As you can tell from some of my past posts, I can't get enough of Flatmancrooked.com! If you haven't done so already definitely check out their site, read their works, listen to their Raudio, purchase their anthology and their John Updike shirt! Support the cause and get awesome stuff to boot!
I had the opportunity to finally meet fmC's very own co-founder and editor, Kaelan Smith, at a New Year's Eve party in San Francisco. I had been reading fmC and hearing a bit about the man of the hour here and there. Now here he was - the man, the myth - right before my eyes! I meant to conduct an interview while he was in Los Angeles 2 weeks ago (mutual friends were showing a reading of their musical) but never really got around to it so during the whirlwind weekend. So I emailed Kaelan a few questions and he was gracious enough to humour me with his answers. His contribution made me smile and I hope it triggers the same effect avec toi!
Find more of Kaelan's works on Flatmancrooked.com and get a peek into his upcoming novel "Brute" at SweetScience.com. I have been working my way through this to get a bit of a taste of the forthcoming finished product. As Kaelan explained one day before I dove in, "It's all about fighting, but you'll see that it's not about fighting."
1. What book are you currently reading? Who is it by? What is it about?
I am currently re-reading "The Sun Also Rises," but as I've read it a number of times recently, I suppose I should discuss the book I read last that I had not previously read. That was "Death in the Afternoon," also by Hemingway. It is, without claiming to follow any sort of narrative arc, a book about bullfighting. Whereas "The Sun Also Rises" is a novel that has at its center, at least in the second half, bullfighting, but is in the end about love and jealousy and recuperation in Paris and Pamplona, "Death in the Afternoon" is about bullfighting almost exclusively. Hemingway sets out, not to apologize or needlessly glorify the sport, but to give the sport its due glory and explain its beauty to an American audience. "Death in the Afternoon" articulates how the bullfight is a tragedy---the death of the bull is inevitable, and even if the death of the matador is not certain, it is likely that he will be gored at least once a season. If of course he finds himself in competition with another matador, as Joselito found himself in competition with Belmonte in 1920, and both matadors are great, it is perhaps inevitable that one will die. When Joselito was killed in the summer of 1920, Spain had been anticipating his death since the spring as one expects Hamlet's death from "A little more than kin."
2. How did you happen to come across this book? Was it a recommendation? Did you read a review? Random bookshop find?
My good friend Tom McCafferty recommended it to me, though I'd forgotten to get a copy until I was in Wellington, New Zealand, looking at a shelf of books in my brother's house. I saw a red, soft-cover copy of "Death in the Afternoon" that had faded to pink after a year---long before it was shelved---sitting on a desk in the sun. I'd finished a collection of AJ Liebling essays while I was staying at his house, and started "Death." I only finished it recently after getting distracted by both Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" and Bolano's "2666," the latter of which I have not finished.
3. How do you normally choose the books you read?
I take recommendations, or read reviews. But I trust very few people, and very few critics. For instance, I do not trust Maureen Corrigan. Nor do I care for how she over-annunciates her syllables. Regardless, I always listen to her recommendations. Once, at her behest, I bought Uwem Akpan's "Say You're One of Them," only to discover that he suffered, in his prose, from the same temporal and spatial dementia that afflicted Dostoevsky in "Crime and Punishment." But, Dostoevsky published that in serial. What, I wonder, is Akpan's problem? Yet I liked the book as it was about Africa and I tend to fetishize the tragedies there.
4. What was the last book you read? Who is it by? What is it about?
Since the most recent book I finished is "Death in the Afternoon," and since I already discussed it, I suppose I should discuss "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill. It is about cricket, and it in some way mirrors "The Great Gatsby," or so said so many reviews. Yes, Chuck Ramiskoon is Gatsbyish, and there is a Daisy and a Myrtle, and even a Nick, and there is a murder and a body in a body of water. But whereas Gatsby's death is the culmination of a tragic love affair, Ramiskoon dies, I think, for his love of cricket. I am an enormous sports fan, and am willing, hypothetically to accept this fate, but O'Neill, for all the specificity of his prose, didn't convince me. The novel felt decidedly British, which is to say it moved backwards more often than forwards. It was bursting with backstory and memory, and not enough sex in the present.
5. Can you name your favourite book? And why is this your favourite?
My favorite book is probably "Lolita." Or maybe it is "The Sun Also Rises." If you have read both books, and I'm sure most of your blog readers have, you might wonder, "how on earth can these be his favorite books? They're diametrically opposed to one another." I agree. That is why I like them. I enjoyed the dialogue in "The Sun Also Rises" when I first read it, but I felt that it was largely unemotional. So I read it again. And then I listened to a recording of it. All told, I read it eleven times last year. Now I know that it is a very emotional novel, but that it hinges on three or four sentences whose value, if you pass by them too quickly, you might not recognize. For instance, when Mike Campbell says of Brett's affairs, when the fiesta is over, "But it's not too much fun for me," he means that her infidelities have nearly killed him. That then explains his lashing out at Cohn at dinner after the first bullfight. Now, speaking of "Lolita," I just like fourteen year old girls.
6. What genre of books do you prefer? Or do you have a favourite author whose works you gravitate towards?
I read "literary" fiction, I suppose. I don't care for comic books, or graphic novels, but that may have a lot to do with the fact that I didn't read them growing up. I also enjoy some non-fiction. I read Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" last year, of course, but I mean that I enjoy narrative non-fiction that has no instructional purpose. Last year I read Philip Gourevitch's "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families." It is about the Rwandan genocide, and is a terrifying and wonderfully written book. I also read all of AJ Liebling's boxing essays last year. He is the greatest American prose stylist you've never heard of. And I discovered Norman Mailer's "The Fight," which is an ambitious book about Muhammed Ali's fight with George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1975. But I have really been loving Hemingway's work recently, as well as Nabokov's. Nabokov, I said recently in an article about Roberto Bolano, is, since Shakespeare, the writer that best harmonizes the heart and the mind. That is my highest compliment.
7. What was your favourite book growing up? Feel free to name multiple if you can't name just one. What was it about this book that you loved so much as a child?
I didn't read growing up, or not very much. I remember loving "Jurassic Park," though. That will have to suffice.
8. What book growing up was THE book that made you fond of reading/literature?
This didn't happen until high school, and it was "The Grapes of Wrath." I loved the
juxtaposition of the the narrative and the abstract chapters that broke up the narrative. I think I would like this much less, now.
9. Was there a particular writer that inspired you to write?
I suppose it was Steinbeck. I remember writing on a slip of paper somewhere when I was a freshman in high school: "Steinbeck is simple enough for child to read, and complex enough for a philosopher to explore." I don't know what I think of that statement now. Maybe it is accurate; I haven't read Steinbeck in eight years. In addition to Steinbeck I remember being profoundly influenced by Albert Camus as a Sophomore. "The Stranger" had a deep, though ultimately negative, affect on me as a writer. For a long time I thought that Mersault's apathy was something to aspire to. But guess what isn't interesting? Apathy. I should have been reading Hemingway and Nabokov in high school, instead of Camus and Cormac McCarthy, though I might not have recognized Hemingway's emotion. McCarthy did plant some seeds of romanticism in me as a Senior. After reading "All the Pretty Horses" I wanted to ride to Mexico and get in some sort of gun battle and cauterize my leg wound with the barrel of my revolver. But McCarthy is as apathetic about human relationships as anyone ever was. Don't be fooled by "The Road," for instance, which is a terrible and sentimental book that borrows---I hope accidentally---from Beckett's "Company," and achieves much less despite being six times longer. It is little more than an episodic children's book interspersed with vague passages about ash. And it's devoid of sex, for God's sake.
10. What books do you often recommend to friends? Why?
I recommend "The Sweet Science" by AJ Liebling. I also recommend "The Sun Also Rises" and "Lolita," as you might imagine, because if you can rationalize those two books in your head you might understand literature. But more than recommending specific books, I recommend the re-reading of books---the excessive re-reading of books. Imagine if you'd only listened to your favorite song once. That is how I feel about novels. You do not begin to understand them certainly until the fifth read.
11. Do you carry a book around with you everywhere? If not a physical book, do you listen to audio books often? Thoughts on the Kindle?
I used to carry around "The Great Gatsby" in my jacket pocket because I had a copy that fit in there. Now I have an iPhone, but no e-book applications for it. I do listen to audio books, and feel that there is great value in them so long as you do not only listen to audio books. But listening to a book will help re-contextualize it, and will thus help you see it more clearly. Also, the musicality of prose (a dangerous term, indeed) doesn't always come through unless the words are heard out loud. When I say musicality, I'm not referring to Toni Morrison. She mis-utilizes metaphor. I am biased towards simile, but I don't care when she says that a house is full of "baby venom." I don't know what that means, literally or figuratively, and I don't care. But JD Salinger, at least in "Nine Stories," is musical. I quote: "With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left--the wet--hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood." Are you kidding me? Does it get more wonderful than that? The beauty, though, is apparent without hearing that prose. But you asked me about the Kindle. I think it is, in part, the future of books, which seems terrible, but I cannot say for sure. The nice thing about a book is that it cannot receive emails. The Kindle eventually will. The iPhone already does. But I sound like an old man. Really I'm twenty-five. If people use the Kindle to read, then wonderful. The future always looks frightening before it is the present.
12. In the book "Ex Libris" by Ann Fadiman that I am currently reading (on and off) she mentions having an "Odd Shelf". It's a collection of books you own that are of a particular genre...but just really random collection of books whose subject matter is totally unrelated to the rest of your collection. Her Odd Shelf holds 64 books about polar exploration: naval manuals, journals, narratives, collections of photographs, etc. Do you have an "odd shelf"? And if so, what subject matter would I find? If you do not currently have an "odd shelf" per se, what would your ideal "odd shelf" contain?
I don't have an odd shelf. If I did it would be filled with porn.
13. Is there a fictional character (or author) you would love to spend a day with and what would you do?
A fictional author? Clearly. Pierre Menard. A fictional character? Right now, I'd like to go fishing on the Irati River with Bill Gorton.
14. Can you tell me a bit about your upcoming novel? What made you want to write this/about this?
My forthcoming novel, "Brute," is about a journalist who sets out to write about two boxers in a small city. Very quickly he falls in love with the girlfriend of one of the fighters. That sounds reductive, and it is. It is very difficult to summarize a book well, especially when it is not finished. But I started writing it as a journalist, covering the careers of two fighters in Sacramento---one on the way up, and one on the way down. I was supposed to write a 3,000 word article. Instead I wrote 30,000 words, much as Hemingway wrote 110,000 words on the matadors Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez, when LIFE magazine had asked him for 5,000. I find that I enjoy getting carried away with a real story. Life is rarely as clearly narrative as it is in sport. A boxing match is a wonderful frame for a conflict between two men.
15. What other works have you written? Articles? Essays? Plays?
I wrote a profile of Shepard Fairey for a magazine in LA last year. It was, I believe, the most comprehensive article on the Obama HOPE poster written before the election. Now I believe the New Yorker has just published a profile. I've published a number of short stories in various magazines, but the non-fictional part of "Brute"---all 30,000 words of it---is appearing on thesweetscience.com in a 20-part series. I feel that that series, though, drags in the beginning. The beginning, of course, is what I wrote first. Now I think it is slow, and even when it speeds up it is not always sure-footed. But by the ninth part, certainly, which comes out in a few weeks, I am, for the time being, very proud of it. Oh, and I had a play called "Undressing" debut on Theatre Row in New York last year. There are rumors that it will appear in LA some time this year.
16. If you could adapt any book into a movie which book would it be?
I think I wouldn't adapt a book. I think I would re-adapt "Pandora's Box," which was a silent film made in Germany in 1929. Though, how it could get made without Louise Brooks as Lulu, I don't know. I've never been so mesmerized by a woman in a film. Only a few times in real life have I been so astounded by a woman. It makes you think that Kenneth Tynan must have slept with her, even though she was in her seventies, when he found her in Rochester.
17. When do you find time to read? How long does a reading session last?
I read at night before bed. Of course, I read all day for work. But for pleasure I read at night. I might read for an hour, though not usually longer unless I am on a plane, in which case I might read for ten or twelve hours. For me, though, reading makes me want to write, and I must be careful not to read at the wrong time if I intend to sleep.
18. Do you have a favourite spot to read at? Can you read in any situation (noisy, crowded, etc.)
I can sometimes read amidst noise. Usually, though, if I'm anywhere but home, I require ear plugs. I would like to eventually have a reading room in my house into which I was not allowed to bring my cellphone. Maybe the reading room would be lit by candle. I don't know. Certainly it would be devoid of any other technology than a light bulb.
19. Can you read in another language? And if not, which language would you like to read/write in?
I cannot read in Spanish, but I would like to read in Spanish. I would like to read Borges in Spanish, even if he considered his native language archaic and tedious. I suppose I would also like to read the Russians in Russian. Thank god Nabokov forced himself to write in English.
20. Do you have any random reading quirks? (You refuse to write in margins? You hate folder pages or bending the spines? You reflect upon a passage for hours/days?)
I love to dog-ear pages, but I hate breaking spines. In fact I despise breaking spines. Do I reflect on passages for hours or days? I sometimes reflect on them for years. I've thought for two years, at least for a few minutes a day, about the passage in Beckett's "Malone Dies" where the boy visits the Lambert house the afternoon their mule dies. My god, I remember so clearly the younger Lambert tamping down the mule's hooves protruding from the loose top soil after they had buried it lying on its back, its legs stiff with rigor mortis. I suppose I always will.
