Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut and Spolia, joins us to talk about 12 years of book-blogging, the downsides of learnign to write online, how she learned to love Henry James, why lack of ambition may have been Bookslut's key to success, and more!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 30 - Bookslut's Holiday
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host Gil Roth and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes and you can find all our past episodes there too. You can also find those episodes, get on our email list and make a donation to the show at either of our websites, VMSPod.com or chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can find us on Twitter at VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Last week you got to hear a conversation with longtime book critic Michael Derta and this time around you get Jessa Crispin, the founder of Bookslut. It's an artificial dichotomy but I sort of like the contrasting dynamics of their genders and their ages and such. I think their literary sensibilities do overlap in a lot of respects but it's still kind of neat to have somebody who started a few decades ago in book reviewing and contrast that with someone who began Bookslut in 2002, which really I guess makes it a 21st century thing but Jess has been doing this for 12 years and has been the lead blogger at Bookslut that whole time which in internet years is like half a millennia. So I'm kind of sort of considering running a third book critic conversation next week but I'm not sure if that works thematically and a few guys even give a crap with this sort of thing. I think it's kind of a neat idea, getting the various perspectives on this whole world but maybe I'll save it for another week. I'll tell you about that at the end of the show. Now, I actually pitched Jessa to record an episode way back when I was starting this a few years ago. I kind of thought she might be interested in talking about how she got started in this whole ludicrous endeavor of trying to have civilized conversations about books. Also, she was a late convert to Henry James and that sort of fit right in with my secondhand loves segment. That thing that I try and shoehorn into to a bunch of these conversations, that question about a book or author that you hated in your youth but learn to love later on in life. I know Jessa came around to Henry James late after hating him when she was in school. Anyway, a day or two before we were supposed to meet, Jessa announced that she was stepping down from blogging at Bookslut after a dozen years. So that seemed like a natural starting point for our conversation. Of course, because it's me, we managed to veer all over the goddamn place but I did get around to asking her about Henry James. So I consider this a long-term success. Now, Jessa Crispin is the editor and founder of Literary Magazine's Bookslut.com and SpoliaMag.com. Bookslut is geared towards book reviews and interviews and Spolia is more creative work, fiction, poetry, translation, et cetera. Her first book, The Dead Ladies Project, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in fall of 2015. She's born in Kansas, has lived in Texas, Ireland, Chicago and Germany. She's written for many publications, some of which are still in business. Her personal library currently resides in Berlin. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Jessa Crispin. (upbeat music) From your perspective, are you a generation older than the online book world nowadays? Me, a generation older, yeah, I think so. It's been 12 years that you've been... Yeah, I mean, my adorable replacement, Lauren, is a millennial. How much younger than you? She's 23, so she's 12 years younger than me. She's the same age as I was when I started. Yeah, so it is a definite difference of perspective and values and all of that stuff. It's easy to fall into the trap of the generation below you or just a bunch of crazy people who don't understand life. But I try to resist that. To what degree, well, given that you're retiring from blogging as bookslides, you're still going to be editor-in-chief of the bookslide empire? Yes, the empire is fine. I think it's fair. We're now in print and in digital. Now we do, you know, an award. We're doing an award for the first time this year. So yeah, I think it's totally fair to call it an empire. And video, you get the whole video. So you get the... Yeah, everything. You do it in 3D, you're all set. Um, what did you foresee? What did you imagine when you were 23? Just starting out doing this. Oh, nothing. I didn't imagine anything. I imagined being at the same office job until I died. And that was pretty much it. I mean, I come from Kansas, so I have a baseline of very low expectations. (laughs) I was in Paris. I was in Paris with a friend of mine who's from Kansas. We grew up like 40 minutes away from each other, but didn't meet until seven or eight years ago. But I was in Paris visiting him. And we were sitting drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, and at a lovely sidewalk cafe. And he's like, you know, he had that moment of like, did you ever expect when you were growing up in Kansas? I was like, Paris was never, like, you wouldn't even fantasize about it because there would be fantasizing about suddenly taking flight. It's just so out of the normal realm. So I had very low expectations for my life. And "Bookslet" was really, I think if I thought about it as, oh, I'm going to build an empire. (laughs) Of online book reviews. Of online book reviews. In 2002, when online book reviews didn't exist. And the internet had crashed. And the internet had crashed. And this was in Austin, Texas. So this was post.krap.com crash. I forget the different-- We had the Y2K thing. We had this. Yeah, there's a lot. There are different bubbles. I can't remember the names of all of them. If I had started out with that mindset, I don't think it ever would have happened. Or wouldn't have been, I don't think it would have worked if I had been ambitious to begin with. So lack of ambition was key to success for you. I think that lack of ambition is generally key to success, I think. I think if you go, I mean, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to be Donald Trump, then yeah, do it. Yeah, get born into it, but yeah. But there was no wildest dream scenario that, oh my God, this is going to lead to a job in blah, blah, blah. You just figured. I thought maybe I could get hired at Barnes & Noble. (laughs) Wishing said borders, because then you would have felt better. You'd have outlasted them. Yeah. Are there any guesses as to why the site took off the way it did initially? Oh, I think just because it was so unusual. How so? Well, just because it was online book reviews, I mean, there really was so little at the time. And it's, you know, there was Maude Newton, who started, I think about a couple of months after I did. And then there was Moby Lives, Dennis, Dennis Lloyd-Johnson. And that was pretty much it that I remember ever seeing. You know, newspapers didn't even put their books coverage online. It was, there really wasn't anything, but people were spending more and more time at their day jobs online. And so there was an audience that wasn't being served. And there was an audience that wasn't being served by the newspaper reviews, because there was, you know, still to this day, newspapers don't really review underground culture. And that's kind of where we started, was comic books, independent fiction. That was where we started, and that was kind of what we built from. And a relatively conscious decision to go in that direction at least. It was conscious just because that was what I was reading. And that's always been what I preferred reading. I've never been an up deck person. I've never been a David Foster Wallace person. - Yay. (laughs) - And that's, you know, they feel like David Foster Wallace, that's fine, people, I don't know. - There are other sites for you out there. - There are other sites for you. The whole world is for you. The whole literary world is for you. Let me have my corner of the David Foster Wallace free. Now, you said your replacement is 23, about the age you were. - Yeah. - Is there advice you would have given yourself, looking back now, besides what you've told her? Are there things you would have said, "Jessa, you really got a, you know, anything that would have?" - I wouldn't have been, I would have given myself advice not to be so naive as far as like, I mean, coming up in Kansas and then living in Texas and I had no sense of, I thought that people who worked in publishing were the arts were the best people in the world. And then to get kind of like, I can't remember if Michael Deerta ever did, but certainly a lot of established critics weren't just sort of dismissive, but actively hostile to the online world when it started to grow. - In fact, for Deerta, he used to do Sunday morning chats online, he had a whole fan base, he would all log in and he would be answering questions and talk. So in one weird respect, he was a proto online book guy, but then there was a cutoff point of, yeah, no, Facebook, social media, he's completely off-board with that. - Well, I think that's smart. - And this is like, yeah, I'm down. I, it's something I realized when I was editing his, I stopped checking my RSS feeds a while ago, I was working on a fiction thing and realized, let me just cut that and all of a sudden I thought, oh my God, my life is so much better. - So much better. - Even the intelligent reading I was doing, I was just reading stuff on a screen. I was just occupying my eyes. I cut that out and, you know, yeah. - It's so much better. - But you don't want to tell anybody that, of course, 'cause you have an online book empire. - Yeah. - So what else would you have told yourself besides don't be naive and people in publishing or actually sociopathic monsters? I'm putting words in your mouth, I know. - No, that's okay. I feel like that is probably a direct quotation of something I've said in the past. I don't know, because I think that I did okay. - Yeah. - I think I did okay. The only time, you know, I fell on my ass a couple times, but I feel like that was always for the best. So I don't know if I would have tried to dissuade myself, but yeah, I mean, I think not taking myself very seriously worked out in the long run, so yeah. - What do you think was the, well, you talk about falling on your ass, the biggest failure that you learned from in the process of book slot? - Oh, I tried to join the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and I did, I did join the board, and then I resigned, like two months after that. Well, I went to the meeting where they, I think the first meeting I went to was the beginning of discussions of the awards, and there was that thing of like, oh, we don't share the same values. And there's just no point to being that person, the contrarian with absolutely no support. So yeah, so then I quit. Plus it was, there was a very high percentage of people on the board who were genuinely hostile to the online book culture, including the president John Freeman. And now John Freeman is on Twitter, but for years he led a campaign. - This is the death of letters and all. - Which is, I mean, looking back, it's ridiculous, but the stakes really did, you know, were that high for some people. And yeah, so. - I find that the smaller the pond, the more batch it and same crazy the arguments tend to get. Is that really something you've encountered? - Oh yeah, I mean, read any of the is poetry dead, and then essays and then the comments section underneath them, all of them, they're amazing. - One of the reasons I may be one of the most mentally healthy people you'll ever meet, I don't read internet comments. - No, you shouldn't, but I do sometimes. - Yes, see? Everybody else is tempted. - Yeah. - My wife will say, oh, I was reading the comments up, nope, I don't want to know. - No. - Do not want to hear what anybody uninformed opinion of, again, associate pathic monster. - That's why I don't have comments on books I've never had, I've never will. - Do you think that was a benefit to the blog also, to not to generate into? - Yeah, because it's, it's, you would, you would be surprised at the level of craziness and hostility that exists in the literary world. If you share a different opinion, - What do you think it counts for it? - I think that, I think honestly that we've decided, collectively, that what we like expresses something deep about who we are as people. The objects that we consume, defines our personality in some way, so that if you don't like Harry Potter, if you publicly say, "I think Harry Potter" is childish bullshit and that adults who read it, probably should consider, you know, like a frontal lobotomy. Then people don't see that as hyperbole or they don't see it as an opinion that you're expressing that you think that this thing is trash. They see it as you are attacking me as a person. You are attacking me as who I am and what I value and these things that I hold dear. So it becomes crazy instantly. I think, I mean, you know, literature has always been contentious and it's always been these, you know, people's passions, but now it seems to be, I disagree with you, okay, then you are insulting me as a person. - My ideological nemesis, who must be destroyed. - Yes, oh yeah, I made a book critic one time for drinks and the first words out of his mouth where I see myself as your nemesis and it is my job to destroy you because I had disagreed with him about Harry Potter. So, you know. - It's sort of incredible. - I was like, all right, I'm gonna have a whiskey then. - It's on you, yeah. - You have the expense account, this is yours. - Well, yeah, I just, for some reason, maybe these conflicts existed in prior eras. I mean, we're used to the James Baldwin and William Sapphire, you know, sort of thing and the Vidal and Sapphire, was it Vidal and Sapphire also? - Vidal and mailer and-- - It was the one who threatened to punch out, was it Buckley who threatened to punch out Vidal on stage? - I thought it was mailer. - No, no, 'cause it was a right-left thing. Yeah, well, and I had the Bruce J. Friedman story about a mailer biting him at a party, but, you know. - Everybody's always trying to punch out of it all. - Yeah, I know, but it seemed that then, you know, arguments were tied somehow to the Cold War, civil rights, and like you say, now it's, you know, is my YA novel approval for adults. Yeah, that's why I don't express too many opinions about my book habits. I tell people what books I like, that's pretty much, it's actually a question that has come up with a few critics I've interviewed over the years, that I'm only going to publish positive reviews angle. Yeah, okay, so, fill me in on how you reacted when you first, you know, when that was first actually spoken by that, what was it, Buzzfeed, or someone? - Well, first the believer, and then Buzzfeed, yeah. Love Grossman at Time magazine. He also made the same declaration a couple years back. Yeah, I think it's, I think that's foolish. - Yeah, I mean, you can't have a community with just, - Everything is awesome. - Happy likingness, I mean, there is a point to criticism. Not everybody does it well, not everybody does it with good intentions, but to just say, oh, well, it's fine, it's fine, we'll just talk about the things that we like, and somehow that will nurture a happy literary community, it's absurd. - It was a, at a long time, comics journal reader, there was a Go Team Comics editorial about that same vibe that, you know, we'll just celebrate the good things going on within comics, and as you know, as I'm sure you know, any environment that includes Gary Groth, and it is not going to simply say, "Let's focus on the positive," and, you know, we actually do need to make sure we criticize the negatives. - Do you feel like you learned to write online? - Oh yeah, I mean, I didn't do any writing really before that, so yeah, which has its downsides. - That was my next question. (laughing) - Yeah, I mean, it's that thing of like, I don't know, there are a lot of writers from my generation that grew up learning how to write online, and there are downsides to that, and there are problems with that. And, but I think that then you get like the opposite of it, which is the MFA, kind of overly cautious, overly thought out, prose, I would take the sloppy over the heavily maintenance to any day. So, you know, I think as long as you don't, say all I'm going to do is write in this kind of bloggy style, as long as you, you know, read things that aren't just in the bloggy style, I think that that's fine. - And you're moving from online into print. Well, I mean, you've got a book coming out, this is my incredibly roundabout, a strange way of saying that. - I do, I do. - You have a book coming out. First, what's it about? Secondly, how's that process of writing different than what you've been doing all these years? - Well, this one takes much longer. - Yeah, I kind of figured that was the main thing. - From 15 minutes to a year and a half, I mean, it is kind of a job. Okay, so the book, the book, I need to learn how to do, I need to do the sale. It's called The Dead Ladies Project. It is a collection of linked essays about writers and artists who are expats and the relationships that they developed with their adopted city with a travel narrative, because I go to all the cities and the relationship between the city of the past and the city of the present. I need to really work that down into something understandable. - You could probably crib a Closterman book about that. I'll just travel log of expatriate writers who, yeah, I don't know. - Yeah, I don't know. - Yeah, it's University of Chicago Press, so I feel like I can be long-winded talking about it because, you know, it's academic. - Now, have you finished it? - I have. - Are you happy with what you've written? - I think so. Yeah, I'm happy with it. Yeah, I'm happy with it. - And how did that process differ outside of taking much longer? Really, how did writing change for you in the process of writing a book? - Honestly, I feel like having this online background helped me with the process because I was doing a lot of it on the road because I traveled for a year and a half, a year and a half to do the travel for the book. And I pretty much just gave up my apartment packed one suitcase and left, and that was a year and a half of weighing the same four outfits over and over and over again. But learning how to do it in small pieces while on the road, learning how to be kind of flexible, and to do it outside of this kind of disciplined, I'm going to work from eight a.m. to three p.m., you know, that kind of structure. That's never really worked for me. And a lot of writers, for whatever reason, are very so committed to that routine and schedule. That if you do something different than that, they think you're not a real writer. - The whole Paris Review writers at work in a way that you try and figure out those, yeah. - I hate those people. - You wonder how many of them were lying? - I think it goes back to this whole thing of like, I figured out something, so it's the thing for the whole world. I figured out something for me, so that's the way that the world works. Sometimes, you know, sometimes you write for 15 minutes at a cafe when, you know, you're waiting for your train. And then other times you have a whole day to work, and then you just have to adapt to the situation as it changes. - Of all the cities you've lived in, what's your favorite? - Oh God, I don't know how to answer that question, because it depends, right? I mean, it depends on what you want and what you're looking for, and I just got back from Bucharest. - What are my old man's from? - It's, everyone told me I would hate it. And I was there for two months, and everybody told me that it's a terrible place, and I loved it. I really felt a very strong connection. God, sorry. I know that's horrible. - Do you have any Romanian heritage? - No, no. And I never been, and I didn't know anybody. - Which expatriate writer were you, which expatriate writer were you shadowing? - Oh, this wasn't for that part. - Oh really, you chose to move to Bucharest. Okay, that's- - Yeah, I had some time on my hands. So I decided to move to Bucharest. - Yes, those things aren't adding up to a picture, but you know- - But for the book, maybe one of my favorite places was Tresta. - Which particular writer were you shadowing for Tresta? - Actually, I'm not a writer. It was James Joyce's wife, nor a barnacle. - And that was your vet, that was your favorite? - Maybe. I mean, you're also really like Sarivo. I mean, the only- - What do you look for in a city? - I don't know how to answer that. It really is just kind of a feeling, and I'm not looking for a specific feeling. I'm just looking for, I mean, going to the cities for the book was very interesting because I was coming with a big historical chunk of knowledge. I spent a lot of time researching the history of the places before I went, because it was important to me not to do that travel writer thing- - Finding it out on the fly. - Well, also like I see something happening, so that's just how things work in this place, where it's maybe just coincidence or a flute, and that is the downfall of the travel writer being an authority on a place that you don't understand. So I didn't want to do that, and so each place, it wasn't so much being there as actively constantly trying to understand it and how it got to this point, and where it might be going, and so it was really for a year and a half, and being in a new city every month to six weeks, being the most awake that I've ever been, because it wasn't, you can't just go to the grocery store, get a can of tuna, you have to really pay attention to what's going on around you, what people are doing, what is that building, why is it so shiny and new, when all the other buildings around it are very old, okay, so it was destroyed, okay, when was it destroyed, and then what had happened to that building before that, and it made it through World War II, and it had made it through the Austro-Hungarian invasion, made it through the Turkish invasion, but then got slammed during the Balkan War, okay, so understanding that kind of level of stuff, or just actively trying to figure it out, it made me love some cities when maybe I wouldn't have if I had just gone on a whim, and made me dislike other cities, which maybe I would have liked under other circumstances. - Which one felt the most alien to you? - Belgrade, I really disliked Belgrade. Well, for a lot of reasons, but mostly there weren't, I couldn't find the women, there were no women on the street, in the cafes, in the bars. - There's nothing about that in the research beforehand. - No, no one ever said there are all the women were abducted by aliens and taken away. - I feel like that time I visited Denver and was convinced a neutron bomb had hit because there was literally no one in the city core when I was walking to my conference. - Is that just because nobody sort of is a pedestrian? - I never found out, I'm convinced a neutron bomb had nobody ever spoken about it. - Somebody would mention that. Yeah, so Belgrade had a really hard time with. Plus, it was just a thing of the American story of the Balkan War, is that the Servians are the bad guys, right, and they were, but it's complicated, and it's not like they didn't suffer. - And someone with Israeli family, that was one of those moments of, you know, reading the Jerusalem post and having the, yeah, but during the war, the Servians were very, very good to us when the other sides were, you know. - The Servians are, they're good people, but, you know, and it's not like this is, it's a thing. - We're not justifying genocide, it's okay, don't worry. - Yeah, yeah, it's just like when I moved to Berlin, and people would come and visit me, friends from America, and some of them would just, like, have that reaction of Nazis. And it was a knee-jerk reaction, and some of them felt bad about it, some of them didn't question it at all, they were just like, I don't like the Germans, I gotta get out of here. And so that was part of it being in Belgrade, that knee-jerk reaction, and then like, okay, so, that's a stupid reaction to have, but I couldn't quite stop it. I could think about it and try to understand it, but I-- - Was there a sense that the city didn't try to meet you halfway, not that it felt, beholden to, but, you know, was there anything there that sort of reinforced, or at least didn't help, beyond not having any female presence anywhere? - I was the female thing, and then there was like, a lot of dogs, and I don't know, I don't know. It was just this weird-- - 'Cause our sponsor is a Belgrade tourist council, and we really need to kind of play up Belgrade-- - It was like a, there was a big poster at the airport that smiled, you're in Serbia, and I was like, it's not a threat, what are you talking about? - You will smile. That's, I could imagine pretty harrowing. My own, as a family of Jewish immigrants, had a very difficult time going to Germany for the first time a few years ago. - Yeah. - Frankfurt, I was taken on a tour visiting a conference in Frankfurt, and then going to Rothensburg beforehand, and driving down the street with my media person, kid comes out of a pharmacy wearing a t-shirt that said Gegen Nazis, with a fist smashing a swastika on it, and I, of course, so yeah, Brigitte, just wondering, is there any sort of issue about neo-Nazis here? Well, I'm typing madly on my phone to figure out what it is, and discover that it was an anti-Nazi. - Yeah, again, you're against Nazis. - Yeah, but at the time, I was a little concerned. The only thing that made me feel better is when I founded on Wikipedia, it turned out that that gang went to a friendly match in France, a national soccer match, and they unfurled their giant banner in the stands, and apparently the French also were not able to read German, and just ran up and pounded the hell out of them and arrested them all, and had them shipped back to Germany, so. - He's poor Germans. - You know, it's sort of a thing you want to be sensitive about, I suppose, but it was very difficult, my first trip out there. I had a few good conversations there that helped alleviate things, such that when I had to go back, I spent a few days in Nuremberg, and well, sort of reinforced everything in both directions, both the good and the evil parts of it all. Books like, back to books like the way from the book. - Let's talk about Nazis. - Yeah, well, there's Nazi literature. I had a great Stefan Zweig interview a couple of months ago, right around the corner from here, also, in George Prochnik, but books kept a periodical structure, putting out issues, even though they were virtual. Why did you do that? - 'Cause I'm lazy, 'cause I'm lazy, and it's just easier to do it all on a weekend than try to remember to put something up in the day. - Just keep rolling things out? - Yeah, that seemed really tedious to me, so I thought I'm better binging than at doing a little bit every day, so yeah, pretty much, this is just because I'm a lazy person. - And a big deadline like that just forced you to knock out? - Yeah, and I'm a procrastinate. I mean, our next one is due on Monday, I just started it this morning. - Oh, I'm keeping Jesus, how do I feel terrible? (laughs) - No, this is good, 'cause I encourage you to allow me to procrastinate even more. - No, no, you're thinking of concepts and ideas while we're talking. Okay, 'cause I just wondered, you're doing that with your spin-off magazine also, which you can actually tell us about, 'cause I've never seen a PDF version of this. - Yes, Bolia. - It's Bolia. - It's Bolia, named after, it's a Latin term for using rubble as building material. And I thought that was appropriate as we are, living through the death of the publishing industry. - So, yeah, I don't, I'm trying to remember why I started doing it. (laughs) I had wanted to do something like that for a while, and then it just sort of came together, all of a sudden, and so-- - But it's not a reviews, instead it's creative work. - Yeah. - A cool user creative, but it's our poetry fiction. - And essays, yeah, a lot of translation. Yeah, it's, I like it, I like it. (laughs) Has it been received? - Well, yeah, I mean, we're doing chapbooks as well, as part of that, so kind of our favorite stories, we make into a physical object with illustration, and we've been selling out of those, and we're doing our Henry James tribute album for the next issue, where we asked writers to write a cover version of a Henry James short story. So, and that's been a lot of fun, and it's been amazing, the reception that we've gotten, especially from, like, writers getting to work, getting to edit, Rebecca Brown has been, like, one of those moments that I would never have thought would happen in my existence, 'cause I remember reading her when I was, like, 22, and it meant so much to me, and then I sent her an email to ask if she wanted to send, you know, submit a piece, an enthusiastic guess, and now she's a regular contributor, and we work together, and it's like, (laughs) - You, do you nerd out? - I nerd out constantly. - Oh, good. (laughs) - What was your last great nerd out experience? - Oh, God, well, Daphne Gottlieb, getting her to write for Spolia and Rebecca Brown on Spolia. I mean, I used to do a reading series both in Chicago and in Berlin, and that was a constant-- - Yeah, have you had in-person meltdowns around somebody you idolize? - Yeah, I mean, I try to keep it together. - Oh, we all try. - It doesn't really work. Getting to meet Ian McGilchrist in Berlin, his book meant a great deal to me, and he was very generous with this talk. Like, I was just dorking out, and he was like, "Do you like to drink?" I was like, "Yeah, oh, thank you." And he was so sweet and kind. Yeah, so yeah, it happens on a very regular basis now. - And dream guests, both people you wanted to interview and contributors that are within reason, but you're still, "Oh my God, if I could only get?" - Well, I keep trying to get Katherine Davis, and she keeps telling me she's too busy. - I just picked up her, I've never read her before, but Ron Slate recommended duplex or her reason novels, so I just grabbed that. - It's very, very good. And we've met, she came to the, oh God, she came to the Chicago reading series and I was at a heart attack. You know, it was that thing of like, for a week I was nervous and trying to figure out how do I just even say hi to this person. And I walked into the room and she was already there and she like stuck it around, she's like, "It's such a pleasure to meet you." I was like, "Why?" (laughing) - See, there's that sense. Either they're all sociopathic monsters or they're just normal people. That's the other side. - It's the people in charge who tend to be sociopathic monsters and then the people who actually do really good work that are maybe sort of obscure in some way. As long as it's not, you know, there are those people then that get bitter. We've all met some of those people but the people who are just doing the work that they love and not so much thinking about, you know, or they've come to terms with the fact that their audience is limited and they just want to work with the people that they want to work with. They're not striving, they're not ambitious and in that way of like sales and marketing and whatever. - Why don't I get the movie deal? - Yeah, I mean, those people tend to be some of the loveliest people in the world. That was a community that I have found that it was a different community than I wanted at the beginning. - You mentioned Henry James earlier. In fact, you had inspired a occasional feature of the podcast, which I'm now going to grill you on. It's something I called Second Hand Loves. The idea is authors or books that the guest once detested but came around to absolutely love and adore. - And I had a vague idea of it and then you'd written a piece about how you came back to Henry James and how important he now is to you as a writer, so talk about that. Talk about Henry James, who you were when you first read him and how you came back to James. - I feel like it's some sort of, I don't know who decided that teenagers were a good audience for a beast in the jungle. That is what I would like to know. What the fuck do teenagers know about regret? - You'll see, at the end of your life now that you're 16, you'll see, you'll look back on the choices that you have made and see that they were all wrong. Yeah, so that was my first introduction was based on a jungle in high school. And it was of course the worst thing I've ever read because it's-- - Yeah, these people are old and they-- - Yeah, and they've lived terrible lives. And you're 16, you say I'm not gonna live a terrible life, my life is gonna be amazing. And I will always accept love. I will always be able to recognize it when it is there and it'll be fine. Yeah, so that was my introduction to Henry James. And so that's what I always associated him with, is like, you know, constipated, emotionally repressed, men who are stupid. That's what I thought about Henry James. - And then as you got older and you met more of them, you were able to-- - And met more constipated, emotionally stupid men. - Yeah. - And then the turning point was a really bad breakup. And my friends, you know, I like hadn't gotten out of a bathtub in eight days. You know, I just had like a set up with like a cup of tea and a bottle of whiskey on the side of the bathtub. And they were like, can you put on some pants? Well, let's go to the bookstore. And I just had this out of nowhere compulsion to read Washington Square. I had no idea why that came into my head but I was just like, yeah, I have to read this book. My friends tried to dissuade me because it is a book about us fenster, but-- (laughing) - Dare I ask, how old were you at that point? - How old was I? It's 30, 31, let's just say. - Yeah, so it was totally spenster territory. And-- - Didn't have cats at that point, did you? - No, but I had cats in the past. - Ooh, that's a-- - Multiple. - Yeah. - At the same time, cats. - That's a warning. - Yeah. And so then it was remarkable because not only was the guy in the book not only did he have the name of the gentleman that had broken my heart but the conversation that we had to break up was in the book. Like, it was amazing. It was amazing. - Did you find out after the fact that he was a huge James fan that he was gonna-- - Yeah, no, because he'd never read it. And he didn't like Henry James, which is probably why it didn't work out. But yeah, it was that weird thing of like, that book came through time to point me, you know, in my hour of need and just like, you know, Kessler had that great line about how there's a special department in Providence of getting the right book into the right hands at the right time. And I totally believe in that because it's been my experience that in your hour of need, the book that you need to read is, we'll find you, we'll find you. And Washington Square found me. And then I just went on a binge reading of Henry James just like, you know. - Being a binge personality. - And yeah, and not getting out of the bathtub. And so I had a lot of time to read and I really did like, email the library of America and I said, can you just send me the box set of the Henry James? And they were like, yeah, sure, what do you wanna say? - It's my bathtub. - It's just... - Jessica's been in care of bathtub ads. - Yeah, so, yeah, pretty much read. All this books, until I felt better. - And you do feel better? - I, you know, I stand before you, it changed women. - Like, only hope, that's, you know, there's the bathtub over there. It doesn't look particularly comfortable. I have more to share. - It's pretty shallow. - Yeah. What's a piece that you're proudest of writing for the, for book slot and then non-book slot writing? - Um, I don't know, um, for book slot, um, it's a blog, so I write them in like 15 minutes and then post to them and then forget what I wrote. There was a post about, um, I don't remember what inspired it. There was some sort of book discussion that was going on. It was political in some way and there was this really kind of idiotic argument of like, well, these people are just wrong because they disagreed with me politically and, um, uh, and we should not talk to them. We should just cut them out, that was kind of the thing. And so I wrote this post about, I dated, um, somebody who was pro-life for a while, um, like, I really, I used to be very stridently pro-choice. There was an incident where, uh, I was mistaken for somebody to, that was about to cook it in abortion. I didn't realize that I was walking past an abortion clinic. I was just trying to get to the grocery store and buy some eggs. Um, and, um, and my path just happened to be by the abortion clinic and there were these protesters lined up and they came up to me and started telling me not to kill my baby and I said, what are they? I don't know what they're talking about. And then I was like, oh, and I was like, well, my dress is kind of loose and baggy and stuff they think I'm pregnant. - So usually it's only gay men who mistake that sort of thing, but go on. - And it was just, and they were like, we, you know, we care about you. I was like, why do you care about, oh, right. And so then I yelled. I became unhinged. Like, I, you know, way crazier than they were. And they, there was a moment when I saw that they were like, they were just backing away slowly. Like, this is the, you know, I, I might be a little crazy, but this project is messed up. And that didn't do anything. It made me feel better in self-righteous, but didn't do anything. And then I found out that the guy that I was dating was pro-life and having an actual conversation and trying to understand and telling him about the fact that I had had an abortion and telling him about the situation and how it was, you know, not a lightly made decision and putting an actual story behind the decision. It didn't make him pro-choice, but it confused his stridency. And then hearing his story about why he was pro-life, confused my stridency. So I got a lot of really nice emails, and then I also got a lot of crazy emails from Peminis. - Which again, is good that you don't have the comments opened up on your site. - Yes, yes it is. - I can imagine that's just asking for trouble. Speaking of killing your babies. - Yes. - You packed up everything and just started moving. - Yeah. - How do you decide what books go with you? What does you do to your library when you split? - Well, it's interesting because when I moved to Berlin, I got rid of everything. I got down to 17 books. - 17. - 17. And I wasn't, you know, I'm going to distill my collection down to 17. It was just like, okay, what's essential and what will go under the luggage, weight limit. And so then there was, you know, a massive calling. I don't know how many books I had, but it was a lot. And then five years later when I decided, or I guess four years later, when I decided to do the travel for the book, there was another big calling, but then everything went into storage. And the books they took with me to go on with me were mostly like books I needed for research. I figured that I could just sort of pick up what I needed. My only kind of like comfort book is the essays of William James, which is such a pretentious thing to say. But that was, that's the book that I don't not travel with. - Is it all marginalia and dog ears? - No, because I'm respectful to my books. - You're afraid, aren't you? Same way I am. You're afraid of going back and finding out what you wrote in it five years earlier. - Oh, well, I'm a little bit afraid of my blog archives. I'm more afraid of my blog archives than I'm working on. - Did you ever go back to your old work? Outside of having to look up something. - Recently I accidentally found it. I was searching for a writer and then just clicking on their results. And then it was like my blog from 2003. And I went down the hole a little while of reading archives. I was like, oh my, who is this chick? - How did you change? What do you think changed? Beyond the, I got better as a writer. Could you pinpoint things that you look at? Oh my God, I wouldn't have done that. - Well, I stopped taking the industries seriously and being outraged or I don't know. - That's funny because we, outrage has become the dominant mode. - Yeah. - And it really has just become the, as we were talking about with the Harry Potter stuff, the need to turn whatever it is into this moment of outrage. - But you had that when you were starting out and you fell into that. - Oh yeah. Oh yeah, totally, totally. That was my main source of energy, I feel like. - What got you past it, do you think? Be I just growing up? Because we know people who are older than us are still just as fueled by that, so. - Yeah, I mean, there was a time when, when I was living in Chicago, I became very involved with the literary culture there. I had a reading series. I would go on the PBS news show to talk about books on a regular basis. I was becoming that person, like the expert that's called out to talk about books. That was a weird role to play and that doesn't help with your outrage. I mean, if you're kind of like the contrarian version of that, then you get outraged because you're forced into contact with industry and with the newspapers that are covering bullshit and that sort of stuff. And so you're constantly in that state of fighting against. And then I moved to Berlin and I was so far removed from the American publishing industry that I was like, "Oh my God, I can do whatever I want." And it was that feeling of like, "Oh, I can only read the books that I want to read. "I don't have to read the new Philip Roth. "I can just pretend like it doesn't exist." And that was like a whole other way of working for. It was honestly a revelation of just, "Oh, you don't have to pay attention to anything. "You don't want to pay attention to." And then to them, the outrage just fell away because it was like, you know, it wasn't that thing of like, "I'm only going to review the nice things," but it really was like, "I can cultivate what I, "a world that I want to live in and not, "I can invite people in rather than constantly "defending the gates," right? So that was a big shift. - And it didn't impact the magazine and the website, or at that point, you'd already started to hand things off a bit and didn't have to be so engaged in the publishing culture. - Yeah, 'cause we had a managing editor back in the States and so I could kind of distance myself. And that was when I really started writing, not just like, reviews the essays and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I started writing, or I had been writing this column, this nonfiction column for the smart set, but it had been very kind of standard review focused for a while and that they were nice. They've been really nice to me as far as like, letting me just fuck with what I wanted to do. - It became more of a personal essay area. - Because I find, I find the book review so wildly dissatisfying as a form, not just to write, but to read and so-- - What do you find dissatisfying? - Well, I find dissatisfying faux objectivity. I find dissatisfying the fact that it's just an external process. I mean, you don't read a book out in the world. You read it, it comes into your body. It comes into your head and it interacts with that. And the reaction that you have to that book is going to be based on the other things that you've read, the things that you've experienced, loves that you've had like this whole lifetime. That's what reading is, it's this constant intake and then synthesizing the new with things that are already there and allowing for change. And none of that shows up in a book review. The only thing that shows up in a book review is this was good, this was bad, this is a nice paragraph. - The prose was serviceable. - The prose was serviceable. This character is interesting. And that's a wildly dissatisfying way of thinking about literature. And I, you know, I do not mourn the depth of the newspaper book review section. There was a whole time when it was really dropping off and people were being laid off and people were, it's a crisis in the culture. I was like, what's dying? What's dying is 750 words of objective opinion on Philip Roth novels or, you know, David Foster Wallace or, you know, straight white men. You know, God bless straight white men men, I, you know, I'm in love with one of them, but it's a very limited worldview. And so I didn't want to do that with my life. I didn't want to crank out 750 word book reviews for the rest of my life. - Do you think you have more books in you? - Oh, I'm already, I'm working on two at the same time. I've been taught not to ask. So don't feel the need to answer. You don't, you don't, you don't have to. - One of them is private, but the other one I've been public about, I'm writing a book about the tarot. - Well, what you actually had circled here is one of my next questions. What's your tarot history? I know nothing, I'm supposed to interview a magician. - Well, it's not the same, it's not a magic trick. - No, no, no, Caitlin, whose last name I'm blanking on, she has a witch magic store somewhere in-- - Oh, well, that's interesting. - In Manhattan, I'll connect you with her. 'Cause she's a great artist, tarot, I don't know what you call a tarot practitioner. Is there-- - Tarot reader, usually? - 'Cause, you know, I'm one of those Jew empiricist types. So what's your history with tarot? What's the book about and what's your story with it? - Well, the book is a series of essays, one for each card. I find literature about tarot incredibly disappointing, so I decided to write my own book, because it either is in this kind of mystical woo woo, bullshit language world of the spirit realm and reincarnation and karma. It's like, well, that doesn't help me figure out what I wanna do with my life, that doesn't help. And then the other way is this kind of self-help empowerment, like that bullshit female realm of like, we need to work on ourselves and our psyches, you know? No one will love you until you love yourself. Fuck you. And so I wanted to do something that came from a more historical, psychological, practical viewpoint. And my experience with the tarot was that I started studying it like nine years ago with two different practitioners. And yeah, it was eight years before I felt comfortable enough starting to read for other people. And now I read mostly for writers. - What's that process like? - And I'm not asking any sort of, you know, dismissive patronizing sort of way. You literally have no idea what that entails. - Well, a reading is basically finding a new story to tell yourself about what's happening to you. We experience things as a narrative. We tell ourselves the story about our lives and that affects how we live our lives. Tarot is really about finding a new story. Each card, there's 78 cards, each card represents an archetype or a situation. And as a reader, you put it into a story. It starts here, it ends here. And, you know, some people use it for prognostication. I think that's bullshit. For me, it's really just about using intuition to override the narrative that you've been telling yourself. - Is this like those Brianino strategy cards? - Yeah, the oblique strategies. - Yeah, that's it. I love those cards. I use them all the time. It's an interruption, right? It's a way to interrupt the way that you've been working or thinking. And, see, I do for a lot of writers, a lot of writers who are having a block on a creative project, who've lost their way on a project, will come to me and we'll do a reading. It's like, okay, well, why are you doing this project? Why did this project come to you? Like, you know, and then what do you want? What is your emotional connection to it? What are you trying to accomplish and then how is it gonna actually work out? What are the obstacles? Why are you blocked? These are the specific situations that are blocking you in it. - And the cards are sort of a medium between you and the writer as opposed to just doing a therapy type conversation. - It does obviously get therapeutic sometimes. And I don't, you know, strictly do creative writings. There's always, you know, the post-breakup conversation is always the worst. (laughing) - You just hand this to William Henry James. - Yeah, and I do a recommended reading list. - See, back in college, and this is, I'm a few years old, isn't you? It was Kundera, a Maribel lightness of being every time there was a major break up. It reached a point where I could actually read it faster than the movie. - Oh my God. - Yeah, it was pretty bad. - In the end, I was a bad man for those years, but, you know, I think after a while, once I had a big split after a seven year relationship from about 94 to 2001, oh, it was "Jernigan" by David Gates. Because at that point I was in my 30s and was starting to, you know, accept there were certain patterns to how I was destroying women in my life and, you know, I finally got better, luckily. Again, Tarot may have helped. Maybe there are a much better steps. - Are there spats or grudges from the early days of book sled that are still going? - Not on my end. Yeah, no, I think that we all, it's ridiculous. It is a thing of looking back and you're like, oh, we took that really seriously. And we were vlogging. We're taking vlogging seriously, you know. We were changing the world by vlogging. - That was the bushy room. - Yeah, yeah, so it's a little bit ridiculous, but no, there's no, you know, there were weird spats. But the only, the only people that are, that's still a problem with their actual psychopaths that exist in the literary world. - On that, I will leave you. Thanks so much and congratulations for, for stepping down from, from book slide as a vlogger. (laughs) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) And that was Jessica Crispin. Even though she's no longer the blogger at book slot, she's still the editor in chief of the site and its sister publication, Spolia. You can find out more about both of those at bookslut.com and spoliamag.com. If you're interested in those tarot readings that Jessa mentioned near the end, the things that she does with creative writers and other artists, you can hit the contact page at book slot for more info. Myself, I ordered a set of those oblique strategies cards from Brian Eno after I got home from our podcast session. I'll let you know if those work out. And thanks for listening to the virtual memories show. We'll be back next Tuesday, but I'm not sure who the guest will be. See, I recorded a fun conversation with the great New Yorker cartoonist, Roz Chast last week, and I'm dying to put that one up, but I also have a session on tap with Frank Wilson, the book critic and editor from Philadelphia who launched Books Inc, this really neat books block. I was thinking that it might be good thematically to have three book critics in a row so you can get a broader perspective on that whole world. Plus, that'll let me hold off Roz's interview until September when there may be more listeners around. I'm just spitballing. If you come back next week, you'll find out who the next guest is. Until then, you can subscribe to the virtual memories show on iTunes and you can visit our websites VMSPod.com or chimeraobscura.com/vm to find all our past episodes and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. I'd appreciate any financial support you can offer. This actual episode was relatively inexpensive. I think it was 1050 for the toll at the George Washington plus gas, but I managed to find street parking near where Jessa was staying in Brooklyn. So, all things considered relatively cheap. Oh, and I should mention, I got a very nice donation from a listener a few days ago named Don Hitt. He's a guy I met during the St. John's College Piraeus seminar early this summer. Don was kind enough to kick in enough cash that I'm gonna go buy a new Zoom H5 audio recorder. Allegedly, it's got a better preamp than the H4, which is what I currently use for field recording. You guys will find out in a few weeks, I guess. And one more thing, if you go to iTunes and subscribe to the show, do me a favor, leave a rating and a review of the show while you're there. I'd appreciate the feedback and Apple seems to like it when more people write about a show or at least check four or five stars or whatever number you wanna give us. Until next time, you've been listening to the virtual memory show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. (upbeat music) ♪ What happened to my promises ♪ ♪ Love, work, and now ♪ ♪ Now, yeah ♪ ♪ What happened to my promises ♪ ♪ Love, work, and now ♪ ♪ Now, yeah ♪ ♪ What happened to my promises ♪ ♪ Love, work, and now ♪ (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]