"Chronic City" features one hapless Chase Insteadman, a former child actor adrift in New York as his fiancée, an astronaut, hovers above, prevented from returning to Earth by an orbital minefield. He soon falls under the mad spell of Perkus Tooth, a writer and inveterate cultural critic-obsessive, who becomes friend and Svengali, sharing with him his love of all things Brando and an increasing paranoia.

Lethem stopped by the Salon New York office to discuss his new novel, his Brooklynite  critique of Manhattan, his MacArthur "genius" grant and the dark side of cultural obsession.

Most anyone with a deep love of film, books, movies has had a Perkus Tooth in their lives at some point, sort of tutoring them on the good stuff. I read that Paul Nelson was an inspiration.

Sure, Paul Nelson was part of that image for me. I mean, Paul Nelson was not frantic, actually. And he wasn't a dandy, and he wasn't a pot smoker, so there's a lot of ways in which if you knew Paul Nelson you'd never associate the two. But something about Chase's innocence meeting Perkus' cultural worldliness comes from the fact that as a 20-something -- 21, 22 -- I kind of fell into Paul's sphere for a little while and he gave me this instant education in his version of American vernacular culture. Ross Macdonald, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Chet Baker. And it was this flood of references for me to sort out and absorb and he became very important. A lot of the things that Paul taught me to value are still really the center of my sensibility.

But there was also something poignant about the amount that Paul depended on the power of his cultural searches and what they unearthed for his sustenance. It was like they were his oxygen, and I adored it and I think I identified with it at the same time as it can't help but serve as a kind of warning ... just so many people I know who have at some point become voracious about cultural collecting, cultural searching -- their identification tips over. I've done it. And it's, to me, so human and so poignant and so compelling and also terrifying to go into that place. And you know, at the same time it's just finally a metaphor for what anyone does, which is search for meaning, constantly trying to ask yourself if you can find in the environment somewhere, the natural world, your family tree, some version of politics or culture or in this case pop culture, a description that makes you understand why you're here. So in that sense it's not culturally specific at all.

What do you mean by a "warning"?

Well, just as critical theory, critique, tips into paranoia -- finding patterns that don't exist -- collecting can cross that line from being the quest for value into being the quest for the subterranean, impossible artifact that will somehow validate all of your existence ... You know, I used to know, I still do know, a lot of [Bob] Dylan collectors, and he's begun demystifying a lot of the secrets by issuing them himself, but these things used to circulate as talismanic objects. And there was always the myth of the song that was even better, the musician who'd come out of some session and say, "Well, yeah sure, you heard 'Blind Willie McTell' because you've got a tape of it, but there was another song that he debuted in the studio that day that was never written down and we all begged him to play it again and he never did." And it's sort of like, "Well, if that song's even better than 'Blind Willie McTell,' then what about the song that Dylan wrote but didn't play that day, or what about the song that Dylan never even wrote! That might be the best one!" It's a path of madness, and certainly I wanted to portray that terrifying descent to some extent.

What's fascinating about a character like Perkus is there's no echo chamber, it's all in his head. He's coming up with his own fictions, really, without any enablers.

In that way it relates really strongly to a book like "The Fortress of Solitude," which is overtly nostalgic. I mean, Perkus is his own fortress of solitude. He's trying to keep a diorama of the version of New York City that means the most to him alive. And for him the Tompkins Square riots are still fresh news and Tom Verlaine breaking up Television is like a fresh tragedy. It's all at the edge of his nerves, the world that means the most to him, and he's trying to bring other people into that system of values.

Chase Insteadman is such an unformed thinker about culture, the world. Do you think you were like that at 21?

I probably wasn't very like Chase Insteadman when I was 20 -- I might be more like him now in a funny way. Or let's say that the ways in which I identify with Chase as a character have to do with the peculiar fate of being slightly known, and an author is by definition not a famous person. In our culture, where fame is a currency and we see it awarded on television in all sorts of strange ways, authors never register, they're not even a blip. But in a tiny kind of weird, subjective version of my own experience, the world I wander through, in a bookstore or just now going into the offices of the New York Times Book Review, people are like [looking over his shoulder in surprise ] -- and I'm about to be on tour and play this part inevitably. Ian McEwan has a great line where he says, "Book touring is like being an employee of your former self." But it's an acting role, you have to authenticate -- yes, I'm the writer who wrote that book -- nightly for people, and it's kind of silly and I'm not an actor, I'm no good in any sense except that I have backed into by necessity the ability to play myself. And the moment you do that, you develop this very obscure, uncomfortable double sense of self and that can be very haunting. And that's what I wanted to capture when I wrote about Chase's sort of mediocre celebrity. The way he's still remembered for something he himself can barely remember doing is something I feel a strange degree of identification with.

You feel like you're acting?

There are times when someone wants to talk to me about Tourette's syndrome -- well, "Motherless Brooklyn" was published 10 years ago. It means I wrote it 12, 13 years ago, I conceived it longer ago. The person who got excited about that isn't very close to the surface for me anymore. So I have to do this strange, polite kind of acting bit where I reinhabit the role of the author of "Motherless Brooklyn."

You've said "Chronic City" came from your distinctly Brooklyn point of view. What kind of critique, do you think, is it of Manhattan?

Of course I shudder if I think I made a deliberate social critique, because it's not mostly a great path for a storyteller to take. But rather than a social critique or especially one of any particular present moment, I felt what I was doing was exploring some of the ambivalent power of Manhattan. And I think it's always resided there, as long as I've been alive and lived next door to Manhattan -- it is a kind of virtual reality. There's something unreal about Manhattan, it's a creation of will and aspiration and money. And unlike most places on earth it's not rooted in its past, it's rooted in its possibilities and its future, and it's always being remade and revamped.

Now, having said that, what makes Manhattan, what makes NYC, what makes the world more complicated than any description, than the one I've just offered, is that it's also real -- people go on living their lives in buildings, eating food, wearing clothes, trying to pay the rent. And I wanted to find a way to put this doubleness into the book. This fact that a place can be a virtual reality and still be so stuck in our world, our real world, that's what I really cared to say about Manhattan.

When I first moved to Manhattan "Motherless Brooklyn" had just come out. In that book, Brooklyn is grounded in this kind of firmament, whereas Manhattan is much more sketchy, changing, fast-paced ...

The compression you've made, I've offered a similar description a few times, and I always look from the Brooklyn point of view that what I find so nourishing of Brooklyn is that it wants to be the big city, but it falls short -- it's always half-renovated, and half-gentrified. So you see these lumps of the future lying alongside the past, the recalcitrant chunks of the past that won't go. And they're just side by side and everyone has to just live with this kind of awkwardness. And whereas Manhattan often tries to remake itself and succeeds, startlingly this crazy new building will come up or crazy new neighborhood will exist and everyone seems to believe in it and move in right away, and it's like, OK, now TriBeCa is a good place to go for food. What? Yes? Really? OK.

Back to Perkus, I kept thinking that, especially in the current climate, what a dying breed that sort of cultural critic is.

You're right, it's always a dying breed. One of the things I'm very devoted to in Perkus is the joke, seems like just a running joke, "I am not a rock critic." In the end he kind of makes this tormented confession: "I am a rock critic!" I feel like there's something very moving to me about the pioneer generation -- [Robert] Christgau, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Paul Nelson, Greg Shaw -- who by force of will said, "We're going to write seriously about this thing that everyone thinks is a joke." It was like founding a school of criticism on bubblegum wrappers. The culture did not believe that rock 'n' roll could sustain analysis. The records were supposed to blow away and disappear after they fell off the charts, no one was even supposed to care who made them after awhile. They were just pop. And they located the connection between this material and American culture at large, between this material and art. And by doing so they created a language for themselves -- that was an act of bravery. I really think it was as bold a gesture as a lot of art making itself. They made something that now of course can be quite complacent and automatic.

We all feel almost that there's a wearisome familiarity with the inside language of music criticism, at least when it's used in a received way. But that didn't exist, so I think of Perkus as -- of course the dates are off, he couldn't have been one of the founders -- but he conveys some of that spirit of trying to say something that no one thinks you're even allowed to try to say. This book is partly about the emotion that accompanies trying to name unnamable things that you see in sets around you. Whether it's conspiracies or facts about the city that somehow are inexpressible facts. It's tormenting not to have the language to put it across and Perkus is tormented by that. But he's also very dedicated. To look at him very generously he's very dedicated to the idea of secret knowledge, to the mastery of secret knowledge. And the Internet and the reissue age is one that is very humbling to masters of secret knowledge -- everyone's a master of secret knowledge now.

You know, when I met Paul Nelson, this can be very hard I think for someone younger than me to understand anymore -- if you get curious about Howard Hawks, if you hear someone saying "Oh, god, you don't know what you're missing," you can go and see "Red River" tomorrow. You can see 30 Howard Hawks movies tomorrow. When Paul Nelson said to me, "You need to know about this," what he then did was pull out of his apartment, which was an archive, these VHS tapes with his hand-lettered labels on them all recorded off PBS or "The Million Dollar Movie," commercials intact, with him fixing the vertical hold in the middle of the big scene -- all recorded for posterity -- that was how this meaning was transmitted to me. It was something rarefied and almost impossible to explore. He wanted me to see obscure Orson Welles movies -- "F for Fake" or "Mr. Arkadin." There's no Criterion Collection, there's no way to get from here to there unless Paul Nelson was up that night recording it with his television. But that's all gone. We're drowning in archival culture.

Are we richer or poorer for that?

I think it's OK. I'd rather have it around.

Have everything available rather than relying on these kind of guides ...

Yeah, I guess in a way there is that sense in which Perkus Tooth is a commemorative character. I had to make these guys naive about the Internet -- you know, the joke about them not even knowing how to bid on eBay, and still having a dial-up computer -- because a lot of the meaning that is so precious and so fragile for them evaporates in the instantaneity of Internet communication.

So what was it like creating after you got the genius grant?

Well, the first thing to say is that I've been a very lucky writer, a very lucky artist, and the luck began before the MacArthur. The MacArthur didn't arrive in the hands of someone sleeping on couches. I found my way mercifully to very, very -- I have a very, very good editor at a very strong publishing house who supports me brilliantly and has now for more than a decade. So, that's something -- forget the MacArthur -- that's something any writer should dream of. I had a lot of opportunities that came with being capably published, brilliantly published. The MacArthur did free me, especially given that it came at a moment when I was -- you know, I'm 45 now, I'm married now, I have a 2-year-old -- I was starting to not want to live the scrappy, year-to-year, no health insurance kind of life. I needed to outfit myself with a few more middle-class amenities just to be able to look my wife in the eye. So it was kind of a perfect time.

But also I saw it as a kind of vote that I should do more of what I'd already been doing, but do it even better, do it more passionately, do it more deeply. I really do feel that this book is connected to the MacArthur in the sense that it's an ambitious book and a big book, but it's also, I'm not trying to please anyone but myself. It's a very willful, very personal, I would agree if you said very eccentric book in a lot of ways. And that was what the MacArthur told me I should do. I believe I was right to take it as that kind of message.

The book dropped this week, reviews are coming up, the book tour's going to start. Does the money free you from really having to worry about the stuff --

Let's not exaggerate the good fortune. My MacArthur runs out in a year, and the really tragic thing about getting the MacArthur award is that the only person in the entire universe who will never get a MacArthur is someone who already got one. I'm on my own. It made the last few years so much easier, and it's hard to know how I could have gotten this book done without it.

In "The Greatest Show on Earth," Dawkins has written what is essentially a layperson's primer for the theory of evolution. Dawkins aims to explain to the everyday reader why evolution isn't a "theory" but a fact and that we need only look around us to find evidence of its existence -- from continental drift to the reproductive habits of wasps. Dawkins uses simple language, elaborate metaphors and color photographs to make his point, and the result is a convincing, if occasionally dry, overview of evolutionary biology. It's also clear, from the book's first pages, that Dawkins isn't very tolerant of his creationist opponents (the book includes a memorably confrontational encounter with Wendy Wright, the creationist president of Concerned Women for America).

Salon spoke with Dawkins via Skype about creationism's popularity in America, its connection with religion, and how he feels about his own notoriety. A video excerpt of the conversation is posted below.

As you point out in the book, over 40 percent of Americans believe in creationism, which is a higher number than in many other Western countries. Why do you think that creationism has such a strong foothold in the United States?

First of all we have to believe the Gallup polls, and I suppose we do. I mean we believe Gallup polls about other things. You're asking me a question about sociology and comparative religion in different countries. I'm not an expert in that, it's not really up to me to say why the United States and Turkey should be way out ahead or behind in this particular case. It does seem to be the case that of all advanced Western nations the United States is more religious than any other.

Do you also think there's a greater degree of anti-intellectualism in America compared to a lot of other countries?

There does seem to be evidence of a divide in the United States between two cultures. It does seem to be a deeper divide, and maybe even a widening one, perhaps we don't see in European countries. There seems to be a divide between what shall we say -- the Sarah Palin voters and the Barack Obama voters -- who seem to be more bitterly split than the corresponding divides in other countries.

You say in the beginning of the book that you would like to convince people that creationism is not a feasible or a viable belief system, but you also make it clear that you're not a big fan of creationists.

That's putting it mildly, yes.

Doesn't that make it difficult for a creationist to read this book without feeling insulted? Won't that hurt your goal?

No, I'm not really aiming it at creationists. I don't think they read books anyway, except for one book. It's aimed at the intelligent layperson who does read books and who vaguely knows a little bit about evolution and who vaguely knows that there are creationists and maybe even vaguely thinks that he's a creationist himself, but who is curious and wants to know the evidence.

It's just that the evidence is so enthralling, it's so exciting. It is so wonderful that here we are on this planet and we understand why we're here. And it's just a sort of ecstatic feeling to understand why you exist, and I want to share that feeling with other people.

Well, one of the things that you do very well in the book is take this very complicated scientific jargon and scientific reasoning and use metaphors to explain it in a way that a lot of people can understand. Do you think there's a lack of that kind of writing -- explaining science for a broader audience?

There's not exactly a shortage. My book is not the only one that does that. I've always done this. I mean, way back to my first book in 1976, I've used that technique and I've always worked hard to try to make it easy to understand, to try to put myself in the position of the reader, which is a pretty obvious thing to do, really.

Do you think there's a shortage of that being done in education?

I think it would be a good idea if other scientists did more of it, and I think there are plenty of scientists who could do it very well. Really I think it amounts to a kind of responsibility almost, to go out there and explain what it is that they do in entertaining and interesting ways.

The biggest science news of the fall has been the unveiling of this new fossil of a human ancestor named Ardi. How meaningful do you think this discovery is, and how far do you think it's going to go in changing people's minds about evolution?

It's not a new fossil. It's been around for a while, but I understand what's happened is that it's been finally described and published. It's not the missing link. There were many possible links, and this is one of them. It's older than the Australopithecines that we know already, so it seems to fall in the gap that had been left between the Australopithecines and the common ancestor with chimpanzee that we know from molecular evidence lived about 6 million years ago. So Ardipithecus lived around 4 million years ago and the Australopithecines lived about 3 million to 2 million years ago. So this does plug a very nice gap.

Do you think that there's any one particular piece of evidence that will change people's minds about creationism, or do you think that it's really just a question of a gradual erosion of people's belief systems?

I wouldn't expect their minds to be changed by fossils, really. I think the more convincing evidence is the evidence from comparison of modern animals and plants, because we have so many different species, and by comparing them with each other, particularly comparing the molecular genetics which is nowadays very easily done. All living creatures have the same genetic code, so you have an exact digital count of the similarities between every species and every other species, and if you look at that pattern of similarities it falls perfectly into a hierarchical tree. It's a family tree. And even better than that, everything you look at -- every different gene you look at -- gives you the same family tree. That's remarkably persuasive evidence to anybody who attends to it long enough to understand.

You also describe an encounter with Wendy Wright, from Concerned Women of America, in the book. She repeatedly refuses to listen to your arguments and not only that but your evidence. Do you think the debate about creationism is just a question of people not being willing to look at very obvious evidence?

I think that's very clear in the case of the interview with Wendy Wright that she had a kind of willful refusal to listen. She absolutely knew what she believed. She's believed it since childhood. She believes it, because it's in the holy book. Nothing that you could say to her would ever change her mind. That kind of mind is not open to evidence. It is a complete waste of time arguing with people like her. Fortunately there are plenty of other people with whom it's not a waste of time arguing, who simply don't know very much about it, and why should they? There are lots of things we don't know much about, and so I have great hopes -- not of convincing people like her, who are forever close-minded -- but of convincing people who just haven't given it very much thought.

Do you think that it's possible for people to be both religious and believe in evolution?

It's an empirical matter that there are plenty of individuals who can manage to reconcile the two. On that level it clearly is possible, because people like Francis Collins do it. I find it hard to see quite how they do it, but that's the topic of my earlier book, "The God Delusion," rather than this book.

What spurred you to write the book now? Was there any kind of current event or any kind of encounter with a person that made you think that now is the time to write a book about creationism?

It is a book that I ought to have written long ago in a sense because all my books previously have assumed the truth of evolution, and this one gives the evidence. I think that if you actually know why now, it was probably that publishers are so centenary-minded. It is the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, and the sesquicentennial -- if that's the right word -- of the publication of "The Origin of Species," and so those two things came together, and it occurred not just to my publishers but to other publishers as well. But really, the more honest answer is that there was no particular reason. It was just a very exciting subject and what could be better than to lay out the evidence for the dominant and certainly correct view of why we exist at all? What could be more enthralling than that? Why do you need an excuse to write about it?

I certainly remember a lot of what's in the book from my high school and college biology classes. What do you think makes your book more convincing than other past books given the fact that a lot of this information has been around for quite a while?

I don't want to make any false claims for it. I write the books the way I want to write them, and I hope people enjoy them. There are books out there which are very good, and it's up to the readers to read as many of them as they like and decide which version they like best.

In the past few years, especially with "The God Delusion," you've become sort of an evangelist for the atheist movement. How have you dealt with becoming a more polarizing figure over the past few years?

I don't quite know why it should be polarizing. I like to think "The God Delusion" is a humorous book. I think actually it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it. They've read other people reacting to it. It is true that religious people do react to any kind of criticism as almost a personal insult, it's almost as if you're saying their face is ugly or something, and so that has put out the idea that "The God Delusion" is an aggressive book. You've heard words like strident and shrill, as well. I'd like to suggest that actually it's quite a funny book.

Do you regret having that kind of reputation? Do you feel like it's handicapping you in the future -- that you'll always be seen as having a certain kind of agenda in mind?

Yes, I think it's unfortunate. I think it comes from people who haven't actually read the book, or who haven't actually met me personally, and so I'm described as a very aggressive, strident person, which I'm not.

What's your next writing project?

I do have a plan to write a children's book, which is barely started. It's too early really to talk about that but one of my ambitions has for a while been to write a children's book about science, not about evolution, but about science and about scientific ways of thinking.

In "City Boy," White recounts his time in New York during the '60s and '70s, before and after the Stonewall riots. Back when New York was still a dangerous and dirty town, White arrived from the Midwest and managed to work his way into the inner circle of the city's cultural heavy hitters through a combination of talent, charm and sexual magnetism. Along the way he also co-authored a sex book ("The Joy of Gay Sex"), had flings with writer Bruce Chatwin and poet John Ashbery, and took jaunts to Rome and Venice. The book is as notable for its depictions of pre-AIDS gay life -- with its unabashed hedonism and seedy sex clubs -- as  for its insidery take on the New York literary world.

White spends much of the book describing his literary compatriots in unflattering terms, and few of his acquaintances from the period emerge unscathed. But White reserves his most acidic prose for those gay critics and artists who remained in the closet (the most vicious attack is aimed at Susan Sontag). Recently, White has himself been the subject of an attack by Gore Vidal, who savaged him in an interview with the Times of London. Talking about White's play "Terre Haute," which recounts a fictional encounter between Vidal and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Vidal called White "a filthy low writer" and dismissed his play as a "vulgar fag-ism."

Salon spoke to White in his New York apartment about the continued importance of gay literature, how the Internet is changing gay culture -- and why Gore Vidal is an "awful, nasty man." 

A video excerpt of the interview is included below. 

Gay culture is becoming much less easy to define, thanks in part to the Internet. Do you think that's a good thing?

If I had been my age back in the '70s I would have probably been alone, whereas now I have lots of boyfriends, because I can meet people online who like old men. Rare birds can find each other, even if it sometimes means traveling a thousand miles. I have a boyfriend now in Spain, who is 31 but likes much older men who are chubby. That's the kind of thing that happens because of the Internet, so I'd be the last person to knock it.

As people's lives become less defined by their sexuality, they also might prefer narratives that are less defined by sexuality. Do you think there's still a need for gay literature?

We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don't need to write exclusively about that. Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people. ["The Hours" author] Michael Cunningham is a good example of someone who is out himself and has written things about gay people, but he doesn't feel the need to write exclusively about gays. There are tons like him among the younger writers.

If you were starting your writing career now, do you think you'd be less inclined to write about gay things?

I've written lots of things that aren't gay. Though I'm writing a novel now about a gay man and a straight man who are best friends, and I follow them over three decades. That's a subject that is so obvious, and almost every gay male I know has a close straight male friend, but no one's ever written about it as far as I know. It's amazing to me that such an obvious subject has never been treated, and I think there are tons of subjects like that. I still find gay life, or the suburbs of gay life, very interesting to write about. I mean, where are the sinister, destructive gay characters?

Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy. Now I think we've gotten to the point where we could write about that older gay male couple who preys on younger boys.

I'm assuming you read the Gore Vidal interview in the Times of London. He says a number of very nasty things about you -- but he also makes accusations that you "gayed-up" his relationship with Tim McVeigh in your play "Terre Haute."

He signed off on it. Now, late in the day, he's decided he doesn't like it, or maybe he forgot -- he drinks a lot. The tension for the [Gore-inspired] character is that he doesn't actually approve of what McVeigh did, but he's attracted to McVeigh as a man and as a personality -- whereas Gore actually approves of what McVeigh did and thinks he's a great freedom fighter.

That's complete lunacy. Gore wanted me to rewrite it to show a lot more sympathy toward McVeigh, but I thought that would lose about 99 percent of the audience. I don't approve of killing hundreds of people in the name of some abstract ideal. I think Gore is a complete lunatic, and it doesn't bother me what he says about me. He's an awful, nasty man. Now he can't write. He's wheelchair-bound, and he's in pain. He lost his lover of many years. The last time I talked to him I said, "Come to dinner, and I'll have some cute boys for you to meet." "Oh, I don't want to meet any of them! " You know, he's just an old grouch.

He's been nice to me over the years, but he's always like this seething volcano and you're always wondering when he's going to go off.

I don't know what he's famous for anywhere, really, because I think those historical novels are complete works of taxidermy. Nobody can read those. "Myra Breckinridge" was funny but light. The essays are what everybody defends -- but a friend of mine who did a volume of the best essays of the 20th century said they're all so topical that they've all aged terribly. I don't know where his work is. You have to have one or two books that are actually good if you're going to have a lasting career, and I don't think he does.

By that standard, which of your books do you think will last?

It's not for me to decide, but "A Boy's Own Story" seems to have entered the canon. I mean, even Harold Bloom chose it for the canon.

You name a lot of names in this book -- often connected to a fairly explicit sexual story. How did you decide whom to include?

I wanted to write about my own formation as a writer, and I also wanted to write about the beginning of gay liberation. I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the "blue chip gays." I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others. One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career.

A lot of what you write -- and celebrate -- in the book is a culture of hedonism and sexual experimentation that seems at odds with the gay marriage movement. What do you make of this generation's pursuit of gay marriage?

I believe in promiscuity. But you know people are a lot more complicated than they appear to be. I mean, right now I'm in a relationship where I am faithful because my partner wants me to be, and I respect him enough -- and it lowers the level of anxiety in our relationship. He's also extraordinarily hot.

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.

A lot of your rise to literary fame in the '60s and '70s involved networking -- and sometimes sleeping with -- important figures in the literary world. Do you think the Internet has changed the importance of that for young writers?

I think the more ways there are into literature, whether it's being published in book form or in any other form, the better. There is always the danger in any society that only insiders who are privileged will have access to publication. I think whenever that system breaks down there is this sudden flourishing of talent. Maybe we're witnessing that with the blog era.

In the book you briefly mention blogging -- and not in a very positive light.

I was saying there are more people blogging than there are people reading them sometimes. I mean, hundreds of thousands of people a year submit poems to poetry magazines, but only about a thousand people subscribe to them. We have many more writers than readers now.

What's your favorite bad TV show?

I like late-night talk shows, partly because that's the part of the day when I'm unwinding, and like every other tired businessman in America, I want to zone out. I can't even tell you their names, but I do watch that stuff. 

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, "A Better Pencil." His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced. Far from heralding in a "2001: Space Odyssey" dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. "A Better Pencil" is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives.

Recently, Salon spoke with Baron by phone about emoticons, the way Facebook and MySpace make us better friends and a not-too-distant future when everyone is a writer.

Your book is about the digital communications revolution, so why did you decide to call it "A Better Pencil"?

OK, I can't answer that very well because the publisher came up with the title. I had a different title, and they decided it wouldn't sell. "A Better Pencil" is a line I use in the book, but I had called it "From Pencils to Pixels." I think they wanted something shorter and, pardon the expression, pointed.

But what I'm dealing with is the way technology affects readers and writers when they communicate. And also how readers and writers help direct the way technology develops. So, what I'm trying to do is put the computer revolution into historical context to see how it fits with previous innovations in communication like pencils, like the printing press, like the clay tablet, like writing itself. A new communication technology does what old technology was able to do – sometimes better, sometimes in a little different way -- and I'm looking at how we make sense of all of this.

How is the criticism directed at computers, instant messaging and Facebook similar to the negative reaction directed at previous communication advances, from pencils to typewriters?

Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it's the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they're interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn't, they don't buy into it.

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

You point out that means of communication we fear often evolve to become viewed as highly personal: Handwriting started out as a completely bureaucratic mechanism and it's now thought of as a very personal means of expression. Why does this happen?

Handwriting could only become personal once handwriting no longer needed to be uniform because we didn't have to worry about readability. Handwriting had to be readable when it was the only way of reproducing texts. Once the printing press took over, you still had several hundred years where documents, business documents, certain notes, letters, were produced by hand, not on print, because the printing press was only useful if you needed large numbers of copies of things. So you still had to have uniform, legible handwriting for office work until the early 20th century when office machinery took over. That's when you start seeing the shift from everybody has to write the same way to expressing your personality.

But we also tend to romanticize the technology of yesteryear. There are always people who feel nostalgia toward the means of communication that have been usurped. What do you think causes this even when, in the case of computers compared to typewriters, say, the new technology has many advantages?

I'm going to have to guess at this because I'm not particularly nostalgic. But when you read this type of commentary, you have a sense that people are afraid of the new technology and think that somehow, things were great, why fix what's not broken? Or I'm too old to learn this new technology. One of the things about new technology is that it tends to be more complicated than the older ones. So at least initially there's a steep learning curve. When I started using a personal computer, they were not particularly plug-and-play. They were really user-unfriendly. You had to be a maniac to stay with it and a glutton for punishment. But I had the sense that eventually, this will be better despite all the difficulties I had to put up with. But the people who yearn for the good old days of older technology like typewriters don't seem to realize there never were any good old days. At the same time, in looking at new technology, it never does everything that people promise it will.

One of the most common arguments against the digital revolution is that communicating via IM or Facebook or e-mail in some sense removes us from living in the world. Isn't there some validity to that? When one of the main ways in which we socialize is done alone, in the privacy of our own home without speaking, doesn't that indicate a dramatic communication change – and perhaps not for the better?

There are two sides to this. Computer socialization -- is this putting an end to face-to-face human interaction? Or does it let us expand our social networks when face-to-face communication is not possible, either because of geographic distance or some other barrier? Obviously, there are people who will reject these kinds of things out of hand and say the only meaningful communication is the one that I can have face-to-face with someone, who say calling Facebook "friends" friends is the end of the meaning of friendship.

On the other hand, I survey my students all the time about this, and there's confirming data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that, in fact, what people are using programs like Facebook and e-mail and chats for is to reinforce friendships and to maintain friendships across distance. My students say I did this semester abroad and the only way I could keep in contact with my friends was through Facebook, and stuff like that. I don't think for most people it replaces anything. I think it extends it. But certainly, there are people who want to say, look I have 15,000 Facebook friends and look how popular I am.

As a professor of linguistics, have you noticed the way your students write and speak changing over time? We hear so much criticism about emoticons and text-speak corrupting language, but do you find that actually occurring?

I don’t think it’s having a negative impact. The sort of scary stories you hear all the time about children at school putting emoticons in their book reports -- that may happen from time to time, but I think students as writers quickly learn what’s appropriate in what kind of context. And so they adapt their writing. Particularly the successful ones. Some people are better at it than others, obviously. Some people are never going to write a good report whether there’s an emoticon in it or not, and some people are going to write dynamite stuff for school even if they use acronyms and little pictures. But writers learn what the audience expects, and they learn that for any successful communication there’s got to be an interchange between what the audience expects and giving them what you want to give them. Getting your message across in a way that they’ll pay attention to. I don’t see that as a big problem at all. My students are not making those kinds of errors, but they’re also in college, and we talk about this sort of thing in class and they say, I don’t even do that in text messages. They say that’s very junior high school, that’s very middle school. Once you mature, once you’re in high school, you look down on that stuff. We punctuate, and we check for spelling. They’re well aware of the conventions, and they buy into them. In fact, it’s kind of hard to break them away from being conventional.

If you don’t think the digital revolution is making us worse writers, do you think it’s making too many people writers? Just to play devil’s advocate, is it a positive that so many people can express themselves publicly online?

We have, through the history of communications, this whole tension between giving people the tools to express themselves and regulating that expression: Who should be allowed to publish? Whose manuscript should be allowed to appear as a play in the 17th century? In London, you had to have government approval before you could put on a play. Shakespeare had to get that approval from the authorities. So what the computer does is subvert those traditional gate-keeping facilities. You don’t need an editor, you don’t need a publisher. All you need is a Wi-Fi and an Apple laptop and a place to sit at Starbucks and you’re a writer. And the funny thing is that you could put anything out there, and somebody is going to read it. Writers spend their whole lives looking for readers and now with the computer, readers are there. They’re just waiting for people to put stuff online. Does this dilute the quality? That’s a matter of opinion. Giving more people the authority to write – people are doing it and they seem to find things to say and they’re finding readers and that’s one criterion for successful writing: having an audience.

A follow-up to that: You talk about John Updike’s fear about living in a world where no writer is ever paid for his work. When there is this much material online for free, while it’s easier for people to express themselves, is it harder for writers to live off their writing now? If writing becomes a hobby rather than a profession, what does that bode for journalism or even fiction writers?

The economical model is changing for journalists, no question. But I think that’s got less to do with the fact that people other than professional journalists can put stuff online. People are getting their news from other sources, from online news aggregators or directly from news sources or from “The Daily Show” rather than buying print. I think historically, professional writing is a relatively modern concept, and writers had to have independent incomes for most of history in order to be writers. They’ve had to have patrons. They’ve had to have day jobs. So what else is new? Most fiction writers don’t make a living from their fiction. A few do, but most of them have to get teaching jobs or some other kind of job to pay the bills. The economical model for publication is changing, but how it is changing and whether it is good or bad or simply inevitable, I can’t say.

Another argument frequently cited against the computerization of writing is that there is now too much information, and it’s harder to find what you’re looking for. However, as you point out, people have been saying this about every communication transformation that has come before the digital revolution.

There’s always been too much to read. Nobody read all the books at the Great Library of Alexandria. Nobody was capable of doing that then. Nobody is reading all that’s online today. What we need and what we always seem to get is a way to make this glut of information navigable. We need search engines, we need indexing, we need reviews. We have all this apparatus to find the data we’re looking for.

How do you see this revolution continuing to change the way we write and read, and do you think the attempts to constrain communication, as we saw during the Iranian elections, can ever be lastingly effective?

Opening up writing to new voices can’t be a bad thing. We’re seeing this spiral. The more people use technology, the more people communicate, the more people in power become concerned with how to control that use. There are two forces pushing against each other. Whether it’s government or religious organizations or schools controlling what children do online or parents controlling what their kids are doing with communication technologies or groups online self-organizing and deciding how to control what does and does not get expressed -- it’s similar to what happened when printing presses became a major means of communication or when radio and TV became major communication players. How do you license, how do you control what gets said on the air? There’s a lot of bad stuff online and there’s a lot of good stuff online, and it’s going to take a long time to figure out what standards and regulations are going to be acceptable that aren’t going to stifle creativity but that are going to give people some security as well. 

Unlike most addiction memoirs, written from the safety of sobriety, "The Adderall Diaries" comes from the frantic depths of dependency (a doctor prescribed Adderall for depression, though Elliott notes that it is, essentially, speed). At the same time, Elliott developed a morbid interest in the murder trial of accomplished computer programmer Hans Reiser, whom he interviewed from jail for Salon last summer. Hans' brilliance, the beauty of his mail-order Russian bride and the sordid details of her death (and love life) made for a trial obsessed over in high-tech circles and TV tabloids alike. In 2004, Nina had divorced Hans and began dating his best friend, Sean Sturgeon, who would go on to play a starring role in her murder trial. As it turned out, Elliott and Sturgeon ran in the same BDSM San Francisco circles and had shared ex-girlfriends, and Elliott had even participated in a bondage photo shoot in Sturgeon's apartment (though he didn't know Sturgeon at the time). Drawn in by his personal connection to the case, Elliott sat in the trial for nearly six months, inspired by other novelists-cum-true crime writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer.

The murder trial contained more twists than usual: At one point during the investigation Sturgeon cryptically confessed to "eight murders, maybe nine" of his own -- revenge, he said, for the physical and sexual abuse he suffered as a child in an East Bay commune. Add to this Elliott's own ruminations about his estranged, abusive father -- who also confessed to a murder in an unpublished memoir, though Elliott could never verify it -- and you have a frenzied exploration into the arbitrary nature of truth and innocence, with mystery and speculation at its core. As Elliott writes at the beginning of the book, "This is a work of nonfiction ... Much is based on my own memories and is faithful to my recollections, but only a fool mistakes memory for fact."

Since finishing "The Adderall Diaries," Elliott founded an online culture magazine, the Rumpus, and has both written and lectured about using the intimate details of his life as writing fodder. When I met him in a Manhattan coffee shop, he proudly held the first bound hardcover copy of "The Adderall Diaries" -- which he called the best thing he's ever written -- and spoke candidly about why most addiction memoirs are bullshit, a newfound love for his father and the connection between writers and suicide.

At the beginning of the book, you write about not always trusting your own memories and what others say. In "The Adderall Diaries," does it matter if the stories are true or not?

In the end it's weird. My father's confessions, Sean Sturgeon's confession to eight murders and even Hans Reiser's confession to murdering Nina -- which he did, but not in the way he confessed -- all three of these confessions were false. In the end it's really a book about not knowing. And about how the lie mixes with the truth and becomes inseparable. We either accept that memories are true, or we accept that there is no truth. Our memories of events are so divergent that they're completely incompatible, and it's impossible to know.

It is a fact that Hans Reiser murdered Nina Reiser -- that's a very important fact, but I don't think we'll ever know why. Hans thinks the reason he did it was for his children -- but in that case he's lying because he's lying to himself. It's complicated.

The book turned out to be much more about your father than you anticipated, and you have a tangled history with him. He's been known to even post online reviews of your books disputing your retelling of the past. Can you talk about that relationship, and why you included him in this book?

He's already left reviews for this book, and I don't even think he can get a copy yet. I love him very much because he is my father. But it took writing the book to realize that my relationship with my father is the most important relationship in my life. Our history has been very turbulent.

I left home at 13, and the state took custody of me. We made up later and there was always a lot of resentment around that. By 2004 my father was regularly contacting journalists I was talking to; even if I didn't mention him, he would tell them that I was lying. I ended up basically not talking to him for five years. In the process of writing this book, I thought I'd made some real discoveries about us and I realized that I loved my father, which I don't think I knew. So I thought it was important that I meet with him and tell him about the book.

Originally, I was going to confront him about the murder he confessed to. And then I decided that it really didn't matter whether or not he killed this guy. That was 36 years ago, and I just wanted to take some of the poison out of our relationship. Then we met and I wasn't that successful, I guess, so after a couple hours, I asked him about the murder. And he acted like he did it. His initial reaction was shock and then he made a joke about it! I think he was surprised but I don't actually know. I don't even think I'm the right person to judge my father's reactions. I'm always wrong about my father. When I started writing the book, I was sure that he didn't do it. By the time I was done writing the book, I was no longer sure. I knew less at the end of the book than I did at the beginning.

It turns out that Sean Sturgeon's confession to eight murders was completely fabricated and a cry for attention. Yet at one point after the trial, "60 Minutes" wanted you to come on and talk about Sean's sexual history and role in the case, but you refused. Why?

A lot of what drew me into the story was Sean. We knew a lot of people in common. When I first met him, I was skeptical, but I liked him -- he really went out of his way to help people and to be nice. But I felt like "60 Minutes" was exploiting Sean. They wanted me to talk about him in a very salacious way and I said no. I sat in this courtroom for six months and one thing you learned from this trial was that Sean had nothing to do with Nina's murder. So after the trial when they wanted me to talk about his sex life, I didn't know why they didn't ask me about Hans Reiser, who I was an expert on by that time. I knew everything you needed to know about this case. So why would you want me to talk about someone's sex life? So I said no, and they tried to bribe me with the rest of the money they owed me. And so I threatened to take them to court, and they paid me. I was personally offended because they were sensationalizing S/M. They were trying to make a link between sadomasochism, bondage, kinky sex and Nina Reiser's murder. But kinky sex had nothing to do with Nina Reiser's murder, not even remotely. I thought it was exploitative and kind of disgusting, but that's what television is.

You wrote a piece for Salon in which you interviewed Hans Reiser after the guilty verdict came in. What was that like? How did you get access to him?

It was easy to get access to Hans Reiser in jail. Anybody can visit in a jail. It's not a prison -- you don't have to be on the list. Still, I knew other journalists had tried unsuccessfully, and so I went in with a plan. When I got there, Hans saw me and he knew I had been at the trial because I had been in court every single day. He picked up the phone and said he wasn't talking to journalists. I told him I wasn't a journalist, but that I wrote a book about him. He said I could write him a letter and he would answer my questions. I told him I didn't have any questions but if he had anything he needed to tell me, now was the time. And then he just started talking and it was just a flood that I couldn't control. I knew once I cut in he was going to stop, so I just let him go for like 40 minutes. And it was all about his victimhood, how he hadn't been given a fair trial and how everybody was out to get him. It was an endless stream and there was no remorse whatsoever. A few days later, he led the police to Nina's body and he's saying, I'm sorry. He definitely has no remorse. He feels completely dead inside.

The book is called "The Adderall Diaries" even though Adderall is only mentioned a few times explicitly. But the tone of the book is very reminiscent of the feeling of being on Adderall -- it is extremely humorless and matter-of-fact.

That's a very astute observation. The Adderall is always there in the book, and in so many ways it's about taking it and getting back on after getting off of it. I think Adderall is really bad for you. I think you get dependent on it and you don't solve problems you would have otherwise solved. You don't confront things because you think it's just the Adderall. It hurts your sleep patterns, it makes you inconsistent in your moods and actions. Adderall is chemically indistinguishable from the original amphetamines, so however you feel about amphetamines, that's how you feel about Adderall. It's the same stuff Ginsburg was writing about and Jack Kerouac was taking, and the Nazis when they were parachuting behind enemy lines on murderous rampages.

I'm still taking Adderall, but I'm against it. I don't think anyone should get on it. The logical conclusion of the book would be for me to stop taking it, but that's the problem with all these bullshit memoirs, these Elizabeth Wurtzel books, they come to false conclusions. The writer wants to give the reader what they want. I hate that because it's phony, it's a lie. That's not what life is. Now I take 10 mg of Adderall a day. I don't know if in the future I'll take less or more or stop. I don't want to make predictions or promises but I do think that Adderall is overprescribed. People get on it and it totally fucks them up. It's insane to put children on Adderall. Medicating your child should be a last resort. The child has to learn and get through these things, and make changes and adjustments on their own. What do you do when you have a behavior disorder and you're taking pills, so you don't learn the things that you need to do to combat the depression and then the pills stop working? It's the same thing with all these drugs.

Can you talk about your own experience with drugs, and how it affects your view of Adderall and other drugs now?

I've known several people that have died from overdoses. I came very close to dying from a massive heroin overdose. From ages 10 to 16, I would take anything that passed in front of me. I just wanted to numb out. I remember taking acid for the first time when I was 11 or 12 and remember specifically thinking, this is what it feels like to be happy. I didn't know what happiness was and now I know. I stopped taking drugs when I was 16. I started again at 21 or 22, overdosed and then I stopped again. I don't drink or do any drugs. I take Adderall, I drink coffee. I have many happy moments. Most people would say I'm funny. I don't think people think of me as depressed. The problem with depression is not being happy or sad, but when you're sad, how far do you go? Even if you're only sad once in a while, if you get really sad that one time, then it's a problem. As far as how you deal with that, I don't know the answer.

At the beginning of the book you write, "I feel ready to kill myself," and near the end, there's a section where you explore suicidal urges and depression. Why do you think these feelings are common among writers?

The book comes from a suicidal urge. When you feel suicidal you can write whatever you want. It really opens you up, and you have total creative freedom, but of course it's dangerous. You could say it has to do with the dilemma of the modern man and woman -- the existential dilemma -- but in the end it's probably just chemicals. I've noticed that it helps a writer to feel kind of manic and to think that what you have to say is so valuable that someone else would want to hear it. But those moments of mania can be followed by periods of pretty deep depression. And that's always been a part of my personality.

The year I spent on the street from when I was 13 to when I was 14 I tried to kill myself seven times. I still have the scars on my wrist. And I'm kind of glad I did try to kill myself and I have these scars to remind me that this is not some new thing and I'm not going crazy, it's just something that has always been there.

You devised something called the "lending library," where you loaned advanced copies of the book to anyone who signed up as long as they would read it within a week and then mail it on to the next person on the list. What gave you this idea?

They had given me 300 galleys and I was supposed to send the book out to media outlets. I did that, but I used 75 of the books to make this lending library. So about 400 signed up to read the book in advance and it was amazing because I got all these letters from people who had read my book. I had never gotten that much feedback from people. One guy that read the book started a Facebook group called "I read an advance copy of The Adderall Diaries" and I didn't start that group! It was great.

But the idea wasn't so much to market the book as it was a reaction to someone else's idea to market it. Somebody wanted to join this program with Amazon where you pay them to send the book to their top reviewers and their reviewers do advanced reviews. I thought that was crazy. Are those my readers? I just thought it was a total waste. We only had a limited number of advanced copies and normally, you'd send five copies out and have one person read it, but this way we could send one copy out and have five people read it. I don't care about selling books. I've never made any money publishing books, so why would that change? I just want people to read it.