Too Hot For Radio: Jonathan Lethem "The King of Sentences"

On booking.com it's easy to book your holiday home. And thanks to no hidden fees, there's no more. Guys, found a villa, I'm confirming. Where were we? Added fees. We don't do sneaky added fees. So you can go from home to holiday home with no dramas. And relax. On booking.com, finding a holiday home's easy. Booking.com, booking.com, yeah. Get the new Samsung Galaxy S26 on the UK's best network. Circle to search and outfit and find the entire look without switching apps. And claim a Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Go worth £299. Get yours on EE Today. Oh, hello. This is a Parnan and Charla and welcome listeners to another episode of Too Hot for Radio. We appreciate you returning for another dose of oh-so-slightly-smutty storytelling. And yes, hotheads, to prepare myself for that ungodly sequence of S's. I did warm up with my favorite tongue twisters. And yes, they were appropriately too hot. You know, Peter Piper poked a pack of peckers. She smells sperm cells by the seashore. All the hits. Now they say never meet your heroes. This is why I routinely shun Oprah's brunch invitations. But when I was a child, well, hotheads, I did not play it safe. Risk was my middle name, much to the surprise of the parents who did not give me one. I fostered one very special obsession. Today we'd called a parasocial relationship, but in any case, I felt like I needed more. So one day after years of pleading fan letters, I did meet my hero, Thomas the Tank Engine. And, well, it was awkward. I mean, I'm shy and he's a train. It was a lot of long silences punctuated by him tooting his own horn. Anyway, after that encounter, I grew a little circumspect. The reason I bring all this up, of course, is that today's story is all about what happens when you become infatuated with someone you don't really know. And what strange or scary things you might do in order to make real contact with that person. The story is also about youth, love of language, and what you do with all your passion when you have more energy than you know what to do with. This story is by Jonathan Lethem. He's a writer known for novels such as Motherless Brooklyn and the Fortress of Solitude, as well as short stories recently collected in his book, A Different Kind of Tension. While he's amazing at coming up with great narrative hooks, he's also quite good at recreating the awkward moments of young adulthood, as you'll hear in today's story, The King of Sentences. Before we get to the story, let me make sure you're not startled by any of our content. Warning. This story mentions pubes. You never know, some people are squeamish, even though I suspect that most of those people do, in fact, have pubes. Performing this story is Brendan Hunt. He's a long-time writer and theater actor who is best known these days for the series Ted Lasso. Hunt helped to create it, write it, and on the show he plays Coach Beard. He's also appeared in plenty of other TV series, including Bless This Mess and the animated movie Elio. You will no doubt hear the relish with which he indulges the young protagonist's logophilia. After the reading, stay with me as I talk with author Jonathan Lethem. Now let's hear Brendan Hunt perform Jonathan Lethem's The King of Sentences. The King of Sentences. This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences. Sentences. Nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn't resist until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming. Sentences. Esther's cleavage is something to be noticed. Or you can't have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture. Or I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as tastes, but is in fact nothing of the sort. Or I said I want my eggs scrambled, not destroyed. At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we'd rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with our filthy wax pencil. Or type it 25 times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper 25 times and then slice each page into 25 slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the result in 625 slips of paper throughout the streets of our city. Fortunes without cookies. We worked in bookstores, the only thing to do. Nobody who didn't and that included every one of our customers knew that any of the volumes throbbing along those shelves was worth, not remotely, nor did the bookstores' owners. Clea and I were custodians of a treasury of sentences much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Though we mostly handled the books only by their covers, or page briefly, through to ascertain that no dunce had striped the pages yellow or pink with a highlighter, we communed deeply with them, felt certain that only we deserved to abide with them. Any minute we'd read them all cover to cover, it was surely about to happen. But meanwhile, every customer robbed us a little. At the cash registers, we spoke sentences tailored to convey our disdain. In terms so subtle, it was barely detectable. If our customers blinked a little at the insults we embedded in our thank-yous, we believed they just might be worthy of the marvels their grubby dollars entitled them to bear away. We disparaged modern and incomplete forms, gornless and garbled jargon, graffiti, advertising, text, messaging. No sentence conveyed by photons or bounced off satellites had ever come home intact. Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement, or slapped under sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural. Were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjammed in our loft bed, Clea and I patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chief in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, ensuring that a souffle or sourdough would rise. A good, brave sentence, I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring, might jolly clear to instant climax. We'd rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat and bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms. Nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war. If only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels, they never would be. All the media trumpeted the administration's azigrammer. But we were chumps, and we knew it. As makers of sentences, we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else's dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues. We barely glanced at our wall scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we'd find in muddy clogs and storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded. Our manuscripts, those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world, but from each other. My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with X, X, X, X, X's of regret. I scurried to read Clea's manuscript every time she left the apartment, but never confessed that I even knew it existed. Her title was, those young rangers thought love was a scandal like a bald white head. Mine was, I heard the laughter of the side men from behind their instruments. Others might hail kings of beer or burgers, we bowed to the king of sentences. There was just one. We owned his titles in immaculate firsts and tattered reading copies and odd variant editions. It thrilled us to see the pedestrian jacket copy and salacious cover art on his early mass market paperbacks to think that he'd once been considered fodder for dime store carousels. The newest editions of the titles, he'd allowed to be reprinted. Four early novels had been suppressed from republication. Were splendidly austere, their jackets from the small presses that published him now bearing text only, no graven images. The progress of his editions on our shelf was like a cartoon of evolution, a slug crawling from a surf to become a mammal, a monkey, and then at last a hairless noble fellow gazing into the future. The king of sentences gave no interviews, taught nowhere, condescended to appear at no panels or symposia. His tastes, hobbies, and heartbreaks were unknown and we extrapolated them from his books at our peril. His digital footprint was pale. People like that didn't care about people like him. Google, for what it was worth, favored a famous painter of wildlife scenes, Beaver Dam's hair and hideaways, with the same name. The king of sentences only wrote, beavering away himself on a dam of quintessence, while wholly oblivious of public indifference and of a sales record by now likely descending to rungs occupied by. His author photograph, identical on twenty years of jackets and press clippings until it stopped circulating at all, arrested him somewhere in the mid-sixties, turtlenecked, holding a cocktail glass forever. His last cocktail, maybe. In the same loft where we entangled, Clea and I drove ourselves mad reading the king of sentences books aloud by candlelight. When we ought to have been sleeping, we'd tear the book from each other's hands for the pleasure of running his word like gerbils in the habitrails of our own mouths. We'd alternate chapters, pages, paragraphs, finally sentences at last agreed to read him in unison. He could practically hear us as we entoned his words. We'd swear they reached his ears. But not really. Really, we were vowing to ourselves and to each other that we'd make a day trip in search of the king of sentences, that we'd flush him out, propel ourselves into his company and confidence, buoy him with our love and bind ourselves and our secret manuscripts, oh yeah, to his greatness. We each had what the other needed of this we were positive. Maybe we'd watch him write. Maybe he'd watch us dance or fuck. Who knew? We'd buy him lunch. He was surely mortal enough for lunch. He'd want us at least for lunch. He lived, we'd learned, north of the city, having drawn from his days as a Greenwich village fluner, whatever inspiration he'd needed, and departed around the time of that last photographic cocktail. We figured that his departure from the narrow townhouse on Jane Street marked an expiration date on anything west of Second Avenue as an authentic locale. Minimal detective work pinned him to a PO box in Hastings on Hudson. How clever and coy he had been to find a place name that was itself but the mere insertion of an apostrophe, a sentence, and a fairly lascivious one too. So it was that we knew he'd summoned us to his hiding place. Clea could play Hudson, and I'd be hasty. We sent a postcard warning addressed to his box, no return address so he couldn't refuse, no fancy sentences fearing his judgment of those, just fragments, coming in two weeks, get ready, can't wait to meet in person, as if we'd already met on other planes, for we had. The appointed day came upon us like a sickness, and though each in our privacy might have preferred to stay in bed and sweat it out, we couldn't have looked each other in the eye if we hadn't staggered out of doors to the subway up to Grand Central Terminal. During the short ride we held hands, fever-sweaty at the palms. Exiting Metro North's Hastings on Hudson Station under a thundercloud clotted sky, we found ourselves the sole travelers not claimed by family members waiting in Subaru's or bleeping their driver's side doors unlocked as they crossed the parking lot with cell phones clammed to their ears. The train continued on behind us in the station depopulated as if neutron bombed. This is the town of the king of sentences. This little town. He could be watching us now, don't act stupid, with a telescope. We blundered along something called Main Street, seeking the post office until a passerby directed us to Warburton Avenue. Inside the mediocre lobby we staked out a position near the numbered boxes, innocuously pretending to screw up our change of address forms so that we had to start over again a dozen times. His box which we surveilled with peripheral vision only, post with risk and possibility. Our own postcard had been handled there, a precursor to this encounter. Losing patience we sidled to the main counter. What time on the average day does the box holder typically, you know, pick up? Box mail goes up at 10.30. Right, sure, but mostly when do citizens appear and begin to gather it up, take it to their private homes, whenever they care to? Sure, right, this is America, isn't it? Sure is, thank you! We resumed charades with a chained pen. Two, three, five, eight, eighteen, hastings on Hudsonians, lumbered in to check their boxes, sort circulars into recycling bins, greet the postmistress and trade coins for stamps, each of comically tiny denominations. Everyone in this hamlet, it seemed, had just found a 16 or 23 cent stamp and a dusty drawer and had chosen today to supplement it up to viability using car seat nickels and pennies. Yet somehow, between transactions, the postmistress had snuck away for a tattling phone call, or so we surmised from the blinking patrol car that now swept up in front of the PO, into the lobby strode a cowboy-esque figure, a man late 50-ish wearing a badge in the manner of a star, lean, and when he spoke, laconic. Clear read my mind, saying, you the sheriff in these parts? Chief of police. Not the sheriff of Hastings on Hudson? No, ma'am, there isn't one. Can I ask you what you're doing here? Waiting! Have you folks got postal business today? No, I said, but we've got business with someone who might have postal business, if that's okay. I suppose it might be, sir, but I'm forced to wonder who we're talking about. The king of sentences. I see. You wouldn't happen to be the authors of a certain unsigned and borderline ominous postcard. Might happen to be, though there was hardly ominous intent. I see, and now you're waiting, I'm guessing, for the address E, in the manner of free Americans in a federally controlled public space. Yes, we checked with the postmistress. I see. You mind if I wait a bit myself? By definition, we can't. Soon enough, he appeared. The king of sentences, unmistakably, though withered like a shrunken apple fetish of the noble cipher in the photograph. He wore a gray sweatshirt and caramel corduroys with the knees and thighs bald like a worn radial tire. Absurd black knikies over gray dress socks, hair white and scant, eyes tiny and darting. They darted to the non-sheriff, who knotted minimally, the king knotted back with equal economy. We collapsed his plan to our knees, conveying the beautiful anguish of our subjection to the sole king of sentences, bowed heads, fingers wriggling as if combing the air for particles of his greatness. A chapter of I heard the laughter of the sidemen from behind their instruments, secreted in the waistband of my underwear, buckled as I knelt there. The king stood inert, if anything, sagged slightly. The chief turned and shook his head, a little appalled. You okay? He asked the king. Sure, let me talk to them a minute. Anything you say. The law went outside to stand and take a cigarette beside the cruiser. He watched us through the window. We knotted and waved as we scrambled back to our feet. Who sent you? The king said. You, you, you, Cleo said. It was you. We weren't so much a scent as drawn, I said. You gave us the gift of your work and now we're here, a gift in return. Take us, Cleo said. No thank you, the king said. His eyes shitted nervously from Cleo, settling on me. We anointed you, the king of sentences, I told him. We're the ones who did that, nobody else. I didn't want to bully him with news of how scarcely his name circulated, how stale and marked down the assembly of his hard covers on news bookstore shelves. I didn't tell you to come. No, but you are responsible for our presence. Let me be clear, I have nothing for you. Take us home, not on your life. We came all this way. He shrugged, when's the next train back? The sentences that emerged from his mouth were flayed, generic, like lines from black and white movies. I tried not to be disappointed in this stylistic turn. He had something to teach us, always. We don't care. We have tickets. We came for you. I don't fraternize. This kind of intrusion is the last thing I need. Lunch, I begged. Just lunch. I eat only what my housekeeper prepares. A disproportion of sodium could murder me at this point. Clea hugged herself with pleasure. I heard her murmur the line, cherishing it privately. Desperation. Sodium. Murder me. The king craned on his nighty toes, checking that the cop was still outside. Forget lunch. An hour of your time. We're to hover in the post office lobby for an hour, doing what, exactly? No, let's go somewhere, Clea said. A hotel room, if you won't have us in your house. Or the bar, I said, offering a check on Clea's presumption. The bar in the lobby of a hotel, a public setting for a cocktail. The king laughed for the first time. A cackle edged like a burnt cookie with bitterness. What largesse? You take me to one of our town's fine hotels. They're as superb as the restaurants. Motel 6 or Econolodge, I believe those are your options. Anywhere, Clea panted. The king's weary gaze again shunted. Clea, myself, the disinterested postmistress, the chief outside, who now ground out a button to the curb with his heel and turned his head to follow the progress of some retreating buttocks. The king's voice edged down an octave. Econolodge, a lower brunyan. I'll find you there in 15 minutes. We don't have a vehicle, too bad. Can we ride with you? No way, Jose. How do we get there? Figure it out. The king of sentences departed the PO and sulked around the corner and out of view, presumably to his car. I couldn't have entirely imagined the extra little kick in his step as he went. The king had been energized, if only slightly, by meeting his subjects. It was a start, I thought. On the sidewalk, we teetered with excitement, blinking in the glare that now filtered through the gnarled clouds. The chief looked us up and down again. We offered charming smiles. Can I give you folks a lift back to the station? No thanks. We're looking for lower brunyan. Care to point us in the right direction? Why lower brunyan? The Econolodge, if you must know. Is it walking distance? Longish, I'd say. Why not let me escort you? Sure. We sat behind a cage. The back seat smelled of smoke, perfume and vomit, raising interesting questions about the definition of police work in Hastings-on-Hudson. The chief took corners smoothly in the prowling, snaky manner of a driver and was unconcerned about regulating his speed. You two in the regular habit of doing junk like this? What do you mean by junk? Putting yourselves in the hands of a customer like your friend in there? I'd be junking his hands any day, Clea said defiantly. Well, he's old and pretty harmless by now, the chief said. I saw him the other day in the pharmacy getting himself one of those inflatable donuts for sitting on when you've got anal discomfort. I'd say from what I've heard those sorts of troubles are his just desserts. We're not dummies around here, you know. When he moved up here from the city, a certain number of stories trailed after him. He's been a bad boy. He's the greatest maker of sentences in the United States of America, I said. I've had a look, the chief said. He's not bad. I'm just wondering if you ever troubled with the content of his books, as opposed to just the sentences. Sentences are content, Clea said. The chief lifted his hands and mocked surrender. Fair enough then I've said my piece. Just understand this, whatever my personal views of either his character or his prose, he's under my protection surely as any other citizen in this town. Comprende? Does everyone up here speak Spanish? Is this a bilingual metropolis? Clea said. That's enough out of you, young lady. Here's the Oconologian, a good day to you both. Thanks, chief. He crept inside the Oconologian's slumbering atrium. A uniformed teenage clerk blinked hello, raised his hand. We ignored him. The king of sentences hovered beside a counter bearing urns of complimentary coffee, labeled premium, diesel, and jet fuel. The king nodded mutely, beckoned to us with a tilt of his chin. We trailed him down a corridor with a tongue-hued carpet. I worked not to visualize an anal donut. Inside, he said, the king lit only a lamp at the bedside in the windowless room. We crowded in, the room a mere margin to the queen-sized bed. The air conditioner rumbled and hummed, the temperature was frigid. The king took the only chair, gestured us to the bed's edge. We sat. Clea and I began simultaneously, tangling loud. We're, I said, Clea said, you're the—let's not waste time, the king interrupted. He spoke in an exhausted snarl, all redemptive possibility purged from his voice and manner. Our rendezvous had taken on the starkness of an end game. Do you want money? Money, I said. That's right. He reached into his shirt pocket and revealed a packet of 20s, obviously prepared in advance. It occurred to me wildly that he'd taken us for blackmailers. Perhaps he was blackmailed routinely, had cash on hand for regular payouts. How much will it take to make you go away? He began counting out piles. 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 20, 40, 60, 80, 200. We don't want your money! I nearly shouted. You've given us enough, you've given us everything. We're here to give something back. I suppose I meant to be glad to hear it. He repocketed his money carelessly. We'd like you to be glad, yes. He only cocked an eyebrow. What have you got for me? I untucked my polo shirt and withdrew my chapter. The page is amassed, curled and baked in its secret compression against my belly. I knew you looked funny, Clea cried. I ignored her, handed the pages across to the king. He accepted them, his expression sour. For a moment there, I thought you were about to undress. He said, would you like that, Clea blurted? Should we undress? The king examined us starkly. He placed my chapter ignominiously on the carpet beneath his chair. Perhaps now we were at the crossroads. Perhaps we had his attention at last. Yes, he said cautiously. I think that would be advantageous. We stripped, racing to be the first bearer to his view. I'd lose the race either way, for Clea had rigged the game. She had written a sentence on her stomach in blue marker. The source of her lately couldn't recall whether he was a capable sleeper or an insomniac. Brilliant, I thought bitterly. The king stared. I saw Clea's pubic hair through the eyes of the king. Clea's bush was full and crazy. I thought, I will never see it again without seeing the pubic hair at which the king of sentences once glanced. The king said, insomniac, I believe. Clea blushed around the sentence, her flesh blazing like neon. Hand me your clothes, please. We handed the king our clothes. He began immediately rending them in a weary frenzy of destruction, tearing both our shirts, sleeve from sleeve, shredding Clea's bra and underwear, slicing at her skirt with his nicotine teeth. He struggled to do any damage to my jeans. I felt I wanted to help him somehow, but stood jellied in my nakedness, doing nothing, not wishing to insult him, to draw attention to his feebleness. It was a mighty enough display given his age. The hands that forged the supreme sentences in contemporary American writing were now dismembering the syntax of my underwear. Soon enough our daily costumes lay in an unseemly ruined pile at our feet. My chapter scattered beneath the clothes and chair legs, forgotten. He hadn't looked at even one sentence, never would. I knew I would have to forgive him, so I did it right then and there. I forgave him. The king moved to the door. We stood in our bare feet, wobbling slightly, goose pimpled, still breathing out clouds of expectation like frostbreath. That's all, Clea said. That's all, you ask. Yes, that's all. That's more than enough. You're leaving us here. I am. He closed the door carefully, not slamming it. Clea and I waited in appropriate interval, then turned and clung to each other in a kind of rapture, understanding abruptly and at last just what it takes to be king. How much in the end it actually costs. Hi, Jonathan, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really enjoyed your story, The King of Sentences, and I thought Brendan Hunt did a fantastic job reading it. So this story, The King of Sentences, has an unexpected inspiration in Roberto Bologna. Can you talk a bit about how Bologna inspired this story in particular? Well, I mean, there's one thing that happened when Pallanio kind of fell on my head and it was in the form of the Savage Detectives, which is that he frees you, not that he's the first person ever to do this, but there's something about the exuberance with which he writes about writers and writing that was like, oh, this thing I think about all the time and it's my life, it's not actually a prohibited subject and I can make fun of it and I can fool around with it the way I do with so many other things. You know, I can exaggerate it and make it surreal and make it silly, but not in the cause of dismissing it, but precisely as a way, as an avenue for pouring my deepest yearnings and fears and excitement into the subject. And he does that so brilliantly in Savage Detectives and elsewhere. You know, he writes about writers constantly. Yeah, and you yourself have explored ideas of kind of not just writers, but reclusive artists at the fringe as with Fortress of Solitude. Is there anything that draws you to these kinds of figures? Do you think in general we're drawn to them as a culture? Well, it's hard for me to talk for everyone, but I mean, I know that I kind of grew up in a world of the arts and so often when I would see them depicted in fiction or film, it was always things that were total home runs, people who won the Nobel Prize or bands that went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the most famous and reclusive film director who ever lived. And I thought, well, what about all the ones that are like the ones that I meet and are like, you know, great, great, they're more likely, which is like half successful things. Bands that had a lot of practices and argued about what their name was going to be and then, you know, only had one gig. Or, you know, writers who were slumping along through the middle of a long career and they're, you know, they're wondering if anyone is out there listening or, you know, or yeah, like the dad in Fortress of Solitude who's painting this endless film that no one is ever going to see. And meanwhile, making his living doing these pulp paperback covers that bring him a certain kind of a claim that he has total contempt for. You know, it's a mixed up world when you throw your expressive life into the marketplace and we all cope with it in different ways. Yeah, I love that idea too of just like the middle tier of artists. Like there's no reason they wouldn't also just have like super fans who covet everything they do. And yeah, I love that you kind of depicted what would that look like. But yeah, there are writers that, that, you know, we think of as reclusive famously like JD Salinger or Thomas Pingeon. Were you thinking at all of those types of writers? Well, I mean, the idea of the reclusive artists or the reclusive writer specifically kind of haunts postwar 20th century literature and it's a reaction to the desire for purity, of course, of a kind because we feel everyone feels vaguely soiled when they're reading interviews or seeing publicity for a writer that they want to take very seriously and so the ones who solved that who cracked the code by make being famous for refusing to appear seem very sacred and solemn to us. Of course, that trick mostly doesn't work. What we notice are the exceptions, you know, Salinger or Pingeon. Counter publicity became a great play for them. But mostly if you decline to be interviewed, the spotlight moves on to someone who is willing to be interviewed. You know, reclusiveness isn't like some life hack. Here's one easy trick to, you know, hit the top of the charts without ever having to get out of bed. But the idea is also comical because it's, you know, the writer writes to connect and to impress. You know, this we know that there's that human reality inside of it all, but we still we revere the arts and we want to see them as outside of the ordinary. Life. So it can be, you know, both exciting and then suddenly also really deflating when a figure becomes human to us when we see them in normal terms, or see them, you know, fumbling around to find an interesting thing to say aloud when they're so brilliant on the page. Right. Right. It all just ends up being like a human behind the curtain, like the wizard. But yeah, that's fascinating too to think about just whether we project more onto people we know more about already or less about like whether one lends itself more to are creating like a whole reality around them that they have no responsibility for. They can't manage it, whether they are are talking a mile a minute and appearing on every social media possible or or refusing all all interventions and interactions. It's the parasocial is invented by the by the person who is is experiencing it. Yeah. And the book is subject to this as well, you know, you met you write them and they just exist and then they get to be read or or dismissed or confused, you know, mistaken for other things. And it's absolutely beyond your control. You're also someone who, you know, credits and offers gratitude to other artists that influence your work. If we sort of just assume at the foundation, every creative person borrows or steals in some way even unconsciously. Why do you think it's important to maybe articulate those connections or get more granular with with saying like, Okay, well I pulled some of this, you know, from here and this from here. Yeah, well, I mean emulation is the path into, well, not just the arts but nearly everything you learn to talk by a ping the talk around you. And, and somehow in in our eagerness to have both the sacred feeling that we have around super expressive art that overwhelms us with its impressiveness. We want to honor those people and think of them as massively original and separate from the the conversation but actually they got there the same way they fooled around they listened. They cobbled things together. And, you know, certainly this is more obvious sometimes in other art mediums. You know, no one is surprised that the way you know a 12 year old kid in his room lured to play lead guitars by trying to do every note. You know, Eddie Van Halen solo that's just the way you get there right now or the yeah, you go to the museum and you see people with easels in front of great artworks trying to repaint them. And at the same time also collage, you know, starting with surrealism and data and the kind of quotations that you find in pop art, and then also sampling and music. The fund of possible images and ideas that float out there are the makings of other kinds of expression that's ordinary now. But we also have a, you know, there's the capitalist imperative to separate an object and protect it put walls around it and make it, you know, intellectual property. So these forces all, you know, contend for our sense of the practice. I always think it's really important to remember and restore a sense of the practice and I know that I make my writings out of what's around me about around, you know, I make them out of other people's I make them out of conversations and feelings inside myself. They're Frankensteins and they don't come from nowhere. This fantasy that the Promethean gesture that something can just be pulled out of an absolute vacuum seems to me kind of silly. Yeah, and it's interesting too that we kind of laud as a culture when someone is like an original, you know, we say like you're a true original or like you're unlike anything else and it's like even those people are, maybe it's not you aren't able to make those connections as directly but I still think those people are also a result of what you're saying like everything they've kind of consumed and been influenced by. So let me tell you a funny story. There's a quote in this essay that you're sort of alluding to of mine called the ecstasy of influence, which is an essay made out of other people's words. And I stitched them together and then I kind of reveal the trick at the end I turn it over and say, oh, this comes from here and this comes from there. One of the lines in the essay is when people use the word original 90% of the time it just means they don't know what the sources were. And that that quote has sort of plopped into the internet discourse and it floats around with my name on it. So now that quote is attributed to me but I think someone else said it. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah. So you mentioned some of your foundational writers as maybe Philip K Dick Raymond Chandler. Would you say there was anyone that like the short story was your king of sentences was there anyone you kind of idolized as a young writer. Well, I think this story, you know, it's a long time ago that I wrote it and when I look at it and I remember the feeling I was having around the, the imaginary writer. I think it, it conflates for me. My reverence in my 20s when I was kind of just trying to make myself into a writer and I was not published yet. And I was a little bit crazy like the two characters, you know, the two young characters in the story are. I think the two people I was thinking of who are both who were one at one is gone, but have both been fairly reluctant to appear although they're not quite as invisible as Thomas pension, where Thomas Berger, the author of Little Big Man and many other great novels and Don de Lulo, who's fortunately still with us at Super Super genius of the sentence, in the first place, I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a writer and I was a Any tips on how to be a good fan? Well, I mean, the funny thing is I'm not, you know, I'm sort of like a person somewhere in between the two poles of the story. I'm not that shy. I kind of like talking to people. And so I'm a little bit still the crazy person yearning to connect as well as the aging, graying, bearded author who might get bumrushed by a fan. I usually kind of, you know, hug them back. I like that my books live in the world and in people's imaginations. And it's I've been maybe just terribly lucky, but it's been a very charming thing for me to meet people who are, you know, are crazed with excitement that I wrote something that hasn't gone gone south for me in any dramatic way. Although I know there are such things, you know, as stalkers out there, it's never been my particular curse. Maybe I'll invoke it now by having this interview. But the thing is I may be disappointing them by not being Rick Halsteadron. Who knows? I may be too, too happy to see them, you know, better to be standoffish. There's so many different ways to disappoint people with your personal appearance when you've written a book, you know. A book is this sort of imperishable, abstracted object and you can never live up to it. Well, this is more of a technical question. But in the story, the young protagonists sort of live and die by these intricate, flowery sentence constructions. But of course, you do need, you know, the kind of other sentence, the more economic, simple ones to help propel things forward. Do you think about those that balance when you're writing about? All the time. All the time. Because, you know, I never thought I would be a, you know, there's a mean word for it. I never thought I would be a purple writer. But I think sometimes in my drafts, I get a little baroque. And so a lot of my revision work is cutting back specifically sentences that are hyper-extended and finding ways to do less. You know, I'll never be mistaken for Hemingway. And I like sentences that are in a way bulging with too many impulses or notions. They want to change tone in the middle. That to me is one of the most exciting and funny things a sentence can do. And I love the masters of the sentence who are, you know, the beginning and the end do not resemble each other. Donald Bartholme does this frequently. But yes, I teach writing too. And I'm often having to point my most excited and sometimes, in fact, the very most gifted and promising writers to the value of a simple declarative sentence, you know, the kind that would disappoint these characters in the story very badly. Right. Like I said, if you just saw on its own, you'd be like, that's, oh, that's okay. Fine, I guess. You need to land certain things and just ground certain things. It's a big part of the job. I know you're drawn to all kinds of art as we've kind of been discussing. Is there any medium you think you'd have been drawn to if you hadn't become a writer, music, film? Oh, geez. I try things still. I dabble. And I mean, I grew up in a painter's household and I used to paint. So the easiest thing to say, and it's true, is that in my mind, I'm still sort of a painter. I imagine what I would be doing on canvases. And someday, I keep telling myself, someday I'll make some paintings again. You know, it's a good thing to do when you're old too. And maybe the words aren't coming as easily. So it's like a good fallback position for me. But in fact, at the moment, I'm in a band. I'm writing some lyrics for my friends and playing bass. And I'm also trying to make a film, but in a very eccentric, sporadic way. I've always taken a lot of energy from other forms and identified with filmmakers or comic book artists. You know, other kinds of narrative art have funded my own efforts very directly. I definitely migrate across the borders of my own art and fool around. Yeah, you do a little of everything it sounds like. Well, we'll land just back on a writing question to wrap up, but you know, it's a podcast about short stories and people who love them, listen to it. Do you have any new favorites you might recommend or authors that should be on people's radar? The two short story writers whose collections have thrilled me in the last year, especially are Ed Park and Lydia Millett. Good comedic writers, very soulful and with a great kind of vernacular gift. So I'd recommend those to anyone. Perfect. Well, I think that's all the questions I had. Thank you so much for speaking with me. I'm so glad you picked it and and that you've found me for this conversation. It's a pleasure. And there you have it. The power and peril of parasocial relationships. Which brings me to this, hotheads. I'm glad I don't know you. Don't get me wrong. I bet you're great. But if you met me, I might disappoint you. I just can't be your Thomas the Tank engine. Ugh, the indignity. Um, that's a Thomas the Tank engine quote. And I'm so, so glad I wasn't able to see the confusion and disappointment on your face when I said it. Our show is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Mary Shimkin. Our podcast producer and editor is Colleen Pellicere. This episode was recorded at the Getty Center in Los Angeles by Phil Richards. Matthew Love is our consulting producer. Our theme song is by Pottington Bear. I'm a Parnon and Charla. Thanks for joining us for Selected Shorts, too hot for radio.