Episode 44: Everything You Do Is Completely Meaningless But It Is Very Important That You Do It

December 26th, 2019
Hosted by Katie Rainey
Guest: David Hollander
Produced by Katie Rainey
Transcript by Jon Kay
Podcast Assistant: Dylan Thomas

We're back animals! And we've got a very special last episode of 2019 for you! Featuring the one and only David Hollander, author of L.I.E. and the forthcoming Anthropica from Animal Riot! Join David and host, Katie Rainey, as they talk about experimental fiction, publishing, the overwhelming nature of our world, and get a sneak peek at the forthcoming Anthropica, to be published in September 2020.

>> Katie: Welcome to the 44th episode of the Animal Riot Podcast brought to you by Animal Riot Press, a literary press for books that matter. I'm Katie Rainey, filling in for Brian Birnbaum while he’s taking some time off. It’s the 44th episode and the last one of 2019. But this is a really special episode not for those reasons, but because I get to sit down and chat with one of my favorite people in the whole world, David Hollander.

David Hollander is the author of the novel L.I.E., a Young Lions Fiction Award Nominee, and the forthcoming Anthropica, which is Animal Riot’s second book due out September 1st, 2020. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Fence, Agni, Unsaid, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Fantasy, among other reputable and disreputable publications. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and two adorable children and they dress up like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

>> David: That was before we thought Trump had any chance of winning the election. That was for Halloween. And I was Secret Service.

>> Katie: You were and the kids were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, which is the scariest thing you can be for Halloween.

>> David: Yeah. Right, Halloween was less than a month before the election. How do you like that?

>> Katie: Spooky. He teaches writing to writers who wanna teach writing to other writers at Sarah Lawrence College. You may or may not be able to find out more about him at www.longlivetheauthor.com. Hi, David.

>> David: Hello, Katie.

>> Katie: So before we really get going here, I want to talk about how we first met because it's a really cute story.

>> David: It is.

>> Katie: It's not actually how we met. But it's how I found you in this world and why I even ended up going to Sarah Lawrence in the first place.

>> David: So this is gonna be a story I don't know yet?

>> Katie: I think I have told you this story.

>> David: Really? I'm sorry if this is like a story that's really meaningful to you, and I don't remember.

>> Katie: I hope that's the case that's our relationship.

>> David: Okay. There's a lot I don't remember, But go ahead, tell me the story.

>> Katie: Well, so I like what is this 8,9 years ago now? When I first decided I was going to grad school, I applied to six schools and got into five of them. And one, I even got a full ride, which was exciting. But to make my decision, I decided to read one book by every current faculty member at every one of those schools. I'm such a Hermione in that way. And I read L.I.E. And that was what made my decision that day. I remember I was in Arkansas, sitting on my back porch was really hot in March because it's Arkansas and finished L.I.E. And put it down. And I was like, I'm going to Sarah Lawrence. And also for Brian Morton's "Window Across the River".

>> David: Yeah, I really like Brian's books, but I do not remember that story. I'm sure I've been told that story. And then you've probably read, L.I.E. more recently than I have.

>> Katie: Maybe I've read it again since then.

>> David: Yes, People reference it sometimes, and I really don't... I'm not lying at all. I don't even remember the plot points that they're mentioning. Yeah, it's really very wispy. And my memory. I more remember what was going on in my life when I was working on it and what I was thinking about and why I was writing it the way I was. Then I remember anything that's actually in it.

>> Katie: Well, why did you write it the way it was? What do you remember?

>> David: Well, I'm really glad you asked, because when that book came out, it, you know, critically, it did fairly well. More people liked it than disliked it, but the parts of it they seem to like where the parts that I didn't think mattered very much like the good reviews were mostly about how it was a convincing and unusual portrait of suburban malaise. But for me, that was just the material I had. And what I really wanted to write about was consciousness and selfhood. And this feeling at that point that was really sometimes difficult for me to navigate that I was not actually David Hollander. That I was kind of floating above him that I was like watching my life more than living my life. So all those like philosophical preoccupations, which you know, connected for me to things like Immanuel Kant and literary theory and to Borges and like these really headier things. All of that stuff was either ignored or pointed out as the books failure, right? And so that was really so... I remember all of those influences, and I remember the book growing out of experiences I had as an undergrad and studying with Rick Moody, who sort of introduced me to the idea that fiction could be more than storytelling. So it was like all these really important thought patterns and influences I think were driving that book, and I remember what it felt like to work on it and have conversations with my friend Michael Smith Welch about it, but I don't remember very well what's in the book.

>> Katie: Well, Sarah Lawrence, unfortunately, did not put me in your class my first year. I was very upset about it.

>> David: Had to wait.

>> Katie: I did. I had Brian Morton, which was a great class. I loved his novel class. One day we're gonna get Brian Morton on the podcast, although he has said no.

>> David: I think he's, um, just trying to live off the fame of his Twitter career.

>> Katie: He's very good at Twitter.

>> David: He is very good at Twitter.

>> Katie: Which will get more into Twitter later.

>> David: He'd be a great interview.

>> Katie: Yeah, well, Sarah Lawrence did not put me in your class and was very pissed off for a year. And then they assigned me a thesis advisor who did not care for my writing. Well, even before that, I got yelled at by a teacher who did not like my writing in their class. I've told you this story.

>> David: Do you want to say their names?

>> Katie: No, I can't.

>> David: Because if you said their names and I might say something bad about them, and then I'd be in trouble.

>> Katie: Yeah, so we're gonna keep it very careful. They no longer work there. I'll say that.

>> David: Yes.

>> Katie: Yeah, but I was pretty much in, like, a crisis of selfhood. By the time I reached your class, I, like, had convinced myself that I was just garbage and shit.

>> David: Yeah, well, that I remember. I remember the arc of your semester in my workshop really well, because there were a couple of early things that you that she wrote, like responses to little problems that given and things, and they were really cool. And there was definitely potential there. But by the end of that semester, you were writing some steps I just thought was really on fire. I was totally like blown away. I remember at one point writing in that margin of one of your manuscripts is something like, Holy shit. Katie, how are you doing this? It was just like one chilling and freezing after another. You know it is like reading Cormac McCarthy or something. So how anyone could have been looking at your stuff and not have seen enormous talent is sort of beyond me because that's the part you get good at spotting is talent. You become less good at knowing who will actually, like publish soon because your predictions about that could be wrong. But you can definitely see who has the raw talent.

>> Katie: Well, I went like, halfway through that semester in your class, I had started my thesis. And I remember in the morning I had a meeting with my thesis advisor, and I had, like, 1/2 hour break, and then I had a conference with you, and my meeting with my thesis advisor could not have been, like, more disheartening. In which she said, You know, the thing about time is that we can only move forward, and I just, like, felt so gutted by that comment. (laughter)

>> David: Yeah, there goes Faulkner.

>> Katie: I know, I just felt so gutted by that. And then I took a break and I was like, reading a book. And then I walked over to the conference and you told me it was the complete opposite.

>> David: Right. Yeah. And that, like, Yeah. The thing about it is I'm always right. Like I don't have a lot of confidence. I'm not confident about very many things, but I do feel like I'm always right when it comes to gauging student work and talent. And I think that a lot of writing teachers have this problem where no matter what they say, they're really looking for the same kind of product they would turn out. And when they don't see that, they feel like the student is somehow failing on. And also, I think, very few writing teachers think especially fiction writing teachers think about language. And so sometimes I mean, there have been people who have wanted to get admitted into our MFA program who have not gotten in. And that's because the package, maybe they've submitted to us, the stories aren't very well put together, right? There isn't like a strong sense of, you know, uh, the Chekhovian plot or worker wouldn't write. But for me, if I see, like, three good sentences back to back, I'm like, yeah, they're in because that's talent, you know, and it can be molded and in whatever direction that person ends up needing to be molded in. But yeah, I don't think a lot of people read that way.

>> Katie: Well, that's a really good segue into the way you write and what you teach and the way you teach because it is so completely different. I've never had a class like yours, And it was like what I had been looking for and didn't realize.

>> David: You should talk to the tenure board.

>> Katie: I know (laughter). Just hire me as your lawyer. Do you have a lawyer?

>> David: That would be great. If I could just sit there silently and say I would like to defer this question.

>> Katie: I would be great at that. So it really has a lot to do with the structure to you. And just like the way you talk about writing. What are those? I'm not gonna say like four things. I don't know if you've changed since then., You talk about stories and you don't talk in terms of characters or plot.

>> David: That's true. What happened was, um that's connected to this course that I had started teaching to undergrads right around the same time you were in my graduate workshop. Which of course, that I called the enemies of fiction. And, you know, I was thinking about the John Hawkes quote about how he began. He began writing with the belief that plot, character, setting, and theme were the enemies of the novel.

>> Katie: You introduced me to John Hawkes. "The Lime Twig" is my favorite book.

>> David: My God, that book is just so fucking good. Yeah, but, uh, most people hate that book.

>> David: You know, I tried to I was in some air slash scare quotes. I was in a book club with these two other writer friends and I got to pick the first book on and I picked the Lime Twig by John Hawks. And, uh, my friend Eduardo was a great writer. A great novelist. He reported to the third person in the book club. I can't believe David gave us this book. This book is fucking unreadable, right? So not everyone loves John Hawkes, right? But the people who love him really love him, which goes back to teaching. You have to remember that just because you're not the reader for something, those readers don't exist. But that course, the enemies of fiction tried to replace those four categories: plot, character, setting, and theme, which Hawkes had imagined as his enemies with four other categories. And I, you know, I was just trying to figure out What is it that I value and fiction. What am I looking for if I'm not really looking for that for, like the clean plot arc and Resolution and all that nonsense? And so those categories were language, structure, voice, and ideas are concepts, right? And so I started organizing my classes around, though it is like four dividers, and I still do that, although I don't always say that I'm doing, but that's usually what I'm thinking when I figure out reading lists.

>> Katie: I totally stole that from you and use that in my high school curriculum.

>> David: Oh. That's great.

>> Katie: It's a great way to teach teenagers.

>> David: I do with my middle school kids that I teach, you know them remember?

>> Katie: Oh, yeah. Up in Cold Springs. Yeah, well, John Hawkes, in your class at the end of the semester. We're supposed to bring in a masterpiece or something that we want to share.

>> David: Yeah. To read aloud.

>> Katie: I remember. I read the greatest paragraph that's ever been written. Which is it? From "The Lime Twig", which is talking about this man beating this woman.

>> David: Oh yes.

>> Katie: It's the most beautiful paragraph ever and it's horrifying. I wish I had it in front of me. I would read it, but it's talking about the strip of fat across her stomach and a sound like a dead bird falling into a field.

>> David: Yeah. I know that section very well.

>> Katie: And I read it with such a religious fervor.

>> David: Yes.

>> Katie: When I looked at, it was like...

>> David: Like crickets.

>> Katie: And you were like... almost laughing in the corner. 

>> David: Yeah. Yeah. At the distance between experience and the reaction, it was great.

>> Katie: It was a really great moment. I will never forget that in your class.

>> David: Was Brian in that class?

>> Katie: Brain, Birnbaum.

>> David: Yeah.

>> Katie: No. He's a year behind me. I did not meet him until I graduated, actually. Yeah. And I didn't like Brian Birnbaum.

>> David: I don't think anyone liked him.

>> Katie: Well, I didn't like him because you liked him.

>> David: Ah, yes. Yeah.

>> Katie: And you had mentioned him a few times in conference with me. And I'm like, Who is this fucking kid?

>> David: Yeah, Brian Birnbaum had come and visited my class when he was trying to decide whether or not to enroll. And so I knew him, actually, he was a visitor to a class... I wish you were here because he was super rude, like I remember him like chewing gum the whole time. Like, I've never really wanted to tell anyone to spit out their gum. Except for that one day where I was like you. But then afterward, he wrote me some, like we had some long email exchanges when, you know, he was trying to make a good decision about where to go. And I was telling him honestly, like, Well, there are some things about this program that, you know, that might not be a good fit. And I think he appreciated the fact that I wasn't trying to, like, sell the school to him. I was like, I have no reason to try to sell it to you. This is what it is. And I said, You know, if you come here, you get to study with me. That could be really good.

>> Katie: Well, you liked him enough to mention him in my time with you.

>> David: Sorry, Katie. I do that all the time that I talked about one student with another student.

>> Katie: Yeah, well, I didn't like him. And then we met. And within, like, two seconds of us meeting I was like, Alright, I see David likes him and we had a really good conversation on DFW.

>> David: Both of you guys sort of cut through a lot of, you know, bullshit. And there's a lot of bullshit.

>> Katie: So Well, speaking of like, infinite jest and DFW I mean, like, do you consider yourself like a postmodernist? What is postmodernism anyways anymore? Like, do you consider yourself one talking about these differences? Like the way you look at writing.

>> David: Yeah, well, I don't know that the label helps anyone understand what anyone else's work is like. I know when I was in my mid twenties and reading like a lot of the American postmodernists, you know, uh, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme and Angela Corder. Although she's not American. But I was discovering this thing that I didn't know until then fiction could do or was allowed to do because a lot of the stories I was falling in love with were sort of fractured, and they were shattering the idea that fiction should resemble reality. They were shattering the idea that fiction should be earnest or reverent in any way. And in some ways, the way it actually feels to me to be alive and in the world was captured better by those crazy postmodern texts than by well behaved books with well worked out plots and endings. So something was going on for me when I discovered what people call postmodernism. That was really important. But what I thought Wallace was trying to do, and this probably is close toe to my objective with Anthropica. I thought he was trying to use some of those post modern methods fracture and play disjointedness and delayed gratification, right? I thought he was using some of these techniques. Techniques. It sounds wrong. It's too cold. Some of what he loved about postmodernism was certainly informing a book like Infinite Jest. But it was also a book that had a heart, right? And I thought he was trying to figure out a way to take what he had loved about postmodernism and kind of marry it to what he loved about modernism. And I've heard it described. There's a critic, Steven Steven something.

>> Katie: Oh, I know what you're talking about.

>> David: He wrote a book about Franzen, but he mentions Wallace in passing, but anyway, he was trying to define this idea of post postmodernism, which, you know, it's a lot of syllables, but, you know, as this idea of sort of bringing matters of the heart and really human concern and compassion into the a sort of formal matrix of postmodern writing and that, you know, that is what I'm trying to do. It's weird because you feel like some readers, they're only going to see one part, and some are only going to see the other part. You know, like readers who are programmed to look for a post modern methods and means that's what they'll see and readers who really are more probably in the majority of readers who are just looking for, like stories about humans in conflict with one another suffering, they're only going to see you, Did you think of is the modernist parts. But for me, the importance of the way I write is that those two things are living together and, yeah, just trying to in some way articulate a kind of fiction that matches my own sort of teeter totter between like total nihilism and total belief, which in any given hour I've swung through that 100 times.

>> Katie: I think that the biggest thing for me and I think you even mentioned it in... We do these things that Sarah Lawrence called craft talks in which a faculty member will give kind of a specialty talk on their on their writing, and you gave a craft talk when I was in school towards the end, and you even said like you know at the end of this really great craft talk, which hopefully will publish at some point coming out somewhere, you know, you were taking questions from the students and one asked, You, like essentially, why you write this way? Or why you read, who you read? And why do you really respond to it? You responded by saying, You know, I have suffered. There's been a lot of pain in my life, and I felt something like I was understood by these stories and like that was the way that I have had felt that these texts, while as nihilistic as they might seem at times, like the paragraph I'm talking about with John Hawkes. I've never felt more understood in that moment, and that's where it really resonated. And that's why that fiction matters to me like it's like Cormac McCarthy, I mean, like, he can write, you know, Blood Meridian about the fucking judge just wreaking havoc on a countryside. And I feel better than had I read some, like, uplifting story, you know?

>> David: Yep. I think we're probably all looking to feel seen and known when we read literature. And since we're looking to be seen when we read a book, we can, I mean for me it's not like I feel crazy or anything when literature doesn't reflect me back to myself. But I have trouble engaging with a lot of books that just seem... a lot of wood is called literary fiction. It seems to me like just a better dressed version of Hollywood cliche like it seems like it's the same kind of like three acts. It's just the words or better so, like, if somebody can write like, you know, pretty descriptions, somehow they're able to be considered more literary. But they're telling the same basic lies and embracing the same systems that I think literature ought to be trying to expose and rail against. Literature should be an active resistance. This is why I love "Push the Bully" so much.

>> Katie: Yeah.

>> David: Your no is still stronger than your yes. From Stanley Elkin's story "Poetics for Bullies". And I think you know this. I told you that that craft talk you mentioned I've been trying to develop a more cohesive essay out of it. That would be, you know, to be read rather than to be spoken. And somehow this thesis has something to do with resistance. Like what makes literature great for me has something to do with, like refusing all systems, refusing the status quo. You know, it's like the sort of damage please or whatever that dangles over a ruler head. You have to be willing to sit in the throne knowing that it's all gonna end, you know, and being aware of the transience both of our lives and of our whole species and all of this stuff that, like, just got here and will be gone before the universe can blink. And I feel like literature that is unaware somehow of our tenuous position is not reflecting me back to myself.

>> Katie: There's an interesting phrase: reflecting back me back to myself, especially in like the current literary landscape and like what we're looking at and like, you know, there's people really advocating for books that reflect them and their identity. But what you're talking about is like you could read like I'm thinking about Otessa's "McGlue"  that is a book that I totally feel that reflecting back to me. But that has nothing to do with me and my identity/

>> David: Right.

>> Katie: That's like a really interesting conversation, especially today.

>> David: Well, sure, because it's true. Right now, people seem to be retreating into smaller and smaller identity boxes. And that doesn't seem like the kind of connection we ought to be looking for. I just think that the entire species is in peril. Right?

>> Katie: Okay, well, we had a Rosetta interruption. Well, let's talk about Anthropica. Is it An-throw-pica or an-thro-pica? How do you want?

>> David: I say An-thro-pica because the way I would say it is like the anthropic principle. Yeah, well, that I don't really I don't really care how people say okay, as long as they buy it.

>> Katie: Well, what does Anthropica mean? There's a subtitle too.

>> David: Yes, the subtitle is new. So the anthropic principle is this idea that to boil it down that, like, humans are the center of the universe, Right? So for me, the Anthropica, which is sort of the name that Stuart, a character in the book, actually gives to the universe he gives to the universe because his discovery is that the whole universe is only here because humans want it to be. That human desire is that is all there is. So for me, it's kind of like a joke that takes a scientific theory to its extreme.

>> Katie: Well, And the Anthropica theory is that, like the world's resource is essentially run out, like every eight days or something like that?

>> David: Yeah, I think it's a day that has changed. It was 30 then it was eight. I can't remember. The idea is that he has Stuart Dregs has basically run the numbers and he's looking at how much oil and coal and water like, how much we're consuming every day and based on what there is on Earth, you know, he's created this really complex software program based on what there is and what we're using. We exhaust all of the Earth's resources in a matter of days, and so he's asking, Well, how could that be? That's not, strictly speaking, possible. And yet it is. And so, you know, from there he developed this theory that it must only be here because we wanted to be here somehow. Our desire for it is replenishing.

>> Katie: I have been walking with you on the street before, and you have stopped me. And you have said, Where the fuck does all this come from, Katie? With all this power lines stuff. So where does that... have you always been that way? Since a kid, like where you are overwhelmed?

>> David: Oh, yeah, Yeah, I just, I remember asking my father on a drive once about, like, highways and how far they went, you know, And just the idea that... even just thinking about roads, right? Like, how on earth could we have poured this much asphalt all over the planet? Right. And, you know, the entire planet could be circled in a matter of hours in a swift flying jet. It just doesn't seem big enough to sustain the rates of consumption of billions of people.

>> Katie: That we have enough trees to bring...

>> David: How could there be enough trees? That's I mean Yeah, and really, how can there be enough coal that we're still burning coal, right? I mean, 7.5 billion people needing stuff powered through, you know, coal consumption. Like how? That just even now, talking about it that seems crazy to make a fact that that could be true. So I think Dregs might be onto something in the book.

>> Katie: You have in your press kit a really good quote. But I just want to read because I used it as the very beginning, cause I think it like I don't know. I think it just puts into the book into a good light or just shows kind of like what you're doing and what we're talking about here you say. Fact, 18 million tons of coal burned globally each day. Fact, 80 million barrels of oil burned globally each day. Fact, 10 million trees, shredded and pulped each day. It didn't really take 24 gigabytes of RAM or his software design prowess to verify an inconvenient truth that every thinking person had already at some point intuited. None of this shit was actually possible. And I love that quote. I read that and I was like, I'm using that for everything.

>> David: I like that too. That was fun to hear you read it.

>> Katie: Is that right? Is that actually 18 million tons of coal. Is that what we burn?

>> David: Yeah, I think those numbers, I should... Yes, but I think they might be on the modest side. A couple of them, I was told when a friend read the book that he thought, based on his own quick research, that those numbers might be higher. But yeah, I'm trying to be accurate based on what I could hunt down.

>> Katie: Yeah, there's also I mean, that's kind of like the scientific part of the book that's happening. So you have this, like, very like, I don't know, almost kind of like the mathematical portion of the book. One character is... he has a whole thing with math. His math.

>> David: His math. Yes, I love when people make fun of his math.

>> Katie: But, like really huge parts of the book are failure and desire. I mean desires. What in Stuart Dregs the scientists theory is what's keeping the world going on then. So many characters are, just like plagued by their great debacles and their failure. One character sounds very, very familiar or a lot of them. They all do, really, But Grace Kitchen, she's a failed writer and you're in her eyes. So what, I guess...

>> David: I'm wondering if there's a question at the end of that.

>> Katie: Yeah, well, I mean, you've written a lot about that, like, in general, and a lot of your stories, like failure comes up and desire, and yeah, I guess just like, why are those why did those things drive you so much? And like, are they so prevalent in your work?

>> David: Yeah, Well, I think desire is prevalent in my work because, you know, desire is suffering, and if we can't kill it, and so we're always gonna suffer. I really do think suffering is what unites us all. You know, just to go back to the conversation about, like, identity, right? You can bet whoever sitting across from you is in pain. That's like, that's kind of a given. And I tried to start conversations from there, right? It's what unites us. As far as failure goes, I think you know. So I published a book in 2001 and I really thought I was gonna be like, the next literary big thing, you know? That book was published in a really big way by Random House. I was being, you know, driven around in black Town cars to readings and asked to do like TV appearances, all kinds of stuff that seemed to herald... that seemed to confirm this belief I had at the time that I was better than everyone, so it was really nice... It was a nice period of ignorance and bliss. But over time, you know, I continued to write books and no one wanted them, and they were getting weirder and darker. And so until Animal Riot wanted this book, you know, we're talking about, like, 18 years having written five other books that no one wanted and just feeling like with each one and hope was harder to to sort of maintain. But that's certainly not the only failure I've had in my life. You know, I've... There's a lot in the book about sports like Finn who is the guy who does all the math, is also an ultimate Frisbee player, which is a sport I have played. I have played at the highest level of my sport for many years, and I was just thinking about all the different ways in which I was psychologically deficient in that part of my life, too, and as a result, had failed in certain ways, whether or not they mattered to other people. So some of the failure stuff is personal. But the other part is, I feel like most of us are probably defined at least as much by our failures as by our successes. But no one really wants to talk about that in the same way. You meet someone in line at the grocery store, you're not supposed to tell them that you want to die. You're supposed to tell them how nice the weather is. So they're so there's something about, a, I don't know, trying to use my fiction as a way to deal with some of the issues that you can't discuss in line for groceries.

>> Katie: I'll say since we decided, you know, since we worked out the contract, the verbal contract and then the actual one of publishing your book, you've seen more ecstatic about fiction writing than you have in a number of years.

>> David: Oh, yeah. That's true. I would say that I probably had given... So when I finished Anthropica, 3/4 When did I send it to you? A long time ago.

>> Katie: Yeah. After many years of me hounding you. Yeah. Yeah. So I finished it a long time ago.

>> David: And I really thought this has got to be the book, right? Like I knew it was good. And then when I couldn't get anyone to buy into it, you know, a couple editors at big, big houses, they liked it, But they were like, Oh, we could never get it passed our...

>> Katie: Yeah, I'm interested in that. Why? Because of the book is fucking phenomenal.

>> David: I mean, I honestly, I did. I didn't know that I had done something good and original, but then when no one wanted that, I did feel like, Well, that's it. Like I don't have any. I don't have anything left in the tank. You know, this is like a bunch of books now, and it even became harder to teach because you feel like you don't really have a platform if you're not putting books out. And so my attitude toward fiction had become something like, Well, it's just like a secret hobby I engage in. Like putting ships in bottles or something like it seemed to lose any real sense of weight in my life. And of course, you know, I'm happily married. I have two kids, and they're often like the center of my life, too. And so it was really easy just to, you know, focus everything on them. You know, they're still obviously the most important thing. But but, yes, literature and my part in it had seemed to sort of dissolve a little bit and its significance. And then when you guys said you wanted to publish the book and gave me the opportunity to go back and start looking at the book again, I would say that, Yeah, it's true. I was sort of, you know, my own fire was reignited. And, you know, it's good to feel like you're a practicing artist, not just somebody trying to teach other people to be practicing artists.

>> Katie: Yeah, yeah, I'm just I'm so interested. We've had this conversation on the podcast about, like why certain books don't get published. You can read a book and be like Holy fuck, this is a masterpiece, which we've had several other readers so far read it and you're gonna read a little bit today on the podcast, which is exciting for me. I could reread it, and I have now over the years, several times.

>> David: You have, yes.

>> Katie: But like why certain books don't get published in the first place. I don't know.

>> David: You know what's frustrating? Because I see it with my students as well. Like, you know, I've had a number of students published books, and I've always been really happy for them. But some of the students who have written what I see are the best books have a harder time getting them published. And, um, you know, it's like people resist the thing that doesn't resemble the product they know. And in this case, the product that they know they can sell the as they've sold it before. And sometimes they forget that, like really like some of the some of the books you know on their list were books that were quite unusual on that. But yes, so it's hard to get people to take a chance. And it's also, I mean, I don't know. In my case, all the people with the most power have told me, not in this exact way, but have indicated that there's something wrong with my work, like there's something wrong with what I'm doing and it makes you feel crazy, you know, because you're reading the things that those same people in power are like applauding. And just lionizing and consider like that the highest execution of the form. And you're like, Yeah, I mean, that's okay, It's certainly doing the things that novels do, right? Sometimes it feels like everyone just wants to put the needle down on a record called Golden Oldies and enjoy its melody.

>> Katie: Well, I feel like we've talked a lot of shit here in big terms so maybe we should put our money where our mouths are and see what happens. Who knows? Maybe people will universally rise up against us now after this and the planet will fall apart.

>> David: Well, I'm not. For the record, I really don't. I don't want to display everyone should love the books they love.

>> Katie: Sure.

>> David: And the fact that a lot of people love a lot of books that I think are just okay doesn't mean that I'm right. It just means that I have to believe I'm not alone in the universe and that there are other people like me who are looking for the kind of book I'm looking for.

>> Katie: Yeah.

>> David: And I feel they are being underserved in a lot of ways by the literary community. And they're definitely out there. The thing is, they may not. There may not be as many of them. And so everyone is just playing to, you know, play the statistical game. And but yeah, I'd like To remind myself to be careful because it's true. We are talking a certain amount of trash, but I don't think that these books are not good. These books that don't speak to me, I think they're very good. That's how they get out there in the first place. It's just that I think there's a lot of other stuff that is as good or, you know, for me better or more relevant that has a harder time getting out there. I really I'm not trying to, like, alienate anyone. You know, I tell my students all the time, like no one can tell you what you love, right?

>> Katie: But I think in general, like you can say more difficult anything with a whiff of experimental language in it is generally the hardest stuff to get out there. And there are writers across a broad variety of backgrounds and cultures that write this more experimental stuff and have a hard time finding a home.

>> David: It's true.

>> Katie: I don't know. I have no problem talking trash.

>> David: Ok. Good.

>> Katie: That's why we want to publish the books we wanna publish, right?

>> David: Of course. Yeah. In some ways, it's reactive. You're looking at what's missing and you're trying to fill the gap. It's admirable.

>> Katie: What are you gonna what party reading from?

>> David: Well, it looks like I'm going to read Chapter 25.

>> Katie: That's helpful.

>> David: Yes, I'd like to say the numbers so people will know that I've worked hard, like others must be 24 preceding chapters. And yeah, and there's a lot of chapters in the book, 70 or something. This Chapter 25 is a piece. So, as you have intimated, there are many characters in the book. One of the characters is a man named Henry who is suffering from ALS and is becoming slowly locked in to use the nomenclature of his disease. The argo, might be a better word there. Anyway, as he's becoming locked in, he's discovering that he has access in some weird way to the desires of other people and is beginning to discover that he may even be able to control or manipulate those desires in some way. So the piece I'm about to read is the first piece in which this is starting to become manifest for him, so you won't really hear Henry's name until until the end of this chapter.

>> Katie: You read this for the very first Animal Riot Reading, too.

>> David: I think you're right. And it's probably the same as it was then. Although I probably made some edits for that so that it would stand alone a little bit better. Yeah, so now there's this issue where the microphone angle of the podcast is making it difficult for me to see the work. But I'll do my best.

>> Katie: That's all right. That sounds good.

================

Excerpt of Anthropica by David Hollander (Animal Riot Press, September 1st, 2020)

On the streets of lower Manhattan, in the middle of a bright late-October day whose sunshine possessed a seasonal pumpkinish quality, a yellow cab’s driver was lost momentarily in an internal litany of accusations against spouse, God, and country (both the United States and the country of his birth, Pakistan) when he made an aggressive left off of Canal to raise a veritable symphony of horn-blowing from those myriad travelers forced to reluctantly uphold the social contract by tapping their brakes, an inconvenience for which no forgiveness could be brokered, neither on earth nor in heaven, this left-turning Pakistani-American swiveling his head defiantly toward those righteously indignant drivers and offering with his right hand an obscene gesture just as his left hand, which loosely gripped the faux-leather steering wheel coverlet, felt the percussion of impact, the front bumper having met with something heavy but yielding and then an instant later a small squeal (perhaps his own) cut through the cabin and the woman he’d struck arrived at the terminus of his windshield which spiderwebbed but did not give, and he thought he saw in the flash of her bewildered face a kind of knowledge of all the lesser crimes he had committed on this day (and days prior) that would now be dwarfed not only by the charges of vehicular manslaughter but also by the guilt and regret he would carry inside himself henceforth, not to mention all the blame he’d harbor against the forces conspiring to ruin his entire disposition on this particular day thereby leading to the careless left turn on which his life was apparently destined to hinge, though at this particular moment his brain was releasing a flood of endorphins into his system such that he exited the cab and knelt before her ruined body in a state of total calm, with the smell of grease and petrol hanging thick in the air and rendering the orangey light heavy and woolen such that he felt the urge to remove the light from the bloodless sack of bones that had only recently been a real live woman and which now lay defeated within a ring of witnesses summoned by her sacrifice. The driver put both hands on his head, as if breathing deep after a strenuous workout, and in his brain pit he simply wished for it to not be real, he wanted it not to have happened and strangely trusted that this wanting would be enough. And of course he had no idea that at that very instant in Florence, Italy, a woman and her lover had just completed their obligatory tourist’s climb to the top of the Duomo to look out across the twilit city whose notched ceramic roofs glowed a deep ocher while in the distance a blue-silver river snaked through the foothills surrounding the city proper where, the woman imagined, other lives were unfolding in a kind of idyllic grace. She saw in her mind’s eye acres of unruined countryside and a huge peasant’s table at which neighboring families drank wine made from their own grapes and laughed and touched each other lightly while a matriarch beckoned from the door of a farmhouse in the dying light, and this American tourist woman wondered if the young man beside her dreamt of such a life while the young man, for his part, was struck anew by the woman’s beauty and his good fortune and as he held her hand there against the railing at the top of the Duomo images of her naked body, her warmth and her smell and the feel of her small breasts in his hands, flittered through him, as did the first ruined cells that would a year from now spell testicular cancer and a year after that his death, but right now these lovers hoped only that each shared the other’s private longings and neither of them could imagine that any force on earth could supersede their wanting, despite the fact that they did not know the shape of the universe nor the fact that at that very same moment an Alaskan wildfire fighter—what they call a “smokejumper”—was furiously digging a line a mile beyond the hot zone when his radio crackled and a superior’s voice informed him of a sudden bizarre shift in wind speed and bearing that was almost as unprecedented as the fire itself was at this time of year in this region, and yet here he was digging through the still-soft soil of an arid pine forest 15 miles outside Anchorage suburbs with eagles soaring above not in their usual capacity as alpha-predators but as an army retreating in the same direction that he was now informed to retreat because the blaze was bearing down on him, and what was his current position exactly and could he huff it over to the ravine on Jockey’s Edge because this was a total shitstorm and the air cover was still forty miles north do you copy over, but he could already hear the monster screaming toward him and casting its hot tentacles of flame out over the tree line and although he had of course always known that his work was a little bit crazy still he’d never once considered this no-win scenario, he didn’t know a single man who’d died fighting fire, and even had he considered the possibility of his own death—and now the flames were ripping through the old growth so that staring off into the middle distance he had the impression that the forest had been torn open to reveal an inferno that it had always hidden and that backlit the veil of earth and sky—even then he would not have envisioned doing what he did next, which was not to make his own wingless flight toward a ravine unlikely to save him from the juggernaut whose heat was of an order that no earthly heat approximated, in fact he could feel already that his blood was hotter (what it felt like was like he was also the fire), no, he did not flee but only dropped his shovel in the dirt and kneeled in the loam and began praying for his little girl Wendy, now five years old, praying for her to live a good and happy life, he closed his eyes and felt the hair on his forearms singe and he did not know it but he was repeating the words, Jesus Christ have mercy on her soul, he thought of the little girl’s smile and the way she sort of glowed with white light, emanating her own private energy signature, he prayed that she would be spared pain and that wherever he was now going the energy signature would be there, too, he wanted the part of himself that was her to go on forever, he wanted it with an intensity that could drive turbines, and as he waited to know what it would feel like when he left this earthly tangle of suffering and need he did not know (of course not, how could he know?) that right then, in a ranch-style three bedroom situated in the dry red dust and clay of a desert suburb sprung up (i.e., the suburb) some two decades earlier on the outskirts of Tempe, Arizona, a 15 year old boy was on the internet ogling with an intensity akin to worship short videos of young and largely interchangeable men engaging in a grisly assortment of sex acts, their hairless bodies contorted into positions completely useless for anything but these highly specific micro-activities, the boy whispering derisive evaluations into the close-smelling air of his bedroom, Disgusting, Gross, Urgh, as he leaned into the screen and imagined their hands on his bare chest, their mouths on his thighs, his closed window shade glazed like a deep-fried doughnut by an early afternoon sun that even in October seemed intent on vitrifying the entirety of this bone-dry State of the Union made temporarily habitable by a hundred-thousand air conditioners humming off-key and without cessation, the boy’s housing grid vibrating with electrical current derived from unthinkably enormous coal-fired generators somewhere out in the middle of this endless fucking desert (and even the boy knew in the reptilian part of his brain that it would require near infinite quantities of coal to sustain this paradigm and that it simply was not possible if considered rationally as a kind of Problematic), and the boy imagined what might be said or done to those daring to “come out” in the conservative precincts of Tempe, he imagined Todd Barone—football-playing meathead and gleeful torturer of the meek—following him home after school, forcing his way into this very home and doing very, very bad things to the boy and his family, he imagined the word “fag” carved into his chest with a razor blade, he imagined (for some reason) crosses burning on his front lawn (which lawn was the same patch of dead straw that cinctured each identical half-acre property as far as the eye could see), he imagined “I Like To Suck Dick” scrawled in black sharpie on his locker, and worse things, things involving animal blood and things involving matches… but he wasn’t gay, he couldn’t be, and he watched the naked men aglow on his computer screen and he touched his erection with a desperate, hollow feeling in his chest and he thought of a shy boy in his class named Liam, he imagined Liam’s palms on his naked back and he felt himself filled to bursting like a cloth bladder with a fluid called “desire” and he said it aloud, “Gross. I’m not gay,” and then his 15 year old body convulsed with its latest orgasm, the warm ejaculate shot from the fist that clutched the erection onto the boy’s bare stomach, and then he was quietly crying there in the middle of his room in the middle of an untenable desert, crying with a shame that threatened to set him ablaze and burn the entire suburb to ashes.

But he could not know, not one of them could know, that in a high-ceilinged room whose skylight looked myopically upward toward a heartless blue sky, a wheelchair-bound former professor whose suicide had been diverted by a Hungarian madman (or visionary) intent on eradicating the human species sat motionless while a dozen simpletons dress as spermatozoa danced around him in clumsy arcs as if in celebration of his disease, the man’s breath fed to him through nasal tubes, his body a locked box into which his mind receded deeper every day, as if sucked inward toward some cosmic singularity, this man named Henry wondering what these visions—of the cab driver, of the young woman atop the Duomo, of the man beside her filled with longing and gratitude, of the smokejumper awaiting his demise, of the crying boy unwilling to accept his queerness and doomed to a double life of denial and pursuit—were, for they arrived within the locked box with great clarity and dimension and they seemed to have something important to tell him, in the same way that his dream of dragging a Hefty bag filled with the parts of a man he’d killed through dark city alleyways had something important to tell him, in the same way that the other increasingly acute vision—of enormous bipedal robots calling out chess moves into a dimlit and empty hangar—had something to tell him.

And there were more visions, too, some more easily accounted for than others. He had visions of his own healthy, young body. Visions of his ex-wife’s nakedness beneath him. Visions of hundreds of dead passengers on a commuter train that threaded through a strange and isolated city surrounded by great marshy fields of rice. He was a dying man but he felt so alive. He tried to beckon the Hungarian over to his side. He nodded his head spasmodically. He blinked. He twitched an index finger. He, Henry, had become something. The world quivered with desire and he absorbed it into his own. He was nearly locked in. He was a bomb casing. He was the weapons-grade plutonium of wanting. He was not dead yet, and was no longer sure he ever would be.

================

>> Katie: Mmm, man, I forgot we were even recording the podcast for a minute. I just got sucked into that. (laughter)

>> David: Yeah, thank you. I forgot where we were and what we were doing.

>> Katie: Yeah. I would like you to always read to me always. You do have such a good reading voice.

>> David: That's what you think. You would get bored pretty quickly.

>> Katie: Well, and what our listeners do not get to see is that you just make a lot of gestures when you read as well.

>> David: Yeah, it was funny. I realized it's important when I was just reading that passage that I was doing that and that there was no need to. There was no audience, but somehow it's almost reflexive at this point. It helps me. It helps me be in the reading.

>> Katie: Well, it's about an hour. And so I could sit here probably all day and keep talking to you.

>> David: I guess it's time.

>> Katie: I have to do the things that are meaningless, but that we must do. It's very important that we do them.

>> David: Yes. That is the title of my craft talk.

>> Katie: What is it exactly?

>> David: "Everything You Do Is Completely Meaningless But It Is Very Important That You Do It".

>> Katie: Yeah, I feel like that's the title of this podcast.

>> David: Yes, yes, let's use that for everything we can. I believe Gandhi said that, but there's a sentiment like it in the Bhagavad Gita, which is where I thought I was stealing it from, but I think it's actually Gandhi.

>> Katie: Well, thanks, David, for being on. This is fun.

>> David: I hope I didn't talk too much.

>> Katie: That's the point of this. But we'll have you back. There's so much more we didn't begin to talk about.

>> David: That's true. You know, I always have this feeling when, uh when I'm talking about my we'll talk about anything, my writing or my life or anything else that I'm just kind of making it up And that if you were to ask me the same set of questions tomorrow, I'd give a completely different set of answers, and I wish it was a different way. But there always is something about it that feels a little made up.

>> Katie: We'll have you back on and figure it out and then we'll compare.

>> David: In fact, you could just do it like somebody accusing a suspect, you know, on 7/20 2019 you said the following.

>> Katie: As just like a little aside going out. So whenever a faculty member gives a craft talk, there's always a student that introduces them. And I wanted to introduce you. Obviously but somebody else would beat me to it. I won't name them.

>> David: Yes, I know who it was.

>> Katie: Yeah, which their introduction was fine. But I wrote one that at one point when I introduce you for reading, I'm going to read. But it essentially has to deal with as if you are on trial and I am your lawyer appealing to the council people and your work you're about to read is the evidence.

>> David: That sounds fantastic. I have a story. I know we have to go, but I have a story called "A Good Human" which is framed as a... that's a great story, actually, that's a story about a human who has ascended to non sentience after, like working at a toaster factory for a certain number of years. But he's being on trial because his non sentience is a crime.

>> Katie: Yeah, That's for another week. We haven't even touched on robots.

>> David: That's true. There's much more to talk about. This is really fun.

>> Katie: OK, 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, Facebook & Instagram @AnimalRiotPress or through our website www.animalriotpress.com. This has been the 44th episode of the Animal Riot Podcast with me your host Katie Rainey and featuring the one and only David John Hollander. Our transcripts for our Deaf and Hard of Hearing Animals are provided by Jonathan Kay, this episode was cut by our Podcast Assistant Dylan Thomas, and we are produced by me, Katie Rainey. See ya later ya filthy animals.