David Remnick on Liebling, Dylan, and Glasnost

Published Jul 21, 2015, 4:00 AM

David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker magazine. It's a title he's held since 1998, and one that requires a tireless attention to detail, and an endless awareness of current news, trends, and ideas. In short, he keeps himself busy. Under Remnick's leadership, the magazine has addressed national events like September 11 and the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; he has also transformed the publication into a nimble digital enterprise amidst a cratering media landscape.

"We come out every week, and now we come out every second," he tells Alec Baldwin.

Remnick has six books and numerous anthology credits to his name, and has worked with some of the leading literary lights of the last two decades. In this wide-ranging conversation, he talks about some of those relationships, about his early career — including four years in Perestroika-era Moscow — and about his lifelong love affair with the music and ideas of Bob Dylan.

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. The New Yorker magazine is having a momentous year. Two thousand fifteen marks its ninetieth anniversary and the year it moved offices from Times Square to one World Trade Center. David Remnick became the magazine's editor almost twenty years ago when Tina Brown named him as her successor. Remnick, who first started as a staff writer, continues to report and write profiles. Everybody has a cartoon of themselves, says Remnick. Mine is I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time. He's written six books and edited more than his share of anthologies. It's no surprise that David Remnick carefully considers how he spends his day. I'm very wary of not consuming time unnecessarily, and that's that's marital that's the modern battle. Well, not to eat it up with what ends up being crap. And I have a lot of friends who use Twitter and are on Twitter and are tweeting during the day and you know, meaningful lives present. Yes, but and I've amended that. You know, I'll do it far less than I used to write. But what I found for with people in jobs like mine who were tweeting, they did one of two things, and they both seemed mistaken. One is that they use it as a promotional vehicle, and they say, we you know, uh, we have a really swell piece on blah, and then three days we go by, we have a real we have a we have a great piece on data. And that's not with Twitter's for there You're not joining any conversations, You're just you know, you're just showing your backside, you your advertising. That's one kind of The other kind is the inadvertent overshare that you then spend weeks cleaning up after after your own elephant. And I didn't want to do that either. I figured that I had enough of a platform, either implicitly as an editor or explicitly as a writer, and once in a while to talk with somebody like you, or go on television or whatever once in a blue moon, and and that was enough. I think that's the right decision for me. When you not that the world is shaking in a desire for for for me to tweet. I love this quote. Michael Specter says the only person he knows who watches more television than Remnick is his own ex wife, Alessandras stayed with Stanley, the TV critic for The New York Times. He remembers calling Remnick one of their favorites. The BBC version of Look Are Smile These People came out on DVD. I said, are you watching it? And Remick said yes, he was writing a piece. He said. I said, I'm giving myself three hours of writing one hour of Smiley. I think that may have been the best thing I've ever seen on television. Oh my god. Alec certainly in the high brower area. I mean Alec ginn is playing Smiley in Tinker Taylor and then Smile these people? What is Yeah? That was heaven the So you wake up in the morning and how do you plug in? What do you do me for news? And things like that. Look in general the New York The New York Times, either because it just is or because out of force of habit is the weather that we live in. In terms of what's going on, in the world. And that's why I think never more so than now, despite the profusion of all the websites that you and I could both name and maybe overlap on Medium, Vox, whatever it is, Slate or whatever rings your bell. But for me, the New York Times as a news gathering organization is still the most ambitious. It just is, and so I'm not going to miss that. Would you like to see them do better? Wow? Where I think they're holding up the the store is on things like international news, where it's just getting worse and worse. There are fewer and fewer places of endbition that can cover the world. I'd like to see the cultural coverage be a little different, really, I think it could be as ammbitious in certain areas as as the international coverage of political coverage. There's things that they cover in pop culture. I sit there, I go they put that on the front page of the arts section of the New York Times. I think that's okay, though, I think that so yeah, I do. I think I think it's it's important for somebody who's my age to remember that Kanye West is for his audience, and I'm part of his audience. What Bob Dylan was for Bob Dylan's audience thirty years ago. Pop culture is something that you're never going to love as acutely, especially in music as when the Pharaonomes were just flying through and when those songs meant something to you. Yeah, and so as somebody who still goes to see the Bobster and uh and others and it still means everything to me. It's so I don't mind seeing those things on the frontage because I know he's someone's Bobster. You bet, you bet. So that's okay. Now with what you do there, is it more management and you're involved in finances and marketing and the move downtown and so or is it just mostly editing. It's all of it. It has to be all of it. Look, my job is week to week and months and month, but it's also has to have some sense of what where we're going, what we're about, who we are, what our internal moral, journalistic, literary purposes in the world. And I have to think about X years from now, and I hope it's a lot of years from now where I hand off this thing in shape in every sense that it that it means what it should mean. But it's also financially healthy. What kind of shape with the magazine in or how would you describe the magazine when you took over. It was losing money. I don't say that, you know, to pound my chest, but it was losing money, was going through a hard Why do you think it was because she was very pop culture centric? It wasn't about that, I think. I think it was The peak of advertising for The New Yorker was in the late sixties. And it's why, Alec, when we think, you know, we make a cartoon of certain periods, of certain things. The reason there were four parts series that weren't so interesting sometimes was because they needed the editorial matter to put next to the ads. It was that rich. And there's, you know, contrary to popular belief, there's just so much great writing out there. You know, advertising began to decline, and yet we were charging of minuscule amount for the for the magazine, you know, And my feeling is you should be able to charge each week for The New Yorker, maybe even as much as a cup of Starbucks or half of the movie costs. Oh my god. Yeah, So now we as a movie or a bad movie, and and now we do and together with advertising. It's a very healthy business. And we try to pay writers decently. Um, And is that a struggle? Well, we need a lot of good stuff. We come out every week and now we come out every second. And I don't want to see any diminution in in quality just because it's just the web. I don't. I'm not saying this for you to be kind. I mean, you obviously have great writers and and and but you want to pay them decent. And how do you compare, Like, who's paying the most money in your field right now? Well, who's sitting up there and just throwing money at nobody's throwing but nobody's nobody's an idiot, nobody's in here. Competitive absolutely, Yeah. Yeah. Is if somebody comes to us from the New York Times, say, uh, you know, Dexter Filkins comes from the New York Times to the New York He's not going to come for less. What he's doing is coming mainly to do something different. I think that's the main attraction. That's what happened with me. I was a newspaper reporter. I wanted to do something different. I had been I had the best newspaper job in the history of the Second half of the twentieth century was a Moscow reporter. It was heaven. But I was also writing, you know, faster than I could type. I was three times a day and no time to think. So got lucky this way to do something where you could right, if not for the ages, then at least not for the ten minutes that you were a looted so when you have But if I just finished one point you asked me about, I don't want to give the impression that being the editor the New Yorkers it is business all the time, but you just too. You have to pay attention to it. The pleasure of the job, the heaven of it is somebody down the hall has read somebody who's twenty four and puts in front of you his or her writing in some small magazine or on some website, and we aside to give her a shot. And the piece comes in and this person has a whale of talent that's enormously ground to give them what kind of a piece to write? Well, it depends on who they are. There's a woman named Sarah Stillman, for example, say her mid twenties, and she had written a few pieces here or there, and every piece she has written for us now, which maybe half does. She seems seems to win an award for it's it's amazing, she's got it. Rachel Levive for this guy Patrick Keith, who just did this piece on Jerry Adam. I was in touch with Rachel to try to get in touch with the woman who she talked about the the adoption case after California, and I didn't eventually email that woman because I wanted to get the rights to her story. I love Rachel's writing. She's terrific. And you know, she hadn't she had been in the I guess she had been in the village voice. She had been here and there. She wasn't invisible. It's not like she's right out of the eighth grade or something. But that is it's enormously gratifying. At the other end, So Roger Angel is ninety four years old, imagine that. And he hands you a piece he's that he's slyly been working on in which he's describing what it is to be old, what it is to lose your powers here and there two experience the loss of his wife, who he certainly figured he would, you know, go go first. And yet he's not through desiring. His sexual desire is still there, and he gets married again and he writes the most astonishing piece on year old text about what it is to desire it and you don't stop. The sap is still in the tree. God man. So when you have the magazine, obviously one's assuming that there's you know, pieces that are three months out, six months out. You have many pots on many stoves cooking, and do you sometimes I don't remember which pots are cooking? Were sometimes I really don't go going on long lead that way. These pieces take months to write and so forth, or maybe longer. And do you sit there and look at pieces and go, that's not a march piece. I don't want New Yorkers to read that in the dead of winter. I don't you know, Like, do you have a sense of how the magazines put together on multiple levels? Yes, and you're you know, there are a lead pieces and then there are shorter pieces, and by by New Yorker standards, a shorter pieces of four thousand word piece, you know, a profile. The longer piece can run twenty words. These are these are considerable things. And if you've delivered week after week of leads that are isis or some grim piece of life. You need to have some sense of rotation. I mean, the magazine is not the magazine if it doesn't have a sense of humor. You're not in business to depress the hell out of the reader. Unremitted, It's like a band having a set list. If you do everything, it's all sixteenth notes fermented. So or will you sound like the remotes? Although I've heard of worse things boom. So you want some variation in tone, invoice, and that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of it's my responsibility, you know. Even the cartoons you don't choose. I do. So the way that's done is is is there's a cartoon editor that gets all these roughs you've had, Ross Chest come by Rosal send in ten roughs, and she's cooking with gas. If one of them each week gets picked, that's the highest hit rate there can be. And and and and she's it. It's a hard way to make a living, and it's a hard way to be an artist. And even there you want variety of voices. You want they can't all be about frustrated men in bed with their you know, non giving girlfriends or something or it can't all be that joke. Can't all be desert islands, or or even meta desert island jokes. You've got to have some sense of variety. I told you my favorite of all time, Gaine Wilson had a fish in a suit, I think I told Rose this, and the fishes in a suit and an elevator, and a man is in the elevator, and the elevator doors have parted, and out there was an aquarium. There's water and bubbles and plant life and other fish. And the fishes turned to the man and says, I guess this is me. It was just my favorite cartoon in the New Yorker that I'm a refrigerator for twenty years, and you know, you get a nearer to this kind of stuff, You forget that this is this is not the kind of job that most people have picking cartoons for a living. In the other night, Esther and my wife, Esther and I have with three kids in one of them has autism. When we go to this Night of Too Many Stars, which John Stewart and Robert Smigel, and they do this amazing thing, and I, you know, said Ester, so what can we offer in the auction part? She said, well, you can auction off attendance at the cartoon meeting. I said, you know, the whole last twenty five minutes. You know, Robert Mankoff and I sit there and we make stupid jokes and we picked cartoons. How interesting can this be? Sixty four thousand dollars we get on the on the auction. Two different people for thirty two dollars a piece want to be in this meeting. I don't know what the hell to do with them. I think I'm going to have to bring in entertainment and addition to take care of themselves. I hope they're happy to be there. I hope. So. So when you're doing the piece you we're talking about Sarah Stillman, Yeah, I look at the New York and I think, you know, do you develop or do they get ready? We have to but they but they But this is this is the ethos of the magazine in the in the early days. It's gonna make you. It's it's hysterical to to to think it was true. But the big money makers for fiction writers way back when with short stories, so Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and to some extent, well before O'Hara comes along, they're making their living on selling short stories to the Saturday Evening Post, to magazines like that. So the New Yorker comes along and eventually Katherine White, Roger Angel's mother, is the fiction editor, and she's got to figure out where where can we make our bones. Well, we don't have the money to compete with the Saturday Evening Post and such magazines for for the big names, Hemingway, fitz Jaralin's son, So we're going to discover new talent. So that became the ethos of the magazine, and they just she discovers, for example, living in a railroad flat in Chelsea, which used to be railroad flats, not the you know, the buffed Chelsea that we know today, which is a you know, upper middle class neighborhood. John Cheever, now there's no question that now, because there is no Saturday Evening Post and the world has changed that sometimes writers will come to us and if not fully formed that they're certainly getting there. Do you have an affiliation with any kind of university programs where you you know, we we've we've done farm system so to speak. The farm system is the mail. The farm system is whoever sending us stuff. You know people think I'm kidding around. People email me every day. I probably get fifteen emails a day that go directly to me because my email is not that hard to figure out, and I have an idea, here's my short story. Now. Most of them are not going to work. We have a big staff. The pieces that come to me that way are not always masterpieces. Once in a while, though, it happens when you have people like that Rachel Vive and listen, Tad Friend and all your mass head. There the the top writers in the in the in the world. What's editing them like for you? When you when you edit, because I am ignorant about this, when you edit them, you just sit there and say, well, you edited for size. You said, well let's lose this. Unless you don't go to say this is a run on sentence that you need a strong gra Absolutely do you do? You absolutely do every writer. Look John Updike editing John Updyke, which I didn't personally do, but you know, you're presiding over various editors and stuff. He's about as perfectionist and handing it as close to what's appearing in the magazine as as possible to be. And then there's the other side of it. Different people do think different things. An investigative reporter is not necessarily a master of prose. That what you're shooting for there is well some of the I just love that statement, But nor is John Updike capable of uncovering the Pentagon papers. So what you're aiming for there is is lucidity and clarity and you know a kind of organization where the story unfolds in the proper way. Your your your goal there is different. But each writer has different stuff that he or she's you know, prone too. You know, as a writer, I've taken too much time clearing my throat in the beginning of the piece, and I hope I've learned myself to get rid of a lot of the crap after finding the group, after finding the rhythm, after finding what it is I want to say and where it wants to go. But very often my editor, Henry Finder, will just very quietly take a pen. Oh yeah, that's who edits you. Oh yeah, and he's great, He's unbelievable. You know. The way it works is I'll send him the piece. Now I've been doing this for a while too, but nevertheless, I'll send him the piece, and back will come an email and the tone is very measured. Um, A lot of good stuff here, A lot of good stuff here, which is a little bit of a way of saying, there's some good things in your pockets, some lens as well, maybe old gum rappers. Maybe we don't need the old gum rappers quite so, maybe fewer gun rappers. I know how to read this editor. I he we know each other for a long time, and I get the point. Outgoes the gum rappers, outgoes the bilge about you know, Hillary Clinton's emails or whatever, the kind of extraneous crap of this first try as And I got this from Barbara Epstein as an editor of the late Barbara Apstein at the New York Review of Books. I was really honored to be invited to write something from Russia for her. The assignment was about Boris Yelson's memoir, but obviously the piece was to write about Yelson and the yeltsa phenomena. And I got back what she called a biggie. What's a biggie? It was a gigantic galley sheet, and it was gigantic because there were so many comments about how much I had screwed up or had run off at the mouth, or didn't explain sufficiently. And it was, you know, the signal that this process was going to take a little time. It's going to take a little time. And in the New York there are a lot of layers of editors, not just there's not just the editor that you have. There's also me kibbittzing in the background. There are fact checkers you've experienced this, and there are copy editors and what's called okayers. And there used to be a woman named Eleanor Gould, miss Gould, who would do her own proof and she was like a super grammarian. And I swear to God Alec, this is no longer. She once found four errors in a three word sentence. I will neither tell you who the writer was, nor tell you the sentence, but it was the most stunning achievement editorial achievement UM since Rosium and John Hersey. It was amazing. I remember listening to UM. You know, as my day is always the same. I'm more of an NPR person than a New York Times person these days. You're being interviewed and you talked about how your childhood I guess I think what was your mother's illness. I tried to write this down. I forgive me, but I tried to remember how I think what you wrote about your mother was very ill when you were young. Correct, she's still alive. Yeah, she had got m S when I was a very small boy. And it was there some comment you made about how that shaped the work you do. It was something about it it's more than the work to do, because the person you are. Right. So I grew up in a house where my mother had MS, which you know, was a kind of slow path down ward's now what's called a burnt out case. It stopped getting worse. So she's in a wheelchair, but she's you know, she's eighty three, and you know, okay. And my father was a dentist. He had a small dental practice. But by the time he was I think he concealed it because I think he the pressure on him to bring home the bacon. And although in our house no bacon, um was immense, and you know, his hands started shaking in the whitefish to bring home the white whitefish, very expensive um. His hands started shaking, and clearly this was you know, if it wasn't so tragic, it would have been funny. It was like Buster Keaton, the Parkinsonian dentist. And so by the time he was in his early fifties, he had lost everything. So I had some sense that I was going to have to make a living as my brother. Remember now you're saying this, and I so I had, you know, as a young guy, dreamed of being a novelist. But that the notion that I just kind of set myself up to be a novelist. Um, nobody was waiting for my novels. So I got a job. I was very, very lucky, got a job at the Washington Post. I mean that that's it. From a nervous world. Right out of college, I did well what my it's the major was called comparative literature and what my father called fancy English. And you were supposed to know a couple of foreign languages. Well, and I knew really well. You know, I grew up in a very different Jersey, right and Princeton looked like a country club. Oh my god, yeah, not even just it was just beyond yeah on Jupiter or something. And that part of it. I didn't like the intellectual part of it. This this sort of the pockets of people like you could. Yeah, I know I didn't get into a lot of places, but intellectually I loved it. And I also got lucky in a few teachers, and that that's the best thing that can happen to you in places like that. One of them was John mcphgeh, who taught writing and still teaches writing in Princeton. He's in his he's in his might be one or something like that still teaches, and to this is what's very rare. You when you're studying literature in college, you're studying somebody who's a literary scholar or a literary critic in the defense sense. He was a practicing writer and talked about things that writers talk about, um, the mechanics of it, how you the structure of it, how you break things down. So to have somebody concerned with the practicalities and just to hear that language that was life changing. Your first job as the Washington Post, Yeah, which is you know, preposterously lucky cops and sports cops, cops, uh, covering night police. I was the world's wars price. Yeah, but he's great at it. What you did is you sat at a desk in the newsroom of the Washington Post, and it was the night shift, which began at six and Washington back then, Yeah, crack murder and the racial breakdown Washington was horrible and and and you would call the various cop shops around the city and the suburbs and the hospitals, and you'd say, this is David Remnick in the Washington Post. Are there any crimes, fires, or accidents I should know about. That's what you'd ask every every forty five minutes. And the answer, usually by seven thirty thirty, was yes. And then you jump in a car and go see some kid, invariably African American um shot to death somewhere on you know you street or an Anacostia. And we'd published two paragraphs, and there were people that are good at it and developed the stories, and I wasn't all that great at it, and I was in a big fat rush to write with a capital W. And so what happened was I had this job. It was a temporary thing, and the guy from the sports department said, you know anything about sports? Oh? Yeah, you know. I watched stuff on TV in the weekend, and probably too much of it, and I knew what this meant it meant a job, a real job, and I said yeah, And I became a sports writer for two years. How was that? Well, you didn't get the A plus assignments right out of the bat, but you just ran around the country and covered any you know, any game, and oh my god, I was on near plate all the time. And I covered boxing in a period when nobody cares about boxing. I covered something called the USFL, the United States Football League, which was in the summer. Huge, and this team that I had, and it was all sort of NFL cast off people who had aged out. You know, Koy Bacon, would you know he'd been at the I think he was a ram or something, and then he washed up, you know, like an old horseshoe crab at the USFL. How awful it was that the horseshoe crabs. Oh my god, exactly. It was the Washington Federals. Craig James was the big star. He was a running back, came from s and you and he's it said, it was, It was grim but fun. David Remnick moved from sports to the Style section, and then he took a very different job as a Moscow correspondent. More on that coming up. Listen to other episodes of Here's the Thing in our archives, like my conversation with Chris Columbus, the director of Home Alone, among other films. He, like Remnick, got a big break early on. A friend had suggested he writes something about monsters. So I spent the next six weeks writing the script called Gremlin's and I sent it to my agent, who um liked the script but felt it was a little dark, and still sent it to about fifty producers and everyone passed on it. And Spielberg. Steven Spielberg was leaving his office on a Friday and passed the script and saw the title and he said that looks interesting, picked it up, read it that weekend, and decided he wanted to option the movie. Now I didn't know this. I gotta call up my loft. I get the phone. He got Chris, it's Steven Spielberg. I was stunned. Take a listen at Here's the Thing Dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here is the Thing. My guest today is David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine. He and his wife moved to Moscow to cover Russian politics for rival papers, he for the Washington Post and she for the New York Times. And while they found themselves in the whirlwind drama that was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it wasn't a popular post at that time. Nobody else wanted to go. It's cold, miserable. Why do you think that is? I have no idea. No one was clamoring for that job. Well, look, you've probably been to Moscow since it's changed. I don't know if you were there before. No money started showing up when my wife and I got to Moscow in nine, in very beginning of eight eight and glossin Peristoi and gorbag we're now well underway there. Food shops said really attractive things like bread, That's what the shop would say, and there was no bread in it or PRODUCTI meaning groceries, and there were none of those either. It was really us um Stark. I loved it. People wanted to talk to us for the first time in decades, us being the tribe of journalists. They wanted to talk and you were there for how long? Four years? They wanted to talk about books. They wanted to come back often or very rarely. I was I lived there. You know what I mean to do, travel back to the United States from or you there from basically were there. Maybe we came back once a year, or any of your children born during the first child spent his first year there, and and yeah, and and we have I have pictures of him. He's not twenty four, you know, in a big giant, old fashioned pram that we put out on the little teeny balcony. Looks like we lived in co op City or something. It's kind of sturdy of to go get bread and PRODUCTI yeah, And and we would wrap him up in blankets with just his little nose, and plumes of steam would come up into the winter Moscow air. And his first words were Varona, the crow is flying. Okay, very smart. Boy doesn't know a word of Russian. Now, so you come back after four years to do what well I had thought. I we had thought, and we had discussed the possibility of men going in the Middle East. It's what foreign correspondence do you go to the next place. It's what foreign corresponds, by the way, talk about all the time, the next place. And I came home and it was very clear that my father's health had degenerated and the next place was going to be New York. There's just no going away. Family. Family. Yeah, And so this is ninety one to his teammate in charge of the magazine. Then, so this is what happened. Tina took over the magazine from Bob Gottlieb and I had written exactly one story for The New Yorker one and one story for Vanity Fair for Tina, and I get called will you please have lunch with Ms? Brown? Four seasons. I get there and I don't think i'd even met her before. If I had, it was for two seconds in the office, and she was still out of Vanity, and all she talked about was The New Yorker. And as they say in Monty Python, I may be stupid, but I'm no idiot. And I thought something's up here, but I didn't quite figure it out. And then two months later she became the hetter than New Yorker and asked me to come right there, and and I was a very happy camper, which dead New Yorker writer. Do you wish you had met and worked well? A J. Leebling? So a J. Liebling, Yeah, A J. Lebling? I think a J. Liebling was this red blazeon enormously fat gourmand who literally dug his own grave with his teeth. He ate himself to death and enjoyed life if if his prose can be believed immensely. I don't like the early kind of you know, telephone booth Indian stuff where I think he's kind of making it up half the time and it's not and it feels jokey and dumb and comes from old world telegram feature writing style stuff. But what I love is the stuff about the Second World War, his boxing writing. He's the best sports writer along with Roger angel I can I can even conceive of his His work about Paris, about food um is just enormously warm. And I liked his lucky attitude about writing. He loved to be doing it. People would come into the office late at night, no air conditioning at the New Yorker in those days, and this pound guy would be stripped to the waist, typing and laughing at his own jokes to soap. And that's that not the normal bearing of your average writer. Mostly, there's a there's a certain self lacerating or lacerated field to writing, this sense of suffering a sense that this work is well. I think, first of all, writing is really hard. It's sold my memoir to Harpercolm. Now you have to write the damn thing. I wrote one book about my critique of the California family law system. So I wrote that book. And then I'll tell you this quickly. Because I went to go to the the big synagogue on Fifth Avenue. I went to go to Temple Manuel. I'm going to Temple Manuel to read for uh. The Library of American release for Roth, and the producers of the event put me in touch with Roth, and I call Roth on the phone. It was in Manhattan. Number is a little place in the city, I guess, and I get him on the phone and he said, I'm very sorry. I don't think I'm gonna be able to come because I'm not here, you know. He said, I wanted to thank you for coming and for doing this and doing the reading. It was myself and two other actors. Thank you, thank you, thank you, And I just wanted to say thank you. I said, my god, I'm so touched him with the great Philip Roth. So I hang up, I do the event. He emails me and says, um, I heard you were wonderful, and again I wanted to thank you by email, so I emailed him back and I go, you'll have to forgive me. I'm sorry, I said, I'm going to write a memoir. I want to write a fictional memoir. I want to have my character, you know, Joe Sweeney, go through life, and everything that happens to me happens to Joe Sweeney. But I'm gonna transpose this and do this. And if you saw, I have it in my phone, if you saw the email he sent me back and all of his emphasis and capitals when he wanted to be he said, first of all, there is no such thing as a fictional memoir for you. The second of all, you must spare no one, he says, especially yourself. And he gives me this. That's the career. You know. We all read memoirs because either for a salacious reason, or we want the gossip, or we want to we like that person, or we admire or fear or something that person. We want to get to this story. But on the occasions that it becomes like a real book, Act one or I love I Love Lordering with intent terrific. But they they take you by surprise that was the thing that was the experience with Patti Smith. I mean, I love and love her as a musician and as a songwriter. Or or Dylan's Chronicles. You know, I grew up with that book Tarantula, which was this you know, kind of affected surrealism. But I because I so revered him, I memory eyes that the way Rabbi's memorized passages of the tumul. But it made no sense whatsoever. And I, you know, as an editor, went to read Chronicles um with the hopes of excerpting it, which is a long story, and boy, that's a real book. It's a terrific, honest book. And that's by the way, and that's wrath soul thing is just unsparing honesty. That's that's the career that's at the center of everything about that writer. What's a profile you were hoping you'd be able to do, or that the magazine was able to do that eluded you. Well, when I was growing up, everything I cared about culturally came from one person. It came from my obsession with Bob Dylan obsession. My parents sent me to a yeshiva for kindergarten because I was ready to go to school, but the public school wouldn't have me yet, I was too young. So I would go with these older boys in a van to Patterson, New Jersey, to a yeshiva called Yavna, and they started talking about the Beatles. I was really young, six or so, the Beatles, the Sky, Bob Dylan, and so I bought my first album a year or so later, called the Best of Sixties six and it contained the song I Want You Now. I was pretty young. I had no idea what that song was about, desire whatever, no idea, but something, something magical entered my brain. It's the combination of the language, the music, the excitement, the cool, the fact that he was named Zimmerman probably had no small amount to do with it. All of that, so that everything that I started to care about was because he mentioned it. Oh there's this thing called the beat Poets. So I started reading Alan Ginsburg. Oh this is this thing called Rambo. I started, without any comprehension at all, reading Rambo as the Drunken Boat or something like that, or Elvis or all my cultural uh u interest came from that hub. From that hub, and it was maybe unhealthy, but you know, got me, gave me a brain. It started the curiosity. Curiosity in many, many directions and very much of a time. So I always wanted to do a profile of him. And one fine day I get a call. I'm now the editor of the New Yorker. Bob has actually written his book Chronicles Great And he wasn't offering. There was no profile in the offer. I'd love to read it, send it, he said, because that's what happens. People send you a PDF. They send you a manuscript, and you read it and you promise not to give it to anybody. No, no, no, no, uh, we can't send you the book. You have to come to the Dylan office. Now. Is that there's an office downtown. It's like a c I a front press. The button that says Dada obviously doesn't say anyth about Dylan. You go up six flights whatever and you go into this huge office and it was like it was like erotica for me. Right, it's just nothing but Dilliana an Dylan stuff, his albums closet. And they sat me in a little room smaller than this with the manuscript with a bear table, and I read it. Took me about three three hours. I said, I'll do it. How many in the book is terrific. If I don't know if you've read it, but it's really good, you should. And and he wrote it, and he did write it unmistakably, unmistakably isn't a good writer. He's him, he's him. He starts the book, you know, coming to New York, a whole child, nothing about that. Then as soon as you get to the point where he's going to write those unbelieved what he calls his own golden period, he skips that and he goes to the eighties where he's screwing up and he's sick of his own sound, of his own voice. It's a wild interesting book the way he chooses to tell his story. He's He's He's He's now in a stage of his life he wants a possession of his own narrative. But in a very Dylan esquay, I come to an agreement with the publisher, but I don't make I don't sign a contract because we had a handshake agreement. And it comes the summer, right before publication, said, I call the publisher and I say, okay, we're ready to go. Um, you know what week should we do it? We'd agreed which five thousand words to do. It's Dylan's arrival in New York. He had basically hitched to come to arrive in New York, and he starts singing at Gertie's folks sitting and becomes himself. He said, there's one problem. Bob wants a cover. What I said, we don't have covers. This isn't Rolling Stone or Life magazine in the seventies or we we have. We have these funny drawings on the cover. He said, well, the long pause, Bob wants a cover. I said, you told me Bob loved the magazine. He said, yeah, yeah, he does. He yeah, yeah. I said, what's going on here? He said, well, if there's no cover, we're gonna give it to Newsweek. Yeah. I said, what we had an agreement, he said, long pause, meaning and you could have translated, we don't have a somebody walking down the street carrying a dealon album in retrospect. I probably should have caved like that, and I dug in my heels and the next thing, you know, the Dylan appeared on the cover of Newsweek. And you know, at this point he looks like David. He looks like, um, I don't know, he looks like Vincent Price playing a cowboy, right with that kind of pencil mustache and and so on, and I lost it being of a David Lynch movie and I, you know, I don't have a bad temper, but I kind of flipped out. And Dylan's got a very nice guy named Jeff Rosen calls me and he says, we'd like you to come here the new dealon album. Know when he's heard it, I thought, God, come on, what am I nine years old? Here? Yes, I will come because I can't resist. And I go down to the studio on Tenth Avenue and I'm put in a room and they play the album, which had yet to be released, called Love and Theft. Okay, great, so I don't know what to do next. The album meant so I really liked it. I would love to have heard it again. And I come out of the room and there he is. There's Dylan. I thought, oh God, I don't know what am I gonna do here? And he he comes up, he saying, and your book about Mohammadan, Yeah he's and he's he's acknowledging my presence in the universe. And we have this kind of awkward, five minute, six minute conversation. I didn't have a stop watch. And that was it. That was my encounter with Bob Dylan. And and and I'm not sure I'm glad it happened either, because it kind of pierced the mythological aspect of it. He was perfectly I don't know if polite is the word, but he was himself a cipher. He's not he's anything, but he's not a cipher. This this this just a cipher. But he can appear to be what he's dealing with people he doesn't know. Just I mean, Alex, I got. I can't even imagine what it is to be you, much less this guy. Who ever, since he's twenty one years old, people think he's a deity. He has a like a minor motorcycle accident. It was like the earth spun off its axis. And it's been like that since he's twenty one years old these now and his seventies. So everybody that comes up to him all day long wants to tell him the obvious that he changed my life. And so I determinedly did not do that, but was suitably respectful. And but I the conversation, I don't know that whether it felt like one second or three and a half hours, it was very very strange. Was the same with McCartney when you were when you're on Long Island and McCartney is out and about and people he's very personable, right, he's very Oh no, he's very warm, and but people start crying like a like a forty year old woman was start sobbing. You have no idea. He probably puts his arm stuck. Understands he says, he hugs him. But my favorite walk in the other direction like a lot of you know, when I think of you when your work and you know this is just my characterizing it. Your you know, your DNA is so strongly political and we live in this national security state, this post nine eleven world and the government and secrecy and what it's like to cover politics today, and is it frustrating for you? Very very I compare it to Roger Angel's description of covering baseball when he was young. You could get up next to the ball players, and ball players had some sense of who you were, and there were casual relationships, particularly spring training. He used to go down to spring training for weeks and just yammer with these guys, and they you know, they were rich because they made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars dollars. Derek Jeter no more needed to talk to a reporter than he needed to dress up like a chicken. It just didn't occur to him. So it became harder politics to cover a campaign. Now you the campaign bus. I think it's well portrayed in the newsroom, where basically it's it's um, it's very very young people filing from the bus every five minutes. It's not interesting, or it's it's interesting, but it's radically different. Um. It's hard for me as a writer to get interested as a profile writer if I if if somebody says, well, we'll give you twenty five minutes, and it's such in such a hotel room, and you're not allowed to ask this that age, there's just nonsense. It's crap. We're about to enter it's really interesting. We're about to enter political race in which the main character is the most disciplined person in history when it comes to the press, Hillary Clinton. And I think most of my readers are a lot of my readers are not facing the dilemma, do I vote for Hillary Clinton or do I vote for a right wing Republican or or center right Republican, if there is such a thing. It's how do I feel about Hillary Clinton. On the one hand, it is now decades and decades and decades past time when a woman should be in the White House. There's a New York Times piece I don't know yesterday. I think it was about the preposterous levels of violence against women, rape, sexual aggression, sexual violence, countries where it's legal to beat your wife. It's just and that's just the beginning of it. Say nothing of economic unfairness. It's just it. It is so long past time. And on the other hand, you know, her other qualities are also manifest. We may well forget about this email piece of business, but it revives um dilemmas that you have about this and how to write about this when she really you know, you're dealing with both her and a press machine that is beyond disciplined. And I understand why. I know what it comes out of. It comes out of many things, not least the the the whole impeachment Monica Lewinsky drama is the spiriting. David Remnick was highly critical of Hillary's press conference to address her use of private email and a secret server. It's one thing for a politician to be stupid, which Hillary is not, he told ABC's This Week. It's quite another for a politician to believe that we're stupid. The fast writing David Remnick will be following the upcoming election carefully. Go to New Yorker dot com for his latest work. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to. Here's the thing o.

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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