{"id":156107,"date":"2021-11-23T17:39:33","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T22:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156107"},"modified":"2021-12-01T11:59:01","modified_gmt":"2021-12-01T16:59:01","slug":"the-paris-review-podcast-episode-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/11\/23\/the-paris-review-podcast-episode-23\/","title":{"rendered":"The Paris Review Podcast, Episode 23"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nEpisode 23, our Season 3 finale, opens with \u201cThe Trick Is to Pretend<\/a>,\u201d a poem by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, read by the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers: \u201cI climb knowing the only way down \/ is by falling.\u201d The actor Jessica Hecht plays Joan Didion in a reenactment of her classic Art of Fiction interview<\/a> with Linda Kuehl. Jericho Brown reads his poem \u201cHero<\/a>\u201d: \u201cmy brothers and I grew up fighting \/ Over our mother\u2019s mind.\u201d The actor, comedian, and podcaster Connor Ratliff reads Bud Smith\u2019s story \u201cViolets<\/a>,\u201d about a couple who makes a suicide pact but then turns to arson instead. The episode closes with Bridgers performing \u201cGarden Song.\u201d
\n
\nTo celebrate this last episode of the season, we asked Bud Smith if there’s a passage from a book that he returns to more than any other. He chose the first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Early on, the narrator describes the late-night, drunken phone calls he makes to old friends. He asks the operator to connect him to a long lost sweetheart, but the operator cannot find the right listing and the call never goes through. It\u2019s as if he has to settle for us instead.<\/p>\n

He has something very painful to talk about that he can\u2019t get to directly. He gives us all these diversions: limericks about Yon Yonson from Wisconsin, anecdotes about taxi drivers, an elevator fatality in Chicago. And there\u2019s that brief recounting of a journey with his young daughter, Nanny, and her friend, Allison Mitchell; they stop at the Hudson River and look at carp as big as \u201catomic submarines.\u201d The plot of the novel still hasn\u2019t started, we don\u2019t know the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, or his dilemma, that he has come unstuck in time. The first time I read the book, I didn\u2019t get that the narrator was showing us his search for a way to write about the atrocities of the Second World War, that he was adopting this casual, digressive style for his protection, and ours.<\/p>\n

What attracts me most is Vonnegut\u2019s willingness, as an artist, to let the air out of the tires of what he had good reason to believe would be his masterpiece. On page two, the narrator calls the novel his \u201clousy little book.\u201d Who is this guy? I thought. Why is he trashing his own book before I\u2019ve even read it? Is this an author\u2019s note I could have skipped? No, it says right here, it\u2019s Chapter One. \u201cI would hate to tell you,” he writes, “what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” These are my favorite twenty-something pages written in our language. The man, “an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown,” saying that he is a failure, and his greatest accomplishment is a failure.<\/p>\n

Vonnegut had to open his masterpiece with a bit of self-sabotage. I can understand that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Linda Kuehl’s 1978 Art of Fiction interview<\/a> with Joan Didion, also featured in this episode, begins as follows:<\/p>\n

\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.<\/p>\n

JOAN DIDION<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hostile in that you\u2019re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It\u2019s hostile to try to wrench around someone else\u2019s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else\u2019s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?<\/p>\n

DIDION<\/p>\n

Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I\u2019m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Listen now at theparisreview.org\/podcast<\/a>, or wherever you get your podcasts. All five episodes of Season 3<\/a> are now available for your listening pleasure. We hope you\u2019ll download all three seasons<\/a> before your holiday travels.<\/p>\n