Vendela Vida
Author
of
And Now You Can Go talks with Robert Birnbaum
Writer Vendela Vida grew up in California, attended Middlebury
College and received her MFA at Columbia University. She was an
intern at the Paris Review and has published a non-fiction
book on the initiation rites of American teenage girls—Girls
on the Verge—that developed out of her master's thesis.
She has recently published her first novel, And Now You Can
Go (volume one of a projected trilogy), and is one of the founding
editors of The Believer
magazine and a teacher at 826 Valencia, a volunteer tutorial program
for high school students. She lives in the Bay area with her husband,
writer Dave Eggers.
And Now You Can Go is the story of Columbia University
Art History student Ellis and her life after she has had a gun pointed
at her by a stranger in the streets of New York City. She is not
robbed or physically harmed, but, of course, this incident affects
her emotional equilibrium and relationship with friends and family.
Joan
Didion has praised this novel, "…so fast, so mesmerizing
to read and so accomplished that it's hard to think of it as a first
novel."
Robert Birnbaum: I was recently reminded that
Flannery O'Connor said something to the effect that there were too
many writers. How do you feel about that?
Vendela Vida: I completely disagree with that.
There can't be too many. At our writing lab, 826 Valencia, we're
trying to raise all these kids to believe that they are writers--and
indeed they are--and convince them that they can go around and say,
"I am a writer," or, "I am a poet," at age twelve,
and hopefully they will take that conviction with them the rest
of their lives. So I don't think there can ever be too many writers.
That's something I have been thinking about a lot lately--this whole
idea that people have that there can only one great writer per country.
I wrote about this in an article for The Believer about
Javier Marias, and I went on a riff about how we just like to have
one writer from each country, or one writer from each household,
even. We have these glass ceilings we put on everything--which I
think is unfortunate.
RB: In this country we like to focus on one writer
in other countries because it relieves us of the responsibility
of investigating more deeply other literary cultures.
VV: Exactly.
RB: We don't say that about the US. Here we have
two or three great writers.
VV: We have two or three per region. I feel bad
for anyone from the South. I've been reading a lot about Cat Power,
that musician whose name is Chan Marshall, and she's often described
as a Flannery O'Connor character or a William Faulkner character.
It seems that every Southern person that's written about has to
be in one of those two categories.
RB: Is there a tendency to inflate the perceived
size of the literary world by people who are its citizens? One is
occasionally reminded how marginal and small that world is…
VV: We seem to circumscribe literature to just
literary fiction. It's easy to forget that there are other great
books out there.
RB: I just got a catalogue from a new imprint
and noticed that of the twelve books listed only one or two were
novels. I agree with you there is perhaps a natural tendency to
narrowly focus…
VV: It becomes a language that you speak. I speak
Italian for example, and I am interested in everything Italian.
And I am not at all interested in things Belgian.
RB: Not even chocolate?
VV: I don't eat chocolate. I like salts. But whatever
your natural inclination, your lingua franca, you are going
to start wanting to absorb everything from that culture. It’s
the same thing when you are a reader of literary fiction, it's like
a language that you speak, and you know more about everything else
because of it because that language gives you access into other
aspects of it.
RB: I hear some writers express disdain for literary
or creative non-fiction or genre fiction. Why is that?
VV: Maybe because it's a different approach to
writing. Literary non-fiction has always been a hard thing to classify
because it's not journalism and it’s not fiction. I think
all those arts are equal.
RB: At the heart of it all, isn't it about storytelling?
VV: Storytelling and using language. Anything reflecting
some aspect of the human condition, whether its actual reportage
— through facts or invention— you still want to convey
some truth that's relevant to the world, as we know it.
RB: It seems literary non-fiction is looked down
on because there is already a story or some givens provided. Therefore
one doesn't make up a story from whole cloth, and thus supposedly
non-fiction is less difficult.
VV: Right. I guess that is a bias. I think it's
a lot more work. My first book was non-fiction, and that took so
much work. I remember how many file cabinets I had in the smallest
New York apartment. My whole floor was taken up with file cabinets
of transcripts of the young women I interviewed. I thought it was
hard work, in particular because you can't make anything up. You
have to stick very assiduously to quotes and sometimes you don't
want to. You think, "If only I could tweak this response, it
would work perfectly with my thesis." And you can't. So it's
a different kind of labor. They are both hard and have different
challenges. For me, I knew that after I finished that non-fiction
book I wanted a respite and needed to take a hiatus from that kind
of work.
You
go into a bookstore and there are all these sections on war
and countless things that there are books about, and yet we
seem to circumscribe literature to just literary fiction. |
RB: What do you think of the technique of composite
characters that does bend elements of the story seemingly to reach
a certain conclusion?
VV: It's okay as long as it's addressed somewhere
in the book.
RB: Vivian Gornick apparently upset a few people
with her long-after-the-fact revelations about her technique that
used composite characters and situations.
VV: I'm not so familiar with her work. It would
have been better if she had done it in the book itself. Then the
reader just trusts you more and doesn't feel betrayed and they can
just enjoy it as a story. As long as the writer is honest…
RB: A curious thing to say in light of the inside
standing joke that many fiction writers will gleefully admit they
are professional liars.
VV: [laughs] Yeah.
RB: I guess they are honest professional liars.
VV: Right. You have to be a professional liar
who is so good that you don't get caught. A friend of mine was telling
me that the secret to being a good liar was to remember your lies.
He said that the problem with many writers was that they had bad
memories. Or they drink too much or do other things to obfuscate
their memory.
RB: I guess the obverse is Thomas Jefferson's
observation that if you only told the truth you don't need a memory.
VV: That's true. [laughs]
RB: I brought up Flannery O'Connor earlier to
get a context for the bush fires in the literary culture. Most recently
on the issue of snarkery and perhaps a subsidiary, one which is
more interesting, creating a kind of literary anonymity—that
too much time is spent on personalities and extraneous things.
VV: I do like the idea of there not being any
design on the book jacket and just reading every book in the same
font. I do think fonts influence the way you read things. Some books
by young women who are very talented—the fonts that are chosen
are not the best fonts, they are too frilly, and they make you not
look at the writing as seriously as the writer intended but not
that the font suggests. Also, it is important to know who has written
a book because you want to see what lines they are coming from.
RB: Why?
VV: For example, if I am reading a book by Sebald,
I want to know that it is by him because I want to put it in the
context of his experience and the context of his other books. If
you are reading Mein Kampf, you want to know it's by Hitler
because you want to put it in a historical context. The name can
be important and help give you clues.
RB: I find it hard to make the separation of creator
and creation, but a celebrity culture does tend to make one think
in that direction. Also, people do things for acknowledgement and
recognition -- why dismiss that very human need?
VV: Right I am reading this great novel now, Mailie
Malloy's Liars and Saints, and in there is a great scene
in the convent where one of the girls in the family wants to be
competitive with the other grades and say they raised the most money
for orphanages in other countries. And the nun has to reprimand
her and tell her you don't brag about accomplishments and you just
do them. We would be a very Catholic society of we did that. I also
think that it's also interesting that when I read a book about an
Indian immigrant as in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake I want
to know, it's interesting to me that she has a name that suggests
that she is from the country that she is writing about. That lends
a certain authority, whether it's bogus or not, this author is writing
about something they know.
RB: What would be the threshold of irrelevance?
Some things are relevant and some aren't. I didn't care about Martin
Amis' dental problems when they were trumpeted in articles before
the publication of The Information, years ago. I think
there is an attempt to apply a rule where no rule can be applied.
Either we totally dismiss the back-story or we wallow in it.
VV: In the literary world there is too much talking
about—this has been said before—talking about reviews
of books than about the books. Or they read the reviews more than
they do the book. Or there is more talk about the author within
the context of their friends. That does take on too much importance.
I don't know the correct solution to mitigate that. Except…
I don't know.
RB: Except for the anonymity option.
VV: Right. It would save everyone…
RB: In a culture where it seems everyone strives
for celebrity, writers have gotten it, not inappropriately but irrelevantly—meaning
it has nothing to do with the content of the books or whether people
have read their books.
VV: Maybe. I think that's still very "insidery."
I can't think of that many examples.
RB: Why do some writers make it onto Page Six?
VV: That is a weird thing. That makes no sense
at all.
RB: Except that one of the Page Six people is
an aspiring and published novelist.
VV: It's an irony that people who are writing
about writers are using the same tools that writers are using as
opposed to people who are writing about architecture. Chances are,
the person who writes reviews is someone wanting to be a writer—is
a writer in some form or capacity. I don't know what the perfect
approach is except to have people who are architects review books.
[laughs] Let's switch it around some how. That's always been a big
problem.
RB: That does indicate we have these cultural
gatekeepers or arbiters that we assign inordinate influence. And
yet as many reviewers as there are, I can't think of more than a
handful that are dependable in their intelligence and incisiveness
and being without an agenda: Eder, Caldwell,
Yardley, Dirda, Birkets,
Mendelsohn. There is a larger group who seem, to me, to be a large
pack of yapping terriers nipping at the heels of their betters.
 VV:
I think of those people you mentioned, but I think more about people
who do things like what you do with Identitytheory and
or Michael Silverblatt with Book
Worm—people who are just getting the word out there and
not necessarily saying, "This is I my opinion, here you go."
RB: Let's talk about the multitude of activities
that you have taken upon yourself. It seems like a lot.
VV: I don't sleep a lot. [laughs] Susan Straight,
whom I interviewed for the first issue, writes and teaches and is
a single mom with three kids. I look up to her. She says that when
students turn in things late with the excuse that they didn't have
time, she says, "You didn't have time? You'd be better off
if you told me you were drinking and hung over in Tijuana than that
you didn't have time. Look who you are talking to."
RB: Susan Straight—is she known beyond the
west coast?
VV: I like to think so. You are right, there are
some writers that are very much California writers, and [she is]
because she writes about this fictional town, Rio Seco, which is
based on Riverside. In some ways she is a California writer in the
best sense of the word. The way Joan Didion, especially in her earlier
work, is a California writer. Those are the two I really think of
as California people.
RB: You are here to talk about your book…
VV: Talking, talking…
RB: What's it like talking about it?
VV: Sometimes it's fun. Talking about it is interesting
in that people seem to bring up the same things a lot and not things
that I think are important to the book. For example, one thing is
that is really important to me about the book is that this woman
is named Ellis because both her parents are immigrants. Her Mom
had this dream of arriving in America and blowing the Statue of
Liberty a kiss. That was very essential to me in naming her. She
had all kinds of incarnations. At first she was Erica—for
America. It changed with every draft. A lot of friends of mine have
Cuban moms and dads and Ethiopian parents and Russian parents, and
many them were clueless when they were growing up because they couldn't
turn to their parents for advice.
RB: I know that experience. I am a child of immigrants.
One's parents are, in an understandable way, infantilized. They
are trying to learn the rules of a new culture along with their
child.
VV: Uh huh. That is a very core issue of this book,
this woman who has this incident which is very much a New York incident,
and the way the people react to it is very much central to New York.
It would have been different, and I would have written it differently
if it was in any other place.
RB: Would you have thought of placing the central
incident in any other locale? It is quintessentially New York.
VV: It is a New York event. A funny thing to me,
too, is that a lot of people have said it is a 9/11 event, a random
attack. I wrote it before 9/11, but read it however you want. I
actually I don't mind that reference because in some ways there
are similarities in feeling like a victim and not knowing what to
do and the helplessness that follows and so forth. But I see 9/11
on a much grander scale, multiplied by a million degrees. It is
interesting to me that not many people have brought up the fact
that this is basically an immigrant story.
RB: To what do you attribute that? A failure of
your writing or the reader's imagination?
VV: People always glom on to what ever they can
relate to. I know a woman, my Ethiopian friend, who liked the book
because she was thinking of all the things her mom says. Ellis'
mom is always messing up expressions. My friend told me her mom
would say, "You can shoot two birds with the same gun."
[laughs] Of course you can. So I think that people always relate
to the parts that are more similar to them and to their experiences.
RB: I found Ellis to have a kind of grasshopper
mind. In that she would make these leaps or connections—which
are amusing if you are reading or observing but perhaps not if you
are interacting with her. There is a passage where she talks about
why she wears a hat, grapefruits and where her mother lives…
VV: Grasshopper-like because of the jumps or that
it's miniature or what?
RB: In its jumps. They are almost non-sequetorial.
VV: I tried to make the book as realistic as possible,
and the fact that her thoughts are fast is because they are supposed
to be—she has gone through this event, and she is not thinking
and meditating. Everything is action and fast. And the conversation
in the book—I tried to replicate human conversation as much
as possible, and that is how people talk.
RB: She seems quicker and also apt to see different
connections that the other characters aren't making. She says, "It's
odd who I tell and who I don’t. But for the most part I don't
tell anyone I know. I fantasize about telling strangers everything.
I want to tell this Chinese American woman with a son at the supermarket.
I want to tell the person who takes my toll at the bridge. I want
to drive in search of lifeguards and fireman and tell them. I want
to give the information like a baby in a bundle on a doorstep to
people who will never know who I am. I can tell them and move on.
Drive off and they will never hold it against me. Never try to explain
future actions with what happened in the past. I do not want to
be judged by this forever."
VV: It is very adrenaline-infused. Maybe that's
what you are referring to. After any heightened situation—whatever
it is—you think you notice things much more clearly. You do
notice things in gushes when you see someone who is missing a leg
you tell the story in your head. You know it in a second, but it
might take a paragraph to write down on the page. Because there
are so many characters in the book —that was something else
I wanted to have happen in keeping with trying to make it as a human,
as lifelike as possible. You do come into contact with so many characters
everyday of your life, but in fiction it is often reduced to five
or six. This book has a lot of characters. There used to be more,
but I combined some of them.
RB: [laughs]
VV: I wanted that to be very realistic. And that's
how you define people in your head. That is why she is giving one-paragraph
back-stories when she sees a person. That's what flashes through
her head.
RB: Her descriptions of the males that spin or
orbit around her—"the representative of the world"—
I can only remember one male having a proper name. That was Nick…
You
have to be a professional liar who is so good that you don't
get caught. A friend of mine was telling me that the secret
to being a good liar was to remember your lies. He said that
the problem with many writers was that they had bad memories. |
VV: The fact that they are not given names—naming
something is a very powerful thing. That they are not named is because
she is not giving them enough credit. They are just people that
she is using in the way that they might be using her for other purposes.
Whether they want to save someone or entertain someone or whatever.
That's why she calls them by these shortcut descriptions.
RB: At the end of the book has she been liberated?
VV: She realizes in order to liberate herself
that this is what she has to do, and this why she makes the decision
that she makes. That the weight of it or the waiting is too much.
RB: So she becomes an immigrant and flies to Ireland?
VV: Yeah. I like books that are around two-hundred
pages. I love Play It As It Lays. I love Mary Robison's
Why Did I Ever. I am a huge fan of both those books. They
are young first novels. Play It As It Lays is not a first
novel, and neither is Robison's book—what I mean is that they
are first novels about this character, the first action or one action
in this character's life, you know they are going to go on and do
other things. I just saw Lost in Translation, which I loved—it
blew me away. Part of the reason is that the young woman character,
you don't know what is going to happen next, but you have an idea,
and you know she is going to be okay. You don't need to flash forward
fifty years from now to know what's happened to her marriage. The
story kind of ends at this pivotal point, and some people might
say it's cut short, but I thought it was an interesting place for
a film or a novel to end. The other book I thought of a lot was
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. It's funny, there
are times you want to remember books as you remember them and not
go back and reread them. I had this memory that after writing that
book Joyce did leave for Trieste and I had that in the back of my
head. That at the end Ellis would go somewhere new. That was the
impetus for that, and I looked at it [the Joyce book] and I wanted
to remember it as I remember it in my head, more perfectly.
RB: Other than for scholarship, what does it matter
how we read and recall a book? I don't reread very often, but I
find it remarkable that when I do how much different a book can
be from my memory. Usually, the emotional core remains…
VV: Well, for me the emotional core is, Joyce
goes off to Italy. I will check that out.
RB: Are you are going to keep writing about Ellis?
VV: No. In a fact I wouldn't come back to this
character, but I envision this as the first in a trilogy about rage
and violence. And now I am working on the second. The book I am
working on now is hopefully part II of this trilogy. And it has
entirely different characters, and half of it is told from a woman's
point of view, and there are some chapters told from a man's point
of view.
RB: You used the word 'hopefully'?
VV: Well, I rewrote this book so many times that
as I'm in the early stages of the new book, the Lapland book, I
can't promise myself that it will end up the same way I envision
it now. If it goes through as many revisions as the first book,
it could be entirely different. It could be set in Japan. [laughs]
RB: There is an added dimension of responsibility
and anxiety in that you decide that there is a third book. Do you
have a clue what that book is?
VV: Kind of. It will definitely react to the first
two. I don't think that you can just show two sides of something.
I thing you have to show three. I am very inspired by Phillip Roth's
trilogy [American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The
Human Stain]. And I loved the looseness of the organization—these
three books were about America but not having much more in common
than that—than they were showing different sides of this culture.
RB: Is there a difference of feeling that you
get when you read something really wonderful and when you write
something that you think is wonderful?
VV: [chuckles] Yeah, the difference is that when
you read something wonderful it's usually wonderful the next day.
When you write something [you think] wonderful it usually sucks
the next day.
RB: [both laugh] At some point you have to decide
whether it's wonderful because you are intent on publishing it.
So when you read that which you believe is ready to be seen by others,
what's that like?
VV: The best way to answer that is the original
draft of this book was around 450 pages long, and I went through
it, and the only part that I was at all interested in was fifteen
pages in which the young woman in the book—at that time she
had a different name—is held up at gun point in a park. There
was something about those pages that I was really drawn to—they
stood out much more than the rest of the pages. I took two years
to write that book, and when I went through it I realized that I
wasn't at all happy with it. I am a very impatient reader. If I
don't like something, I put it down. It's really sad when you are
putting down your own book. [laughs] Well, it's indicative.
RB: What happens to those four-hundred pages that
you tossed?
VV: I think I got three good metaphors from them.
RB: Are they totally gone?
VV: I'll never come back to them.
RB: Are they somewhere?
VV: Yeah, they are on a hard drive somewhere,
but I have no desire to go back to them any time soon.
RB: Is that the way it goes for you—you
write a lot and then pare down?
VV: I am a completely wasteful writer. I wish
I could use my time better—then I could be more efficient.
RB: Is it a warm up? Is a buzz or a heightened
feeling going on?
VV: I think it's a buzz. It's energetic, and there
is something about the story that energizes you, and then hopefully
the writing mirrors that, and then when you editing it you are inspired
by the energy of the writing as opposed to that seminal moment.
Because that is already left behind.
RB: You pour it out and then…
VV:
You have to erase a lot. Sculpting it. That's why And Now You
Can Go is written in short sections with a lot of space breaks,
that indicate a huge amount has been taken out right here. [laughs]
There are a lot of scenes—Joyce Johnson, a teacher of mine—said
when talking about writing her first novel, she said she felt she
had to describe what the character did that night and when the character
went to bathroom and what the character had for dinner. She realized
a space break, there is this fabulous device, and for me it served
me very well in terms of being able to sculpt some of the scenes.
RB: Is what you like to write and what you read
the same? Is there a rule about what you like to read?
VV: I also love Thomas Bernhardt, who writes his
books in one long paragraph. Which is completely opposite. And if
I could do that I would have. That's not the way I thought this
character would think. Maybe a different character. His characters
are more obsessive and come back to the same thoughts.
RB: As in Sebald, who I read as having written
one long sentence. Is that a Germanic trait?
VV: It is more in keeping with one long thought
that is being continued throughout the book and emphasizing that
stylistically.
RB: Your course seems to be charted in terms of
your writing life…
VV: Two more books. [laughs]
RB: You are aspiring to two more books hopefully.
What is the place of the magazine in your life?
VV: In terms of what I hope for it?
RB: Yes and how much of your life it occupies.
VV: It occupies every morning. My routine when
I am not travelling is waking up at eight, working on the Believer
until eleven. Then I work on my novel, and then I go teach, then
in the evenings I am either writing or working on Believer
stuff. I write pretty late at night.
RB: That would account for you not sleeping much.
VV: I guess so. With the Believer we
have just gotten our sea legs in the past couple of months. My hope
for it is that our circulation keeps increasing—not for bigger
numbers but because we are proud of what we do and want people to
read it. We have a great audience now. We get tons of letters, and
it's exciting to create this dialogue with what we put out there
and people responding to it. That's exactly what we wanted. I hope
to keep engaging people. And there are so many books and writers
we want to write about and artists we want to profile. Just to get
a chance to get all there in there and out there…
RB: The recognition that there is so much worthy
stuff that is not being attended to flies in the face of being in
it for the long haul. That creates a kind of urgency or tension…
VV: There is that urgency because every month
you are working so fast you don't even know what is going on. But
the time we put an issue to press…
RB: What I am trying to say is that two things
are in tension with each other that ought to work in unison.
VV: I guess they should move together, but that
sense of urgency keeps people, keeps me going—whether it's
adrenaline or the sense that the clock is ticking, you…
RB: The finished product is pretty relaxed in
its graphic presentation, lots of space, classic type fonts, few
photos, a traditional grid…no advertising.
VV: One way that the urgency is reflected—at
least in so far as the interviews are concerned [VV is the interview
editor] I always try to start them off mid interview. The question
that you would normally find half way through—I try to move
that up. For me, it creates that urgency. I realized when I was
reading that wonderful new Paris Review Anthology, the
title of which I will botch because it's all-inclusive…
RB: It's a one paragraph title. [The Paris
Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders,
Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball,
Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since
1953]
It's
an irony that people who are writing about writers are using
the same tools that writers are using as opposed to people
who are writing about architecture. |
VV: They don't run the interviews in their entirety.
They kind of have the best of, for each page. The questions were
probably buried three-quarters of the way through, and that's essentially
what we try to do.
RB: Well, it does depend on what you intend—an
interview, a conversation or dialogue, an oral history…in
any case, the content is not fixed. What two people talk about at
any given moment may not obtain on another day…
VV: It's more artifact, which I think is really
cool too.
RB: You wrote in the diary you did for Slate
that 826 Valencia was expanding. Can you talk more about that?
VV: When we started April 10th of last year, our
whole plan was to be a drop-in tutoring center for kids. It's free,
non-profit. I've learned a great deal about non-profit…
RB: [laughs] Me too.
VV: [laughs] We started getting all these incredibly
talented volunteers. We now have about three hundred and fifty.
Which is amazing. They are all incredibly qualified.
RB: They are writers?
VV: We have two Pulitzer Prize finalists as volunteers.
Editors, Ph.D.s—we just have an amazing crop of volunteers.
RB: Would this be evidence that at least some
writers think it's their job to attempt to improve the world?
VV: I think so. It's like anything else if you
are mechanic and you can fix a tire easily and you see someone struggling
on the side of a road you are doing to stop and help them.
RB: As opposed to a prevailing lifeboat mentality?
VV: [laughs] I think that the same thing applies
to writers. You just want to be able to share. In some ways, especially
with writing it’s such a solipsistic, selfish act in so many
ways. And the only thing that makes me feel better is being able
to help younger people to write. The most rewarding thing is—I
teach College Entrance Essay class, and that helps even the playing
field. 826 is expanding, and we are starting to go into public schools…
RB: Do all your activities meld together? Or are
there discreet boundaries between your work as an editor and as
teacher and writer. Is the circle of people you work with the same?
VV: Heidi and Ed are mainly writers and the people
I work with at 826 are mostly from the ranks of teachers. They are
blended together in that everyone wants a world of better writing.
We don't publish any negative book reviews. We are promoting writers
we think are great. The same mentality is behind 826, which is a
kind of kindness to writing, encouraging more writers and encouraging
more people to be writers. That's where it comes together.
RB: Do you read unkind reviews?
VV: No I don't read reviews.
RB: Any sense of the effect(s) of Heidi
Julavits' manifesto in the first tissue of the Believer?
VV: Oh sure. It's a funny thing, I knew this would
happen. It's like a New Yorker cartoon. Someone says, "Let's
all be nicer," and then people throw tomatoes. Because no one
really wants to be nicer. I am not saying that's what happened.
Heidi fully expected it. In some ways we are happy that the word
'snark' is back in the lingua franca, and Heidi used that word because
she is a big Lewis Carroll fan. Even the title comes from a Lewis
Carroll epigraph. The Clive
James comment was surprising because I think he was implying
she didn't know what she was using.
RB: Oh, I read it as implying that no one else
seemed to know.
VV: Interesting.
RB: I thought James summed up the debate well.
VV:
[laughs, haltingly] In some ways, yes. I am not convinced that there
is a good to bad reviews or that people who shouldn't be reviewing
a book are assigned to review that book because it's just schadenfreude.
RB: I thought James was just acknowledging that
it was a fact of human nature that people were going to get nasty.
And some people could say some critical but intelligent things and
that they might employ snide language. That's just the way it is.
VV: I don't mean to be Little Miss Pangloss. I
don't think it has to be that way. That's what we are trying to
do with the Believer is change that. It doesn't have to
be that way and we are not. And that's why people like us and like
our reviews. It confuses me and it's funny to me and it's sad to
me. But I do definitely think it's schadenfreude.
RB: Will this issue go on forever?
VV: Oh. I don't know about forever. I'd like I
think that Believer will stamp it out. [laughs]
RB: With Snarkwatch?
VV: I like Snarkwatch. I don't know if we will
stamp it out, but it makes people more aware of it.
RB: It does seem that people pay attention more
to the reviews than the books. Where's the attention to literature?
VV: It’s very strange to me. I stay away
from all that stuff. I am surprised when I hear the stuff that does
go on. There is a way to isolate yourself. Not that you should.
That's what you do.
RB: It is getting tedious. I was engaged in one
of those weblog threads and somebody called me a nitwit.
VV: [shouts] Don't read it! Don't go on line!
RB: It was amusing, and I was wondering what would
move someone to be insulting in a discussion about some literary
issue—and to someone they didn't know? A lot of rage…
I didn't insult his momma. Anyway, was there a model for the Believer
when it was conceived?
VV: For a while with fifty e-mails a day we would
keep saying what about this and what about that. Or 110 e-mails
over the course of two days because we decided everything was too
long, and now those (Motels, Light) are some of my favorite sections,
and Underway was started because I was always curious about what
was on people's desks when they are between books. Basically, the
magazine is an extension of a conversation that Ed and Heidi and
I would have if we were sitting down and spending the day together.
What we talk about or people we are interested in. Or, have you
heard of this or that? You are right, any conversation is the result
of a time and a place and a particular day, and so every issue is
like that as well. It’s much more guided by the time, place
and day and the particular combination of people and people who
pitch ideas to us. Some of those ideas have been the best.
RB: Kind of a sanctuary.
VV: I didn't say sanctuary [laughs]
RB: I don't know if that's a loaded word.
VV: The fact that people can come to us basically
over the transom. Half our contributors are people who have pitched
us on the Internet. That's how we, I met—you.
RB: Oh yeah. I'm going to cut this part out.
VV: [both laugh] I've never seen you before.
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