Tina Brown talks with Salon about Princess Diana's not-so-enchanted life, her rebellious streak and her transformation into a humanitarian heroine.
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Tina Brown might not have staged it this way, given a choice, but to have “The Diana Chronicles” debut the week the wan blond icon Paris Hilton suffered a psychological and media crackup was great timing. Anyone wanting to ask whether Princess Diana mattered, or why the world got so worked up about her marriage, her divorce, her beauty, her romances, her philanthropic causes, and finally her tragic death 10 years ago this summer, can find illuminating contrast in the Hilton saga. If it’s in our DNA to be captivated by princess stories (and it seems it is), to be fascinated by wealth, celebrity and beauty, to look for meaning and symbolism in the lives of the people projected on the world stage, to emulate or idolize or analyze or tear them down, how much more rewarding when such a symbol surprises us, changes into something we didn’t expect. A princess suddenly becomes an outsider, a wealthy lady of leisure devotes herself to humanitarian causes — and then dies tragically, mysteriously, at 36. We got all of that in the Diana story. Now we watch Paris Hilton’s rise and fall and work hard to find larger meanings in her so-far empty life, but they mostly elude us, and make us feel a little dirty for seeking them.
I have to confess, I’m an Irish Catholic, I have no love for monarchy, I didn’t understand the world’s Diana fascination until after she fell out the window of the House of Windsor, and became the world’s most beautiful and privileged outcast and underdog. I followed her emerging humanitarian career — especially the crusade against land mines and her work on AIDS — respectfully from a distance, and I was surprised by my own sadness at her death, and my retroactive anger at the way the royal family had treated her. I didn’t have to sort it out; Tony Blair and Elton John grieved with me. Who didn’t love the people’s princess, the queen of hearts? Clearly I wasn’t alone in being an American skeptic of wealth and royalty nonetheless deeply saddened by the princess’s tragic death: Salon’s energetic Diana coverage turned it from a culture magazine into a news organization, as traffic soared with every new Diana story we published that long, sad week at the close of August 1997.
Ten years later, after the necessary corrective of Stephen Frears’ “The Queen” — oh, how Diana made the royals suffer, so manipulatively; poor Queen Elizabeth! — I approached “The Diana Chronicles” with wariness: What more could we learn? Or care? Had we all been had by the narcissistic, needy, media-smart Diana? But I came to care again. It’s a riveting book about media, celebrity, monarchy, modernism, and about women — more precisely the hole at the center of many women raised to look for a prince, even today.
Tina Brown’s Diana is a little girl lost, abandoned by her mother, whose unhappy marriage and flagrant affair led to her losing custody of Diana and her siblings when the future princess was only 6. She courts her father, often by being his photo subject; she has an undistinguished career at school, leading to a lifelong description of herself as “thick as a plank.” She leaves school at 16 and, rather unbelievably given her wealth and status, goes to work as a nanny for an American family. She lives the fairly empty life of a “Sloane Ranger,” a cadre of wealthy young women who lived around London’s Sloane Square, famous for having fun. When her sister Sarah dates Prince Charles, she decides she wants him. As she gets closer to her prince, she doesn’t quite understand the role of Charles’ close friend, Camilla Parker Bowles, although she will figure it out soon after her marriage.
The rest is literally history, but “The Diana Chronicles” settles most of the open questions about the princess’s marriage, her divorce, the aftermath and her death. The book is satisfyingly dishy: Brown walks you through all the romantic and sexual controversies around Diana and informs you, based on more than 200 interviews and her informed parsing of all the evidence, that yes, Diana and Charles consummated their relationship before marriage; Charles picked up again with Camilla later than Diana believed; Diana indeed had affairs with bodyguard Barry Mannakee and army officer James Hewitt and, after her divorce, with surgeon Hasnat Khan and married art dealer Oliver Hoare. Brown scoffs at the insistence of Dodi Fayed’s father, Mohammed al-Fayed, that the princess planned to marry his playboy son. Instead she finds evidence Diana was hoping to hook up with American financier Teddy Forstmann, and launch a new campaign against illiteracy. Brown calls the Fayed romance a “relapse” for Diana, back into her desire to be sheltered, and her weakness for “this silly state of glitzy nonsense.”
But the book is more than just dishy: It traces the development of Diana’s social conscience and ties it to the deep neediness and sense of being an outcast that would, less productively, send her chasing after unworthy men. Watching the princess walk across a live-land-mine-studded field in Angola for a documentary, and then do it again for a better shot, becomes a symbol in Brown’s book of Diana’s courage, her conviction and her media savvy as well. She embraces AIDS patients and lepers and dying children, easing their suffering and her own. “She had an extraordinary gift in terms of communication, passion, caring and kindness; she was a very special woman in that sense,” Brown says. “She had the ability to communicate genuine intimacy and feeling for strangers in ways that were inspiring.”
I spoke to Brown about the book at the East Side Manhattan home she shares with her husband, Sir Harold Evans. The book is the storied editor’s first literary project since her Talk magazine folded five years ago. Brown’s career has been entwined with Diana’s — she chronicled the royal romance as editor of London’s Tatler, and even served as a consultant to American networks for the royal wedding in July 1981. Her 1985 Vanity Fair story “The Mouse That Roared” was the first to describe the extent of the unhappiness between the prince and princess of Wales. After editing Vanity Fair Brown moved to the New Yorker; Diana asked her to lunch in July 1997 to discuss her new life and her humanitarian causes. Barely a month later, the princess was dead. Brown talked about Diana’s life, her death and the alternative ending she imagined for the princess’s extraordinary story. Starting today, she will be blogging about the book for Salon.
How well did you know Diana?
I knew her as a social acquaintance, enough for her to come over and greet me at events. And then, she wanted to have this lunch at the end. I think it was putting her views across to someone in the media. I was at the New Yorker at the time. So she asked Anna Wintour if she would bring me to lunch.
What surprised you as you got closer to the story?
Well, I guess the complexity of Diana. I mean I doubted a bit in the beginning whether or not I was really going to have a meaty heroine. Whether there was more to her than really met the eye of being a beautiful girl who had an unlucky marriage.
Right, but you had a notion …
I had a notion. I knew of course that there was more than that, but I also wondered how much I would feel involved with her. But I began to see that there were so many layers to this story. There was the contextual aspect, which was fascinating, of course — painting the picture of the society at the time, of the media at the time and so on. But I think what really surprised me about Diana was just her extraordinary sort of daring, really. I mean, I hadn’t really thought through what it was like for a girl who came from that Spencer lineage. The Spencers were close to royalty for 500 years, and her grandmother was a lady-in-waiting, her aunts were ladies-in-waiting, her father was the queen’s equerry, which is like the right hand of the queen. And yet it was Diana that kind of shook the monarchy.
Blew it up.
Blew it up like Guy Fawkes tried to. She really was a very brave, ballsy girl and faced down the queen and Prince Philip in really the most amazing way. When she did the Andrew Morton book (“Diana, Her True Story”), when she told her story pretending to be off the record — I mean she told him the entire story and he put it all into others’ quotes. This was her book really, in the sense that she annotated the galleys of the damn thing. But this was incredible behavior, because it’s as if Laura Bush did a kiss-and-tell about George Bush while she was in the White House.
If only.
And faced him and everybody down and said, “I had nothing to do with this book. Andrew who? Morton? Who’s he?” It was pretty incredible political stuff. And then when she did the Martin Bashir interview on “Panorama,” I mean, she had the cameras smuggled up on a Sunday, and did this interview that she knew would just blow them all up.
But it seems like you’re a little bit ambivalent about how much she knew it would blow everything up. Maybe it was my own reading, but she seemed surprised.
She was always a bit surprised. I mean the thing about Diana that is fascinating, here is where the complexity comes in, is she did these things but she often didn’t think through the next day. She was tremendously driven at certain points to really make a stand, and for that, one has to admire her. But you question her judgment at times, and it’s puzzling and interesting how she never really thought through the consequences of her actions. She was so caught up in the drama of that moment that the important thing was to get her story out, not how it would really impact everybody else. She imagined, for instance with the Morton book, that when everybody in the royal family would read her story, they would feel tremendous remorse for the way they treated her. And actually, of course as we all know, if you read a book like that, you just feel furious. And the same thing happened with Bashir; she basically thought, “I have to tell my story because they are trying to write me out of this picture and I want to make sure they understand.” Well they did understand; they understood all too well.
And that was the end of the marriage.
And that was the end. As far as the queen went, she had to sit and watch her daughter-in-law on television saying basically that the royal family were jealous of her and that the monarchy didn’t know how to rule. I mean, I’m sorry, but in other eras she would have been beheaded.
Right.
So it’s kind of amazing about Diana that she had this kind of reckless spirit. And her brother had it too, really, in [Diana's eulogy] in Westminster Abbey.
You said that’s something Diana would have done.
Yeah, she would have absolutely done it. I mean, it was the Spencer streak. The Spencers were, as the queen mother said, very difficult — that the Spencers were, let’s put it mildly, a headstrong, brash, dashing family is the truth. What I also found out is the only leverage she had was in the media. She had to use Morton, she had to use Bashir. Frankly how else was she going to make her stand? I mean, she had an alternative plan really, which was explode or implode, and she decided to explode. The alternative was to simply subside, to kind of go under, suck it up.
Suck it up, have secret affairs.
Have secret affairs, accept with a very smiling face that her husband was absolutely off with another woman and just live with it. And she didn’t want to, she was too young, too beautiful, too romantic, and too desirous for some kind of emotional fulfillment. I mean, I sometimes think, perhaps if Diana had been less beautiful, would it all have been more bearable? It might have been easier all around. The family wouldn’t have been as jealous; she wouldn’t have been the superstar she was; Charles could have handled it better. And she probably would have had fewer options, and less power with the media.
I was struck in the book by the correspondences from one generation to the next in Diana’s family: Her grandmother breaking up the romance of a friend’s daughter to Johnnie Spencer, to put Frances, Diana’s mother, in that role — who was then, of course, totally miserable. And then Diana sets her sights on Charles after her sister Sarah dated him — who knows how serious it would have been, but Diana decided she could best Sarah.
It’s interesting. It was that realm of upper-class society — sexual politics are very ruthless. Basically Diana was schooled in the ways of her grandmother Fermoy, who was a socially predatory, scheming woman. Diana’s role models were these women who said, “Everything is for that tiara at the end; go for it and don’t let anything stand in your way.”
By any means necessary.
By any means necessary, just get that ring on your finger with the tiara intact. In a sense, that was the message Diana got from everybody. So it’s not surprising in a way that as a 19-year-old girl, she set her heart on the biggest catch in England, because that’s what she’d been raised to do.
But then she had no idea how unhappy she would be. In your book, there’s this palpable claustrophobia and despair in every setting, from the honeymoon to Balmoral.
I know, it’s very interesting. I really do feel with her that the dream became the scream. It was like an insulin coma. She was in this kind of swaddle of pink smoke around herself where she had this dream that was so strong; her romantic haze was so strong. Even though her mother had married her father at 17 and was miserable in very similar ways, she seemed to imbibe nothing of that, and just wanted this huge catch.
I was really struck by how Diana — I remember her being referred to as one of the “Sloane Rangers,” but I didn’t really know what that meant until I read the book — that there was this whole class of young women utterly unprepared to support themselves, or even to have interests. I mean, here you have this wealthy girl who goes to be a nanny to Americans …
It was really remarkable as late as 1979. Here’s Diana, whose father is an earl who lives in a stately home — she leaves school at 16 to be a nanny and a cleaner. I mean it’s pretty incredible stuff. Without one single academic qualification, not one. Her two sisters, actually, did the same, and her sister Jane was actually a very bright girl who certainly could have gone to Oxford or Cambridge.
So was that something odd about the family?
No, it was true very much of that type of girl. Her brother went to Eton and Oxford and the girls weren’t educated.
It just felt like another century to me.
It felt like another century, I know. I was particularly struck — I mean I wasn’t as struck at the time because I guess I accepted that these girls did behave like that. I was at school with a lot of them, actually. But it was the tail end. I say that Diana was the last uneducated English girl. It’s true, in a way. She was the last of that generation to live like that, but it’s still remarkable that it went as long as it did in the late ’70s. I mean, we already had all of feminism and the ’70s were the time of the Sex Pistols. It’s an amazing thing; they got prepared for absolutely nothing.
Did you ever find yourself trying to write an alternative ending where Diana grows up — what would the next chapter be if she had made better choices in men or decided to be on her own?
I did think a lot about that — about what would Diana be doing now. One thing I never called her out on was being fake about her humanitarian passion. That’s one of the things in the end that validated her for me — I felt she had an extraordinary gift in terms of communication, passion, caring and kindness; she was a very special woman in that sense. She had the ability to communicate genuine intimacy and feeling for strangers in ways that were inspiring. At the time that I met her, she was just coming out of this land-mines campaign, which was probably her finest hour, you know. And yet within six weeks of when I see her in July of ’97, when she was so self-possessed, so on top of things, ready for her second act, she’s on this boat with Dodi Fayed, right back where she started in this silly state of glitzy nonsense. Diana’s desire for love was her terrible Achilles’ heel — her desire to be cherished. She never had been is the truth. Not as a child, not as a young bride, not as a married woman. She just never experienced genuine emotional fulfillment. She did have a good love affair with James Hewitt, but, you know, she was punching a little below her weight it seems. Hasnat Khan was a genuine love for her, but he wasn’t prepared to give up his Muslim life, so in the end …
She was Princess Diana and she was rejected.
She was always rejected is the truth.
It was always the wrong person.
The slipper never fit. It was just rotten for her that she couldn’t have a decent, solid grown-up relationship; it was all she really wanted. So, you know, once again in despair, she kind of goes into this — I don’t think of it as her last great romance, I see it as her summer relapse. Everyone was away, she was miserable as hell, Charles had just given the 50th birthday party for Camilla, Hasnat has given her up, the boys are in Balmoral. She is miserable. Everyone she knows is off with their families, and then Dodi Fayed says, “Come on this boat.” It was terrible judgment and very self-indulgent, but she did it. But I don’t think it would have lasted. I feel she was in the middle of trying to think about her next act in terms of doing documentaries and working on humanitarian campaigns. I learned she had this new idea, which was to work on illiteracy — that was going to be her new campaign. I think she was definitely going to come out of it. I really do. I think it was all dependent in the end on whether she met somebody who could have been this quiet, supportive man. Jackie Kennedy Onassis had Maurice Tempelsman. She went through her Onassis phase just like Di went through her Dodi phase …
Needing that protection, that cocoon.
Yes, Jackie thought she could replace the power of the White House with the big toys and yachts of Onassis, and Diana thought she could replace Windsor Castle with big toys and yachts. And I think she would have come out of it just as Jackie did and found a sort of more mature and quieter way to be. William did not like Dodi, nor did Harry. The boys found him just embarrassing, and it could have never sustained in the face of that. I think that Diana really took seriously her responsibility to be unembarrassing to William, as the king. So I think she would have kind of got herself in check and tried to live a life of humanitarian concerns. I think she probably every so often would have ended up doing something silly, though, unless she found someone. She was a very needy girl. She was a hard woman to have a love affair with, because she was so demanding. She wanted to be the moon and the stars to one guy and the center of somebody’s life. It’s maybe just because she was never the center of anybody’s. I think that was her tragedy with Charles was that she — not that she lost him, but she never had him. That’s what I think made her insane. And the same thing, really, with her parents. I mean, you know, her mother, she only had her for six years and then she lost her. And her father was a very sweet man, but he wasn’t a man who was emotionally really there.
Why do you think we still pay so much attention?
Because her achievements were profound. I think that she did teach the royal family a different way of being royal. There is no question about it.
Tony Blair said to you that it was more than that. It was a different way of being British.
She came to represent a new national desire for compassion and warmth and inclusiveness, because Diana’s great gift was that she really was able to take the underdog and give them dignity. And there was a wonderful story that I heard, which I put in the book: She went to visit an AIDS hospice and there were two old gay guys, and she was sitting, talking to them, and one of the old gay men said to her, “You know, this is so funny. You’re a princess and I’m,” and he started to cry, “and I’m a queen.” And she put her arms around him and laughed and he remembered it after she died, and he just cried when he remembered it, because it may seem today not so important, but at that moment, it was important for him to be able to say to a member of the establishment, “I am a queen. I’m gay.”
And be embraced.
And be embraced, and forgiven, as he saw it. Being given permission to be gay by a member of the class that always sort of rebuffed him was a very profound thing. The notes that were left when she died were things like, “You gave us strength,” “You gave us courage” — the inmates of [whatever jail]. Also, she really did show a way to leverage global celebrity to a very positive end. The Angelina Jolies and the Bonos of today, they are very much working in her template. And there have always been rock stars doing philanthropic types of things, but she really did take it to a new level, and with her land-mine campaign, she really showed not just that she was going to raise money for hungry people or whatever but that she could actually move the needle on an important issue. She took on a controversial issue and she actually did activate world debate and create something positive out of it. That was important.
Did you find yourself disappointed in her periodically?
Yeah, every so often you would think, why do that? Really, why do that? She did some bad things to Fergie [Sarah Ferguson, former wife of Prince Andrew], which were really unnecessary. She was happy to dish up Fergie to the press to distract attention from herself. That was a shame. I mean that was kind of beneath her. She would treat her staff badly sometimes at the end.
And yet your affection for her comes across.
I like her, I still feel she’s a heroine. Jane Austen said about Emma that she was faultless in spite of all her faults, and this is how I felt about Diana. She had all these flaws. She could be a real, dangerous bitch, but she was just fabulous as well. She was also a major force in the world and a great loving, kind presence who could spread a lot of light and did. I think she would have been a sensational queen, and she would have been really good at it. That was part of her rage, of course, that she didn’t just lose the prince, she lost her role.
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh
A designer of perfect homes no one can live in
Meet the backyard architect whose book shows off inventive micro-homes with eye-popping, comic-book-style art
SLIDE SHOW
Author Deek Diedricksen in his $100 disaster relief shelter, the "GottaGiddaWay." (Credit: Bruce Bettis/Reprinted with permission from Lyons Press)
Photographs of tiny houses — like the ones Derek “Deek” Diedricksen regularly shares on his blog — tend to fascinate even those of us who might never be moved to try amateur carpentry ourselves. But open the new, expanded edition of Diedricksen’s book, “Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts, and Whatever the Heck Else We Could Squeeze in Here!” (out Feb. 1 from Lyons Press), and you’ll see this backyard architect’s inventive micro-homes through an entirely different, more exciting artistic lens.
Builders, be warned: This is not an instruction manual. Instead, Diedricksen’s book is bursting with abstract creative concepts, all outlined in eye-popping, full-page black-and-white comic-book-style drawings (you can see some examples — along with a number of photographs — in the slide show that accompanies this piece).
Over the phone, the author explained that, while small house fans shouldn’t necessarily look to him for step-by-step tutorials, his ideas (particularly his recycling tips) can be adapted in countless construction-related contexts. And you don’t have to be a tiny house fanatic to admire Diedricksen’s resourcefulness, or to wonder as you read — as the author himself wonders in his introduction — “how much space … you really, truly need to live well.”
This started out as a self-published project. How did it get picked up by a publisher?
I started selling the book out of my basement. Before that, I’d tried to get a children’s book published; I went through all the avenues, and spent a lot of money copying it and sending it out and all that, but it just never went anywhere. So I put this book together later, and hesitantly released it on my own, thinking that if anything it’d just be a gift for my brother or my father, or other like-minded people. I didn’t even pursue any publishers; I said, forget it — with the Internet and YouTube and all that, I’ll just try to push it on my own. And in a year and a half or so, I sold a couple thousand copies, just by word of mouth. There was a sort of snowball thing with the press; NPR was the first big media entity to cover [my work], and later I was covered by the New York Times and other organizations. That certainly helped move copies out of my basement.
Fast-forward a bit, and then, out of the blue, I had a couple of different publishers approach me. I never looked for any of them; they came to me. I already owned a ton of books from Lyons Press — they’ve done a lot of stuff with micro architecture, including many books that have influenced me — so choosing them was a no-brainer. I couldn’t even keep up with the book anymore anyway, so I [figured I'd] give it to someone else!
The illustrations really make this book stand out from other, similarly themed titles. You do have some experience as a comic book writer, right?
I used to do some comic strips. “Comic book writer” is kind of a misnomer; it was more just comic panels for a couple of Boston-area papers and magazines. I was one of those high school kids … I did well, but was always in the back of the classroom, never really paying attention, just doodling in my notebook the whole time. Eventually, I took that and tried to make it more constructive.
Why do you think tiny houses are so popular these days? Many people who probably wouldn’t ever build one for themselves seem to be fascinated — and there’s clearly a dedicated community devoted to actually making them.
I think there are a couple of reasons. One of them is the economy. With the job situation the way it is, there are a lot of people looking for ways to cut costs, and wondering: “Why do I necessarily need this gigantic house I’m working 80 hours a week to pay for, to heat, to furnish, to maintain?” Bigger houses require much more of all of that. And a lot of people think, “If I can build a smaller house (or even just find a smaller house) to live in, I’m saving myself a ton of money.” I was talking recently to someone who brought up an interesting point — that if you have a smaller house, you’re more or less not allowed to spend more money on junk, because you just don’t have the room for it.
But there’s a whole creative aspect of it, too; there’s a building faction of people who [want to break with the mainstream] in these days of automation and having everything done for you. I did a speaking thing at MIT, and was talking to some of the people there. I said, “Why do you want me out here? You guys are geniuses; I’m this idiot who builds with plywood and recycles garbage.” One of them said that these days, people don’t do as many things with their hands — so what I’m doing is very foreign to them. They were just curious.
Do you think more people come at this movement from the creative perspective? Or because of their political or economic beliefs?
I think it’s a mix of all of them. There are a lot of people out there — I’m one, too — who don’t like to be told what to do. I do have a “normal” house (on the very small side). But when we were shopping for houses, I thought, you know, I really wish I had some really cool homemade, organically built (not in terms of organic cotton, or this and that — more like “free-flowing”) [place].
If you look at books by Lloyd Kahn, for instance, they have all these houses with almost hobbit-shaped rounded walls; they just have a more natural, comfortable feel to them, instead of looking like white-walled boxes. Half the stuff I build, I really don’t draw many plans; I just go out there, have some lumber, sit there, think about it and start just piecing stuff together to see where it takes me.
It seems like many of the houses in your book couldn’t be — and aren’t even meant to be — full-time residences.
There are a few in there that could be, actually. But, I mean, this is true of my videos, too; there are some people who misunderstand it to a certain degree. With my videos, I build these really tiny things, and they say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous; there’s no bathroom or guest bedroom; you can’t live in those.” I tell them to keep in mind that I need to deliver one video a month … Just take the recycled material ideas from this and apply them to a bigger dwelling that you design yourself. I’m just trying to convey the ideas. I’m all for small houses; I’m trying to push that too. But with some of these, I need to explain: Don’t take it at face value; just take some of these ideas and run with them. You can take them and make a 300-square-foot, very livable house. But in two weeks, I can only build something that’s 100 square feet or smaller. I don’t have the time, the money or the yard space for anything else.
Readers should know that this book doesn’t offer step-by-step instructions.
There are definitely a lot of educational elements, especially with recycled materials and construction approaches. I think there’s actually a ton crammed into it — especially visually. I want people to open it and have half a heart attack from the visual avalanche of sketches. Someone compared it to a “Where’s Waldo?” book.
In terms of step-by-step stuff, one publisher approached me and said, “We love the book, but we want step-by-step instructions for every design, and materials lists.” I said that would take me 10 years to do, and the book would have to be 3,000 pages long — because there are something like 60 different cabins in my book. I’d rather throw out a bunch of different varied and eclectic ideas in a hundred-odd-page book. If you wanted full plans and materials lists, there’d probably be four or five cabins in there, and that’s it.
At the end of your introduction, you pose the question: “How much space do you really, truly, need to live well?” How would you answer that question yourself?
The answer’s different for each person. I live in a house in the 1,000-square-foot or so range, but there are four of us and a huge dog. A lot of people say I don’t live in a small house, but it’s about a third of the U.S. average, which is almost 2,500 square feet — and I have quite a bit of stuff. I feel we have quite a bit of space, considering. There are people who live out there in 200-square-foot houses — but keep in mind, they’re by themselves; it’s a single person. So if you do the math, it equates, more or less.
My problem is that I have a lot of hobbies. I own a couple of drum sets; I do some musician stuff and play in a couple of bands. I need some space to store that kind of junk. I keep joking that in my second life I should take up the kazoo or the harmonica. It’d be much more space-efficient.
There’s really no set answer for this question, unfortunately.
How about in the abstract?
I think people could live comfortably enough — two, three people or even four — in a house that’s 500 square feet or less. And that’s a house with laundry in it. (For most Americans, a house has to have a washing machine and a dishwasher; people forget you can go to a laundromat if you want.) Even if you do want to plug all that stuff in, it could be very doable.
A lot of what prevents houses of this size are the codes in certain regions, unfortunately. People feel smaller houses are going to detract from the value of neighboring houses in certain communities — which isn’t really true. There’s a whole political thing behind it, but I won’t bore you with that.
Finally, are there one or two houses from the book that you’d like to single out as the most fun or unusual?
The one that most people — even some real-deal architects — seem to like the most is the “Inverted A-Frame.” I’m a fan of the A-Frame style, based on those cabins that were built as second homes in the ’50s, ’60s and before — and so for the heck of it, I said, “What if you just took it and flipped it upside down? What would happen? Why not?” I had never seen it done before, so I did a sketch of that, and I’ve gotten a great response from that. A couple of people said they wanted to build it, but I haven’t heard from them since.
There’s another one that’s really simple — it’s called “The Pimple” or “The Terrapin,” and it’s a tiny houseboat. I think it’s just a fun sketch; it’s got a giant squid attacking the boat. That’s one I actually haven’t built, but I want to build it at some point in time, and chronicle traveling up some marsh or river somewhere in a mini-documentary. I’ve always wanted to do that.
William Gibson: I really can’t predict the future
The science fiction legend tells Salon that if he had a crystal ball, he'd have put Facebook in an early novel
William Gibson (Credit: Michael O'Shea)
On the Toronto stop of his book tour this month, William Gibson was asked by an earnest 20-something reader for advice: “Give my generation whatever you think is helpful for it to survive.” Where an author with an inflated sense of self-worth might have dispensed a few pearls of wisdom, Gibson replied that one should distrust people on stages offering programs for how to build the future.
As much as people look to Gibson as a prophet, the science-fiction writer who invented the term “cyberspace” (in the 1982 short story “Burning Chrome”) helped conceptualize the ways we interact with the Web (in 1984’s “Neuromancer” and later works) and foretold the explosion of reality TV (in 1993’s “Virtual Light”) is notoriously reluctant to predict the future. The title of his new collection of journalism and essays, “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” is taken from a piece on H.G. Wells where Gibson explains his suspicion of “the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever.” Though he’s often able to extrapolate from the present with great prescience, Gibson prefers to probe, not prescribe.
“Distrust” is the Vancouver-based Gibson’s first book of nonfiction; mostly it deals with aspects of technology, and his prose, as in his novels, is always vivid and keen-edged. And yet the newly written afterwords he appends to each piece can be unflinchingly self-critical. Some articles are very much of their time and place; others cram startling insights into a mere few pages. Still others read like provocative responses to Frequently Asked Questions – one is even titled, “Will We Have Computer Chips in Our Heads?” (The answer? “Maybe. But only once or twice, and probably not for very long.”)
Over a bagel and cream cheese at Gibson’s hotel, the morning after his Toronto talk, the lanky writer, with his friendly drawl, furrowed brow and perpetual mien of engaged curiosity explained how his fiction and nonfiction overlap, and how he plans to dream up more imaginary futures out of the weirdness of the present.
How do you feel when a young reader asks you – or orders you – to “Give my generation whatever is helpful for it to survive?”
Oh, it’s complex. I feel old, and unwilling to be the golden geezer. At the same time I feel sort of avuncular. When I was that young man’s age, I wouldn’t have asked that of anyone. I wouldn’t have thought that anyone over 30 was capable of saying anything much that I should be believing anyway.
Does it hearten you in a way that he asked this, as maybe now there’s less of a perceived gap between generations?
I suppose so. I didn’t really have a problem with that question; I just had a problem thinking of any piece of advice. I should have said, “Never pass up a chance to use the toilet,” and “It’s a good idea to eat three reasonably sized meals a day. Take care of your gums.” [laughs] This is the kind of advice you can actually give younger people.
In your piece about Steely Dan’s album “Two Against Nature,” you write, “I’m starting to feel like a reviewer, which makes me intensely uncomfortable.” Your nonfiction, in general, resembles your fiction in that it’s presented as one person’s direct experience. Are you more comfortable with this method of writing than with a kind of omniscient critique?
Yeah. With the nonfiction, I have an instinctive need to present the material as simply as, “This is what I think it is.” Whenever I sense myself moving into pundit mode, I like to stop and check my motivation. Am I just doing it for some extra attention? Do I actually believe what I’m saying? It makes me a very poor television guest, because I’m incapable of saying anything without qualifying it. It’s very hard for me to produce the sort of demonstrative sound bite that that medium runs on: “X is x, don’t you know?” And mine is like, “Well, I sometimes feel that x is x, but then again, it can seem like y.” The medium doesn’t know what to do with that – at least the kind of trad television that we’ve got.
That said, your nonfiction pieces do tend to start out with strong, declarative sentences, even though there are nuances later on.
Well, that’s probably an attempt to do the culturally accepted thing … When I move into a different form, somebody’s paying me for it, and I have to produce on a relatively short deadline, I become a cultural chameleon and start to emulate, say, the look and feel of a Wired article. There are artifacts of that attempt at camouflage in all of those pieces, and it always made me feel a bit reluctant to bring out a collection like ["Distrust"]: some of it seems forced in a way that I would be uncomfortable with in my fiction. [In nonfiction], the reader wants to be immediately assured that this is somebody who knows what he’s talking about. So I jump into the middle of the stage, make a declarative statement, and possibly by the end of the piece I’ve completely reversed my opinion! [laughs]
You write that you’ve been “mining” one of the pieces in this book “for over a decade now,” for both talks and fiction. Does this mean you have an ongoing relationship with your texts in general?
Someone who’s very familiar with my work can read this new book and see where the nonfiction later bled into the fiction. The flip side is that unless there’s a very pressing professional reason to do so, I very scarcely reread my own fiction. I could not, if it were required of me right now, give you précis of the plots of my earlier novels. I remember scenes and characters somewhat, but I haven’t read them for 20 years, and I know “Neuromancer” very well because I’ve had endless, largely pointless, talks with filmmakers about turning it into a movie. Something someone gave me at the signing last night reminded me that in “Virtual Light” [from 1993] there’s a country song called “Me and Jesus Are Gonna Whup Your Heathen Ass.” I thought, “That is kind of predictive, pre-9/11.” It isn’t really predictive; it’s just that the tendency was there in the culture to think that way, which is why I wound up putting it in the book.
In an afterword, you mention that writing the piece “Dead Man Sings” “was entirely a matter of taking dictation from some part of my unconscious that rarely checks in this directly.” Certain passages in the book are quite poetic in an unexpected way, and I wonder if they might have come from a place other than the organizing journalistic brain. Do you ever write something and then figure out what it means later?
I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand. Have you ever seen Brian Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies? One of them is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s my favorite. [At a] hotel in New York a couple of days ago, the young woman who checked me in said what sounded to me like, “Thank you, sir; my name is Tyranny. If there’s anything you need …” I’m not enough of an extrovert to go, “Your name’s what?” … For the rest of the day, I was thinking of young, benevolent female characters with the first name “Tyranny.” Possibly an Asian character, where it’s kind of an ESL issue. Those things inspire me, but what you’re talking about is a result of the process of composition having spun itself up to a certain wonderfully flaky level, where it says something that I transcribe without quite being able to understand it. I’ve learned to trust that, and it seldom lets me down. Occasionally if I look back at something I’ve written I’ll find one of those that I don’t understand, but that’s a bad thing – the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.
Last night [fellow science fiction author] Rob Sawyer pointed out how opposite his idea of creativity was to what I describe in the introduction to this book. He said that he had to be able to decide beforehand what [a book] was about, how he was going to do it, and then as he went along, he would compare what he was composing to this directive that he had arrived at prior to the work. To me, that’s absolutely incomprehensible; the part of me that sits here having this conversation with you is incapable of doing any very original literary work. The part of me that creates stuff is right now largely offline and unavailable, and I couldn’t summon it if my life depended on it. I have to make myself available and hope it turns up. To me, that’s where the good stuff comes from. It’s like, William Gibson doesn’t get ideas for novels while I’m walking around in the world … [He stops and grimaces.] That scared the shit out of me, because a friend of mine that’s a publicist in New York once told me that the worst sign in the interview is if the author ever starts to speak of themselves in the third person … so I did that for effect.
If you’re traveling somewhere, are you simply aware that what you see around you might seep into something you write, or do you actively seek to have experiences that may be useful?
As William Burroughs liked to say, “A writer always gets his pound of flesh.” No matter what I’m going through, I can always step back and go, “This is material.” [He pulls out his iPad, encased in a black sleeve, and calls up a picture he took of a house in Key West with strange curved shutters that open out into awning-like structures.] I could get a whole novel out of that house. That’s got some mojo going on! Not just the window, but the front door has got at least one layer of inch-thick plywood, no hinges.
I’m a fairly visual writer; I can get an awful lot out of really closely examining a photograph like that. It’s a very interesting exercise that I would recommend to anyone. Take any photograph – preferably a photograph that contains relatively little information (no humans or animals in it) – and catalog everything visible. It usually can’t be done in less than a thousand words, and it can’t be done well in less than about two [thousand]. It always leaves me thinking that pictures really are worth a thousand words, at least, that the visual matrix is so incredibly rich with stuff and meaning, that there’s actually no place to stop. People who have tried it find they stop because they just get exhausted.
Your first three books were set relatively far in the future from when they were written –
For my own purposes I assumed that “Neuromancer” was set in 2035, but I was very careful to keep out of the book anything that would allow anyone to date it by internal evidence, which I think was a smart move, considering the longevity that it has strangely enjoyed.
The next three were set in the near future, and your latest three have been set in an “imaginary present.” Are you working your way around to the past?
I once thought I was, but I think I’ve actually worked my way around to the future again. The first three were full-on “This is the future” genre sci-fi books; the next three were like the ‘90s in high cyberpunk cosplay mode. Those [characters], for me, hadn’t been altered by history at all. They were like ‘90s people, but inhabiting this satirical set. I never saw a critic or a reader even remark on that. They accepted them as folk from the very near future, and noticing the lack of response to that was one of the things that emboldened me to write “Pattern Recognition” [2001] and then the next two books ["Spook Country" (2006) and "Zero History" (2010)], which are speculative novels of the very recent past, in that they are each set in the year prior to the year in which the book is actually published, with huge amounts of internal evidence of when it is. A lot of people said to me, “Why are you doing that? It’s going to date it.” I said, “I want to date it. It’s in some way a description of life, and I want to know which month these imaginary events supposedly happened in.”
The other thing that sent me on that program was a worrying sense I had, by the end of my sixth novel, that my yardstick of absolute quotidian weirdness was actually an ‘80s yardstick. In order to accurately judge the degree of cognitive dissonance I’m inducing in the reader with my fiction, I need a yardstick of how weird the world is right now, and by the time I got to “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (1999), the world outside the window was fully as weird as the world of [the book]. Then we abruptly found ourselves in the post-9/11 era, when the 21stcentury seriously began, and my yardstick was just too short. I couldn’t navigate. Where those last few novels have fit for me in the process was getting myself a really contemporary early-21st-century yardstick of weirdness. And now, if I want to write something set in a future rigorously imagined from this incomprehensibly strange and complex world we now live in, I’ve taken the measurement of that, to some extent, by writing the fiction, just by opening myself further to the weirdness of it.
So now I’m feeling my way towards what that could be. As always at the beginning of the process, I’m completely overwhelmed. It seems to be either impossible or hideously difficult to describe the future of social media from the point of view of characters who would be participating in it, perhaps even while they’re sleeping, and not be paying its workings any mind. A huge part of the work in writing “Neuromancer” was a kind of stage-managing on behalf of the reader. I want the reader to be experiencing something akin to culture shock constantly and be slightly off-balance in an enjoyable way, but never fully lost. It’s a very complex and tedious business to keep the reader supplied with reliable information about the strange place that the reader’s entering, and yet keep it out of sight so that the reader doesn’t have the text issuing what science fiction writers of my day were taught to regard as the “expository lump.” It becomes strategic – the more novel the environment you’re describing, the more complex the act of providing the reader with the oxygen of meaning. A totally disoriented reader generally won’t stick around.
If somehow in 1985 you had the idea for Facebook as the idea for a science fiction story, and you sat down to write it, you’d have all those problems, because the artifact that the character is encountering and interacting with is incredibly complicated and would require a huge amount of exposition or totally adroit set-handling.
Dating tips from Dickens, Austen and Tolstoy
Authors Maura Kelly and Jack Murnighan tell Salon about their new book, which harvests love lessons from literature
It is a truth pretty generally demonstrable: A shrewd eye for the complexities of human nature does not guarantee its bearer an enviable love life. Still, it does often go hand in hand with the descriptive powers necessary to craft a lasting literary classic.
That’s one of the ideas addressed by journalist Maura Kelly and writer (and medieval literature scholar) Jack Murnighan in their new book, “Much Ado About Loving,” which draws advice on matters of courtship, sex and marriage from authors as diverse as Virgil and Sylvia Plath.
Over email, the pair told Salon about their inspiration for the project — and some of its most surprising revelations.
How did you two start working together, and how did the idea for this book emerge?
Maura Kelly: Jack and I got to know each other after I wrote a profile of him for the Daily Beast, pegged to the release of his previous book. We became friends, in part because we liked talking about the books we were loving, and the people we were loving — or trying to love. I was always asking Jack for advice about my dating conundrums. And a lot of times, when we’d be hanging out at his place, he’d start telling me how I should take a lesson from a novel. When I was dating a sourpuss academic, he reminded me of the cautionary tale of “Middlemarch,” for example. (In that book, the main character gets married to an arrogant guy who’s devoted his life to writing a scholarly work — and boy, is she miserable.) Eventually, I began to think, I should bottle Jack and begin selling him to all my friends. Then I thought, Hey, we should write a book!
Jack Murnighan: Ha ha. Yes, after many attempts to fit inside a bottle, I concluded that writing a book would be much easier.
In the introduction, Maura notes that while several of the great writers you discuss — specifically Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy — were sharp social observers, they had messy (or, in Austen’s case, uneventful) love lives themselves. How (if at all) should this color our interpretation of their characters’ romances?
MK: It’s a do as I say, not as I do kind of thing. Those authors weren’t saying, “Live as I live.” They were saying, “We are great amateur psychologists and great observers of life, and we have observed great lives — and failed, unhappy lives — and here’s what they look like.” Turns out, they didn’t look all that much like the lives of the authors!
JM: I can speak from experience that one learns a lot more from failure than from success. Maura and I are both pretty sanguine that our various checkered dating pasts helped give us a lot of the perspective that we share in the book.
What do you think readers might consider the most surprising example in the book?
JM: I was quite taken with Maura’s conclusion in the first chapter (based on Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”) that if you don’t find any guy good enough, it might actually be your problem. I also tend to get pretty surprised looks when I say that one can find the formula for how to be attractive to everyone in “War and Peace.” Not exactly most people’s idea of the go-to book for dating advice!
Of all the authors whose work you cover, whose romantic observations do you think are the most consistently true to life?
MK: My money might be on Tolstoy — in all those pages, he had the time (and, of course, the writerly skill) to create relationships that so much resemble the ones we encounter in the real world. But I feel a real emotional kinship with Dostoevsky and Dickens, I guess.
JM: I would agree with Maura’s list and also add both Gabriel García Márquez and D.H. Lawrence. I think they had extremely deep understandings of both psychology and human passion.
Do you think 21st-century readers who devour the classics run the risk of measuring themselves against unrealistic romantic examples — since in so many cases, ideals and realities were very different for men and women in past centuries? (E.g., will a female Austen-worshiper venture into the world of romance with unrealistic expectations of what she is likely to find?) Or do you think most of these books offer more abstract, timeless lessons?
MK: A big part of the reason why we did this book is because we found the love lessons in the great books so timeless. I write about Virgil’s “Aeneid,” and the relationship between Aeneas and Dido — which was basically a friendship with benefits, or at least Aeneas thought it was, whereas Dido was a lot more invested. Rereading her story as I was working on the book, I was reminded of how amazingly contemporary it felt. And even with Jane Austen — even with books written during an era when courtship was so much more formal — there’s a lot of philandering and a lot of wondering about where relationships are going that feels familiar. Maybe even more, with Austen, there are questions about finding the person who will help you become your true self, and your best self — about self-realization — which feel very relevant.
JM: Yeah, once you start talking about all-time classic books, they almost invariably have a level of depth and nuance that goes way beyond mere idealization. In fact, quite a few of the novels we cover dramatize the dangers of having rose-colored glasses on (“Great Expectations,” “The Magic Mountain,” “Remembrance of Things Past,” etc.), so I’d say great literature actually helps you keep from living only in dreams.
Roughly how many of the lessons you discuss represent genuine revelations you had while reading particular books — and how many represent the recognition of particular phenomena from your own life (or your friends’) in great novels?
MK: In my case, just about all of them, really! That was another big impetus for the book; so many of the novels that Jack and I love had stories that resembled the ones we were hearing about from our friends, or the stories we’ve personally lived. When we were working on the book, my editor called me to say she’d been counseling a friend through a breakup — and that she’d given the friend my chapter on “Revolutionary Road” because it was exactly what she needed to hear. It’s about how to deal when you’re dating a person who thinks he’s meant for much better things — but he’s never had the courage to see if he can achieve those things. So he marinates himself in a bitter juice of self-importance, protecting himself from the truth about his own insignificance by telling himself how much better he is than everyone around him. “Howards End” also really spoke to me personally — a book about what you should do if you’re dating someone whose political views you don’t agree with!
JM: Yeah, I confess to having sent draft chapters of mine and Maura’s to friends in the last few months just so I wouldn’t have to tell them the whole argument in person. And, as I express in a number of my chapters, I’m still trying to implement in my own life lessons from the books (like not over-idealizing at the beginning), so I’m thinking about the various books and scenes all the time.
Dennis Cooper: There’s nothing numbing about a wild fetish
In a Salon exclusive, the godfather of modern transgressive lit explains why he really loves Disney
Dennis Cooper (Credit: Yuri Smirnov/HarperCollins)
On the spectrum of extreme literature, Dennis Cooper lies somewhere between the Marquis de Sade and the Old Testament. His novels – terse, scatological and violent — are rooted in a kind of apocalyptic morality easily mistaken for sadism. The typical protagonist is a young gay man drifting from one trauma to the next, automatic and emotionally dazed. Cooper’s Southern California interiors take on the gothic ambience of bondage sets, autopsy rooms and theaters of the dark suburban absurd. In the hands of a lesser writer, such subterranean states would be merely lurid. Cooper, however, achieves something close to grace. Novels like “Try” and “Guide,” part of a five-book series called the George Miles Cycle, are often unexpectedly tender. In chronicling his characters’ obsessive search for love, he confronts our most desperate human instinct.
His new novel, “The Marbled Swarm,” is something of a departure. Written in hothouse prose – one part Robbe-Grillet, one part Lautréamont – it’s the confessions of an anonymous 22-year-old Parisian. At the heart of the novel is Chateau Étage, a rural French manor scarred by peepholes, secret tunnels and a mysterious parricide. The house is a symbolic touchstone for the novel’s abundant doppelgangers, cannibals and sadomasochists, all of whom mirror and fracture as the narrative grows ever more precarious. It’s a vertiginous read, more hallucinatory than just about anything else in contemporary American fiction.
I recently sat down with Cooper on the San Francisco leg of his national book tour. Despite repeatedly emphasizing his inarticulateness, he proved witty and deeply focused. Over coffee in a North Beach cafe, we discussed pornography, fetishism, his incendiary blog and why Google will never take the romance out of discovery.
Do you think of yourself as belonging to a transgressive tradition?
No. Only because I always get drawn into that. Some of my favorite writers when I was young would be considered transgressive, but I like stuff that isn’t transgressive at all, too.
A few critics have noted a fairy-tale influence in “The Marbled Swarm.” Is that something you were thinking about?
Only in the sense I was thinking a lot about Disney.
That’s probably not the most obvious Dennis Cooper influence that jumps to mind.
I’m interested in how Disney flattens fairy tales. Disneyland just fascinates me. I grew up in Disneyland, went there a few times a year every year, so it’s in my blood. I still think it’s the happiest place on earth.
But the stuff in the book comes more out of video games. Zelda is the kind of game I’ve always loved and played. It’s kind of like a modern fairy tale. I mean, it has animal protagonists [laughs].
Peepholes, and holes in general, are a recurring motif in this book. Tell me about your interest in voyeurism.
It’s weird. I’m not a voyeur actually. Well, I don’t know … does looking at porn make you a voyeur?
Yes, to some extent.
Because I look at a lot of porn. So maybe in that sense, yeah, I’m a voyeur. I’m interested in the relationship between the reader and the writer, and there’s a kind of power imbalance there that’s essentially voyeurism. In this book I explicitly go into that.
Has the role of the voyeur changed given the Internet?
There’s a big difference between that and a guy who peeks through his curtains at his neighbor taking a shower.
What about cruising? It seems like such an anachronism now.
The cool thing about cruising is you get the whole scale of a person. If you just see someone online you don’t really have a 3-D picture of them, so when you actually meet there’s a period of adjustment where they’re three-dimensional and you have to learn how their faces move when they talk. It’s very disorienting. There are also just fewer places to cruise now. In Paris it used to happen everywhere. I live right next to a place that was apparently a big cruising spot, but it’s gone now. There’s just a little bit of illegal immigrant stuff going on. There are still bathhouses and saunas and shit.
Speaking of Paris, you live there but don’t speak French that well. How has being estranged from the language around you influenced your own prose?
My friends over there speak English, but I’m always mediating what I say because I know they don’t speak the language very well. I think maybe I have a desire to be incredibly articulate. Like, over-articulate everything. And in this book, I wanted to do this thing where you have to wade through the bushes of language to figure out what people are trying to say. I don’t get to employ English in Paris as fully or unreservedly as I do here, so that made me want to really ratchet it up in the book.
There are characters in this book who fantasize about being run over by steamrollers.
Yeah, the Flatsos. It’s based on a real thing.
There are actual Flatsos?
There are enclaves of people who are obsessed with perverse forms of anime or manga. There’s one called guro, which is mentioned in the book, and then all these sub-groups that enjoy violent pornographic manga. There’s a group called squish junkies, and they incessantly draw pictures of themselves or movie stars being steamrolled. Or them having sex with pieces of paper, but the paper will be screaming. But no, there are no actual Flatsos. I mean, you can’t really make your face like a plate [laughs].
What’s the most extreme fetish you know of?
Worming.
Worming?
It’s basically you cut off your arms and legs so you’re just a trunk and a head, and you live like a worm. A master takes care of his slave worm.
Nobody actually goes through with this, right?
I don’t think so. What master would want to … I mean, there’d be shit all over the place.
You’ve been charged with glorifying sexual abuse and pedophilia. All of the disturbing things that interest you are often dismissed as being merely numbing.
It’s not numbing at all. That’s the weird thing I’ve had to deal with. I can do all the nuances I want and critics just aren’t going to see it. I’ve tried everything, every sort of strategy to circumvent that and have people realize it’s not numbing. It’s the opposite of numbing. It’s against numbing.
Does your family read your books?
No. My dad tried, he was really supportive, but my mom was just embarrassed by them. She was horrified when there were reviews in the L.A. Times because she thought her friends would read them and think she was a bad mother.
Which reminds me, I want to return to your interest in porn because it’s something you write about so often. Every high school kid in America has probably watched porn online, and if they haven’t they could very easily. Are you at all nostalgic for the days when pornography seemed more illicit or dangerous?
It’s interesting what happened to porn films. Porn from the ’70s had all these narratives that are impossible to watch now. You’re just fast forwarding all the time because they have these complicated stories with real characters who cry and stuff. They’ll be maybe three sex scenes. And that’s because you were trapped. You had to sit in the porno theater and watch. Now you just don’t want people looking at your desktop; that’s the only thing illicit about it.
Were pornos more artful before the Internet?
Well, they aspired to art but very few of them were ever artful. There was this guy, Wakefield Poole, who did these Fellini-esque ones, and there was Jason Sato, who did Douglas Sirk-ean porn. They were like auteurs. They weren’t very good, but they were kind of interesting. I’m really into Eastern European porn because it’s very strange and bleak. There’s an unintentional gravity to some of that stuff that can be disturbing. I mean, watch porn from Romania or Bulgaria or Russia and you can see they’re all prostitutes and doing it because they have to. You get much more feeling out of it … more worry and conflict. You can’t look at these uncomfortable kids and not wonder what the story is there. It’s not art, but it can have the power of art.
You quit college to travel and gather experiences for writing. Is it still possible for young artists to re-create that kind of random, improvised journey in the age of information overload?
There’s the possibility, but the problem is the Internet is too important. To remove that would be to remove something that’s essential about the way life is structured now and the way our interests are dictated. The concern would be that you’d end up writing something parochial.
But it seems the mythology of the open road and that kind of haphazard, word-of-mouth itinerary doesn’t happen much anymore. Everything is on Google.
But that doesn’t take the glamour or poetry out of it. Reading about something and seeing it is so completely different. I don’t believe the whole idea people my age often have that everything has been lost because information is available. Art and music and writing are just as exciting now as they ever were. People are just as interesting. I don’t see us becoming less interesting because we surf the Internet. I think that’s old people being freaked out.
The science of taste
Why can't a blindfolded person tell white wine from red? A top neuroscientist explains how the brain creates flavor
(Credit: iStockphoto/apomares)
Whether we’re talking about America’s obesity epidemic, mocking the “foodie” movement on “The Simpsons,” the USDA’s revamped food pyramid, or what they’re cooking up on “Top Chef,” food and eating are a national obsession — especially at this time of year.
But just as fascinating is the hard science behind our intimate relationship with food. Gordon M. Shepherd, professor of neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, has spent a lifetime researching the brain mechanisms involved in olfaction (our sense of smell) and its impact on flavor perception in the brain. His new book is “Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters,” out this month from Columbia University Press. Shepherd’s work is anchored in a burgeoning field within neuroscience — figuring out the mysteries behind our olfactory system, the ways in which smells are represented and processed in the brain.
Shepherd argues for the quintessential importance of olfaction in our everyday experience of food. Without smell, Shepherd says, there is no flavor. “Neurogastronomy” takes a detailed look at just how smelling in the nose, mouth and brain produces the unique experience of flavor that we associate with eating our favorite or least-favorite foods.
Shepherd explained why sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner triggers our instincts to overeat, how to do the nose-pinch test, and the best way to fool an experienced wine taster.
What came first, your interest in gastronomy or your interest in neuroscience? Did one lead to the other?
My first interest is in neuroscience, in particular in the part of the brain that processes the sense of smell. And we all think we know what smell is … It’s when we sniff something in and it has a nice smell. But as I went further along I began to realize that increasingly smell was for sensing the flavor of food. It goes almost unrecognized as we eat our food because we think it all comes from taste in our mouths. The more research that I did on flavor, the more I realized that the sense of smell was the dominant sense in flavor — and that we are almost totally unaware of it. The science of smell is increasingly important for understanding flavor, and flavor really contributes to whether we are eating healthy or unhealthy diets.
You explain that smell is a dual sense. It’s composed of orthonasal and retronasal smelling. What’s the difference between them?
Orthonasal is sniffing in. It happens when we sense perfume, something in the environment, or in the aromas of the food we are about to eat. Retronasal is called retro because it comes from the back of the mouth, and it’s the way we smell when we have food in our mouths. While we might not be aware of it, vapors that come from our food while we are breathing out stimulate cells in our nose. That is how smell contributes to flavor. We don’t realize it because all we usually notice is the mouth-feel, the textural quality of food.
In the book, you discuss the ways in which smelling relates to the experience of flavor, and how it is different from tasting. You say that smell is “synthetic” while taste is “analytic.” That’s an interesting idea — could you elaborate on what you mean?
It’s really simple. Taste is sweet, salt, sour and bitter — and umami, a meaty taste. The amazing thing is that when you have something in your mouth, you can taste whether it’s sweet, sour, bitter and so forth. This is analytic, because you analyze taste piece by piece, just as you would picking things up from a table. Each one is picked up separately. Smell is different because smell arises as a whole entity. It’s impossible to take the pieces apart. That’s why we call it synthetic: It’s synthesizing and bringing things together. And these are two aspects of sensation that are very important for the different senses.
One of the simpler concepts in olfaction is that smell molecules bind with receptor cells in our nasal cavity. After that things get a little bit more complicated as far as how information is relayed and processed within the brain.
Smell molecules are represented in the first stage in a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb processes the information about smell in a way that is very similar to the way our retinas processes an image, or the way auditory parts of the brain represent musical patterns. It’s important to understand that smell is not completely unique in the way it stimulates the brain, because it processes information in a pattern, the same way other senses do. Only in olfaction is this sensory pattern represented in the frontal cortex, which is the most developed part of the human brain. All of the other senses have to be relayed forward in order to get to the cortex, so in mammals the sense of smell has privileged access to the front of the brain.
In another interesting part of the book, you mention studies that have shown marked variations in taste between some individuals. In some of these studies people have been labeled “supertasters.” How do their tasting ability and propensity differ from the rest of us?
This has to do, partly, with how many taste buds they have. One of my colleagues has shown there is a correlation between having a high number of taste buds and a propensity to be sensitive to bitter taste. The more taste buds you have, the more likely you are to be a supertaster, and it’s caused by genetic differences. But keep in mind that this difference is specifically in the sense of taste. Taste contributes to flavor, but sometimes taste and flavor are used interchangeably, and they are not the same. There should be no ambiguity between “taste” — which is sweet, salty, sour or bitter — and flavor, which is a combination of olfactory sensations, tactile sensations and taste.
What role do texture and color play in taste?
You can be really fooled by the color of the food you are eating. I mention that you can fool people, and these include experienced wine tasters, into assuming that a white wine is a red wine, simply by dying it red. I think that’s a very good example of how color can be used to manipulate people. It’s something that gives us expectations about the flavor of what we are going to eat, and it’s very well understood by food companies, a point that Eric Schlosser makes in “Fast Food Nation.” You can bet that food companies are studying the colors that kids like to see on boxes of cold cereal and cans of soda.
This might be pertinent, as Thanksgiving is coming right around the corner. What is “the buffet effect,” and how does it relate to some of our instinctual eating behaviors?
The buffet effect, also known as the cafeteria effect, relies on the assumption that if you have only one food in front of you, you will stop eating when you are full. But if someone brings you another plate with a different type of food on it, you are likely to keep eating. And it can go on like this indefinitely. You will eat far more with a variety of foods at one sitting than you would if you were eating only one dish. Fast-food companies know this. They sell a series of things in addition to the Big Mac. Thanksgiving is a good example of how with a dozen different dishes we just keep eating and eating. It’s a very real thing and people who are obese lack control over it.
Many parents tend to struggle at times with kids who are picky eaters. But in the book you discuss some of the ways in which taste and olfaction are relatively plastic. You mention that flavor preferences can change and young children can learn to enjoy certain types of foods from exposure. Do you have any advice for parents of picky eaters?
Well, I know from my own family experience that kids vary widely as eaters. And some aren’t just picky eaters but will refuse almost all foods except for a very narrow few. For kids, eating often means putting something in their mouth for the first time. That first sensation of something in your mouth can be quite aversive at first. And a child is more likely to feel that certain foods elicit a sensory quality that is unpleasant. This is where understanding how the brain creates the sensation of food, with multiple senses contributing, means that a therapist could begin to assess which sensory system is affecting how a child feels about an aversive food.
A lot of the topics in the book made me think about my own personal relationship to food and taste. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but sometimes I’ll go to a restaurant and notice that although they have Heinz ketchup bottles on the table, the first taste will clearly determine that they’ve filled the Heinz bottles with an impostor brand of ketchup. It infuriates me, and I think it undermines exactly what you lay out in your book: that the human propensity for taste and olfaction is actually much more sophisticated than we might assume. Can you speak to this?
I haven’t experienced that, but it makes sense. I think one of the simplest ways of giving more credit to smell in flavor is the simple nose-pinch test. You pinch your nose and put a piece of candy or food on your tongue and ask what the flavor is. With their nose pinched, most people will be able to tell that it tastes sweet and that is all. Once you un-pinch your nose, the whole flavor of the food is able to travel to the brain, and that is all due to smell. As the subject breathes out, air goes from the back of the mouth up to the nose. This is a simple experiment that you can do around your dinner table. It gives you a completely new appreciation of where your sense of flavor is coming from. People use their sense of smell to get more pleasure out of the food that they are eating.
Page 1 of 63 in Author Interviews
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Stephen King and my dad (Part 1) 
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The things I carry 
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