David Gates, author of Jernigan. Preston Falls, and The Wonders of the Invisible World, talks about his writing career, owning his niche (once accurately described as “smart but self-destructive white American middle-class men in crisis”), teaching fiction, leaving the east coast for Montana, building a country/rock band of writers and critics, how he feels about the end of Newsweek, and the anxiety that drove him into writing his first novel. It’s a fun, rambling conversation with one of my favorite living writers. Then, repeat guest Ann Rivera joins us to talk about her recent reads and how she escaped the postmodern condition!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 14 - The Wonders of the Audible World
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memory Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. Now, my previous episode was posted from Shanghai, where I was on a short business trip. I'm back in the wilds of Northern New Jersey now, where I hope to be settled for a few more months before I get any more major travel plans. This episode features a conversation with David Gates, the writer behind Jernigan, pressed in falls, and the wonders of the invisible world. The first two are novels, and the last one is a short story collection. Now, I taught Jernigan in a three-week class at my undergrad institute with my pal Mark, who turned me on to the book. We were doing a class on alcoholic novelists. Rather than great writers who drank, we thought we'd focus on great drinkers who wrote. So we did Bukowski, Frederick Exley, and based on how good Jernigan was, we had to assume David Gates was also an alcoholic. So we taught those three books. A few years later, I gave him a call while I was sitting around bored during my day job. He was a writer and critic at Newsweek, and it turned out over the course of our conversation that he is not an alcoholic, had no problems with booze whatsoever, and that the book was entirely fiction. That said, Jernigan remains one of my all-time favorite novels, and Gates and I have stayed in touch all these years. He was mighty kind to even take my call back then, since I was even more of a schlub from New Jersey than I am now. And we've had nice correspondence on and off, gotten to meet once or twice. He moved out to Montana a few years ago, which made me a bit worried that we would never get together to record an episode of the show, since, as you guys know, I love doing these interviews face-to-face as opposed to Skype or phone or anything. But it turned out this summer he's going to be back east, both at his farmhouse in upstate New York, and to teach at this low-residency MFA program at Bennington College. And well, that's only a three-hour drive from Shea Virtual Memories, so I figured I would add one more crazy trip to the 10 weeks of running around to all sorts of different places that I've been up to since April. So I went up to Bennington a few Saturdays ago. We decided to record in the backyard of the dog house, the residence, well, it's the only teaching residence that allows pets on the Bennington campus. So I apologize if you hear sort of background, woody noises and such. After we spoke, David took me over to the dining hall at Bennington campus for lunch. And while there, I met a number of the other teachers who are part of this MFA program. I was, I was a bit in awe because I was at a table with Amy Hempel and Philip Lopaid and Susan Cheever and Lynn Sharon Schwartz and just told them it would be great to stay in touch and maybe we can work on an episode with one of them or each of them down the line. I also ordered books by all of them when I got home so that I could actually bone up on their stuff and the off chance that they do want to record an episode of the podcast. We now get my conversation with David Gates, the author of "Jernigan," Preston Falls and the wonders of the invisible world. You can make, you can love, you can make, you cry. My guest today on the virtual memory show is David Gates, one of my favorite novelists and short story writers, author of "Jernigan." David, thank you for coming on the show. Hey, I'm sitting here. I don't have to come very far to do this. That's true. I made the trip up to Bennington, Vermont for today's show. In fact, we're recording "Outside," which is the first for the virtual memory show so I apologize in advance for the crickets and wind and everything else you're going to pick up. I don't think we've got the cicadas here yet. No, no. They're all over in New Jersey though. I've got them pretty hardcore there. They sound like the Raybeams from the Martians and Mars attacks that this is an undulating thing. I'll see you coming up soon with a guy named David Rothenberg, this musicologist who's just put out a book called Bug Music, sort of about how the insects created man's idea of rhythm and all this. I have to read his book still, which is why I'm paraphrasing that much. Actually, let's start with where we are and why we're here. We're in Bennington. You're teaching a summer writing workshop? Yeah, Bennington has a low residency MFA program that I teach in and there's a 10-day residency in June, which we're in the middle of, and there's another one in January. You've been teaching writing for a while now for a number of years. Oh, I know. Well, you're a writer in America, so you're not going to make a living from books. I know, yeah. And I quit news weeks. That's something I also want to get to down the line, but what's the sort of the key lesson, I guess? What do you try to impart to younger writers in these courses? Well, I have five or six things that I regularly say. The one that I'm liking these days is to ask them to remember that every character in a story or novel thinks that he is the main character, not just the protagonist through whom we're seeing the thing, whether it be a first-person narrator or a close-third person narration, but all those other people think it's their story. So what is their motivation? What's their agenda? What are they trying to accomplish? How are they trying to get over on other characters? Yeah, what's the mission in any given scene or encounter the characters will have? And it's relatively easy for beginning writers to get their protagonist right, but those other people, you've got to sit in their chair to and figure out where they're coming from. And which writers do you think best sort of give them an example of that, something for them to study? I always recommend Jane Austen to them. She is the one. What are kids trying to write nowadays? It's all over the place, some of it is, there's some magic realist stuff, there's some historical stuff, there's the usual contemporary realist stuff, there's a little bit of kind of metafictional stuff, there's a hugely wide range even within a given workshop. Has that been consistent over the years you've been teaching or has it been trained? Yeah, pretty much. I don't really see any trends developing. I'm not seeing a lot of vampires and werewolves then fans. I've interviewed a couple of literary agents and editors and basically, yeah, they think the vampire thing is played out, zombies still have some time. Was it ever played in? It's sold, which I guess is different than how valid it is. Now how did teaching affect your own writing process? Oh, God, that's a good question. I'm just making more conscious of mechanical aspects. I suppose it does, yeah. Sometimes the sense that maybe my students are looking over my shoulder and I'm doing stuff that I've told them not to do, so I try not to do it. It certainly sharpened that awareness, consciously I try to put all that out of my mind when I'm sitting down to write, but I certainly try not to do stuff that I don't recommend myself. Can you give us an example of one of those? Oh, using adverbs, using adverbs, writing the kind of dialogue where people answer each other in a very direct, flat-footed way, how are you today? I'm fine, maybe a better choice is how are you today? Oh, it's hot as hell. Just something a little indirect to show that there's a separate consciousness emanating from each of these people and separate things on their mind where they're not actually literally answering each other, but reflecting on what appears to be a conversation. But in reality, what's going on is someone is expressing what's really on his or her mind. Sort of that Harold Bloom listening to yourself, talking to yourself? Well, not that present, not that, not so much that, but you know, if two people get into a conversation, each will have something that he or she wants to talk about and to get out there, and that will often be at odds with what the other person wants to talk about and get out there, and good dialogue will sometimes reflect that conflict. So it's not such a cooperative process as we like to think it is. More the idea of scene work, I guess, the idea that I think that you're trying to go with. Yeah, it's scene work. And the horrible fact is that so many conversations are really combats, that's like one-to-one combat. Well, what I think characterizes most Tarantino movies outside of all the gunshots is really, they're all about interrogations and scene, but not the scene. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And David Mannett, and you can see it in Jane Austen, and those are brutal combats of points of view. I noticed, I'd read out your last few short stories, the one in the Paris Review, and in Grandpa. And they seem very dialogue specific in almost a one-act play sort of way. Is that any sort of trend in the way that you're writing at this point, or is that just sort of way? Yeah, something I picked up on in my own, you know, internal projecting thing. I'm trying to think back about what it used to be like, and I can't remember, because I'm the last person who would sit around reading my stuff, and other people will remember these things a lot better than I do. I promise I won't quote anything of yours back to you today. Well, that's okay now. I'd find it interesting. Yeah, I'd find it either illuminating or humiliating. Yeah I don't know if it's a new thing, but it's certainly an awareness of seeing and an awareness of moving the story forward by means of seeing and by getting conflicts between the people happening by means of seeing. And I love to write dialogue. I have to no, never at all, nor film, because you'd have to work with other people. That's part of it. You know, I don't mind working with other people when they're good, you know, and I'm very happy to take credit for their work. It's just, you know, it's forms that I've never done anything in, and I'd be starting from beginner level, I think. The last decade plus you've been publishing short fiction. You have a collection coming together this one? Yeah, I'm pretty close. I've got a deadline of mid-December, by which I have to kick in either two new stories or one sort of novella-length thing to fill out the collection that I've got. I've got 10 stories that are imprinted or about to come out. But my editor felt it muted once in a war. Well, oh my God, that's not what I'm trying not to think that that's what he's asking for. But if something horrible were to happen, if they were less than... Yes, secretly I'm feeling that he wants something that's going to knock it out of the park, so that in combination with the deadline is just utterly terrifying. Speaking of utterly terrifying, new novel, any... No, I don't want to write any more novels. Really? Why is that? I don't think I'm very good at them. I mean, people obviously have liked those novels, but my God, they're big and they take a long time and there's so much organizational stuff you have to do. And with a story, you know, I can work for a few months or more than a few months and have something that packages and of which I can control pretty much every part and get it right. And with a novel it's just so much more complicated. I work with students a lot who are doing novels and I'm happy to do that, but for me I'm not quite seeing that. Are your favorite writers, novelists generally or short story writers? It doesn't much matter. I'm just wondering in general, do you find yourself reading more novels than short fiction? You know I suppose I do, but it's always the same novels, you know, it's always like every year I'll go through all the Jane Austens and most of the Dickens novels and I re-read so much more than I read. I read stuff to teach and that's actually a large part of my reading, just re-reading stuff that I've assigned and getting up to speed with it once more. What books do you tend to assign most often? Well, I'll assign, you know, a Jane Austen, I'll assign short stories by Hemingway, Cheever, Carver, Amy Hample, sometimes a George Saunders story, sometimes Donald Barthelmay. You know, I kind of like to do more or less a range of stuff, all stuff that I like, but I'd like to have a little bit of variety and what I'm assigning. Do students do that? Oh, the Beckett Trilogy. I'm usually able to believe people to get through that, love leaders, a perennial. Do you find students trying to sort of ape David Gates' content, the two smart, self-destructive, white, middle-class, mid-life crises, sort of thing? Not to put you in a pigeon mower. Yeah, yeah. No, but I am a pigeon mower. That's my turf and they better stay there, a lot of them are too young to be doing mid-life crisis. So it's like the first novel at 22, so it really primed me for the next 15 to 20 years. Well, you know, maybe they think he's younger than he really was, and he's really old now. Yeah, I don't see that so much. I still see a lot of carver-influenced stuff, which I think is wonderful. And there may be people influenced by stuff that I don't even know what the hell they're influenced by. I may be getting stuff that's a straight rip-off of Bologna, and I have no idea what I'm seeing. But you're no longer assigned books for something like Newsweek. You really-- Yeah, I'm gone. Because I detest most contemporary fiction myself. Well, what little I see of it, I don't know enough about it to detest it. I read the reviews and the times, and it all looks like nothing I ever want to read. But I would be doing that if I were not teaching, which takes up a lot of the time, and most of my reading in unfamiliar stuff is student manuscripts. And then all stuff that I'm teaching for specific pedagogical purposes. But again, without having a paid book reviewing job, there wouldn't be-- I know, I'm just not up to speed anymore. Which I consider a strength, not a weakness. It's fine. When I was up to speed, it was fine being up to speed. Now, you were a book critic, and a music critic for Newsweek for quite a long time. How do you feel about what's happened to Newsweek as a brand and how it's imploded in the last few years? It's sad. I'm sure it was inevitable. I'm not sure I know-- I think I know one person who's still there. But that's all, pretty much all the people I knew were gone. It doesn't, of course, exist in print anymore. I guess it does in certain countries overseas. It's now for sale again. But while it's sad, that's history. I'm not sitting around mourning. Oh, no. Just do you feel any sort of general sadness over, wow, that was an institution, and that's completely gone? Yeah, it's a personal sadness. Time has passed. That era of my life is over. It was a wonderful year, it would be in magazines. It was just at the tail end of when they would pay people decently, and you'd have an expensive cab, and you could fly places to do stories. We've seen that collapse. Free dinner on Friday nights when they were closing the magazine, Free Town Car Home, or if you were past 9 p.m., which I took great care to do a lot of the time. Oh, I'm going to be stuck here for a while. Yeah. I don't know when Tower gets that anymore. Since the Internet's obviously one of the big factors in Newsweek's utter demise, what's your take on how the proliferation of literary blogs and book writers online, how's that affected book criticism in your opinion, or have you been, again, so far outside of it? Yeah, I'm pretty far outside of it. I don't really see much of it. I still look at the same old stuff that I would be looking at if I were not having a computer in front of me. It's a New Yorker website every day, the New York Review, Times Book Review, Book Forum, and that's about it. I do go on arts and letters daily every day, and the stuff they link to is often pretty interesting and the stuff I would never discover from LA Review Books, The Guardian, and that's a good resource that's saying. I always think of you as a, not New York writer, but a New York suburban or ex-urban writer, but you're living in Montana now, you're touching in Vermont. What brought you out to Montana and what keeps you there? Montana, I went to as a visiting writer in the fall of 2010, just they invited me, and I thought it sounded like a great idea, so I went, and when I was there, an actual job opened up which I applied for and got. There wasn't really much happening for me in the east coast. I had an apartment in Brooklyn that I had bought at the time I was still at Newsweek, and I got a buyout offer from Newsweek very shortly after, so my only real reason to be in New York City was to teach my class in the New School MFA program once a week. I was spending most of my time at my house in upstate New York, which is about an hour from Bennington, where we are now, and making the long drive down, hassling the parking, staying in my overpriced apartment one night a week, and booking it back up to the country. I'd like to live in the country, and that was kind of becoming a crazy, isolated life, and when the Montana thing opened up, beautiful country, great people, a job where I would have colleagues in an office get to go to faculty meetings. People tend not to look forward to that, but okay. Well, I don't look forward to it anymore, but it was a wonderful novelty the first couple of times. But still it was, you know, I didn't really have a community since I was not spending a lot of time in New York, and Montana really is that, and the students are terrific. In fact, if I can brag on one of my students, whose name is Andrew Martin, he just got his MFA, and he's having his first story come out in the Paris Review. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. And there are other really good writers out there, it's a good program. How does the, how do the students differ in writing from New School to Bennington to University of Montana? Is there any sort of way you characterize that? I can't generalize about it. It's, you know, in each place I've had amazingly good people, and not so amazingly good people. But I really couldn't, just to estimate that Bennington, you know, has always the absolutely best, most brilliant ones are Montana does, or the New School, or Columbia, or the other places I've taught. It's always that range. Now, where'd you grow up? I grew up in Connecticut. Okay. How does the life in the country play into that? Was that a relatively rural area in there? Yeah. When I was a kid, the town I lived in was quite rural. We had about 26 acres of land in an old farmhouse, and our land had joined hundreds of acres of land owned by the water company. So I spent a lot of time in the woods, and hunting and fishing, and all that. And keep it up now that you're running about that? I don't. I mean, I will go out in the woods sometimes, but I feel too sorry for animals to shoot them, and I feel too sorry for fish to catch them. And so no, Norman McLean, like my favorite thing. No, no, no. I have friends out there who are seriously, seriously into the fly fishing thing. And I would be very happy to go out on the river with them, but just don't ask me to cast the line. It's between 10 and two with the power and grace and all that stuff. You know, it's beautiful to balance. When you go to the campus at Montana, you'll sometimes see a wide circle of people practicing their casts on the lawn, like into the middle of the circle. It's a very cool thing to say. The one time I tried it years ago, all I did was get my line tangled up in the brush, and it just, you know, it was not seeming like fun. It's got to be a metaphor for something. Do you find yourself able to write non-East Coast settings at all nowadays, or is it still in place? I don't want to. And the last thing I want to do is be a guy who's been in Montana for two years, and now thinks he's got a handle on the culture there, so now I'm going to be a Montana writer. You know, my territory really I feel is the East Coast, New York City, North and East. I don't think I've written much that's set west of the Hudson River even. Now, where do you think without getting psychoanalytical? Oh, no, I don't mind. Where does the self-destructive - I'm among friends. The smart, self-destructive, mid-life crisis, white guy, genre, or niche that you're in, where does that come from internally for you? Oh, God, my mid-life crisis was so long ago. That's what I'm wondering. How do you manage to sustain it all these years? I'm due for the late life one, the life support crisis. I mean, you're born after the wars, they're sort of baby boomer, non-after a couple of wars. Yeah, it's true. Civil war. The alleged big one. Yeah. Is there a sense of, you know, non-greatest generation thing, or, you know, what do you see when you look inside as to where, you know, this stuff comes from? Um, have you tried therapy at all? I haven't, so I have no idea. Obviously didn't work. Okay. Do you guys try? I tried a lot of things. Um, I don't think, you know, I suppose that I'm more determined by my generation than I'm aware of than I like to think. And there are a million carton copies of me out there who, you know, listened to the same bands in the 1960s and so on and so on and so on. And I do feel lucky to have come up at a time when things were changing so much. Um, you know, when I was eight, ten years old, you know, a little Richard really was on the radio and the year I graduated from high school was the year like a Rolling Stone came out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, you know, I watched, when I was in high school, I would go down to New Haven, which was about 30 miles away and you know, the new Fellini film would be playing at the Lincoln or the new Bergman film. Uh, and then, you know, the '70s films, I was all about, you know, Bonnie and Clyde and five easy pieces and that, yeah, so it was a, it was a, it was a good, lucky, you had a resting time to be a kid, you know, diverging on adolescent, diverging on young adults. But, um, but the impetus to make art out of, out of all that, we didn't take up writing until you were in your early 30s. Yeah, I was in '33 and then, uh, Jernigan didn't get published, I was 44, so it was kind of a long, I didn't go to an MFA program, so I was attempting to figure it out by myself. But I, I was never aware of trying to capture that, I mean it captured me, so I was willing to let that come out in a, in a not deliberate way. But the funny thing is that, um, these days when I'm, uh, you know, teaching graduate students and, you know, becoming friends with them, they're sort of the same people that I was, they're even listening to the same music, you know, they're, they know all about Doc Boggs and Charlie Patton and the Rolling Stones, it's, you know, and, and Samuel Beckett, I mean they, they, you know, they, it's as if they have a lot of the same cultural experiences that I had and they, those, those things make as much sense to them as they did to me in what I presume is pretty much the same way. Interesting. It's hardening that makes me think I'm not getting old, which I actually am. Yes. In fact, you are. That's my old. Jesus. Yeah. Yet do students, do you get that, that sense that, that infinite accessibility that the internet gives us, that ability for kids who would not have been exposed to this stuff at 18, 19 can in fact come across anything that you can always point someone to a link. Yeah. That's, that's true. It's really, really hard to get your hands on stuff or even to find out that it existed when I was saying high school. Um, well, consider, I think the, the Robert Johnson recordings came out in LP, maybe when I was, um, I can't guess what year it would have been, but '64, well, you can sort of date it because if you look at the cover of Dylan's "Bring It All Back Home," which I believe was early '65, um, there's the Robert Johnson LP sitting in a pile of records in front of him. And it was a brand new thing then, if you recall, the cover of that album, got him digressing into this crap, and I'm just going to do it. That's okay. You can edit it. We got time. Um. I have a three hour drive up here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The cover of that album had a, a drawing or a painting of Robert, of the artist, Robert Johnson, artist's conception, uh, seen from above, you know, you're looking down at him playing the guitar. This is because they had not yet discovered the photograph of Robert, or the photographs now of Robert Johnson. So it was that stage of things, um, very hard to get more obscure things. Now everything is available, um, the thing is, of course, that, um, it obeys what Philip Larkin called Larkin's Law, which is that, um, the stuff that you, you know, the stuff that you listen to when you're 18 was probably the valuable stuff, because it survived anyway. And if you are, you know, hugely excited about some undiscovered, obscure figure that you never heard of, likely there's a reason that person hadn't been discovered. Uh, you know, and, and that's Larkin, of course, who is a canon kind of guy, but, um, but I think that's, you know, in some sense true, um, barbecue Bob is not as wonderful as Lead Billy. He's wonderful. But, but my belly's got a certain, yeah, yeah, how do you feel about the longevity of something like Jernigan, which people still seem to be discovering and thrilling over that thrilling enjoying the hell out of, uh, I'm fine with it. I feel very distant from it. Yeah. Uh, there are a lot of people more attached to Jernigan than I am. But you feel a certain, not canonicity, but you know, some sense of, wow, I wrote something that people 20 years later are still grooving on. I should say I feel that, shouldn't I? No. You should be honest about what you're feeling. Really. You know, I really don't care. I mean, that's a book I wrote so long ago as a different person, I'm happy that people like it. I think they're a good things in it. It's, um, it's not a thing that's part of my present life at all. I think it's cool, but, um, okay, it was, it was a book, is it? Okay. It was a book. It was a book. Life is really quick. I don't know, and I don't know whether to hope so or hope not. I've been reading the last couple. Uh, I did not read the last couple. Um, I think the last one I read was Exit Ghost, which, uh, no, no, don't wince like that. Don't wince like that. One of my beliefs is the parts. They were good parts. But I believe one of the worst aspects of the Bush administration was the amount of shitty art done by people who hated the Bush administration, and I think Exit Ghost kind of falls into that. Well, there's that, um, on the other hand, the Bush administration novel that I love, which most other people loathe, is a checkpoint by Nicholson Baker. It's never read. The assassination one. Oh, yeah. I highly recommend it. It will take you back to your, your pathological hatred of Bush, which is what that book is all about. When I re interviewed Fred Kaplan a couple of months ago about invading Iraq and Afghanistan, I had to read his book and thought, Oh, wow, yeah, I'm just back 10 years ago, filled with a. Yeah, no, it was a very energizing time to, to be filled with that utter loathing. Uh, I don't know if you've had this experience, but I used to have to turn the radio down if his voice came on the radio when I was in the car. I, I just could not even stand the voice. Yeah. How does that, well, what's the political vibe up in Montana? Um, well, Missoula is a very liberal college town, college town. Um, one of my favorite bars there is the Union Club, um, you know, where I go with my graduate students after class, and that place on debate nights and election nights was just packed with people watching the overhead TVs and cheering on the Democrats. Um, it's, you know, other parts of the state obviously are different, but they have a lot of Democratic elected officials out there. I mean, it's not Wyoming. Yeah. I think Eastern Washington also was, was pretty odd in, in those political terms. I've seen to remember them being referred to as a socialist state of Washington at one point, uh, during the 80s. Yeah. I suspect so. I know people who grew up in that part of, um, wait, no, no, I, I know people grew up in Eastern Oregon, but I don't really know much about that territory. Why did you begin writing? Um, I began writing, well, you know, I'd, I'd written some in high school, the way people do, and it was, you know, what it always is, high school writing, class school writing. And then for years and years after that, I was just, I, I believed that writing was completely over with, and the rock and roll was the new thing. That was, that was the relevant and important and sensible thing to which should devote your life. And that wasn't a very good musician and still not though I do it all the time. Um, and I remember, um, living in East Cambridge in 19, what would it have been, 67 or something. And the guy in the apartment next door, it's a slightly older guy, by which I mean, he's maybe like three years older and he had like the long hair and all that, he looks just like me, but he was a novelist and I just thought it was the greatest thing in the world, you know, poor guy, you know, stuck in this antiquated old school, you know, yesterday form, you know. The novel is dead. As it always has been. Yeah, I know. Where does he think he's living? Yeah. Um, but then I, but I'd always been a reader and at some point I just got over that. Uh, but I'd never thought I was a fiction writer that never occurred to me. I went to grad. I went to, I did well in undergraduate school as an English major. I went on to grad school, um, I got married to Anne Beatty and she was a real writer. She was writing, you know, that amazing early fiction of hers at the time and it never even occurred to me to do such a thing. Uh, I was so naive then, um, it amazed me that she was writing fiction that had to do with, um, people kind of like us and I thought, wow, what I thought, you know, uh, you could actually make fiction out of, you know, stuff that's like your life, a little suspecting that perhaps people had done that before, uh, you know, but she was doing, and it was, it was astounding, but it never occurred to me even to try to do such a thing. Um, but after, uh, we had split up, I was living up in Connecticut and commuting into Newsweek and I'd just been hired there in the fall of '79 to answer readers' letters. You know, it was a low level kind of PR job and I remember one day on the, and in the time, you know, kind of in maybe '77, '78, early '79, I was trying to do a few little things. I did a couple little, you know, Bartholme, Bartholme like story-ish things and, uh, I did a cartoon novel, uh, yeah, so I was doing that kind of stuff, but not really, I was just kind of grasping at anything that would make sense 'cause I was out of graduate school. I had not finished my dissertation, which was on Beckett, uh, but that's sort of fitting, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, didn't have a job and I was just, you know, I was trying any desperation move to do anything and one day, so I finally got this job at Newsweek just by pure accident and I was on the train one day, I just had a terrible anxiety attack and a crisis of whatever and began to screw the nun a yellow legal pad that I had and, um, you know, it's basically my complaints about my own misery and I was terrified that if I even lifted the pen from the page, I'd just be carried off that railroad car screaming, you know, past all the commuter guys and I did that for about three days, just, you know, sort of therapeutic venting on the page and, you know, in a little while, I began to become cold and calculating and worldly and I thought, well, shit, that's pretty interesting, um, you know, maybe what if there was a guy who felt like this and what if there was a guy who felt like this or what if I, you know, gave this like a little quarter turn to the left, maybe this would be fiction, uh, so that was it and then I just, you know, having nothing else to do, I thought, well, okay, let's dedicate the life to this, let's, you know, let's become a, let's become a literary hermit in the Garret Saint and that'll be my life and, and a mere eleven years later I got something published, so I just goes to show you how I can turn on a dime. Any short stuff published before then? No. So the book was the very first, uh, yeah, I, I don't really remember the chronology but the same year that Jernigan was published, I did get a short story into plot shares. But Jernigan was bought before you published anything. I think so. So I think so. Now what outside of intense anxiety, what writing rituals do you have nowadays? Are there times a day that are better or certain settings or, or? Well, usually the morning is better just because the day hasn't yet fully begun for me and I'm not, you know, out there in the world so much but I have this unfortunate habit of going online first and checking email first and reading it on to this and reading the times first and reading about what the New York Mets did and that's a foregone conclusion man. Well, I know but, you know, but it's, it's, it's always a different mode of failure. Sure. So that's, you know, that's kind of good for an hour and all this time of course I'm drinking coffee and getting shakier and shakier and, you know, at some point I can actually sit down and cough out a few little things. I can't work for very long if I'm beginning a project when, when I've got the thing well in hand, then I can work for long stretches. I can kind of. How do you know when you reach that point? Or is it just once you're working long and you realize it's? You realize it. I mean when there's actually enough there to work with and you see possibilities and you're interested in it, then that's, you know, that's for me the sweet spot. The early stages, I don't like it all. Now you mentioned being in a band and playing music. You have a small band here at Bennington, not a small band, you have a large band here at Bennington. Can you tell me about that? Yeah. Well, it began right in the orchard, 20 feet from where we're sitting right in this red and the dog house. When I was first hired here, Svenperkers wasn't yet director because Liam Rector was still alive. But Sven and I discovered that we both played guitar, so we would sit in that room with our guitars and, you know, play some songs that we knew and we discovered a guy named Lee Johnson, who is actually a hell of a writer, though we didn't know he was a writer and we didn't know he was a musician. We just knew he was like the tall, AV guy who set up the mics. But one day, one evening the poet Major Jackson gave a reading and there was Lee with a bass playing like jazz bass as Major Red. So we approached him and said, "Yeah, well, you're a jazz guy, you probably are interested, but do you have any kind of an interest in country music?" Well, he'd grown up in Nashville, his parents had played in a bluegrass band, his brother is a fiddler. He has huge interest in country music. So when we found Lee, things began to kind of coalesce. Another guy on the AV team turns out to be a great guitar player and whose real life involves playing cello in a very avant-garde noise music outfit. We are at Bennington. We are at Bennington. We are at Bennington. Wyatt Mason came up. I don't know if you know Wyatt, he's now teaching at Barb, but he was teaching here. And he was at that point, I guess in his 30s and decided he wanted to learn guitar and he just learned. I mean, within like six months, he was a killer guitar player, which made me want to kill him. Yeah, he had no understanding of what he couldn't do. So when Vic would show him something to do, he would just do it. Let's see, this is more training and crap, that's what that is. And then we're lucky enough to find Erica Pluff-Lazure who was a grad student and a great singer, a woman named Lily White, who's a killer jazz saxophone player. She was in Jimmy McGriff's road band for a while, she's a fabulous, fabulous player. And then James Wood came up to visit and we found out that James played drums and is actually -- James also does finger drumming. He also does finger drumming, which is pretty amazing. But listen to him on the drum kit. Well, I can play you some stuff, if you'd like. His Keith Moon tribute was pretty -- That was a wonderful piece, but he's a terrific drummer. So it's now -- this fan is now playing harmonica because we've got too many guitars. Too many guitars. Too damn many guitars around. You know, like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction thing? Yeah, yeah, it's like that. So it's kind of evolved from two aging guys with acoustic guitars sitting in the living room to like 10 pieces on stage, you know, full rock and roll, loud wall of sound. But I assume this is like "Impressed and Falls" with the no original songs, everything. No, no, no, no. Well, no, no. I take that back. It is all covers except one of our singers, Val Haynes, who's getting her MFA, this residency, was a -- had like a career as sort of a punk folk person in the '80s, I guess, in New York. And she has some songs that she's written that actually kind of work for us. There's one that's kind of rolling the stones like song that we do, but mostly we're about covers. And there's too many good songs to be trying at this late date to add your little grain to the heap. How's the back -- well, how does your musical experience at all impact your writing, or do you see any influence in understanding music? I don't really. And I try not to do what I was doing in "Impressed and Falls," which is, you know, call out every song that I know and show off my musical knowledge, and that's awful, and, you know, I just don't want to do that anymore. That being said, I do a fairly recent story that's about an avant-garde composer who is a student of Morton Feldmann's at Buffalo. I mean, he's imagined very Morton Feldmann was real. So that stuff still creeps in, and I can't entirely keep it out, but I no longer do the thing where people are sitting and having a conversation, and a significant song is playing in the background. And I try my best to talk students out of the hammer coming over the head, and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although -- can I brag on myself? Get a microphone. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. And the one time when I did that and actually had fun with it is in a story called "The Wonders of the Invisible World," where a woman thinks she's pregnant, and they're sitting in a restaurant, and she's announcing this to the guy who she thinks is the father. And on the sound and the bar that they're in, Billie Holiday is singing "Baby Get Lost." So I just had the narrow say, "I know, I didn't believe it either." So yeah, one can apologize for that, and one can wink and nod and nudge the reader, and you know, "Oh, isn't this meta fun that we're having," but you can't do that trick too often. But your narratives also have that sense of understanding the, I don't want to say silliness, but the artificial-ness of some of their connections are making. Yeah, don't defend its plausibility, Gill. It was fun. Okay. I'm down. It was fun. I was writing a comic novel at one point. Do you stay, or are you into, I hate the term "graphic novels," or are you into comics at all? No, not at all. Okay. I mean, I used to love, well, it's funny, I don't know if you saw it, but there's a piece by Michael Shavon on the New Yorker website, I don't know if it's in the Real Magazine about superhero costumes. I haven't seen it. And he apparently read the same era of Superman comics that I was in love with, like the really silly... Oh, yeah, essentially the tales of the Bizarro world many years ago, those were the great 1950s and 60s. Bizarro world. Mr. Mix is Spitalik. Yeah. Silver Age Superman. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The really good stuff. Yeah. You know, where Jimmy Olsen is all as being transformed into a creature with a big rubber nose. And... Red Kryptonite was your plot friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's like red Kryptonite and blue Kryptonite and, you know, whatever other kinds of Kryptonite that have specific effects. And when they really were in their decadent phase, that's when I loved that stuff. But I don't, you know, really followed the graphic, the new graphic stuff much. And the last one I was in love with was Mouse, and that's a long time ago. We'll see if we get Spiegelman on the show someday, although... Oh, you should. Well, you should. It's not up to me. But... Now, a friend of mine pointed out that Robert Frost grave is somewhere here in... It is. It's in Shaftsbury, actually. Ever been? Yeah. Do you do any sort of literary pilgrimage? Nope. Sort of thing? Okay. That's... I've wondered. I had some people who, you know, really devote themselves when they're traveling. I, for one, would love to get to Montaigne's library someday. But that's just an excuse to get to France, I think. It's not that I'm... Averse, necessarily. Averse. I think I'm just indifferent. I mean, I'm a huge reader of Robert Frost. I love Robert Frost. But you know, I haven't gone up to Bennington to look at where the soot is buried. I mean, you know, what do I need to do that? Well, you know, then I'd be kind of more interested in, but I know where you would find the west-running brook, I mean, it's maybe someplace, maybe not. But then once I see it, you know, why am I impressed with it? You know, we got the poem, got the book. The poem, I visited the four quartets locations from Eliot's. It was her husband's big treat from one woman, anniversary, and felt that that really kind of reinforced her reading of Eliot as it went. But I'm not sure how much of that holds up with other poets or other artists who were site-specific or writing about a particular occasion. Yeah, I'm sure it could. I mean, I've never been to England, and I like to look at pictures of it, but I'm afraid if I go to England there's going to be autumn of veals, you know? I went to New Zealand about 10 years ago and did a lot of crazy stuff during my time there. Possibly the most risky was trying to cross the street because I invariably looked the wrong way every single time, and bungee jumping and everything else wasn't that big a deal, but trying to cross the road was, was, well, I wouldn't mind going to New Zealand to see all the Lord of the Rings locations, I mean, that just looks, what isn't CGI'd, is insanely beautiful. You have no idea until you get there. You will never see a landscape like this in your life. It's one of the most remarkable places I've ever been. Tolkien guy at all or not. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, what sort of books were you raised on, or reared on, when you were a kid? Yeesh. Did you tend to read more, you know, fantasy, boy stuff? Yeah, I didn't read a lot of that, and I didn't discover Tolkien until I was maybe in college. I mean, and, you know, again, I'm so damn old that when I was first reading Tolkien, I was reading in the pirated paperbacks, because the Houghton Mifflin ones with the stern warning from Tolkien about, you know, how you should buy this edition and no other, you know, that was more even around, but I didn't read a lot of that stuff. So I just, you know, I read a lot of miscellaneous stuff from my parents' library. I read a lot of, you know, meat and potatoes, classics, of course, but, you know, I read a lot of sports stuff. Still read a fair amount of sports stuff. Okay. Well, I endlessly reread, well, nothing is going to be endless in the long run, but I reread Roger Kahn's "Boys of Summer" a lot. You know, I mostly like to read about, say, the '50s, '40s and the '50s. I love Jane Levy's "Sandy Kufak's" book. I thought that was a fabulous book. Really loved "Moneyball." That's a hell of a book. It's a hell of a book. Yeah. I mean, if I'm reading new stuff, it's going to be nonfiction, mostly. Yeah. You also teach nonfiction. I do, yeah. How does that differ? What are you trying to do with nonfiction? How do you teach that versus your fictional class? We'll see, you know what I mean. The workshops are workshops, you know, and your workshop and stuff. I've never, this fall, I'm doing a complete reading class with the graduate students, and I'm still kind of putting together a book list for that. I've got some fun stuff, I think, up my sleeve. I want to do the Dick of Deception back-to-back with this boy's life because it's, you know, it's about the same father of, you know, the two older brothers. Oh, I found, you know, there's the famous John Updike piece about Ted Williams' last game where he hits the homerun his last time, I bet, hub fans bid kid adieu, I think it's gone. But there's another piece by a sports writer, I believe it was Ed Lin, who actually had access. He was there in the dugout. So he was eavesdropping and, you know, those two pieces, you know, I kind of like pieces that I like to pair pieces that bear in on the same material, figure out how people do it. Anything by one of our mutual pals, Ron Rosenbaum? I thought about Ron, yeah. You remember that mangal of peace, I remember most of Ron's stuff, but yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought that might be a good one to do. There's a piece by George Packer, which I think was in the Times or Washington Post. I don't believe he was in The New Yorker, where he traces the progress of a t-shirt from New York to Nigeria, you know, just a brilliant feat of reporting. I want to do Boswell's Life of Johnson, and I'm not going to make him read all of it, but read around in it. And then a book whose author's name I do not remember, I'm afraid, it's called Boswell's Presumptuous Task, and it's a biography of Boswell, but also an explanation of how he came to put the Life of Johnson together, and then about, you know, the discovery of various Boswell papers, I think that's a really instructive thing. Do you think there's a good place for that sort of long form, not Boswell length, but you know, long form nonfiction nowadays? I hope so. Do you read a lot online like that? It's a little hard for me to stick with long form stuff online, especially when the bastards make you click on different pages. You know, I save everything to insta-paper and reread it fast. Well, yeah, I guess I could do that. One thing that it was a feature I wanted to do for this podcast, that everybody thinks is a good idea, but no one has a piece for it, except for the very first person I interviewed. It's something called Second Hand Loves. The question is, do you have a book or author whom you once detested, but grew to absolutely adore? Which, again, everybody thinks sounds great, but no one can come up with one for themselves. It does sound great. Let me think. My pal did Marilyn Robinson's housekeeping. That was hard. Oh, okay. Which she hated and then read eight years later and realized, oh, it was me, not the book. And there were people that I discovered late, and I discovered Jane Austen pretty late. I discovered sheaver pretty late. But I think that my even resistance is too strong a word was just based on what my preconception was. Ambivalence and that harrow blow. It didn't rise to ambivalence. It was, I think ignorance might be the word you're looking for. But yeah, who did I, well, no, that's tough. I mean, I certainly am re-evaluating people all the time, and the stock for certain writers falls for me, and the stock for certain writers rises, but I'm not sure there's anyone. Well, okay, here's one that I think about some, which is Savas Theatre. I'm re-reading that right now as a matter of fact. Are you doing? Yeah. I'm 400, 300 pages into it right now. I bet it's holding up pretty well. Yeah, I read it when it came out in '95, and I'm re-reading it now. All of the subsequent books come out of that one. It's the polio, the every theme that comes up in a later book is in Savas Theatre, and it's the last great sex novel that he did. That book, I did not like when it came out, and now it's the stock in that one is rising a lot. I think partly because I liked the subsequent one so much, but I now think that's an amazing book, and I really did resist it. At the time, I enjoyed it, but only as much as I was enjoying Roth in general. Reading it now, I think it's the key to the last 15 years of what he did. I also find it interesting in that it's a novel about a man in his mid-60s whose life is over. And for Roth, he had another 10 to 15 years of writing and realizing that it could only get worse after that, which is why every man, to me, is the book I'll go back to periodically like that. How interesting. His life is over, but not over. One maybe to read in juxtaposition with that is Joseph Heller's, I believe it's closing time. It's the last, I think it's the last of the Heller books. Oh, I have to admit I've never touched. Oh, no. I started Catch-22 once, didn't dig it back in college, and never went back to it. Well, you might give something happen to shot. That might be more to your taste than Catch-22. Which has a joke about it in Jernigan, as I recall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've trotted that joke out a couple of times. Yeah, Catch-22 is pretty antique, and that was the book I read it at the right time, written in high school, and I think maybe I would not care for it as much, but something happened is pretty serious book. But not my last. But closing time, I mean it's, you know, one level quite bad, but it's so depressingly honest about a writer, absolutely, you know, many feet past the end of his rope, and it's really chilling to read it. Which is probably a terrible note for us to end on, but... That's a round. I like ending on terrible notes, as you well know. That's true. That's true. David Gates, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for having me around. Thanks for coming up. And that was David Gates. He doesn't have a website, so I can't point you to one of those. But you can find his recent fiction in The Paris Review and Granta, and you really should go read Jernigan, as well as his other novel, Preston Falls, and his short stories. I can't praise them enough, and I think over the course of our conversation you've got an idea of what the tone is for what he's writing and who he's writing about. And now there's a bonus conversation. My very first guest, Anne Rivera, was in town during July 4th weekend, and we grabbed some lunch, and then broke out the mics to record a little segment on what she's been reading lately and why. Anne's first appearance on the show was in March of 2012, and that time we discussed her change of heart over Marilyn Robinson's novel, Housekeeping. That was part of that secondhand love series that I mentioned to Gates during our conversation. I'm a little embarrassed about how primitive my recording setup was back then when I first recorded with Anne, and she was really impressed by the new mobile studio I carry along with me. But just like with David's interview, I do apologize for the sound quality. This one was recorded at Gina's Bakery in Montclair, New Jersey. It was a very nice establishment, so nice that people kept coming and going throughout our conversation. So you'll hear the door opening and squeaking and closing and people talking in the background. But again, good microphones, and I think it's a pretty good conversation about what Anne's reading, what it says, and what she considers the postmodern situation. My guest is my first repeat guest on the virtual memories show in Rivera. We're currently in Gina's Bakery in Montclair during July 4th weekend, getting together to shoot the breeze, and I decided to bring the mics along and ask Anne the question that I unfortunately put to many people. What are you reading lately? Well, I just finished Super Sad True Love Story. How is it? It is good. It is a really good book. It is. It makes you lose some faith in the direction we're going in, although after his description of onion skin jeans, I never look at my students' skinny jeans the same way ever again. I was going to say you work in academia, so you must have a pretty diminished idea where mankind is headed anyway. I can't. You know, it's weird in academia. It swings back and forth. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Students aren't really all that different. I find even with cell phones, even with social media, I hear all about how everybody's losing focus and attention span. Really did we have that much focus and attention span? I didn't. We just didn't have so many distractions around. Like, you know, wacky podcasts like this. What else are you reading? Okay. I'm also reading, or I've read the extra prong, you know, I'm going to guess how to read the air, which is really wonderful. What's with that? And I'm looking forward to reading the whole novel that's next up on my list. Yeah. Now, it's about, actually, a professor teaching in a private school in New York. His father's just died. His father escaped from Ethiopia, went to the Sudan, and found his way, no, went from Sudan to Ethiopia, and found his way out on a cargo ship. But what's interesting to me is that he doesn't know his father. He knows very few stories about his father. He feels like he never really connected to him. So one day after his father's funeral, he found himself in front of his classroom of very privileged kids, and he's supposed to be teaching American literature, actually, and he ends up starting to tell a story about his father. I mean, he is very clear, the narrator is very clear, that much of it is made up because he's trying to explain who his father is to himself. And it's very interesting. It talks a lot about what his father went through, but also, he gives an excellent picture of what happens when a teacher gets personal with his students, and what the students pick up on. So eventually, the story starts circulating, and he goes from feeling completely unseen by his students to being seen. Suddenly, he becomes a whole person to them, but only through the torments that his father endured. Eventually, it comes to the Dean's attention that he's doing this, because he's done several class words of telling this story. And the Dean's reaction is, well, it's really good that they learn more about the outside world. And it says volumes about academia, about class, about what it means to be an immigrant in America, or be the son of an immigrant, and also, too, what happens when you're cut off from your family, that urge to create a narrative about what happened. Fill in those blanks. Ever had any impulse like that with your own students to tell stories? I had to fictionalize who you were. I tell stories all the time. Yeah. I tell stories all the time. They're fairly true, actually. But I tend to tell stories to talk about how to deal with certain things, to make connections with them. I teach a lot of musicians, so I tend to talk about bands a lot in class. I make the connection between writing music and writing just essays, because otherwise it's a completely alien form to them. But you can get more into it. I tell stories about Hampshire, of course, Hampshire College, it's hard not to tell stories about Hampshire. Yeah. I think spilling in the blanks is really useful, it illuminates certain things for them. It illuminates certain things for me, too. What else are you read? I have read Russell Banks, The Lost Memory of Skin, which is interesting. I haven't read any bangs, although I've seen a couple of movies adapted from his books. This one is about sex offenders. Yeah. So. So that's a cheerier thing than the sweet hereafter, that's good. Yeah. This one. This one is about what it means to live on a margin and be pushed out into the margin, and he begs the question, what causes a sex offense? Never answers it. Instead, it's about alienation, it's about looking for community wherever you are, whatever community you have to be in, and he raises the really thorny issue. What do you do with somebody who has done their time, and nobody wants that person near them still? Right. You're not paying your debt to society, but... It's never paid. Right. It's never paid. And what's interesting with the main character, because it's a young boy who had gone on to the internet after he got discharged from an army for distributing porn, actually. And he goes on the internet and he finds a girl who says, you know, she's a certain age. She seems interested, and it turns out to be almost a tetra-cutter-like scenario. The father is there, and he ends up getting sent to jail. He doesn't actually do anything, but he's not healthy either. So it's not an easy thing of, oh, this is an innocent, and he's out-capped with all these other people, and he's stuck in this market. No, he's not entirely innocent either. He's a really weird guy, and what's interesting is that as the book goes on, he becomes to embrace this even more, this marginal way of living, he becomes comfortable in it, and when he has the opportunity no longer to be there, he ends up choosing to go back. There's a subplot with a professor of sociology who comes to try and figure out why the community, can he make a community? Can he rehabilitate people by giving them empowerment as a community? And then it turns out that the professor may or may not be wanted for past CIA. Again, it's activities, I should say, past CIA activities. Again it's this thing about narrative, about stories. The stories do tell yourself, the stories do tell other people, and the fact is you don't ever really know what happened. You find this sort of commonality among the books that you've been choosing lately? Yeah, I do. That's out of that narrative impulse. Is that a... Well, I find narrative impulses, and that's one of my major impulses when I read all the time. I'm always interested about what narrative does, because narrative imposes an order, a certain kind of order, on things, and it is a way to try to get into the impulses of what makes us act the way we do, because you can never really reach that, you never really know. But there's still always this burning desire to create a story, to create a narrative out of something in order to comprehend it. So this is a story I tell my students all the time about when something happens to you, it's chaotic. It doesn't necessarily make sense, it's impressions, it's the ultimate postmodern condition. You know, it's fragmented, there are relationships, but they're not immediately clear. We tend to comprehend what happened to us once we start telling the story of what happened. And what's interesting about that is that you walk that line between fact and fiction, what really happened, what you think might have happened, and what your impulses to fill in, and because it seems like it should have happened that way. I don't know if I'm choosing these things for a reason or a thing, it's everywhere right now. I think it's a natural outgrowth that comes after this big postmodern kid where, you know, for a while there are a lot of the novels I was reading were about people's inability to connect. You can't connect to anybody. It's not possible. You never know what's happening in another class. We went to a college of alienation, you know, in that Hampshire everything was geared around how you were alienated from the establishment. Everything, whatever the establishment was. And I think that reflected a large removal, certainly it's an academic. If you're coming up in the 90s and the early 1000s, you couldn't get away from postmodern discourse, you couldn't get away from deconstruction, if you didn't have that point of view, you were necessarily completely rigorous. In my dissertation myself, though, I started turning towards more about even though we know we can take it as a given, there's never a complete connection, there's no such thing. What I did is I went back and I looked at Adam Smith's notion of sympathy. And what's really interesting about that is he says that too, he says you never really can know what's going on in somebody else's mind, but you can be sympathetic. You can make a connection with somebody else through this sympathetic notion where you know that you're different. You will always know that you're different, but by the other person trying to make a connection with you and you having enough self-control to bring the level of your own emotion down where you can meet, you can make a sympathetic connection between the two. I study a lot about how texts and readers can connect, so it's kind of a natural outgrowth for me. What interests me now, though, is these are relatively new novels that are having this turn towards connectivity. How do we connect? What does connection look like? Well, I think it's symptomatic of an era that's social media, everything is seen in terms of connections and links, and it's obviously accelerated so much in the last few years. What's the last book you put down because you simply couldn't go any further? The last book I put down because I couldn't go any... Oh, it was Michael Pollan's food rules. Really? Yeah. What turned you off? We've been there and done that. I get it. Okay. I understand about eating well. No. I understand the idea of eating from the earth. You don't need to be guilted about it any further? No, I was kind of done with that. Okay. I understood it perfectly. Okay. And the last great book you read? The last great book I read was Love Is Mixtape by Rob Shelton. Oh, that's a great book. It is such a good book. Given our '80s into '90s world and that our mixtape... Absolutely. I had a personal interest in it, but the quality of this writing is fabulous. Yeah. It's a really good writer, very evocative, very clear and crisp prose. I got into it right away. I don't know. He did a follow up book. I think about Duran Duran, but I'm not sure. I think so, but I don't know. Yeah, there's no point in trying to top that one. No. And Rivera, thanks so much for coming back on The Virtual Memory Show. It's always my pleasure to be here. And that was The Virtual Memory Show. You can find past episodes on iTunes or at our website, chimeraabscura.com/vm, or virtual memoriespodcast.tumbler.com. You can also like the show at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. And if you visit the iTunes page, please leave a rating or a review of the show. I'd love the feedback. And if you visit chimeraabscura.com/vm, you can hit the donate button and kick in a little money to defray my web hosting costs and other podcast bills that I tend to run up. Like travel and hotel costs, for example, next week I'm going to be traveling up to Reader Khan, this literary SF and fantasy festival up near Boston, hoping to get a bunch of interviews during that event, starting with John Crowley, the author of Little Big and the Egypt Cycle, two of the really amazing works of literature of the, I guess, for the post-war era at least. Let's just go with the 20th century. He's one of the finest writers of the 20th century into the 21st. So kick in a couple of bucks and I will give you a shout out in the next episode and send you a copy of a recent short story that I wrote. And speaking of the next episode, there will be a new episode of the virtual memories show every other Tuesday, if I have anything to say about it. Until then, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]