***

Rumpus: First of all, congratulations on your nomination for the PEN/Faulkner.

Eric Puchner: Thanks.  I’m still picking my jaw up off the ground.

Rumpus: But here you are, entering the prize phase of a writing career.  Do you still feel like a “young writer”?

Puchner: No, but I haven’t reached the point where I’m correcting people about it, either.  I’m actually middle-aged.  But the publishing industry is different from, say, Hollywood — you can be “young” into your forties.

Rumpus: So you’re starting to feel like a mature artist?

Puchner: I don’t think as a writer you ever feel that way, do you?  I’m writing short stories again now, and every time I start a new one, I feel almost exactly the way I did when I was twenty-two.  Every story is its own invention, and the inventing doesn’t get any easier.

Rumpus: Deborah Eisenberg says the sentences get easier, but the stories don’t.

Puchner: But the sentences get harder too, if you’re challenging yourself.  The newness takes place on the level of style, too.

Rumpus: Talk a little about your transition from being a storywriter to writing your first novel, Model Home.

Puchner: I’ve always felt very comfortable in short story land.  The geography makes sense to me.  So it took me a while to work up the nerve to write a novel.  You need an extraordinary amount of faith I think to write one.  It’s almost a religious endeavor.  But I tried to keep in mind what Doctorow says about writing a novel being like driving at night in the fog: you can only see as far as your headlights.  Once I resigned myself to the fact that it might be a colossal failure and that was okay, at least I’d die trying – then I managed to write one.

Rumpus: I hope you take this in the right way, but I was surprised at the relative grace and ease with which you took to the novel form.  You always talked about your writing process as one that got caught in perfecting sentences before you could go on to the next sentence – a grueling way to write a novel.

Puchner: I sort of chucked my perfectionist tendencies out the window and just wrote the thing without looking back.  In fact, I wrote the first half more or less as separate novellas… I wanted to write a novel that wasn’t a short story writer’s novel – you know, where every chapter is more or less a discrete entity.  That was important to me.  I admire some short story cycles, like “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which is brilliant, but often they leave me unsatisfied as “novels.”

Rumpus: Nice shout out to the competition! (A Visit to the Goon Squad was also nominated for the Pen/Faulkner).  Alice Munro and Stuart Dybek have stories as novels, too.

Puchner: Well, I love the Beggar’s Maid.  It’s one of the brilliant ones.

Rumpus: But the critics pounded Dybek for his, Sailing with Magellan. They felt cheated.

Puchner: Haven’t read the Dybek.  But I love his stories.

Rumpus: I was reading some Paris Review interviews recently, particularly with Graham Greene and Faulkner and they both had a terrifying section (for me) where they discussed – in great detail — the overall system of their novels.  Do you see an organizing system like that operating in your work?

Puchner: I think I probably do have a system, but I won’t know what it is until I write a few more novels.  For me, at least, it’s probably 80% subconscious.  But there are always going to be writers who think, as Nabokov famously said, anyone who writes a novel without having mapped it out first is an “amateur.”  Personally, if I had everything mapped out before hand, I don’t think I’d be able to stay interested.

Besides, we’re all amateurs at this stage in the game.  Who makes any money?

Rumpus: You’re a somewhat recent transplant from bookish SF to… LA.  As a writer, how are you finding the change?

Puchner: I find LA to be a very fertile place for the imagination.  Not the easiest place to live, but there’s something about the friction it creates that inspires me… it’s just so weird and huge and beautiful in totally unexpected ways.  Which sounds like a good description of a novel.

Rumpus: I was thinking about your recent piece in GQ and about the number of writers with con men types as fathers.  You, John LeCarre, and – famously – Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff.  Do you think having a dad who was a confidence man influenced you to become a writer?

Puchner: He wasn’t really a confidence man.  I think I should clarify that, since the majority of his life was spent as a nine-to-five banker.  But I do think that he withheld something from me and betrayed me in some pretty profound ways when I was a teenager – and (I can only speculate) that writing was my way of simultaneously getting back at him and trying to make him proud.  I don’t mean literally getting back at him.  But almost everything I’ve written – even the weird speculative story I just wrote – is about him in some way.

Rumpus: So my parallel doesn’t hold?

Puchner: I think he was always telling stories about himself that weren’t true, and the tragedy was that in the end he couldn’t live up to these stories.  So in that respect, we were both storytellers.

Rumpus: But you do your spinning in the open.

Puchner: So did my father!  In his case, the story was all you saw.  The truth – that he was broke, deeply insecure, possibly clinically depressed – was all kept under wraps.

Rumpus: Do you see anything heroic in your father’s behavior from this remove?

Puchner: I think you could see it as heroic, yes, but it was driven by a clear, almost pathological desire to impress.

Rumpus: What – other than vengeance — made you want to write?

Puchner: I wanted to make someone feel the way that my favorite books made me feel.  The first book I ever read that made me think I could actually put words on a page, though, was Ray Bradbury’s Collected Stories.  My brother got it for Christmas one year – a huge tome, over a thousand pages, I think – and it was the first time I ever really thought about authorship.  Like, I guess I imagined that books just wrote themselves before that, but something about the book-sized author’s photo on the back impressed me a great deal.  Someone actually sat down and wrote this!

And I read every story in there, a lot of them more than once.  I can still remember a couple perfectly.

Rumpus: Bradbury is an LA guy.  Are you still a fan?

Puchner: I’m too scared to go back and reread them.  I worry about the twists at the end.  But [Charles] Baxter told me recently that he thinks Something Wicked This Way Comes is a great novel.

Rumpus: It’s a great title, at least.  Were you one of these people who wrote “novels” when you were a kid then?

Puchner: No.  I wrote godawful poems.  Lots of them.

Rumpus: Rhyming?

Puchner: If only.  My hero was ee cummings, so you can only imagine.

Rumpus: What’s the worst title of a poem you can remember?

Puchner: “3:00 a.m. and trane on sax”

Rumpus: Was Trane capitalized?

Puchner: No!  I should have clarified.  I’d never been up till 3:00 am when I wrote it.

Rumpus: Do you ever try your hand at poems now?

Puchner: No.  I looked back at some of the poems I wrote in high school and college recently, and it was disheartening to say the least.

Rumpus: But do you ever see a flash?  Here’s the moment that shows I could do it?

Puchner: Occasionally when I write a metaphor or an image in a way that I feel no one else has ever done before.  And I think, I could be a poet!  But I think any fiction writer worth his or her salt secretly wants to be a poet.

Rumpus: You’re married to Katharine Noel, herself an accomplished novelist.  How do you two settle who gets the writerly material in your lives?  The funny stories, odd neighborly behaviors, etc.

Puchner: We sometimes have to fight for it.  We strike bargains all the time.  Well, if you get such and such, then I get the anecdote you’ve been meaning to turn into a story for years.  Nothing comes free.

Rumpus: Can you give a specific example?

Puchner: Well, there’s a moment in one of my stories, “A Fear of Invisible Tribes,” where the protagonist thinks about the Neur tribe of Africa and how they had over a thousand things they were scared of, some of them really arresting and weird and beautiful.  That was something she’d kept from college on a notecard.  She did not give it up without a fight

Rumpus: Earlier in the interview you said about writers, “We’re all just amateurs now.”  Have you ever thought about “professional” writing, like television?

Puchner: I never used to.  But there’s so much good TV these days — The Wire to me is as good as a great novel.  But there’s also the unfortunate reality that many people don’t want to hear the truth about life.  They want to be uplifted.  So it’s dangerous to confuse the size of an audience with artistic merit.

Rumpus: When you need some inspiration what book do you pick up?  What books stick with you?

Puchner: I was thinking about James Salter’s Light Years yesterday, and how much it had influenced me as a writer – specifically, how much of it had influenced Model Home.  They’re completely different in tone and style, but the breadth of it, the disintegration of family, all of it had an impact.

Though I read a review of the new Geoff Dyer book recently, and he’s quoted as saying that the married couple in Light Years have the most annoying names in the history of literature.

Rumpus: I love Light Years.  I love the part with the shirts.

Puchner: Yes, the shirts!  It’s almost like metafiction, since it echoes the Great Gatsby shirt scene.  I was put off by Salter’s fetishization of material things at first, till I realized what he was up to.

Rumpus: Charles Baxter, to bring him up again, has said that one of the things writers figure out as they become mature artists is what they can’t do.  What you would put on that list for yourself?

Puchner: Many things.  I used to try to write things that had a purely intellectual payoff, like Borges, but I realized some time ago that I’m not Borges or Calvino.  I like story, I like character, I like to try to move people rather than dazzle them with postmodern hi-jinks.  It took me some time to realize there are many ways to be original, not only the most obvious ones.

Rumpus: Have you played the Great Gatsby video game?

Puchner: Is that a joke?

Rumpus: Nope.  It’s awesome.

Puchner: What’s the object?  To f*** Daisy?

Rumpus: To find Gatsby.  You’re Nick.

Puchner: Find Gatsby?  He’s lost?

Rumpus: He’s elusive…

Puchner: Ah, like the green light at the end of the dock.

Rumpus: Exactly.  If there were to be a video game of Model Home, what would the goal be?

Puchner: To make me lots of money.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Puchner: I’ve got a number of embryonic novels sitting in untitled folders on my desktop, but I don’t think I can talk about them.  I’m too superstitious.  Right now, at least, I’m thinking in terms of a story collection – I just had one taken by Tin House, and I’m working on others.

Rumpus: Tell us the next book we need to read.

Puchner: Well, since I mentioned Geoff Dyer, I recently read Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi—there’s a book with a completely original structure that will also move you deeply. It’s pretty terrific.  I mentioned Egan’s Goon Squad already.  And of course there’s the brilliant Deus Ex Machina by Andrew Altschul, which I would have mentioned already except that he’s books editor at the Rumpus.

Rumpus: Good advice!  Oh, and I’ve got an idea for the video game.  Jonas is on his bike in the desert, searching for the mystery of the explosion.

Puchner: Or Warren is trying to find the answering machine that has Dustin’s confession on it.

Rumpus: I’d play it.

Puchner: I’m not sure I would.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
• California Dreaming
• The Blurb #14: The Land of Underwater Birds

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Béla Fleck has the honor of having been nominated for more Grammies in more categories than any other person. Born in New York City to parents sophisticated enough to name him after Béla Bartok, he started playing banjo in high school. Sascha Paladino – his much younger brother – is the director of Ni Hao, Kai-Lan on Nickelodeon.

Fleck and Paladino sat down with The Rumpus to talk about Fleck’s heretofore unknown appearance on Hee Haw, the five albums he’d bring to a desert island, and why Hollywood thought he needed a black friend.

The Rumpus: How did you decide to make this documentary?

Béla Fleck: Sascha made a great film about me and Edgar Meyer – a short film – that was really interesting and special, and attracted the attention of Peter Gelb at Sony, who wanted to put out this African record and thought that Sascha should make a movie about it.

Sascha Paladino: And I thought it was a good idea.

Rumpus: You got on board.

Fleck: We all thought it was a great idea. Except once Peter Gelb found out how much it was going to cost he backed out.  And left us holding the bag.

Paladino: He thought it was going to be a lower budget kind of thing, and we wanted to do it right. But if he hadn’t brought up the idea I don’t know what would have happened.

Fleck: Yeah, we have to thank Peter. I mean, in most ways we have to thank him. He was definitely coming from the right place all along. But because we thought we were doing it at Sony that whole time we never looked anywhere else. When he backed out it was too late. We’d already spent a huge amount of money and planned a bunch of people’s lives around it.

Rumpus: Who paid for it then?

Fleck: I ended up financing it.

Paladino: In a way, that turned out great. We were lucky you [Fleck] were in a position to do that, and it was great because we didn’t have to answer to anyone.

Fleck: It safeguarded the creative process in a cool way.

Rumpus: Of the film or of the music?

Fleck: I doubt anybody would have pushed me [on the music]. When I was at Sony nobody ever gave me any creative suggestions on the music.

Paladino: The danger was more with the film. With that kind of investment, people want to make sure they’re getting something back.

Rumpus: Let’s say you were one of these people: you’re at Sony, and you wanted to buy this film. What changes would you have wanted to see?

Fleck: Well, I can tell you one thing. When I got back and I met with people at Sony Pictures about it, they said, you know, would you consider doing this with Danny Glover? Like go to Africa with Danny Glover? Or Forrest Whittaker? So you had a black friend you were exploring Africa with?

Rumpus: A black friend?

Fleck: Yes. I was like, no, you don’t understand: we’ve already gone. Of course, they’re trying to think about how to make this a mass appeal kind of thing. And of course, we would love it to be a mass appeal kind of thing. But so was Buena Vista [Social Club]. And it wasn’t done as a mass appeal kind of thing.

Paladino: The other thing I would say [about proposed changes to the documentary]. When we came back, and we were looking for funding to finish the film, people kept saying, okay, so what’s Béla’s transformation? What’s his journey? They were looking at it as a conventional narrative, and a lot of the commercial documentaries nowadays have that. Great movies, like Spellbound.

We thought about it a lot, and we even tried different versions of the film that had Béla’s voiceover, talking about how he changed, but -

Fleck: It felt false.

Paladino: He didn’t really change. He went to Africa. He wanted to make great music. He made great music. He came back.

The movie isn’t really about Béla. It’s really about the people he meets along the way and these portraits of people you wouldn’t have a chance to hang out with normally or listen to.

Rumpus: So no transformation.

Fleck: If there was a transformation it actually happened after the making of the film. When we got home, what happened? We spent two to three years straight working on the project, editing the film, editing the music. Both Sascha and I. A day didn’t go by when I wasn’t immersed in this material. So I think the musical evolution I’ve gone through has come from all the work with the material. The personal evolution [was more] from watching the footage and seeing all the things that I didn’t know was happening around me. I learned a lot about myself.

Rumpus: Like what? What did you learn?

Fleck: Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It’s amazing what you see and what you learn. (Pauses) I learned that I’m so busy with what I’m doing, so focused on what I’m doing, that I miss a lot of opportunities for interacting with people. I’ve got an obsessive quality.

Rumpus: Oumou Sangaré – in the documentary – said an interesting thing. She said, Béla is someone who maybe doesn’t express himself verbally very well, but he expresses himself perfectly with the banjo. Do you think that’s a fair characterization?

Fleck: I think I’m getting better at being verbal. I used to have a lot of problems with it. I had my own little demons that I was fighting, and I used the banjo as an escape. But I think I’m doing better.

Rumpus: After this interview, I certainly wouldn’t have characterized you as not being verbal.

Fleck: (laughs) Good. I want to make one more point about the movie… I was a big fan of a writer named Jack Vance, a science fiction writer. He always wrote about these guys who were either going down a river in a strange world or would be in this one land where people acted really strange, and he’d have these interactions with them that were strange – he’d usually get run out of town or something. Then he’d end up in the next town over where the rules were totally different. And I love this stuff. So when people were saying the movie has to have a story arc – a beginning, a middle, and an end – I thought, does it really? I wasn’t buying it.

Rumpus: Were there any musicians who didn’t make it into the movie that you wanted to record with?

Fleck: Toumani [Diabaté] didn’t make it into the film. He was traveling – he seemed too busy. He’s a big, big star. But then he called me up and said, Béla, I want to be in your movie. It was too late, but we did get him on the record.

Rumpus: When you say Toumani is a big star, what exactly do you mean?

Fleck: Toumani is the most well-known instrumentalist from Africa. Two years ago he won the Grammy with Ali Farka Touré. He’s recorded with Taj Mahal. He’s one of the great collaborators from the African instrumental scene.

The cool thing is that he’s been able to pull it off as an instrumentalist. I really relate to Toumani because of that. He’s playing an ethnic instrument and bringing it to the world.

Rumpus: Is that how you see your career as a banjoist?

Fleck: It’s definitely part of it.

Rumpus: How did you pick up the banjo?

Fleck: I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn’t actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.

Rumpus: This is in New York City.

Fleck: New York City, yeah.

Rumpus: One of the stated goals of the movie is to take this instrument – the banjo – that you point out is identified as a white working-class –

Fleck: White Southern.

Rumpus: Yes, a kind of cracker instrument — and to trace the African roots of the banjo.

Fleck: There are a lot of chapters to the banjo’s history. Part of it are the roots in Africa, where it’s a more primitive instrument. Then it comes to the United States where it morphs into the slave music that they created here, which was very African in origin. Gradually, it starts to become imitated by white players in blackface doing the minstrel shows that, you know, we would consider to be in very bad taste if we heard it today, but at the time was done in England and all over the world. Then, to the debates about what was appropriate to play on the banjo, whether it should only be savage, primitive music, or whether you could play minuets and light classical music on it.

Rumpus: When was this discussion?

Fleck: Late 1800s. They were selling thousands of banjos every year. Many thousands. It was like the guitar.

Rumpus: Then?

Fleck: Then the banjo works its way into the beginnings of jazz. Louis Armstrong’s early bands. Jelly Roll Morton’s music. Cab Calloway. All this stuff with the banjo in it. Then it becomes excised from jazz by one guitar recording. Everybody wanted to have a guitar after that.

The slave music continues to be assimilated into other cultural variants – Southern Appalachian mountain music, bluegrass, old time music. There are black string bands of that time that played old time music, that are largely forgotten.

And then Earl Scruggs comes along and transforms the banjo into a virtuosic modern instrument. For the first time, the Southern banjo style becomes the identity of the banjo, and everything from before is wiped off of people’s consciousness by the power of that explosion.

Rumpus: This is good? Bad?

Fleck: It’s just – being from New York, I wonder why am I inspired by bluegrass and Earl Scruggs? But when I look at the whole history of the banjo, I feel really good about it, including the Earl Scruggs part.

Rumpus: Speaking of banjos, what do you think about the movie Deliverance?

Fleck: I like the movie. That’s one of the most powerful uses of music in a scene in a movie. That’s why that song had such a great impact, aside from being such a catchy number. And it forever cemented people’s image of the banjo as a cracker instrument.

Rumpus: That’s what I was wondering about.

Fleck: The other thing that cemented it was the television show Hee Haw, which you’re probably too young to remember.

Rumpus: I’m from Arkansas.

Fleck: You know it then. They’d jump out of the haystack and say, Hee haw! I’d watch the show to hear some banjo, but I didn’t want anything to do with jumping out of the haystack, you know.

Rumpus: Or the cornrow.

Fleck: But I did it. I appeared on that show before it closed.

Paladino: I didn’t know that.

Rumpus: We’ll have to Google that. (Rumpus readers: please find this if you can! But see below for a Johnny Cash appearance on Hee Haw.)

Fleck: Yep. The late eighties, when they were still taping.

Rumpus: If you were banished to a desert island and you could only take five albums, what would they be?

Fleck: Hmm. Joni Mitchell Blue, Oumou Sangaré’s Collection, Making Music by Zakir Hussain…what am I up to?

Rumpus: Three. You can take one of your own, if you want.

Fleck: Abbey Road. (Long pause) Kind of Blue.

Rumpus: Do you have a favorite hip-hop album?

Fleck: I don’t know enough about hip-hop, though I’ve heard some great hip-hop. I just did a thing with Qwest Love – we did a performance together in Memphis at the Folk Alliance Festival, and we had a great jam and a conversation. I learned that there’s a lot of hip-hop that would be great with a banjo in it. It would just groove like crazy, and I hope I get to be one of the guys who does that, because it’s coming. It’s coming.

Rumpus: You think so?

Fleck: I promise. He said he has something in mind.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

I love Revolutionary Road, but I want to argue against these critics, including Yates. He wrote at least two other masterful novels, the unremitting Cold Spring Harbor, and the strangely nimble but devastating epic, The Easter Parade.

The Easter Parade is about two sisters. Their early lives seem the familiar stuff of Yates’s short stories, but once they hit puberty and stumble into adulthood, the novel stretches its wings. The women’s lives split — one has the nuclear family in Long Island, the other the career in Manhattan — and Yates, as he’s so good at, both sketches in these categories and then turns them on their head, shaking all the change from their pockets.

I bought this book on a tip from another writer (thanks, Pete), and I could barely put it down — even in the bookstore. I read it in two sittings. How could such friendly prose contain such dark depths? It’s the mystery and the genius of this writer who — whatever he believed about himself — continued to gain mastery as an artist, even after his brilliant first book.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: The Unnamed
• The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
• The Last Book I Loved: Small Porcelain Head
• The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
• Jeva Lange: The Last Book I Loved, Life of Pi

Founder of the Weather Underground, and favorite whipping boy of the failed McCain campaign, Bill Ayers talks to The Rumpus about the ’60s, the present, and his fans in the Chicago Police Department.

Ayers and The Rumpus started our interview with a bomb scare. We sat down on the couch in a busy hotel lobby and a worried security guard approached. “Is that your bag?” she asked, pointing to a backpack and coat that were definitely not ours. “Nope,” we said. “Oh boy,” she said. She asked a few other people. The owner was not there. She radioed in. I considered the irony of being blown up while interviewing Bill Ayers. I figured it would at least get me a wikipedia entry.

Just then a young woman came up. The bag was hers. The security guard radioed back in. Relief! But also a little disappointment?

Anyway, the young woman, Jenny Witt, took her seat and became involved in the interview. It was a nice touch of anarchy for an interview with the founder of the Weathermen. – Scott Hutchins

THE RUMPUS: When your name popped up in the Presidential campaign, and the Weather Underground came up, one of the things that I think many of us – people of my generation – struggled to understand was how you saw the world in the moment of the sixties. Let’s take the summer of ’68, for example – when you were that age, what did the world seem like to you? What did you see?

BILL AYERS: Look at the drumbeat of ’68.  January 1968, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. We recognize that the United States has been defeated for the first time in its history. The United States – this military behemoth – has been brought down by a peasant nation. Going into the spring of ’68, you have Columbia University, you have the Mexico City Olympics, you have Russians invading Czechoslovakia, on and on, this drumbeat of things happening. March 31st, 1968, Lyndon Johnson announces he won’t run for President. Here’s the most effective politician of his generation; he’s passed the most far reaching civil rights legislation. He’s ruined his Presidency in the furnaces of war. And he announces he won’t run for President. Those of us who were anti-war activists had this spontaneous explosion.

I was in Ann Arbor where I was president of Students for a Democratic Society. We had this spontaneous demonstration through the streets of Ann Arbor and we ended on the steps of the president of the university’s house. I had a bullhorn and he had a bullhorn and we were shouting back and forth and there were thousands of students trampling his rose bushes…

RUMPUS: Who was the president at that time?

AYERS: Robben Fleming. He was a very good friend of mine. Robben has a chapter on me in his memoir, in which he says, Bill Ayers and I didn’t always agree but he was always determined and articulate. What I remember saying that night was “Fuck you, you motherfucker.” Anyway, what Robben said that night was congratulations. You have won a great victory. Now the war will end.

Five days later King is dead. Two months later [Robert] Kennedy is dead. And four months after that it’s clear that not only will the war not end, but two thousand people a month are being murdered.

See you guys, because you’re young, can say, oh sure the Vietnam war was ten years, three million people died, it was a miserable tragedy, but it wasn’t thirty million, it wasn’t three hundred million. But standing in the summer of 1968, [you didn’t know that]. You said, “What the fuck can we do? We’ve already persuaded everybody that the war is wrong.”

This was a crisis for the anti-war movement. We’re not sophisticated people – we’re mostly kids. So we splintered. Some of us went into the Democratic Party and tried to build a peace wing within the party and succeeded in that. Succeeded in getting McGovern nominated, and succeeded in getting him crushed.

I founded an organization that wanted to survive what we thought was an impending American fascism.

RUMPUS: That’s what I’m looking for. You believed there was an impending American fascism. What did you think it was going to look like?

AYERS: I knew what it was going to look like. Well, it didn’t turn out to be true, but I can tell you what we thought it would look like.

What we thought fascism would look like was that it would have two faces: the face to black people was going to be increasing depression, increasing economic hardship, and the murder of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. That’s what fascism looks like. That’s exactly what it looks like. Targeted assassinations. Terror against communities. I was in Detroit during the riots of Detroit, I was in Cleveland during the riots in Cleveland, I was in Chicago during the riots in Chicago. And what that looked like was fascism. They were lining up bodies in Cleveland like cordwood. It was disgusting.

The face of fascism in the white community would be conspiracy trials. What we envisioned for ourselves were endless trials, endless prison sentences, conspiracy indictments. And it was all happening. I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That’s what fascism was going to look like. That’s what it did look like.

RUMPUS: But it didn’t turn out that way.

AYERS: It turned out not to be quite the way we imagined it. But if you were living in the middle of it, without the benefit of hindsight, it doesn’t seem to me as crazy as it does now to think of it that way.

RUMPUS: But…

AYERS: Let me get back to something – I don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person just like you guys and I’m as much a part of this generation as you are. You can’t make me not. I mean, what the fuck – I’m living. I don’t remember looking at my watch on December 31st 1969 and thinking, “Oh, fuck, we’ve got to do something.”

The mythology of the sixties takes two faces right now. One’s the kind of John McCain face: it was the beginning of anarchy. And the other is these old radicals who look nostalgically at a ship that already left the shore. I can’t think of anything more depressing.

Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn’t end the war. And that’s what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That’s our shame.

When is the war on terror going to end? You don’t know. You have no fucking idea. Is your hand up? I love you for that.

Young Woman: Can I ask a question?

AYERS: Of course – you’re part of the interview.

RUMPUS: Sure. What’s your name?

Young Woman: Jenny Witt.

RUMPUS: Go for it.

JENNY WITT: Okay. Looking back, you guys didn’t end the war. Vietnam ended the war. Do you think you could have?

AYERS: I can’t think of what we might have done. A lot of contemporaries of mine will say, ah, the fucking Weathermen deflected things. But the problem they all have is they can’t tell me what they did that was so effective. None of us was effective.

I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn’t agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war. So we’d done our job. That’s where we ran up against reality.

The rhythm of being an activist today involves a pretty simple rhythm. You have to open your eyes to the reality before you. You have to look and see. Then, when you open your eyes, you have to act. Then – and this is where the Weathermen went off the tracks – after you act you have to doubt. You have to rethink. You have to reconsider. Then you have to act again.

My challenge to my own students is that I often ask, “You all are against slavery, right?” [They say:] “Of course. Slavery is bad.” Then I ask, “Would you have been against slavery in 1840? Because if you were – and I know you flatter yourself to think you would have, and I want to be right there with you, too – if you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.

But of course we would have been, because we’re good people. Are you against the detainment of the Japanese? Yes, you are. Do you want Nelson Mandela let out of prison? Of course. You want apartheid to end? You bet.

But I lived through those things, and I can tell you – to be for Nelson Mandela’s freedom in 1963-4-5 was to be a tiny minority at the University of Michigan. Tiny. To be against Marcos, the dictator of the Philippines – when he came to speak at the University of Michigan and he was wined and dined by the alumni – that was to be one of twenty people.

I only mention that shit not to say, weren’t we great? I mention it to say, what are we missing now? What am I missing now? What aren’t we seeing?

RUMPUS: What aren’t we seeing?

AYERS: For example, your grandchildren will say to you, “You were in Chicago when the first African-American president was elected.” You’ll say, “Yes, I was.” They’ll say, “Wow, were you at Grant Park on November 4th?” You’ll say, “Yes, I was.” It doesn’t matter if you were, you’ll say you were. “And did you go to Washington?” “Yes, I sat right by the podium.” You’ll say the whole thing – you’ll lie about the whole thing. Okay. And then your granddaughter will say, “Is it true it cost Obama half a billion dollars to be elected?” And you’ll say, “I don’t remember that.”

Half a billion fucking dollars, in a democracy, to become President. That’s fucking crazy. And your granddaughter will say, “That’s crazy. You call that democracy?” And you’ll say, “I think he raised it on the internet.” She’ll say, “Big fucking deal. You mean democracy was so polluted by money that it took half a billion?”

I’m not saying that will happen. I’m just saying, that’s the problem with looking backwards as opposed to looking now. Your granddaughter will say, “You lived in Chicago. You lived two miles from a place that caged 16,000 African-American males.”  This is only about three miles away. What if I said to you, “There are 16,000 Jews in a prison three miles from your house?” You’d be horrified.

RUMPUS: Looking back on the U.S. in the ’60s and ’70s and comparing it to the U.S. now, can you give a progress report? Have things gotten better, not gotten better?

AYERS: Chou En-lai, who was the premier of China under Mao Tse-tung, was asked in the late sixties by a French journalist what the impact of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century was on the Chinese revolution of the twentieth century. Chou En-lai thought about it for quite a long time, and his response was, “It’s too soon to tell.”

So anybody who thinks they know what the sixties mean is interpreting in light of the present. I think that all of history is contested, and all of our understandings of history are contested.

But are there things that are better? Yeah. The fact that we just elected the first African-American president, the fact that we just turned the generational page, the fact that we elected a community organizer – it was unthinkable two years before it happened. Now for the rest of all time it was inevitable.

On the other hand, are we still headed for the precipice at an accelerated rate? We are. Take the question of war and peace, which I think is the question upon which the Obama administration is either going to thrive or die. On the question of war and peace we’re not better off than we were 45 years ago. At that time we had a giant military establishment – I mean, giant. But at this point the world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.

I gave a talk in Germany last year. I was asked to propose an international law that would highlight power and asymmetries of power. I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base – those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.

Of course, I gave the talk in Berlin, so they loved it. I was playing to my audience. But the fact is we’re more unstable today as the only superpower than we were 45 years ago as one of two superpowers. It’s an irony, but it’s a more unstable world with the kind of military might that the U.S. has. As long as we drink the kool-aid and think that our safety depends on this kind of military might and intervention, invasion, occupation, we’re forever unsafe.

Our safety only lies in becoming a nation among nations. Yet how do we win that argument? I don’t know.

RUMPUS: You look like you have another point.

AYERS: Yes.  Similarly, on the question of poverty – are we better off or worse off? You could say we have a broader middle class. Maybe. But we also have the immiseration of the working class, the greater immiseration and alienation of middle class people. What is the benefit of work in today’s economy? Is the work humanizing or dehumanizing? That’s one question. A second question is – is the gap between the well-off and not well-off less today than it was 45 years ago? It’s much, much greater. So, progress? On two great measures, war and poverty – we’re not doing so well.

Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don’t know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.

King talked in his later speeches about the three evils: racism, militarism, and materialism or consumerism. Are we better off or worse off in terms of a culture of consumerism? I think we’re much worse off than 45 years ago. Again, we’ve all drunk the kool-aid. The way you know how you’re doing is you buy more shit. You go look in the basement of any middle-class person who owns a home and you’re horrified. What are they doing with all that shit?

At the same time, we’re in the world of yes we can. That begs the question of yes we can what?

RUMPUS: You mention often that you’re anti-imperialist, but it’s hard for me to figure out what that actually means. What, for instance, would an anti-imperialist Chicago look like?

AYERS: The great thing about Chicago – the wonderful thing about being a citizen of Chicago – is that as weird as people think my ideas are at some level, the majority of the city council agrees with me on almost everything. We agree on gay rights, we agree on handguns, we agree on the Patriot Act, we agree on the war in Iraq. So what would an anti-imperialist Chicago look like? First of all, we’d have to change the way we do schooling, and we’d have to change the way we think about work. We’d have to have a gigantic big tent, democratic, messy conversation about what it means to be an educated person and what work entails. Again King – at the end of his life – was saying we only need to work 4 or 3 days a week. The rest of the time we should be involved in social action, the arts, recreation, and sports. How much healthier would we all be if that was our life?

The fact is in the last 40 years we’ve gone from having a 40-hour work week for the middle-class, upper middle-class, professional. For example, my dad was chairman of Commonwealth Edison for 30 years, worked a 40 hour week. That’s unthinkable today. I’m a professor, I work an 80-hour week. He was home for dinner every night, and he ran the biggest corporation in Chicago. That’s fucking crazy.

So can we imagine a different world? I can. That’s a world where work is rational, it’s in the common good, and we’re actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.

RUMPUS: In your memoir, you mention tattoos. You have a few?

AYERS: I’m covered.

RUMPUS: What’s your theory on them? Why do you like them?

AYERS: Your body’s always going through changes. It’s fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it. I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I’m covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.

RUMPUS: Do you have a favorite?

AYERS: Do you know the African-American artist Jacob Lawrence? He did a series of large canvas painting of the black migration from the south. It’s called the Migration Series. Brilliant. It’s a great show to take kids to, because you can really see the pathos and the hope and the shattered dreams of the black migration of World War II from Mississippi to Chicago, for example. But he did a lesser known series called the John Brown series. I have a Jacob Lawrence on my back of John Brown distributing weapons to slaves.

RUMPUS: That must have taken a while.

AYERS: That’s my favorite, because it hurt the most. I bled a lot. But you’re supposed to bleed a lot when you’re for freedom. Fuck it.

RUMPUS: I hear there’s a Republican representative in the state house who’s trying to legislate your job away.

AYERS: Yeah, he’s already introduced legislation.

RUMPUS: Do you think it’s going to happen?

AYERS: No. It’s not going to happen. You look at something like that and it kind of reminds me in a small echo of the last presidential campaign. Here we are in Illinois with a political comedy going on of absolutely catastrophic proportions, an economic collapse that’s causing real pain to real people, and this guy – this Republican guy – is going to introduce legislation to ban me from teaching. I’ve taught for 22 years in the university system.

After 9/11, another Republican legislator got a committee to create a sub-committee to investigate me. They did. That cost the state money. They read everything I wrote, and they hired an investigator. They interviewed everybody who’d ever published anything I wrote. By the end the investigator came to me off the record to say he’d really enjoyed reading my stuff and good luck to me.

RUMPUS: Do you see your university life as a second act? Or is it just an extension of what you’ve always done?

AYERS: It’s one long act. The idea that you live your life in phases – I’ve never bought that. I feel like I’m the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I’m the same person who joined a fraternity, I’m the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I’m the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.

I’m different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I’m thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They’re not different. I still want a world at peace, I still want a world in balance, I still think that injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.

To be a human being is to suffer. But it’s the unnecessary suffering, it’s the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped. I don’t feel any different than I did in 1965 in that regard.

RUMPUS: Jenny, you’ll ask another question then we’ll wrap it up?

JENNY WITT: It must frustrate you that you’re judged every day today on what you did in the past.

AYERS: It really doesn’t. Because first of all, there’s a perception that there’s a unified judgment about me that’s negative, which isn’t true. When the right wing was beating up on me in the early stages of the last campaign, I got a lot of hate mail, I got a lot of threats from a lot of crazies. Once it jumped to ABC and became a national story, the love outweighed the hate 2 to 1.

I’ll give you two examples. I was shopping in Home Depot yesterday for some crap. I’m heading down one aisle, and a guy comes up behind me. He’s a young guy, African guy with a thick accent. He says to me, “Are you Ayers?” I said I am. He said, “I just want to shake your hand. Thanks for standing up and being brave.” This is a guy who works at Home Depot. How do I know him? I don’t know him.

Last week, I went down to the Chicago Central Police Department to get my fingerprints taken, because I had to get my rap sheet so I could try to get into Canada. I walk in, and the entire fingerprinting group – who are all African-American, many middle-aged, some young – they all say, “Ayers!” We have to line up and get our pictures together. What the fuck? I mean, the central police station.

If you listen to Fox News, or you listen to the people who might write a letter to this or that…

JENNY WITT: My father.

AYERS: Like your father. It seems like I’m this demon. But most people who think about it are not actually persuaded by it. The proof is the last election.

It didn’t work with me. So [at the end of the last Presidential campaign] they ran a series of ads in Florida about my friend Rashid Khalidi who’s a brilliant, brilliant Palestinian scholar, not an anti-Semitic bone in his body. He’s a cosmopolitan guy who grew up in New York City, went to UN international school. His dad was a diplomat from Lebanon.

Anyway, Rashid is a professor at Columbia and we used to be in a blended family. We’re very, very close. So they run these ads in Florida, and CNN is interviewing a high McCain official the last week of the campaign. They ask him, “You claim that Obama has friends that are anti-Semitic. Who?” The McCain guy says, “Rashid Khalidi.” The CNN guy, without any knowledge or depth of understanding, says, “Okay. Who else?” The McCain guy says, “Bill Ayers.” The CNN guy says, “Ayers isn’t an anti-Semite. He’s a terrorist.”

So Rashid calls me on the phone and says, man, let’s trade places. You be the anti-Semite for a week, and I’ll be the terrorist.

JENNY WITT: Wouldn’t you just like to move on?

AYERS: I have moved on. During this campaign, I got up every morning and worked on my graphic novel. I didn’t eat my liver and worry about how I was going to answer shit.

You get to a point where you don’t take the criticism seriously. The way to do that is know who you are. If you know who you are and what your work is, then you don’t have to take the criticism seriously. But the flip side is you can’t take the praise seriously either.

I’d decided a year before the campaign started – I knew [my name] was going to come up; I didn’t know how bad it would be – I wasn’t going say anything. Every now and then I would weaken, because I’m not very good at being quiet. Bill O’Reilly wrote me several times and said, just answer this, just answer this. So I sent one along to my oldest son, and I said, I got to answer this. This is outrageous. I’ve got a good one-sentence answer. Zayd wrote me back and said, no, you can’t answer. Remember, you’re looking at the roller coaster, but don’t get on the roller coaster. I thought, Hmm, very Buddhist advice. And that’s what I tried to do. I tried to watch the roller coaster from a great distance, know that cartoon character wasn’t me.

When I became a punch line on the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live, I knew it was kind of over.

RUMPUS: In your memoir Fugitive Days, there are lots of fireworks and lots of fun time with explosives. There seems to be some sort of argument in there…

AYERS: You call that an argument?

RUMPUS: Yeah. You made a structural choice, juxtaposing Weathermen bombs with fireworks.

AYERS: The memoir is a memoir of 10 years – 1965 to 1975. But there’s a little prelude about my growing up in tremendous privilege and an afterword about what happened after the Vietnam War. The point of the explosives in the prelude is to say, here’s an American kid in the 50s, and what are we raised on? We’re raised on fireworks and the 4th of July. We’re raised on a belief that everything we do is good. I was born in Hiroshima. I was born in Nagasaki. And those were good things. Those weren’t crimes against humanity. That wasn’t terrorism. That’s what I was trying to do.

RUMPUS: But the thing is, the fireworks are fun.

AYERS: My point is to paint this American pastoral, and in the American pastoral there are bombs. I’m setting up the fact that this guy becomes known as a mad bomber. But I’m saying it was part of my childhood – the sense that Americans are always good. Even our national anthem – the bombs bursting in air – that’s supposed to be good. And I’m clearly putting that whole scene in there as irony.

RUMPUS: To me that scene is much more complicated than just irony. There’s also the sweet relationship with your grandfather. There’s something real and human in it, too.

AYERS: But that’s what I’m saying. Isn’t it ironic? The idea that you have this national holiday based on explosions is fairly bizarre, given the history of this country.

Our conceit is that we’re a peace-loving country, our reality is – a lot has been made of the fact that I had that photograph made of me standing on the American flag. It’s been all over the right wing blogs. And I’ve been asked about it several times. My response is that the American flag is not one thing. You and I would like to believe that it stands for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, and that’s a nice thing. You want to believe it. I want to believe it. But if you’re a peasant in rural Vietnam or a peasant in Iraq – or you’re in Gaza – and you see these phosphorous bombs coming towards you, made in America, branded with an American flag, the American flag means something quite different.

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there’s more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we’re doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

RUMPUS: Is that your prediction for the future?

AYERS: I’m an optimist in my heart – I’m a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother – but a pessimist in my head. I think that’s the dialectic we all need to be in. We don’t know what the future is, so it’s silly to be an optimist naively or a pessimist cynically. We don’t know, so we should all get the fuck busy.

**

See also: Mortals, Norman Rush’s Novel for Adults

See also: Bad Mommy Blog

See also: The Rumpus Interview with Malcolm Gladwell

Related Posts:

• The Pleasure (and Privilege) of Indignation
• The Last City I Loved: Washington D.C.
• The Week in Greed #16: How to Take a Salesman to the Woodshed
• Because He Makes The World Safer
• A Matter of Dignity

Glen Duncan’s new novel, A Day and a Night and a Day, is an intense and involving story of a man pressed violently against his own limitations.It’s a brilliant book – in terms of voice, structure, and current relevance – and it proves once again why Duncan is so highly regarded in his native Great Britain. This novel should make us Americans take note.

I didn’t come to this novel thinking I was going to like it. It’s about torture, and not just any torture but “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of outsourcing our dirtiest work so we can keep the old-school, electrodes-clipped-to-the-private-parts variety of interrogation off the books. (Can the resemblance to Enron’s accounting practices be coincidental?) Plus, the novel is about Americans torturing other Americans – but Duncan is a Brit, making me fear I was in for a lot of finger wagging, however deserved it may be.

Within the first five pages you know Duncan’s project is not admonitory. He’s much too smart for easy moralizing, and though it will probably hurt his chances for the Nobel Prize, he doesn’t come down on one side of any argument. Instead, he writes a novel. In it he portrays with accuracy and engagement both the tortured and the torturer. Augustus Rose is our main character, and we get to know him with biographical depth. He grew up a mixed-race child in 1950s New York, with the attendant benefits and humiliations; by the late 60s he’s a war protester, student, and inappropriate boyfriend of a WASPy young woman. This passion, more than anything during the day and the night and the day that Augustus is tortured, is what returns to him. It’s a compelling story on its own.

Rose’s torturer, a man named Harper, is a wonderful villain, a psychopath-as-dorm-room-philosopher. Here’s Harper during the interrogation:

“This stuff you can’t even have the conversation. Morality, meaning, truth, the terms are embarrassments. They’re like bloated old aunts who should shuffle off and die. The prerequisite for intellectuals now is the acknowledgement of the absurdity of the intellectual life. Philosophy is to politics what boxing is to total war.”

Dostoevsky is Duncan’s predecessor here – Harper is a kind of unrepentant Raskolnikov, full of the monstrous logic of young men. He’s a full bore existentialist, and not the good kind.

For all of Harper’s Nietzschean tropes, the interrogation has deep shades of theology. For Rose, who was raised Catholic, torture is kind of purgatory, and Harper is the dark angel in charge of scouring Rose’s life, uncovering his sins, and burning them away. Though the book makes comments to the contrary, torture is framed here as purification. A purification with no purpose, maybe, but a purification nonetheless.

This is the unsettling side of A Day and a Night and a Day: it somehow suggests something attractive about torture. Not the pain, but the idea of being called to account for one’s life. Can you imagine anyone – any god, any soulless government spook – breaking your bones, maiming you, for the secrets inside you? I can’t. And at the end of this book, this ordinariness felt strangely like a loss.

However topical it might seem, the novel isn’t about extraordinary rendition, per se. You won’t find insights into the nuts and bolts of smuggling suspects off to sites where human rights are, shall we say, a deregulated market. These details are sacrificed in favor of something more universal – and it’s hardly a trade-off. A Day and a Night and a Day is a beautiful novel about power, pain, and abuse in a world beyond good and evil. Sadly, nothing could be more relevant.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Review of Zero Dark Thirty
• Guantánamo Diary
• The Moon Rises
• Tortured Confessions: The Rumpus Interview with Justine Sharrock
• Politics Sunday

Steven Soderbergh is in San Francisco, promoting the general release of his new four-hour epic, “Che,” starring Benicio Del Toro. When asked how the promotional tour was going, Soderbergh complained that he’d already done about 150 interviews, but he’s glad he’s getting to talk about Che Guevara.

“It helps anytime you can get into politics,” he says. “Anytime you’ve got something that can take you into the political realm then you’ve opened up the conversation a lot. You don’t get as many of the, you know, ‘What’s Brad like?’”

There are two of us interviewing Soderbergh, but we have condensed ourselves into a single non-fiction character, The Rumpus. In this interview Stephen Elliott and Scott Hutchins become one person, the collective “I”.

The Rumpus: I love so many of your movies, but they seem very different. I can’t connect “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” to “Out of Sight” to “Traffic.” And I can’t connect “Traffic” to “Che” at all. Am I missing something there?

Soderbergh: The good news is that I don’t have to know if there’s a link. Wells had a great quote once where some critic asked him a similar question. He said, “I’m the bird, and you’re the ornithologist.” I don’t really sit down and think on a macro level how or if these things are connected. They obviously are in the sense that I wanted to make them. And so there must be something in them that I’m drawn to.

There’s probably a commonality in protagonists who feel through sheer will they can make things turn out the way they want them to turn out, and Che’s the most extreme example of that. But in that regard he’s not that much different than Jack Foley in “Out of Sight.” Or Graham Dalton in “Sex, Lies.”

Rumpus: When people talk about your movies they often talk about the two different Soderberghs. There’s the Soderbergh who does the big projects, and there’s the Soderbergh who does the smaller movies. Do you see your films in that way?

Soderbergh: That’s a delineation that only somebody who doesn’t make movies would make. They’re all for me. I’m not going to spend two years of my life on something that I’m not excited about. And they both have their pleasures. But the process is remarkably similar when it comes down to it. When you’re trying to shoot a scene, the problems are almost identical. It’s just you have more people standing around.

Some filmmakers, you know, have their style and then they kind of go looking for the movie. I’m not like that. I don’t have one style that I want to take from movie to movie. I think that may be a result of an eclectic upbringing. My father, who was the one who really got me hooked on movies, liked all kinds of films, and I saw all kinds of films at a very young age. So especially when you’re starting to make films, and you’re seeing everything from studio movies to “Last Year at Marienbad,” at a time when things really imprint in a way that’s unique – I’m talking about from around 13 to 17 – [it has an effect]. I was lucky that I was getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of films during that period, and I was liking them all. So it seemed logical to me that you could – as in the style of the studio directors of the 30s and 40s – jump from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction.

Rumpus: Though I do see a common thread in your projects, which is a real interest in story. Even your smaller projects have a strong story to them.

Soderbergh: I’m probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It’s rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story. “A meteor hits planet Earth” – that’s a story idea but that doesn’t give me any indication of what the character is. Whereas “Out of Sight,” is about a guy who puts himself at risk because he becomes obsessed with the woman who’s trying to put him in jail. That’s an idea that’s about his character, as opposed to the larger issue of how bank robbers operate.

I tend to be drawn more to people than pure story ideas. So you find the character and then you have to deal with another issue, which are the forms you have available. Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there’s nothing that Godard hasn’t already done. You can’t do a single thing that Godard hasn’t already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable.

Rumpus: What were your thoughts on the character of Che?

Soderbergh: I was interested in his will, just the strength that he displayed. It’s kind of unusual. Here’s someone who’s been exposed to things that really outraged him. His ability to turn that outrage into action and never waver is really unusual. I mean, we all get outraged by things and there are things that make us angry and maybe for a while we get angry enough to actually go do something about it. But we’re talking about a guy who for ten years, every day, got up and did something really difficult. And chose the hard way to do it. That’s not normal, especially in someone who’s an atheist. You see this kind of fervor all the time in people who pay tribute to a higher power, who say, “I’m inspired by a higher power,” “I’ve been called by a higher power,” and that’s where they draw their sustenance. He’s the opposite. He believed that everything that’s going on is happening here. And what fascinated me was that he kept his dedication without ever calling on something bigger than him for strength. The reason I was drawn to the jungle part of his life is because it’s the purest expression of that strength.

Rumpus: The Bolivian part.

Soderbergh: Cuba and Bolivia. Just being out there in the middle of nowhere with the gun. In looking at his lifeline, I couldn’t help but notice that he kept going back to the jungle. I thought, then obviously there’s something there that compels him. When we got out to shoot the thing, I got a better sense of what it was. There’s a real simplicity and a purity to being out there doing one thing, where you have one goal. I can see why he felt he was the best version of himself in the wild.

Rumpus: What was the original thing that brought you to Che? Of course, you’d heard of him, but was there a moment when you thought, “I’ve got to do a movie about this guy?”

Soderbergh: No. Laura and Benicio [Laura Bickford and Benicio Del Toro, the film’s producers] brought the project to me.

Rumpus: So you never owned a Che shirt?

Soderbergh: (laughs) No. I couldn’t have been less knowledgeable when they brought this up.

Rumpus: But he’s such a political symbol. What were your motivations? What were you thinking about when you decided to make this movie?

Soderbergh: I was just thinking about what I always think about: what do I want to see? What would I want to see if I went to see a movie called “Che”? In this case, a lot of people have a very personal idea towards him, and the film isn’t very concerned with that. (laughs) It’s not a movie about feelings. And a lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it’s really not about that. Or rather it’s about feelings in the abstract. It’s about his feelings regarding building a better society. And it’s about his feelings regarding the removal of exploitation as a profit-making method. But on a one-on-one level, he’s not a very emotive person. That’s what I got from all the research we did. And my refusal to sort of manufacture an emotion or a sense of drama that wasn’t there is annoying to some people.

Rumpus: Is there political pushback? Are you getting grief?

Soderbergh: Oh, sure, sure. The Q&A in New York when the movie opened was pretty interesting. A lot of people screaming and yelling.

Rumpus: What are they screaming?

Soderbergh: They screamed what they scream in the movie. “Murderer.” “Assassin.”

Rumpus: They were anti-Che?

Soderbergh: Oh yeah. The people that like Che tend to come away saying, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” The people that are anti-Che just see it as a commercial for him. Some of them can’t really get beyond the idea of a Che movie. For them, by definition if you make a movie of him you’re supporting him. It’s impossible for them to understand that’s not how art works. That that’s not how an artist works. I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn’t mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK. They [the anti-Che critics] see the movie, and there’s no amount of accumulated barbarity that will satisfy them. For them, he is defined by the events at La Cabaña right after the revolution. That is him, for them. My whole thing is, yeah, that’s part of him. But I don’t define him by that. That seems to me to be consistent, actually, with the rest of him. If you saw the film and then you went and, say, researched him on the Internet, would you be shocked by La Cabaña? Would you say, “Wow, that doesn’t seem like the same guy?” I don’t think so. This is a guy that felt, “Yeah, you gotta kill people. This is a revolution. That’s what happens. I could get killed.”

Rumpus: And he does, at the end of the second movie.

Soderbergh: That’s my other response when they get really upset. I say, “Well, didn’t you like the last thirty minutes of Part Two? That should be like snuff porn to you.” At least this is a guy who really walked the walk. He didn’t have to go to Bolivia.

Rumpus: It didn’t seem he was even wanted there.

Soderbergh: No, he wasn’t. And the story of the Congo, which we couldn’t get into, was similar. Kind of a dry run for Bolivia. But, again, people didn’t want him there. He didn’t get on with the local revolutionaries. The indigenous African rebels didn’t get on with the Cubans. It’s a fascinating story and I would have liked to do it, but we just didn’t have time.

Rumpus: Getting off topic a bit…you talked about your teenage years, and about being imprinted by them. You spent your teenage years in Baton Rouge, where your dad worked at LSU. I was wondering if you saw yourself in any way as a Southerner?

Soderbergh: Well, I grew up mostly in the South, and there’s definitely something about the South that’s different from the North. When people ask me where I’m from, I say Louisiana. I spent more years there than anywhere else. I have a friend whose theory is that you’re from wherever you went to high school. I think that’s mostly true. There’s definitely a way of thinking and a way of being in the South that has its advantages and disadvantages.

Rumpus: I was definitely struck in “Schizopolis” with the Southerness of the main character’s romantic interests. [In “Schizopolis,” Soderbergh plays both the main character and his doppelganger.] There’s a kind of free-floating Southerness in the accents.

Soderbergh: Absolutely. My first wife was from the South. She talks that way. If you get a couple of drinks in me, you can hear that I spent a lot of time in the South. And there’s a great story telling tradition in the South. A great oral story-telling tradition that I think is interesting.

Rumpus: Back to “Che.” One of the things I wondered about was how charismatic Castro is in the movie. And I wondered, is Che really just a good second in command? Is he just Trotsky to Castro’s Lenin?

Soderbergh: Oh, absolutely. I mean, that’s what Bolivia [Part Two of the movie] is about. I mean, we don’t know what Che believed, but there are two possibilities. Either Che didn’t understand that [dynamic], or he thought that he was that.

Rumpus: The Castro figure.

Soderbergh: Yes. And neither necessarily paints him in a positive light. If you’re not smart enough to know what Fidel meant during the Cuban revolution, that – when they were on the Granma [the leaky boat they took to Cuba, a famous moment of the Cuban Revolution and a key scene in the movie] – Fidel was already a rock star in Cuba, and how important that was to the indigenous population, then you’re not paying attention. And if you think that because you’re Che, when you go into Bolivia, when people find out it’s you, that they’re going to have the same kind of reaction that the Cubans had to Castro, then you’re high.

It really is an aspect of his belief system that you have to wonder about. How could you not understand that without a Fidel you’re going to have a problem here?

Rumpus: Castro, for me, more than any other character in the movie, was really bright and shiny and alive.

Soderbergh: Castro, without question, is one of the smartest politicians that’s ever walked. This guy is really, really, really smart. It has nothing to do with whether you agree with him. I’m just saying that this guy is really smart.

You can see all the seeds of it in Part One. Like how he sees the macro of all of it. And how everyone he encounters is kind of being weighed by him. That just how he thinks. He’s the best at sort of pinpointing who will be a great resource.

I mean that’s what you do as a director.

Rumpus: Wait – are you saying you see yourself in Castro? Is Castro the Soderbergh in the film?

Soderbergh: I’m just saying I didn’t judge that way of thinking, because I felt like that’s exactly what I do. I meet someone and I think, “Now, how can I use this person?” Then I suck them dry and throw them away.

Rumpus: You also bring out the best in them…

Soderbergh: Fidel would say the same.

Rumpus: … I think of Jennifer Lopez and Julia Roberts as two examples. My favorite performances by those two actors come in your films. And George Clooney is a different actor before he meets you and after, I think.

Soderbergh: Your job is to create a situation in which the best that they have is allowed to come out. I’m not getting anything out of them that isn’t there. I’m not one of these I’m going to reach down their throats and pull the performance out. I hate that shit.

Rumpus: When you cast a star do you think that’s the best person for the role, or is it because you want to have a star in your movie?

Soderbergh: I’m not a snob. If I feel like there’s a star that’s the best person for that role, then that’s who I get. And sometimes I might feel like [a movie] is kind of a weird idea and if I’m going to get enough money to execute it properly I’ve got to get somebody in it that is going to justify the expense. But I think there are only two times that I’ve ever ended up paying somebody their quote. Like what they actually were worth in the marketplace. In all the other movies I’ve made – including all the Ocean’s films – everybody worked for way under what they normally get, in order to make the film. If they all got paid normally, you couldn’t make the movie.

Rumpus: It’d cost a billion dollars.

Soderbergh: Yeah. And I’m a big believer that if there’s something you really want to do, don’t walk away because of the deal. I see it happen a lot. I see people walk away from things because they didn’t get the deal they wanted.

Rumpus: What does that mean exactly?

Soderbergh: If I’m a director and I read a script and I say yeah I really want to do this, I would never walk away because the deal wasn’t very good – that I wasn’t getting paid very much or that the chances that I would see anything on the back end were remote because of the financial waterfall and the way it’s structured. I would never use that as a reason not to do something. A lot of people do. I think that’s always a mistake.

I mean, the Che deal is the worst deal a director had ever made in the history of motion pictures. I guarantee it. It’s awful. I mean, I’ve got so much of my own money in the project, and the way I’m being paid…it’s hard to explain how far I am from any money that’s coming in. But what, am I not going to make the movie? Who cares? And, you know, if I direct a movie for scale, like on “The Girlfriend Experience” – the movie I just finished shooting – that’s more than my dad ever made in a year. Ever.

Rumpus: Can you tell Sasha Grey (the star of The Girlfriend Experience) to do an interview with us? Because we’ve really been trying to get her to do an interview.

Soderbergh: Don’t worry. When the movie comes out you have an interview. [The Rumpus says: You heard it here, Sasha.] She’ll be talking to you. She’s great in the movie. She’s going to surprise people. We just screened a version of it for some friends. I had like 30 people come, and they were really surprised by her.

Rumpus: To wrap up…when you won the Oscar you dedicated your speech to artists, to all the people who create, which I found really inspiring at the time. But I read in a recent interview where you said that if a movie can’t stop the stoning of that thirteen-year-old rape victim in Somalia, what good is it? Are you not feeling positive about the power of movies?

Soderbergh: No.

Rumpus: Has your faith in art been shaken? What about your movies, your life as a filmmaker?

Soderbergh: Well, I feel I’m closer to the end of it than I am to the beginning of it, in terms of my career. But yeah I still have that question. Or rather I feel I need to really think about whether there’s a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don’t think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.

Rumpus: We just saw “Waltz with Bashir” last week, which is a movie that I think – it’s not necessarily going to change the world – but a lot of people are learning a lot of new stuff because he found a new way to get them the information. I mean, don’t you feel that way?

Soderbergh: No. Because it doesn’t go deep enough.

Rumpus: That particular movie, or movies in general?

Soderbergh: Any discussion about the Middle East that doesn’t start with whether monotheism is a good thing or a bad thing is an irrelevant discussion. This is all based on the fact that some people think that a certain piece of land that was host to some events two thousand years ago has magic meaning. I don’t believe that. I think dirt is dirt. Why people are still fixated on this idea of having this particular piece of dirt – I don’t understand it. That dirt isn’t worth one life to me. So you can sit and talk about who had what when and that, but it goes back to a deeper question of our need to create a narrative with this force that is acting upon us. Until we address whether that’s smart or dumb nothing’s going to get solved.

Rumpus: You’re talking about both sides of the conflict.

Soderbergh: Yeah.

Rumpus: But you don’t feel you can do that with your films? You don’t feel you can address those feelings?

Soderbergh: I think we’re hardwired, unfortunately, to keep making the same mistakes over and over. More and more elaborate versions of the same mistakes.

Rumpus: But does that make your films irrelevant?

Soderbergh: Yeah.

Rumpus: You don’t think you could make a relevant film within that context?

Soderbergh: I don’t think so. (Thinks.) It would be a miracle.

**

See Also: The Rumpus Long Interview with Tamim Ansary

See Also: Fade To Orange, Michelle Orange’s Film Link Happening

See Also: Ryan Boudinot’s The Eyeball

Related Posts:

• The Girlfriend Experience: Interviews and a Set Diary
• Che Debates Rage On