Episode 13:
Please don’t tell me about your dreams
April 11th, 2019
Hosted by Brian Birnbaum
Guests: Jared Marcel Pollen & George Sawaya
Produced by Katie Rainey
Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the Animal Riot Podcast. We'd like to reintroduce Jared Pollen, whose first collection of stories is debuting with Crowsnest, an imprint of Political Animal, a journal dedicated to high-level political discourse. In the vein of writers such as Don DeLillo and Christopher Hitchens, Jared's writing strikes an uncannily subtle brand of literary satire that at opportune moments dips almost imperceptibly into incisive sociopolitical commentary. Along with fellow O.G. George Sawaya, we talk Jared's inspirations, approach to writing, and end with a reading from one of the collection's stories.
>> Brian: Welcome to the 13th episode of the Animal Riot Podcast brought to you by Animal Riot Press, a literary press for books that matter. I'm your host, Brian Birnbaum. We're here today with Animal Riot OGs George Sawaya and Jared Pollen. George, as you know, is a poet in fiction writer from Alabama. Roll Tide.
>> George: Roll tide.
>> Jared: Roll tide.
>> Brian: Okay, good. That that was indeed a call and response and you guys complied brilliantly. The state knows what's best. Please comply. Anyway, George and Jared are joining me to talk about Jared's forthcoming collection (The) Unified Field of Loneliness, which will be coming out with Crow's Nest. It's their debut publication, which is an offshoot of Political Animal. They're just online Jared, right? Political animal? Okay, yeah, they're an online journal. And today's brand of fuckary is brought to you by surviving Vyvanse, which I took for the first time yesterday at 7:30 in the morning and did not stop feeling it until today when I woke up, which is a little too long, in my opinion. More reports later. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Let's get back onto the floor. Let's get back on brand. There's no amphetamine use in Jared's collection. So let's talk about some other things. Like Jared's collection.
>> Jared: Yeah, well, it's actually it's The Unified Field of Loneliness.
>> Brian: Oh wow, I forgot a very important article, and that's upsetting. Maybe we'll go back and edit that or maybe we'll just keep it real and just, you know, let human flaws shine through. So, yeah, let's talk about like where you started with this. Or let's go back further / farther? Do you want to start with, like your writing process and like where you came from, as a writer?
>> Jared: Yeah, sure.
>> Brian: Katie, our producers just signed to me "Let's start with his birth"
>> Jared: OK.
>> Brian: Which is probably worse than starting a novel with "I woke up" (laughter).
>> Jared: It's worse than waking up from a dream at the beginning of a story.
>> Brian: Coincidentally, I saw Seth at Animal Riot the other day. Seth Katz, we will have him on sometime. A fellow Sarah Lawrence grad. And he was reading World The World According to Garp. And that book I think starts with him being born and like, honestly, I just don't know how you get away with something like that, but he did. Anyway. Jared's book does not start with someone being born or waking up. So yeah, let's start with something else.
>> Jared: Well, I started writing shortly after I finished undergrad actually. While I was in school, I didn't have much interest in being a fiction writer. I'd always love to reading, and I thought maybe the only writing I would ever do was in journalism. At that time, I was more interested in becoming a political journalist because I studied Poli Sci and I studied English lit, and I thought that was a good way to fuse the two things that I had studied in school and try to parlay that into some kind of career. But after doing just a bit of journalism work for the school newspaper, I very quickly discovered that it was something that I absolutely did not want to do and that I didn't have the level of freedom that I really wanted out of writing. So around the time that I was graduating from undergrad, I well...
>> Brian: I actually do want to ask you a question real quick about that. Was it because you had to follow a narrative based on facts? Or was it something internal to the actual school journal?
>> Jared: No, it's not because it was constrained to facts per se. I do write a lot of essays and get a lot of joy out of writing. It was more stylistic guidelines. It was more the dictates of any journalism standard. George, having probably done some journalism work, probably knows this as well. Most of your readers read at a tenth grade level. You're discouraged from using the personal pronoun... first person pronoun. You're discouraged from using certain things. Stylistically, you're discouraged from going on tangents. You're discouraged from using certain kinds of language and certain kinds of imagery.
>> Brian: So not not just so not just facts, but the narrative is very narrow.
>> Jared: Yeah. And you know the journalism work that I did, I got a glimpse into the trench work of what that's like. Going to meet someone and then interviewing them and then transcribing the interview and then going back and writing like, you know, eight hundred words and then having it cut down to six hundred words. And then the stuff that got cut out was the stuff that I thought maybe it was the most significant or the most important, and then it running, like in the school newspaper, which nobody read anyway. And so the whole experience was very unsatisfying and very disenchanted. Fiction to me always seemed like pure freedom. So shortly after I graduated and I was confronted with that adult question of what am I going to do with the rest of my life, it seemed to me like giving this fiction writing thing would be the best possible course of action. So was this summer of 2012, and the applications for Sarah Lawrence were due... the applications for all grant programs, including Sarah Lawrence were due that December. I think, was December 31st of that year.
>> Brian: And we are circa Kobe Bryant, tearing his Achilles in the timeline of his career.
>> Jared: Yeah. Just to give us some context.
>> Brian: Yeah we applied that fall and then we heard back that spring.
>> Jared: Yes, right. So this would have been the summer of 2012 when I graduated. And at that time, I've never written a story, never written anything seriously. I dabbled in poetry a bit when I was an undergrad, and it was all shit for the most part. It was derivative mytho- poetic, like, you know, TS Eliot....
>> Brian: At least you can admit it (laughs).
>> Jared: But I had never written a story with any conviction before. I had never written any piece of fiction longform fiction seriously before. So I had about six months to teach myself how to write a good enough story to get into a program like Sarah Lawrence. And I think I wrote two or three stories in that interim and the last one that I wrote I submitted and it was accepted. And then we started the following year in September. So it it all happened very quickly, actually. By the time I was getting ready to apply to programs, I had, you know, literally no experience writing fiction. So whether it was a stroke of luck or some demonstration of early talent, I don't know. But I managed to get into the program, and that was the first hurdle, the first confidence boost. And then, by the time I was leaving that program two years later, I had half of this collection assembled, and I knew that I was in it for the long haul. That this was not just like a pipe dream or a passing fancy, that this is really what I wanted to do.
>> Brian: Yeah, and I'm just going to interject and mention that you know, at the beginning of that program, you were like the first person I had ever... I think you were the first person I really talked to. We were sitting out on that lawn and like this orientation party.
>> Jared: That's right.
>> Brian: We were talking about metaphysics or something. And then a couple of days later, I don't know if he had met George by that point. But, you know, I think it's funny. You should talk about you guys meeting because you guys are basically, you know, demographically, like, you know, fairly opposite in away. At least for Westerners.
>> George: I was there when you all met. I'm glad I was so memorable. But we actually walked up to the to the campus together, Jared and I, because he just moved in, what, like a week before?
>> Jared: Yeah, I moved in the last week of August, and I had very little communication with George before I moved out. Unlike everybody else, I didn't go to Sarah Lawrence to kind of scout, you know, the school and the program and see what the faculty was like. I wanted to get out of Windsor so bad that I was just like, fuck it, I'm going to go. I don't care what it's like.
>> Brian: Anywhere but here (laughs)
>> Jared: Anywhere but here. So I moved in not really having had a lot of contact with George. I think I sent him one email and I said, like, "What's the house look like?" And he wrote like, "it's all right", and that was pretty much it. (laughter)
>> Brian: Roll tide. It's all right - roll tide. People should also know that Windsor is like, you know, you can see Detroit, like across the... What is it? What lake separates you guys?
>> Jared: The Detroit River
>> Brian: Oh the Detroit River. I think it's important.
>> Jared: Windsor straddles the right side of the Detroit River. If I stand on my back deck, I can see the Ambassador Bridge and the Renaissance Center.
>> Brian: So you're like an American emeritus or something like that. I don't know.
>> Jared: Yeah, well, I grew up on America's doorstep, and, you know, I was conscious of the fact that I wasn't American, but I always felt much closer to America spiritually and intellectually than I did to my home country. And Windsor is kind of a weird place because it's so close to the United States. You know, people use Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. Some people use feet instead of centimetres. Some people use a miles prior instead of kilometers. Things like that. People usually watch the American news to get their weather. There's only one Canadian station on TV. It is kind of like a weird sort of that American bubble inside of Canada.
>> Brian: Interesting. Okay, so yeah. So you graduate, as we all did somehow, despite the Tomfuckary that took place at 25 Stillwell, where you and George moved in. And then what happened after that?
>> Jared: Well, I wrote a novel, and then one or two stories were written during breaks that I took while I was writing the novel. And then the last four stories were written in 2017, and once I had about ten stories together, ten seemed like a nice, symmetrical number. I think story collections that have, like, you know, fourteen, fifteen stories in them are too long. Actually, I think a short story collection should be lean by design.
>> Brian: I feel like you feel like that about albums, too. At least I do. Maybe I'm just projecting.
>> Jared: No, that's absolutely true. I have this thing with the number ten. I think all my favorite records have ten songs on them.
>> Brian: So Pearl Jam Ten must be your favorite album of all time.
>> Jared: Must be.
>> Brian: I want to mention also that it's like, kind of ironic because you'd finished half this collection... I'm not sure exactly if you had, like, an absolute direction, but you did write that novel and then you got an agent for that novel, and it's been pretty difficult to find like a publisher for the book, but for the novel. But this collection kind of seemed a little bit easier to place, probably because of your relationship with Political Animal. But I don't know. It just goes to show we don't know what the fuck is going to happen in this writing game, you know?
>> Jared: That's right. So I actually completed the novel about a year and a half before I finished the collection of stories. And then I sat on the novel for a bit while I was trying to find an agent for it. And during that time I met Louis SlOtsky and Alexander Wall, who run Political Animal magazine, and they were starting a press of their own called Crow's Nest books a literary fiction press, and they liked the essays that I'd written for them. And in my byline, my biography, I had a note in there that I had fiction published in other journals and stuff like that, and they asked if they could read the manuscript for the novel. And at that time, I wasn't willing to let the novel go quite yet. But I was still looking for agents, and so I sent them the collection of stories and they expressed interest in it and they offered to publish it. And so that's how that came about. And that was at the beginning of 2017, and the collection is about to be published. Well, by the time this airs, it will be in the past tense of the collection was published on March 15th. So it's being published this week at the time of speaking.
>> Brian: Excellent. Excellent. We just moved to the fourth dimension. All right. Yeah, that's very cool. Which I'm very excited about. My favorite stories so far... I've only read the first few because I was going to be, you know, as they call it beta reader these days. But, you know, I got pretty much like completely time fucked by, you know, starting this press and, like, trying to get my novel together and all the shit, so I'm really excited to read it. You know, my favorite one so far is "In a Nutshell". Which is what? Is it still the second story in there?
>> Jared: No that story is placed near the end of the collection now. But that was actually one of the first stories I wrote. I wrote that in the fall of 2013 at Sarah Lawrence. So that would have been on my fourth or fifth story ever.
>> Brian: Was that our first semester there? So Mary's class?
>> Jared: Yeah
>> Brian: That's an esoteric reference. So, yeah, talk about that story a little bit just because I love it and I can speak into it a little more. We can act like it's the single off your album ten redux.
>> Jared: Well, in a nutshell story was inspired by the particular voice using the second person pronoun. Now, most of the time, like 99.9 percent of the time, stories told with the second person pronoun are awful.
>> George: Agreed.
>> Jared: Stories that use 'you' are almost always terrible. And they feel sort of gimmicky and completely governed by style and are usually playing games with the reader in some kind of way. And I really don't find that very interesting. But I heard this voice talking in my head, and it was the voice of a young boy moving out to school, very much like I was at that time.
>> Brian: Well, let's be clear. Like an eighteen year old boy. With the climate, you know, climate, like finding with leaving Neverland coming out. We don't want to like you mix our opportunities (laughter)
>> Jared: Right. (laughter)
>> Brian: I'm getting a shit look from my producers.
>> Jared: Let's leave Michael out of this, alright? Yeah, so let's be clear. A young man, who started undergrad, and that's a young man from the Midwest going out to California to start school, and he is stuck in a traffic jam in his parent's car. And he's just sort of talking to himself. And he's addressing himself as we all do when we talked to ourselves in our own head as 'you'. There's this kind of voice in his head. And then there's the second voice that's addressing the first voice. And it was that kind of dialectic, that kind of conversation with yourself, where you're addressing yourself as 'you'
>> Brian: 'You' or 'we'?
>> Jared: Yeah of course.
>> Brian: In fact, there's a character in Book of Numbers by Josh Cohen, who strictly refers to himself as 'we' and everyone else is like a plural. It's fascinating, but anyway, that's not not neither here nor there. Continue.
>> Jared: Right. And it's strange the way we do that, you know, like if we drop our phone or something we will say like, 'Oh, you idiot', it's like, who are we talking to? And why are we saying 'you'? Why don't I just say like "I'm an idiot" out loud? Why do I have to say 'you'? So it just shows that there's this second voice inside our head, the second voice that addresses ourselves as 'you'. And that was what was really intriguing to me. And that was the way into this story. And the whole story is just a sort of internal monologue of this young man talking to himself while he's stuck in traffic.
>> Brian: Yeah, that is my favorite story so far that I've read from it, especially just cause the voice of it. I agree with you, the second person thinking just really be a kind of like a gimmicky trope. But I really like how you had a clearly defined reason for going into it. But I especially liked, you know, it kind of reminded me, in a sense of like something like "Forever Overhead", even though it's... is it in second person?
>> Jared: "Forever Overhead" uses the second person.
>> Brian: Yeah, well, it reminded me of that story, just in the same sense that it's a very small snapshot. There's hours that are going by right, and they're stuck in this traffic jam. And the story is really all like, texture. The observations and I guess just the perception that he's having are just they're very rife, like each block is like its own little story and it's told in this way that it's like just the observation itself moves the plot. Like, you know, there's there's basically no description of what's happening. It's like This is here, This is here. This is here. This is what's happening, you know, and "Forever Overhead" is kind of like that, too. I don't know if you took inspiration from that story specifically.
>> Jared: Well, actually, I felt discouraged when I started writing the story. I actually didn't want to use the second person pronoun because "Forever Overhead" used it, and I thought, like like, this is too close to the "Forever Overhead" story, like it's going to seem like it's, you know, derivative or something. So actually I nearly changed the piece and tried to do it with the first person pronoun because I wanted to distance it from the Wallace piece, but it just didn't work. And so at I ultimately decided, like, fuck it, I'm just going to, you know, just going to write the story the way I imagined it. But that piece certainly was firing. And I think I brought that piece in that semester of school, because we had to share a piece each week. And that was the one that I brought in.
>> Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, we're going to get back to this. We'll talk a little bit more about the book, but I just want to take a little detour and I'm going to turn to George. I'm turning in my seat towards George. Imagine everyone. Everyone imagine me turning to George. Our producers are giving me strange looks, turning... finding George, they can't... OK. Oh, She found George. Okay, George, I want both you guys to talk about this, but I want George... through your eyes, what was like to meet a spindly, brooding dark featured but somewhat palate, you know, because, you know, in Windsor you don't get too much sun... Canadian... (laughs)
>> Jared: Can we throw something redemptive in there? Like, you know, charming?
>> Brian: No, because you're not. You're a misanthrope. You're an intellectual misanthrope. That's yeah, that is charming. That's what our producers are saying. She they're saying that that is your charm is how disdainful you are (laughter)
>> Jared: George can probably describe very well that first meeting.
>> George: I was so excited.
>> Brian: Yeah.25 Stillwell. You roll up in your jag, and it's, you know, with the cracked windshield that's going to be sold in a little bit so you can buy more beer for us. (laughter)
>> George: Over the bridge in New Jersey, I took that broken Jaguar over the George Washington with, like, no breaks.
>> Brian: Yeah, George is hurtling up from Alabama in the jag and Jared's flying in first class from Canada. No, that's not what happened, but anyway, continue...
>> George: That automobile was ill advised purchase. Don't buy a 2001 Jaguar.
>> Brian: I totally disagree (laughs).
>> George: It's great looking car, but terrible underneath. Don't worry about it now. I was stoked to meet a Canadian, you know? I mean, that might as well have been Belarus, for all I know. I barely poked a noggin above the Mason Dixon for the first twenty five years of my life. So I get to meet a Canadian was a great triumph. We broke each other's mold though. Jared, of course, was expecting some slack jawed hillbilly spitting tobacco on the stoop of the house we both shared while I was expecting some apologetic, apoplectic like light beer drinker (laughter). So we surprised each other thankfully, and we were fast friends. Not least of which, because we were stuck with one another, but I think we had way had so much more in common than either one of us certainly thought. And to go back to Jared's collection. I mean, one of the first things I ever read from him was in a nutshell, which was shocking because he confessed at the time how little writing he'd actually sat down and done. And I knew he was politically minded, which was great because I was, as he mentioned earlier, I also studied journalism and and, you know, we had certainly had that in common and that both given up on our journalistic aspirations in favor of fiction. Initially at least. So we had we had too much in common, in fact, and an appreciation for the amber spirits, be them Canadian or Kentuckian in origin, certainly helped move things along. And I may come off more affable but I think I'm an equal misanthrope when all is said and done to our Canadian...
>> Brian: Yeah, you're a gregarious misanthrope.
>> George: I am. Because I like to fuck with people. So if you're not interesting, I'll make you interesting one way or the other. We'll get you enough use.
>> Brian: With enough George pours.
>> George: That's right. That's right.
>> Brian: You edited my novel so you know that I took my favorite line from you. You were talking about boring people and you were just like, I just want to tell him, like, you know, just do drugs (laughter). You're not interesting enough.
>> George: You've got to complicate yourself. Like you are tabula rasa right now. And you just need to sprinkle a little something onto yourself. Pick a drug. It could be anything but you, but you need to you need to complicate.
>> Brian: Yeah, yeah. Complicate the narrative. (laughter) Let's turn you from a John Grisham novel into a Langston Hughes poem.
>> George: Yeah, there you go. Your camouflaging into the beige of the walls. You're gonna need to you need to develop a little too enthusiastic of the taste for bourbon or conversation.
>> Brian: A borderline problematic drinking problem...
>> Jared: Well, those were two things that George and I really shared with each other when we lived together. Like he said, I think we both expected the absolute worst to be each other. I was expecting some like knuckle dragging Red state, You know, Cro Magnons hand (laughter).
>> Brian: Cro Magnon, that's a compliment.
>> Jared: I think he I think he summed up the archetypical Canadian pretty well so I won't improve on that. (laughter). So I won't try.
>> Brian: But yeah so when did you guys realize that you actually have a lot of crossover tastes?
>> Jared: Probably the first night I was in there or the second night. The first night was kind of chaotic. As I remember, we got in quite late and, like, blew up the mattress for myself. And I was introduced to George. We didn't really speak much. And I think maybe it was the second or third night that I was there. I was assembling some Ikea furniture and George offered me a Budweiser and we went and sat on the stoop and I believe we talked about Borges. We talked about postmodernism. We talked about Hemingway. We talked about Faulkner. I believe I asked George, in a very sort of like, almost like you better not get this question wrong kind of way. I asked him like, who's the greatest Southern writer and George said Faulkner. And I was like, that's right.
>> George: It was years later we went to Roanoke together.
>> Jared: That's right, and we would go visit Faulkner's house together years after that. So I wouldn't describe it as a lightning strike. But it was apparent to me almost right away that this was someone that I was going to get along with, which was relieving, since, you know, having to spend two years in a house with somebody who you don't really like or even like just a little bit could be excruciating.
>> Brian: I know all about that.
>> Jared: Yes, you do. (laughs)
>> Brian: You know my relationship with Kendra back in grad school. That was rough.
>> Jared: But we got along famously, and it should be said, by the way, that if we lived in a sitcom, our house would have been the main set. It would have been Jerry's apartment on Seinfeld. We hosted people throughout the entirety of that program.
>> Brian: That's very true and which is actually very meta because we would often put on Seinfeld on mute and possess a character, a piece.
>> Jared: Yeah. Assign each other character...
>> Brian: And improvise their dialogue. Those were some good times that is just a rung below the Star Wars Marathon, which actually is my favorite Stillwell moment because it was so much way were we're on the cusp of graduation, and I remember I had never bought so much weed in my entire life. But I think I bought like, a half an ounce and I was rolling a joint like every twenty five minutes or something. (laughter)
And we just sat down and watched every Star Wars movie in reverse, right?
>> Jared: We started off with Jedi and working back.
>> Brian: Oh God, that was masochistic bliss.
>> Jared: Yeah, we just ah, we just got fucked up and just riffed on the movie and just, like, made fun of it and quoted lines. And it was a great exercise in like a shared understanding of, like, what makes certain things funny, you know, like, we all laughed at the same things, you know? And it was one of those things where you feel like you're friends, like, really get you or really understand you and we all just kind of had the same sensibility. And it was revealed that watching those movies.
>> Brian: I think we also what we shared most is that we understood the absurdity of existence. Like we kind of looked around like why don't these fuckers find this funny? (laughter) But anyway our producers have an excellent idea. We need to go back and say who we were on Seinfeld because I kind of forget. I think I was Elaine. Was I Elaine?
>> Jared: No, no. George was George. Which you know, you know. Come on. I believe Brian, you had to have been Kramer. Because if there's a Kramer at all in our group, it's definitely you.
>> Brian: That's right. Yeah. Come on. Yeah, that's right. What the fuck is wrong with me? And Devon was Elaine. and then you were Seinfeld.
>> Jared: Yeah, which is appropriate. Katie wasn't there. I don't believe Katie was there that night.
>> Brian: Our producers are saying she was Newman. (laughter) Ah, God.
>> Jared: We had a lot of good times at that house. I miss that place.
>> Brian: Yeah, and it probably inspired your collection absolutely in no fashion at all. Right (laughter)? Other than other than you know, your underlying consciousness.
>> Jared: Well, three pieces that made it into the collection were penned at the desk at that house. "In a Nutshell", the drift piece, which is about the boy counting the tiles on the chair, and the suedehead story, which is about the two architects who traveled to the Ukraine and are inspecting the building site. So those three pieces lasted from the Sarah Lawrence days, quite surprisingly.
>> Brian: All three of those. All three of those which I've read, and those were penned in Stillwell, which means inside your serial killer room, I never understood how, a grown man could maintain themselves so...
>> Jared: Immaculately?
>> Brian: Just immaculately.
>> George: The forensic efficiency of a sociopath. (laughter) But it was beautiful. It made my room look like a tornado struck?
Brian George, remember when I was dared to lick your belly button when you passed out?
>> George: I do. I remember you informing me about that.
>> Jared: When did that happen?
>> Brian: I think that was at the end of our second year.
>> Jared: I have no knowledge of that event.
>> George: It was a chaotic time. (laughter)
>> Jared: There was some weird shit that went down at that house but I never heard about that.
>> Brian: Yeah, that was a great night. Too much alcohol in that house. Or not enough, or just the right amount.
>> Jared: Was that the night that I... I think I remember that night. I think that was the night that I took your car because there was an event on campus and there was this girl that I was kind of chasing, and I took your car and went to campus. And when I came back, you were just, like, hand off the bone, you know, wasted. (laughter) I think Michaela was in the sink? Was it that night?
>> George: That's right.
>> Brian: That could've been. Yeah, I think so. But anyway, let's get back on track here. Not that we weren't. We were just on a separate track. But I'm shunting.
>> Jared: But I shunt.
>> Brian: Yeah, how shall I shunt? But who were your influences at Sarah Lawrence professor-wise?
>> Jared: Well, of course, there's our good friend David Hollander...
>> Brian: He's going to be our second novel coming out on Animal Riot, so everyone should look forward to that.
>> Jared: Yeah, "Anthropica".
>> Brian: Yeah, he's, like, kind of the reason all of us fiction writers, like, almost like, kind of went there. I mean, he's like the reason so many people go to Sarah Lawrence. At least me and Katie. But, I mean, I know you and countless other people who've going to Sarah Lawrence as a grad program, pretty much like he's almost universally seen as the best professor there. I mean Garth was great. I mean, David has this kind of special ability to connect with students.
>> Jared: He does. Well David is definitely a magnet for a certain kind of student. I have to confess, I didn't know who David was. I hadn't done any research on it before I went to the school. In keeping with the anywhere but here attitude that I had when I was applying to grant programs. I think Katie said that she read like a novel from every single faculty member before she came to Sarah Lawrence?
>> Brian: Yes, she did. Which is crazy to me. Yeah. I mean, I think I read David's book. That might have been the only one I read before. I mean, just cause that he was kind of the reason I was going to go there, you know?
>> Jared: I confess that I actually didn't read anybody's novels. I barely even sort of glanced at that their profiles. Sarah Lawrence is one of the last schools that I applied to. It wasn't until I got there that people started telling me about this guy named David Hollander and how it seemed like we had a lot of things in common and we would sort of jive with each other philosophically and in terms of our taste in fiction. But I didn't take a class with David until the start of my second year. So the first year, the class that probably had the biggest impact on me was Garth Hallberg's class, which was all about dramaturgy in fiction. I have to confess, I was a bit of a pissant when I started at Sarah Lawrence.
>> Brian: Yeah, you were. (laughter)
>> Jared: Yeah, I and kind of acted like I doubted that there was anything that any teacher was going to tell me that was going to be useful.
>> Brian: And also also my favorite pissant Jared moment is our first semester in Mary LaChapelle's class and someone... I'm not going to, you know, obviously I don't even wanna name names here, but remember someone's story didn't it start with a dream or something?
>> Jared: Yeah. Apropo.
>> Brian: You know, I started your story and, you know, it started with the dream and I was just like ughhhh. (laughter) You just put your face in your hands and I'm like you just did that in a workshop. (laughter)
>> Jared: Well, it was, as I recall, the story began with a character coming out of a dream and then sort of doing a post game analysis of what the dream could mean. And that just seemed to me like a very bad way to start a story. And all I could do was muster a groan of discontent.
>> George: Can we talk for a minute, like all three of us, just for the benefit of some of our listeners who may not understand what is so hackneyed about beginning a narrative in this way? Can we just discuss real quick why this is inadvisable shared? Would you like to clarify? Given that you were the one that supplied the groan in question?
>> Jared: Well, for starters, I just don't think dreams are very interesting material for fiction. I mean, how many great books have you read that are about dreams? Or how many great books can you think of that have really great dream sequences in them or have any dreams at all in them? There's a few, maybe examples. "Finnegan's Wake" is one long dream, but "Finnegans Wake" is impossible to read. Kafka is all a dream, but it doesn't acknowledge that it's a dream, which is why it succeeds. It has its kind of own inner logic to it. Nabokov, I think, famously distrusted writing about dreams. Henry James said "tell a dream lose a reader". It's just not something that is universal. You can't grab onto it. You can't grab onto it in the way that you can with things in our social life. And that's probably why it doesn't succeed in any way on the page. It's because it's not universal. It's unique to you. It's what Freud called the polymorphous perverse. It's all you're sort of subconscious kinks in quirks in strange affinities and obsessions with holes and phallic structures and things like that. It's not interesting material for writing.
>> Brian: Yeah, I generally agree. All of these things, all these rules have exceptions, of course, but I always find dreams more than anything, I generally just find dreams to be boring as shit. Like you have to be able to really pull it back into a sort of comprehensible narrative because dreams are inherently incomprehensible. Even dream analysis is just kind of as fruitful as it can be. It's just incredibly hard work. And to do that work for a book and to make it digestible and like, somewhat entertaining, more than just some hodgepodge of meaning, I think it's just very difficult. Our producers are very intent on providing the example of "Fever Dream", which came out pretty recently. Which is an exception but I generally agree there's nothing more boring.
>> Jared: Well there's nothing more boring than listening to someone tell you about their dream, isn't there?
>> Brian: No (laughs)
>> George: It can be tough. The significance of it is, I think you touched on Jared, is subjective. So it's so difficult to justify that flight of sort of in narrative fancy within the narrative itself. It's just so difficult to to justify why I read that right? I accuse certain directors of this a lot. JJ Abrams being one that he just does not care. He's going to take you where he wants to take you. He doesn't care how how cheap it is. And that's the thing about dream sequences in the narrative that I find offensive. It's just this cheapening of the present moment in the narrative. You see this a lot in popular fiction and popular TV and cinema that you have these very well structured dreams that are thin recurring, perhaps to the character, and then they have to go back and figure the significant out. What is so and so trying to... what's my dead aunt trying to tell me about my job as an automotive salesman, right?
>> Brian: Or a barn assistant?
>> George: (laughs) Yeah, yeah. Or a barn assistant. What is my dead dog from the twelfth grade trying to tell me about the dangers of being a barn assistant (laughter). Just get into the fucking story. Why are we having dreams? I don't believe that dreams happen like that, right? You have a dream where it's you've gotten your pants off in the middle of an auditorium while Abraham Lincoln has given a speech. They're absurd The brain is not really going about its business, trying to help you figure out your life's problems. It's not like the brain's sitting back going "I bet that if I can just get Marylan Monroe do cart wheels down Fifth Avenue while they're passing in a prop plane, which is sky writing something about their father that they'll be able to figure out that they really need to quit their job and find another one. The brain doesn't it's just not it's nonsense. And that's what you don't use it in fiction. Don't do it.
>> Brian: Yeah, honestly, having gone through three years of psycho analysis, I don't need more dreams to analyse on in a book. (laughs)
>> Jared: True, although I should say at the moment I'm reading twenty "2666" by Bolano, and there's actually a few dream sequences in there that are not bad.
>> Brian: Yeah, I think he does that kind of thing a lot, and sometimes he pulls it off. Sometimes it's... I mean to be honest, one of the biggest things he suffers from is being boring as shit, so it's not really surprising. But yes, so, unfortunately, our producers and have to hop off in about ten minutes or so. So we were wondering if Jared, if you wanted to read like a section out of "In a Nutshell" if that possible.
>> Jared: I can if you give me a second to try to call it up. I don't know if that's probably the best story to read from because it's not really self contained. It's like one long paragraph.
>> Brian: That's true, it's just that we were talking about it. It would just be nice. You can choose something else if you if you really feel that desire.
>> Jared: All right, so I have something here. It's not from "In a Nutshell", because I can't find something that's self contained. But I do have an excerpt from another story that I can read if you want.
>> Brian: Yeah, let's do it.
>> Jared: So for context, this this is an excerpt from a story about a de programmed Islamist who is imprisoned in India. Sorry, excuse me. Not in India is imprisoned in Egypt and is then released and he de radicalizes and becomes something of a public intellectual and a force of, you know, de radicalization in the West.
>> Brian: Like are we talking like apostate or like still is like still follows Islam but is not radical anymore?
>> Jared: An apostate. The character was actually loosely based on people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Majaad Nawaz, if anybody knows who they are. And if they don't, I would recommend you look up who Majaad and Ayaan Hirsi Ali because they're great people doing great work that needs to be done. So they're sort of ex radical apostates. This guy's an ex radical apostate, say, who becomes sort of a public intellectual in the West, and he's in New York meeting with the editor from the publishing company who's going to publish his memoir. They go to the MoMA together and they look at modernist art, and then they're gonna walk back out down Fifth Avenue, and this is where the passage picks up.
--
And then they were out again on the elm-lined avenue, walking into a light snow, the warm
shop windows and the diode lights buzzing above; flags hung from the frontage, huge and
successive, nodding in the wind; and here again were the winter gatherers, each different from
before but identical en masse, being pulled into the orbit of the overbright evergreen at the centre of the plaza.
Around the corner, a different crowd was gathering under the crouching limbs of the bronze
Atlas statue. Across the street a scaffold was going up around St. Patrick’s Cathedral, climbing
its spires, crowding its rose window and making blocks of its gothic angles, the needle points
that knifed the air. But the platforms and steel continued up beyond the structure, so that at least
a full storey of space above the cathedral itself was occupied just with scaffolding, along with the
segment of sky contained between the spires. This lattice, now bound to nothing, seemed to be
the next stage in its development, its evolution, just as it was, so that it was no longer the frame
that enclosed the structure, but the structure itself, reaching up, describing the sky, the sea above.
This transformation was easily included among the soaring verticality of steel and glass in the
surrounding (Saks, Olympic Tower, Trump Tower)––another building undergoing maintenance
before the winter snow. This intersection of idols, inheritance and appropriated symbolism was
nonsensically and vertiginously layered, and it put into him the familiar angst of homelessness,
the absence of a firm place, the solidity and reliability of knowing and belonging. But there was
no condescension in the feeling, nothing “heretical,” or “profane” (as he would have once
described it). The feeling was, in fact, affirmative: speaking to America’s immaculate power of
integration and irony––those rip currents of modernity. And the pangs that came with these
currents were also its luxuries.
He’d considered moving to America many times. Each visit, he thought, would make the
induction final. This had always been a model society for those of lost or abandoned faith, as
well as those who considered themselves among the chosen and the righteous. Over 800 of these chosen and righteous––the defeated foot soldiers of the caliphate––would now be returning to the shores of the West, to Great Britain, a country––his country––which had failed modernity in
this respect. How many would be returning to the American continent? How many had left in the
first place? And all the others would be arriving as well––and were arriving at this very moment,
dropping into JFK and LaGuardia, nuclear families from all across Arabia and North Africa,
those now degraded Hobbesian states that were once named the nursery of civilization.
>> Brian: Very cool. Yeah. I have not read that one yet but I'm super pumped to read that.
>> George: Yeah, that's really good.
>> Brian: Was that at the beginning, Jared?
>> Jared: No, that's somewhere near the end.
>> Brian: Interesting. What struck me the most is that you began there and you know, this isn't the beginning of the story, as you just mentioned. But you began there with a very kind of, like, Jared esque metaphysical sort of drop in. You know, it kind of transitioned pretty seamlessly into a more internal like, paradoxically internal but collective sort of view of what's going on with, like, kind of the general feeling of, like, Islamic extremism and as you said the apostasy. I'm really excited to read that. And did you say the title for that? What was that called?
>> Jared: The title of that piece is called "The Lovers."
>> Brian: Interesting, which, based on that passage, you wouldn't be able to tell from it. The reason for that title is contained somewhere else in the story. It's actually the title of a Magritte painting that I really love.
>> Brian: Oh. Magritte. Love it. Yes, so tell us where we can get your book and any other information that you find pertinent.
>> Jared: Okay, well, the book will be available on March 15th on CrowsNest books.com, which is my publisher. It will be available exclusively on Crows Nest for about two months, and then sometime in the middle of May, it will have a wider release, and it will be available on other platforms like the Zon and bookstores nationwide hopefully. So if you're looking for it, that's where it's found. In addition to that, I have some journalism and some essays that can be found online on websites like 3 AM Magazine and Political Animal. At the moment, I'm also currently finalizing the last stages of the contract for an agreement with Political Animal to publish my first novel, "Venus and Document". So they're going to run that one.
>> Brian: Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is news. You you kept this under wraps. I didn't hear about this.
>> Jared: I did
>> Brian: Yeah. I think that's the right move. I mean, it seemed like the the agent wasn't getting it done. Although it's nice to have an agent on your side, though. Which is good.
>> Jared: Yeah. So the guys at Political Animal are going to publish "Venus and Document", the first novel, and hopefully that will be released in the Spring or Summer of 2020, next year.
>> Brian: Perfect. Yeah. Now you and David could go on tour together. Bussing it together.
>> Jared: That's right.
>> Brian: Fuck yeah. All right. Cool. I think we're good guys. And anything else you wanna mention, George, what do you got? Tell it. Give us a progress report on Total Recall 2.
>> George: Oh, man, you know, I've been thinking about it. I've been thinking more and more about Total Recall 2. The first one takes place on Mars, which is great. It's really good, but I think we got to go further. I think we've got to go to one of the moons of Jupiter for the next one. And, you know, if Arnold's not available, it's going to be tough. I don't know who else we got. The easy answer would be Chris Pratt, but frankly, I don't think he could do Total Recall. And I don't think Jason Mamoa could do it.
>> Jared: Yeah that's tough. I don't think he's kind of he's a little bit too sanguine. He's a little blithe.
>> George: Yeah, I want to see a man rip throats. I cannot watch Chris Pratt rip throats like Arnold. We're gonna have to deage him like we've done with Samuel L. Jackson and many others. We're gonna have to deage him and send his ass to Mars again. Maybe beyond.
>> Brian: Great. Yeah, We will package that little hot take as a preview for our Total Recall Two episode. Wait, actually, no Total Recall 2 Part 2, actually. Our previous episode will be called Total Recall 2.
>> Jared: Let's do this together.
>> Brian: Yes, absolutely. Yes. Let's do this together. #LetsDoThisTogether. Okay, That's it for today's episode. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and review on whichever platform you're listening. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at @AnimalRiotPress and Facebook and Instagram at Animal Riot Press or through our website animalriotpress.com. This has been the 13th episode of the Animal Riot podcast with me, your host Brian Birnbaum featuring George Sawaya and Jared Pollen, whose book The Unified Field of Loneliness is coming out on March 15th. And it's produced by Katie Rainey, without whom we would be merely three of Shakespeare's thousand monkeys banging on a typewriter .