What does the search for a lost cat have to tell us about the nature of love and marriage? Peter Trachtenberg joins The Virtual Memories Show to try to answer that question and to talk about his work, including The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning and Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons! We discuss the tension between non-fiction and fiction, how to search for a lost cat, where the line is between the private and the public, how he stumbled into the lyric essay form, how the process of getting clean and sober influenced his writing, how marriages fall apart and how they (maybe) come back together, and more!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 30 - On Cats and Calamities
[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 show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation of the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter @VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. As past Saturday night, my wife and I went into New York to see a movie and go to a friend's birthday party. The movie was Tim's Vermeer, which was just wonderful. It's a documentary about a guy who thinks he's figured out how Vermeer painted light so accurately and beautifully, and then sets out to prove it. The kick is, he's not a painter, but he thinks he's reverse-engineered a tool based on the technology that would have existed in Vermeer's time, that'll essentially let a human being paint light like a photograph. It's a really amazing piece of work, and you really should see it. It's only showing for a week right now in New York and LA in order to qualify for the Oscars, but I think it gets wider release in February. I'm not sure how wider release a movie like that's going to get, but at least add it to your Netflix queue, Tim's Vermeer. The birthday party was for Bob Sikoriak, a cartoonist I interviewed about a year ago for the show. He combines literary classics with lowbrow cartooning, sort of doing the metamorphosis by way of a Charlie Brown strip, or crime and punishment through an old Dick Sprang, Bill Caine, Batman motif. He's, I think, a really wonderful cartoonist, and you should go check that one out if you haven't already. I met a lot of nice people at Bob's party and may have lined up some good guests for 2014, even though you guys may be kind of sick of cartoonists by now. Now, in between, Amy and I did something kind of special. We took the subway down from Lincoln Plaza to Christopher Street and walked east towards Bob's apartment. On the way, we stopped in St. Mark's Bookshop. Now, that's a place where Amy and I met for our first date way back in January 2004. I took a picture of her standing at the display of books by the pillar in the front of the store, which is where I think I remember seeing her for the first time. And then we decided to see if the restaurant where we had that first date was still in existence. It was, so we got dinner there, and just kind of mooned at each other, just cuddling together the first night we spent. It was really wonderful, even if the food was kind of bleh. Overall, it was also a lot cheaper than going to the resort in Big Sur where we had our honeymoon. Anyway, it was a really lovely night. And I bring this stuff up by way of approaching this week's guest, Peter Traktenberg. A pizza writer I met while interviewing David Gates up at Bennington last June. He's an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of a bunch of books, well, several books, and a lot of essays and journalism and short fiction. And his newest book recently came out in paperback from Decapo Press. It's called "Another Insane Devotion on the Love of Cats and Persons." And it's really an amazing work. Peter takes the occasion of a lost cat and the kind of sort of disintegration of his marriage, and he explores ideas about love and the workings and the mis-workings of memory and our relationship to cats. It's also about the nature of writing nonfiction, a topic I find pretty interesting. But it was also kind of neat to kind of frame that and the, well, the marriage, it really does seem to be disintegrating over the course of the book with the love that Amy and I have and the kind of nostalgia. Well, I wouldn't even say nostalgia. The joy we had looking back at ten years. Anyway, "Another Insane Devotion" is a wonderful companion to another book of Peter's, "The Book of Calamities," five questions about suffering and its meanings. Or maybe I just feel like that because I read both books in the span of like eight days when I was in Germany this fall. But regardless, Peter's a really engaging writer and he has a really discursive style and a self-learnedness that I just find really, really wonderful. You should check out both "The Book of Calamities" and "Another Insane Devotion." I think you'll get a lot out of them. And we met up in late October while he was visiting friends in New York City and we talked about a lot of things. And now, "The Virtual Memory Show" with Peter Tractenberg. How much movie watching do you do? I don't... I mean, I started going spurts. I saw a lot, like as a teenager and when I was younger. I tried to see at least one thing a month. I mean, it sort of depends on if stuff is good. Yeah. Like during the summertime, there's almost nothing. Do you go out to theaters or do you watch it? I like to go out to theaters. I don't even have a TV. I just got like a big monitor from like from pit like on their budget. I was able to get a 27-inch monitor so I can watch a movie. I can stream now. So I'll probably do a lot of that. But I'm like overwhelmed. This is my first full-time teaching gig really, apart from a year-long gig I had. So I'm working a lot and I'm trying to write two books at once. So I basically feel like I'm working all the time, except in the morning for an hour, I either meditate or I read like I read, took me three years and I read Prusd. I read the Rochelle in three years and I read for an hour in the morning. Sometimes I'd read out loud just to track his sentences. Yeah. It's there's a lot of clauses in the lot of holding on. I did a good chunk of it while my father was in for Quintuple Bypass or Joe Hackensack and there were hours and hours of waiting to do stuff and I just kind of I was already I guess three or four books in and just had the okay just gonna just gonna read this stuff and you know keep going and see how you know five hours later we got some news. Okay this is this is good. I made some serious progress in Prusd also and I celebrated finishing it by turning on the TV at home and realizing that Anchorman was on which I'd never seen. I was like okay that's kind of that's perfect. Actually let me ask my experience after finishing Prusd was when I started reading something else afterwards I found that I was plowing through books like 200 miles an hour because I was in that gear from from Prusd for a couple of weeks after I was still you know this hyper brain activity. Yes definitely. I mean the first fiction I read after Prusd was reading chow up stories and I'd some of them whichever I was already familiar with but yeah I would just yeah it is funny how we end up in those those higher gears for a while. Had you finished it before writing another insane devotion? I was no I was actually writing reading it while writing at least the first draft. Yeah no I finished Prusd December and by which time you know it had come out. Yeah so I was still reading it and it is written a lot under the spell of Prusd and there's a lot of references to Prusd. Yeah that's what I was wondering if you'd actually got it. We're sort of recording now so we'll kind of just lead in and be one of those conversation already in progress. One thing I wanted to tell you having read the book of calamities and another insane devotion in the span of eight days last week. Curiously I found the book of calamities which is well you can characterize it further the listeners. Somehow more I want to say uplifting or at least and heartening than another insane devotion which just saddened the living crap out of me but why don't we go into the two books and sort of talk about you know what you've been leading up to now. Well I mean the thing about calamities is it is about how people make sense of suffering so it starts with the bad news and then it gives you the good news and I don't know about that devotion. I mean it is about love and I found it very pleasurable to write unlike calamities but you know it is about sad things. It's about love and the loss of love and about being made about vulnerability and maybe about the difficulty if not the impossibility of loving anybody. And you reach that conclusion over the course of writing it and we should tell people it's a book about well it's another insane devotion on the love of cats and persons which is just out in paperback now which does work in a very interesting mode covering both your relationship with cats over your adult life and what seems to be the disintegration of your marriage at the time but what did you what did you learn about love in the process of writing it. Well I believe that what I came away with was that love is attention and they started writing it based on two enigmas. One was why did I bother traveling 1400 miles to look for a runaway cat. At a time when I was broke I really could not afford the trip and she also had been informed was had been missing three days so the odds of my finding are we're not necessarily good so why did I do that and then also why did I love the one person that I that I loved or it loved deeply you know why had I married her as opposed to any of the other women I'd been involved with at different times and I didn't you know both of which were mysterious to me and both of which I mean you know sort of love is usually the end of the sentence or it's the end of the riddle but then well what does it mean to love a person or love a cat what does it call forth from you what are the faculties that you know come into play and it's you know it's one of these questions that we think is settled just like we think suffering is settled yeah and maybe it's because I don't have formal training and philosophy but I became curious well what is it that that goes on inside one and at least from your writings about Proust in the the process of the book it's not just what goes on inside but how love is reflected whether the reflection is love I guess that that question of his love part of that observation of the the beloved well some of it is the your imagination or your projection of what the beloved you know what they what they're thinking about you what they feel toward you I mean Proust thinks it's all projection right and I'm not as much of a pessimist as Proust is I mean I think that you find out something about the other being it's occluded or refracted through your own imagination and your own projections that you get the spark of this other this other presence in the world and those moments when you get it are very powerful even there's a passage in Hegel's elements of the philosophy of right it's one of his his footnotes that this a massive description of what love is that's that's ultimately boils down to finding the other person in yourself and finding yourself in this other person on being unable to imagine yourself without that absence yeah oh okay yeah it's wonderful I always thought of as a cartoon doing one of those love is cartoons except with this gigantic you know german oh that would be a passage underneath with the two little naked people you know just standing there kind of you know eyeing each other confusingly but one of the the aspects I guess it just being a non-fiction writer I wonder you mentioned at the start of another insane devotion that there is a completely fabricated bit within it and that you're sort of in the process of doing that experimenting with that tension between fiction and non-fiction I was very disappointed to find out what that that passage actually was because I thought it was something different oh you'll have to say what you thought it was yeah well when I was well the thing that I thought it was I'm not going to give away in case somebody reads another insane devotion you can't find it out on Facebook which is where I saw yeah the answer I thought it was the part where you said that you'd never had a lap dance oh I was convinced that was utterly fabricated and this is going to be the one little thing but no lo and behold it was something completely different yeah sorry but you know much more interesting thing than my you know much more banal way of of approaching this stuff but can you talk a bit about that idea of attention between fiction and non-fiction yeah I mean you refer to love as referring to love as a tension or attention attention yeah attention a t t n oh yeah I was going with tension with well it is tension but that's I don't know if that's what is it it's that's contingent rather than necessary from the guy with no philosophy background that that's I that's I I I crampred that book you know so talk about that idea of of again wedding fiction and non-fiction where you see it how well you see it working I mean you also teach yeah non-fiction how do you how do you keep people from falling into that sort of James Frye dopiness of trying to create utterly well the thing about James Frye was I mean every memoirist is fabricating anybody writes a memoir is fabricating because your memories of your own life are fabricated you know the problem with James Frye was that his level of lying was very unsafe his fabrications were really unsophisticated I mean I haven't read the whole book I read enough an excerpt from it when it came out to be convinced this is the kind of lying you do when you're 13 you're trying to convince people what a badass you are so it's low level lying you know and art is high level lying and the memoirs do you have to at least manage to convince yourself that these fabrications are true which is what how memory works that you believe what you remember and I probably believe lots of outrageous things but nothing is outrageous is like you know causing the train wreck that killed my high school girlfriend or something like that although you did have a rather interesting part in another insane devotion where you tell two different versions of proposing to your yeah your wife or at least two different versions of how she responded to it well that was that was an example because my memory of what had happened was kind of cloudy so that's why I had two different versions of it did she ever she yes corroborate one of the other yeah she corroborated one of the other actually how how difficult is the invasion of privacy aspect of this because there's an extremely it's we're we're difficult to read imagining you know what the other partner and the spouse must have been thinking how tough was it in that book and how tough is it in your work overall well in this book it was quite tough I made certain choices that there were certain things I wasn't going to write about I mean part of the whole the whole book is designed what I think it's like is if you were to make up your own crossword puzzle and you have to do not only the clues but you have to figure out what are the black spaces so there certain areas I just wouldn't write about I wouldn't write about sex for example except in the most elusive passing way I wouldn't write about our careers that was another black dad area what I wrote about you know it's difficult enough and sensitive enough and I've certainly you know have Nat readers who felt that the book there's something indecent about the book or extremely a bearing of intimacy yeah yeah and that's what I wondered the book itself in part covers this integration of a marriage yeah did that process of revealing accelerate that disintegration do you feel or was there no I felt everything had already happened although the marriage is not disintegrated I'll say which it's in a weird it's in a weird limbo but I won't I don't want to talk too too much about it sure um does that take out my next question which is can two writers really live together two professional writers some can some plainly can I was gonna say Louise Erdrich and and Michael Doris except one of them had a commit suicide see yeah I don't want to I put in long term in my my little question Iris Murdoch and what's your husband's name John Bailin Bailin or Bailey I forget but yeah that's one that keep in mind but yeah I stay together until she died of Alzheimer's so there are people yeah okay because I had wondered the the book itself leaves that I'm relatively ambiguous and I just wasn't sure during the little research afterwards as to whether the book itself you know pushed it one way or another and if you look at the book it is not specific about the causes for the rupture it speculates about the causes because the thing is that I couldn't honestly say why why the marriage was in the state that it was you couldn't you didn't know why I didn't know why yeah yeah um which is again very real I think we're most yeah unless you have like a big dramatic cause you know what somebody has an affair or what somebody empties a checking account or somebody is an abusive drunk yeah but like you know in the continuum of unhappy marriages or or flawed marriages there are lots of reasons why why people don't stay together or can't and I wanted to write from a state of from a state of not knowing and we still don't know yeah okay I'm fine with that um how did you get started in writing actually probably because I was an only child and had parents were not native English speakers and I needed to entertain myself when I would make up stories yeah where were they from my father is from Russia via Vienna so he had come to Vienna like the family fled Russia during the civil war he was born in 1911 he would be a hundred and two now which is just unbelievable to me um so they came from Russia the Vienna he lived there until the Anschluss and got out and eventually ended up in the States and my mother my mother's family was Russian but she was born in and grew up in Finland they just happened to be here they happened to be in Helsinki at the time the revolution of the revolution and she was born four or five years later and eventually got to got to the States yeah and who were you reading when you were a kid when I was a kid I was reading I like the hardy boys I liked Charlotte's web I liked I loved the story of the treasure seekers E.L. Nesbitt the Edwardian children's book writer her most famous book is The Five Children in It she's very funny she's like a book that you can she's a writer who you can read as an adult and get the humor that sort of sails over children's heads um and then I you know I was I started reading Moby Dick as a 10 year old because I'd seen the movie and I mean most of it passed over my head but I kind of labored at it so nozellic experience who actually finished it and I don't know if I I finished it eventually but I don't know if I finished it as a 10 year old no no I would watch the movie the movie I found the movie incredibly exciting as a little kid and I would sit with my stuffed animal you know watching it as you know we had our little rituals our comforts back then and it's um I mean you know if you look at it now I've just written an essay which has a lot of effects in it special effects and you know you look at the whale in it the whale is incredibly it's just mostly you have like long shots of a sperm whale breaching and then you have close-ups it's probably styrofoam it's probably this big styrofoam that's a 1950s yeah special effects budget yeah in black and white um did you see a sort of through line for what you're writing for the books you've done I mean besides you as a person I know because I mean book of calamities it's very it's not autobiographical except as a frame true and I don't intend to write autobiographically again except I'm interested all I the only autobiographical element I see in the stuff I write I've written since is my thought I'm interested in the way I think um and in following sort of the associative train of my thought um I think that the common thing is that I write about questions that most that most of us think have settled okay and you know as though I just didn't get a certain kind of education and I needed to or else I don't trust necessarily what I derive from reading and I had to figure out stuff for myself and most recently well the love for one thing most recently well I've written a book it's based I'm not a book a long extended essay called inside the tiger factory that I'm trying to get placed now that is really about it's about the tiger in life of pie and about real tigers and it explores the question of why when I saw the previews and I would see the tigers on the tiger on screen I would get really excited and like my eyes would fill with tears yeah I would be incredibly moved and then when I found out that the tiger is 87 percent CGI I was enraged I just felt so cheated you know I'm a reasonably sophisticated guy I know that you cannot make a movie with in which a real tiger is on it yeah you you cannot less you know maybe in the thirties you could have done it but but you uh sort of reflecting on the nature of it's on the nature of animation it's about idolatry it's about the extinction of real tigers in in the wild it's about the relation between um the real animal and the imaginary animal do you do any particular travel for this one I know with book of calamities at least ties in a lot I went to the national zoo I got a backstage tour of the tiger cage at the national zoo I mean I've proposed I would like to do a profile of two there are two people who I write who I interviewed for the essay one of whom is a french big cat trainer named Chiaphela Pultier who trained the real tigers on which the animation was based okay um he also did the animals and gladiator and the other guy is uh john side and sticker who's the national zoo's tiger expert or the smisonian's tiger expert who is somebody in vulva zoos who no longer believes that zoos are are adequate places for tigers he's in his all his work is devoted now to preserving wild landscapes for them mostly in india and Nepal things like this and and the book of calamities also sort of puts me in mind of advice I got from ron rosenbaum many years ago about doing his literary journalism this notion that any field you're looking at you have to go find the the apostate you know find the guy who doesn't believe that this is the way things should be and figure out from him what the story is as to why oh that's interesting the place is the way it is it sounds a little bit like the you know again pursuing a guy who's working at the zoo but doesn't yeah agree in the whole project so if I push you in a new direction for your writing just you know put me in the acknowledgments of oh yeah next one who um well what were your non-fiction influences I mean it sounds a little montane like in terms of pursuing your your your reason through different topics but I'm trying to think originally well I was more influenced in the beginning by fiction writers so for example I loved burrows and I love Dennis Johnson yeah um for non-fiction didion oh wow where'd you get that out of print books but they they have the I'm wearing a naked lunch t-shirt from the original book design they sell them down at the strand also if you happen to go I just I needed something under the sweater and thought you know I bet if it gets too warm I can always go with a naked lunch reference he'll he'll like yeah so yeah if you swing over to the strand while you're here you can probably find it somebody at burrows Dennis Johnson Dennis Johnson then for non-fiction didion um an essay is named yul abyss um hilton als whose new book I'm reviewing actually who I think is brilliant john jeremy Sullivan uh somewhat recent or some of them are these are fairly recent I didn't read montane until quite late yeah um some of dickens's travel writing and reportage a lot of travel writers I mean seven tattoos has a lot of travel writing in it so uh thesager who travels in deserda arabia wilford at thesager who died well I'm always confusing him I'm blurring him and fry a stark who also traveled in the same area in the middle east they're both travel right adventurer slash travel writers so I love doing these because I end up coming across 10 more writers I need to start following which you know joseph mitchell I love since we're in his general stomping grounds near the lower east side but not close enough was bruce chatwin and the yeah issues over you know what was real and what was invented yes an issue very much so I mean we're going back to the whole question of real and invented and this you this I don't envy you in the editing of this I was actually a lot of what brought it up for me was the whole thing about john de god is uh the lifespan of effect I was in a panel at AWP in 2012 and it was about the ethics of writing non-fiction and the ethics of fabrication and the host of the panel was enraged by de god I mean she was so enraged she would not refer to him as john de god if she would only call him jake doom okay and I the most famous person in the panel was Rebecca skloot and I sort of was the left wing of the I would say that I feel that you know a non-fiction writers liberty with facts varies depending on whether the facts are his or hers or somebody else's um without going into great length are you familiar with the story behind lifespan of the fact no no I'm not okay I don't want to go into it a great length but the facts concerned de god I was writing about the suicide of a teenage boy in las vegas and in the course of doing this article evidently he'd made up the number of strip clubs in vegas and the fact checkered lifespan of effect as the record of his back and forth with his fact checker I do seem to recall that that coming up now it sounds familiar now the whole book in a way is a kind of elaborate fabrication or I wouldn't say a hoax but you know he was going into it open-eyed yeah he wanted it's a provocation saying and my feeling is you know what made the it unethical if it was unethical is the fact that the facts concerned a real kid who killed himself whose parents suck who he himself suffered in his parents I can't imagine what they suffered as a result so the facts aren't his to play with if you're writing about your own life well it's they're really just your own facts because you are usually involved with their people yeah so you owe something something to them but you have certainly more leeway and the other hand I don't think that it's becoming for writers to like get indignant and start you know to get indignant about stuff like that there's a great line that Pam Euston has when she says you know that we all knew that when Oprah Winfrey was was grilling James Fry who she really wanted to be grilling was Dick Cheney that's what we wanted to see get raked over the colds for lying yeah but Dick Cheney would not go and open that's that's yeah beyond her pay grade yeah interesting and does that that tension between you know again that idea of fabrication and nonfiction put you in conflict with other what was some of the other writing professors maybe that I we met at Bennington yeah in the FA program there do some of those other writers disagree with with that perspective do you find I've never found anybody maybe one or two people who violently disagree but most people who are serious writers understand that a memoir is a different order of non-fiction than journalism or reporting you know there's a difference between a memoir okay another insane devotion everything in it except for the one fabricated piece not the lap dance yeah not the lap dance is either something I talk about thin facts and thick facts and thick facts are things that I can document I you know used actual emails I used receipts I refreshed my memory with interviews with other people and thin facts are just the facts of my memory which are a little more negotiable or a little more slippery and that you know that's what all all memories and but memoir refers not to life but it refers to your memory of a life that's the root the root is mem is memory and memory is an internal landscape if I'm writing about the fall of Lehman Brothers or the blockade of Leningrad during World War II I'm referring to actual events that happened in the world outside I'm referring maybe to other people's memories of those events and other people's record of those events but there are actual events that point you out toward that world if you read the 900 days and you walk through present day St. Petersburg you see buildings that were strafed still that were strafed by German planes you see you know places where walls were were blew up in bombings and that is not you know there is there is maybe an external landscape landscape a record of another insane devotion but it's not you know a very clear one there's no recording angel to how difficult is it in teaching to convey to younger students that that's subtlety of the thin and thick facts that the you know again what to how not to just you know embellish your own experiences to make yourself seem macho or something well I don't really with most with most undergrads and lots of grads I really don't want to see memoirs yeah I mean you know I can't make a rule against it but I usually try to subtly convey that at 20 you have precious little of your own experience to write about and yet an incredible amount of self absorption yeah one thing I say is that whatever I'm teaching I insist that there be an element of research in it they have to find something else out you know which is an antidote or at least it mitigates one self-absorption right see outside yeah which again is a big part of both books yes that I read of yours and way too compressed a period of time what drew you to suffering the the earlier book the book of calamities what really to attracted you to that that two episodes one was the death of a friend his name was Linda Corrente whatever it's worth who died of breast cancer and I believe 99 and still in our early 40s she was somebody who I had been friends with since the late 70s so for a long time who I added one point probably been quietly in love with and she was the first person of my own age who died of of illness as opposed to an overdose or something linked to a particular kind of lifestyle sure and my reaction to it I was just stunned and enraged just seemed wrong to me I couldn't wrap my head around it and I had what was probably a kind of hallucination the day that I learned she was terminal I went outside my apartment I heard a man and a woman on the corner you know the woman was saying the thing you got to understand about God is he's not nice he's not nice at all yeah so I was trying to make sense of my own in comp in comprehension then the other event was the reaction following September 11th which was the reaction in New York made perfect sense to me but I would I remember like watching Oprah for some reason that week where we all did some some weird things and she was interviewing a bunch of of I guess housewives in the Midwest all of them were talking about how terrified they were to go to their mall shopping in cases they attacked the mall two of our my co-workers were stuck in Chicago when it happened they they decided to rent a car and drive back an editor and a salesman for another magazine and um wisely they stopped overnight rather than push the whole way through in Akron and the next morning they picked up the local newspaper at their hotel and saw the defense plans in case alcada you know again world trade center pentagon Akron this is you know the the lab we're going to take out the rubber factory and then we'll bring America to its knees so yeah they they at the time everybody saw themselves as a target where were you at the time I was in the Hudson Valley I would have been in New York that day yeah in fact down fairly near the world trade center except that I was getting married that week and so I'd stayed up to like arrange the wedding not in the too soon way one of my previous interviews is with Drew Friedman oh had that book too soon yeah of you know which was the great Gilbert Gottfried line oh I love that one yeah delivered the the bad world trade center joke at a friars roast I think a week after the attacks but yeah there was a sense of I want to say fallout that the perhaps being as close as we were to the city we felt as though we were privileged in our trauma and that the further you got out from the country it it it shouldn't have affected them as badly yeah I guess was the the sense of propriety we had towards it while discounting what happened at the Pentagon we all treated it as though New York and it's a sudden radius was was it so it's really a reaction to that and your personal reaction to your your friend's death that well I was also struck by that we immediately went to we constructed a myth yeah a myth about what the attacks had been about they hate us for our freedom well it wasn't our freedom that they attacked us for yeah I mean you know they hate us because we're good they hate us because we're in Saudi Arabia yeah that's ultimately what it came to but and that started you on a year multi-year project yeah it was five years oh god it was horrible it was horrible and then it broke me how often did you think of bailing on the the project I thought about bailing on it all the time particularly I mean I was the last year in which I was writing I was pretty much blocked yeah or I was almost blocked I mean I would write but it would take me all day to write a paragraph and I thought I'm fucked here because I I owe an advance and B it's like even if I kill myself they'll say oh he couldn't deal with the book I thought my only out is to get a have a heart attack or you know get hit on a corner walking through New York City yeah I think it's a wonderful book I thank you admittedly I read it you know in a big chunk while flying to Germany and kind of stealing myself for the whole okay I'm going back to Germany I'm gonna deal with you know the historical family trauma here but but yeah I think the way both that and and another insane devotion that sort of lyric essay mode in which you write the idea of well particularly with the second book with another insane devotion the sort of interplay of your life into these fields of knowledge while trying to convey a narrative in a sense it actually seems to be now that I think about it the undertone of the book of calamities also that there's a way of telling your story underneath it that you may not have been conscious of but I'm not gonna you know that's interesting yeah yeah I won't tell you anything more about your own life okay that's good you know go to a therapist instead but um I've been I figured neurotic Jew or neurotic but well I'm a Jew I mean you know the thing is doesn't matter what I believe I mean you're Jew would regardless of what you believe yeah I tried explaining that to someone in Germany last week that you know whatever else is the case I'm also always going to be Jewish so I may as well adopt the roses they would have left me they would have they would have they wouldn't have barred me from the camp yeah well as long as you're here you may as well yeah yeah but how did you find Buddhism how was the well it it is I mean probably I first encountered it in a very watered down version through the beats you know I loved as a teenage or a young man and they held up for you Burrows has Kerouac hasn't good Ginsburg almost gonna sound terrible I don't think he's a great poet I mean I I still love okay no one's listening I love actually Kaddish I love yeah Kaddish I think is a great poem and there are things about him that continue to move me very much but it's almost extra literary and for a lot of them it's extra literary I think Burrows however is a great artist yeah and it's supremely supremely controlled even when he doesn't seem to be yeah which is part of the art yeah but from there you you discovered that's that was what interested me at first and then I read I read Buddhist before I began any kind of practice it was just it was the only thing that made sense to me this is the only thing that adequately explains suffering to me how so um because it says that it is an inevitable part of wanting things of you know having having desires which most beings seem to have and the fact is that if you desire things you what you're attached to or what you gravitate toward will be taken from you so it makes sense to me you don't have to believe in god you know you can be an atheist and be be a Buddhist it accommodates plenty of other religions it's I I mean it is a religion but it does not insist on having a monopoly on truth um because it has a very strong it's code of ethics is consistent with with what I with mine it's very experiential it does not have like a body of doctrine or like an iron body of doctrine for example the the Dalai Lama eats meat that's like there's this great story that when he was here sometime like in the early thousands he they were supposed to cater from Zen palette and at one point one of somebody in his in his party said oh no his holiness can't eat that he needs meat okay and I surprise the hell out of everyone who yes yeah the sense of this integration that comes through another insane devotion of the relationship or at least the way it's conveyed by the narrator seems to tie into the lack of steady work the lack of my the economics of your lives seems to drive the the notion of is that yours I don't think so I hope it's mine is a mine is in the kitchen it seems to be driving the the economic situation seems to drive this sort of misery that that's going on within the relationship do you find that you're right differently with steady work yeah and I mean how significant is the that financial aspect to you know again figuring out what what it has been very freeing in the sense that I'm not gambling on I don't stake that much on whether my work gets published now I mean I wanted to be published I certainly have a stake you know a vanity stake yeah but it's made me feel much freer about writing experimentally about writing associatively I mean I have always done that because I can't write any other way I mean I could have done calamities is a much more straightforward book right but it didn't interest me and they weren't paying me I wasn't getting paid enough to end up doing like just a serviceable job on it what's the well how did you really fall into the the lyric essay mode how did you come across that or probably because I have a short attention because they can't tell one story at a time as we're seeing that that you know that holds up here yeah and because I believe in elliptical I mean I do straight journalism which is much more you know get the you know let the reader know within one within two sentences what the story is and go after that story and go after it in the most straightforward possible way and that can be quite interesting but it's much more like being a dog going for the bone as opposed to going out and not knowing what you're gonna find yeah one other topic that comes up in your your work is your history of addiction in the past pretty much clean yeah I've been I've been clean and sober what almost 28 years so congratulations thank you um but how's that process of cleaning up influenced you how did it influence your work well it made it possible for me to write really yeah um I don't think I could have I'd written a couple short stories and a lot pieces of failed novels before but um it made it possible for me to work in a systematic disciplined way um I think simply the fact of being clean or did that process of cleaning up I think simply the fact well it's hard for me to distinguish but I would say a simply the fact of being clean meant I had mental faculties that I did not have okay but also it taught me a lot of that process and it taught me a lot of that patience and it taught me a lot about humility in the presence of things I don't understand well I didn't understand for example why I was making the associations I was in calamities um I have to really you know compliment my editor Asya Machnik at a little brown because I knew very early on that I wanted to pair there were one to genocide with uh or a state the or a staya and the edifice trilogy and I couldn't tell you why at first I mean later on it made sense to me but I wanted to look at those as texts even though nobody involved in the Rwanda and genocide was was thinking of either as far as we know yeah as far as we know you know just so you know that was I respected my own intuition enough to pursue it and how important is the editor the editorial process been having somebody overseeing I don't know what I would have done if she said this doesn't work this doesn't make sense I probably would have listened to her because I was very insecure I didn't know what I was doing I really did not know what I was doing um and also I was dealing with material that I felt humble about I mean it was you know you're in the presence uh you were talking with people who've seen their families murdered and before their eyes yeah and you don't want to do a disservice to what they went through or to them um and you are aware of your of your incredible ignorance and your privilege and you were trying to convey something of their experience and at the same time render say something about the historical background of that experience trying to make sense it's making sense that ties the whole book together that idea of trying to find answers to the questions that you kick off each each chapter with yeah um that notion that there is some sort of cosmic thing I don't know if it's cosmic that's the thing that's why I really defer to people who suffered it's just I think that they're the arbiters they get to tell this story yeah although you also tell the wonderful uh section in the book about teaching writing to a bunch of Vietnam vets yeah at a Buddhist retreat and how terribly they react to the the Buddhist advice of letting go of their suffering because the suffering is all they have um do you find that temptation not for me but for other people yeah I see it all the time no because I mean I get enough I mean you know my life has been predominantly very pleasurable and I will choose pleasure over suffering almost any day of the week except for five years yeah five years of that um question I always ask people uh a what are you reading uh-huh what are you reading I'm reading uh Hilton Als' new book of the essays which is called White Curls which I think is brilliant and very strange and eccentric yeah and do you have literary freak out moments people you've you've met who you idolized and you just oh my god I can't believe I'm meeting yeah oh god well I felt that way teaching with Philip Philip yeah how do you contrast your your non-fiction with with his do you see he is much I think much more a much Defter writer a much more elegant and poised um much funnier yeah yeah um and better read I think I'm fairly well read I think I'm good but I just think you know do you have a sort of idling or idolization of him that it's just oh my god that guy's operating on a level I would not try to write the way that he does probably because I feel he's got it covered I felt that way when I met Dydian um those are two kind of mind and but ones that you actually were nervous in the presence of okay because that's I'm always curious just because I tend to downplay I make everybody Joe in some respect so I try to make it easy on myself but I'm sure there are people I would just totally who do you think you'd freak out uh there are there are people on my dream list of of guests like I mentioned before this Philip Roth obviously yeah um Stoppard another one oh yeah I would just partly because I would also be afraid of just speaking incorrectly just saying something wrong and and just getting here to be as though these are the most uncharitable people in the world for some reason when they're probably very personable and delightful guy I called Harold Bloom once I'll glue had a wonderful conversation with him um I was as I told you before we started recording I used to do small press publishing and at one point I thought I could completely sink all chances of making money by re-issuing Walter Pater's Plato and Platonism and this is on the recommendation of one of my my authors and figured I would hit up Bloom to see if he was interested in writing an introduction and unfortunately he wasn't well as he put it you must understand my dear I'm so busy right now that were you to offer me a chance to write an introduction to the illustrated biography of Sophia Loren I wouldn't be able to do it and to him that was that was as good as it was going to get but he was very very personable very friendly and um yeah I'm sure there are people I would still just kind of panic around even with the microphones which seem to make me armored somehow but you know it's good to know that it's chronic that it's a human condition I suppose and what are you working on besides the uh I'm working inside the tiger factory two books I'm working on a book of essays about singers and about the voice yeah um singers who sound like one thing an R another thing like singers who sing white singers who sing black black singers who sing white men who sing like women women who sing like men going how far back I'm really just going back to like the 60s okay it's not history it's more meditation on the voice and identity like how you decide what a singer is and also what your internalized vision of the singer your imagination about the singer how it shapes your sense of yourself and what you can what you do or can feel yeah interesting is that uh finished or in process now it's in process okay it's actually early in process and I'm writing a novel my it's my first attempt at a novel in a long long time about the bankruptcy and death of the Ulysses Grant how did you hit on that as a topic um I was originally trying to do it as non-fiction but I knew that I wanted to write about it about these events he you know was taken in a Ponzi scheme yeah and he wrote his memoir sort of in a last in a very desperate attempt to make enough money for his widow and probably redeem his reputation he was sick at the time yeah have a widow okay for the reader or list he went but his firm went bust yeah lost every penny he'd put in it and the money of friends yeah and then shortly after that he found it he'd throw throat cancer and it was going to kill him and he died within a year and I'm but I wanted to write it and make it clear that I was really writing about now I mean and there are things that I can do in fix it's possible to do that in fiction in a way that I couldn't in non-fiction unless I wrote in a very didactic hectoring way and I don't want to so trying it into our our great recession as we do it well also the permanent distribution of wealth in America and also like our notions of who gets to fail and who doesn't with all the projects that you have going on is there a sense of making up for lost time yeah oh okay yeah I feel yeah I'm very conscious of that I mean I'm 60 years old so I don't think my time is limited unlimited and how many cats do you have three okay you still have well whatever my lease shh don't don't let anybody know Peter Trachtenberg author of Another Insane Devotion and The Book of Calamities thank you so much for your time so much and that was Peter Trachtenberg author of Another Insane Devotion sorry that the episode ends kind of abruptly we were recording in the apartment of Friends of His in the City and when they got back home he felt it was kind of rude to dominate their living room and kind of consign them away so we wrapped up a few minutes after they got back it's it's rare that I interview somebody who's even more discursive than I am but I I really enjoyed the sort of veering around of this conversation the sort of ability to make connections and follow intuition is part of what characterizes Peter's book or part of what I find so engaging about it but like I said you should give both of them a shot both Another Insane Devotion from Decapo Press and The Book of Calamities which came out from Little Brown a few years ago and if you'd like to check out more of Peter's work then visit his website PeterTrachtenberg.com and Trachtenberg is t-r-a-c-h-t-e-n-b-e-r-g and that's it for this week's virtual memories show I actually don't have an episode in the can for next week so I'm hoping at least one interview comes through in the next few days if all goes well or at least according to plan you'll get to listen to either book critic Lori Mutchnick or bar mitzvah photographer Kip Friedman trust me I'm pretty sure that latter be a good one now do me a favor and go to iTunes and post a review of the show or hit up our website chimeraobscura.com/vm and make a donation of this ad-free podcast and if you've got ideas for guests drop me a line at groff at chimeraobscura.com until next time I am Gil Roth and you are awesome keep it that way you [BLANK_AUDIO]