I don't know that ...
I don't know that I'd agree with the last part of what you said.
There's a real split, it's interesting that you went and interviewed Crichton,
because there's a real split in U.S. literature
between commercial literature, novels like Crichton writes, Stephen King, Tom Clancy,
who are the other big ... Grisham.
Some of which are really pretty good,
and they make a great deal of money and there's a whole lot of demand for them.
And then there is still and I think it's probably like this in...
well, it's probably not quite ...
There's probably more demand for serious books in Europe.
But here there's a small pocket of probably, I don't know, half a million...
say, a million readers,
many of whom were from the upper classes
and have good educations and have been taught the pleasures of hard work in reading
or music or art and like that.
I mean, when you're talking me, you're talking to somebody
who doesn't have very much power in the culture
and who's not very important except in a fairly small
I don't know what the analog would be.
It would be something like maybe contemporary classical music in the US,
which there are people who enjoy it and listen to it,
partly because of training and partly because
they are disposed to be willing to do a certain amount more work reading it.
But compared to popular music and rock and roll and hip-hop and stuff,
classical music is nothing.
I mean, economically or commercially or in terms of how many people have heard of it
or how much an influence it has on the culture.
And, for me, personally, I don't know that it's really ever been all that different.
I think probably American education used to be a little bit better
and a little bit more difficult
and children had no choice but to realize that there were certain things
that were hard and involved a certain amount of drudgery
that were actually very satisfying at the end of it,
but for the most part I think in the U.S., people who have been doing
"serious stuff" which is harder and stranger,
have always played to a much smaller audience.
Interviewer: So, what is literature able to do that other -
I saw this on the sheet of paper.
Interviewer: Yeah, because I had to ...
Good. Good. So let me ask you first, and then I'll ...
What is it that literature can do that other things can't do?
It's not so easy, is it?
Interviewer: No, no. Not at all.
But I thought that, you know, you're more intelligent than I am.
Well, actually, I read in this interview
and you said something,
That good art somehow is able to not make you feel alone.
That is something actually that I'm very addicted to.
Because, simple as I am, I'm very happy
when I don't feel so lonesome when I read something.
And also, good literature?
Literature is something very musical to me.
I had that with Bernhard very much,
because the sicker he got in his life,
the easier the words became.
And it was like some kind of music.
So, for me, the beauty of the words and also this musical thing about it,
and also something philosophical and not feeling alone.
Why don't - can we just put that in?
That's a better answer to the question than I could have given.
Interviewer: No, no. First I had to answer.
Well, play back the tape of what she said, and I'll just - no.
It's a heavy question.
There's something musical about it,
because it has to do with patterns of meaning that develop over time.
There's stuff, for me, about reading
that isn't like looking at a piece of art,
because, there, I choose how long I look and what I look at.
I'm being directed through a linear flow of time.
But in a piece of music or in a movie, that flow is directed for me.
I've really got no choice, but to follow it.
Whereas books, it's weird.
I'm moving through time, through this thing,
but I can also, I don't know whether you do it or not,
but if I've read a paragraph I like a lot, I go back and I read it over again.
So I'm trapped in time, but I've got more mobility within that time.
And then I think ...
There's other writers I've talked to about this
and most of us who end up doing this like to read as kids,
probably for the same reason you did.
I'm trying to think of a way to say it
where it doesn't just sound stupid and simple,
but it goes without saying that ...
There are four of us in this room.
I'm sure we all seem fairly pleasant.
There are big limits on what we'll ever know
Like I don't know what's in your mind, right now.
God knows I don't know what's in his mind right now.
There's a way for me -
I'm talking more as a reader -
that when I'm reading something that's good and that's real
I'm able to jump over that wall of self
and inhabit somebody else in a way that I can't.
You know, that we can't in regular life.
And when I do inhabit that other person,
very often what they're thinking or saying or feeling are things very much the way I do,
but I'm scared there's something wrong with me that I do and nobody else does.
There's a tremendous reassurance about that kind of
communion and empathy.
And then it gets more complicated,
because I'm also getting access to the mind of the author
in a way that we don't have access to each other talking this way.
Most of the friends I've got,
and most of my friends don't like to read.
Most of the friends I've got who don't like to read
find it, A) boring, and B) just kind of lonely and slow.
And I just don't get it.
because watching television for me,
although it's easier, is much lonelier.
Watching in flat images on a flat screen doing interesting things
and often they're very easy to look at
is very different from knowing what it's like to be inside somebody else's skin
or knowing what it's like to be able to spend two hours with an author
who somehow can make me feel like I know what it is.
I mean, it just seems like a form of magic to me.
Interviewer: And is it also comfort?
I can't remember which American writer it was ...
I heard him speaking.
He said that his job is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable.
And so that, there's something comforting ...
There's something comforting about being able to inhabit somebody else,
but there's something also very uncomfortable about it,
because usually the experiences that person is having
are just the ones that I don't like
or that I haven't worked out.
And it seems to me that the biggest split isn't
between music and literature or music and sculpture, whatever.
They're forms of art that offer us escapes from ourselves and our daily lives.
And I think that's fun in small doses.
And then there are kinds of art that offer us more confrontation
with our own lives.
I don't think it's surprising that there isn't as much demand
or as much money in the latter,
because it's more difficult and less pleasant sometimes.
It takes skill and education to get good enough at reading or listening
to be able to derive pleasure from it.
There's class stuff involved here that gets very tricky.
But I think it's worthwhile.
I think reading and writing are both worthwhile.
That's very profound.
[Laughter]
I did good for awhile in the middle there.
That was lucid.
All I did was parrot back what you said -
Interviewer: No, you didn't.
But I took like ten times as long
And I did this [hand gestures] a lot more.
Boy, is it hot in here now.
Interviewer: Yes, it is. [Laughter]
Camera Man: Oh yeah.
Interviewer: So we are right into something that I actually have ...
Do you want me to get you some water or something?
No, I'm fine. I'll just be sweating here in my chair.
It's fine. Not a problem.
Interviewer: The typical American.
Yes, the sweaty American.
I'm proud to sweat on behalf of the USA.
[Laughter]
If you do work like this, you pay certain prices.
You don't make as much money.
Not as many people read your stuff.
But people who are reading it and are interested in it,
you're pretty sure ...
The thing that I like about doing this kind of stuff is that I'm pretty sure
my readers are about as smart as I am.
I think if you're somebody like Crichton
or someone who's a Harvard M.D., but you're writing for a mass audience,
things get very strange.
I don't worry that people who are reading my stuff are misunderstanding it.
Or "banalizing" it
any more than it's already banal.
I do worry, weirdly, about when it's translated into languages that I don't know.
I worry that I don't know what's in there.
One thing that also very much appealed to me
is when you spoke in an interview about existential loneliness.
I said the word, "existential loneliness"?
Interviewer: Yeah. Something like that.
Okay.
Interviewer: You know, I'm German. Somethings I get things right and wrong.
No, no, no. Okay ...
Interviewer: And that's something very much I like to hear an author say,
because, in the things I read, that's one thing I'm searching for,
these testimonies of existential loneliness.
So, is that something you still relate to? Or ...
Well, yeah. If I understand your question,
this is the stuff we were talking about two questions ago.
There's something painful about being stuck in a body and a consciousness
that can't ever, except through conversation,
can't ever be inside anybody else's.
And there is a magic about ...
Except, see, I don't know that much about music.
People who do say that there is a purity with which
the composer's emotional state can be felt by the listener
that can't be approached by anything else either.
Probably, most of kinds of art have this magical thing
of, for a moment, there's a kind of reconciliation and communion
between you and me that isn't possible in any other way.
But it's also the sort of thing that's so weighty and so general,
It's weird to be saying this on television.
There's something about ... there's nothing wrong ...
It's not that there's anything wrong
with being interested in stuff that's interesting and attractive.
What it seems to be like here is ...
Television and corporate entertainment,
because it's so expensive, in order to make money,
it has to appeal to a very wide audience.
Which means it has to find things that a lot of people have in common.
And I don't know about you, but here, I think,
what most of us have in common here
are our very most base, uninteresting, selfish, stupid interests.
Physical attractiveness. Sex. A certain kind of easy humor. Vivid spectacle.
That's stuff that I will immediately look at, and so will you, and so will you.
So it's in our very most base and childish interests that we are a mass.
The things that make us interesting and unique and human,
those interests tend to be wildly different between different people.
So, my guess is ...
In terms of American mass culture, as a mass,
for things to get significantly different,
what it's going to involve is fragmentation in the entertainment industry.
Something like what's happened in the American magazine industry,
where instead of three or four magazines with millions of subscribers,
you have thousands of magazines, each with a few thousand.
That is, if entertainment can get more niche -
N, I, C, H, E, is the English word -
it's possible that these companies that put this stuff out
can stay alive and make money without having to appeal to ten, twenty million people.
Because I don't think that it's evil. It's just the way that it works.
The only way to get ten or twenty million people all interested in the same thing
is to pitch your appeal very very low.
Because maybe you're not interested in any of the things that I named,
you know, just immediately, but I am.
I'm no different than anybody else. I'm not, really.
There are a few people who aren't interested in it at all.
But I am.
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