Author Interviews

Some time ago I discovered the "Wired for Books" website which contains an audio archive of interviews with various writers conducted by Don Swaim (http://wiredforbooks.org/mp3/). I downloaded nearly all of the interviews, a few dozen hours of material. They are informal, conducted in the 70s and 80s, fodder for a much briefer radio news broadcast, from which Swaim would cut and snip, parsing the question and answer format for a bit of reportage that left undisclosed his own often humorous, idiosyncratic personality.

Today at work, I listened to three somewhat awkward interviews with the late Alice Adams (whose stuff I have never read), a conversation in the mid-80s with Allen Ginsberg, two interviews with the Israeli writer Amos Oz, and a talk with Amy Tan. (The Adrienne Rich interview was cut short after three minutes -- the mp3 file apparently didn't fully download.) As a perceptive person might see, I started with the "A's".

Adams, a prolific short story writer for The New Yorker, spoke of her various troubles with rejection in the industry, which prompted Swaim to speak of Rick Bass, the short story and nature writer, who he says claims to have written a thousand short stories before one was finally accepted for publication. I find this extremely difficult to believe. Maybe he was into flash fiction? Adams found this incredible as well, but recommended trying for the best publications first, as she did, and working your way down. (Things may have changed in publishing in the twenty years since she gave this word of advice.) Also of interest -- she mentioned she taught a creative writing class, attended by Harriet Doer, who was in her late 60s and working on her first novel while in the class (Stones of Ibarra). She later published it at the age of 74, and it won the National Book Award.

Ginsberg was eloquent, political, passionate. Smaim did not know who Moloch, the pagan god whom Ginsberg references in the second part of Howl. So the late Beat poet told him that the Israelites were forbidden to offer their children to the god Moloch; they were not allowed o make them to "pass through the fire". He related this to what parents do to their children in our civilized, industrialized, war-profiterring countries. He also read the first few lines of Howl, a rendering that brought life to it which I haven't quite heard so well before. He said that the poem was meant in some sense to be a literary translation of the jazz sax riffs rendered by Lester Young, which brings me to a less abstract form of translation...

Amoz Oz was interesting in his theory of translation because he writes all of his work originally in Hebrew. He then works with American translators on the English renditions. His arguement was that he did not desire a too-literal translation of his work, especially idiomatically, since that would break up the normalcy of the dialogue. he demands of his translators, he said, that they "be unfaithful to be loyal". He said that it was like playing a violin concerto on he piano, which can be done beautifully as long as one doesn't try to make the piano sound like a violin, a vulgarity. Oz was also of interest in that he grew up in a conservative home, rebelled as a young teenager by joining a kibbutz (a type of socialist and originally agrarian commune -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz). As a writer as of the interview, he still lived in the kibbutz with his family, where he was allowed to spend a lot of his time writing, but also still waited and served tables during some meals, could be found driving a tractor as well. The kibbutz basically subsidized his writing during his early years. After he found fame and more money through translation in English and other languages, he still gave all his money and royalties to the community; he signed his checks over to the "smiling accountant". However, should he ever need anything, such as a month off to rent a motel room somewhere and write, he could merely go to the "frowning accountant" to make a request, and a check would be unquestioningly written to him.

Amy Tan, whom I have also never read, but with whom I am familiar as a member of the rock and roll band, "The Rock Bottom Remainders" (along with Stephen King, Roy Blount Jr, Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, and other mass market literary figures) spoke of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, which began as a series of short stories. She reports that the telling of her own personal experience, her subjective and honest rendering through fictional characters, unveiled universal truths about the nature of motherhood. Jewish woman would say, "your mother wasn't Chinese! She was Jewish!" And Irish, African, American, Russian, Greek woman, the same. She was surprised by this, she said, since she was writing something very particular about her own unique experience.

The Monk and Philosopher

The father is a secular humanist who writes stringent critiques of religious piety. The son, once a promising scientist, is a Tibetan Buddhist and translator for the Dalai Lama. Contrary to some popular reports, they are not estranged; rather, the father,a famous western philosopher, is curious about the son’s eastern religious beliefs, and allows him space and opportunity to present them in the extended conversation which comprises the tome, The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life.

Combined within the binding of this work is not only a conversation between father (Jean-Francois Revel) and son (Matthieu Ricard), but also a sort of dialogue between east and west, an agreeable disagreement between two athiesms, the Western secular denial of a transcendent personal Creator (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) and the Eastern philosophical denial of the religious Hindu traditions which comprises the sophisticated Buddhist system of thought.

Throughout the course of the discussion we see, more than anything, the west’s embrace of eastern values through the father’s curiousity about the son, as well as the west’s secular ignorance and stupidity about its own religious traditions. Many of Revel’s statements, for instance, regarding Christian traditions and mystery are unfounded and struck me as odd and obtuse; while many of Ricard’s statements about Buddhist beliefs, while seeming more in line with my own understanding of religious tradition, often struck me as self-contradictory and confusing.

For instance, on several occasions Revel makes broad sweeping statements in critcism of Tibetan Buddhist peity, using almost archaic Reformation language, levelling the argument of "empty superstition" in an uninformed manner, sort of like trying to cut butter with a chainsaw. For one instance of many, Revel falsely claims, "In Catholicism, to light a candle in a church implies the very superstitious idea that the candle can earn us either the grace of a saint, of the holy Virgin, or even of God himself, and grant our wishes."

One might wonder how Revel defines "superstition" or whom he queried about the practice of candle-lighting, which certainly can become a superstitious act, but is not necessarily so. Rather, it is most often a symbolic act, representing steadfastness and veneration for those whom one honors, as well as symbolizing the light that enlightens the heart darkened throough cosmic ruin and personal sin, and is therefore imbued with inherent meaning and beauty. Revel too easily grasps the potential denigration of an act, and fallaciously represents it as the act itself, revealing basic misunderstandings and flaws in his critique of his own western heritage. Revel constantly repeats similar genetic fallacies throughout the discussion, which his son sometimes eloquently refutes.

In this instance, Ricard offers: "Such customs are useful outer supports allowing believers to communicate with an inner truth. I know from experience that when ordinary Tibetans offer thousands of butter lamps (the equivalent of candles) they’re well aware that the light they’re offering symbolizes wisdom dispelling darkness. The prayer they’d be making as they offered lamps would go something like, ‘May the light of wisdom arise in myself and all living beings, both in this life and in lives to come.’ Even very simple people are aware of the symbolism."

Father and son continue to discuss metaphyics, compassion and love, reincarnation, karma, politics, meditation and the differences between western secular philosophy and eastern spirituality.

Unfortunately, Revel’s secular view is a bit dated and rigorous; he would fit in more with the perishing scientism of the last century (and the one previous to it) than with the current philosophical debates surrounding, for instance, the nature of mind, computationalism, and other, less discursive or empircal models. Like Nietszche, Revel is unaware of the nature of the mysteries of his own religious traditions, and in rejecting degradations, commits fallacious steps of logic without, perhaps, realizing the manner in which his own secular assumptions are more like blinding faith than are the very traditions he attempts to refute. In other words, he is a fundamentalist for atheism, owning all the negative connotations that may be attached.

If this were a book by Revel himself, I would have thrown it across the room (such as when, again, he defines "free-will" as the unlimited ability to do anything one wishes, which is not the definition any advocate of free-will would agree with--even Kierkegaard admitted that free-will is limited by necessity). Revel represents well, then, perhaps, a dying or even dead secularist scientism in the west, (which in recent years has sought to revive itself through various popular books that basically regurgitated well-refuted 18th and 19th century arguments for atheism).