Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: People who know me well know that I keep a
Speaker 1: folder of writing that has changed my life in some way.
Speaker 1: Among these personal gospels is Eisenhower's farewell address Vacillation by Yates,
Speaker 1: and essay called American Weimar by novelist Steve Ericsson. Reading
Speaker 1: it for the first time twenty one years ago was
Speaker 1: a bolt of lucid fear, fear for this country and
Speaker 1: fear for the values at its foundation. The piece is
Speaker 1: an indictment not of America but of modern Americans, people
Speaker 1: in denial of our past, still exhausted and divided by Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and too angry at each other to harness any goodwill.
Speaker 1: America wearies of democracy, it begins, and the result is
Speaker 1: a hysteria of which we're barely conscious, a hysteria in
Speaker 1: which democracy appears as a spectacle of impotence and corruption.
Speaker 1: Since writing these words, Ericsson has become one of America's
Speaker 1: foremost novelists. He's got ten books, countless awards, and a
Speaker 1: Guggenheim Fellowship to prove it. But in all I knew
Speaker 1: was that someone had finally put his finger on what
Speaker 1: felt sick about this country. The nation gets meaner and
Speaker 1: more petty, he writes, until rage is the only national
Speaker 1: passion left. Twenty one years later, the national sickness Steve
Speaker 1: Erickson diagnosed has only progressed. The rage has evolved beyond
Speaker 1: what I even anticipated. Then. I've become more aware over
Speaker 1: the years that have passed of this profound division in
Speaker 1: the country that I realized now has always been there. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, if people ask how did we get to
Speaker 1: where we are now, my answer would be, We've actually
Speaker 1: always been here. We've always been these twin Americas, the
Speaker 1: one that made a promise and the one that broke
Speaker 1: the promise the moment it was made. And we've never
Speaker 1: we've never really reconciled the two. And I think it's
Speaker 1: going to be difficult to reconcile the two. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that the America that elected the first African American
Speaker 1: president can be reconciled with an America that voted for
Speaker 1: the first president and modern memory to be openly endorsed
Speaker 1: by the ku Klux Klan. You reference something here. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read this um as one historical phenomenon after another
Speaker 1: from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, to the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: to Watergate, to O. J. Simpson hurtling down the L
Speaker 1: A Freeways is offered as a moment when the country
Speaker 1: lost its innocence. We have not grown up enough to
Speaker 1: accept that America has never been innocent at all. That's
Speaker 1: such an idealist, romantic country was created out of such
Speaker 1: profound transgressions. Is a more complicated paradox than we can entertain. Now.
Speaker 1: I want you to articulate for our when they can
Speaker 1: read other things for written by you. You know what
Speaker 1: happened to us in the wake of Vietnam, You know,
Speaker 1: I think we we had to reconcile ourselves with what
Speaker 1: could not be reconciled with, which was fifty thousand Americans,
Speaker 1: not to mention the countless hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese,
Speaker 1: of Vietnamese who died for what exactly I mean, we
Speaker 1: we don't have an answer to that, and nobody believed
Speaker 1: anymore at that point that national interests that right, the
Speaker 1: collapse of Southeast Asia will somehow to us meant meant
Speaker 1: anything to the national interests, in the same way that
Speaker 1: a hundred years later, we still don't know what World
Speaker 1: War one was really about you were old enough to
Speaker 1: go to Vietnam? Did you go? No? I um was
Speaker 1: in Nixon's lottery, which matched you up with your birthday,
Speaker 1: and you've got a number, and if your number was
Speaker 1: below two hundred, you were probably gonna go. I got
Speaker 1: number three. Your life was hanging in the balance depending
Speaker 1: on this random chance of this lottery. And I think
Speaker 1: that when that can't be reconciled a national people have
Speaker 1: to create some psychic rationalization for it. It's it's because
Speaker 1: the meaninglessness is too overwhelming to live with someone like
Speaker 1: Cruise who say that Vietnam wasn't the problem, the countercultural
Speaker 1: reaction to it and the lawlessness of what happened to it,
Speaker 1: nothing infuriates me more than that. You can take the
Speaker 1: excesses of the drugs, the silliness, the ephemera of the
Speaker 1: represent tations of the countercultural movement in our society and
Speaker 1: stripped those away and say this was when people cared.
Speaker 1: And people who belittle and blame the countercultural protests of
Speaker 1: that period. I don't know why it is that nothing
Speaker 1: infuriates me more than that when I read that, well,
Speaker 1: because they're blaming the wrong thing. But I will make
Speaker 1: this distinction. The first time somebody burned an American flag,
Speaker 1: I think we lost the next fifty years. There were
Speaker 1: bad tactics in the service of good causes that the
Speaker 1: right was then able to But to go back even further,
Speaker 1: you know, talking about what we've choked down and the
Speaker 1: loss of American innocence. A hundred and fifty years after
Speaker 1: the fact, there are still millions of white people who
Speaker 1: will not admit the Civil War was about slavery. That
Speaker 1: is the American version of Holocaust denial. It keeps us
Speaker 1: from becoming what we want to become. It's a lack
Speaker 1: of a knowledgement that keeps us from fulfilling the American idea.
Speaker 1: I think Americans, whether they're trying to rationalize the meaninglessness
Speaker 1: of Vietnam or two and fifty years of slavery, it
Speaker 1: maybe in the American DNA too, always think that everything
Speaker 1: is year zero. It might be in the American DNA
Speaker 1: to have cut ourselves loose from history and therefore not
Speaker 1: ever have to answer for it or to it. Trump
Speaker 1: is not something that happened to America. America happened to America,
Speaker 1: and Trump is the result of that. Trump is um
Speaker 1: was born out of claims, in the face of all evidence,
Speaker 1: that the first African American president was not a real
Speaker 1: American and not a real president, to which the Republican
Speaker 1: Party at the time said almost nothing. And the Republican
Speaker 1: Party deserved what it got. Unfortunately we got it too.
Speaker 1: What is your political process and what's your political rearing
Speaker 1: with your parents when you were young group in southern California,
Speaker 1: your whole life, that's correct, And um, I was raised
Speaker 1: a conservative Republican by my my parents who were you know,
Speaker 1: my were artists, who were artists and who had started
Speaker 1: out when they were very young as FDR Democrats. But
Speaker 1: like a lot of people at that point, we're starting
Speaker 1: to drift right. Word well, I think that Cold War
Speaker 1: Cold War um, and then later on in the sixties
Speaker 1: reaction to the counterculture um, which I you know, I
Speaker 1: think has has defined our politics over half a century
Speaker 1: more than we know. I think a lot of the reason,
Speaker 1: for instance, that working class people are persuaded to not
Speaker 1: vote their economic interest is because of these values that
Speaker 1: came out of this county linked between the culture or
Speaker 1: the mainstream and the states exactly. And and so you know,
Speaker 1: I I was raised a m a Republican conservative, And
Speaker 1: to make a long story short, and number of things happened.
Speaker 1: First of all, by the time I came of age,
Speaker 1: or was seventeen or eighteen, I realized that on the
Speaker 1: great domestic crucible of the day, which was civil rights
Speaker 1: and racial justice, conservatives were on the wrong side morally
Speaker 1: and historically. Um That in turn undercut a basic tenet
Speaker 1: of conservatism, which says that the more that power devolves
Speaker 1: away from the federal government, down to the state, down
Speaker 1: to the locality, the greater individual freedom grows. The problem
Speaker 1: with that is that is contradicted by history. On any
Speaker 1: number of occasions, it's taken the federal government intervening against
Speaker 1: the states to secure the a vidual freedoms of African Americans, women,
Speaker 1: gay people, and and then as my um ideas about
Speaker 1: the role of government in life changed, as I accepted
Speaker 1: that sometimes it takes the federal government to preserve the
Speaker 1: social contract, uh conservatism changed. It became when I was
Speaker 1: identifying as a conservative as a teenager, it was closer
Speaker 1: to what we now think of as libertarianism, and in
Speaker 1: the late seventies and early eighties it starts to become
Speaker 1: On the one hand, more corporate and on the other hand,
Speaker 1: more theocratic. And it felt like, you know that that
Speaker 1: for all the lips service that conservatives give individual freedom,
Speaker 1: what they really cared about was order. And the only
Speaker 1: individual freedoms that I've ever heard conservatives get exercised about
Speaker 1: where the freedom to make a profit and the freedom
Speaker 1: to own a gun. And so generally my polity picks shifted,
Speaker 1: while I think arguably the center of gravity shifted, because
Speaker 1: if you go back and look at, for instance, Barry
Speaker 1: Goldwaters views. Now, I mean, Goldwater was an environmentalist, he
Speaker 1: was pro gay rights, he was pro choice, he was
Speaker 1: he supported the Voting Rights Act. Goldwater rightly identified as
Speaker 1: the most extreme nominee of a party in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Is well, I mean, his vote against the sixty four
Speaker 1: Civil Rights Act was a bad vote. Nonetheless, I think
Speaker 1: that his views, which were so extreme in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: are now significantly to the left of the current Republican Party.
Speaker 1: So I shifted one way, the center of our country's
Speaker 1: political gravity shifted another way, and that's why I wound
Speaker 1: up where I'm wound up to me. At the same time, philosophically,
Speaker 1: it's been this fiction between capitalism and democracy, right, like
Speaker 1: how much we're on a boat and which which containers
Speaker 1: to be throw over the side of the boat to
Speaker 1: keep the boat from from capsizing. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: the last ten to twenty years have just have just
Speaker 1: confirmed that or or validated unfettered capitalism nearly drove this
Speaker 1: country over a cliff ten years. And you know, I
Speaker 1: think that there's a lot to the argument, the current
Speaker 1: argument that we're pretty close to an oligarchy at this
Speaker 1: point where we're there. It's very demoralizing, it's very depressing.
Speaker 1: Fifty years ago you could use the word capitalism and
Speaker 1: the expression free enterprise in the same sentence. Now it's
Speaker 1: laughable to to think that capitalism is free enterprise. And
Speaker 1: the conservatives, who, um, you know, who are distressed by
Speaker 1: centralized state power, never seemed to feel the same distress
Speaker 1: over centralized corporate power. What was writing in your life?
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not just saying that you were such
Speaker 1: an amazing writer and you've been reviewed with some of
Speaker 1: the most I mean just glowing. I mean that's a cliche.
Speaker 1: And what was the writing process for you as a
Speaker 1: child and when when did you realize this is what
Speaker 1: I would do? I realized that pretty early. I was
Speaker 1: when I was young, let's say five years old, I
Speaker 1: stuttered very badly, and to the point the teachers I
Speaker 1: thought I couldn't read. And this is actually fairly typical
Speaker 1: of writers. You know, you have a verbal facility, but
Speaker 1: it's being obstructed, shuttered, shuttered in your speech, so you
Speaker 1: retreat inside your head. Uh, the verbal facility manifests itself
Speaker 1: in written words. You're living inside your imagination. It doesn't
Speaker 1: make you more sociable. But um, I the time I
Speaker 1: got to college, I liked college a lot. I went
Speaker 1: to u C. L A. And I was why and
Speaker 1: why so for someone who's open minded, is you? Is
Speaker 1: why so California centric? Was there any thoughts of you,
Speaker 1: I want to go to Berlin, I want to go
Speaker 1: to London. I want to go Yes, but but it
Speaker 1: was far enough and it was and I remember a
Speaker 1: sense of liberation the time where you wining the valley
Speaker 1: again Granada Hill. So for those who don't know Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: he's he's right. The gap between Granada Hills and Westwood
Speaker 1: Westwood really is like Paris. It was absolutely it was
Speaker 1: another world, you know, And I thought Westwood was the
Speaker 1: big city, you know it was, and uh and and
Speaker 1: after that, I um, I actually did go to europe
Speaker 1: Um and I lived there often over a while. So
Speaker 1: U c l A was that step away. Steve Ericson
Speaker 1: is one of our leading thinkers on the legacy of
Speaker 1: the Sick Days and seventies, But a few people had
Speaker 1: more of an impact on how Americans saw that era
Speaker 1: in real time than Dan Rather. When President Nixon was
Speaker 1: elected in Night, I'm frankly vought at the time, here's
Speaker 1: a new breath of air. But I quickly learned that
Speaker 1: the Unixon people, including President Nixon, they had such a
Speaker 1: deep and abiding hatred for the Prince. It revealed to
Speaker 1: me the first time we have a problem here an
Speaker 1: important reminder that America has come through this before. Rather
Speaker 1: his new book What Unites Us answers Ericson's question, can
Speaker 1: the many Americas be reconciled with a resounding yes. Here
Speaker 1: my whole conversation with Dan Rather at Here's the Thing,
Speaker 1: Dot Org, this is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening
Speaker 1: to Here's the Thing. Steve Ericsson's most recent book is
Speaker 1: Shadow Bad, a funny, heartbreaking road trip through our divided country.
Speaker 1: The writing is intensely visual, which reflects Ericson's own alternate
Speaker 1: life path. I majored in film. Well, I started out
Speaker 1: a political science major UM, and I was taking a
Speaker 1: lot of literature courses, and I wanted to take some
Speaker 1: film courses. But the bureaucracy at the time and may
Speaker 1: still be the case, was such that, UM, I could
Speaker 1: still take the political courses and the literature courses if
Speaker 1: I was a film major, but I couldn't take the
Speaker 1: film courses if I was a policy major. So it
Speaker 1: was a completely tactical choice, you know. Um it was
Speaker 1: a way of since since I knew I wanted to
Speaker 1: be a writer, and since what I majored and really
Speaker 1: didn't matter much to me, it was a matter it
Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't matter what you're majoring, right, because I was
Speaker 1: going to go off and do what I was gonna do.
Speaker 1: And so I made the strategic choice that allowed me
Speaker 1: to do all the things. Was film school, top film school.
Speaker 1: It was great, But you didn't pursue that. I didn't
Speaker 1: pursue being a filmmaker. UM, could you have said, do
Speaker 1: you think you were capable? The guy, the stuttering boy
Speaker 1: from Granada Hills who goes inward with that was he
Speaker 1: was he able to express what he wanted to in
Speaker 1: film as well as as writing. I think you nailed
Speaker 1: it with the question. I mean I I realized at
Speaker 1: some point that I probably shouldn't make a choice. That
Speaker 1: both of these things would be really hard. It would
Speaker 1: be impossible to try to do both. And the thing
Speaker 1: that that you're right on about is that film, as
Speaker 1: you would know better than I, is a more collaborative
Speaker 1: highly so ever as being a writer, you lock yourself
Speaker 1: in a room and you have as little um interaction
Speaker 1: with humanity as you can get away with. And you
Speaker 1: know what that suited me? That that's who I was. Um,
Speaker 1: what's the first time you sold a piece and you
Speaker 1: became a professional writer? I sold a piece actually to
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles Times Calendar. The gist of it was
Speaker 1: that the line between reality and fiction was blurring. This
Speaker 1: was the early seventies. How does that work? Well, you
Speaker 1: know it works the way it still works, which is
Speaker 1: that I knew somebody who knew somebody and who could
Speaker 1: get the piece into the hands of the editor of
Speaker 1: what was then the l A Times Calendar and and
Speaker 1: and give it a real read. Because that's what it takes.
Speaker 1: I teach writing, and as I tell my students without
Speaker 1: trying to depress them unduly. You know, editors look for
Speaker 1: a reason to say no. They're not looking for a
Speaker 1: reason to say yes. So you have to be sure
Speaker 1: you don't give them any reasons to say Now, how
Speaker 1: do you do that? When I submit a novel, for instance,
Speaker 1: it's it's pristine, it's so clean you can eat off
Speaker 1: the thing, and um it, it's laid out to look
Speaker 1: the way the book is gonna look, so they can
Speaker 1: visualize how how it's gonna look, you know. And when
Speaker 1: I get papers from students where there are typos and
Speaker 1: that that kind of thing, I just explained to them
Speaker 1: you can't do that, I mean everything can you expect
Speaker 1: people to care if you don't care exactly? And every
Speaker 1: little flaw becomes cumulative, it builds up and it it
Speaker 1: reinforces this, uh, this impulse to turn the thing down.
Speaker 1: So you wrote this piece that did you have books
Speaker 1: you've written, you know, in your pocket. I was writing
Speaker 1: novels all the time. I was writing, since I had
Speaker 1: I was in high school. I mean, I wrote five
Speaker 1: levels before I published one. Your first book that's published
Speaker 1: as what the first book is published in ve That's
Speaker 1: twelve years after I had published the first piece. And
Speaker 1: if you had told me at that time it was
Speaker 1: going to be I'm glad there was nobody to tell
Speaker 1: me it was going to be another twelve years, because
Speaker 1: they they felt like twelve years in the wilderness. And
Speaker 1: by the time I sold the book, I remember the
Speaker 1: feeling was more relief than anything else, because it just
Speaker 1: seemed like it was it was never going to happen.
Speaker 1: And that is the same thing somebody who knows somebody.
Speaker 1: The thing that was instrumental was finding the right agent
Speaker 1: during that twelve years. How do you support yourself? You
Speaker 1: were doing the teaching thing then, were you know? I wasn't.
Speaker 1: I was what does the writer do? Those was right.
Speaker 1: I was working for the PR department of the Auto Club.
Speaker 1: I had a job. I had a job job. I
Speaker 1: was also writing freelance pieces for the l A Times,
Speaker 1: the l A Weekly, which just had just launched in
Speaker 1: the late seventies. The Los Angeles Reader was another so um.
Speaker 1: I was cobbling together a living. But it was always
Speaker 1: clear in my mind that, you know, success for me
Speaker 1: meant becoming a published novelist. And when you got the
Speaker 1: book published because you got a literary agent. And are
Speaker 1: you still with that literary Yes, you are, I am.
Speaker 1: And I had had several agents before her, none of
Speaker 1: them could sell my work. Um, I had gone to
Speaker 1: New York, uh to find an agent. I've interviewed with
Speaker 1: four agents. They had all read this, this novel what
Speaker 1: wound up being my first published novel. They all said,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a really interesting book, but I don't
Speaker 1: think I can sell it. And then I finally found
Speaker 1: somebody who said, I don't know if I and sell it,
Speaker 1: but it's a really interesting book. And she wound up
Speaker 1: selling it to somebody who had turned it down. What's
Speaker 1: her name? Melanie Jackson? Who she? What company is she with?
Speaker 1: Her own? Why have you stayed with her all this time?
Speaker 1: What does she do for you? So here's a quick
Speaker 1: story that revolves around that first novel and how the
Speaker 1: first novel sold. Um. She had submitted it to somebody
Speaker 1: as Simon, and she was who had turned it down,
Speaker 1: And a couple of months passed by and it's gone
Speaker 1: to some other people, and then one afternoon she gets
Speaker 1: a phone call from this editor as Simon, and she
Speaker 1: was through who had turned the book down, and the
Speaker 1: editor was bemoaning the fact that another book that she
Speaker 1: had turned down had gone on to be published and
Speaker 1: had gotten attention and was doing well, and she was thinking,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't have turned that down in my age, and said, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna feel the same way when somebody publishes
Speaker 1: Ericsson And the next day, the next day Simon and
Speaker 1: Schuster bought the book. That's what a good agent does.
Speaker 1: You're pretty tough on Bill Clinton, and some of your writing,
Speaker 1: it goes to you. On the simplest level, he let
Speaker 1: you down. Yeah. I wound up voting for him twice.
Speaker 1: I still believe that, um uh, he might have done
Speaker 1: the country a favor if he had resigned during Monica.
Speaker 1: It would have put Al Gore in, who probably would
Speaker 1: have won in two thousand. You know, once the issue
Speaker 1: became less about you know, he has a fair and
Speaker 1: became more about impeachment, I switched. I did not think
Speaker 1: what he had done was a constitutionally impeachable offense, and
Speaker 1: it was clear to me that that the Constitution was
Speaker 1: being molested by Republicans. Ken Starr has more conscience for
Speaker 1: what he did to this country. But you know, Bill
Speaker 1: Clinton sure helped them out keep giving them a target.
Speaker 1: As my friends said to me, he's he said to me,
Speaker 1: I had this horrible incident. I'll mention this because I
Speaker 1: throw my own thing on the table. I had this
Speaker 1: horrible incident where I left this blistering voicemail from my
Speaker 1: daughter that my then ex wife put on the internet.
Speaker 1: She released it to a tabloid organization that played it
Speaker 1: on the internet. And as my therapist said back then,
Speaker 1: he said, well, you know that was wrong, and that
Speaker 1: made things worse, and that was terrible. But none of
Speaker 1: this would have happened if you hadn't left the voicemail.
Speaker 1: None of this would have happened if he hadn't done
Speaker 1: what he did. In the time we have left, I
Speaker 1: want to talk to about your books. How does that
Speaker 1: process for? Again, for our six listeners who are writers
Speaker 1: out there? The must be a rabid reader. I used
Speaker 1: to be a rabid reader. I don't always have the
Speaker 1: time to read, and when I'm working on a novel,
Speaker 1: I don't read other fiction. I'll read history, or I
Speaker 1: may read poetry even but I don't I don't want
Speaker 1: to go into somebody else's world. Who are right? Was
Speaker 1: that you admire Pension, Marquez, Faulkner, Henry Miller, the Brontes, um.
Speaker 1: Those those were writers who influenced me in some way.
Speaker 1: Do you have a reading list you give to your
Speaker 1: students in the I do send it to me, Okay,
Speaker 1: I want that if I get one thing out of this.
Speaker 1: I mean they tend to, uh, they tend to form
Speaker 1: object lessons. So you know you want to if I
Speaker 1: want to, for instance, show the students how landscape can
Speaker 1: be a character in um in a story The Sheltering
Speaker 1: sky By by Paul Bulls, or how voice is can
Speaker 1: drive a narrative Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Um. But and
Speaker 1: so that that's the function of the The reading list
Speaker 1: tends to Are you still teaching now? And you teach
Speaker 1: at I teach that you see riverside, and you see riverside,
Speaker 1: and so that's uh, how far off a dry is
Speaker 1: that for you? From? Oh my god? I know? And
Speaker 1: you teach how the class meets how often once a week,
Speaker 1: once a week for three four hours, right? And if
Speaker 1: I have two classes that quarter, um, I'll put them
Speaker 1: both on the same day and I'll have one monster day.
Speaker 1: So just getting it out there, getting it out there
Speaker 1: and and then the class is entitled what well there are?
Speaker 1: I have the luxury of creating my own classes. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I'm teaching workshops, so we're critiquing the work of the students.
Speaker 1: This coming quarter, this would probably be interesting to you.
Speaker 1: I'm teaching UM a course of fiction into film. That is,
Speaker 1: I give them a list of novels and then we
Speaker 1: watch the adaptation that this coming quarter September, October November.
Speaker 1: This this airs said, I'm not going to be out here.
Speaker 1: I can con visit your class again. Come sit on
Speaker 1: it fast. They would be thrilled if you were just
Speaker 1: sitting in the room and listen to you talk. And
Speaker 1: so you do that, and you and how many years
Speaker 1: have you been at UC Riverside Now, I've been at
Speaker 1: u C Riverside now this is going into my fourth year.
Speaker 1: And why do you what do you what is that
Speaker 1: impulse in you to teach UM? Well, it pays my
Speaker 1: bill for starters. And I learned things about writing when
Speaker 1: I'm teaching things about writing, I learned. I do enjoy it,
Speaker 1: and I think I'm getting better at what's hard about it?
Speaker 1: For you? What do you wish you were better at?
Speaker 1: You know, the hardest thing about it is, uh, is
Speaker 1: negotiating the fact that you really can't teach it, that
Speaker 1: writing is not that talent is not a teachable thing.
Speaker 1: Skill is a teachable thing. Um, you know that. But
Speaker 1: but but talent or vision or even voice are are
Speaker 1: things that the students have to bring there. And and
Speaker 1: the other thing about workshops and writing programs in general,
Speaker 1: which I think are generally really valuable, but they do,
Speaker 1: by their nature, tend to socialize what is really anti
Speaker 1: social behavior. You know, you're sitting around with with with
Speaker 1: other people talking about your writing, and that's okay up
Speaker 1: to a point. There, there's also a point where you
Speaker 1: need to have the solitude to grapple with with your
Speaker 1: right that's right. Um, your most recent book is Shadow Bond.
Speaker 1: What to talk to me a little bit about how
Speaker 1: that came about? You know, I just one night I remember, Um,
Speaker 1: the family was gone. I was alone, and I this
Speaker 1: will sound more mystical than I mean, but I had
Speaker 1: this vision if I can use such a grand work
Speaker 1: of of the Twin Towers suddenly reappearing in the Dakota
Speaker 1: Badlands twenty years after their fall, and people start to
Speaker 1: gather and um, uh, they become like this American Stonehenge,
Speaker 1: and people then start hearing music coming out of the towers,
Speaker 1: and and living in the southern tower is Jesse Pressley,
Speaker 1: who was the real life stillborn twin of Elvis, and
Speaker 1: he's going mad hearing a voice in his head that
Speaker 1: sounds like him but he knows isn't his, and imagining
Speaker 1: an America where he survived in his brother's place. That's
Speaker 1: how I will write something, especially when I'm starting and
Speaker 1: it starts slow and it's intermittent and yes, and which
Speaker 1: which is not great. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: try to talk to the kids about is the more
Speaker 1: of a routine you can make it, the better. But um,
Speaker 1: if I can't make it a routine, I'll write it,
Speaker 1: I'll be excited about it, and then as time goes by,
Speaker 1: I start to worry it to death. But you know,
Speaker 1: one of those unteachable things, along with voice and talent
Speaker 1: that we were talking about is is instinct. And after
Speaker 1: you've been doing it a long time, you start to
Speaker 1: develop an an instinct for what's working or what's not working.
Speaker 1: Which isn't to say that after um, a year and
Speaker 1: a half, you're not so sure. You know, you you've
Speaker 1: been living with the material for that long, you've started
Speaker 1: to lose perspective. Um six publishers turned it down, as
Speaker 1: was the case with this novel, and moralize and you go,
Speaker 1: are they right? You know? UM? Am I wrong? Am
Speaker 1: I not seeing it? All those doubts. I don't think
Speaker 1: you ever stopped rappling with and where you're working on
Speaker 1: another book at the moment. I don't have an idea
Speaker 1: in my head. Writer Steve Erickson American Weimar, which we
Speaker 1: linked to and Here's the Thing dot org stands as
Speaker 1: one of the sharpest essays ever written on the country's
Speaker 1: past and present. The current political crisis has only made
Speaker 1: its warning more urgent. But here's something to cheer you up.
Speaker 1: Ericson's Hollywood farce Zeroville is returning to its spiritual home.
Speaker 1: James Franco picked up the rights. He and Seth Rogan
Speaker 1: star that's coming next year at a theater near you.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing four