Episode 1: The George Pour
November 27th, 2018
Hosted by Brian Birnbaum
Guests: George Sawaya & Devin Kelly
Produced by Katie Rainey
Transcripts by Jonathan Kay
In our inaugural episode of the Animal Riot podcast, we kick off our commitment to literature and fuckery by examining fiction through the lens of human history -- namely that of Yuval Noah Harari's excellent book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. We do so under the auspices of The George Pour: a pint glass of bourbon, splashed with a bit of soda, which we consume over the course of our loosely-themed yet always engaging conversation.
>> Brian: Hello everyone and welcome to The Animal Riot hour brought to you by Animal Riot, a literary press for books that matter. Today with me, I have Devin Kelly. Say something about yourself.
>> Devin: Hi.
>> Brian: Say something really interesting.
>> Devin: Uh... The Finback Whale is the world's second-largest whale, but the loudest mammal.
>> Brian: Okay, I would've gone with the last time we were drinking these drinks, you almost shit yourself.
>> Devin: I did almost shit myself.
>> Brian: But we'll move on. We'll move on. George, introduce yourself. George! Your, your, your face has fallen from our taping space, but... that's okay.
>> George: Yeah, I'm invisible, though. It makes me easier to talk to. There's an interesting fact, I'm easier to speak to when I can't be witnessed.
>>Brian: That's beautiful.
>>George: How about that?
>> Brian: No.
>> George: I think so.
>> Brian: Well, I'll introduce myself. I'm Brian and I co-founded Animal Riot with Katie and our friend John but really Devin is the bellwether for all this shit, aren't you, Devin? You came up with the name for the reading series.
>> Devin: I am. I am the bellwether.
>> Brian: Yes, so okay...
>> Devin: It's been years.
>> Brian: So you guys are writers. I'm a writer. That was the worst introduction I've ever heard in my life. That's okay. We'll continue. More importantly, we have this hour's brand of fuckery, which will continue on every single episode that we ever make. We'll do something stupid.
>> Devin: Yes.
>> Brian: And this one is the George -4 brought to you by George. George, can you tell us what a George -4 is? I... you know, I, I, I did write down some instructions and I went over them with George, but I'd be happy to let George actually just go ahead and talk about it.
>> George: Yeah. It's a simple principle, really. It's a concoction like most good things that is born out of hardship, as so many things in the south are. It's born out of hardship; you've got about $11 for a bottle of whiskey; usually Old Crow, preferably Jim Beam, if you're sitting flush, if it's payday.
>> Brian: Or the Dickel.
>>George: You get about... Or you could use Dickel as well. But it needs to be a bourbon and that's not a bourbon.
>>Brian: I did it. We got a bourbon. It's not what you want, but it's a bourbon.
>> George: It's not ideal. And then you need some kind of soda, usually a Diet Dr. Pepper, if you're watching your figure. They can be procured from any in-neighborhood gas stations, usually one or two should do it --the bottle, maybe three. You take a pint glass, you fill it up to the top, brimming with ice, brimming with the ice, all the way up, all the way up, you fill it about three quarters-- all ice. It has got to be all the way. It's chief that the ice must be all the way up.
>> Brian: I remember that.
>> George: Then you pour about three quarters, three quarters Bourbon, top it off with Dr. Pepper, stir and enjoy, imbibe until whatever you're escaping has been thoroughly evaded.
>> Devin: Or until something comes to escape you.
>> Brian: Yeah, Yeah.
>> George: This is true
>> Brian: This time we'll avoid any marijuana, which I think is what tipped Devin over the edge, all those years ago. [LAUGHTER]
>> George: But, unadvisable to mix.
>> Brian: I mean unless you're me. I like mixing, I will later. Later, I will mix. Anyway, so you gave us all the instructions, which is great. Thank you for relieving me of that duty. But the last, the last instruction.... The last directive is to consume the George- 4 which we will now do over the course of this podcast.
>> Devin: Yes.
>> Brian: Yes, okay, and then we will talk about something literary: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by: Yuval Noah Harari an Israel- lite, an Israelite, is that too biblical? He's from Israel.
>> Devin: Yes.
>> Brian: Basically George, George thinks Israel's hilarious. George, do you have anything to say about that? [LAUGHTER]
>> George: Not, not, not that I think would be fitting for this podcast. I think Israelite is hilarious. Israelites, the Canaanites-- Phoenician.
>> Brian: I'm a Sephardic.
>> George: I think it's a great suffix or group of people, and I wish that -ite was used as a suffix for all.
>> Brian: Brian-ites. Are we Brianites?
>> George: Yeah, you know, me... I'm a washing... I am a Washingtonian, but I wish I was washington-ite.
>> Brian: Yeah. That would be better.
>> George: Or New York-ite.
>> Brian: Okay, so anyways... this Israelite, this young Israel gentleman wrote a book basically about humans, but not just humans, Homo sapiens, in particular. So basically dating back about 70,000 years to the emergence of language, essentially, and you know, he goes on to talk about how language shaped our origin myths which control populations and set laws and ethics and created money and you know, all that motivation for economies and stuff like that.
But before he does any of that, he talks about how we evolved past all the other human species and animals in the world, because of the ability to tell fiction, or to lie, you know, whichever you prefer.
Being that we all have engaged in this practice...
>> Devin: Narrative.
>> Brian: Everyone in the world, narrative.
>> Devin: Oral history.
>> Brian: Everyone in this room has participated in writing fiction as a serious practice, which I would not recommend to anyone else, but we all, we all lie and stuff. And now-- but, you know, so we thought this is a good place to start.
We're all writers, we're starting a Press, and we're publishing my novel first, which is borderline cronyism maybe.
>> George: And not a lie. It's truly.
>> Brian: But anyway, so fiction is the basis of everything, that's what he says, yeah. I'm kind of paraphrasing. What do you have to say?
>> Devin: I was actually just talking about this in my role as a high school teacher and shaper of young minds. We were reading--George, have you read The Great Gatsby?
>> George: Oh yeah, totally.
>> Devin: There's a pause, there.
>> Brian: He's lying.
>> Devin: I better make this quick, because I don't want to want to take up most of the space here, which I inevitably won't. But we were ranking.... we did an exercise-- we just finished the book. We did an exercise ranking the main characters in The Great Gatsby from most honest to least honest.
>>Brian: Oooo.
>> Devin: And when we initially did it, all the students had ranked Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, as the most honest person, simply because he was the narrator.
>> Brian: Off the hip, I probably would have said the same.
>> Devin: And it was interesting to introduce the idea to them that Nick Carraway is: One, fictional and not F. Scott Fitzgerald, and because of that, could contain an element of unreliability as a narrator, and so, it's sort of, a fictional representation of the unreliability of narrative as a practice.
>> Brian: That's Meta
>> Devin: As a practice for, for, for conveying truth, and I, I did a quick little example with them, of like, any time you tell a story- I was talking to them- that you think is funny and no one laughs, the first thing you do- if you tell that story again, is what? What do you do?
>> Brian: I don't know. What? Change the punchline?
>> Devin: Yeah, you... well, you, you do some sort of embellishment. You embellish...
>> Brian: You do it better.
>> Devin: Yeah, you tell it better, which in essence means you have to incorporate some element of the lie.
>>George: Now, that's interesting, Devin, because you're talking like, like, so what you're saying is that there's almost like a snowball effect; that we get the reward of a laugh when we tell a story and that encourages, like, further hyperbole, further, fictionalizing. Like, the more outlandish it becomes, the more positive feedback we get.
>> Brian: Yeah, like a fish, like the fish. Every time you tell the fish story, your hands grow farther apart.
>> Devin: Oh yeah, the fish I caught. I thought the fish was some story we all read in Grad School.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Brian: No, remember that every time...
>> George: And then you tie that back to--
>> Brian: Go ahead, George.
>> George: Sorry, go ahead.
>> Brian: No. YOU go ahead.
>> George: I was just going to say that--[LAUGHTER] you tied that back to, to, to honesty. I was reading an article a while back about why humans, and this will tie back in to sapiens, as well, why humans are so piss poor at detecting lies; that we're just were not good at it, and that a human being has about a 54 percent chance, if I'm remembering correctly, of telling when there's a lie.
So a little better than a coin flip for being able to identify when you're being lied to, because we don't have a lot of practice, like, we don't get feedback when we're right, and we think somebody's lying.
A lot of times, they'll just deny it, and then when we're wrong and we're sure that it's lying, we can't be convinced. You know, so we're bad at lying because we're:
A. We're unpracticed at it and...
B. We don't get a lot of feedback, so even the best of us is marginally better than a coin toss, which... which is why we have so many fictions, and why fictions are so good for us, right?
We can't segregate fact from fiction quite as aptly as we think we can.
>> Devin: That's interesting. I like your point. I don't know if we're unpracticed at lying, so much as we're unpracticed at, at.... I'm trying to think about... because I think we're all good at lying because everyone's told...
>> Brian: I think in this day and age we're probably worse at lying than ever, I would think, because of all the tools that are, you know, out there to parse our lives and stuff like that, but I don't know.
I mean, relating back to fiction, I'll say the moment I realized I got to be a better writer was when I stopped trying to reveal truths and started just writing shit that I thought seemed real to me, which seems like a contradiction in terms, but it's not, it's... It turns it, turns it like, kind of like, a serious like, academic sort of, endeavor into something that I'm just kind of playing around with, and when we're playing around is when we're telling jokes, I guess, you know, so you spin a better lie that way, but, you know, I mean obviously fiction has a verisimilitude that everyone seeks, but not in every book.
>> George: Yeah, I could... Well, wouldn't you say, when you say, 'not trying to write right truth,' do you mean, sort of like, attempting profundity in a way? Like you are having fun with-- yeah, yeah. I don't think profundity is enjoyable, you know, I think, I think if people wanted profundity, they could pick up one of the great holy books of the world and find themselves beset by wisdom.
>> Devin: Or the Scarlet Letter.
>> George: People have to be fooled into, into Epiphany or hoodwinked into, into wisdom. You can't just throw it at them, unless you're a poet on Twitter or a prognosticator on one of America's great news channels.
>> Devin: I think your line of 'being fooled into Epiphany' is a great little catchphrase.
>> Brian: That's a great memoir title: Fooled into Epiphany. That's great!
>>Devin: That shamefully can be a best-selling memoir by someone who doesn't deserve that title. But the idea of being fooled into Epiphany is quite apt, I think, when you consider what quality narrative, and fiction does for you. I'm thinking of people like Barry Hannah, of like storytellers who do not seem on the surface level like they are dealing with universal truths, until you finish the story and realize that they've been dealing with universal truths the whole time.
>> Brian: Yeah, and that's a skill because to write something and put it down and know that you might be navel-gazing half the time, and then you just wake up and you're like 'Shit! I've got to relate this to other people.' I mean that doesn't happen with every story or everything you write, but sometimes it does.
And yeah, I mean, that's, that, that's the pinnacle of fiction. I mean, if you want to reach profundity you've gotta reach everyone. And you're not going to do that on a lying basis. The lying basis. There's only a few books I've read that you get to the last line, and you're like, 'Oh shit, I just got checked.' You know?
>> George: They asked this of Hemingway when he was given his Nobel prize. They said- they were talking specifically about the Old Man and the Sea, and somebody had the- what I can only imagine- was the nerve to ask him, how he was able construct such an allegory. It was one of his most allegorical works. They claimed Hemingway-- that he was never trying to write an allegory
>> Brian: And that makes complete sense to me, because I couldn't tell you what fucking allegory lies in that novella. Like what is... honestly...
>> George: Bring the fish in the boat.
>> Brian: I think symbolism is really...
>> Devin: It's just a quality book about fishing.
>> Brian: It's a metaphor for the thing that we're doing. No, I honestly think that symbolism can be very powerful, but I think it's also bullshit more than 90 percent of the time. It's projected by the reader. Which is fine, it's like 'death of the author' shit, but you know what I mean?
>> Devin: I felt this realization quite, in a more hard-core way, teaching high school English, because you focus- when you're teaching- you focus on those terms that you feel like you're never going to use again, like symbolism, and we were reading, we read Scarlet Letter to open which is replete with symbolism.
>> Brian: That's true, we never talked about symbolism in Grad School, because why would we do that?
>> Devin: Yeah. Well, like we read The Scarlet Letter and everything becomes a symbol, and then you, and then we read The Great Gatsby and everything is also a symbol. Like, the green light or... the green light or the billboard with Doctor Eckleburg's eyeglasses or the yellow car or just anything that has a color, and it serves a purpose to tie a bow around the novel. Like, the green light comes back at the end and it gives you, like sort of a, 'huh' feeling. I think, especially if you're 17 or 16 writing this and realizing...
I think it's nice, it's nice at that moment to be like that young and realize that someone can like tie a bow around something that magnificent or like that holistically, but at the same time, it does nothing to further truth or narrative. The only thing I think symbolism serves to do is potentially relate to human experience, in that we endow our life; we endow things in our life with meaning.
>> Brian: Yep.
>> Devin: But those things themselves don't actually further our lives, like they do in a novel. Like, an author can put a thing in the novel to carry the momentum of the novel; that's symbolism, but in our lives, if we're truth telling, through fictionalizing-- like, nothing holds significance, other than what we give significance to.
>> Brian: Right. And that's why fiction is kind of like a lie that is a truth. But before we continue this conversation. I want to mention that I think our biggest goal on this podcast is to get more women on it, because we're talking about The Scarlet Letter right now and it's just a bunch of dudes.
>> Devin: Yes.
>> Brian: And that's fine, but moving on... yeah, I'm curious as to how much of that symbolism was taught to you, and how much did you pick up yourself?
Because I couldn't tell you, because basically, virtually every book that was given to me in high school, I did not read. I didn't start seriously reading seriously until 18 or 19.
>> Devin: And I am also realizing as a high school teacher now, most of the kids don't read the book,
>> Brian: Which is a fact. I mean, like, you know, especially when I learned that you could just read the Cliff Notes-- this is like, poor. I'm not a good role model, because I should be...
>> Devin: There's also like 85 different versions of Cliff Notes now. There's Shmoop, Sparknotes...
>> Brian: Don't even tell me, man.
>> Devin: Shmoop is the thing all the kids...
>>Brian: Should I write a Cliff Notes for my own book? Is that like the most narcissistic thing?
>> Devin: You need to Shmoop it.
>> Brian: I'm going to Shmoop my own book. Anyway, yeah, but that's why my only tattoo says, "Symbols can be beautiful, sometimes."
>> Devin: It's also misspelled. [CHUCKLE]
>> Brian: It is misspelled. Yeah. It's something that could have been corrected that I chose not to have corrected, because I thought it was apropos.
>> Devin: That's why we first liked you, in the first place.
>> Brian: Because I was such a fuck-up?
>> Devin: Right, George? The misspelled tattoo.
>> Brian: Yeah, I still, I still forget where it's from. You told me once. Is it Joyce, is that when it comes from?
>> Devin: Vonnegut. I believe. I'm not Brian, but it's Vonnegut's
>> George: I'm still tattoo-less. I'm open for suggestions. I think you should, I definitely think you should get a dick tattoo, because here's the thing; dick tattoos, they are almost like accordions, you know what I mean? I mean, like, you know, it's a like decorating an accordion.
>> Devin: Brian is only one third done with his George -4 and has already brought up the dick tattoo, as a viable, [LAUGHTER] as a viable enterprise for inking permanently one's own skin.
>> Katie: At some point I'm going to start speaking from the peanut gallery over here and start bleeping you on air.
>> Brian: That's fine. I've already said that George hates Jews which is just not true and like--
[LAUGHTER]
That's fake news. It's an inside joke because George is Lebanese and I'm some form of American yeah, a Jewish-American, which means next to nothing, until I go to the airport and TSA pulls me over.
What were we talking about? My tattoo? That's why you guys liked me?
>> Devin: George said, 'no tattoo'. He hasn't had --then you said the thing...
>> Brian: Oh, yeah. The dick tattoo. Right? It's important because: A. if you want a real dick tattoo, you have to somehow maintain an erection for the duration of the tattoo being, you know... I'm getting... George is dying over here. Katie's giving me directions on Microsoft Word.
>> George: is that Katie's slapping the desk. It sounded like...
>> Brian: First of all, no, maybe that's the next challenge. You know, the Odyssey is another challenge we can do on this show. We should talk about that another time. Maybe this episode, but at some other later date.
>> Devin: I practically did it on Saturday.
>> Brian: Did you?
>> Devin: Well, I did...
>> Brian: You do the 50 miler?
>> Devin: I did three of them. I did three of the things.
>> Brian: Okay, so you ran the 24 or 26. What was it? 26?
>> Devin: 24,
>> Brian: 24. You didn't drink.
>> Devin: I drank a lot of beer.
>> Brian: Okay, okay so let's backtrack and let's explain the Odyssey. There are four elements to the Odyssey.
>> Devin: We are really going off-topic.
>> Brian: No. This is why we picked sapiens because everything that falls under the umbrage of humankind. Everything, we say, falls under the umbrage of humankind.
>> Devin: The Odyssey is a...I'm going to hold this for a bit. (Making noise-- 'uhhhhhhhh')
>>Brian: Until you remember it.
>> Devin: It is a four-part challenge that is a 24 hour challenge.
>> Brian: Four criteria.
>> Devin: Yeah, it's a 24 hour challenge with four criteria that was conceived of when I was a competitive collegiate runner.
>> Brian: Did you come up with it?
>> Devin: No.
>> Brian: Oh, okay.
>> Devin: It was bequeathed to us. There are four--
>> Brian: By Odysseus himself.
>> Devin: Yeah. There are four numbers: 6, 12, 18 and 24 and there are four activities: miles run, doughnuts eaten, beers drunk, and I'm going to say self orgasms achieved.
>> Brian: Yeah. Orgasms achieved.
>> Devin: Yes, but by the self,
>> Brian: But not applied to someone else. Especially, if not consensual. We do not promote that kind of behavior.
>> Devin: You can pair any activity with any number, but you have to-- and so for men I would say, speaking as a man, I would recommend six orgasms and the rest is like sort of, up for grabs. My 'go to' would be 24 miles run and 18, 18. I would say 18 beers--
>> Brian: Those are interchangeable. The 12 and the 18.
>> Devin: Yeah, 12 and 18 are interchangeable, and so this Saturday, I ran 50 miles and I drank probably 14, 14 beers that day.
>> Brian: Okay.
>> Devin: And I had --
>> Brian: So you did more than you needed to for the 12.
>> Devin: No orgasm achieved and, um--
>> Brian: Okay. But you had a lot-- you had a lot of ... doughnuts.
>>Devin: I had a lot of beer. Dough-nutty things. I went to Waffle House and had waffles.
>> Brian: Okay. You weren't doing the challenge so we can say anything necessarily derogatory about what you eat during a 50 miler.
>> Devin: All I ate during the race was-- I drank, probably a liter of Coca-Cola and ate six or seven handfuls of M&Ms and a Strupe waffle.
>> Brian: Do you not think that caffeine gets in the way at some point?
>> Devin: I think I went to it too early. Yeah this is for a podcast of a different time.
>> Brian: No, it's all relevant, no.
>> Devin: We're going to try and bring George back into this.
>> Brian: No, I think Yuval Noah Harari- George- I don't know if you'd agree, but I think he'd think that everything we're saying is, is relevant to what he-- his experience.
>> Devin: As long as you bring it back to narrative as a...
>> Brian: Narrative. As a device. As a deceitful mechanism.
>> Devin: I would like to pose you a question, George.
>> George: You got it.
>> Devin: Can I ask you a question? What do you think is more efficient? And perhaps artistically-- I'm going to come up with a word here, I'm halfway done with a mediocre George-4--
[LAUGHTER]
>> Devin: Artistically powerful. I'm going to say this, an efficient and artistically powerful way to convey truths about the world and ourselves; fiction or poetry?
>> George: Oh man.
>> Devin: And like for the audience, I would like to give a bit of background. George, I think, is one of the finest unknown poets in America.
>> Brian: Unknown? I know of him!
[LAUGHTER]
>> George: That's a bit strong.
>> Brian: This man's been published before, for Christ's sake.
>> Devin: He's in Poets.org. What's your answer to that question, George?
>> George: Which is more able? Is that what we've narrowed it down to?
>> Brian: George, George, George before you, before you start, I need, I need to, I need to announce-- well, first of all, wow, I'm buzzed already. Jesus! Already at 30 minutes, yeah. I'll tell you these George-4's! They'll getcha.
>> George: Straight to the dome, baby. Straight to the dome.
>> Brian: Straight to the dump. Okay so, I, I just want to state for the record, I am a fiction writer. I actually have like, minor contempt for poets, because I think so many of them suck, and I know that fiction writers...
>> George: That's fair.
>> Brian: ...have the same proportion of suckers, but at the same time, like reading fiction is so much less abstract. Especially at times, you know, poetry can be a word salad sometimes, whiles like fiction, if it's a word salad you're reading Henry Miller on acid or some shit like that, you know, I mean, not that he wrote fiction. He wrote some deranged form of memoir, but you know, you know what I'm saying. So anyway that's the score here. So we got two poets. Devin writes fiction, but not anymore. You know, you kinda quit on the game over there. He's a poet and a nonfiction writer, and, and you know, me. You got me over here, so okay, continue George.
>> George: Well, I don't think that it could possibly be answered, right? I don't--
>> Devin: Wow!
>> George: If we, if we, if we answer this question, we have to ask ourselves, like which medium or which art medium has the most truth potential. The truth potential.
>> Devin: That's another good memoir for you.
>> Brian: The old TP-
>> George: The truth potential. You know, obviously this is what we do. The writing is one of the oldest forms of artistic and informational exchange. We convey things to ourselves every day through some kind of language, right? Whether it's audible or not, you know, I wouldn't say that a piece, a statue, like statuary, like a really artistic piece of Italian marble, a statuary, could do as much as say, a novel could, right? I don't think I'm going to get a lot of pushback on that.
>> Brian: Did you just compare a bust to the written word?
>> George: Yeah, yeah. We're talking about the truth potential of artistic mediums here, right?
>> Brian: Fair enough.
>> George: Like a fixed slab, a fixed slab is only; it's not, I mean, you-- it can be witnessed, but I still think that a piece of visual art is probably capable of conveying a little more than the face of George Washington, you know, like you could find at the MET there in New York, right? I mean, even really, like the most romantic pieces statuary.
>> Brian: I don't know, man. Enough dead presidents in my room and like you know, I feel artistically fulfilled.
>> Devin: To quickly counteract the point that George has not made--
>> Brian: He's talking about fucking, like, the "Thinker" or something.
>> Devin: As a poet, and we've talked about this poem, Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo, the one that ends "You must change your life".
>> George: Oh, yeah, of course.
>> Devin: Which is a poem about a statue.
>> Brian: Which is... what is, what's that called? What's the word for it?
>> Devin: Ekphrastic.
>> Brian: Ekphrastic.
>> Devin: It's an Ekphrastic poem. As is W. H. Auden's; the one about Icarus. Musée des Beaux Arts, about suffering, they do not (?) masters. Rilke's poem is an Ekphrastic statue that is missing so much, and I would argue the poem-- it well-- it puts your poem into some sort of perspective because the poem would not exist without the incomplete statue. But the poem itself, to me, renders more meaning than the statue, because of the incompleteness of the statue. Maybe that; in and of itself; that double, sort of existence of both, is a good, sort of, reckoning for art itself that one cannot exist without the other.
>> Brian: But that's all great and good.
>> Devin: It is great and good, as I am.
>> Brian: But what we wanted to know...
>> Devin: We wanted George's opinion.
>> Brian: You euphemistically said, what's better, poetry or fiction?
>> Devin: And George didn't put up a fight. Before you even continue the conversation, I'm going to count to three. At the end of three, you have to say, poetry or fiction. George, you on-board?
>> George: Oh, man. I can't believe you put me in this position.
>> Brian: You have to! This is phoning it in. We all know what we're going to say. What I want to do--
>> Devin: I might say fiction.
>> Brian: You said basically, better at revealing truth, but we have to define truth because we were just talking about how fiction has a better ability.
>> Devin: Maybe end the podcast by us doing the one, two, three.
>> Brian: I kinda like that idea, actually.
>> Devin: Are we asking, like what we mean by truth? When we say, revealing truth?
>> Brian: It seems to me that we need to ask the question of what does good art do in the first place? So we're going to go in a circle and we're to start with, George.
>> George: The question is: what does good art do? Is that the question?
>> Devin: What does good art do? What does good art do? W-D-G-A-D. Whatagad.
>> Brian: What does it do AND why do we do it still, considering that this dude says that fiction is the thing that we-- is the launching pad for our entire species, you know. So why do we still do it? Is it still necessary? I mean, obviously, it's still performed in our political spheres and such things like that. Go ahead.
>> George: Let's get some platitudes out of the way first.
>> Brian: Oh, yes!
>> George: Because there are too many platitudes about this, right? The one that you're going to see like, speaking of tattoos, the one you might be tattooed on some people is, or scrawny artists, right? 'Art for art's sake.' That one's pretty good. I don't mind that platitude, but there's the other one, how does it go? 'Good art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.' That's nonsense.
>> Brian: Oh, man. You've got them lined up! Just bandolier, man.
>> George: That's garbage, right? And then there's this whole idea that anyone who creates art is attempting to escape death; that's also bullshit. In many ways making, making pulls us towards that impermanent, right? You were talking about the difference between poetry and fiction. It's my assertion that poetry celebrates the impermanent while fiction attempts to preserve something. That's what I contest, but what must good art do? Good art must be different. It's gotta be to be advancing the narrative right, especially when we talk about fiction; we're talking about contributing to the great conversation, right? if all you gotta do is bang the same bad detective story drum, or another iteration of vaguely interesting commercial literature, like, I don't know why you're doing it. If you're not trying to further the craft, if you're not trying to do something different, or capture something unique. I think that's what good art does. I think anything else that, sort of, follows behind everything that's already been done, is not necessarily art, I think it's just commodity masquerading as creativity. So there you go.
>> Brian: But you do come at this stuff from somewhat of a conventional angle, somewhat of drawing from tradition. So how do you draw-- how you reconcile that with pushing the technology forward?
>> George: Well, I think-- We can--I'm not going to, but we could talk about the last hundred years of literature, and we could talk about the last hundred years of style, right? Where certain things have been innovated, given any literary decade or school. Here, at the onset, or at least almost 20 years into the 20 first century, I think the last, for me, the last place and I feel qualified to innovate within a tradition is the tradition of genre and bending genre to make it do things that it hasn't been asked to do before. That's what, that's what I like to do.
>> Brian: So where do you see room for experimentation on the level of prose. I mean, not just, you know, fiction or nonfiction, even lines, like verse? Do you not think that there is room to grow there? Because, I mean, I think there's a separate distinction from the literary scene-- language is constantly evolving. I mean, you know, due to technology... whatever.... slang, whatever you want to call colloquialisms. I don't know. I mean, I've moved away from experimental stuff, as I've gotten older, but at the same time stayed there, because I believe in the value of the new, you know the value of a new perspective or a new voice, or whatever it may be, you know, you know, attached for many. Like of that, like, politically driven locus of like, whom it's coming from, you know what I mean?
>> George: Yeah. I mean, again, when we look back at the twentieth century, right? There're so many people that are playing with the prose on the level of the prose, down in the sentence, doing things. You have Hemingway, even Falkner, of course. You've got Joyce. I mean, they, they practically broke the system and contributed...
>> Brian: Oh yeah. Faulkner...
>> George: ...style for the next hundred years.
>> Brian: Right, Faulkner practically invented the voice of an autistic gentleman. Essentially, I mean, I don't think anyone's written about that before. If I'm not mistaken.
>> George: And then you've got Gertrude. Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.
>> Devin: Stein, especially.
>> George: It's happening all over the place. The twenties was that revolutionary time. But that, that, that struggled to carry on through, say like, the sixties or even the fifties. I mean, when we had, we had the beat poets, which I think are quite divisive. I think most people, If you're, if you're really into literature, especially poetry, you fall in one place or the other on the beats, but you have, like the Lang pose --the language poets who were just dreadful across the board. Right? I forget the poem. Devin, you may remember; where it's just one person reading like from 0 to 100 and they just get more worked up as they go. "Zero, one, two..." and they just get really into it towards the end, "98! 99!" You know, things like that. I'm sorry, you've lost me. For every action, it equals an opposite reaction. Like the Avant-garde.
>> Devin: You know, it's like the equivalent of John Cages' 433. Is it 433?
>> Brian: Yeah, who are these people? I don't know who the language poets are. I honestly don't know who beat poets are. Because I only know the beat fiction writers.
>> Devin: Ginsberg. You've got, Ferlinghetti, you've Kerouac writing fiction.
>> Brian: Kerouac wrote fiction, was he-- and Burroughs. And all of them close with these guys?
>> Devin: Yeah, that's the same scene. Right, George?
>> George: Yeah. Oh yeah, totally. I think a lot of them-- who was the-- Was it Burroughs that they all sort of looked up to until he got high on smack and shot his wife in the face and nobody minded about it?
>> Devin: Thompson.
>> Brian: And he was the best of them.
>> George: Gonzo. I mean, and really that's, that's what the beats gave us more than anything; it was Hunter S Thompson. For what it was worth. I know he was divisive, but I quite liked him.
>> Brian: I liked him a lot.
>> Devin: Gonzo journalism, like Tom Wolfe too, I think, puts-- calls a lot of fiction into question.
>> Brian: Was Tom Wolfe a beat? He was in his thirties.
>> Devin: Tom Wolfe, the journalist is not -- well, he just passed away. I wouldn't call him a beat. I'd call him new school journalism Avant garde. He sort of, I would say he is a descendent from that Burroughs, Hunter S Thompson sort of, like-- give yourself a lot of permission to call truth whatever truth is, and I find, I find some of Tom Wolfe's stuff-- I read it because he died this year. I read the Right Stuff about the about the astronauts going to space which got a lot, which was a bestseller, but also got a lot of criticism because there's a great deal of things extrapolated potentially in the in the book and it calls itself nonfiction, but I found it unbelievably entertaining and a portrait of an era and I think there is a lot of truth in its fiction, which I think is, maybe should bring nonfiction into the realm of--
>> Brian: Conversation.
>> Devin: Conversation, because what we call truth is so often not. It's a lie
>> Brian: I think that's it-- I honestly, I'm starting to realize that that's the nucleus of this conversation, because if we're talking about... If we're talking about how you can lie and make fictions and make great stories I reflect on our actual experience, our real experience, and teach us lessons and emotions and all that great stuff, yet we, and, and, and, in addition to that we have this person, Harare who's basically, you know, written an entire book on human history based on the idea that we can create fiction in order to further ourselves. What truth, what role does truth have in what we're doing on a day-to-day basis?
>> Devin: Well, our politics certainly calls that into question.
>> Brian: Easily the most important realm.
>> Devin: Yes. I think more so than anyone's Podunk novel or poem.
>> George: And of course science. Like I mean, science is this beyond a narrative truth which would be what's being deployed in politics, right? Changing the narrative, changing the popularity, but I mean, if there's if there's any objectivity, it has to come from physics, it has to come from chemistry...
>> Devin: Science. Yeah, but what if we live in a world where science is completely disregarded?
>> Brian: Or better yet, we live in a world-- well, half-- it's you know, it's almost like 50% disregarded, give or take. But we do live in a world in which science is not complete and never will be complete. So that's the big ticket right there, because we have to work our way around the fact that we don't know exactly what's going on. We never really totally will, and so these representations, these metaphors still have value, obviously in our society, that's why we keep writing fiction. I guess to answer we've been driving at.
>> Devin: Maybe. But it's like we live in a world where our president- we all here have the same president- his response to the wildfires still raging in California; it was that we should have more deforestation, which is a scientific lie that it is perhaps the for--
>> Brian: Or what they would call in tech, a greedy algorithm, because it's basically doing the thing that's easiest before you that doesn't take the long term effect.
>> Devin: Or like if we take down the forest and there's no trees to catch fire, but we don't understand that-- or we are just lying to ourselves that it is the taking down of the forest that in large respects is causing the fire, or is one cause. So we live in a world where such, where the, like, fiction and nonfiction, poetry, take a backseat to whatever our president says. Always. Would you agree?
>> Brian: Oh yeah. I mean, a caboose seat on the long train of American legislation and economy.
>> Devin: And so, if we live in a world where even our artful lives take a backseat to someone's less artful politically motivated lies, what is the purpose of our artful lies? Ostensibly, well, no, not even ostensibly--
>> Brian: That's a great question, Devin.
>> Devin: Thank you. You know, absolutely.
>> Brian: Our more artful lies have a lot of value because the people that are comprehending them also comprehend the fact that they are lies, and they turn them into truths themselves. When we are forced to accept the truth without interpretation. I think that becomes a huge problem that that's where in modern times we've run into trouble in terms of, we can't even agree on facts. So when you take that into consideration, you know-- George, go ahead.
>> Devin: We need some George.
>> George: No, I was just going to tie that back to, nonfiction because, because you say people are happy to receive our lies, right? And receive our fictions and live in them and swim in them and make them real for themselves, right? We're them, an imagination for a little while, we're giving them some characters, and we're giving them, hopefully some, some distraction at worst, something that could change their perspective, at best, hopefully, right? But when somebody buys a nonfiction book, and it turns out later that that nonfiction author was lying through their teeth the whole time.
>> Brian: A Million Little Pieces.
>> George: People are ready to pull out the pitchforks and torches. Exactly. James Frei, I believe was his name, right? He's been practically wiped from the bookshelf, right? Because, because he's been, he's been erased, because people get so upset when they think they're being sold, or that which is truthful, and when it turns out not to be that-- think they've been swindled, but yet when somebody buys fiction, they don't have this issue. They go, "Oh, I admit what it is." And that's because of the emotional connection that we, that we are more willing to give to that which claims to be true, than we are to that which claims to be fiction. But we still have, of course, have tremendous attachments, emotional attachments to fiction, fandom, in all of its ways, be it a television show or cartoon series or book or a series of books, right? Game of Thrones comes to mind. People are crazy for it, right? So which is it that has the greater capacity for obsession? Is it the thing that claims to be truth, or is it the thing that admits that it's, that it's imaginary, that it's imaginary, but that can produce something like an emotional truth in each of us. I mean, are they equal forces; greater than, or equal to?
>> Brian: I think, yeah. I mean, I think you just basically touched on the fact that, politically, the former is true. Whatever, whatever can convince us of being fact is the most important thing, politically. And, and, and emotionally on an individual basis, unfortunately, because we have institutionalized- I guess emotions- we have not done that to this point, other than mental health. I do think --I do think that fiction-- all, all forms of literary work do something on us, for that, but fiction in particular AND poetry, for that matter, do a great deal of work on directing the ability for us to feel, and to think. And, and kind of widen that circumference of, of human experience, which I don't think politics does. I think in a lot of ways it narrows it and constricts it.
>> Devin: I also worry that in this perhaps-- and this perhaps isn't a great thing to say... Normally, normally-- I'm going to relate it back to my, my current job as a high school teacher. I am a high school teacher.
>> Brian: Which is why you drink.
>> Devin: And I get the question a lot of like, "Mr. Kelly, why are we reading this book?" Of which, I have truly no response. There is the one response I usually go to, which I think is a sort of paraphrasing from Baldwin which is essentially that like, we read books to make us feel individually less alone in the world. we find in the-- a narrator or a protagonist or antagonist, someone or some feeling that makes us feel like we are less alone in the world. Like the way in which we think about the world is not as different as we think it is. I wonder sometimes whether we are more inclined... I wondered-- what I wonder when I think about that is like, I think that it is a great thing, because I think so often that art does address the feelings of people who, so often unaddressed by large portions of discourse, but I also wonder about, like how often it is that we pick up a book with a narrator that we just despise. And because we have nothing to relate in that narrator. We put the book down, and I wish that we could keep reading that book with that awful narrator, you know what I'm saying? Like, so often, I don't, I don't want us to live in a world where we just simply read things that have, or relate to things that have people that we can easily relate to. I want to live in a world where we, we do challenge ourselves to sort of, enter into the lives, especially in an artful way of people that we cannot relate to. I think, and I think that is a much larger discussion.
>> Brian: It is, it is. It has to do with censorship. I think that's where sensitivity readings come in. To be honest. And not that those are bad things, they're definitely a good thing. I think it's important that we're relating to people that we are not in direct contact with, and so on. But I totally agree. I think that the dirt of our society should be recognized in order for study, if anything else, you know?
>> Devin: Yeah. Considering that we brought up truth telling in our modern society. Do you think that writing- and this is to everyone in the room- that writing in and of itself is a viable means of enacting change, progressing-- progressing change, progressing the human race in this moment right now? In this moment that we stand right now what viability does writing have to do anything? Does it? George, your turn.
>> George: Hmm. Maybe it used to have more of an ability to do this, but I feel that the marketplace of ideas is too loud now. I think if you want to-- if you want to announce--
>> Devin: It's too loud.
>> George: It's too much of it. I mean, like, so, and that everything goes for everything except like major films because the price point to get in on by creating a major motion picture is tremendous, right? So, you're going to have to have that money, if you want to make a movie. All you have to have to make a book, if you're the author, all you have to have is paper and pen, right? I think it costs. Writing's got to be the cheapest commodified art form in the contemporary marketplace of ideas. But, of course, we talk about frequently in our interpersonal lives, the sort of gatekeepers, the presses for that sort of throttling to produce these things, and of course there looking at it from a business perspective, you know, when we think about those great books, right? great books of history that may or may not have more of an impact on the societies in which they were initially released that could eventually have spread elsewhere, for good or bad, but I don't know now, honestly, now if you want to sell a book, it practically has to be made into a movie before it sells considerably.
>> Brian: You know George, I agree with. I agree with that and you know that's kind of the reason why we are starting Animal Riot as a Press, which is a spin of The Animal Riot Reading Series. Our, sort of, rebuttal to that is that we want to acquire books that we feel deserve to be out there and that progress our species. If that's the right way to put it. I mean, I really think it is. But to print to prove why we want to do this is because we want to invest in our writers. So if our writers can make an impact on people around us, and the communities around us, the communities that we interact with, we want to invest in them. And, and, and, and George what you're saying is basically, it comes down to money. It really does, you know, it comes down to this society we live in. And if we invest in our writers, we believe that we will put out work that does affect the kind of change that writing may have used to, or still does to a certain degree, maybe to a large, to a lesser per capita extent. We want to increase that. That's our goal.
>> George: I want to-- I want to clarify something, because I think that there or that there are ideas out there that are enacted in fiction form that can change, can affect change. As far as the consumer's concern it's how do we find those, right? So that, if your brand is centered on that, as Animal Riot press will be, then I think that is, you know, declaring the mission statement of the press. We want to publish ideas, we want to publish things that are furthering the narrative, things that are further the conversation. And people know that about the press and people can find those kinds of things there, but as a former librarian, right? you come to the library and you want, you have that question, you pose that question to me as an Adult Services Librarian, you know, which of these books is going to change me? I don't know. I would have a hard time just taking you to the shelf, right? I could show you the books that changed me. The books that historically change something, but now, I mean, like we had 150,000 materials at my former library which was a medium-size library. It's just so much, so much! It's the same with TV; It's the same with music, you know, new forms of delivery have the market swollen up like that. So that there needs to be a place like Animal Riot for that very reason. Thus ends my interjection.
>> Devin: Well, I think to your point, George, the response from me, especially because we are living in, I would say, late capitalism, is that, if you want to affect change, You affect change by investing in your community, and you invest in the community of relatively like-minded folks, and their tangential counterparts, and you don't, you actually don't shoot for the moon, you shoot for the streetlights, like you shoot for little goals that you think are right above you, because most of everything is unachievable in late capitalism, and unless you have 10 billion dollars, most of everything is deeply unachievable and so you shoot for the goals that you can achieve and you affect them in the places where they mean something when you achieve them, and because meaning something when you'd-- like, getting an outcome when you achieve a goal should mean communal benefits; It should mean that like, you see someone you directly affected, and they say 'thank you' and I think, like, that I think is what is one of the weirdly positive consequences of living in this era; is that in order to affect change in this era, you return to a place where affecting change means you affect the person who is right next to you, and therefore you can directly benefit, in some sort of holistic way-- Like, like things like gratitude become more important now than they did years ago where like your gratitude was someone who got your package 2000 miles away. Like, I think that we are weirdly returning to an era where you have to see someone right next to you, and I think that's like, in some ways a good/bad thing.
>> Brian: I agree, and I also think that literature is not just about edification or didacticism or anything like that; it's really about bringing to people a more full, a more full version of humanity. Really. I mean, that, that's what it's about, and that's why we do what we do.
>> Devin: Yep. It's why we're doing this podcast. We're talking to people that we know and love.
>> Brian: Exactly.
>> Devin: Like George.
>> Brian: Like George.
>> George: Yeah, yeah. I know, we enrich each other in the same way that the Arts enriches the people that receive it, right? Experience. The enriching of the fleeting existence, right? Some joy, some 'ecstatic now' that happens, when we watch the series finale of a great TV show, or when we return to that book that has meant so much to us, and scan through for that one paragraph that we just can't get off, right? I mean, it's in a lot of ways, it's the cultivation of, and the intelligence, sort of the obsession, right? I mean, we-- it's, it's okay to be obsessed with something. In many ways that's what being alive is, right? I mean our obsession is we don't want to lose it, we don't want to let it go. So we dig our claws into that, to that great book and then we as writers have that, have the additional privilege of having, you know, hundreds of books, and works, paintings, and television shows and movies, songs that we pour into then we pour into, siphon into, that thing that we make, right? It's trying to give back, trying to grind it all down, and recycle through our individual subjective, you know, life. And that's, for me, as I-- as I assume for many creatives-- the three of y'all, including Katie there, right? and that's why we do it, because you say it's not about so much self-edification, Brian, I completely agree, but I think for a lot of us this is a compulsion, right? We, we have a compulsion, we have to have some output. There's only so much input we can have before we have to make something with it, right?
>> Devin: Yeah...
>> Brian: All right, guys, we're going to close this down. It's been a--it's been a long hour of Animal Riot. I am sufficiently fucking-hamed off the bone. This George pump- George 4, I'm serious! I'm struggling, I'm struggling to-- it's actually. It's very, is very low. It's a few fingers at best. I'm struggling to just talk straight.
>> Devin: We're not-- like, we're just talking to George, right?
[LAUGHTER]
Are you coming up soon, George?
>> Brian: While we will have you...
>> George: If I can find work.
>> Brian: But I'm going to wind this down. Devin's upset. Devin's having a fun time. That's what we do here. Don't forget to tune in for Animal Riot Hour this, uh, you know, next month. We can't tell you exactly when it's going to be released, but you know, it will, we can promise you that, and be sure to stay tuned to information about our launch party scheduled for January, in all the cities that I told you about: New York, Seattle, Arkansas-- Little Rock, Arkansas, and Baltimore and we'll also have launched our website by then, animalriotpress.com, where you'll get to read all about our holistic approach to publishing quality fiction and nonfiction, and plenty more, and that's it for tonight. Thank you, very much.
>> Devin: Woo. We're done!
>> George: See ya. Hey, not bad fellas. Did we get too serious? Should we have had a little more fun?
>> Brian: This episode is brought to you by Animal Riot. Featuring George Celaya, Devin Kelly and myself Brian Birnbaum and is produced by Katie Rainey, without whom we would be merely three of Shakespeare's thousand monkeys banging on a typewriter.