Lily Salter's Blog, page 992

Cow-milking lessons from mom: Life (and writing) skills from my mother

Anyone who writes a book called "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters" has to expect to be asked about her own mother, so let me get that conversation started here.   In my novel "Once Upon a River," the protagonist Margo Crane’s mother was a runaway. My mother, Susanna, was the opposite—she stuck around home. When everybody was running around and running away in the 1960s and '70s, my mom had to be there to milk the cow twice a day. Susanna has lived a life full of challenges and personal trials, mostly brought on by her own strong and determined character. She raised a heap of kids by herself, her own kids and other people’s—the price she paid for always being there was that other people showed up for the free babysitting. Sometimes neighbors or cousins stayed the whole summer. Mom was a horsewoman, and she became a horse trader. She also became the one the local farmers all called to help to deliver their difficult calves. She also has drunk plenty and smoked like a chimney for decades. She loves to spend time listening to music and laughing and telling and hearing funny stories. She wants literature to entertain and relieve her from stress, to smooth life’s rough edges. This is why Susanna doesn’t love my writing. She’s very proud of me, but she wishes I’d write something funny, like slapstick or folkloric humor. Or she wishes I would write a series of murder mysteries in which a clever woman outwits criminals before the book’s end. Instead, I write about problems that have no solutions. My stories make a reader think more and worry more. Nonetheless, an awful lot of what I’ve learned about writing has come from her. The first thing I learned was to work hard. From the time I was 7 years old, my mom was a single parent struggling to feed at least five hungry kids at any given time. She had eight acres of land, a few outbuildings and a pasture where she’d kept a horse. Well, as soon as she got divorced, she figured out that she could get free runt piglets from the local pig farmers (the ones that wouldn’t survive).  She bought a mean old milk cow named Red, a Hereford-Ayrshire mix, some cheap calves at auction to raise for meat, and some chickens for eggs. She also grew a hell of a garden and canned 200 quarts of tomatoes. I have seen this small woman lug 50-pound feed bags, 80-pound bales of hay, and when it was time to restring the pasture fence, she wrestled railroad ties for us to use as fence posts. I shouldn’t say this, but she may have stolen some of them from alongside the railroad tracks. Furthermore, once she saw how big and strong I was growing up to be, she put me to work. When I was 9, she taught me to milk the cow, and I often did the evening milk duty. We didn’t know any better than to just pour the milk through a coffee filter and drink it just like that.  Now I think that the raw milk lifestyle we enjoyed is illegal in about 11 states. The winter I was 10, our barnyard pipes froze, so for months I carried dozens of five-gallon pails of water before and after school. We chopped wood to keep the fire going to keep the house warm. Some summers we brought in thousands of bales of hay. (I think that working kids the way we got worked might now be illegal in a few states, too.) Among the many realizations I’ve had in my writing life, most important was realizing that writing well was not a matter of being brilliant. Writing, it turns out, is just more hard work. I learned this when working on a story called “Sleeping Sickness,” which ended up in my first collection. It happens to be about a mother and daughter, and the mother’s manifestation of depression is that she sleeps for 12 or 14 hours at a stretch (this is not my mom). And I kept working on the story every day, going through it over and over again, week after week, and then month after month, and my attention to the story was making it better, not in any glorious rush, just bit by bit it was getting better. I sent it to a magazine called Kiosk, and the editor sent it back with some suggestions, so I worked every day for another couple of months. Once I made that discovery, that writing a story was something like digging a ditch or chopping wood or weeding a garden or milking a cow every day, then I knew I had a chance in this writing business. Brilliance, I can’t count on, but hard work, well, I can do that. I was raised up for that. Case in point: “Bringing Belle Home” is a story in my collection "American Salvage," and I worked on that story for 24 years before I got it right. But I did get it, finally. There’s another story in that book that I wrote in five months—that was the quickest I ever wrote a story. That was the title story, and I wrote it in a kind of panic.  Funny, the same thing happened in writing the title story of "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters"; I decided on a title for the book, and then felt I needed a story with that same title. It took about five months for that story, too.   Maybe some of you new writers out there think that writing a story is  going to get easier and faster as your career progresses. If anything, now that I know what I’m doing, it takes more time and more agonizing for me to write a story. Same goes for novels. My first one was the quickest; because I didn’t know any better, I was able to write a first draft of "Q Road" in six weeks. Oh, as an aside, some writers are always saying how their characters take over the story and write the story themselves. Well, give me some of that! My characters are like the laziest of actors, lying around in their comfy lounge chairs waiting for me to tell them what to do. When I get up in the morning to write, which I do seven days a week, three hours a day if I can, the characters are all staring at me out of my computer screen, waiting for me to direct and finesse their actions, dialogue, moods and attitudes. They want me to do the hard work. The second thing I learned from my mom is that reading is really great. Recently I heard my mom tell my brother she wasn’t going to do something like haul wood anymore, because it was a man’s job. I nearly choked on my stalk of raw asparagus. Well, there’s got to be some advantage to getting older, and now she spends a lot of time reading. She reads about five books a week, more than anybody else I know. She read to us kids when we were little, and we had a lot of books in the house, including the Nancy Drew series and a lot of horse books like "Black Beauty" and such. We did not have a TV in the house for most of my growing up. We didn’t get one until my brother started dealing drugs and bought one himself. But it was locked in his room. For the record, my brother straightened up his act decades ago and is a productive member of society. OK, let me confess something. I am not a bookworm. I know this sounds sacrilegious coming from a writer, but reading has always been work for me. Satisfying work, wonderful, important, meaningful, but work nonetheless. When I listen to other people talking about reading, it sounds like it’s as easy as floating down a river; when I read, it’s like rowing upstream. (And if you’ve read my work, you know rowing is a kind of work I like.) So I did not go to bed with a flashlight so I could read under my covers. Usually I fell to bed exhausted from running around all day and hauling wood and hay bales. If I didn’t want to sleep, my inclination was not to read, but to sneak out my bedroom window and run out into the night and have adventures with my friends and especially with boys. You can ask my mother if this is true. I used to go out into the night and travel miles to hide in shrubbery and peek in the windows of the bedrooms of boys I liked. Reading is to me like exercising and it’s like writing and like eating healthy. I do all these things every day, religiously, and I love doing them, though maybe not at any given moment. I’m telling you this just because in our work of trying to create reasons to read, I think we sometimes assume that for everyone reading is really fun and easy, and I want to suggest it might not be. Nonetheless, even if it is not exactly fun, it is hugely rewarding.  Even today, my reading style is to read about four pages, and then get up and move around and then sit back down and read again, a few more pages. Reading is always worthwhile. I know as a writer that if I want compelling language and stories to come out of me, I’ve got to put compelling language and stories into myself. It’s that simple. Still, I occasionally lose my willpower, and then you’ll find me sitting in front of the TV eating cupcakes. Or more likely eating cupcakes while staring at the inmates, most of them sex offenders, at the minimum security prison next door playing basketball. In case you’re wondering what minimum security means, it means they don’t lock the inmates in. Watching my mom has taught me to take an interest in the people around me and engage them in conversation willy-nilly. So I am reading every day, but what I love best is to talk to people. My mom is, and I am, too, the person who talks to everybody in line at the post office. I love to chat with the postal clerks and grocery story cashiers, and the librarians and the guys at the oil change shop—no matter if they tell me to stay in the car, I get out and watch what they’re doing. I love to hear people’s stories and to learn how they feel about life and its challenges. (And I have learned that if you show some interest, people will indeed share their stories with you.) Most of what I’ve learned in life beside what I’ve read, I have learned from talking to folks. I’m happy when I’m sitting at a table sharing stories, jokes and anecdotes with friends. I’m happy to meet someone new who has an experience I’ve never dreamed of, and it turns out most people do have such experiences. My mother’s mother, Betty, used to do the same thing, though she lived a life very different from my mom. Betty was a proud active lifelong member of the Chicago League of Women Voters and attended and took notes at the Metropolitan Sanitary District meetings for decades. Occasionally I get story ideas from the people I talk to, but more often what I’ve gotten are glimpses and insights into the human psyche and soul, and that is worth more than any story plot. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I think of all my writing as communication first and foremost. Men are great to have around, but they have their limitations and you might not want to depend upon them too much. We’ll just leave it at that and say Susanna taught me to be independent. And I’ll make the case that being capable and independent has helped me stay happily married for 28 years to the same dude, my darling Christopher. You might have noticed that fiction writers, novelists especially, are most often people who need to live calm, sensible lives. A novelist needs a life without drama in order that she can deliver all the drama to the page. She also taught me to keep an eye out for what’s most interesting around me, right in my own neighborhood. My mom could always find lots of interesting people in her own community. Though her parents had been city people, from the time Susanna was young, she hung out with the old farmers and talked to them about how to raise animals and garden and drive wells and build barns. If anyone is interested in saving a dwindling resource, it would be the knowledge of the old men and women from American farms. They know how to do everything, and they know how to do it cheaply. If my biggest revelation was about writing being hard work, then my second one was the realization that I should write about the Michigan people with whom I’m familiar. In other words, I should write about people from my own tribe, who have special knowledge and skills that I know about, such as how to scrap out metal for money and steal railroad ties and castrate pigs. These are poor and working-class people and some farmers, people who fix their own cars and work low-paying jobs that aren’t very satisfying, and maybe they drink too much, these people, and maybe they love uncarefully. So many people say “write about what you know,” that it’s tempting to discount it, but I came around to understand that old saw in my own way. I lived for years in Chicago and then in Boston and Milwaukee, and I used to try to write about generic people who didn’t live any particular place, or else I wanted to write about city people, because they seemed more exciting than my own people. But when I lived in Boston and I’d tell people about my mom gathering everybody up to go haul a dead frozen cow out of a neighbor’s pond where she’d fallen through the ice and drowned. The neighbor had said we could have the meat, so the whole family went to go retrieve this cow with a boat and a chainsaw. Well, I could tell by the looks on their sophisticated city mugs that this sort of activity was new and interesting to them. Turns out my knowledge and experience of life has given me some stories to tell. Keep things lively In the moral universe, where we live our real lives and eat breakfast and go to work, the worst crime is murder, or maybe torture-and-murder. But in the writing universe, the universe of stories, murder and torture and mayhem are just fine. In some genres, murder is required! The real unforgivable crime for all writers is the crime of being dull. When I’m revising, which is 95 percent of what I do, maybe 98 percent, I’m continually searching what I’ve written to eliminate places where the story is bogging down, where a character is feeling self-pity or being melodramatic. In the moral universe, we all feel self-pity and indulge in melodrama and whimpering and whining, but there’s no need for it in the pages of a story, when our reader can so easily put down the book and turn on the TV to a cop show and eat a cupcake. Every moment of a book has to be interesting. Don’t take myself too seriously If I could show you a couple of photos right now, I’d start with one of Mom and me butchering a rooster last year. This rooster started out as a nice enough Plymouth Rock fellow, big and strong with glossy black-and-white plumage, but then he started picking on the hens, causing the hens to peck on one another. Everybody was losing their feathers. Then he started attacking my great-nieces when they went in to collect eggs. For the next photo I would then show you a photo of three things on a blue-and-white plate: two testicles and a chicken heart. You would notice that each of the rooster’s balls are bigger than his heart. The job of a writer is twofold. One half of your job requires you to take yourself and your vision and ideas and sensibility very seriously, to have confidence that what you write matters. And it matters enough for you to neglect your family and friends, and especially your housework. As Jane Smiley told the New York Times, “mess reminds me that I can choose to write or I can choose to clean, and I have always chosen to write.” And the other half of your job as a writer is to be humble and open to constructive criticism that can make your work better. This might come from friends or editors. Or even from your mom. But mostly it has to come from your own critical self. You must be prepared to admit and acknowledge that you are just plain wrong at times, that your work is not good enough. Yet. And then you have to go back to having confidence again, because you have to believe you do have what it takes to be able to make the writing good enough. And sometimes, when it’s rough going with the story I’m working on, I need to remember that writing is just part of my life. There are other things, like family, friends and food. And wine. And my donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote, who don’t give a fig about my success or failure. And there’s the joy of talking to the people in the line at the post office and in the line to where we’re all waiting to renew our driver’s licenses. Mom taught me that it’s OK to hide the really good chocolates away from your kids and your husband. Honestly, are they going to appreciate them the way you do? Always keep in mind how things affect those who are not doing as well as you are. Don’t be fooled by what seems respectable—keep in mind what helps people get by. The only time I saw my mom get politically active recently was when she found out that our little Michigan township was going to pass an ordinance that said that people could not work on their cars in their driveways. It seemed that some people who did not have to fix their own cars thought that fixing one’s own car in the driveway made street looks messy. Well, my mom gathered up everybody she could find to go to that meeting and remind the folks on the board (who did not fix their own cars) that this was a community in which poor people, many of whom didn’t have garages, were trying to survive and keep their cars running as best they could with few resources in order to go to their low-paying jobs.  She reminded them that it’s an important skill in the community for kids to learn how to fix cars, and the driveway was where they learned it. And I have found much of my inspiration comes from understanding how poor people and the working poor make it work in America, where the cards and laws stack up against them. And I consider it an important part of my job to show readers a picture of those who are struggling near the economic bottom, even if they are a little less attractive than those at the top. Mom is still teaching me to live passionately and not play it too safe. While my mom is still usually the smartest woman in the room (have I mentioned she knows how to build a highway bridge as well as how to make great cabbage rolls), she is getting older, and she’s frail. She just had her shoulder replaced, and she’s had five other recent surgeries on her arteries and her back. I’d like her to slow down and take it easy, but she lets me know she doesn’t intend to. She still parties heartily—she has the same passion for partying as I have for writing. She has a good guy friend who’s about my age who often takes her out to rowdy events, and he pulled me aside recently and said, “You know, this could kill her. Somebody threw her in the swimming pool last week. If you don’t want me to take her out, I won’t.” And though I’d like to put her on a diet of healthful foods and moderation of all kinds, I say, “Take her where she wants to go, and make sure she has fun.” She has taught me to prevail! Without saying as much, she taught me to keep going, keep working at whatever it was I was trying to do, and to thus prove myself more powerful than the opposing forces.  She has used this word "prevail" rebelliously, saying she would personally prevail when she got divorced, when somebody cheated her on a horse trade, or when some jealous wife put the kibosh on some of her fun, even when her own body threatened to fail. For me as a writer, though, my own self-doubt is often the toughest force opposing me. If the problem is that I’m feeling crappy about myself and my writing, then the solution is to write some more and keep writing, to write better, to write something else. The cow has to be milked, morning and night, and the story needs to be written, no matter how lousy you might feel. I took the long way to writing. Though writing was always my dream, I studied philosophy in college and then education, and then I went on to get my master’s degree in mathematics. I went on for many years afraid to commit to a life of writing, or afraid to commit to trying. I was afraid of failing in such a competitive field. And yet, I could not give up writing. And at age 35 (with the encouragement of my mathematics Ph.D. adviser), I took my first serious writing course. There I met the powerful force of nature that was soon-to-be National Book Award-winning Jaimy Gordon, who has been a whole other kind of mother to me. And ever since then, I’ve just had to keep on working hard, keep on keeping it lively, and employ all those other lessons I learned from Susanna. And from the other mothers I’ve picked up along the way.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of several books, including "Women and Other Animals," "Q Road" and "American Salvage." Her forthcoming collection of stories is "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters," to be published by W.W. Norton on Oct. 5. She now lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, and she teaches writing in the low residency program at Pacific University.

Anyone who writes a book called "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters" has to expect to be asked about her own mother, so let me get that conversation started here.   In my novel "Once Upon a River," the protagonist Margo Crane’s mother was a runaway. My mother, Susanna, was the opposite—she stuck around home. When everybody was running around and running away in the 1960s and '70s, my mom had to be there to milk the cow twice a day. Susanna has lived a life full of challenges and personal trials, mostly brought on by her own strong and determined character. She raised a heap of kids by herself, her own kids and other people’s—the price she paid for always being there was that other people showed up for the free babysitting. Sometimes neighbors or cousins stayed the whole summer. Mom was a horsewoman, and she became a horse trader. She also became the one the local farmers all called to help to deliver their difficult calves. She also has drunk plenty and smoked like a chimney for decades. She loves to spend time listening to music and laughing and telling and hearing funny stories. She wants literature to entertain and relieve her from stress, to smooth life’s rough edges. This is why Susanna doesn’t love my writing. She’s very proud of me, but she wishes I’d write something funny, like slapstick or folkloric humor. Or she wishes I would write a series of murder mysteries in which a clever woman outwits criminals before the book’s end. Instead, I write about problems that have no solutions. My stories make a reader think more and worry more. Nonetheless, an awful lot of what I’ve learned about writing has come from her. The first thing I learned was to work hard. From the time I was 7 years old, my mom was a single parent struggling to feed at least five hungry kids at any given time. She had eight acres of land, a few outbuildings and a pasture where she’d kept a horse. Well, as soon as she got divorced, she figured out that she could get free runt piglets from the local pig farmers (the ones that wouldn’t survive).  She bought a mean old milk cow named Red, a Hereford-Ayrshire mix, some cheap calves at auction to raise for meat, and some chickens for eggs. She also grew a hell of a garden and canned 200 quarts of tomatoes. I have seen this small woman lug 50-pound feed bags, 80-pound bales of hay, and when it was time to restring the pasture fence, she wrestled railroad ties for us to use as fence posts. I shouldn’t say this, but she may have stolen some of them from alongside the railroad tracks. Furthermore, once she saw how big and strong I was growing up to be, she put me to work. When I was 9, she taught me to milk the cow, and I often did the evening milk duty. We didn’t know any better than to just pour the milk through a coffee filter and drink it just like that.  Now I think that the raw milk lifestyle we enjoyed is illegal in about 11 states. The winter I was 10, our barnyard pipes froze, so for months I carried dozens of five-gallon pails of water before and after school. We chopped wood to keep the fire going to keep the house warm. Some summers we brought in thousands of bales of hay. (I think that working kids the way we got worked might now be illegal in a few states, too.) Among the many realizations I’ve had in my writing life, most important was realizing that writing well was not a matter of being brilliant. Writing, it turns out, is just more hard work. I learned this when working on a story called “Sleeping Sickness,” which ended up in my first collection. It happens to be about a mother and daughter, and the mother’s manifestation of depression is that she sleeps for 12 or 14 hours at a stretch (this is not my mom). And I kept working on the story every day, going through it over and over again, week after week, and then month after month, and my attention to the story was making it better, not in any glorious rush, just bit by bit it was getting better. I sent it to a magazine called Kiosk, and the editor sent it back with some suggestions, so I worked every day for another couple of months. Once I made that discovery, that writing a story was something like digging a ditch or chopping wood or weeding a garden or milking a cow every day, then I knew I had a chance in this writing business. Brilliance, I can’t count on, but hard work, well, I can do that. I was raised up for that. Case in point: “Bringing Belle Home” is a story in my collection "American Salvage," and I worked on that story for 24 years before I got it right. But I did get it, finally. There’s another story in that book that I wrote in five months—that was the quickest I ever wrote a story. That was the title story, and I wrote it in a kind of panic.  Funny, the same thing happened in writing the title story of "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters"; I decided on a title for the book, and then felt I needed a story with that same title. It took about five months for that story, too.   Maybe some of you new writers out there think that writing a story is  going to get easier and faster as your career progresses. If anything, now that I know what I’m doing, it takes more time and more agonizing for me to write a story. Same goes for novels. My first one was the quickest; because I didn’t know any better, I was able to write a first draft of "Q Road" in six weeks. Oh, as an aside, some writers are always saying how their characters take over the story and write the story themselves. Well, give me some of that! My characters are like the laziest of actors, lying around in their comfy lounge chairs waiting for me to tell them what to do. When I get up in the morning to write, which I do seven days a week, three hours a day if I can, the characters are all staring at me out of my computer screen, waiting for me to direct and finesse their actions, dialogue, moods and attitudes. They want me to do the hard work. The second thing I learned from my mom is that reading is really great. Recently I heard my mom tell my brother she wasn’t going to do something like haul wood anymore, because it was a man’s job. I nearly choked on my stalk of raw asparagus. Well, there’s got to be some advantage to getting older, and now she spends a lot of time reading. She reads about five books a week, more than anybody else I know. She read to us kids when we were little, and we had a lot of books in the house, including the Nancy Drew series and a lot of horse books like "Black Beauty" and such. We did not have a TV in the house for most of my growing up. We didn’t get one until my brother started dealing drugs and bought one himself. But it was locked in his room. For the record, my brother straightened up his act decades ago and is a productive member of society. OK, let me confess something. I am not a bookworm. I know this sounds sacrilegious coming from a writer, but reading has always been work for me. Satisfying work, wonderful, important, meaningful, but work nonetheless. When I listen to other people talking about reading, it sounds like it’s as easy as floating down a river; when I read, it’s like rowing upstream. (And if you’ve read my work, you know rowing is a kind of work I like.) So I did not go to bed with a flashlight so I could read under my covers. Usually I fell to bed exhausted from running around all day and hauling wood and hay bales. If I didn’t want to sleep, my inclination was not to read, but to sneak out my bedroom window and run out into the night and have adventures with my friends and especially with boys. You can ask my mother if this is true. I used to go out into the night and travel miles to hide in shrubbery and peek in the windows of the bedrooms of boys I liked. Reading is to me like exercising and it’s like writing and like eating healthy. I do all these things every day, religiously, and I love doing them, though maybe not at any given moment. I’m telling you this just because in our work of trying to create reasons to read, I think we sometimes assume that for everyone reading is really fun and easy, and I want to suggest it might not be. Nonetheless, even if it is not exactly fun, it is hugely rewarding.  Even today, my reading style is to read about four pages, and then get up and move around and then sit back down and read again, a few more pages. Reading is always worthwhile. I know as a writer that if I want compelling language and stories to come out of me, I’ve got to put compelling language and stories into myself. It’s that simple. Still, I occasionally lose my willpower, and then you’ll find me sitting in front of the TV eating cupcakes. Or more likely eating cupcakes while staring at the inmates, most of them sex offenders, at the minimum security prison next door playing basketball. In case you’re wondering what minimum security means, it means they don’t lock the inmates in. Watching my mom has taught me to take an interest in the people around me and engage them in conversation willy-nilly. So I am reading every day, but what I love best is to talk to people. My mom is, and I am, too, the person who talks to everybody in line at the post office. I love to chat with the postal clerks and grocery story cashiers, and the librarians and the guys at the oil change shop—no matter if they tell me to stay in the car, I get out and watch what they’re doing. I love to hear people’s stories and to learn how they feel about life and its challenges. (And I have learned that if you show some interest, people will indeed share their stories with you.) Most of what I’ve learned in life beside what I’ve read, I have learned from talking to folks. I’m happy when I’m sitting at a table sharing stories, jokes and anecdotes with friends. I’m happy to meet someone new who has an experience I’ve never dreamed of, and it turns out most people do have such experiences. My mother’s mother, Betty, used to do the same thing, though she lived a life very different from my mom. Betty was a proud active lifelong member of the Chicago League of Women Voters and attended and took notes at the Metropolitan Sanitary District meetings for decades. Occasionally I get story ideas from the people I talk to, but more often what I’ve gotten are glimpses and insights into the human psyche and soul, and that is worth more than any story plot. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I think of all my writing as communication first and foremost. Men are great to have around, but they have their limitations and you might not want to depend upon them too much. We’ll just leave it at that and say Susanna taught me to be independent. And I’ll make the case that being capable and independent has helped me stay happily married for 28 years to the same dude, my darling Christopher. You might have noticed that fiction writers, novelists especially, are most often people who need to live calm, sensible lives. A novelist needs a life without drama in order that she can deliver all the drama to the page. She also taught me to keep an eye out for what’s most interesting around me, right in my own neighborhood. My mom could always find lots of interesting people in her own community. Though her parents had been city people, from the time Susanna was young, she hung out with the old farmers and talked to them about how to raise animals and garden and drive wells and build barns. If anyone is interested in saving a dwindling resource, it would be the knowledge of the old men and women from American farms. They know how to do everything, and they know how to do it cheaply. If my biggest revelation was about writing being hard work, then my second one was the realization that I should write about the Michigan people with whom I’m familiar. In other words, I should write about people from my own tribe, who have special knowledge and skills that I know about, such as how to scrap out metal for money and steal railroad ties and castrate pigs. These are poor and working-class people and some farmers, people who fix their own cars and work low-paying jobs that aren’t very satisfying, and maybe they drink too much, these people, and maybe they love uncarefully. So many people say “write about what you know,” that it’s tempting to discount it, but I came around to understand that old saw in my own way. I lived for years in Chicago and then in Boston and Milwaukee, and I used to try to write about generic people who didn’t live any particular place, or else I wanted to write about city people, because they seemed more exciting than my own people. But when I lived in Boston and I’d tell people about my mom gathering everybody up to go haul a dead frozen cow out of a neighbor’s pond where she’d fallen through the ice and drowned. The neighbor had said we could have the meat, so the whole family went to go retrieve this cow with a boat and a chainsaw. Well, I could tell by the looks on their sophisticated city mugs that this sort of activity was new and interesting to them. Turns out my knowledge and experience of life has given me some stories to tell. Keep things lively In the moral universe, where we live our real lives and eat breakfast and go to work, the worst crime is murder, or maybe torture-and-murder. But in the writing universe, the universe of stories, murder and torture and mayhem are just fine. In some genres, murder is required! The real unforgivable crime for all writers is the crime of being dull. When I’m revising, which is 95 percent of what I do, maybe 98 percent, I’m continually searching what I’ve written to eliminate places where the story is bogging down, where a character is feeling self-pity or being melodramatic. In the moral universe, we all feel self-pity and indulge in melodrama and whimpering and whining, but there’s no need for it in the pages of a story, when our reader can so easily put down the book and turn on the TV to a cop show and eat a cupcake. Every moment of a book has to be interesting. Don’t take myself too seriously If I could show you a couple of photos right now, I’d start with one of Mom and me butchering a rooster last year. This rooster started out as a nice enough Plymouth Rock fellow, big and strong with glossy black-and-white plumage, but then he started picking on the hens, causing the hens to peck on one another. Everybody was losing their feathers. Then he started attacking my great-nieces when they went in to collect eggs. For the next photo I would then show you a photo of three things on a blue-and-white plate: two testicles and a chicken heart. You would notice that each of the rooster’s balls are bigger than his heart. The job of a writer is twofold. One half of your job requires you to take yourself and your vision and ideas and sensibility very seriously, to have confidence that what you write matters. And it matters enough for you to neglect your family and friends, and especially your housework. As Jane Smiley told the New York Times, “mess reminds me that I can choose to write or I can choose to clean, and I have always chosen to write.” And the other half of your job as a writer is to be humble and open to constructive criticism that can make your work better. This might come from friends or editors. Or even from your mom. But mostly it has to come from your own critical self. You must be prepared to admit and acknowledge that you are just plain wrong at times, that your work is not good enough. Yet. And then you have to go back to having confidence again, because you have to believe you do have what it takes to be able to make the writing good enough. And sometimes, when it’s rough going with the story I’m working on, I need to remember that writing is just part of my life. There are other things, like family, friends and food. And wine. And my donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote, who don’t give a fig about my success or failure. And there’s the joy of talking to the people in the line at the post office and in the line to where we’re all waiting to renew our driver’s licenses. Mom taught me that it’s OK to hide the really good chocolates away from your kids and your husband. Honestly, are they going to appreciate them the way you do? Always keep in mind how things affect those who are not doing as well as you are. Don’t be fooled by what seems respectable—keep in mind what helps people get by. The only time I saw my mom get politically active recently was when she found out that our little Michigan township was going to pass an ordinance that said that people could not work on their cars in their driveways. It seemed that some people who did not have to fix their own cars thought that fixing one’s own car in the driveway made street looks messy. Well, my mom gathered up everybody she could find to go to that meeting and remind the folks on the board (who did not fix their own cars) that this was a community in which poor people, many of whom didn’t have garages, were trying to survive and keep their cars running as best they could with few resources in order to go to their low-paying jobs.  She reminded them that it’s an important skill in the community for kids to learn how to fix cars, and the driveway was where they learned it. And I have found much of my inspiration comes from understanding how poor people and the working poor make it work in America, where the cards and laws stack up against them. And I consider it an important part of my job to show readers a picture of those who are struggling near the economic bottom, even if they are a little less attractive than those at the top. Mom is still teaching me to live passionately and not play it too safe. While my mom is still usually the smartest woman in the room (have I mentioned she knows how to build a highway bridge as well as how to make great cabbage rolls), she is getting older, and she’s frail. She just had her shoulder replaced, and she’s had five other recent surgeries on her arteries and her back. I’d like her to slow down and take it easy, but she lets me know she doesn’t intend to. She still parties heartily—she has the same passion for partying as I have for writing. She has a good guy friend who’s about my age who often takes her out to rowdy events, and he pulled me aside recently and said, “You know, this could kill her. Somebody threw her in the swimming pool last week. If you don’t want me to take her out, I won’t.” And though I’d like to put her on a diet of healthful foods and moderation of all kinds, I say, “Take her where she wants to go, and make sure she has fun.” She has taught me to prevail! Without saying as much, she taught me to keep going, keep working at whatever it was I was trying to do, and to thus prove myself more powerful than the opposing forces.  She has used this word "prevail" rebelliously, saying she would personally prevail when she got divorced, when somebody cheated her on a horse trade, or when some jealous wife put the kibosh on some of her fun, even when her own body threatened to fail. For me as a writer, though, my own self-doubt is often the toughest force opposing me. If the problem is that I’m feeling crappy about myself and my writing, then the solution is to write some more and keep writing, to write better, to write something else. The cow has to be milked, morning and night, and the story needs to be written, no matter how lousy you might feel. I took the long way to writing. Though writing was always my dream, I studied philosophy in college and then education, and then I went on to get my master’s degree in mathematics. I went on for many years afraid to commit to a life of writing, or afraid to commit to trying. I was afraid of failing in such a competitive field. And yet, I could not give up writing. And at age 35 (with the encouragement of my mathematics Ph.D. adviser), I took my first serious writing course. There I met the powerful force of nature that was soon-to-be National Book Award-winning Jaimy Gordon, who has been a whole other kind of mother to me. And ever since then, I’ve just had to keep on working hard, keep on keeping it lively, and employ all those other lessons I learned from Susanna. And from the other mothers I’ve picked up along the way.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of several books, including "Women and Other Animals," "Q Road" and "American Salvage." Her forthcoming collection of stories is "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters," to be published by W.W. Norton on Oct. 5. She now lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, and she teaches writing in the low residency program at Pacific University.

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My neighbor from hell: But did sweet, ugly revenge go too far?

Last January I was at a party when my wife texted that our walls sounded like they were raining. She wasn’t on LSD. She was at home with our two children, and it was much too cold for rain. I asked her to feel the walls to see if they were wet. They weren’t. I told her I’d listen when I got home, then forgot all about it. Later, when I passed my neighbor’s door, I heard the rain and knocked. No answer. I looked outside for my neighbor’s car, but it was gone, so I did what seemed the neighborly thing and called the guy. When he didn’t pick up, I left a voicemail suggesting he check on the noise. My wife nodded, and I fell asleep.

Two or three hours later, I heard banging on the front door. My neighbor was angry. His entire apartment was flooded. Why didn’t I tell him? I pointed out this was exactly what I’d done. I should have done more, he told me. Everything was ruined! I apologized, but this only emboldened him. He got angrier and louder. Eventually, my wife told him he was going to wake our kids. She closed the door, but because she was half asleep, she closed it with me outside, so I stood eye to eye with my accuser. It occurred to me he might punch me in the face. Some people need an antagonist, and I was the person he’d sought. My neighbor was older but wiry. He ran regularly, though with a notable limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. I wished him the best before anything more happened, returning to my dry apartment.

My wife and I had been living in this apartment on the Long Island edge of Queens for almost five years. There were things we liked, such as the public transportation and public schools and parks and trees and variety of food. We also liked that we were paying less for more space than we’d had during the preceding years in young, sexy Brooklyn. One of the things we didn’t like was our neighbor, who embodied a non-optional mandate toward friendliness. If you didn’t stop to chat about who was visiting whom, if you didn’t comment on the weather (really, the weather!), there was something off about you. Probably you thought you were better than everybody else, especially if you arrived with subtle signs of foreign invasion: different diction, a smile that didn’t last long enough, unfamiliarity with the things that matter.

He seemed not to like me right away, which was okay because I didn’t like him either. Specifically, I thought he was a fake, that his commitment to all matters local masked a judgmental streak that seemed the driving animus of his life. When you live above somebody for five years, you see things; more to the point, you hear things, and never have I heard a more aggrieved human being. Every evening he paced the shared hallway or porch, cataloging to his brother or ambiguous girlfriends/friends the people who had wronged him. I was hardly alone in earning his ire, which was comforting, except there’s nothing comforting about entering the orbit of a man who believes there’s a right way to act, knowing you don’t act that way. Worse, the neighborhood was with him. People congratulated us on acquiring such an enviable neighbor. He’d lived in the building more or less forever, so there was little hope of him leaving.

When I recounted the flood story to my friends, they eagerly took my side. It wasn’t my fault his pipes burst. What did he expect? This was the question I couldn’t leave alone. While I didn’t feel as though I’d done something wrong, I didn’t feel as though I’d done something right either. I mulled a more genuine apology or, better, offering to help in any way I could. In the end, I did neither. It would be uncomfortable. Plus, I was annoyed. I concluded I didn’t owe this man anything, just as he didn’t owe me anything in turn.

*

There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in the Bible. Here’s a line you know: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in children’s programming, as well. Won’t you be my neighbor? But I’m not a Christian anymore, and I’m not a kid. I’m an adult with neighbors who sometimes challenge me in ways I don’t feel like being challenged. Whereas I feel like I have to endure the challenges my closest family or friends present, I don’t feel the same way about my neighbors. I’m not even sure what "neighbors" means.

My grandfather, who implausibly supported a family of six by raising chickens and selling eggs, had to know his neighbors. They were his livelihood. But my day-to-day existence no longer relies on neighbors. My income comes from a university. My food comes from supermarkets. My interests come from all over the place. I can talk to my friends from home or school or wherever on any number of electronic devices. I can have a face-to-face conversation with my brother in Japan from my computer. The "Jetsons" future so many of us waited for so impatiently has arrived.

If I don’t need my neighbors, and they don’t need me, why should I place a premium on a relationship dictated by chance? The last time I did that I was getting a physical before school, and the other kid waiting for the doctor started talking to me, or I started talking to him—I don’t remember. It was 30 years ago. I stopped making friends that way when I turned 5.

I understand the need for decency. I understand being nice to my neighbors in the way I understand being nice to anyone I have a superficial relationship with, like the person buttering my bagel. But if the person who butters my bagel moves next door, should our relationship grow deeper?

This mindset, I recognize, separates me from others, potentially for the worse. Many people’s best friends are their neighbors. My parents were these people. Some of my happiest memories from childhood are of my parents drinking and laughing with the neighbors. We had family nearby, so it wasn’t out of desperation that my parents befriended the neighbors. My parents genuinely liked them, and the feeling was mutual. After many years away, my mother eventually moved back to the neighborhood; indeed, she moved in with the neighbors, who still treat me as part of their family, even though they have two children and six grandchildren who live closer than I do. This was the example I grew up with, a meaningful one I carried into adulthood when I formed my own family.

The first places I lived on my own--Charlottesville, Iowa City, Ann Arbor--all felt a long way from rural New England. Small towns with large state universities are famously good places to meet people who look and sound different from you, to nurture self-indulgence and self-righteousness, to try on and discard different personae. Upon arriving at college, I permanently ditched what remained of my Boston accent. (On the phone, my mother told me I sounded like a snob.) I also made some of my best and most enduring friends. They were my neighbors. My first-year roommate performed my wedding ceremony 11 years later. I loved the people I lived with as much as anyone I know loved the people he or she lived with at school. Eventually, I moved to a neighborhood in Brooklyn, where like many parts of New York, it’s normal not to talk to the people around you. So I didn’t. I never felt like I was missing something.

*

After the pipes burst, my neighbor stopped trying to be nice. It was sort of a relief but mostly annoying and, for my wife, frightening. My teaching schedule allows me to be home most days, but the days I’m at work, I’m at work all day. She didn’t relish an angry man stomping around while she was alone with two children. And was he angry!

In fairness, living below a family with kids is a bad deal, particularly my kids, who learned to walk early and never stopped moving. Like many kids, they enjoy screaming, apropos of nothing. My neighbor’s schedule as a bartender in a city where bars close at 4 a.m. could not have been less complementary with our schedule. For a while, my son woke at 4:30 a.m. His graduation to 6:15 was viewed in our quarters as a major achievement, but that difference couldn’t have seemed like much of a gift to my childless neighbor. He’s one person, and we were two people and then three and then four. Plus, we would throw parties sometimes. We rarely invited him. We didn’t want him there.

Neighbors might turn out to be people you would voluntarily spend time with, but there’s no reason to expect this. The biggest thing my neighbor and I had in common is that we’re guys. We didn’t come from similar places, and we didn’t do similar things for work or pleasure. We didn’t read the same books, or listen to the same music, or drink the same beer, or follow the same teams. One might rightly protest that there’s value in spending time with someone unlike you, and I agree. But I don’t want to spend time with everyone: I want to spend time with people I like, whether that’s easily anticipated or a complete surprise. Never for a minute did I like my neighbor.

It occurs to me that maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe the concept of liking someone or something has gone too far. I criticized my neighbor earlier, but I sit in quiet judgment of people who obsessively like photos and posts on Facebook. In my fiction writing workshop, I admiringly quote Nabokov, who warns against readers who have to like characters. The high school version of myself would recoil at the very word likeable; perhaps the current version of myself should too. Maybe my inability to befriend a neighbor I don’t like represents a personal failing, a narcissism that demands everyone I spend time with share my little corner of the world.

On our last day, my wife told our neighbor she wished it had gone better. He sort of grunted, unwilling to cede the high road he walked alone. He wasn’t surrendering the personal injustice he nurtured for anything she was offering. I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t say anything to me.

*

In a parallel universe, I rub my eyes and say, Let’s get to work. I return to my apartment, but instead of going to bed, I grab a bucket and towels. I spend the night dealing with the pipes and dealing with my neighbor. Possibly, I call the landlord. Get over here, I say. We need your help. We’re all in this together. If my pipes ever burst, I know implicitly that help will arrive. Knee-deep in water, exhausted, I look at my neighbor, who is still internalizing all that’s been ruined. He can see from my look that I feel for him, and he’s grateful. Now he is the one who apologizes. He knows he came off hot earlier, and perhaps he hasn’t always been the easiest guy to live with, but he appreciates my being here.

In the universe I inhabit, I come home tired. I have my own apartment to worry about, my own family to take care of, my own problems to ignore. I don't want to spend my night dealing with another person’s flooded apartment, a person who doesn’t even like me. I might want to be the kind of person who does this, but I’m not. I want to go to bed, so I do.

Shortly before my wife and I moved out, we received an unmarked envelope. It contained a sarcastic note thanking us for being such good neighbors. One of us was called a peach. I showed it to my wife, and as I watched her reaction, I understood this was the breaking point. Perhaps our neighbor designed the anti-thank-you note this way.

*

My wife and I started looking at houses, something she’d long desired and something I viewed with ambivalence. Now we were in agreement: We couldn’t stay. We liked the first house we looked at, a small ranch. Nobody living upstairs, nobody living downstairs! We couldn’t exactly afford it, but we’d figure it out, and we did.

Even before buying the house, we began to meet the neighbors. We were, at this point, prepared to do whatever it took. We didn’t just smile and wave. We chatted. Eventually, we brought over our kids and asked questions and nodded. Between our making an offer and closing on the house, one neighbor erected a new fence.

The other day my wife and I were in a different neighbor’s house. This neighbor was showing us pictures of her children while our children ran around, nearly breaking everything. This neighbor seemed happy. I offered, preposterously, to help her move heavy things. A few days later, she came over with a magnet of the town’s recycling schedule. It doesn’t have to be hard.

We’ve lived here two months, closer to my office and far enough from our old neighbor that there’s a good chance we’ll never see him again, which feels strange because there were few days over the past five years that I was home without being aware that he was home too. Some rooms and times I could hear him better, but I always knew when he was there. When he left town, the space felt different, not just quieter but also more peaceful. I never saw the inside of his apartment beyond what I could view from the hall when his door was open. He never saw the inside of my apartment either, yet he was as much a part of my experience in that place as anyone outside of my wife and children.

Someone that ubiquitous, it seems clear, deserved better. Except when I try to imagine what I could have done differently, I have no idea. I wouldn’t have been happier sharing drinks with him on the porch. I tried: It was awkward. Nor do I think being more confrontational would have improved things. What would I have said? I want you to be more respectful of my efforts. He might have responded, quite reasonably, I want you to be more respectful of my ceiling.

Now I have a desk in my basement, where it’s theoretically quiet, except I can hear everything above me, the running and yelling and dropping and picking up and crying, crying, crying. I have high-powered headphones, into which I blast piano sonatas, and still I hear other people living their lives.

Last January I was at a party when my wife texted that our walls sounded like they were raining. She wasn’t on LSD. She was at home with our two children, and it was much too cold for rain. I asked her to feel the walls to see if they were wet. They weren’t. I told her I’d listen when I got home, then forgot all about it. Later, when I passed my neighbor’s door, I heard the rain and knocked. No answer. I looked outside for my neighbor’s car, but it was gone, so I did what seemed the neighborly thing and called the guy. When he didn’t pick up, I left a voicemail suggesting he check on the noise. My wife nodded, and I fell asleep.

Two or three hours later, I heard banging on the front door. My neighbor was angry. His entire apartment was flooded. Why didn’t I tell him? I pointed out this was exactly what I’d done. I should have done more, he told me. Everything was ruined! I apologized, but this only emboldened him. He got angrier and louder. Eventually, my wife told him he was going to wake our kids. She closed the door, but because she was half asleep, she closed it with me outside, so I stood eye to eye with my accuser. It occurred to me he might punch me in the face. Some people need an antagonist, and I was the person he’d sought. My neighbor was older but wiry. He ran regularly, though with a notable limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. I wished him the best before anything more happened, returning to my dry apartment.

My wife and I had been living in this apartment on the Long Island edge of Queens for almost five years. There were things we liked, such as the public transportation and public schools and parks and trees and variety of food. We also liked that we were paying less for more space than we’d had during the preceding years in young, sexy Brooklyn. One of the things we didn’t like was our neighbor, who embodied a non-optional mandate toward friendliness. If you didn’t stop to chat about who was visiting whom, if you didn’t comment on the weather (really, the weather!), there was something off about you. Probably you thought you were better than everybody else, especially if you arrived with subtle signs of foreign invasion: different diction, a smile that didn’t last long enough, unfamiliarity with the things that matter.

He seemed not to like me right away, which was okay because I didn’t like him either. Specifically, I thought he was a fake, that his commitment to all matters local masked a judgmental streak that seemed the driving animus of his life. When you live above somebody for five years, you see things; more to the point, you hear things, and never have I heard a more aggrieved human being. Every evening he paced the shared hallway or porch, cataloging to his brother or ambiguous girlfriends/friends the people who had wronged him. I was hardly alone in earning his ire, which was comforting, except there’s nothing comforting about entering the orbit of a man who believes there’s a right way to act, knowing you don’t act that way. Worse, the neighborhood was with him. People congratulated us on acquiring such an enviable neighbor. He’d lived in the building more or less forever, so there was little hope of him leaving.

When I recounted the flood story to my friends, they eagerly took my side. It wasn’t my fault his pipes burst. What did he expect? This was the question I couldn’t leave alone. While I didn’t feel as though I’d done something wrong, I didn’t feel as though I’d done something right either. I mulled a more genuine apology or, better, offering to help in any way I could. In the end, I did neither. It would be uncomfortable. Plus, I was annoyed. I concluded I didn’t owe this man anything, just as he didn’t owe me anything in turn.

*

There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in the Bible. Here’s a line you know: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in children’s programming, as well. Won’t you be my neighbor? But I’m not a Christian anymore, and I’m not a kid. I’m an adult with neighbors who sometimes challenge me in ways I don’t feel like being challenged. Whereas I feel like I have to endure the challenges my closest family or friends present, I don’t feel the same way about my neighbors. I’m not even sure what "neighbors" means.

My grandfather, who implausibly supported a family of six by raising chickens and selling eggs, had to know his neighbors. They were his livelihood. But my day-to-day existence no longer relies on neighbors. My income comes from a university. My food comes from supermarkets. My interests come from all over the place. I can talk to my friends from home or school or wherever on any number of electronic devices. I can have a face-to-face conversation with my brother in Japan from my computer. The "Jetsons" future so many of us waited for so impatiently has arrived.

If I don’t need my neighbors, and they don’t need me, why should I place a premium on a relationship dictated by chance? The last time I did that I was getting a physical before school, and the other kid waiting for the doctor started talking to me, or I started talking to him—I don’t remember. It was 30 years ago. I stopped making friends that way when I turned 5.

I understand the need for decency. I understand being nice to my neighbors in the way I understand being nice to anyone I have a superficial relationship with, like the person buttering my bagel. But if the person who butters my bagel moves next door, should our relationship grow deeper?

This mindset, I recognize, separates me from others, potentially for the worse. Many people’s best friends are their neighbors. My parents were these people. Some of my happiest memories from childhood are of my parents drinking and laughing with the neighbors. We had family nearby, so it wasn’t out of desperation that my parents befriended the neighbors. My parents genuinely liked them, and the feeling was mutual. After many years away, my mother eventually moved back to the neighborhood; indeed, she moved in with the neighbors, who still treat me as part of their family, even though they have two children and six grandchildren who live closer than I do. This was the example I grew up with, a meaningful one I carried into adulthood when I formed my own family.

The first places I lived on my own--Charlottesville, Iowa City, Ann Arbor--all felt a long way from rural New England. Small towns with large state universities are famously good places to meet people who look and sound different from you, to nurture self-indulgence and self-righteousness, to try on and discard different personae. Upon arriving at college, I permanently ditched what remained of my Boston accent. (On the phone, my mother told me I sounded like a snob.) I also made some of my best and most enduring friends. They were my neighbors. My first-year roommate performed my wedding ceremony 11 years later. I loved the people I lived with as much as anyone I know loved the people he or she lived with at school. Eventually, I moved to a neighborhood in Brooklyn, where like many parts of New York, it’s normal not to talk to the people around you. So I didn’t. I never felt like I was missing something.

*

After the pipes burst, my neighbor stopped trying to be nice. It was sort of a relief but mostly annoying and, for my wife, frightening. My teaching schedule allows me to be home most days, but the days I’m at work, I’m at work all day. She didn’t relish an angry man stomping around while she was alone with two children. And was he angry!

In fairness, living below a family with kids is a bad deal, particularly my kids, who learned to walk early and never stopped moving. Like many kids, they enjoy screaming, apropos of nothing. My neighbor’s schedule as a bartender in a city where bars close at 4 a.m. could not have been less complementary with our schedule. For a while, my son woke at 4:30 a.m. His graduation to 6:15 was viewed in our quarters as a major achievement, but that difference couldn’t have seemed like much of a gift to my childless neighbor. He’s one person, and we were two people and then three and then four. Plus, we would throw parties sometimes. We rarely invited him. We didn’t want him there.

Neighbors might turn out to be people you would voluntarily spend time with, but there’s no reason to expect this. The biggest thing my neighbor and I had in common is that we’re guys. We didn’t come from similar places, and we didn’t do similar things for work or pleasure. We didn’t read the same books, or listen to the same music, or drink the same beer, or follow the same teams. One might rightly protest that there’s value in spending time with someone unlike you, and I agree. But I don’t want to spend time with everyone: I want to spend time with people I like, whether that’s easily anticipated or a complete surprise. Never for a minute did I like my neighbor.

It occurs to me that maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe the concept of liking someone or something has gone too far. I criticized my neighbor earlier, but I sit in quiet judgment of people who obsessively like photos and posts on Facebook. In my fiction writing workshop, I admiringly quote Nabokov, who warns against readers who have to like characters. The high school version of myself would recoil at the very word likeable; perhaps the current version of myself should too. Maybe my inability to befriend a neighbor I don’t like represents a personal failing, a narcissism that demands everyone I spend time with share my little corner of the world.

On our last day, my wife told our neighbor she wished it had gone better. He sort of grunted, unwilling to cede the high road he walked alone. He wasn’t surrendering the personal injustice he nurtured for anything she was offering. I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t say anything to me.

*

In a parallel universe, I rub my eyes and say, Let’s get to work. I return to my apartment, but instead of going to bed, I grab a bucket and towels. I spend the night dealing with the pipes and dealing with my neighbor. Possibly, I call the landlord. Get over here, I say. We need your help. We’re all in this together. If my pipes ever burst, I know implicitly that help will arrive. Knee-deep in water, exhausted, I look at my neighbor, who is still internalizing all that’s been ruined. He can see from my look that I feel for him, and he’s grateful. Now he is the one who apologizes. He knows he came off hot earlier, and perhaps he hasn’t always been the easiest guy to live with, but he appreciates my being here.

In the universe I inhabit, I come home tired. I have my own apartment to worry about, my own family to take care of, my own problems to ignore. I don't want to spend my night dealing with another person’s flooded apartment, a person who doesn’t even like me. I might want to be the kind of person who does this, but I’m not. I want to go to bed, so I do.

Shortly before my wife and I moved out, we received an unmarked envelope. It contained a sarcastic note thanking us for being such good neighbors. One of us was called a peach. I showed it to my wife, and as I watched her reaction, I understood this was the breaking point. Perhaps our neighbor designed the anti-thank-you note this way.

*

My wife and I started looking at houses, something she’d long desired and something I viewed with ambivalence. Now we were in agreement: We couldn’t stay. We liked the first house we looked at, a small ranch. Nobody living upstairs, nobody living downstairs! We couldn’t exactly afford it, but we’d figure it out, and we did.

Even before buying the house, we began to meet the neighbors. We were, at this point, prepared to do whatever it took. We didn’t just smile and wave. We chatted. Eventually, we brought over our kids and asked questions and nodded. Between our making an offer and closing on the house, one neighbor erected a new fence.

The other day my wife and I were in a different neighbor’s house. This neighbor was showing us pictures of her children while our children ran around, nearly breaking everything. This neighbor seemed happy. I offered, preposterously, to help her move heavy things. A few days later, she came over with a magnet of the town’s recycling schedule. It doesn’t have to be hard.

We’ve lived here two months, closer to my office and far enough from our old neighbor that there’s a good chance we’ll never see him again, which feels strange because there were few days over the past five years that I was home without being aware that he was home too. Some rooms and times I could hear him better, but I always knew when he was there. When he left town, the space felt different, not just quieter but also more peaceful. I never saw the inside of his apartment beyond what I could view from the hall when his door was open. He never saw the inside of my apartment either, yet he was as much a part of my experience in that place as anyone outside of my wife and children.

Someone that ubiquitous, it seems clear, deserved better. Except when I try to imagine what I could have done differently, I have no idea. I wouldn’t have been happier sharing drinks with him on the porch. I tried: It was awkward. Nor do I think being more confrontational would have improved things. What would I have said? I want you to be more respectful of my efforts. He might have responded, quite reasonably, I want you to be more respectful of my ceiling.

Now I have a desk in my basement, where it’s theoretically quiet, except I can hear everything above me, the running and yelling and dropping and picking up and crying, crying, crying. I have high-powered headphones, into which I blast piano sonatas, and still I hear other people living their lives.

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Margaret Cho: No one is more sensitive about p.c. culture than white people

Over the years, comedian Margaret Cho has been called many things. Trailblazer. Fearless. Dangerously funny. But what she is can be summed up in one word: ajumma. Ajumma is a Korean word that defies translation, though it sometimes comes out as “auntie.” Politely, an ajumma is a middle-aged woman wearing white footie socks with cheap plastic sandals as she stands, hands on skinny Korean hips, shouting her displeasure at the world. But the word has also come to be associated with formidable female lung power, because the ajumma refuses to be quiet. She not only owns her bawdy sexuality but doesn’t care if it scares you, because she is not here to please men, look pretty, or be rescued. These are strengths rarely possessed by the delicate or girlish. Margaret Cho has been this kind of woman most of her life. Not only has she been outspoken about her own experiences with childhood sexual abuse and being raped during her teen years, she has recently — and dramatically — stepped forward in loud defense of Planned Parenthood. No celebrity has been as willing to take the heat that comes from being unambiguously aligned with the mission of the embattled women's health care provider. Margaret Cho now fills that void, sparring on Twitter with conservatives such as Adam Baldwin and Dana Loesch, and fending off veiled death threats from online trolls. To one detractor, she responded: “I feed, clothe, entertain homeless people on street corners #berobin. You take away low cost healthcare for women in need. Who's the Christian?” She is a complex creature. Raw and real, Margaret Cho sports dramatic ink in places that peek out from demure sleeves, appearing every bit the badass big sister to a whole new crop of female comedians. She’s been performing long enough to make her a bona fide comedic institution: the sitcom she starred in two decades ago, “All-American Girl,” is widely acknowledged as having paved the way for NBC’s hit “Fresh off the Boat.” After kicking off with a new special that just aired on Showtime, “PsyCHO” — the title of her new tour — is about to hit the road. As Cho puts it on her website, "This show is about insanity, and about the anger I feel about everything happening in the world right now, from police brutality to racism to the rising tide of violence against women. It makes me so crazy — hence the title: 'THE PSYCHO TOUR,' because there is no 'i' in team but there is 'CHO' in psycho." (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) Paula Young Lee: You’re pretty awesome. How do you feel about becoming, for lack of a better word, one of the elder stateswomen inside the field of comedy? Margaret Cho: I love it! I think it’s great. I have to say that ajumma status is so ... cool. You know what that is, right? PYL: Yep. We could have an entire conversation just about that, being an ajumma when you’re a teenager. MC: I’ve always been an ajumma, but when you get older, the culture we were brought up in works in our favor where aging is good, combatting the Hollywood idea that aging is bad. I’m very grateful for that. PYL: Do you feel it’s changing your comedy? For example, do you feel you have to be more mature? MC: I think you try to create work that is really brave and funny and exciting. You have to constantly recreate yourself in show business, which is a very fast thing, especially now with the tremendous speed of social media. There are so many personalities, so many different kinds of comedy that you can access, so it’s definitely important to stake your claim and say who you are. But that’s the nature of comedy. You always want to be improving and growing and changing with what’s happening in the world. That’s when comedy is most effective. PYL: There’s been a lot of conversation right now about PC culture and how it’s affecting comedy in particular. Do you feel that you consciously or unconsciously rewrite jokes to respond to that? MC: Well, everybody gets a voice, and you kind of wing it constantly, but the loudest voices complaining about PC culture, oddly, are from white people. White fragility! White people are so sensitive about race and racial conversations. I feel like I’m always walking on eggshells when I’m around white people. It used to be so much easier when we all we had to do was walk on their backs. [Eds. note: A reference to Ashiatsu, an ancient massage technique associated with Asian women walking barefoot on clients’ backs.] But calling it out and talking about it ... I think it’s great, because there are definitely racial problems in this country. Comedy is a way we can figure out how to solve it, and how to solve it without making people really angry. PYL: I agree completely — I think that comedy can be a great bridge builder between opposing factions. I was struck by a comment you made on Seth Myers’s show: “Whenever white and black people fight, Asians and Mexicans never know what to do.” I think a lot of Asian Americans feel as if we’re stuck in the middle as an all-purpose placeholder, so I was grateful to you for saying out loud, “Umm, are we white?” Did you get backlash to that comment? MC: Backlash? No! It was so incredibly true that nobody protested! There is this weird idea of — of where do we fit in that spectrum? Where do we actually have the ability to talk about race and be understood? Asian Americans and Latinos face that kind of thing. We have a similar racial history, we’re all from different countries and different backgrounds yet [have] similar migration patterns and ideas about where we fit in the racial conversation. PYL: You really talk quite frankly about race and sex without becoming racist and sexist with the jokes. Is this something that comes naturally to you, or is this something you consciously craft? Maybe a bit of both? MC: I don’t know, I think maybe it has to do with identity and the understanding that this is a woman of color talking about race. As a woman of color you have little more permission to go deeper and question things because your identity, in a way, is a shield. But if you come at it from a minority status, my person, who I am, softens the blow of whatever it is that I’m saying, because I am that. PYL: I love your impression of your mother. It really is spot on ... you manage to capture the essence of Korean mother-ness. I always wondered what your mother really thought about it in private. MC: She loves it! She’s the star. She’s so many different things, so talented, and yet because of her age and her identity she never gets celebrated. So this is an unusual case where I’m able to shine a spotlight on her and she just revels in the attention. She thinks it’s so fun. PYL: So you’re close to your mother? MC: Yes — to both my parents. They’re really incredible people. PYL: And they’re not upset you didn’t become a doctor? MC: Well, I think they are upset, but now they realize that actually, maybe, it’s better! PYL: You’re remarkably successful, so that makes you like Psy — your parents can only be a little bit angry at this point! I was going to ask you: Is there mudang in your family? [Eds. note: A mudang is a Korean shaman; the gift runs in families.] MC: Not in the immediate family, but there are definitely some distant mudang relatives, for sure! PYL: I was wondering about that because you do have a shamanistic function. I think this in general is true of all pop cultural icons — which you are — we just don’t call it that. The ability to channel and mediate is what the mudang does, and that role is traditionally ascribed to women. MC: Right. PYL: This is also the age, when you hit your forties, when the mudang powers come into play. The older woman is at the height of her powers, which is the opposite of what Western culture posits. MC: Yes. PYL: All these issues regarding sexuality, independence, communication, spirituality — all these things come into coalescence. I was wondering about this vis-à-vis your upcoming tour; from what I’ve read about it in press releases, “PsyCHO” is your way to confront the morass of American society and then channeling your anger. MC: "Psycho" in itself is a feminized way [of] talking about insanity or perceived insanity. It’s always like, “She’s a psycho bitch” or “psycho ex-girlfriend” or whatever. In the film Psycho, the Anthony Perkins character becomes his mother to be a killer. So it’s a bit of feminized hysteria, which I think is the same thing. The show is trying to harness that feeling: how do we make sense of everything that’s happening, whether it’s all of this violence against women we’re seeing, which is starting to become institutionalized, with ISIS using rape as a way to justify their own involvement or acting like it’s part of their religion? Or somebody like Bill Cosby, who did something that nobody would believe for so long because people couldn’t imagine that he [could do] this, even though all those women had the same story and the same things to say and they named him, yet nobody believed them. There are so many different instances — I get so frustrated about it. So I want to talk about how we can use our anger to heal. There are a lot of different aspects to the show. ... In my own life, there is [the loss of] Robin Williams and Joan Rivers and so I guess it’s also about the passage — about becoming a mentor after your own mentors die. You have to become that. So I think that’s what I’m trying to do. PYL: These past few days, you’re been sparring a lot due to your support of Planned Parenthood. MC: Yes. I stand with Planned Parenthood because it's the only healthcare alternative for many women. They do Pap smears, breast exams as well as provide pre- and post-natal care, not to mention birth control and STD testing — all vital to women's health. Abortion isn't federally funded, but all these other things are. When people disagree, they only attack me personally — they offer no cogent rebuttal. Merely Bible verses and death threats, which prove how wrong these people are. It's sad how ignorant and bigoted some people are. PYL: That goes back to my initial question about how you feel about becoming an elder in this community, and becoming an icon and being a person who has to lead the way for the younger generation. I don’t know if you’ve ever envisioned yourself as a role model but, whether you like it or not, you are one. MC: You have to be the unni. You have to be the elder. [Eds. note:The unni is the eldest of sisters; the noona is the eldest sister with younger brothers.] PYL: Are you the unni in your family? MC: Yes! Well, I’m the noona, because I have a brother. But I am the unni of my comedic generation. I was born in the '60s, so a little bit older than the others. PYL: I’m always struck by how vulnerable you appear onstage. That [quality] makes you very relatable, but it makes me wonder about the toll it must take on you psychically. MC: There’s vulnerability — so I have to make sure the audience is certain that I know what I’m doing. There’s vulnerability there because my heart is open, but at the same time I definitely have a lot of "weapons" at my disposal. I have all the language, I have all of the moment — I have all of that to spar with somebody, to take anything on. PYL: You have a lot of confidence. Are you a born performer, or did you have to learn that as a skill? MC: I think I had to learn it. But I started so young that it might have just been that I kind of had to grow up and make people understand that I was worth listening to, even though I was a child. PYL: You have to holler. MC: Yes, you have to have a very holler-y sensibility. So they know there’s something worth listening to.

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The New Sensibility of Susan Sontag & Tom Wolfe: The “dark lady” and the man in white were an unlikely pair, but both were looking to liberate American culture

It was 50 years ago, in 1965, in Mademoiselle magazine, of all places, that Susan Sontag announced the existence of a “New Sensibility” afoot in American culture. By 1966, that phrase would reach a more intellectual audience with publication of her path-breaking collection of essays, "Against Interpretation."   Sontag, however, was not the only figure in 1965 to flip that phrase around. Tom Wolfe, in the introduction to his best-selling book "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," had exclaimed: “The hell with Mondrian, whoever the hell he is ... Yah! lower orders. The new sensibility – Baby baby baby where did our love go? – the new world, submerged so long, invisible, and now arising.” Wolfe and Sontag jointly staking out the territory of this new sensibility? Could a more unlikely pair be imagined? Wolfe was the newspaperman given to wearing a white suit, white spats and fedora; he was smart and cynical but capable of enthusiasm, especially if it went against the grain of the mavens of elite culture. His prose hit like a howitzer, full of capital letters and exclamation points. In contrast, Sontag was the emerging “dark lady” of American letters, decked out in black turtleneck and a torrent of dark hair. She was tall and commanding; there seemed to be nothing that she had not read. Her sentences, if not quite sensuous, were beguiling, full and subtle, with a fine eye for aphorism. Which of the pair first came up with the phrase "the New Sensibility"? Probably Sontag, because Wolfe may have been slyly poking fun at Sontag when he quoted the words “Baby baby baby where did our love go?” They were from the song “Where Did Our Love Go?,”  by the Motown Group the Supremes. It had been a No. 1 hit on the pop charts in August 1964. What’s the connection? Although Wolfe might have appreciated the tune’s contemporary rhythm and energy, the group singing it had been singled out by Sontag in her own article on the New Sensibility. While Sontag’s roots were sunk deep in European modernism – and its most recent offshoots – she argued that elite American culture lacked a danceable beat. Why must everything be so heavy and brooding? Why must intellectuals crawl over every cultural expression like ants upon potato salad at a picnic? She famously announced that intellectuals and American culture needed to be liberated, to begin to enjoy the “sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” In sum, she finished the opening essay of her book with the words: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” In 1965, The Supremes were on her mind and record turntable. In a diary entry for November, she admitted to herself, “My biggest pleasure the last two years has come from pop music (The Beatles, Dionne Warwick, the Supremes).” In her book "Against Interpretation," in the essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” the Supremes popped up anew. What was wrong with intellectuals, such as Sontag,  kicking off their shoes and dancing to such lively music? The edifice of high modernism would not tremble or tumble too badly. Maybe some of its imposing doors might even come ajar. Indeed, as the essays in "Against Interpretation" indicated, the saturnine spirit of serious art existed nicely alongside the rhythms of the Supremes. Sontag, as a critic, craved both high and low art. But the films and plays, literature and art that attracted her were not quite popular. She was drawn to works that interrogated madness, bewitched with silence. She adored foreign films, cast in the Nouvelle Vague manner, that were often resistant to understanding, self-referential and anchored in the history of the medium. Her taste in fiction (present in her own novel "The Benefactor") was for prose without metaphor, a flat narrative voice, plots that were more dreamlike than logical. Wolfe’s admiration was for quite a different world of culture, one that Sontag had never experienced – nor sought out. While they might both dig rock 'n' roll, he wanted a culture of energy, bright lights and ha cha cha.  He loved the garish and outsized, hence his attraction to Las Vegas. It had “The wheeps, beeps, freeps, electronic lulus, Boomerang Modern and Flash Gordon sunbursts.” Hardly the type of expression associated with some of Sontag’s heroes, such as Samuel Beckett or Simone Weil. Wolfe traveled the United States in search of grass-roots cultural expression. He found it in the unlikeliest of venues, at least as he presumed for a typical New York intellectual. He wrote knowingly, and sympathetically, about Junior Johnson, a race-car driver, “a modern hero.” He marveled at the craftsmanship and culture of auto detailers. He readily stooped to consider the instant celebrity of one Baby Jane Holzer, whose key attribute was tonsorial: “Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face . . . all that hair flowing down over a coat made of ... zebra!” No black turtlenecks for Tom Wolfe. The tastes of Sontag and Wolfe, in that magical year of 1965, rarely overlapped. But each of them was open to a new sensibility that was open to extremes – to pushing things, willing to go too far, ready to offend by over-expression (think here of folks gallivanting around onstage, scantily clad, engaged in some ritual with pieces of meat and fish, as in Carolee Schneemann’s performance piece “Meat Joy,” or Andy Warhol statically filming a friend sleeping, hour after hour).  Such strange, shocking performances were popping up everywhere, also found in the confrontational theatrical experimentation of the Living Theatre, the performative work of Yoko Ono, the creative egoism of Norman Mailer, and the intense fascination in art with madness, breaking boundaries and violence. (Think here of the aesthetics of the bullet-ridden scene in "Bonnie and Clyde.") Sontag and Wolfe named but did not create the culture that was suddenly swirling about them in the mid-1960s. Its roots could be found easily in the work of John Cage, who during a magical summer in 1952, not only debuted his piece of radical composing, "4’33”," with its silence allowing new sounds to be heard, but also orchestrated at Black Mountain College the first happening, a chaotic event that combined poetry reading, snake-dancing, artwork, music and more, all occurring at the same moment. The excesses, the cultural liberation that Sontag and Wolfe were celebrating existed throughout the 1960s, although it ran up frequently against censorship laws (which were slowly but surely losing the campaign) and conservative notions of what constituted art. But the new sensibility, in everything but name, was emerging in the 1950s, in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the photography of Robert Frank, the amoral novels of Patricia Highsmith, the smoldering and ambiguous sexuality of Brando, the artistic mingling of forms and methods in the art of Robert Rauschenberg, and in early sexual energy of rock 'n' roll.  It had simply blossomed by the mid-1960s, hardly needing the British invasion of the Beatles and other groups to strike the chords of cultural freedom and fun. For Sontag, the New Sensibility was a battering ram against academic stodginess and purity. While this drew her to Camp culture (she had first hit the headlines with an essay about this phenomenon in 1964), she did not throw the baby out with the bathwater. She wanted all that culture had to offer, however outrageous. Hence, she wrote with uncharacteristic enthusiasm about the film "Flaming Creatures," with its blurred scenes of nude performers and transvestites in motion – and no discernible plot or raison d’être. But, as she had made clear in her “Notes on Camp,” Sontag was both “drawn” to Camp -- and “offended by it.” Wolfe invariably opted, at least in print, for the outrageous, especially when it allowed him further opportunity to poke fun at the self-inflated egos and pretensions of cultural worthies. Whether he identified with the old or new culture remained unclear, hidden behind his inscrutable smile. Looking back 30 years later, Sontag admitted that her enthusiasm for the excesses of the New Sensibility had a strong element of the “evangelical zeal” of a recent convert. Yet, she remained adamant that the tired distinction between high and low culture needed to be cast aside. She had put her finger on the pulse of the emerging sensibility. The New Sensibility, now 50 years after being labeled by Sontag and Wolfe, remains our cultural configuration. We live is a culture of excess. Divisions between high and low have been largely obliterated, limitations on violence erased, and distance between performer and audience crossed, the division between the mad and sane broached. Sontag had worried in the 1960s that once an analyst applied a name to a phenomenon such as Camp, that entity was in danger of being contained, somehow crushed of energy. Such has hardly been the case for the New Sensibility. The distance from "Flaming Creatures" and the celebrity culture of Baby Jane Holzer to Kim Kardashian and the twerking of Miley Cyrus seem more of a piece than of a different entity entirely. George Cotkin is Emeritus Professor of History, California Polytechnic University, and author of the forthcoming book "Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility" (Oxford University Press).It was 50 years ago, in 1965, in Mademoiselle magazine, of all places, that Susan Sontag announced the existence of a “New Sensibility” afoot in American culture. By 1966, that phrase would reach a more intellectual audience with publication of her path-breaking collection of essays, "Against Interpretation."   Sontag, however, was not the only figure in 1965 to flip that phrase around. Tom Wolfe, in the introduction to his best-selling book "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," had exclaimed: “The hell with Mondrian, whoever the hell he is ... Yah! lower orders. The new sensibility – Baby baby baby where did our love go? – the new world, submerged so long, invisible, and now arising.” Wolfe and Sontag jointly staking out the territory of this new sensibility? Could a more unlikely pair be imagined? Wolfe was the newspaperman given to wearing a white suit, white spats and fedora; he was smart and cynical but capable of enthusiasm, especially if it went against the grain of the mavens of elite culture. His prose hit like a howitzer, full of capital letters and exclamation points. In contrast, Sontag was the emerging “dark lady” of American letters, decked out in black turtleneck and a torrent of dark hair. She was tall and commanding; there seemed to be nothing that she had not read. Her sentences, if not quite sensuous, were beguiling, full and subtle, with a fine eye for aphorism. Which of the pair first came up with the phrase "the New Sensibility"? Probably Sontag, because Wolfe may have been slyly poking fun at Sontag when he quoted the words “Baby baby baby where did our love go?” They were from the song “Where Did Our Love Go?,”  by the Motown Group the Supremes. It had been a No. 1 hit on the pop charts in August 1964. What’s the connection? Although Wolfe might have appreciated the tune’s contemporary rhythm and energy, the group singing it had been singled out by Sontag in her own article on the New Sensibility. While Sontag’s roots were sunk deep in European modernism – and its most recent offshoots – she argued that elite American culture lacked a danceable beat. Why must everything be so heavy and brooding? Why must intellectuals crawl over every cultural expression like ants upon potato salad at a picnic? She famously announced that intellectuals and American culture needed to be liberated, to begin to enjoy the “sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” In sum, she finished the opening essay of her book with the words: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” In 1965, The Supremes were on her mind and record turntable. In a diary entry for November, she admitted to herself, “My biggest pleasure the last two years has come from pop music (The Beatles, Dionne Warwick, the Supremes).” In her book "Against Interpretation," in the essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” the Supremes popped up anew. What was wrong with intellectuals, such as Sontag,  kicking off their shoes and dancing to such lively music? The edifice of high modernism would not tremble or tumble too badly. Maybe some of its imposing doors might even come ajar. Indeed, as the essays in "Against Interpretation" indicated, the saturnine spirit of serious art existed nicely alongside the rhythms of the Supremes. Sontag, as a critic, craved both high and low art. But the films and plays, literature and art that attracted her were not quite popular. She was drawn to works that interrogated madness, bewitched with silence. She adored foreign films, cast in the Nouvelle Vague manner, that were often resistant to understanding, self-referential and anchored in the history of the medium. Her taste in fiction (present in her own novel "The Benefactor") was for prose without metaphor, a flat narrative voice, plots that were more dreamlike than logical. Wolfe’s admiration was for quite a different world of culture, one that Sontag had never experienced – nor sought out. While they might both dig rock 'n' roll, he wanted a culture of energy, bright lights and ha cha cha.  He loved the garish and outsized, hence his attraction to Las Vegas. It had “The wheeps, beeps, freeps, electronic lulus, Boomerang Modern and Flash Gordon sunbursts.” Hardly the type of expression associated with some of Sontag’s heroes, such as Samuel Beckett or Simone Weil. Wolfe traveled the United States in search of grass-roots cultural expression. He found it in the unlikeliest of venues, at least as he presumed for a typical New York intellectual. He wrote knowingly, and sympathetically, about Junior Johnson, a race-car driver, “a modern hero.” He marveled at the craftsmanship and culture of auto detailers. He readily stooped to consider the instant celebrity of one Baby Jane Holzer, whose key attribute was tonsorial: “Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face . . . all that hair flowing down over a coat made of ... zebra!” No black turtlenecks for Tom Wolfe. The tastes of Sontag and Wolfe, in that magical year of 1965, rarely overlapped. But each of them was open to a new sensibility that was open to extremes – to pushing things, willing to go too far, ready to offend by over-expression (think here of folks gallivanting around onstage, scantily clad, engaged in some ritual with pieces of meat and fish, as in Carolee Schneemann’s performance piece “Meat Joy,” or Andy Warhol statically filming a friend sleeping, hour after hour).  Such strange, shocking performances were popping up everywhere, also found in the confrontational theatrical experimentation of the Living Theatre, the performative work of Yoko Ono, the creative egoism of Norman Mailer, and the intense fascination in art with madness, breaking boundaries and violence. (Think here of the aesthetics of the bullet-ridden scene in "Bonnie and Clyde.") Sontag and Wolfe named but did not create the culture that was suddenly swirling about them in the mid-1960s. Its roots could be found easily in the work of John Cage, who during a magical summer in 1952, not only debuted his piece of radical composing, "4’33”," with its silence allowing new sounds to be heard, but also orchestrated at Black Mountain College the first happening, a chaotic event that combined poetry reading, snake-dancing, artwork, music and more, all occurring at the same moment. The excesses, the cultural liberation that Sontag and Wolfe were celebrating existed throughout the 1960s, although it ran up frequently against censorship laws (which were slowly but surely losing the campaign) and conservative notions of what constituted art. But the new sensibility, in everything but name, was emerging in the 1950s, in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the photography of Robert Frank, the amoral novels of Patricia Highsmith, the smoldering and ambiguous sexuality of Brando, the artistic mingling of forms and methods in the art of Robert Rauschenberg, and in early sexual energy of rock 'n' roll.  It had simply blossomed by the mid-1960s, hardly needing the British invasion of the Beatles and other groups to strike the chords of cultural freedom and fun. For Sontag, the New Sensibility was a battering ram against academic stodginess and purity. While this drew her to Camp culture (she had first hit the headlines with an essay about this phenomenon in 1964), she did not throw the baby out with the bathwater. She wanted all that culture had to offer, however outrageous. Hence, she wrote with uncharacteristic enthusiasm about the film "Flaming Creatures," with its blurred scenes of nude performers and transvestites in motion – and no discernible plot or raison d’être. But, as she had made clear in her “Notes on Camp,” Sontag was both “drawn” to Camp -- and “offended by it.” Wolfe invariably opted, at least in print, for the outrageous, especially when it allowed him further opportunity to poke fun at the self-inflated egos and pretensions of cultural worthies. Whether he identified with the old or new culture remained unclear, hidden behind his inscrutable smile. Looking back 30 years later, Sontag admitted that her enthusiasm for the excesses of the New Sensibility had a strong element of the “evangelical zeal” of a recent convert. Yet, she remained adamant that the tired distinction between high and low culture needed to be cast aside. She had put her finger on the pulse of the emerging sensibility. The New Sensibility, now 50 years after being labeled by Sontag and Wolfe, remains our cultural configuration. We live is a culture of excess. Divisions between high and low have been largely obliterated, limitations on violence erased, and distance between performer and audience crossed, the division between the mad and sane broached. Sontag had worried in the 1960s that once an analyst applied a name to a phenomenon such as Camp, that entity was in danger of being contained, somehow crushed of energy. Such has hardly been the case for the New Sensibility. The distance from "Flaming Creatures" and the celebrity culture of Baby Jane Holzer to Kim Kardashian and the twerking of Miley Cyrus seem more of a piece than of a different entity entirely. George Cotkin is Emeritus Professor of History, California Polytechnic University, and author of the forthcoming book "Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility" (Oxford University Press).

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There are rules in my bar — Yes, even you, who called yourself the Angel of Death

BE NICE There’s a sign taped to the mirror behind the bar where I work in Brooklyn that says, “Be nice or you’ll get the boot.” (To animate its message, the sign is in the shape of a boot.) Some customers notice it, point it out, have a laugh. Others don’t. Still, it’s as good a declaration of this particular bar’s ethos as any—and once in a while, when I sense intimations of aggression, if someone starts getting out of line, I point to it, smile, and repeat aloud what it says. It usually breaks the tension in the room. This is a good-natured, friendly place, this little neighborhood bar in a gentrifying but still relatively modest part of Brooklyn, in the fuzzy borderlands between Park Slope and Sunset Park near Green-Wood Cemetery. We don’t want any trouble here. We want everyone—and that includes you—to make nice, to make friends, and have an easygoing, no-pressure $3 Miller High Life, $3 shot of Evan Williams good time. And the happy truth is: Most people here are nice. I love my job. In my four years behind this bar, only a few incidents have given me real grief, and those have been extreme, anomalous cases. Once, a raving madman, jacked up to his eyeballs on speed, sweating through his T-shirt, came in, ordered a shot of whiskey, didn’t drink it, and proceeded to pace the length of the almost-empty bar enumerating, in a loosely coherent monologue, the many conspirators arrayed against him: The Bloods. The Crips. The Hollywood establishment. Old friends who’d betrayed him. The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Then he became eerily still for a moment, as if finding the quiet center of his self-made storm, looked me right in the eye, and told me that he was the Angel of Death. “You were kind to me when I walked in,” he said, “and you will come to regret that kindness.” Suddenly, it felt like a siege. It took a long, tense time to get him out of the bar. But he was wrong: I don’t regret whatever kindness I showed him. That’s what I expect of all bartenders, and what I wish for from all customers. Like many bartenders, I’ve been propositioned from time to time in uncomfortable ways. I’ve had to intervene more than once when male customers have bothered uninterested women customers. And, sure, sometimes I’ve had to cut people off and give them the boot—but nicely. There are innumerable ways to be not nice in a bar, and mostly they’re not extreme. They’re about manners, assumptions, and ways of asserting power and control. It’s everyday stuff: seemingly small, constant reminders that there are two kinds of New Yorkers: those who work in service, and those who do not. SO, WHAT ELSE DO YOU DO? I had a friend in college whose dad, an Italian immigrant, tended bar at a beloved old-school Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s East Side for decades. Many of his regulars were character actors, some regularly seen in the films of John Cassavetes. (Maybe that’s irrelevant, but I just like Falk and Gazzara and Cassavetes.) Anyway, the man, my friend’s father, made a good enough living behind that bar to buy a nice house in a nice New Jersey suburb, and put two children through college. I like to think those actors tipped well. Something makes me suspect they did. But good tips alone don’t pay mortgages and tuition. It may seem as though bartending is now a more respected office than ever before, but I don’t think that’s true. As taste in drinks has become generally more sophisticated, tending bar may require special skills, and it may have acquired some cultural cachet, but my sense is, for all that, it used to be more professionalized, and pre-tip wages reflected that. Tending bar was once regarded as a real job, a way to make a living without having to make a living many different ways, as so many bartenders do now. I doubt that anyone ever asked my college friend’s father what else he did, or what his real job is, but I’ve come across very few bartenders now who haven’t been interrogated in this way. Most weeks, I’m asked at least once what else it is that I do. In the years since I returned to bartending after a long absence, I’ve had some good luck as a writer. My memoir was published. I write a column for a newspaper. But I still bristle at the question, and hesitate before answering. Partly because I think “What do you do?” is never the most interesting question one might ask someone they’ve only just met. Partly because I’m as surprised as anybody that I wound up with another career that’s working out OK, and that wasn’t always true for me, and it hasn’t been true for many other bartenders I know, irrespective of their talent and ambition, so it’s a matter of solidarity. Partly because I think bartending is an excellent occupation in itself, and I’m uneasy with the assumption that it can’t possibly be enough. (Sometimes I do tell them that I’m a minister, which is also true—I was ordained as an Interfaith minister in 2002, and have served as a Red Cross chaplain—even though I hardly consider it my job, because it generates pretty spectacular reactions, and because it pleases me to consider the ways in which bartending so often feels like a kind of ministry.) My friend Susan, who was possibly the greatest bartender I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching, learning from, and being served by, probably handled it better than I did. She’d just make shit up, and have fun with it. “When people asked me, ‘what do you really do?’ I would laugh so hard.” I can just hear that laughter—it was one of the many joys of drinking when she was behind the bar. “I would say things like, shshsh, but I work on the corner of 43rd and 9th. I was a sheepherder by day. I was a nun. A ditch digger—just for the exercise.” Other bartenders’ responses and reactions sound more like my own. I returned to bartending at forty, after more than fifteen years away from it. I’d never really thought about getting behind a bar again. But when the owners of a then-new, cozy, unfussy bar in my neighborhood asked if I’d give it a shot, it felt like a blessing. I was recently widowed, still mourning. That loss—and the two sad and stressful years during which my husband had been sick with a very rare type of cancer—had made me retreat, close ranks, and isolate myself. I think the bar’s owners knew that, and offered me a shift as a kind of mitzvah, an act of kindness, a way to get me out of my apartment and out of the worst depths of my sadness. It couldn’t put an end to grieving—nothing can, save time—but it helped. At least one day a week, I had to wake up, shower, brush my hair, and talk to people. I hadn’t been doing much of any of that since Frank died. Doing work that was physical and social—unlike writing, which is sedentary and solitary—turned out to be just what I needed. But that felt like more story than any customer wanted to hear when they asked what else I did. What was I going to say? Write and mourn? * We all have our reasons for winding up on the working side of the bar, and a certain kind of customer always wants to know what they are. Christy left a career in advertising in Boston because she’d always dreamed of living in New York. Advertising jobs weren’t easy to find after 9/11. Instead, she got a gig at a bar in Tribeca, and discovered that she liked it, a lot. (It was at my favorite place, the much missed Liquor Store bar. I remember it largely as a peaceable drinking kingdom, with a great mix and range of regulars, where fun and politesse reigned.) “I looked back only when pegged by a shitty conversationalist—a suit wandering in accidentally or some other arrogant overachiever —with the question, ‘So, what else do you do?’ That would send me reeling into a shift-long panic attack, or self-doubt. Over and over again.” But mostly it isn’t arrogance or self-importance that compels bar patrons to ask this question. Evan, another former bartender, hated “the assumptions people made about my life—that I must be in school, or had been laid off from a real job, that I was nomadic.” But he quickly adds: “The curious were well intentioned, I assume.” And I believe that, too. I recently had an argument about this with a curious, well-intentioned friend. We’d just had lunch together, and agreed that our waiter was funny and charming. “I wish I’d asked him what else he did,” my friend said. I told her that it’s probably best she didn’t. That the question, regardless of how kindly one asks it, is often unwelcome, and sometimes even makes people feel bad. Would you ask a teacher what else she did? A banker? An editor? It’s a question only asked of those of whose jobs seem to many others to be transient, temporary, somehow less than substantive. Excerpted from "Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York" edited by John Freeman, published Sept. 8, 2015 by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright by Rosie Schaap, 2014. All rights reserved.

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“‘SNL’ is still the center of his universe”: “Live From New York” author goes deep on Lorne Michaels’ legacy and the future of “Saturday Night Live”

When James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” came out in 2002, it was heralded as the definitive behind-the-scenes look at the legendary late-night institution. Containing interviews with hundreds of writers, cast members, hosts and NBC execs, spanning from the hedonistic heyday of the Not Ready for Primetime Players through the troubled "Saturday Night Dead" years into the new golden age of Ferrell and Fey, the book is a rich, densely-populated tribute to the show's legacy and its enduring impact on entertainment, politics and American culture at large. On Oct. 6, Miller and Shales are releasing the paperback version of the updated edition, with its 200 new pages covering the last 10 years of "SNL." While the show has always gone through ups and downs, this past decade has been a particularly tumultuous one, as the show has fought to forge a path for itself in the rapidly changing digital world and to remain relevant in an increasingly competitive and fragmented viewing landscape. In the new pages, we hear the show's recent history described by the people who were there in the trenches: Andy Samberg discusses the rise of "SNL's" now-omnipresent digital shorts; Tina Fey and Sarah Palin reflect on the political impression that defined the 2008 election; while Kenan Thompson, Sasheer Zamata and other cast members weigh in on the diversity casting crisis that engulfed the show last season. But, as ever, the most important figure is producer Lorne Michaels, the enigmatic visionary who reshaped the entire entertainment industry in his own image, and to whom the book serves as testament and tribute. Ahead of the show's 41st season premiere this Saturday, we sat down with Miller to talk about the show's evolving history, its current challenges, and his hopes for the future of an American institution. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed. I was really impressed by how candid the cast members and writers were, and how open everyone was about their dislikes and their grudges. How did you get people to open up? I don't mean to be pretentious about this, but the goal is to make a book of record. In terms of how certain things really happened, you want it to be in that book. So I think that people understand that this is their chance to really speak the truth, and speak honestly about what they did and what they felt, and who was problematic. Was there anyone who particularly surprised or impressed you during the interview process? Well, it's funny because you see these people on TV, and you always wonder going into an interview: Are they going to be like their persona on TV or not? Take somebody like Chris Rock, for instance, who's incredibly funny – but he winds up being so smart too. I mean, the guy was so smart. I remember leaving that first interview with him and thinking: Whoa, yes, his stand-up is great, and he's fun in the show, but there's so much more going on. There were some amazing anecdotes that came out, like when Bill Murray talks about carrying Gilda Radner around a party just before her death, the sort of amazing little moments that you were able to elicit.  When you hear something like that you just realize how special that is, how really incredible. At that moment, you almost stop being an interviewer and you're just a fan of the show. Gilda, Belushi, Phil Hartman: These are people that you wish you could have interviewed. But it was so incredible to hear [Murray] talk about that moment, and to hear people talk about her. Because the truth is that there were other people that were part of "SNL," and then people would say, “I couldn't wait for him to leave” or “I couldn't wait for her to leave.” So when somebody like Gilda comes along, you realize how deep-seated the love is. When people in the book talk about it, it really does seem that there was sort of a magic happening in those legendary first five years of the show. Absolutely. Look, there were a couple of things. One, it was new. So just the fact that it was new and it was breaking down so many barriers, and we'd never seen anything like that. And there was no expectation that it was going to work. I think Lorne understood it, but certainly a lot of the members of the cast didn't. So there was just so much new about the first five years. And then the incredible talent, and the fact that they were, week after week, still messing around with convention, and being really disruptive in the most delicious way. So I think I totally understand when cast members after those first five years looked back with envy or intimidation. It was just inevitable given the weight and the import, the magnitude of those first five years. Can “SNL” still do that sort of risky, ground-breaking comedy, given how long it has been around and all the new competition it faces? I think it can still push boundaries. But the problem is that our world has changed, so some of the stuff that they do Jon Stewart was doing, and now John Oliver is doing, and Stephen Colbert was doing, so they're not the only game in town. [These other shows] may not be doing sketch comedy, but just in terms of sensibilities and being really satirical about what's going on, the landscape is a little cluttered, frankly. Do you think that "SNL" can stay relevant in the current political landscape when pitted against John Oliver, and Colbert, and all those guys? This is what I was trying to say at in my recent Vanity Fair piece. They’ve always had a special place and this year they need to keep that place. They need to not be conflated with other shows that are doing satirical, political humor. That means the sketches have to be very distinctive and noteworthy and the writing has to be as sharp as ever. I think it’s going to be an exciting year for them, because there’s a lot of material. [Longtime writer] Jim Downey was a very prominent figure in the book, and he is pretty harsh when speaking about the show’s politics in recent years. He says that the show hasn’t done anything surprising in recent years and that “SNL” has become “an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment.” The thing I love about Jim is that he's so genuine. He doesn't pander, and he's just one of my favorite people to interview because you really get to understand how he feels. The 40 years of "SNL" kind of run like an EKG. There are triumphant times, there are downtimes, and there are transition years. And I think that some of that is mirrored also in terms of political years. 2008 was incredible, with Tina playing Sarah Palin. But I think Jim was trying to say that they'd become a victim of their own success – boy, they don't take as many chances as they used to. And I think that's what he was really speaking to, and I think that kind of frustrated him. Whereas Horatio Sanz, in the book, refers to Downey as “the Karl Rove of SNL,” and he expresses the concern that Lorne leans too much on Downey instead of relying on more liberal writers like Seth Meyers. And that the show hasn’t been tough enough on the GOP in recent years. One of my favorite indoor sports is at a dinner party or when you're just sitting around with friends, and people will say, “Oh, you know, 'Saturday Night Live' is a really a Democratic show.” And then somebody will say, “Oh no, no, no. Its a really conservative show. Jim Downey's a really big conservative, and you should see the way he skewered Hillary.” In a way, the show's been incredibly successful in the sense that you don't think it's an arm of MSNBC or Fox News, or something like that. I think that they're an equal opportunity offender. They like messing around with everybody who's on the stage. And I think that's really important because if there was a de facto branding of their political philosophies, that would be really detrimental. Do you think that Lorne has become more afraid to go after the left, or to do humor without thinking about the political consequences?  Somebody once tweeted to me: “I just saw Lorne at a restaurant with the Clintons. And you have to write about this, because how can he make fun of them now if he's hanging out with them socially?” And I wrote back, “You don't know Lorne.” Lorne's got a big world, and there's lots of interesting, famous people in there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're out of bounds. There has always been this debate about the extent to which “SNL” actually influences politics on the ground. There are people who say that because Will Ferrell's Bush was so lovable, that it turned the tide of the 2000 election. And there's also the viewpoint that Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression is really what ruined her. How strong do you think “SNL’s" political impact is, ultimately? I'm not sure if there's somebody who goes into a voting booth and votes a certain way because of an “SNL” sketch. But I will say this. The Will Ferrell-George Bush thing was really interesting for me because my Republican friends said, “I can't believe how 'SNL' is killing Bush. They're making him out to be this idiot, and he's so stupid, and he's under Cheney's control.” And my Democratic friends were saying, “I can't believe how ‘SNL' is helping Bush, because at the end of the day, they make him out to be the kind of guy you'd like to go out and have a beer with.” And studies show that that's partly how [people] calculate who they're going to vote for. So I don't think it's directly linked to how somebody votes, but I think there's a kind of subconscious branding you have in the back of your mind. I think that there were things with Sarah Palin that may have been more deleterious to her than Tina, like the Katie Couric thing. Let’s talk a bit about the coming election: In your recent  Vanity Fair piece, you point out that the Donald Trump impression is quite difficult because he's already such a larger-than-life character, and someone in the book described Obama as an impression with a “10.10” degree of difficulty. I think the Trump thing is like, when the Lord wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. Because there's this unbelievable character in the race, right? So just to jump into the writers’ room: Everybody is throwing out ideas like, “What if Trump says something about Carly Fiorina’s face. Y’know, ’look at that face! You can’t be president with that face!’” And someone else will say, “No, he actually said that!” Or “What if he gets on a riff about John McCain, and just says like, ‘I don’t even think he’s a hero.’” “No, no, he already said that.” So it’s like, where do you get stuff? It’s a little tricky. And Jay Pharaoh is back doing Obama. Can you talk a little about the notoriously difficult Obama impression? This has been the case since 2007. Obama is, without a doubt, the most difficult president in the history of "Saturday Night Live," in part because he doesn’t have tics. He doesn’t have — Jim Downey calls them ‘handles’ — almost like this port of entry where you get in there and mess around with his mind or his affectations. One of the great defining sketches of the Bill Clinton era was Phil Hartman jogging and he makes a campaign stop at a McDonald’s. He’s talking to everybody about policy and he says, “Hey, can I have a bit of your burger? Can I have a sip of your shake?” You saw that Clinton boyish id there and it was just perfect. Obama doesn’t have something like that. It’s much harder for him. In the update of the book, you write a lot about the new digital culture surrounding "SNL" — how everything gets picked up and dissected online nowadays. It seemed that a lot of the cast had trouble with the level of backlash they face online on a daily basis. In your experience, is the Internet making it harder for “SNL” to do its job?  There’s a great positive, which is that “SNL” doesn’t need to have people watch it on Saturday night at 11:30, like you used to, in order to appreciate it or see it. The next morning, you can get basically every single sketch online. The bad news is now there are really weird metrics attached to it. Before, the show would get a general rating. Now — Andy Samberg and Jorma and Akiva [from “The Lonely Island”] talk about this — like: Oh my gosh, look at the hits on "Lazy Sunday." And you can do that with sketches, too. Like, the question of how viral does a sketch go? Right, they’re already competing to get airtime. Then they’re competing to be aggregated on Twitter. This is stuff that 90 percent of the earlier cast never even imagined they had to deal with. I can’t tell you how many cast members said "I had to stop Googling myself. I stopped looking at whether or not a sketch was picked up by Deadline or HuffPo or Slate or Salon." “SNL” has been criticized a lot for its lack of diversity, and you cover that a lot in the book, including the casting call for black female cast members that took place last year. What was the mood like from the staff around this issue? It seemed like there was a split of opinions.  Clearly, there were people who were bothered by it. When that whole controversy started up, I know some people were surprised by the extent of the conversation and how much it became a national conversation. I think it was just one of those reminders that “SNL” is a pretty big blip on our cultural radar. It wasn’t an insignificant conversation or controversy or debate. That said, Sasheer [Zamata] is just amazing and I think she’s been a terrific addition to the cast. She’s incredibly talented. There’s no one in the world who could say — or if they do feel that way, have them call me — that she doesn’t belong in that cast. I also think they were really smart about how they brought her along, the first night. She is very methodical about how involved she got. It was really smart. And so that’s behind them now. A number of female writers and cast members you interview — Nora Dunn, Janeane Garofalo — talk about the historical notion that "SNL" is bad for women. How has that changed over the years, and do you think the assessment of “SNL” as a boys' club is a fair one, or has it been overblown? When someone says that they feel something about their workplace, I try never to sit and judge and say, “Oh wow, that’s overblown.” I’m not a woman, I wasn’t in the room when a guy may have been somewhat demeaning. I can't say. What I do know is that your question is rooted in truth, which is that a lot of people felt the way that they did. And I think that you can’t be on the air for 40 years and not go through changes. I think that Lorne is not the type of person to understand a problem of that magnitude and then ignore it. I will say this, that from the time Tina [Fey] became head writer, I did not hear that once from anyone, about Tina. Not once. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a nice segment in the book where she talks about going back to host in 2006, and observing this newfound sense of camaraderie on staff, which she credits to the women on the show at the time, like Amy, Tina and Maya, and how they really changed the attitude there. Maya was terrific on this subject. When Maya talks about the sisterhood that exists in the “SNL” biosphere, it’s actually beautiful. She’s so freaking articulate. It’s crazy. I could have done 40 pages just on her. I think I’ve interviewed 570 people for “SNL,” and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is on my Mount Rushmore. She was part of the earlier days and she was really candid about that. And I was so glad to interview her now for the new volume because she did come back and host and she’s just so unbelievably smart and has this keen sense. Her radar is amazing. Who else is on your Mount Rushmore? Maya. She doesn’t have the visibility that Tina and Amy have. It’s easy to love Tina and Amy, because we know them so well and they are smart, they are gracious. When I interviewed Amy, she was in the middle of production and even though her reps said she had limited time, she was like, “Do you need anything more? What else can I help you with?” That’s a window into somebody’s character. One of the reasons why I felt that this had to be an oral history was because each of these people have such distinct sensibilities and they’re really interesting to listen to. There’s no way -- I don’t care if you’re Hemingway -- you can write prose that will capture the uniqueness of all of them. There were days when I would have four unbelievable conversations. I mean, they’re really, really smart and they’re candid and they really care. I know "really care" sounds like a saccharine phrase, but here’s the thing — and Kristen Wiig was so great about this — you don’t sleep and you don’t see daylight and it’s not really glamorous. But they’re committed. When you’re on "SNL," you’re swimming in the deep end of the pool. You cannot fake it. If you fake it, then Lorne and the writers and the rest of the cast will see it and then on Saturday night, the audience will see it. There’s just no margin for error. You gotta come through. So, it requires a lot of commitment. I actually had many of the cast members talk about the fact that their work life was much more demanding on "SNL" than it was on a TV show or a movie, and I think that says a lot. Lorne is this really fascinating, almost mythical figure who seems to inspire fear and love in equal measure. People describe him as a father figure, a mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, all sorts of things. How would you characterize Lorne’s relationship with his cast and how that has changed over the years? The thing I really appreciate about Lorne is, in some ways, as much as he didn’t like old Hollywood and how he’s been a chief architect of a new era, he’s a throwback. He’s iconic, like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg. When you say Lorne, it's like Cher. The least-used word in the world is Michaels, because you don’t need to say it. I think the fact that he’s been doing it for 40 years is obviously noteworthy, but more importantly he has a very complex relationship with staff and with writers. And I think what’s been interesting to document under the rubric of cultural anthropology is Lorne’s growth through the years and how it has manifest with the staff. Because person after person [has said] he has been, particularly since having children, much more benevolent. He’s been a little less mysterious. The first twenty years of the show, people were absolutely terrified of him. Not everyone, but there was no doubt that he was the head raccoon. And people always were trying to figure out "is he mad at me, does he love me, does he like me?" And I think that nowadays there’s less anxiety about that. He’s much more of a father figure. He’s much more involved. Cast member after cast member talked about how he’s great with career guidance and he’s been a real mentor. That’s been really interesting to write about. And now Lorne doesn’t just have “SNL,” he also has “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night,” and he recently had “30 Rock.” NBC late nights are entirely his domain. Has that changed the dynamic on the show at all? If I were to say to you, Lorne Michaels has “30 Rock,” an Emmy-winning primetime show, he’s got late night shows — I’m conflating eras here — and he’s got “Saturday Night Live,” one might think, okay, he’s been doing “SNL” a long time, he’s kind of on autopilot, he’s going to devote his energies to “30 Rock” and launching Jimmy Fallon and someone else is going to be the de-facto head of “SNL.” And you’d be totally wrong. Because “SNL” is still the center of his universe. He’s never missed a show. Never. So in terms of the hierarchy of needs, I’m sure Jimmy Fallon and Seth and Tina, when they needed him, that’s fine. But he has always been wedded to the fact that on those 20 [“SNL”] shows a season he’s going to do everything he can that week to make it the best show possible. And that’s pretty extraordinary. You referred to “SNL’s” trajectory as being like an EKG machine. What are we in now, a peak or a valley?  Last year there was a lot of attention because of the 40th anniversary and the special itself was so spectacular. It was kind of like a tsunami that washed over individual episodes. I do think last year and the year before, one of the things we saw is that the show has the tendency to be a little host-dependent. So what’s happening from a ratings perspective is people aren’t sitting down because it’s Saturday at 11:30, they're saying “Oh, Justin Timberlake is on, let’s watch that.” So that puts a lot of pressure on the booking department in the sense that you’ve got to make sure the hosts are a certain caliber. I think one of the things the political year may do for “SNL” is that people will not pay so much attention to who the host is and they’ll want to just come and see all this great political humor. I was excited when I heard Taran Killam was going to play Trump, because I think he’s such a huge talent. Is there anyone that you are particularly excited about on the show right now? I would watch Kate McKinnon read the Yellow Pages. She’s out of this world, crazy talented. Unbelievable. And I think Aidy [Bryant] has grown so much. But in terms of the political stuff, Kate is doing Hillary this year. And she’s off-the-charts talented. Other than Kate McKinnon, which cast members do you hold a soft spot for? I’m really glad Kenan came back; there was a rumor he was going to leave. And that would have been sad. I understand everybody has their own shelf life at “SNL” but I’m really glad he’s back. There’s a bunch of really talented people. I’m always going to root for “SNL.” Not just because of its great history, but because I think it occupies a really special and important place in the culture and in television. Wherever I give a speech or a book signing, people say “Oh god, ‘SNL,’ it used to be so great.” Come on. It’s such a lazy way of looking at things. A lot of these people haven’t even seen the show in four or five years. So I’m rooting for it. I know it’s cooler to be cynical, but I’m kind of burnt out on cynicism. I tell my kids, I think we live in a world where good news travels too slow. So I’m happy to say I’m rooting for it. I hope they have a great year.When James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” came out in 2002, it was heralded as the definitive behind-the-scenes look at the legendary late-night institution. Containing interviews with hundreds of writers, cast members, hosts and NBC execs, spanning from the hedonistic heyday of the Not Ready for Primetime Players through the troubled "Saturday Night Dead" years into the new golden age of Ferrell and Fey, the book is a rich, densely-populated tribute to the show's legacy and its enduring impact on entertainment, politics and American culture at large. On Oct. 6, Miller and Shales are releasing the paperback version of the updated edition, with its 200 new pages covering the last 10 years of "SNL." While the show has always gone through ups and downs, this past decade has been a particularly tumultuous one, as the show has fought to forge a path for itself in the rapidly changing digital world and to remain relevant in an increasingly competitive and fragmented viewing landscape. In the new pages, we hear the show's recent history described by the people who were there in the trenches: Andy Samberg discusses the rise of "SNL's" now-omnipresent digital shorts; Tina Fey and Sarah Palin reflect on the political impression that defined the 2008 election; while Kenan Thompson, Sasheer Zamata and other cast members weigh in on the diversity casting crisis that engulfed the show last season. But, as ever, the most important figure is producer Lorne Michaels, the enigmatic visionary who reshaped the entire entertainment industry in his own image, and to whom the book serves as testament and tribute. Ahead of the show's 41st season premiere this Saturday, we sat down with Miller to talk about the show's evolving history, its current challenges, and his hopes for the future of an American institution. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed. I was really impressed by how candid the cast members and writers were, and how open everyone was about their dislikes and their grudges. How did you get people to open up? I don't mean to be pretentious about this, but the goal is to make a book of record. In terms of how certain things really happened, you want it to be in that book. So I think that people understand that this is their chance to really speak the truth, and speak honestly about what they did and what they felt, and who was problematic. Was there anyone who particularly surprised or impressed you during the interview process? Well, it's funny because you see these people on TV, and you always wonder going into an interview: Are they going to be like their persona on TV or not? Take somebody like Chris Rock, for instance, who's incredibly funny – but he winds up being so smart too. I mean, the guy was so smart. I remember leaving that first interview with him and thinking: Whoa, yes, his stand-up is great, and he's fun in the show, but there's so much more going on. There were some amazing anecdotes that came out, like when Bill Murray talks about carrying Gilda Radner around a party just before her death, the sort of amazing little moments that you were able to elicit.  When you hear something like that you just realize how special that is, how really incredible. At that moment, you almost stop being an interviewer and you're just a fan of the show. Gilda, Belushi, Phil Hartman: These are people that you wish you could have interviewed. But it was so incredible to hear [Murray] talk about that moment, and to hear people talk about her. Because the truth is that there were other people that were part of "SNL," and then people would say, “I couldn't wait for him to leave” or “I couldn't wait for her to leave.” So when somebody like Gilda comes along, you realize how deep-seated the love is. When people in the book talk about it, it really does seem that there was sort of a magic happening in those legendary first five years of the show. Absolutely. Look, there were a couple of things. One, it was new. So just the fact that it was new and it was breaking down so many barriers, and we'd never seen anything like that. And there was no expectation that it was going to work. I think Lorne understood it, but certainly a lot of the members of the cast didn't. So there was just so much new about the first five years. And then the incredible talent, and the fact that they were, week after week, still messing around with convention, and being really disruptive in the most delicious way. So I think I totally understand when cast members after those first five years looked back with envy or intimidation. It was just inevitable given the weight and the import, the magnitude of those first five years. Can “SNL” still do that sort of risky, ground-breaking comedy, given how long it has been around and all the new competition it faces? I think it can still push boundaries. But the problem is that our world has changed, so some of the stuff that they do Jon Stewart was doing, and now John Oliver is doing, and Stephen Colbert was doing, so they're not the only game in town. [These other shows] may not be doing sketch comedy, but just in terms of sensibilities and being really satirical about what's going on, the landscape is a little cluttered, frankly. Do you think that "SNL" can stay relevant in the current political landscape when pitted against John Oliver, and Colbert, and all those guys? This is what I was trying to say at in my recent Vanity Fair piece. They’ve always had a special place and this year they need to keep that place. They need to not be conflated with other shows that are doing satirical, political humor. That means the sketches have to be very distinctive and noteworthy and the writing has to be as sharp as ever. I think it’s going to be an exciting year for them, because there’s a lot of material. [Longtime writer] Jim Downey was a very prominent figure in the book, and he is pretty harsh when speaking about the show’s politics in recent years. He says that the show hasn’t done anything surprising in recent years and that “SNL” has become “an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment.” The thing I love about Jim is that he's so genuine. He doesn't pander, and he's just one of my favorite people to interview because you really get to understand how he feels. The 40 years of "SNL" kind of run like an EKG. There are triumphant times, there are downtimes, and there are transition years. And I think that some of that is mirrored also in terms of political years. 2008 was incredible, with Tina playing Sarah Palin. But I think Jim was trying to say that they'd become a victim of their own success – boy, they don't take as many chances as they used to. And I think that's what he was really speaking to, and I think that kind of frustrated him. Whereas Horatio Sanz, in the book, refers to Downey as “the Karl Rove of SNL,” and he expresses the concern that Lorne leans too much on Downey instead of relying on more liberal writers like Seth Meyers. And that the show hasn’t been tough enough on the GOP in recent years. One of my favorite indoor sports is at a dinner party or when you're just sitting around with friends, and people will say, “Oh, you know, 'Saturday Night Live' is a really a Democratic show.” And then somebody will say, “Oh no, no, no. Its a really conservative show. Jim Downey's a really big conservative, and you should see the way he skewered Hillary.” In a way, the show's been incredibly successful in the sense that you don't think it's an arm of MSNBC or Fox News, or something like that. I think that they're an equal opportunity offender. They like messing around with everybody who's on the stage. And I think that's really important because if there was a de facto branding of their political philosophies, that would be really detrimental. Do you think that Lorne has become more afraid to go after the left, or to do humor without thinking about the political consequences?  Somebody once tweeted to me: “I just saw Lorne at a restaurant with the Clintons. And you have to write about this, because how can he make fun of them now if he's hanging out with them socially?” And I wrote back, “You don't know Lorne.” Lorne's got a big world, and there's lots of interesting, famous people in there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're out of bounds. There has always been this debate about the extent to which “SNL” actually influences politics on the ground. There are people who say that because Will Ferrell's Bush was so lovable, that it turned the tide of the 2000 election. And there's also the viewpoint that Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression is really what ruined her. How strong do you think “SNL’s" political impact is, ultimately? I'm not sure if there's somebody who goes into a voting booth and votes a certain way because of an “SNL” sketch. But I will say this. The Will Ferrell-George Bush thing was really interesting for me because my Republican friends said, “I can't believe how 'SNL' is killing Bush. They're making him out to be this idiot, and he's so stupid, and he's under Cheney's control.” And my Democratic friends were saying, “I can't believe how ‘SNL' is helping Bush, because at the end of the day, they make him out to be the kind of guy you'd like to go out and have a beer with.” And studies show that that's partly how [people] calculate who they're going to vote for. So I don't think it's directly linked to how somebody votes, but I think there's a kind of subconscious branding you have in the back of your mind. I think that there were things with Sarah Palin that may have been more deleterious to her than Tina, like the Katie Couric thing. Let’s talk a bit about the coming election: In your recent  Vanity Fair piece, you point out that the Donald Trump impression is quite difficult because he's already such a larger-than-life character, and someone in the book described Obama as an impression with a “10.10” degree of difficulty. I think the Trump thing is like, when the Lord wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. Because there's this unbelievable character in the race, right? So just to jump into the writers’ room: Everybody is throwing out ideas like, “What if Trump says something about Carly Fiorina’s face. Y’know, ’look at that face! You can’t be president with that face!’” And someone else will say, “No, he actually said that!” Or “What if he gets on a riff about John McCain, and just says like, ‘I don’t even think he’s a hero.’” “No, no, he already said that.” So it’s like, where do you get stuff? It’s a little tricky. And Jay Pharaoh is back doing Obama. Can you talk a little about the notoriously difficult Obama impression? This has been the case since 2007. Obama is, without a doubt, the most difficult president in the history of "Saturday Night Live," in part because he doesn’t have tics. He doesn’t have — Jim Downey calls them ‘handles’ — almost like this port of entry where you get in there and mess around with his mind or his affectations. One of the great defining sketches of the Bill Clinton era was Phil Hartman jogging and he makes a campaign stop at a McDonald’s. He’s talking to everybody about policy and he says, “Hey, can I have a bit of your burger? Can I have a sip of your shake?” You saw that Clinton boyish id there and it was just perfect. Obama doesn’t have something like that. It’s much harder for him. In the update of the book, you write a lot about the new digital culture surrounding "SNL" — how everything gets picked up and dissected online nowadays. It seemed that a lot of the cast had trouble with the level of backlash they face online on a daily basis. In your experience, is the Internet making it harder for “SNL” to do its job?  There’s a great positive, which is that “SNL” doesn’t need to have people watch it on Saturday night at 11:30, like you used to, in order to appreciate it or see it. The next morning, you can get basically every single sketch online. The bad news is now there are really weird metrics attached to it. Before, the show would get a general rating. Now — Andy Samberg and Jorma and Akiva [from “The Lonely Island”] talk about this — like: Oh my gosh, look at the hits on "Lazy Sunday." And you can do that with sketches, too. Like, the question of how viral does a sketch go? Right, they’re already competing to get airtime. Then they’re competing to be aggregated on Twitter. This is stuff that 90 percent of the earlier cast never even imagined they had to deal with. I can’t tell you how many cast members said "I had to stop Googling myself. I stopped looking at whether or not a sketch was picked up by Deadline or HuffPo or Slate or Salon." “SNL” has been criticized a lot for its lack of diversity, and you cover that a lot in the book, including the casting call for black female cast members that took place last year. What was the mood like from the staff around this issue? It seemed like there was a split of opinions.  Clearly, there were people who were bothered by it. When that whole controversy started up, I know some people were surprised by the extent of the conversation and how much it became a national conversation. I think it was just one of those reminders that “SNL” is a pretty big blip on our cultural radar. It wasn’t an insignificant conversation or controversy or debate. That said, Sasheer [Zamata] is just amazing and I think she’s been a terrific addition to the cast. She’s incredibly talented. There’s no one in the world who could say — or if they do feel that way, have them call me — that she doesn’t belong in that cast. I also think they were really smart about how they brought her along, the first night. She is very methodical about how involved she got. It was really smart. And so that’s behind them now. A number of female writers and cast members you interview — Nora Dunn, Janeane Garofalo — talk about the historical notion that "SNL" is bad for women. How has that changed over the years, and do you think the assessment of “SNL” as a boys' club is a fair one, or has it been overblown? When someone says that they feel something about their workplace, I try never to sit and judge and say, “Oh wow, that’s overblown.” I’m not a woman, I wasn’t in the room when a guy may have been somewhat demeaning. I can't say. What I do know is that your question is rooted in truth, which is that a lot of people felt the way that they did. And I think that you can’t be on the air for 40 years and not go through changes. I think that Lorne is not the type of person to understand a problem of that magnitude and then ignore it. I will say this, that from the time Tina [Fey] became head writer, I did not hear that once from anyone, about Tina. Not once. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a nice segment in the book where she talks about going back to host in 2006, and observing this newfound sense of camaraderie on staff, which she credits to the women on the show at the time, like Amy, Tina and Maya, and how they really changed the attitude there. Maya was terrific on this subject. When Maya talks about the sisterhood that exists in the “SNL” biosphere, it’s actually beautiful. She’s so freaking articulate. It’s crazy. I could have done 40 pages just on her. I think I’ve interviewed 570 people for “SNL,” and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is on my Mount Rushmore. She was part of the earlier days and she was really candid about that. And I was so glad to interview her now for the new volume because she did come back and host and she’s just so unbelievably smart and has this keen sense. Her radar is amazing. Who else is on your Mount Rushmore? Maya. She doesn’t have the visibility that Tina and Amy have. It’s easy to love Tina and Amy, because we know them so well and they are smart, they are gracious. When I interviewed Amy, she was in the middle of production and even though her reps said she had limited time, she was like, “Do you need anything more? What else can I help you with?” That’s a window into somebody’s character. One of the reasons why I felt that this had to be an oral history was because each of these people have such distinct sensibilities and they’re really interesting to listen to. There’s no way -- I don’t care if you’re Hemingway -- you can write prose that will capture the uniqueness of all of them. There were days when I would have four unbelievable conversations. I mean, they’re really, really smart and they’re candid and they really care. I know "really care" sounds like a saccharine phrase, but here’s the thing — and Kristen Wiig was so great about this — you don’t sleep and you don’t see daylight and it’s not really glamorous. But they’re committed. When you’re on "SNL," you’re swimming in the deep end of the pool. You cannot fake it. If you fake it, then Lorne and the writers and the rest of the cast will see it and then on Saturday night, the audience will see it. There’s just no margin for error. You gotta come through. So, it requires a lot of commitment. I actually had many of the cast members talk about the fact that their work life was much more demanding on "SNL" than it was on a TV show or a movie, and I think that says a lot. Lorne is this really fascinating, almost mythical figure who seems to inspire fear and love in equal measure. People describe him as a father figure, a mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, all sorts of things. How would you characterize Lorne’s relationship with his cast and how that has changed over the years? The thing I really appreciate about Lorne is, in some ways, as much as he didn’t like old Hollywood and how he’s been a chief architect of a new era, he’s a throwback. He’s iconic, like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg. When you say Lorne, it's like Cher. The least-used word in the world is Michaels, because you don’t need to say it. I think the fact that he’s been doing it for 40 years is obviously noteworthy, but more importantly he has a very complex relationship with staff and with writers. And I think what’s been interesting to document under the rubric of cultural anthropology is Lorne’s growth through the years and how it has manifest with the staff. Because person after person [has said] he has been, particularly since having children, much more benevolent. He’s been a little less mysterious. The first twenty years of the show, people were absolutely terrified of him. Not everyone, but there was no doubt that he was the head raccoon. And people always were trying to figure out "is he mad at me, does he love me, does he like me?" And I think that nowadays there’s less anxiety about that. He’s much more of a father figure. He’s much more involved. Cast member after cast member talked about how he’s great with career guidance and he’s been a real mentor. That’s been really interesting to write about. And now Lorne doesn’t just have “SNL,” he also has “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night,” and he recently had “30 Rock.” NBC late nights are entirely his domain. Has that changed the dynamic on the show at all? If I were to say to you, Lorne Michaels has “30 Rock,” an Emmy-winning primetime show, he’s got late night shows — I’m conflating eras here — and he’s got “Saturday Night Live,” one might think, okay, he’s been doing “SNL” a long time, he’s kind of on autopilot, he’s going to devote his energies to “30 Rock” and launching Jimmy Fallon and someone else is going to be the de-facto head of “SNL.” And you’d be totally wrong. Because “SNL” is still the center of his universe. He’s never missed a show. Never. So in terms of the hierarchy of needs, I’m sure Jimmy Fallon and Seth and Tina, when they needed him, that’s fine. But he has always been wedded to the fact that on those 20 [“SNL”] shows a season he’s going to do everything he can that week to make it the best show possible. And that’s pretty extraordinary. You referred to “SNL’s” trajectory as being like an EKG machine. What are we in now, a peak or a valley?  Last year there was a lot of attention because of the 40th anniversary and the special itself was so spectacular. It was kind of like a tsunami that washed over individual episodes. I do think last year and the year before, one of the things we saw is that the show has the tendency to be a little host-dependent. So what’s happening from a ratings perspective is people aren’t sitting down because it’s Saturday at 11:30, they're saying “Oh, Justin Timberlake is on, let’s watch that.” So that puts a lot of pressure on the booking department in the sense that you’ve got to make sure the hosts are a certain caliber. I think one of the things the political year may do for “SNL” is that people will not pay so much attention to who the host is and they’ll want to just come and see all this great political humor. I was excited when I heard Taran Killam was going to play Trump, because I think he’s such a huge talent. Is there anyone that you are particularly excited about on the show right now? I would watch Kate McKinnon read the Yellow Pages. She’s out of this world, crazy talented. Unbelievable. And I think Aidy [Bryant] has grown so much. But in terms of the political stuff, Kate is doing Hillary this year. And she’s off-the-charts talented. Other than Kate McKinnon, which cast members do you hold a soft spot for? I’m really glad Kenan came back; there was a rumor he was going to leave. And that would have been sad. I understand everybody has their own shelf life at “SNL” but I’m really glad he’s back. There’s a bunch of really talented people. I’m always going to root for “SNL.” Not just because of its great history, but because I think it occupies a really special and important place in the culture and in television. Wherever I give a speech or a book signing, people say “Oh god, ‘SNL,’ it used to be so great.” Come on. It’s such a lazy way of looking at things. A lot of these people haven’t even seen the show in four or five years. So I’m rooting for it. I know it’s cooler to be cynical, but I’m kind of burnt out on cynicism. I tell my kids, I think we live in a world where good news travels too slow. So I’m happy to say I’m rooting for it. I hope they have a great year.

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The irreversible damage of Volkswagen’s stunning deceit

Volkswagen’s ruse to circumvent U.S. auto emissions standards has left many wondering about the precise environmental impact of its cars, which emitted more pollutants than regulations allow. Although the extra pollution is impossible to quantify so soon, experts agree that although the amount is globally insignificant, it might add to Europe’s regional health concerns. On September 18 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered that four Volkswagen vehicles from model years 2009 to 2015 had been rigged with illegal software. They used a sophisticated algorithm that would make the cars run cleanly during emissions tests but then stop so the cars would get better fuel economy and driving ability. As such, the unrestricted vehicles released higher-than-acceptable emissions in everyday driving situations. The German automaker quickly recalled 482,000 VW and Audi brand cars in the U.S. alone, and later admitted that the software might have been fitted to 11 million vehicles worldwide. EPA now suspects that these cars emitted 10 to 40 times more nitrogen oxide—a pollutant that can harm human health—than standards allow. Many news organizations were quick to jump on this number. The Guardian ran its own analysis, claiming that the scandal may have caused nearly one million extra metric tons of pollution yearly. But experts remain skeptical. John Heywood, a mechanical engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who focuses on internal combustion engines and air pollution is hesitant to agree with such high numbers. He has identified a key change in how the engine operates (by delaying the start of combustion) that would improve the snappiness of the driving, but it would only increase nitrogen oxide emissions by three to five times. Travis Bradford, director of Energy and Environment Concentration at Columbia University, agrees. He argues that a number as high as 40 likely represents a spike while the car is accelerating. It cannot be anywhere near the average. “Fuels these days are not that dirty and emissions control systems are not that clean,” Bradford says. “So the idea that it would on average be 40 times the amount of emissions is pretty incredulous.” Still, experts agree that nitrogen oxide (pdf) is a nasty pollutant. Once released into the air it quickly converts into nitrogen dioxide—a reddish-brown gas with a pungent odor—and then absorbs sunlight to transform into the yellow-brown haze that blankets cities. It is this smog that can exacerbate dozens of health problems, including asthma, bronchitis and emphysema. Alternatively, it can be washed into the ground in the form of acid rain, which can kill plants and animals. Once the damage is done “there is no antidote,” says Yiannis Levendis, an engineering professor at Northeastern University who focuses on diesel emissions. The news is not tragic for those living in the U.S., where the portion of diesel-powered cars is small (roughly 1 percent). But in Europe that number is much higher, clocking in at roughly 50 percent. In some European cities there is already so much nitrogen dioxide that it is “toxic in its own right,” Heywood says. But that was prior to the scandal. VW just upped the dosage. All experts agree that on a local scale, the extra pollution can only make matters worse; on a global scale, however, it is insignificant. According to the EPA, small cars released roughly one billion metric tons (pdf) of greenhouse gases in 2011 alone. TheGuardian’s estimate, which experts agree is likely too high, is that the rigged cars account for only 0.1 percent of that. “Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, this is a drop in the bucket in terms of our aggregate pollution,” Bradford says. He says “unfortunately” mostly because he thinks it’s a shame that pollution is already so high, and partially because he is flabbergasted that a company of VW’s stature could stoop so low. “They literally stole public property,” he says. “They took air that could have been cleaner and available to all the people in the U.S. because they wanted to sell cars.” Heywood will keep crunching the numbers. But he’s waiting for Volkswagen and EPA to release more concrete information. “We've got to let the dust settle on the numbers,” he says, before we jump to any radical conclusions.

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Trump and Putin’s crazy bromance: Two guys too weird for fiction who long to rule the world

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin both resemble fictional characters more than real people, which may help explain Trump’s repeated assertions that he understands the Russian president and would get along with him. “In terms of leadership, he’s getting an A,” the putative GOP frontrunner told Bill O’Reilly, while essentially endorsing Putin’s current campaign to prop up Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, a major factor in the mounting tensions between the United States and Russia. So far the bromance has been one-sided, thankfully. Putin is nothing if not a shrewd operator, and whoever in his inner circle has been tasked with making sense of the Trump phenomenon has no doubt advised him to steer clear. But if Putin and Trump seem like satirical or symbolic figures out of novels or movies, they come from different kinds of stories and, more to the point, from radically different fictional traditions. Trump is a larger-than-life caricature taken from a Sinclair Lewis novel or an early Frank Capra film, a vicious and merciless plutocrat-turned-politician who appeals (as I have previously suggested) to deep, ugly currents within human nature and American history. Putin may look like a similarly blunt instrument from this distance, an old-time Russian strongman who invades neighboring nations, imprisons political opponents and causes voices of dissent to die or disappear under mysterious circumstances. But the man who consolidated power in post-Soviet Russia 15 years ago with startling rapidity – in a process that has been much investigated but never entirely explained – is a subtler and more shadowy creation than that outline suggests. He’s a character out of a postmodern, metafictional work by Don DeLillo or Philip K. Dick, about whom so little is certain that the reader begins to suspect he does not exist. Certain facts about Putin’s life and career can be ascertained, but the more you examine them, the more they seem like “facts” in quotation marks, or come to resemble the constant Russian media images of Putin fighting forest fires in Siberia, diving beneath the Black Sea in a submersible or riding a motorbike with the Russian equivalent of the Hell’s Angels. I mean, he really went to those places and put on those uniforms, right? Those are facts too. Clear across the American political spectrum, from those eager to cast Putin as an unhinged, power-mad tyrant who is singlehandedly relaunching the Cold War to those on the radical left who halfheartedly try to cast him as a hero standing up to the American empire (i.e., because he is singlehandedly relaunching the Cold War), our problem is that we think we have Putin figured out but we don’t. We don’t understand Putin because we know almost nothing about Russian society or Russian political history, and we don’t understand him because the invented or self-invented character called “Putin” is not meant to be understood. If those sound like contradictory proposals, well, welcome to Putin-land. When I waded into “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” a whopping volume by the Brookings Institution scholars Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy that is viewed as the authoritative work on Putin in English, I did not suspect that the American foreign policy establishment would embrace this sort of literary or philosophical ambiguity. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are all said to have read this book, which was expressly intended to provide Western policy-makers and bureaucrats with a psychological and historical framework for understanding this most perplexing of contemporary world leaders. But you barely get five pages into “Mr. Putin” before Hill and Gaddy start to sound like bright liberal-arts undergrads who just got stoned and read Jacques Derrida or Slavoj Žižek for the first time. “Attempting to write about Vladimir Putin,” they observe, presented challenges they had not noticed or imagined until they were well into the project. When you “delve into his hidden aspects, whether in the past or present, you are playing a game with Putin. It is a game where he is in charge. He controls the facts and the ‘stories.’” They could not afford to “take any story or so-called fact at face value when it comes to Vladimir Putin,” they continue, because “we are dealing with someone who is a master at manipulating information, suppressing information, and creating pseudo-information … after 15 years, we remain ignorant of some of the most basic facts about a man who is arguably the most powerful individual in the world, the leader of an important nation.” Very little is known about Putin’s childhood in Leningrad (as it was then called), and almost all the so-called information comes either from stories he has told himself or official campaign biographies. Putin was married for more than 30 years (he is now divorced) and has two adult daughters, but his wife and children “are conspicuously absent from the public domain,” as Hill and Gaddy put it. During the latter stages of the Soviet era, he was a KGB officer for about 15 years, a fact often reported as if it explained anything. But Putin was nowhere near the top of the Soviet bureaucracy, and there are any number of onetime KGB officials and Communist Party apparatchiks among the ruling elite of contemporary Russia. Only one of them rose to undisputed control of the entire country. How that happened is the great mystery of Putin’s career, one he appears to have purposefully clouded in doubt and one that “Mr. Putin” makes only tentative efforts to unpack. Somehow or other, Putin went from being the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in 1996 (who was nearly brought down by a local corruption scandal that threatened the city’s food supply) to becoming the acting president of Russia on the last day of 1999, following Boris Yeltsin’s abrupt resignation. He has run the show in Moscow ever since, and whether that outcome resulted from a coordinated backroom coup d’état or represents the unintended consequence of a chaotic chain of events remains a huge unanswered question. In the grand tradition of political science doorstops, “Mr. Putin” includes considerable wonky dissection of power struggles within the Russian oligarchy and the contributory factors behind specific policy decisions of the Putin era. I particularly enjoyed the detective work that leads Hill and Gaddy to conclude, purely on circumstantial evidence, that Putin’s strategic thinking was shaped by an American business-school textbook from 1978 that was apparently in vogue at the KGB academy when he studied there. On a more substantive level, the book offers a succinct account of how Putin came to feel increasingly disrespected and undermined by both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations between 1999 and the Iraq invasion in 2003, and moved from a generally pro-American position to the view that the United States was a fatally arrogant and grossly incompetent player on the world stage. You don’t have to like the guy to concede that he had a point. But even amid the mind-melting forest of details compiled by Hill and Gaddy’s years of Putin-spelunking, they never move far from the idea that to understand Putin even a little we need to struggle with Russian history and the concept of “Russian-ness,” and that those things come heavily loaded with contradiction, mystification and doubt. I had already come up with the conceit of describing Putin as a literary character (I swear!) before discovering that Hill and Gaddy had done it too. Their example is funnier: Putin’s attitude toward Russia and its history, they argue, resembles that of Oleg Komarov, a “pseudo-colorful” Russian émigré who teaches at a small American college in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel “Pnin.” Komarov is both reactionary and pro-Communist: His ideal Russia, Nabokov writes, is an incoherent blend “of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church and the Hydro-Electric Dam.” Whatever violence and brutality and repression Putin inflicts on Russian dissidents, disagreeable ethnic minorities or neighboring nations, at least according to the central thesis of “Mr. Putin,” is done in the Komarov spirit. He channels the Russian people’s historical memory of repeated invasion, war and privation, and their collective desire to reclaim the lost greatness of both the Russian Empire that crumbled in 1917 and the Soviet colossus that collapsed in 1991. Putin is a “man of the state,” as signified by the untranslatable Russian word gosudarstvennik – a term no American political figure would willingly embrace even if it clearly fit (as it would, perhaps, for Biden or Hillary Clinton). In our peculiar political discourse the word “American” carries a double meaning; as either a noun or an adjective, it does not signify the same thing when spoken on Fox News or on MSNBC, by Donald Trump or by Bernie Sanders. That’s just one small example of the way English lacks the fine distinctions of Russian. Hill and Gaddy make the important point that even as Putin has capitalized on resurgent Russian nationalism as a pillar of his political base, he has also positioned himself as a bulwark against its most extreme varieties, a reasonable man trying to hold an unreasonable country together. Putin consistently uses the more neutral term Rossiyskiy to describe Russian identity – again, a word associated with the Russian state – instead of Russkiy, which is associated with Slavic Russian ethnicity, the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Church. (In other words, with what we would call racism, although the term does not precisely apply in the Russian context.) Putin waged an extended, bloody and expensive war to subdue the rebellion in Chechnya, while facing a campaign of domestic terrorism many times worse than 9/11. Throughout that period he resisted the calls of Russian nationalists for ethnic cleansing in Chechnya, or systematic discrimination against Muslims and ethnic Chechens living in Russia. Putin’s record on human rights and civil liberties has been dreadful and should not be whitewashed, but every decision has been framed in terms of the Russian state’s historic destiny, rather than narrower conceptions of nationality or race. Both Putin and Donald Trump have risen to power and prominence as national archetypes of strength and as “self-made men.” But Trump is a self-created grotesque, a reality TV star constructed to be more shocking and outrageous than any Kardashian, any celebrity gender reassignment, any mass shooter, any accordion-playing YouTube kitty. Putin, on the other hand, was constructed to disappear into a vague idea of Russian greatness and a purposefully generic cloud of “pseudo-information.” He has all but erased his own identity to become the semi-divine avatar of his nation-state, as Stalin and Peter the Great and a long line of others did before him. Not for nothing did journalist Masha Gessen call her 2012 Putin biography “The Man Without a Face.” No doubt it's true that Putin and Trump reflect related global strains of populism and nationalism, and that both appeal to the deep-seated human yearning for a strong male leader or father figure. But the social and historical currents that created them are so different that the comparison is almost meaningless in practical terms, and for good or for ill the reality of a Trump presidency – dreadful as that is to contemplate – would look nothing like Putin’s presidency. Trump’s charismatic and/or repulsive persona is rooted in the American myth of the sovereign individual, the John Wayne or Clint Eastwood figure who stands free of laws and social conventions and who views government as a big hoax inflicted on suckers by pencil-pushing pantywaists. Whether you think that archetype is more or less sinister than Putin's gosudarstvennik, the abstract embodiment of a collective identity, is a matter of interpretation. But it is even more contradictory, and far less functional. Trump can only gaze across Europe longingly and dream of the kind of power wielded by the faceless, characterless man in the Kremlin. As fundamentally screwed as our country is, we should be thankful that he’ll never have it.

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The Catholic Church’s South American shame

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The Catholic Church has allowed priests accused of sexually abusing children in the United States and Europe to relocate to poor parishes in South America, a yearlong GlobalPost investigation has found.

Reporters confronted five accused priests in as many countries: Paraguay, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil and Peru. One priest who relocated to a poor parish in Peru admitted on camera to molesting a 13-year-old boy while working in the Jackson, Mississippi diocese. Another is currently under investigation in Brazil after allegations arose that he abused disadvantaged children living in an orphanage he founded there.

All five were able to continue working as priests, despite criminal investigations or cash payouts to alleged victims. All enjoyed the privilege, respect and unfettered access to young people that comes with being clergy members.

In the US, Catholic leaders have come under intense pressure for concealing priests’ sex crimes, and for transferring perpetrators among parishes rather than turning them over to law enforcement. The scandal has cost the church billions of dollars and led to a sharp decline in new clergy.

Victim advocates say that relocating priests to poorer parishes overseas is the church’s latest strategy for protecting its reputation.

In response, in 2002 US bishops approved a “zero-tolerance” policy, under which priests who molest children are no longer allowed a second chance to serve in the clergy.

Victim advocates say that relocating priests to poorer parishes overseas is the church’s latest strategy for protecting its reputation.

“As developed countries find it tougher to keep predator priests on the job, bishops are increasingly moving them to the developing world where there’s less vigorous law enforcement, less independent media and a greater power differential between priests and parishioners,” said David Clohessy, spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. “This is massive, and my suspicion is that it’s becoming more and more pronounced.”

Jimmy Chalk/GlobalPost

The priests GlobalPost confronted on camera, far from the US and European churches where the sexual abuse allegations occurred, include:

Father Carlos Urrutigoity, accused of sharing beds with and fondling teenage boys in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The bishop of Scranton called him a “serious threat to young people,” but in Paraguay, reporters found him leading Mass in a major church. He had been promoted to second-in-command of the diocese of Ciudad del Este. Father Francisco “Fredy” Montero, accused of abusing a 4-year-old girl in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He relocated to his native Ecuador, where he was placed in a succession of remote parishes — despite a dossier sent by the Archdiocese of Minneapolis to his new diocese, warning of Montero’s past. Father Paul Madden, who admitted molesting a 13-year-old boy on a mission trip when he was stationed in Jackson, Mississippi. The diocese paid the victim’s family $50,000 and Madden moved to the diocese of Chimbote, Peru, where he still celebrates Mass each week. Father Jan Van Dael, accused of molesting several young men in his native Belgium before moving to northeastern Brazil, where he started an orphanage for street kids. Van Dael is under investigation by Belgian and Brazilian authorities after accusations of abuse arose in Brazil, too.

Another priest we tracked down, Father Federico Fernandez Baeza, was indicted by a grand jury in 1987 on two second-degree felony charges of indecency with a child.

The priests we tracked headed south after sex abuse allegations were made against them in US and European dioceses.

A family in San Antonio, Texas accused Fernandez in a civil lawsuit of ritually raping two brothers over a two-year period. Prosecutors dropped the criminal case after the diocese of San Antonio reportedly paid the family more than $1 million. Fernandez flew to Colombia, where he continued a high-profile career in the church. We traced him to the city of Cartagena, where he’s a senior administrator and priest at a Catholic university.

After consulting with Fernandez’s office, university guards prohibited us from entering the campus, and Fernandez has not responded to requests for comment.

The priests told us they have been allowed to continue preaching unfettered, without facing internal investigations, despite Pope Francis’ pledges to clean up the church.

Last year, the pope sent a letter to every bishop in the world, ordering them to follow a global “zero tolerance policy” on child abuse. This year he created a commission tasked specifically with protecting children from church sex abuse.

Following repeated phone calls and emails, both the Vatican’s press office and the head of the commission, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley, declined to provide comment for this story.

The cases GlobalPost found are exactly what the church and Cardinal O’Malley’s commission need to be focusing on, said Peter Saunders, an advocate for abuse survivors and a lay member of the church’s commission.

“Zero tolerance is meaningless unless it applies to the whole institution,” he said. “Arguably, some of the biggest problems are in the less well-off parts of the world, South America, Africa, the Far East. This is where we know many priests flee to in order to carry on their abuse, which is an absolute outrage.”

View the full investigation here.

 

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“My partner left me because I can’t have children”: Women who face infertility share their stories

Whisper is a social network where men and women can express their deepest feelings anonymously. Below, women facing infertility talk about their fear, guilt and sadness about not being able to conceive a child, and wonder why friends don't get how insensitive it is to ask, "Why not just adopt?"

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