said earlier, I felt, to me, the Plabos book is almost an extension of my literary writing. I will tell you, I am 17,000 words into my next book right now, and it is a novel, and it has a fantasy premise. I'm a little, I keep referring to it as in my fantasy novel, but I'm a little hesitant to call it a fantasy novel because I think when I say that for a lot of people what they think are like people with swords flying around them. Yeah, King of Thrones flying dragons or else sorcerers and elves and things. This is not that type. There's a lot of levitation in it, which I joke is why it's the sequel to the Plabos book. But it's a very whimsical, it is written under the star of Mobius, I will say, and it is whimsical. It's got some very humorous elements, some poignant moments. I'm really into it. I'm having a lot of fun. It's making me feel young again, writing it. It's fast paced. It's a good thing. I'm enjoying it. And so that's the answer to that question. I hope to bring you on again to, for me, Evergreen episodes are also great, but if you do have another book down the line, it'll be great to make the trip back up here. But the real last question, which if you've listened to the show you know is coming, what are you reading? What am I reading? Slash, what book have you plots over in recent months or told people you need to read this, even though that's your job? And I take it that the part of the question is I'm not allowed to say my own books. They have kind of, my own stuff has kind of eclipsed everything else in terms of sucking up my attention in recently. I'm trying to think, what have I read lately that really, I think what I've been doing lately is dabbling, jumping into things and pulling short, you know, short stories and little bits and pieces of different things. It's a great question because it allows the responder to proselytize on behalf of something, right? That's what I'm always hoping for. I'm going to come out of these as an idea of what I should read next. Yeah, what a funny thing that of all the questions, that would be the one to stump me. Normally that would be the easiest one, right? That would be the easiest question. Sure, the guy who has to do this for a living, so they can make it a little more challenging, like I said. Yeah, well, I can tell you what I'm looking forward to reading next, which is, I have this book I've been wanting to get to, which is the latest graphic novel by Max to Project Guess. I want to read that, and then I also have, then I'm going to be the publicist for the next Patrick Modiano novel that we're publishing in English, Yale University for us is publishing, and that's the English translation is called ballerina, but I have the French because I like to read those in French as well. I like to read both French and English, so I have that, the French version is called Adosus, and that is definitely high on my list of priorities. I've never read Modiano, so what's the book I should start with? Oh, that's a good question because he has so many, and there are also variations on similar themes. I think one of my favorites is called Paris Nocturne. That's a real, that's one that just appeals to me, there's a lot that I could name, that's one that I love. I also love his memoir, pedigree, but the only thing I have to say about that is it's very, it's kind of a love it or hate it book, I think, in terms of the way people react to it. It's a very unusual almost staccato kind of stream of memories, so you have to be willing to accept that it may not do what you expect a memoir to do. You have to meet it on its own terms, but it's very short, so it's easy to read it, and even if you're not sure you like it, you can read it again and discover that you do like it. Figure out what you were getting from it the first time or not getting, so I've gotten much better at reducing expectations going into a lot of these things. Real last question, which I should have asked, going to see Plablus in the new season? Yes, I hope so. Do they give you good seats because of the book or not? Yeah, I have to, I know this is there, we're having this conversation in late June, which is their crazy, crazy time because they're going to the American Dance Festival. And then they go to the Joyce, and so my friends are very, very, very busy right now, and I am looking forward to seeing it. Robert, thank you for making this book, and thank you for coming on the show. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a real treat. And that was Robert Pranzatelli. Go get his new book, "Pillablus, A Story of Dance and Life" from University Press of Florida, or UPF. It's an absolute marvel, and like we talked about, its themes carry through to a lot more than modern dance or to this particular dance troupe, but more to the nature of art and creation, and living in a world. Well, living in a world with others both conceptually and in sheer physicality. Yeah, God, this book is fantastic. Anyway, I think it's okay to share Robert's website, which has some of his stories and essays. He shared it with me before we got together. It is the folioclub.blogspot.com. The folioclub is all one word, T-H-E-F-O-L-I-O-C-L-U-B. Otherwise, Robert is not on social media, near as I can tell, which, as we all know, is for the best. You can find his employer, Yale University Press, though, there at yalebooks.yale.edu, and on Instagram as Yale Books, and on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter, as Yale Press, all one word in both cases. You can also find "Pillablus," the dance troupe, company, theater, whatever you want to call it. "Pillablus" is at their site, "Pillablus.org." You'll find videos of their performances there, linked to this book, their online shop, info about the company and its dancers and its history, and most importantly, their tour schedule. See, "Pillablus" is going to be playing in a few weeks in New York, starting in late July. This is 2024 for you time travelers out there. After reading this book and recording this show, I'm tempted to go see them in person, so I might try and coordinate that with one of Robert's going to come down to see them and maybe see if I can weasel some introductions with them. Anyway, "Pillablus" is P-I-L-O-B-O-L-U-S, and it's "Pillablus.org" for their site, their nonprofit. I'll have links to all this stuff in the show and episode notes for this one. They can support the virtual memories show by telling other people about it. Let them know there is this podcast comes out every week with interesting conversations with fascinating people. You can also help out the show by telling me what you like and don't like about it or who you'd like to hear me record with or what movie or TV show or book or piece of music or theater, art exhibition, dance performance, whatever. You think I should turn listeners on to. You can do that by sending me an email DM if we're connected on Instagram or blue sky letters. I love postcards. If you get my address, it's at the bottom of the newsletter that I send out twice a week. I love getting those. I send out a postcard every day to some random victim recipient and it's always nice when people write back. It's never nice when people write me an email telling me they got my postcard. I don't dig that at all. Anyway, you can also leave a message on my Google voice number. That's 973-869-9659. That goes directly to voicemail so you don't have to worry about getting stuck in an awkward conversation with me. Messages can be up to three minutes long. So longer than that, you'll get cut off. Just call back, leave the rest of your message. And let me know if it would be okay to include your message in an upcoming episode of the show. It might have something interesting to share with listeners, but I'd never run something like that without the speaker's permission. If you got money to spare, don't give it to me. At least not right now. I am in the midst of trying to figure out the pricing for the book I am going to produce at the end of this year. It's going to be a Kickstarter thing. So if you do want to give me money, save it. And once I launch this Kickstarter, kick in that way, it's going to be amazing if I pull it off. So anyway, what you should do with your money in the short term is give it to other people and give it to institutions in need. With people, you can go through like GoFundMe, Patreon, Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, CrowdFunder. There's different crowdfunding platforms where you'll find people who need help making rent, covering car payments, veterinary bills. You might be trying to get an artistic project off the ground. It might be in a position where just a couple of dollars from you can really make a difference in their lives. Now, with institutions, I give to my local food bank and world central kitchen every month, but there are a lot of different things you can do with your money to help. Planned Parenthood, Women's Choice, Freedom Funds, Election Funds, the Poor People's Campaign. There's a lot of things you can do that if you have a little money to spare, you can help make a better world. So I hope you will. Our music for this episode is "Fella" by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. You should visit my archives to check out my episode with Hal from the summer of 2018 and learn more about his art and painting. And listen to his music at SoundCloud.com/Mayforth. And that's M-A-Y, the number 4, TH. And that's it for this week's episode of The Virtual Memories Show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another great conversation. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show and download past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find all our episodes and get on our email list at either of our websites, VMSPod.com, or chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also follow The Virtual Memories Show on Twitter and Instagram at VMSPod, at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com, and on YouTube, Spotify and TuneIn.com by searching for Virtual Memories Show. And if you like this podcast, please tell your pals, talk it up on social media, and go to iTunes, look up the virtual memories show, and leave a rating and maybe a review for us. It all goes to helping us build a bigger audience. You've been listening to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth. Keep reading, keep making art, and keep the conversation going. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]