Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We're honored to have author Jonathan Lethem as our guest for the
next two weeks, discussing his work, especially his latest,
_Brooklyn Crime Novel_, winner of the New York City Book Award.

Jonathan is the author of thirteen novels, including _Gun, With
Occasional Music,_ _Girl In Landscape_ and _Chronic City._ His fifth
novel, _Motherless Brooklyn,_ won the National Book Critic's Circle
Award. His stories, essays and criticism have been collected in
eight volumes, including _The Collapsing Frontier,_ from PM Press's
"Outspoken Authors" series, and the recent gathering of his art
writing, _Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture._ His writing
has been translated into over thirty languages. He lives in Los
Angeles, where he teaches at Pomona College, and in Maine.

Linda Castellani will lead the discussion. Linda has been a member
of the WELL since 1991, and currently hosts the WELL's Miscellaneous
conference.  Previously she co-hosted the Mirrorshades conference
with Jon Lebkowsky and author Bruce Sterling.  And prior to that,
she was a co-host of this conference, inkwell.vue.
  

    
Hello, Jonathan!

Welcome to inkwell.vue.  We are delighted to have you here with us. 

Looking forward to talking to you.
  

    
Hi Linda, great to be with you here (again)!

I'm delighted to be doing this.
  

    
Until I started reading your books to prepare for this discussion,
my entire knowledge of you was in the context of Philip K. Dick. 
So, in my mind, I see you in Berkeley.   But let’s delve into the
past, shall we, and see where the Jonathan Lethem we know came
from…I’m guessing Brooklyn.  :-)
  

    
Well, it's easy to pick up my trail in both localities. Berkeley was
a tremendously important place in my development as a writer, and I
was a Bay Area person for a bit more than a decade, from 1985 to
1997. I worked at bookshops, attended science fiction conventions,
briefly worked for Hotwired (people here will remember it, I bet)
and went to a (relatively) early Burning Man. I was adjacent but not
part of a very interesting period of "high theory" activity in the
graduate program in Rhetoric at Berkeley, and I spent a lot of time
with people who were closer to the burgeoning idea of the internet
and silicon valley than I was. And lots of people who were on The
Well. All of this influenced me and my early writing -- whereas it
took quite a long time to decide to deal with the fact that I was
from Brooklyn.
  

    <scribbled by castle Mon 9 Sep 24 02:48>
  

    


Actually, I planned to ask this later:  what brought you to
Berkeley?  Did your early writing take place in Berkeley or had you
already begun before you arrived there?
  

    
[I scribbled because I wanted to reword my question.]
  

    
Ha! Sorry Linda, for already making our conversation go in
curlicues. There would be a certain logic to starting with
childhood-in-Brooklyn and then getting to my '20's in Berkeley,
wouldn't there? Well, we can do both at once, perhaps. But let me
answer your actual questions.

I grew up in a family that was leftist and bohemian -- art hippies,
to make it simple. My dad was (and still is, at 92) a painter. My
mother, who died when I was fourteen, was a native New Yorker
(Queens) who dropped out of college in favor of the folk scene in
Greeenwich Village. She was a huge reader, loud and funny, a bon
vivant.

In short, I grew up in a scene of art and politics, among people who
were technically poor but culturally rich, and were accidentally
helping gentrify an impoverished non-white part of Brooklyn during
the earliest part of what began happening to cities in that period
-- the reversal of the "white flight" of the '50's.

I thought I was meant to be an artist like my dad, and went to a
special public high school for the arts. Then got into Bennington
College on the basis of my portfolio, with the expectation I'd be an
art student. But... I'd been reading voraciously, starting with my
mother's bookshelves, and dabbling with writing in high school, and
when I found myself unhappy at college (long story) I pretty much
instantly declared that I would drop out and write a novel. I began
one at age 19, the middle of my freshman year. 1982-3. 

To make a long story not too long: it took me some time to complete
this promise to myself. I first got to Berkeley by drive-a-way car
and hitchhike, in the summer of '83. Then bounced back to college in
Vermont for one more semester.

In high school, I'd wanted to go to California to track down my
hero, Philip K. Dick. He died in 1982. I sort of went to Berkeley
anyway because of him -- to fit myself into whatever traces of him I
could locate. (I found some -- a story we can tell later.) I also
had a free place to stay in the Berkeley hills, with a friend's
uncle. It was his garage, but it was pretty nice up there.

I started writing in earnest in that garage. I like Berkeley because
it was full of bookstores and because the atmosphere of permanent
hippie dissidence reminded me of my parents' world, which I longed
for, and which was being eradicated in so many ways elsewhere, in
the Reagan '80's... I think I felt consoled by that familiarity. 
  

    
Curlicues!  Your use of language is so delicious.

BTW, the floor is yours for the next two weeks, so long or short, we
await your stories!

I am deeply envious of the environment you grew up in, and I can
imagine longing for it.  Mine was full of golf and real estate and
who could top whom in travel accommodations, but like you, I read
everything I could find on the bookshelves, which included a lot of
Harold Robbins, so I grew up with some puzzling ideas about sex. 
But this isn't my story!

Let's unwind the curlicues a bit.  What happened to the novel you
began when you dropped out of college?

And please tell us the story about your search for Philip K. Dick.
  

    
This conversation is publicly accessible, meaning anyone can read
it, whether or not they are a member of the WELL, the online
community platform hosting this two-week discussion.

For non-members, here's a short link for easy access:
<https://tinyurl.com/jonathan-lethem>.

The full link is:
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/549/Jonathan-Lethem-Brooklyn-C
rime-N-page01.html>.

Either link will take you to the first page of the public
conversation. If you are not a WELL member, we encourage you to
visit regularly as the discussion will expand across multiple pages.
Use the pager (dropdown menus at the top and bottom of the page) to
navigate through the conversation as it evolves.

Feel free to share these links on social media or with anyone who
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While non-members cannot post directly, we welcome your comments and
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post them here on your behalf.

If you'd like to participate in more discussions like this, consider
joining the WELL: <https://www.well.com/join/>. The WELL is an
online community with vibrant, thoughtful conversations on a wide
range of topics---an excellent alternative to the fast-paced,
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This conversation will continue for at least two weeks, through
September 23. Thanks for being part of it!
  

    
Good. So, the novel I started when I was nineteen -- I began it in
December of 1992 -- was called Apes in the Plan. It eventually took
more than three years of work, and wasn't really any good at all.
The degree of emulation of Philip K. Dick was shameless, and I say
that as someone who believes that direct displays of influence are
nothing to be ashamed of. Also that emulation is help to younger
writers in learning to write -- I encourage it in my students as a
learning method. I was learning.

The UK literary scholar Joseph Brooker explored the archived
manuscript and described it at length here:

https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/8828/
  

    
As a New York teenager, my sense of California geography was a bit
confused. I associated Philip K. Dick strongly with the North --
Berkeley and Marin -- and though I'd read A Scanner Darkly and
Valis, I somehow hadn't really grasped that he was living (as I do
now) in the Southlands sprawl. So, when I dreamed of going west and
presenting myself as his acolyte, as I did, I held onto the idea
that I had to go to the Bay Area.

As a teenage reader I'd also imprinted strongly on the Beats, and so
there was this ghost of an impulse to reproduce their archetypal
path from NY to San Francisco.

When Dick died, I still had this muddled map of escape and
self-invention stuck in my head. And, as I said, my friend Eliot had
an uncle with a garage we could stay in. It was a thing to do. In
some way I was paying homage to my wish to present myself to PKD by
going anyway.

Before too long, I'd sought out Paul Williams, who was Dick's
literary executor, and had begun the Philip K. Dick Society
Newsletter. Paul sort of scooped me up, allowed me to help him with
minor editorial tasks in the PKD world, and became a key mentor to
me in my early writing. In this way my impulse to connect with PKD's
world was fulfilled after all.  
  

    
I was a Paul Williams fan, an avid reader of Crawdaddy! and
influenced by _Outlaw Blues_ (though I didn't read his other books).
What was it like working with him? I had the impression that he was
a bit strange.
  

    
Paul was an amazing person for me to fall in with when I did. He was
generous with his stories of encounters not only with Phil (whom he
always referred to by first name -- a thing I'll never slip into
doing, since it distinguishes those who actually met him in person),
but with Brian Wilson, David Crosby, Timothy Leary, Theodore
Sturgeon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and yes, Dylan. He introduced me
personally to Gordon Gano and Terry Carr and David Hartwell and Greg
Shaw (founder of Bomp! Magazine and record label) and his own former
wife, the brilliant Japanese folksinger Sachiko Kanenobu. And he was
not only a generous and insightful reader of my own extremely
erratic early fiction manuscripts, he let me learn to edit by giving
me work on the PKD estate and newsletter. He was a good companion
who took our friendship as a given despite our age difference and
uncommon experiences and connections. Was he also strange? No doubt!
I was too. We had a lot of fun together.

I could tell Paul stories all day, no doubt, but I'll wait for
questions to guide me. Oh, okay, here's one: in the early days, when
few others cared because PKD was all out of print and the project of
managing his literary 'remains' was Quixotic (though Paul never
treated it as a burden), Paul's garage in Glen Ellen was full of
what is now known as "The Exegesis" (which I later had the privilege
of editing, with Pamela Jackson and others). We used to leaf through
the boxes of unbound pages together and marvel at the problem of
guiding to anyone's meaningful attention... Dick's copy of the I
Ching was also there in that garage, a book as worn and well-used as
you could possibly imagine, and still full of paper slips bearing
questions that Dick had posed to the oracle. I remember finding one
such slip of paper that said "Should I bring X the Nembutals she
wants, or will she use them to kill herself?" Readers of Valis will
recognize the connection...
  

    
"guiding IT to anyone's meaningful attention..."

(I'll do better with proofreading my posts from here on in, I
promise)
  

    
Paul was so great.  I worked with him a little on The Dark-Haired
Girl, and he came to visit me in Orange County.

Earlier you mentioned that you were unhappy with college and that
you dropped out, yet you left Berkeley to return to the east coast
to go back to school and ultimately get your degree.

Will you tell us the story that you hinted at about being unhappy
with college and what took you east again to go to college?  

I'm also intrigued by your comment "I was adjacent but not part of a
very interesting period of "high theory" activity in the graduate
program in Rhetoric at Berkeley."  What was that program and what
does "high theory" mean?  Did you return to Berkeley for graduate
school?
  

    
I was slightly unclear -- I went back, but only returned for a
single semester. I'm still technically a sophomore on leave.

It's worth adding that despite only being a very ambivalent student
there for three semesters, my experiences at Bennington were pretty
formative, and I still find myself enmeshed in certain ways with the
legacy of those years there... but my failure to fit myself to
college life had a lot to do with having been a public school kid in
NYC and then finding myself at an exclusive and expensive college
where nearly everyone was privileged in ways that were almost
unimaginable to me.

It's the case that I might not have been inclined to stay in school
*anywhere*. I was enacting anti-institutional rebellion at levels
that were ranged from coherent to inane.

Kaja Silverman, Avital Ronell and Judith Butler were all around
Berkeley at the time I was close with people in the Rhetoric
department, and everyone was reading Deleuze and Gattari and
Baudrillard for what felt like the first time... a tremendous amount
of excitement was generated, and plenty of sheer noise, too.
  

    
I'm eager to get back to your books.  Did you write the first one -
okay, the second one - while in Berkeley?
  

    
Gun, With Occasional Music -- my second try at a novel, and the
official "first novel" -- yes. Begun within a few months of settling
into life in Berkeley, while working as a bookstore clerk at Pegasus
Books on Solano, and living in the flats.
  

    
That's where I came in! Really enjoyed "Gun" and have been following
your work ever since. Thanks for starting this conversation, I'll
chime in with a question eventually.
  

    
Same here. I'm a big fan and eager to hear more
  

    
I came in at “Girl In Landscape.” But the story I find myself
thinking about, over the years, is “The Hardened Criminals,” which I
feel like was ahead of its time in recognizing fundamental problems
with our criminal justice system or really, our class system. 
  

    
I started with Motherless Brooklyn, listening to the audiobook.  The
reader very convincingly voiced the dialog you wrote for the
character with Tourette Syndrome.

You wrote the characteristics so convincingly I felt certain that
you must have the syndrome yourself or you somehow channeled someone
who did.  

If at all possible, can you describe how you did that?
  

    
I know that sounds like a silly question - “I sat down and wrote it,
of course!” - but it’s one that I continually asked myself while I
was listening.  “How did he do that?!”
  

    
As I sought to learn more about Motherless Brooklyn, I encountered a
litany of awards:  the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, the Salon Book
Award, and that it was the Esquire magazine book of the year.

Among those who was equally impressed by the book was actor Edward
Norton, who ultimately starred in, co-wrote the screenplay for, and
directed the movie.  

Could you tell us about the evolution of making the film version of
the story?