Look what we just found! Garth Risk Hallberg’s Apostrophe Cast Interview. And what better way to celebrate, we ask you, than by giving Garth’s reading from his Field Guide to the North American Family another listen?
1) How often do you say, “Risk? Risk is my middle name.”
Every day, after brushing my teeth, I look in the mirror and say precisely these sentences. My only regret is that my parents didn’t give me a cooler first name…like Maximum.
2) You have a new book coming out soon, and a coin is in the title. A penny to be precise. Why is the penny associated with luck? Why is Lincoln on the penny? Do you have any wheat pennies? What is the oldest penny you have ever discovered in your pocket?
This book – actually just an introductory essay – was commissioned by the publisher, who I suspect was drawn more by my record of writing text that sits alongside images than by my numismatical genius. The association between pennies and luck, though, turns out to be pretty old…it dates back to those profligate Latins, who left offerings at springs for the divinities they believed animated the water.
3) What is the most dangerous situation you have ever been in?
I’m almost certain it was a situation whose danger I didn’t recognize at the time. I want to say it was probably the time I wandered drunkenly out of a party and climbed halfway up the Brooklyn Bridge cables, before realizing I was drunk and that no one was going to stop me from going higher. I stopped me. I have some friends who, on other occasions, made it all the way to the top, as I no doubt would have if I were named Maximum Risk Hallberg. By the way, no drunken kid will ever again climb the Brooklyn Bridge without quickly being arrested
and thrown in Guantanamo.
4) Do you have enemies? Will you share any of the struggle here?
I try not to have enemies. I think I probably have people who consider me their enemy, though. In fact, I’ve had people I hardly know announce they’re my enemies, both in person and anonymously, online.
5) What would you do if you discovered paparazzi following you around?
I think I’d get all Lohan on them. I have no great love for being photographed, nor for having my private life invaded. Fortunately, no one seems to have any interest either in photographing me or invading my private life. Or even in reading my work. Ha ha. That’s a joke. Or is it?
6) How many of your significant others have been writers? Are writers’ relationships harder than “normal” relationships?
Yow. This is an awkward question. I have to answer it in the abstract: I don’t know how writers date other writers. There’s that great Kathy Chetkovich essay in Granta about her famous significant other. Writers are naturally such competitive creatures, at least in my experience.
It seems like the desire for your significant other to write something brilliant and the desire to write something more brilliant than your significant other would eventually cancel you out completely.
7) Is a writer ever responsible if someone gets bad ideas from his work?
I don’t think so. A writer is responsible if his work is bad, or contains bad ideas, but the fact that Ulysses launched a thousand pale imitations is not, pace Dale Peck, evidence of Ulysses’ inherent pallor. I think I cribbed some stuff from Sebald for the Field Guide, which may have been a bad idea, but I don’t think it diminishes Sebald. (The recent spate of Sebald revisionism is, by the way, its own kind of bad idea.) Even more interesting is the case of Heidegger, who got bad ideas from his own work, but whose work I find completely beautiful.
9) Is there any movie you have seen that you believe should be banned?
Great question. I don’t believe in censorship, but I do have a problem with kitsch, as Milan Kundera defines it. Particularly egregious, for me, are movies that use rape, the Holocaust, or other moral as plot devices or metaphors, without giving them any dramatic weight of their own. I found “Little Children” to be ethically repugnant – not because it tried to make its child molester sympathetic (which I liked) – but because of its mawkishly contrived ending.
10) If you could star in a remake of any classic movie, what would it be and who would direct it?
How about “My Dinner With Andre?” I’d remake it as “My Dinner With Andre 3000″ (but would keep Wallace Shawn, obviously, in both his actor and director incarnations).
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