This might sound like the sort of breathless hyperbole regularly used to prop up glaring deficiencies in otherwise flimsy policy papers. Yet there’s more than a little menace to Florida’s proclamations when you consider that the professor of public policy at George Mason University published “The Rise of the Creative Class” only three years earlier. In that book, he described with earnest, unabashed exuberance the prominence of the very same class in what he calls the new “Creative Age.”

In fact, the ideas in Florida’s 2002 book have come into vogue and gained a certain amount of status over the past few years, with dog-eared paperbacks of “Rise of the Creative Class” landing on the desks of a disparate (and sometimes desperate) range of professionals: urban planners, community redevelopers, economists, gay activists, financers, curators, developers, musicians and so on. And don’t forget the local and regional politicians, especially if said politician lords over a small- or medium-size inland city that makes up one of the postindustrial rustlands spread all too generously between the two coasts.

That book, Florida’s first, highlighted an energetic, mobile, economically productive “creative class” that emerged in force after the bubble economy of the ’90s — a class whose members range from idea-creating professionals such as scientists, designers and entertainers to knowledge workers in business, law and healthcare who use their creative capacity to solve complex problems. According to Florida, this new class includes 38 million Americans, and the creative sector makes up more than 30 percent of the overall labor force.

For cities to remain strong, or to rebound from postindustrial neglect, Florida prescribed artistic and cultural development; this would attract members of the new flourishing, prospering class. His emphasis on a thriving, music-filled nightlife and a populace of artists and scenesters ignited the imaginations of developers and planners around the country. His book provided tables that ranked cities on the key components that, according to Florida, make up the trinity of successful development: technology, talent and tolerance. “The Rise of the Creative Class” quickly became ammunition for thinkers whose similar ideas had been steamrolled by machine politicians already bought and paid for by traditional businesses and developers, whose orgiastic fantasies of castle-like sports stadiums and big-box retailers have taken over the horizon.

Florida also runs a thriving consultancy and has traveled the world preaching the gospel of the creative class to rapt government officials desperate to resurrect their sputtering economies. But while Florida has found his share of enthusiastic devotees, it hasn’t been all lattes and laptops. Writers such as Karrie Jacobs questioned Florida’s popularity in an April 2005 article in Metropolis Magazine titled “Why I Don’t Love Richard Florida”: “I don’t think Florida is wrong. It’s just that his distillation of creativity into the kind of prescription routinely proffered by management consultants makes me fairly sure that what he’s selling is not the virtues of creativity but rather the ingredients of a formula.”

And countless Republicans and conservatives have taken umbrage at the suggestion that economic vibrancy no longer resided in traditional development strategies or that the road to economic recovery did not involve reopening a steel plant but soliciting young people with tattoos and piercings. Those even further to the right blanched at Florida’s notion that successful resurgence was predicated and even helped by concentrations of gay and ethnic populations. Clearly, the thought that queers and people of color were anything but talking points to scare the populace into reelection on an gay-marriage-cum-anti-immigrant platform was completely beyond the pale.

Florida recently took time to talk with Salon about “The Flight of the Creative Class,” which reconceives his urban diagnosis to fit a global scale. The competition for talent, writes Florida, is no longer between U.S. cities but between cities around the world. Not only that, but the long-standing advantages the U.S. has traditionally had in attracting such talent is slipping away due to reactionary government obstacles and, perhaps most important, the ongoing and increasingly divisive culture war in the country.

Your first book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” was so optimistic about the potential of what you termed the “creative economy,” but this new book is almost alarmist in nature. You argue that the U.S. is facing a potentially crippling economic crisis if it doesn’t improve the ways in which it attracts and retains creative workers.

I’ve studied competitiveness for 25 years and the current economic threat is by far the gravest competitive threat to ever face the United States. It’s far more significant than the challenge posed by Japanese or Asian competition in the ’90s because it’s aimed at the crux of our advantage, which is our ability to attract the best and brightest talent. Everyone is frightened of letting terrorists into the country when it’s actually more likely that they’re keeping out the next Einstein. Look at the amount of attention given to Social Security, look at the attention given to building football stadiums — and you can’t even get a conversation going about attracting and retaining talent!

How did this book come about? At first glance it seems so different from the domestic focus on the American cities in your first book.

After I finished “The Rise of the Creative Class” I was invited to the Knowledge Wave conference in New Zealand. The speakers were Robert Putnam [author of "Bowling Alone"], [Stanford professor] Paul Romer, and me, plus all these heavyweights from around the world. Later they arranged a lunch with the director Peter Jackson [of "Lord of the Rings" fame] and a tour of his Wetta Studios.

When I asked him why he chose New Zealand to build his state-of-the-art studio instead of L.A. or elsewhere in the U.S., he said, “I decided I could build this incredible digital film production complex in Wellington. And not only could I attract talent from around the world because we have a great project and great people and a great location — there’s the sun and the beautiful surroundings and the beautiful city — but it’s small enough so there weren’t the kind of distractions you would find in L.A.” Distractions like a lot of congestion, people who don’t come to work, people who don’t have to work all day to afford a house …

He said, “What we could do here is build a team, while in L.A. everyone is moving from project to project. What I’m trying to do is build an actual company that’s around for a long time. It’s for people who want to work for a company that has a continuous stream of employment.” And he said he could get people from Australia, from Germany, from France, from the Soviet Union or the former East European block and from the United States. They all wanted to work at the studio.

And so I put that into my head and I started to think and I started to travel around a little more and it just dawned on me that the competition between Pittsburgh and Austin, Cleveland and Seattle, St. Louis and San Francisco, wasn’t just a national competition. In fact, the competition for talent was global.

Which is the same type of global expansion that’s happened in many industries.

Right, it was like what had happened in the auto industry 20 years ago, when you had French auto producers, Italian auto producers, Japanese auto producers and the big three here, and they all competed for national market share. But then that market went global — as did the market for TVs and the market for telecommunication devices and the market for computers — and then companies had to compete on a world scale. The same thing is happening with cities and the talent they compete for.

And when all this hysteria about national security, homeland security started to happen, I realized that what really drove the United States to its position of greatness wasn’t the fact that we had a big market or lots of raw materials or our American ingenuity. What really made America great for the better part of a century and a half has been our openness to people from all over the world. That’s what built our textile industry, that’s what built our railroad industry. It was because we accepted people like Andrew Carnegie in the steel industry, David Sarnoff in the electronics industry, Adolphus Busch in the beer industry, and so on.

And according to analysts’ statistics for the high-tech revolution, 30 percent of the companies in the Silicon Valley area were founded by an Indian or someone born in a Chinese-speaking country. Whether it’s eBay or Yahoo or Google or Hotmail, what drove America’s high-tech revolution and other industries was the ability to attract the world’s best talent.

But what are the current problems the U.S. faces in terms of attracting that sort of talent? What’s the difference between now and, say, five years ago?

There are two factors interacting here. The first, which would have happened anyway, is that other countries realized how important talent is and cities in those countries have become really effective in competing for talent. So the playing field has been leveled. In the past, people would have said, “Absolutely, my first choice is to move to New York or Boston or San Francisco or Seattle or Chicago …” Now cities like London, Dublin, Amsterdam and Stockholm have become extremely attractive to talented people, not because of any particular public policy but because of the way they’ve developed over the past decade. And I’m not just talking about the relocation of Americans, I’m talking about the location decisions of people on a world scale.

The second factor is that — obviously spurred by this so-called threat of terrorism — we’ve become far more restrictive in our ability to absorb and attract foreign talent. The numbers are all there, showing the decline of foreign students in the U.S. and the decline in the number of visas issued. So many foreigners have visa troubles now, even great scientists, artists and musicians. And once they’re living and working in the U.S., they can’t go home to visit relatives for five years because if they’re not a resident they have to get their visa renewed every time they enter or exit the country. Which means it’s a huge problem to leave the U.S. even for a short period of time because they’re not sure they’ll be able to get back in again. Not surprisingly, there’s a general sense in the world that the United States isn’t as welcoming.

In your first book you state that diversity and especially the presence of a large gay community in a city indicates a level of tolerance that is a prerequisite for urban redevelopment in the creative era. In this book focused on the global creative economy you write that the concentration of foreign students is a leading indicator.

I call students the canaries of the global talent flow. The United States has the largest single number of foreign students, and we actually are very, very, very significantly concentrated among Indian students and Chinese-speaking students. But, for example, only 4 percent of our total student population is made up of foreign students, while in Australia 22 percent of the student population is composed of foreign students.

And in particular, the recent U.S. restrictions have hit hard at foreign students who compose the critical backbone of our high-tech industries. We couldn’t have high-tech industries in the United States — no matter how much we want to say we would — without foreign-born engineers and computer scientists. We just wouldn’t have them. We couldn’t run them because we don’t produce enough talent of our own. Fifty percent of the computer scientists in the United States are foreign-born, which is a huge number. But it makes sense. If you have a billion kids in India and China and a billion kids are trying to learn engineering and math and computer science, there are going to be a lot of really talented and smart kids, even if they’re distributed at the same ratios as U.S. kids. And in the past that gave the U.S. a great advantage because we were able to attract the lion’s share of the brightest, most technically sophisticated, entrepreneurial, motivated kids in the world.

So are you saying that a country like China or India might supplant the U.S. in terms of attracting talent sometime in the future? I told a friend about your Peter Jackson moment and he laughed and said, “It’s not like a few hive workers from the film industry leaving for New Zealand is going to impair the U.S. economy.”

No, it’s not that any one country is going to emerge as the next great superpower and attract all the best talent. It’s not like “It’s going to be the EU” or “It’s going to be China.” That’s silly. But if these increasingly competitive countries take 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 percent of the talent that used to come here, when you add that up over 10 to 20 countries, that’s a huge loss.

And what’s happening, of course, is that India and China and the Chinese-speaking countries are focusing on retaining their kids and attracting back their expatriates. And at the same time, Canada and Australia, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, London and Dublin are all trying to get a toehold on attracting really talented people from all over the world. So the global competition for talent is escalating just as the global competition in automobiles or electronics escalated two decades ago.

We’ve never seen labor markets on this scale that are so strongly global. And the United States is at a tipping point where we might lose our historical advantage. This book sounds the alarm. We better wake up because we can no longer take this for granted.

So how do current issues with regional and urban development fit into all this? In the book you call this one of the most potentially dangerous unrecognized or unaddressed factors.

Cities are the places that attract talent. I mean, consider that 90 percent of GDP comes out of metropolitan areas. And yet somehow some people think that we don’t need cities. Not only do we have to open our borders, we have to strengthen our cities massively because they’re the cornerstones of our ability to compete for talent. But for the past four years the Bush administration has done everything to prevent that, from huge decreases in infrastructure spending to drastic cuts in block grants.

And now most cities aren’t equipped to compete anymore. The only policy we seem to have to revive our cities is to build another stadium. What does that have to do with attracting foreign talent? Who cares? No one cares. I’ve never met one foreign-born person that said “a new stadium” was an important factor when deciding where to live and work. The national government is clueless and our cities would rather be distracted by sports mania instead of paying attention to more serious issues.

My anecdotal evidence suggests that this is already starting to have a big impact. In terms of conversations and interviews I’ve had all over the world, it’s quite clear that the competition for talent isn’t just U.S. cities against other U.S. cities, it’s the world. When I talk to people around the world, they might say, “Oh, New York is my favorite city.” Or maybe they have one or two other U.S. cities — “Ah, I like Chicago a lot, I like San Francisco a lot,” or “I like Boston a lot and I like D.C. a lot.” And then you start to hear a bunch of foreign cities. And now when you talk to young Americans graduating college, when you ask them where they want to move, after they get through their four or five top U.S. cities, it’s quickly “I’ll move to London or I’ll move to Dublin or I’ll move to Sydney or I’ll move to Melbourne.”

The policies and ideas of the Bush administration, as well as those coming from most Republicans and the conservative movement, seem diametrically opposed to what you’re saying is needed to attract talent and prosper in the creative economy.

Once I heard a former high-ranking member of the Bush administration on economic policy, when asked about immigration and national security, say, “If it comes down to a question of national security and economic growth, we will always choose in favor of national security. I don’t care if it means that the next Bill Gates can’t get in …” And that’s a view shared by many members of the administration, at least what we’ve seen in policy.

But the bigger issue is not the Bush administration. The bigger issue is the class divide, which is destroying our country. And that divide is between people who are members of the creative class and fortunate enough to migrate from Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Buffalo or St. Louis to these great thriving creative centers like New York and Boston and Washington and San Francisco and Chicago and Los Angeles. Those people are doing just fine. But the people left behind got really pissed off and got angrier and angrier and madder and madder, and they looked at these cities filled with single people, filled with young people, filled with successful people, filled with immigrants, filled with people cohabitating, having fun, vibrant night life, filled with gay people, and they said “Enough’s enough!”

The blame for this situation also goes to the Democrats, because when the Democrats were in power President Clinton, whom I admire greatly, did not build a society that provided a way for these people to become part of the creative economy. So it’s this anxiety that’s grown up as a result of the rise of the creative economy — whose benefits are extraordinarily concentrated among a relatively small group of people in an even smaller group of regions — that’s ripping this society apart. And that’s what political polarization really is. It isn’t just an issue between red and blue states, it’s a political polarization which has underneath it a new economic geography of class. And it’s terrifying.

You don’t win friends on either side of the aisle by using the “C” word. No politician likes to go there.

People have attacked me for using the word “class.” Actually, what my critics have done most of the time is try to make my argument appear elitist, and that’s not what it is. What I’m saying is that there’s this new class of people, the creative class, with a different relationship to the economy, who generate a lot of value and, as this book suggests, are also getting paid a heck of a lot of money for doing it while the whole rest of the economy gets left behind. So this class divide is becoming starker.

Here’s the way I look at it: You go to any part of the United States, and you know when you’re in a creative class neighborhood or when you’re not in a creative class neighborhood. You know it, you feel it, it’s there. You don’t have to believe it’s a class, but you know it. I know it, you know it, I feel it. I could even feel it in Australia, you could feel it when you went into certain kinds of communities.

This is a true class divide — economic in its roots, with social and cultural implications. In the U.S. it’s very concentrated in particular communities and particular regions and particular neighborhoods. The great failure in this country, and the great risk to this country, is that no one is willing to talk about how to move across that class divide, so you have Democrats and Republicans equally throwing gasoline on the fire.

And while most of my friends on the left will point an accusatory finger at George Bush, I actually think George Bush is doing exactly what he’s supposed to do. He and the Republicans are supposed to reach out to the people who are scared and anxious and say, “The past was better for you. Why do you want a future that resembles Washington, or L.A. or Manhattan? Why do you want all these crazy gay people running around and yuppie nightlife and single people and your kids moving there and their marriages breaking up? You want your good old family values back, don’t you?”

The failure is on the left because they’re the people who are supposed to be making a case for a proactively inclusive future. And why can’t our left today — instead of saying we’re going to appeal to blue-collar voters by saying, “Well, what we’re going to do is scale back women’s rights and we don’t even want to talk about gay rights” — why can’t the left do what you’re supposed to do? Which is what Franklin Roosevelt did.

What Franklin Roosevelt did, and this is by the way of an analogy, during the New Deal, which was brilliant, I mean freaking brilliant, is he said, “I’m not going to fan the flames of class warfare. I’m not going to side with business or labor. I’m not going to close the factories nor am I going to give giant tax breaks to the robber barons.” Our situation now looks just like the late 1920s — the creation of new industries, creation of new sectors, incredible robber baron wealth, Gatsby-like partying in the cities, all of this celebrity culture, and then an impoverished new class, the working class. Which is exactly how the creative economy has unfolded.

Except that what Roosevelt did is say, “I’m going to make sure that these working-class people get to be part of the industrial economy. I’m going to build an industrial society that allows people to organize and bargain collectively, raise their wages, has affordable housing, get long-term mortgages, provides occupational safety and health, Social Security in their old age and welfare in their spells of poverty. And I’m going to make sure that their kids can go to college.”

And now the Bush administration is doing everything it can to roll back the New Deal.

Right, that’s their goal and that’s why the U.S. is losing this competition for talent. Let’s go back: The reason Bush can do that is because Clinton and the Democrats never extended the benefits of the creative economy the way they needed to. Because of the Democrats’ failure to create some kind of mechanism for socializing the risk or ameliorating the risk and fear that people in Pennsylvania and Arkansas and Alabama and Tennessee and Montana feel. And because the Democrats were seen as the party of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, regular people said, “The hell with you!” and abandoned the Democratic Party and became a core constituency of Bush’s support.

Now Bush has the mandate, at least in his eyes and the eyes of the Republicans, to dismantle the New Deal, which gives other countries a huge advantage. Because the creative economy downloads risk onto the individual, you need mechanisms to socialize that risk, to spread that risk.

What do you mean by socialize the risk? If you start talking like that and keep using the word “class,” all the reactionaries are going to start calling you a creative communist.

I’m not talking about socialize as in socialistic. I mean develop mechanisms that say to an individual: When you pursue your career or a bunch of projects or a bunch of service jobs, when you’re laid off, you’re going to have some kind of wage insurance or unemployment insurance, some kind of health benefits. You’ll have some sort of education benefits so you can go back to school and navigate this creative economy with some sense that you’re not going to be absolutely abandoned.

The U.S. has become very Darwinistic. And the failure of the left to develop an alternative is our greatest dilemma, because the conservatives are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. I’m not saying it’s right for our economy, it’s disastrous to our economy, but you shouldn’t expect the conservatives to build that platform.

What’s happening in Canada, in Australia, in Scandinavia — I went and met with the premiers of West Australia, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. I met with labor governors and liberal party mayors. All of them are building platforms, and the one in South Australia was remarkable — they invest in productivity and prosperity, invest in economic opportunity, use the market and make sure they’re a creative society with ecological sustainability and social inclusion. So the dialogue in Australia and Canada and Scandinavia is about how to build a creative or innovation economy and how to build that kind of social safety net. Or, a better phrase than social safety net would be socially inclusive innovation. It’s not so much a social safety net like the old industrial economy but it’s a way of making sure people are included as a part of it. But that dialogue isn’t happening in the United States and this is what abjectly terrifies me.

What no one really understands is that in the creative economy, what makes us different and yet the same is our creativity. Every single human being is creative. Every single human being has creative possibility. Whether it’s a blue-collar worker or somebody who cuts your hair, or somebody who waxes your back, or somebody who works in a high-tech company, or somebody who writes poems. What we all have is our creativity. And we can actually organize people on that basis. We can say, “We’re all different yet we’re part of the same whole thing.” Why can’t the Democrats articulate that message? And why are they broken down into this intra-partisan fighting?

Why do you say the anti-elitism of George Bush & Co. is so harmful?

Here’s a guy who went to a private prep school, to Yale and to Harvard. And he’s developed a posture as an anti-elite to cultivate the support of the people who are terrified, legitimately terrified, about how they fit into the creative economy. He’s appealing to the common man by saying, “You know what we’re going to do, we’re going to stop this. All these things you’re afraid of, we’re going to stop. We’re going to stop this gay marriage thing and we’re going to stop women’s rights, we’re going to make sure not as many immigrants will get into your country and we’re going to make sure terrorists don’t take over your cities!” It’s the old “Know Nothing” platform.

But his anti-intellectualism is part of a political posture to appeal to this group, by playing on their fear, which allows them to pull a fast one on people, as Tom Frank rightly points out in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” They say, “Oh, we’re going to give you back your moral values and your family values and the America you feel that you’re losing and we’re going to take away everything that gives you some sense of security.” So they’re going to dismantle the New Deal, they’re going to make the tax cuts permanent. If you ask me, the debate over stem cell research alone — that could destroy a whole emerging sector of the American economy and virtually anyone who works in that field will have to move.

The idea of promoting “socially inclusive innovation” might fly in Australia and Scandinavia, but I can’t think of any politician out there who could weather the fury of rote partisan criticism supporting that sort of change would bring out.

Yes, what scares me is that that force is absent from present-day America. Instead of bemoaning low-wage service jobs and then just talking about restoring manufacturing and dealing with outsourcing, someone somewhere has to say that the real key to the future is to make these service jobs good jobs. I mean that’s the real policy point — the service economy, which represents 40 to 45 percent of the lowest paying jobs in our economy with the least protection, has to become part of the creative economy. We have to change those jobs in the way industrial jobs were once changed from being terrible jobs to being good jobs. We’re in deep trouble if we can’t focus on and address the externalities of the creative age — income inequality, the class divide, housing unaffordability, traffic congestion, and the one also talked about in the book, the incredible amount of mental stress, which is the occupational health and safety issue of the 21st century.

Gays seem to be the perennial target. And asides like gay marriage have served to organize and energize all sorts of crazy agendas.

Gays and to a lesser extent women and to some degree immigrants, but gays most of all, become the target of all of this hatred. But it’s not hatred that comes out of thin air: It’s fear. It’s fear that the economy is going somewhere that gives advantages to these people who live in gay neighborhoods, who live in places like Washington, D.C., who have all of these advantages — education, skill, cosmopolitism and abilities. And if they’re not gay, they surely must be French. So that becomes a scapegoat issue and a way to organize.

And then progressive political forces are saying, “You know what, the gays cost us the elections,” or “You know what cost us the election? It’s that women’s rights stuff. Ah, it doesn’t really matter if women don’t have a right to have control over their own bodies. Ah, the hell with them …” It’s that sort of reaction that leads to this stalemate. What the progressive forces in this society have to do is ameliorate that fear and that anger.

The point is that if all this continues, America’s economic advantage is gone. It’ll become an intolerant place, the kind of place where lines are drawn in the sand, where gays don’t feel comfortable, where young people don’t feel comfortable, where immigrants and newcomers don’t feel comfortable. The fact is that according to our rankings, the U.S. is 20th in tolerance out of 45 countries. As a country we’re not ranking with the equivalent of the San Franciscos or Austins, we’re ranking with the equivalent of the conservative Southern areas. And that’s a huge problem.

If we fail to address this fundamental class divide — on which these evangelicals and social conservatives and all this stuff is being promulgated — if we can’t address that class divide, we are in very deep shit. And it’s not enough anymore to just say, “Well, we’re going to tweak our immigration policy,” or “We’ll take a closer look at what’s happening to our cities.”

Yet for all that crisis talk, the book ends on a hopeful, or perhaps even utopian, note, depending on the reader.

At the end of the day most Americans are very open-minded people. Many Americans are terrified and the ones that are scared are the ones who have the fewest advantages. The ones that are rallying around the Christian Coalition and the evangelical cause and the social conservatives, the ones that elected Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, those people are petrified.

Yet despite all that, there are very positive points in the American political and economic horizon, but they’re local, they’re not national. And what puzzles me, after living in Washington, D.C., for nine months now, is the absence of any real conversation about this. And it’s not just in Washington policy circles — the media is completely out-of-touch as well. We have the same dozen talking heads appearing on talk show after talk show discussing national policy debates like Social Security or tax cuts, completely divorced from the economic transformation this nation is wrenching itself through.

The great hope in the American political system is the fact that there are people working tirelessly in the states and localities. The big disconnect is in Washington, in the House, in the Senate, and in the Bush administration, which is the most disconnected of all. But there are people of both parties at the local and state level working really hard to try to build exciting and creative solutions. The big debates in our cities are about housing affordability and about maintaining accessible neighborhoods. And in older industrial towns, they’re wondering how to make their city a more exciting place that retains young people. And one thing the last century and a half of history has taught us is that you can never underestimate the transformative power of the United States.

In 1994, Hallowell published “Driven to Distraction,” a groundbreaking bestseller about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and he became the most recognized ADHD specialist and researcher. (The clinical term is ADHD, but it’s often simply called ADD, partly because hyperactivity is not a requirement for the disorder.) His book has sold over a million copies and is still considered one of the indispensable bibles of ADD literature by both patients and therapists.

Although subheaded “Recognizing and Coping With Attention Deficit Disorder From Childhood Through Adulthood,” the book’s major impact was in calling attention to the disorder in children. Hallowell and coauthor John J. Ratey estimate that ADD affects 5 to 8 percent of the general public. During the decade since the book was published, ADD represented a miracle diagnosis for many parents who couldn’t handle their disruptive, hyperactive children. It also became the most studied childhood psychiatric disorder, while the word “Ritalin” entered the American lexicon and behavioral drugs to treat ADD became an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Yet to many people, the explosion of ADD diagnoses meant a rash of overdiagnosing and overprescribing, and they insisted that Ritalin and other behavioral drugs were being used as a substitute for parental attention and signaled eroding family values.

Hallowell, who himself has ADD, and Ratey recently released a follow-up book, “Delivered From Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life With Attention Deficit Disorder,” which includes the latest research and medical findings on ADD, as well as the authors’ unique strategies for dealing with the disorder. What’s especially noteworthy about the new book is how much more attention Hallowell and Ratey give to adults than in the previous book, indicating a shift in recent years as psychiatrists have been diagnosing adults in record numbers. (When I talked to Hallowell, he pointed out that ads for Strattera drove public awareness of adult ADD. “It was a market-driven issue that led to increased interest,” he said.) The new book also has a self-diagnosis section and guidelines for ADD and marriage, family life, sex, dealing with children, and how to live with an ADD spouse.

While there are still a number of questions about adults and ADD (perhaps best illustrated by these dueling headlines that appeared last fall in HealthDay and the New York Daily News: “Adult ADHD: An Overlooked Problem” and “It Doesn’t ADD Up: Do You Have Attention Deficit Disorder, Or Are You Simply Overworked?”), new studies provide some alarming facts. For example, in September, Dr. Joseph Biederman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, released a study claiming that ADD costs Americans suffering from the disorder about $77 billion in lost income a year, more than the total cost of drug abuse or depression.

But in his new book, Hallowell insists that ADD is not just a pathology and can actually be a source of creative and intellectual gifts, if treated properly. “The best way to think of ADD is not as a mental disorder,” he writes in the introduction, “but as a collection of traits and tendencies that define a way of being in the world.”

Salon spoke to Hallowell about ADD’s positive side, its role in everything from sex to crime, and why the American gene pool is filled with ADD.

What’s changed since you wrote “Driven to Distraction” in 1994?

Back when “Driven to Distraction” came out, most people had never heard of ADD. The problem now is that people know about it but they don’t understand it. We find ourselves having to correct a lot of factual errors while back then we just had to provide information. The average person still might think the only treatment is medication, or they might have all sorts of misconceptions about ADD. They think that it’s overdiagnosed or that it’s an excuse or that it means you’re stupid or that you have to be hyperactive to have it. That’s all wrong information, and because of that people who really have the disorder might end up getting no treatment or the wrong treatment.

This new book is an attempt to get them the right information so they can get the tremendous help this diagnosis and treatment offers. It really is remarkable the kind of turnaround a person can experience. They can go from profound frustration and underachievement to major reversal, not only professionally but in their personal lives as well. A marriage can be saved, and a family can go from struggling bitterly every day to getting along. A career can go from a feeling of chronic frustration and a sense of “I don’t get it” and “I’m not getting where I want to go” to the exact opposite.

Have your thoughts on ADD changed since the last book?

The biggest difference is that I now really see the condition as a potential gift. It’s a potential gift because people with ADD tend to have — embedded in the disability, embedded in the problem — sparkling qualities such as creativity, energy, intuition, the ability to think outside the box, tenacity, feistiness. Embedded in what’s going wrong is a lot that can be made to go right. Take one of the core symptoms: impulsivity. Well, what is creativity but impulsivity gone right? You don’t plan to have a creative idea; it happens impulsively. You don’t say, “Well, it’s 10 o’clock in the morning, time for my creative idea,” and lay it like an egg. It happens by the random collision of thoughts, and then suddenly you say, “Wow, a new idea!” So the point of treatment is to take this condition and unwrap the gifts. It’s often wrapped in a lot of problems like disorganization, procrastination, distractibility, impulsivity, restlessness. You don’t want to just curtail the negative symptoms. It’s even more important to look for and try to promote and develop the positive attributes.

I think we ought to treat it that way, but in the medical profession we’re not doing that. That’s something that sets this book apart from others and what sets my approach apart as well. I think a strength-based treatment is essential to get the best outcome and bring out the latent hidden talents in people.

How did ADD become so popular? What I mean is, how did it garner — and so far sustain — so much public interest?

It’s because this is such a prevalent and misunderstood issue. Once you start talking about ADD, that becomes obvious. Everyone says, “Yes, gosh, I’m like that” or “My son is like that.” And modern life itself is coming to resemble ADD, so more and more people are wising up to the fact that this is something worth knowing about.

A severe case of modern life can render someone to look as if they have ADD. That’s something I call pseudo-ADD, and that condition is rampant. It happens with people who are harried, overcommitted, rushing around. The key is, How do you distinguish the inbred, inborn biological attention deficit disorder from a byproduct of modern life?

Well, how do you tell the difference?

There is no proof positive test, meaning we don’t have a brain scan yet to tell whether someone has ADD or not. So you take a careful history, and if someone has the symptoms for a long time, and those symptoms are interfering with their life, and if they occur in multiple settings, then it’s ADD.

If, on the other hand, the symptoms only occur at work, then it’s a work issue, or if they only occur at home, it’s a home issue. What you find is that sometimes the symptoms occur at home but they don’t occur when someone’s on vacation. You might not have true ADD but you end up with the same symptoms, such as distractibility and feeling overloaded, and then you’re making impulsive decisions in that context. So the book is useful for both groups.

What are the biggest environmental factors causing pseudo-ADD?

The biggest factor is just simply information overload. The key is that you need to be in charge of [the information] instead of letting it be in charge of you.

In terms of data points, voice mail and e-mail are at the top of the list. And then you have decision points, which are a little bit more stressful because every one of those bits of data usually begets a decision — “What do I do with this?” — and that’s more stressful. Just receiving the data, the physical act of listening or reading, is hard enough, but then each one of those bits of data leads to a decision. One or two decisions is fine, but when you’re dealing with a hundred of them each morning you reach a point where you become distracted and less creative because you start to get impatient and irritable. You end up turning your back on opportunities simply because you’re overloaded and it’s too much to handle. And that bad feeling of “I just can’t take it anymore” leads to diminished efficiency, less open-mindedness and flexibility, and less ability to use your uniquely human capacities to their best advantage.

But again, it depends how you manage it. I’m not a Luddite; I’m not anti-technology. I’m a passionate believer in managing technology so it doesn’t manage us. For example, if you text message to advance a business deal, that’s great, but if you text message instead of advancing a business deal, that’s a problem. Or it’s a problem if you have to respond to every text you get. Some people don’t realize what a hold this has over them, and it becomes like an addiction, where they feel compelled to answer the telephone whenever it rings. You don’t have a full-blown withdrawal syndrome, but you have a mild withdrawal. You define an addiction as anything that when you take it away you go into withdrawal, and when you take away some people’s cellphone, e-mail and voice mail they become agitated. They feel naked.

Are addiction and ADD often diagnosed together?

In the addiction population probably 15 percent have undiagnosed ADD. Unfortunately, most addiction specialists don’t think of it, so the addiction is treated but not the ADD. That leaves a gaping wound, and it’s only a matter of time until they relapse. But if you catch on to the ADD early, it’ll make it much easier to give up the addiction.

A man who came to see me had a history of alcoholism and had gotten sober but still felt stuck. Even though he was doing well in his work, he wasn’t happy doing it, and also in his relationship he felt stuck. I evaluated him, and he had ADD, and it was a dramatic revelation for him. He said, “My God, I knew getting sober helped me, but this is the other key I’ve been looking for, and it makes sense of my whole life up until now.” Once he realized that, he was able to make some changes at work, such as delegating more administrative details and doing what he was good at instead of trying to get good at what he was bad at — which is another hallmark of ADD. He brought his wife in and we worked on explaining what was going on in the relationship, and she began to understand him better in terms of brain science instead of character pathology.

Is that why you have tried mixing ADD treatment with a 12-step format?

It’s an unusual approach but it can be very helpful. I’ve observed over the years that a lot of adults with ADD were behaving like addicts. They’d become addicted to negative thinking or procrastination or missed engagements, and in a funny way they couldn’t live without it. So I thought, why not try to treat this as though it were an addiction? Some people have really benefited from the 12-step approach. You begin with “I’m powerless over my negative thinking,” or “I’m powerless over my tendency to procrastinate.”

From what you wrote, one of the worst results of the disorder is that people with ADD acquire negative self-image problems. Is there a specific time in life when that sort of thinking starts?

No, the negative self-image begins when you start to feel frustrated, when you start to underachieve and you don’t know why, and that can be anytime. Underachievement and a sense of frustration and feeling down on yourself and down on life are the hallmarks of undiagnosed ADD. And the older you get the more pronounced that becomes, and the longer you go without the diagnosis and treatment the more likely it is that you’re going to suffer from this very negative version of yourself. Because all you’ve been experiencing is underachievement, and you don’t understand why, and the more you try the more you come up short, and the longer you’re driving on square wheels the more upsetting it is. And believing that you’re a loser [for most of your life] is what’s so disabling and so terribly, terribly difficult.

I’ve treated hundreds of people from age 6 to 86 who have been experiencing chronic frustration and they don’t understand why they feel like a loser. And then you supply them with the simple insight that they lack focus due to the way their brain is wired, and you provide them with focus, and suddenly they start to achieve at a much higher level. They’re able to communicate more clearly and organize more effectively.

It’s the direct result of what lack of focus can do vs. what proper focus can do. And most people are just not aware of how incredibly damaging being unable to pay attention can be. And the key is that it’s “unable” as opposed to “unwilling.” But what the spouse, the teacher or the employer often thinks is that it’s unwillingness.

Does ADD affect children and adults in fundamentally different ways?

No, the same symptoms — distractibility, impulsivity and restlessness — that same triad is present in both children and adults. Though one difference is that the lives of adults are different from those of children. It can be a less obvious problem for adults because adults are allowed to do what they’re good at, and they’re not forced to do what they’re bad at. Whereas kids are forced to do both what they’re good at and what they’re bad at. We ask kids to be good at everything, but adults don’t have to be.

Of course, the longer you live with undiagnosed ADD, the more likely it is that you’ll come under the influence of secondary problems like anxiety and depression. If you feel chronically frustrated, that’s depressing and anxious-making. That’s more of a problem in adults.

What did you mean when you wrote that in the world of ADD “landing is learned in midair”?

The person with ADD typically puts off studying, understanding or learning a new skill until it’s a crisis, and they’re about to crash to the ground. Only then do they pull out their book or instruction manual or get ready for a presentation. Amazingly enough, they’re often able to pull it off, but there are those times they don’t, and they crash. It’s horribly damaging to a student’s life or an adult’s career or someone’s marriage if someone is always trying to produce results at the last minute.

But there are professions in which that type of behavior can help you succeed.

Some professions are filled with ADD. Journalism is a hotbed. So is advertising and the stock market. Anything that involves creativity, risk, excitement, you’ll find a lot of ADD people. Hollywood is ADD heaven. Actors and everyone out there thinks they have it. It’s because it’s high stimulation — the structure is changing all the time and it’s an adventure. Entrepreneurship of any sort is a great profession for people with ADD. A lot of doctors have ADD, a lot of trial attorneys, a lot of people in sales.

The careers that are bad for people with ADD are those that put a high premium on conformity, punctuality, doing what you’re told, repetition and organization. A mid-level executive in an insurance company is going to be in ADD hell. Probably a mid-level executive anywhere would be.

If possible, it’s best for people with ADD to be self-employed. If you’re a writer, be freelance, but have a wonderful assistant who has attention surplus disease. Some people are just born better organizers.

In the book, you write about a number of the social costs caused by undiagnosed ADD.

The prisons are just full of people with ADD. The stats are hard to get because prisons won’t let you go in and do testing, but people estimate that well over 50 percent of the prison population has undiagnosed ADD or an undiagnosed language-based disability. In other words, they can’t put feelings into words and they’re impulsive. Add that to poverty and drugs and alcohol and you have a criminal. That and being male, because 95 percent of the prison population is male, which is such a staggering statistic. Men have such a hard time dealing with aggression. And dealing with feelings in any way except being more aggressive.

Is ADD an American phenomenon? It hasn’t been diagnosed as frequently in any other country.

We have more diagnoses, but not more people that have it. The epidemiological studies in places as far away as Indonesia show roughly the same prevalence rates, roughly 5 percent of the population. The reason we diagnose more is because we’ve led the world in ADD research and educating the general public.

It also has to do with the type of people that originally came to America. I think our gene pool is loaded for ADD. Those who colonized the country tended to be the mavericks, the people who didn’t want to sit still, those who wanted to set off on their own. Our country was built by people like that.

I don’t like these lists people trot out all the time speculating which historical figures might have had ADD — Edison and Einstein and others. But certainly there have been people who fit an ADD profile. Obviously I haven’t met them, so I can’t diagnose them, but ADD traits are very much in the American grain. I mean, if you read a description of the early colonists, it’s like an ADD hall of fame. Benjamin Franklin — if he didn’t have it I’d be amazed. The positive qualities of innovation, thinking outside the box, trying to get a lot done, all of that is very much in our gene pool.

Some people would say that besides the most obvious cases, ADD is diagnosed too frequently. For example, in her recent book “Home Alone America,” Mary Eberstadt wrote about diagnosing children that the current criteria “cast as pathological a great many other children who have what could be called the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t variety” of ADD. There’s the same sort of perception with adult diagnosis as well.

I think what those people worry about is that the diagnosis is being used as an excuse, and it should never be used as an excuse. It’s not an excuse to get out of taking responsibilities, it’s an explanation to help you take responsibility more effectively. And it shouldn’t become a political issue, and it veers dangerously toward that all the time.

People will ask me, “Do you believe in Ritalin?” and I’ll say, “It’s not a religious or political principle, it’s a medication, for goodness’ sakes.” It’s not a matter of “Do you believe in ADD?” It’s brain science. It’s a diagnosis made to help people, to advance knowledge, to help people learn better. I feel very strongly and passionately committed to keeping it away from the rhetoricians who want to turn it into an article of faith or belief. If we keep it in the realm of reason we can make use of what we know and not get lost in the quagmire of political and religious debate.

Why does it get politicized like that?

We unwittingly approach conditions of the mind differently from conditions of the body. There’s a sort of unspoken bias that when it comes to the mind you’re not supposed to even talk about it let alone intervene using medication or other formal treatment. It’s the same sort of bias mental health professionals face all the time. It’s been around forever.

But again, don’t play up the bias. That’s what always bugs me about the media; they want to talk about bias and prejudice, but that’s just a footnote. I mean, I love the press, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t be talking to you if I didn’t, but for some reason the media always wants to write about the problems and biases and conflicts. I guess it’s sexier that way, but the big story ought to be that we’ve identified an issue and we’re developing strategies for dealing with it. Whether it’s ADD in a classroom or pseudo-ADD in the workplace, this is a really common issue that affects tens of millions of people, and we’re developing guidelines for helping people to deal with it. And that’s really good news.

OK, let’s finish up with sex, then. There’s a section of your book devoted to ADD and sex. Usually, those two things aren’t really discussed together.

The sex part is very interesting and I’m quite certain nobody has written about this. I just learned about it by treating so many adults with ADD. There are a few common patterns.

One is couples who almost never make love. And they think, Oh God, I guess we’re losing interest in each other, but that’s not really the case. It’s a scheduling problem. If you think of ADD, one of the biggest problems is showing up in the right place at the right time. And what happens with these couples is that the ADD person will stay up until all hours of night on the computer, so the two are never awake and in bed at the same time. A simple behavioral prescription often works: Pick a night, any night, and show up in bed at 10 o’clock, naked, and see what happens. You might end up just watching “Law and Order,” but you might end up making love, and most of the time that’s what happens.

Another sexual issue is that women who have undiagnosed ADD have trouble reaching orgasm. They might blame it too much on a Catholic upbringing or something like that, but that’s not the problem. It’s that they can’t focus long enough. Especially for women, sustained focus is essential for an orgasm, and it’s not going to happen if you’re lying there and wondering about the kids’ doctors appointments the next day. Medication can make a huge difference by helping them focus. Those have been some of my most grateful patients.

A third problem is when men essentially use sexuality as a form of self-medication, and they become sex addicts, or whatever you want to call it. It can happen with women, too, but it’s mostly men. And they think, I’m a bad person, and that sort of thing, but in reality it’s undiagnosed ADD, and when they get the ADD treated they’re able to stop compulsive sexualizing.

The ADD person looks for high stimulation and that can be found in any number of different ways. Drug abuse is one way, gambling is another way, risk-taking behaviors like driving a hundred miles per hour down the highway is another way. But you can also get that same high stimulation in healthier ways. Physical activity, entrepreneurial endeavors, those are good ways. The goal is not to get rid of the desire to seek the high stimulation, but to find adaptive ways of doing it.

Stahl’s story didn’t start out that way. He moved from his childhood home in Pittsburgh to New York and Columbia University, where he began a promising writing career. He did a stint writing for porn king Larry Flint and then moved on to Hollywood, where he penned episodes for “ALF,” “Moonlighting” and “Thirtysomething.”

Like so many writers before him, he found television a harsh mistress, and his heroin habit rapidly got out of control. He once submitted a script to the producers of “Twin Peaks” that was covered with his own blood and hair. At age 38, he found himself taking orders at a McDonald’s, where his adolescent co-workers believed he was mentally disabled.

“All my heroes were dope fiends,” Stahl says. “Keith Richards, Miles Davis, William Burroughs, Charlie Parker. The thing is, when you’re kicking dope, Keith isn’t there with a warm towel to press against your forehead.”

The success of “Permanent Midnight” got Stahl out of the fast-food industry, as did the resulting film version. (Ben Stiller played our pincushion antihero, and the two became friends.) Two novels appeared, “Perv: A Love Story” (2001) and “Plainclothes Naked” (2002), both of which boasted fictionalized western Pennsylvania settings and recounted the type of drug-induced chaos and whacked-out characters that had apparently become his forte. Both were warmly reviewed and devoured by fans, but didn’t break through to a wider audience.

Last summer Stahl published “I, Fatty,” a faux-memoir by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who rose to be one of the most famous silent movie stars of his day. The 300-pound comic, revered as the inventor of the pie fight, was the first star to earn a million dollars a year, and then became the object of the first celebrity tabloid scandal when he was falsely accused of rape and murder and vilified by the press. It is a far more empathetic novel than anything Stahl has written before, and to his surprise it was reviewed in the New Yorker, with a high note of enigmatic praise: that “Stahl remains a writer who delivers, every few pages, a bit more than a reader expects.” Attention from the New York Times, People and other media followed.

Recently Stahl wrote the 100th episode of the top-rated TV series “CSI,” which drew more viewers than the last game of this year’s World Series. “I, Fatty” was just published in Britain and will soon be translated into Italian and French. He’s also working on adapting the novel into a film, which is being developed by indie producers This Is That (formerly known as Good Machine, which made films such as “21 Grams,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “American Splendor”) .

“I’ve begun to realize that some books confirm your view of the world, some shatter it — but the great ones do both,” he wrote in a recent e-mail. “That’s what I’m going for, in whatever genre I happen to be disguising what, for lack of a better term, might be called my particular art.”

The following interview is a pastiche that took place over the space of several months, by e-mail and in phone conversations.

What’s it like getting major attention from the New Yorker? That’s a novelist’s wet dream.

Thanks to Ben Stiller being attacked by a puppet while shooting smack in “Permanent Midnight,” I’ve pretty much been pegged for life as “that junkie who wrote ‘ALF.’” So I have few illusions — or concerns — about my place on the literary food chain. Child molesters can actually do their time and reenter the community, but write a sitcom to pay the rent, and you’re pretty much doomed to literary-adjacent status for all eternity.

I have always felt like an outsider, on the page and off, so I can hardly say I was expecting to turn up in the wet, palpitating heart of mainstream respectability that is the New Yorker. That said, being the subject of a Thomas Mallon New Yorker critique was as gratifying as it was alarming. You had the feeling, reading his piece, that he felt the need to get up a few times and spray his laptop with Lysol while he was writing. But I give him credit for subjecting his tender sensibility to mine. I mean, I know what I’ve been cooking up all these years, and if somebody from the world of Quality Lit, as Terry Southern used to put it, wants to pop his head in the door, that’s swell.

This might be a half-baked misreading, but it seems that “I, Fatty” is more politically conscious (or maybe developed, or realized or whatever) than anything in your earlier books. There’s nothing definite I can point to, I guess. It’s a matter of contrast — your last novel had the premise of a photo of George W. Bush’s privates in the hands of couple of crackheads, which seems written in an entirely different mindset.

First off, nothing in my writing, for better or worse, is “conscious.” That implies more choice, control and volume control than this particular writer possesses. That said, this happened to be a time in America when the archetypal moral giants running our life today — self-righteous, Bible-clutching geniuses like John Ashcroft — were in the first flush of cultural battles. Billy Sunday, who persecuted Fatty Arbuckle, and Sen. Rick Santorum share the same enlightened vision of humanity.

Ignorance was a tad more baldfaced back then. Rooming houses sported signs like “No dogs! No colored! No actors!” On the other hand, this was a time when heroin was legal — manufactured by Bayer, marketed as “housewife’s friend” and sold over the counter, leading to an epidemic of addiction among the most mainstream, upstanding members of society. The war on drugs was in its nascent phase — America switched from smack to cocaine with Coca-Cola and assorted other cocaine-based tonics in the early decades of the last century.

The “war on moral degeneracy,” i.e., the culture wars, of which Arbuckle was the first and most public example, drove the studio heads, who were savvy enough to sniff anti-Semitism beneath the right wing’s concern for protecting America’s youth from moral corruption, to invite Christian fundamentalist Will Hays, an ex-postmaster from Indiana, out to Hollywood to assume the position of censorship czar.

You can, among other things, trace the origins of Rob and Laura Petrie’s twin beds in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to dictums laid down by “Big Will.” Rumors that he harbored a secret desire to be urinated on by women dressed as milkmaids were never confirmed. And even Randolph Hearst — who invented the tabloid business on the back of specious Arbuckle rumors — shied away from printing possibly doctored photographs of Hays in the throes of a water-sports orgy.

How was it writing about someone from another time and place? Your previous novels have been contemporary in setting.

I don’t really buy the “outside your own experience” category. We all breathe, fuck, sweat, cry, hunger and a few other things I’m probably forgetting, so, in the end, the specifics of our experience mean less than the universality of our emotional response to them. In terms of, say, Roscoe Arbuckle, I may never have been forced into a fat suit to keep up the illusion of girth for an adoring public, but I can certainly imagine the shame of that situation, the kinds of conflicts, torments and weirdness it must have instilled in the early-abused Arbuckle to have to endure such a circumstance.

Speaking of conflicts, torments and weirdness, have you been keeping up on your political reading? Now that the election’s over, the only people left on the bestseller lists are Jon Stewart and Ann Coulter. I saw Coulter on TV recently, and she looked exhausted or strung out.

Do you think it’s drugs or anorexia?

I don’t think it’s either. I just think she’s just tired, or maybe she just looks that way.

I heard that vicious rumor that she was Rush Limbaugh’s drug buddy.

No way!

Sort of the Courtney Love to his Kurt Cobain. I mean, not a lot of people are talking about it, but I’m just saying, that could be. That’s an image you might want to put in your brain. But I don’t even want to speculate what she’s up to. That’s the thing, I don’t judge. If she needs a little recreational crack, God bless her.

I thought you were serious for a second.

Yeah, the Kurt and Courtney of the conservatives and neocons. I’m just saying that could be. I’m not saying that’s my next book, I’m not saying it isn’t. But it’s something to think about. She is skinny and it doesn’t look natural.

Yeah, but Rush didn’t exactly lose any weight as a junkie. He’s still a pig.

Well, some people go up and some people go down. I mean, Charlie Parker was a fat junkie because of all the candy bars and shit, so Rush obviously wasn’t on an exercise regimen. I’m just thinking that Ann has more discipline, you know?

Rush Limbaugh a junkie — it’s such a delicious thing. It’s the same type of thrill you got when Jimmy Swaggart got caught in a motel room jerking off on a prostitute. It’s such a weirdly American breed of hypocrisy, like George Bush posing as a brush-clearing regular Joe instead of the zillionaire Ivy League, born entitled, never-had-to-fill-out-a-job-application oil skeek that he is. Not that that’s all bad: If you and I could banish our dirty piss tests like Bush did in the Guard, America would be a better place for all involved.

On a more serious note, you have to give Rush credit — he’s probably done more to curb the spread of opiate use in this country than anybody. When I was coming up, you had this hipster dope-fiend legacy: Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Burroughs, Richards and Nick Cave. Now you’ve got … Rush Limbaugh. I mean, who wants to do the same drug as some overfed, unlaid right-wing toady? I can just picture Rush scratching his nose and explaining his anti-immigration policy to the maid he bought his shit from. Buying Dilaudid from your maid — does it get any more Republican?

What about Bush getting reelected? Any sage predictions as to the character and achievements of the second term?

I’d have to go back to H.L. Mencken and quote something he said in the Baltimore Sun in 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Put differently, as Americans are subtly and consistently stripped of their personal power — be it economic or intellectual — the need to bask in some nationalistic pseudo glory must increase proportionately. A few more years of Bush and people will be eating flags — raw, of course, since if you cook them that counts as burning. Around the time the first Bush-girls porn tape hits the Internet — “Oh baby, spank my ass and call me Fallujah!” — Attorney General Billy Graham will declare the entire nation possessed by Satan and invoke martial law until the Dark One can be rooted out. I don’t subscribe to the notion that Bush Jr. is necessarily the worst president — but I do believe he’ll be the last one.

But let’s get back to “I, Fatty.” It really does have a compassion that feels different from your previous books.

“Fatty” was the first book I wasn’t writing about myself in one way or another, and therefore, as it turned out, I could write with more tenderness than would usually creep into a book. Of course, Arbuckle was kind of an American innocent, where I was basically a druggie fuckup.

Plus, it’s easier to be vicious toward one’s own idiocy — or easier for me — because self-loathing translated into literature can be hysterical. What I loved so much about Roscoe’s character, and his time, was that, in some ways, they were less jaded, they were infinitely more debauched. When you go directly from survival mode to stupid rich, there’s a sort of psychoemotional case of the bends that ensues. Which was the case with a lot of those gutter-to-solid-gold early Hollywood types. It’s almost like they stayed loaded because their own good luck scared them.

Mabel Normand, who was a bigger star than Fatty when they started making movies, liked to get coked up and do no-panties back flips across the grass in front of the crew. Today that might merit a still in the Star. It’s not that we’re more sophisticated. Just that it’s more shocking to find out some young hot megastar has cookies and milk, reads Horace and goes to bed at 9 than it is to hear they do a bunch of MDA and fuck trannies in Moe wigs. Self-destruction, at this point, is a wing of show business.

What have you been reading recently?

Well, a little [Michel] Houellebecq. Did you ever read that guy? I can’t spell his name. That French guy. He’s one of these fucking great maniacs. And, you know, the usual. David Foster Wallace. Bruce Wagner’s new book is great. There’s a lot of amazing writing out there right now.

Which Wallace book?

I love “Oblivion,” and one of my favorites is “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.” And “Infinite Jest” is one of those books you’re always three-quarters through till you keel over at 80, you know. It’s just genius, man. It’s like maybe if you wave it over your head some of it will rub off.

I keep hearing people saying, “Oh, no, it’s not a time for novels anymore; this is a time for serious books and nonfiction.”

Yeah, it’s like people announcing the death of irony. You know, there are people who make their livings by making declarations. But from where I’m sitting, just as a guy who reads, it seems like there’s a lot of great stuff out there. Sam Lipsyte has a great new book coming out. There’s a guy who couldn’t even get his book published in America, you know. Now Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing it, a book called “Homeland.”

When you talk about being a writer, do people still identify you as the guy in “Permanent Midnight”?

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about being a writer to people. I listen to about how they want to be writers. But yeah, people talk about that, sure. That’s what happens when you write memoirs. You end up being the junkie guy.

But then this New Yorker review comes out and suddenly I’m a guy with an “oeuvre,” a word I couldn’t spell before that. People have been calling me up saying, “Hey, now you have an oeuvre. You’re a made man.”

So I guess everything’s different, but people still talk about “Permanent Midnight,” in terms both literary and non. Some people respond to the writing, some to the insanity, some to the wailing-in-the-abyss humor. It’s not something I analyze a whole lot. But on one level, no doubt, if you’re a leper, then other lepers can come over and feel comfortable talking about the time their own nose fell off.

Whether it’s “Notes From Underground” or “A Million Little Pieces,” people respond to literary howling. Some people have told me “Permanent Midnight” saved their lives — which may or may not be true. Others, as recently as last week, approach me to say how much it fucked them up. One guy in Florida got very indignant and told me he’d been doing fine, off smack a couple of months, then he picked up “Permanent Midnight,” finished it and traded it for two bags of dope. It was like, “Thanks a lot, man …” I just wonder how his dealer liked it.

You grew up in working-class Pittsburgh, and your previous novels have been set in that area. How much does that background still define you?

Your origins travel with you, one way or another. I still say “jag-off,” a regional slur common only to western Pennsylvania exiles like Dennis Miller or Michael Keaton. It’s like “asshole” but cruel in ways you’d have to grow up within scent of a steel mill to fully comprehend. I have some relatives back there. Wonderful, wholesome people. And I have one friend I’ve known since grade school. He was in New York the same time I was, the original drummer for Blondie, until he decided to go back to Pittsburgh and get a degree in chemical engineering five minutes before they morphed from CBGB’s to future “Behind the Music” megastars. Who knows? All kinds of unlikely maniacs have come from the “Tri-State area,” as they used to say on local news. I mean, Oscar Levant, Andy Warhol and Mister Rogers. Who the fuck wouldn’t be proud?

Are you comfortable being written about so much? You’ve gotten more attention for this book than most authors.

I don’t take that shit for granted. If someone wants to write about you, it means a lot. Maybe someday I’ll get that sort of relaxed arrogance, but right now it’s like “Really? There’s no stuff on the Olsen twins you have to write about? That’s great, squeeze me in!”

Didn’t you write or say something about the Olsen twins?

At one point some interviewer was hounding me about what the equivalent crime to Fatty’s would be today, so I suggested it was like if Ronald McDonald gained 300 pounds, then raped and murdered an Olsen twin. Of course that was before all the cocaine stuff came out. I don’t mean about Ronald — I think he’s into Dilaudid. I mean the twins. Rehab was not yet part of the Olsens’ résumé when I said that.

You don’t seem like a Hollywood type of guy, but you still live there.

I don’t think I’m a real Hollywood type. Well, I have a daughter here. I’m a family values guy. It’s your basic broken home; she lives half the time with me. My house is not that far away and because I’m a writer I’m vaguely unemployed anyway. Having kids, well, it changes your view of your engagement in the world. Then again, I think people get very self-righteous about it. To a lot of people I think they’re just yuppie pets.

What are today’s kids like?

They’re little angry people. I don’t meet a lot of dumb kids. Kids are smart, even if they’re not school smart. There’s, like, nothing for them to believe in. The level of rage against Bush — I mean, even the hippies had their illusions to believe in. But George Bush wearing a flight suit — even the children are like, “Give me a fucking break!”

It was very admirable that Bush quit drinking at 40. I don’t mind that they have to hide his medical records because he has coke in his blood. But it’s like, if you’re going to try to con me, give me a more interesting con. For example, Kennedy was good; he stole an election with a certain elegance. But now? Christ! They’re recycling everyone from the ’80s. There’s John Negroponte, king of the fucking death squads, who’s now running Iraq. It’s all the same shit — it’s just that George W. is the USA cable movie version.

There’s one thing about Fatty Arbuckle. Here’s a guy who was persecuted by white male Christians who thought Hollywood was corrupting the youth of America. So they blamed Hollywood. In one sense nothing has changed; it’s just more slick packaging. There are more evangelical Christians in America than ever. People believe in heaven and hell, and they’re red-blooded, God-fearing, Jew-hating Americans. Look at fucking Henry Ford — or look at Prescott Bush, for Christ’s sake. He was cited for fucking trafficking with the Nazis — that’s what gentlemen did back then. I just think nothing’s really different. It’s just that now, through the complicity of the press, it’s so absolute that it doesn’t especially get through.

You’ve also done a lot of journalism. Didn’t you interview Marlon Brando once?

That was when Chic magazine was supposed to be Larry Flynt’s answer to Esquire or something, and he even hired, I believe, Norman Mailer to write something for the first issue. So he flew me to where Brando was living, but nobody bothered to tell him I was coming and he wasn’t in the mood, I guess. It was great though, because I had the flu, and was more or less hallucinating, but one thing I wasn’t hallucinating was that all the little children on the island looked like Brando. It was like the island of the little Brandos. And he was running a resort there, mostly for rich Italians as far as I could tell, so there was the surreal spectacle of him wandering around being hassled by some rich slink from Rome who wanted him to know the butter was off.

My first journalism gigs were for the Santa Cruz Times, for eight bucks an article, when I was 20. Back in New York, while I was writing porn for mags like Beaver and Club and banging out fake sex letters for Penthouse, I was also doing things for the New York Press and the Village Voice, and publishing short stories in “little magazines.” Until, succumbing to poverty, I took a gig in the humor wing of Hustler, which meant coming up with a lot of gags involving genitally shaped rutabagas people mailed in from North Dakota. I’ve never been to North Dakota, but for some reason a good deal of the vagina-shaped vegetation this country produces seems to come from there. Maybe it’s the soil.

The Hustler gig involved moving from New York to Columbus, Ohio, specifically, the Columbus YMCA. The showers were of the giant stall variety. You had to keep your eyes open because most of the other occupants were brown lung victims, leathery old coal miners holed up at the Y waiting for their clock to run out. And these guys would fire things out of their gullet that could put your eye out. That was pretty much their only recreation, I guess.

But Flynt at that time was going through his religious conversion, with Jimmy Carter’s sister [evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton], and a few months after that, when we’d moved to Los Angeles, somebody blew a hole in him with a .357. Larry had things on Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese and all the rest of the Moral Majority, so it isn’t surprising somebody tried to take him out. I always liked the guy, though. He had a re-creation of the shotgun shack he grew up in constructed in the basement of his home in Beckley, this ultra-swanky section of Columbus. He was like Horatio Alger with pussy.

You’ve taken on a lot of colorful assignments over the years.

This was back in the waning days of gonzo journalism, when you put yourself in grotesque situations in order to write about what it felt like being there high out of your mind. So I’d end up at a nude singles retreat at Elysian Fields, in Topanga Canyon, dancing naked to “Fame” (not the David Bowie song, but the theme to the old TV show) until the DJ stopped the music and you had to “hug the three people next to you!” Which in my case generally involved some guy named Irv from Reseda and a couple of saucy blue-hairs.

I’ve been on burial-at-sea ships, where a father-son team unloaded shoeboxes full of “cremains” into the ocean. This was memorable because, as they were dumping a batch, they were eating Big Macs, and a squall came up and blew all the formerly human grit back onto their burgers. One thing I didn’t know: What’s left after they cremate you isn’t powder, like in the movies. It’s more like kitty litter or gravel. In fact, when I go, I’d like to have myself scattered on somebody’s driveway.

That kind of stuff. Tons of weird encounters. My heroes were guys who cranked out some weird hybrid that was more than nonfiction and more than fiction, but not just criticism or commentary either, the weird and the hysterical and massively felt or researched or hallucinated, the Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Gay Talese, Nick Tosches, Lester Bangs continuum which was journalism that was really fiction but not, sometimes making your own weird sensations the real focus of whatever you’re writing about, sometimes going deep into genius parallels, the Tom Wolfe thing of finding comparison between the evangelical Christians and the sans-culottes or whatever.

I’m not a guy who’s kept meticulous records and files. I’ve moved around a lot, voluntarily or otherwise, so all that magazine stuff becomes a blur, and there are dozens of stories that have disappeared into the mist. Still, for your basic introverted, chemically altered aspiring novelist, being plunged into these arcane situations — whether it’s covering the Miss America Pageant, the Republican Convention or Puerto Rican midget wrestling — is not the worst way to see the world.

What happened to you after the success of “Permanent Midnight”? Was that a difficult period?

It was a weird time. You learn how to deal with catastrophe, but I wasn’t prepared for success. I mean, seeing the worst moments of your life projected nine feet high by people that vaguely resemble you — it’s like years of therapy in 90 minutes. I think everybody should have a movie made of their most mortifying moments and have it shown around the country in rooms full of strangers. Then you get you see how people react to them.

Before that got made, the money fell through, so I ended up hanging out for a year with Ben Stiller and working on “What Makes Sammy Run?” I went from abject poverty to taking a private jet down to St. Bart’s, writing scripts and eating Sly Stallone’s leftover tuna sandwiches on the plane. It was bizarre after living so long with a Depression mentality.

“Permanent Midnight” was filled with loathing about the TV writing you were doing a decade ago. But you seem to have come to terms with it.

Well, I was much more pretentious back then. You know, it was like “Gee, Samuel Beckett didn’t write ‘ALF,’” but then again, nobody asked him to. For all everyone knows Beckett could have had his own HBO series. It’s a balancing act and you have to know when to jump off the train. I got to do the 100th episode of “CSI,” and that’s great. It’s instant gratification and I have no contempt for it, but if that’s all I did I’d go nuts.

I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing back then, and it was a long time ago. I’ll still probably have “He only wrote three ‘ALF’s” engraved on my tombstone, but I don’t take myself that seriously anymore.

Lobster is unique in our cuisine for another reason. It is pretty much the only remaining animal we kill in the kitchen before eating. Many people are understandably squeamish about plunging a live fellow creature into a pot of boiling water — even if it looks like a giant bug — and the ethics of this practice have been disputed for decades.

You might feel pity for the clawed creatures when you see them floating somnolent in restaurant tanks, a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare. But then again, after reading Trevor Corson’s “The Secret Life of Lobsters,” you might not. Corson describes lobster life as an endless round of ruthless, ritualized violence and kinky, territorial sex practices that would make a porn star blush. Real lobsters, he maintains, bear no similarity to the friendly animated creatures seen in movies and on TV, or to the caricature presented by activists like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Lobster existence is like an underwater version of the movie “Boogie Nights,” combined with a never-ending Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Corson’s book is more than just a litany of crustacean factoids — he has lived the lobsterman’s life. After spending five years studying Asian culture in China and Japan, Corson came back to the small Maine island where his family vacationed when he was a child. He became a lobsterman for the next two years and then spent a year interviewing lobster scientists about the complicated, brutal conduct of lobsters at love and war. His book also addresses a crucial ecological quandary, the question of what accounts for the recent boom in Maine lobster fishing, whether the industry is as healthy as it appears to be, and whether lobstermen and scientists can make the age of gourmet plenty last.

How did a Princeton graduate with a specialty in Asian subjects get into lobstering?

Lobsters do seem like an unlikely obsession, and it’s not something that I would have predicted for myself. I was a summer kid in Maine, on Little Cranberry Island, which is described in the book. Of course, being a summer kid in Maine doesn’t confer any sort of status at all. The relationship between the locals and the summer people is often fraught at best. But I used to go down to the wharf and watch the fishermen come in and unload their catch and that was very exciting. These guys were like superheroes, with these big beautiful boats coming in from the distant ocean, battling nature and everything.

At the age of 5 I built my own cardboard lobster boat that I could stand inside. I painted it red and I would drive it around the island. I even got my cousin to dress up as a lobster and covered him with cardboard body armor. I thought a lobster should be painted red, but my parents convinced me that live lobsters are really brownish green, so I painted him green. We didn’t want him to be dead, because then it wouldn’t be any fun to catch him.

Isn’t the lobster depicted in PETA’s literature red? So it looks like he’s dead already?

Their logo was red. It may have been a strategic decision to attract attention, because generally lobsters aren’t depicted as red, but I thought it was an interesting choice for them.

Maybe someone screwed up.

Yeah, it’s really kind of dumb. In the past they’ve said some completely ridiculous and untrue things about lobsters, like that they mate for life and they walk hand in hand along the bottom of the ocean and that they raise their young. All of that is completely absurd and gives the impression that lobsters are kind and nurturing to each other. Lobsters despise each other. They socialize a lot but in a hateful way. They do in fact walk hand in hand along the bottom of the ocean, but that’s a deadly game of chicken called “claw lock.” When other forms of pushing and shoving haven’t settled a fight, the two lobsters reach across like they’re shaking hands and put their two crusher claws together to see who chickens out first. That’s the one time they hold hands, and it’s a very dangerous, aggressive situation.

What’s the misconception about lobsters you hear most?

A lot of people think they mate for life, which couldn’t be further from the truth. When people hear these mythical factoids, they’re often taken as a reason not to eat lobsters. After studying them, what I realized is that they’re really primitive and their reactions are automated responses to chemical stimuli to achieve certain outcomes. It’s not as though lobsters are doing a lot of thinking down there.

What distinguishes the Maine lobster from other crustaceans?

Stupidity and claws. The only close cousin is the European lobster, which is almost identical but is bluish in color. They catch those in Ireland but in much smaller numbers. There’s another small Norwegian lobster that’s also related, but that’s about it. There are other clawed lobsters around the world, but not in very big numbers. Caribbean lobsters, the Australian and New Zealand lobster, and the Hawaiian lobster are all spiny, or rock, lobsters. And none of those have claws. In terms of evolution, they’re much more sophisticated. They migrate in clans, they’re much more cooperative in social situations.

Maine lobsters have this complex, interesting social life, but they’re very predictable. It’s hard-wired behavior. Scientists built these little neighborhoods for lobsters and if they spaced the habitats too close together, the lobsters wouldn’t stop fighting. Even if there were little lobsters that posed no threat, the bigger lobsters were hard-wired to just keep fighting and couldn’t stop. Another example is what happened during a mating experiment that increased the ratio of females to males in a tank. The males become unbelievably belligerent and keep on fighting because they can’t let it go, they have to decide who is dominant. In a tank they’re stuck together and there’s nowhere to hide, so it can get brutal. In one case there was a male who was dragging himself around by his lips because he’d lost all his other appendages in fights. Clearly he was losing, but he couldn’t figure that out because he was hard-wired to keep going. It’s not like lobsters are sophisticated enough to say, “Geez, the circumstances aren’t in my favor, I’m going to back down.”

Actually, there’s a third distinguishing thing: incredible population density. There is no lobster density like on the Maine coast, especially right now.

How did lobster become a delicacy?

It’s really changed since the time they were considered junk food that Mainers would try to avoid if they could. In the early 20th century, Mainers would only eat lobsters because the fish they caught was too valuable to eat themselves. At the turn of the century wealthy people like the Rockefellers started going to New England in search of the calm, quiet, rural life. They were called “rusticators.” They had an elitist appreciation for the simple rural coast of Maine, the unspoiled land that wasn’t filled with all those annoying immigrants in the city. So culturally the simple boiled lobster dinner achieved its status during that period. Those people popularized it as a luxury.

People in Maine should be thanking them for that.

Yes and no. The rest of the world thinks of lobster as a symbol of Maine, but for people in Maine it’s a very fraught item. For a lot of people, especially those who don’t live on the coast, they can’t afford to eat lobster. At one point the state decided to make lobster the official license plate symbol, and one Maine writer pointed out: “If you wanted to pick something representative of Maine, how about macaroni and cheese?” So for many Mainers it’s an annoying example of how wealthy outsiders have turned the state into their personal playground and made it inaccessible to them. Most people in Maine can’t afford waterfront property anymore, the lobstermen can’t afford the space for their equipment on shore because coastal property has become so expensive. A lot of lobstermen live significantly inland from where their boats are.

Is there any corporate lobstering? Or is it all individual fishermen?

That’s the really neat and interesting thing about the Maine lobster industry. One of the reasons it’s been so exemplary is that it remains almost completely uncorporatized. A lot of that has to do with the fact that 80 percent of the fishing takes place within 3 miles of land. It’s a seasonal fishery that’s based on catching the lobsters when they come into shallow waters. So it’s very territorial and there are lobstering communities that control certain territories. It’s an informal system that developed over decades. Over the past 20 years the state and even the federal government have imposed more regulations, so the struggle has been to figure out how to codify these informal regulations. In the past it was an open frontier where the lobstermen were the law and they’d police their own boundaries. If someone was pushing into their territory they would launch a defense. There are all sorts of tricks to discourage someone from setting traps in your area.

Like what?

Usually it starts out fairly innocently, like you would take an unfamiliar buoy and tie the rope about it so that the buoy’s backwards. It’s called “back tying.” That’s just a warning and next time the encroacher hauls up his traps he’s going to see that the locals have taken note and that they don’t want him there. And he faces escalation if he doesn’t leave. The next step is usually to haul up the traps and take out the bait bag and any lobsters and put it back, so he’ll know the traps have been tampered with. Now, none of this is legal and I’m not saying anyone has done it.

These are tough guys, aren’t they? Do they start punching each other at some point?

They are very tough guys and there are definitely stories of guns on boats and whatnot. They’re very tough and the communities are very tight and they really look out for one another. It’s partly for safety, because it’s a dangerous job. There were two guys at Little Cranberry Island who were killed in a storm at sea and one of my fellow stern men was dragged overboard while I was working there, though fortunately nothing happened. Almost all these guys have a story of getting a foot tangled in a rope and nearly being dragged overboard.

There’s a variety of lobstering subcultures along the coast. Different areas have different mentalities and practices, but what really impressed me about the guys on Little Cranberry Island is that they were serious about basic conservation, such as V-notching, which is a peculiar practice. It came about because you can’t sell a lobster with eggs; it’s illegal. But there’s a terrible history during the 19th century of lobstermen scraping the eggs off female lobsters and selling them. So at one point the state started offering to buy those egg lobsters and release them in order to protect them, which was a good idea, but then the lobstermen would just catch the same ones and keep getting paid for them, so the state said, “Hey, wait a minute.”

So they came up with the idea of notching the flipper. Then in the 1920s there was kind of a bust, probably due to overfishing and the Depression, and something like a third of the fishermen left the business. When the next generation came back after World War II they were aware of this bust and realized that they needed to do more to protect the industry and decided to do self-imposed notching. Especially the previous generation, they were very serious about it. And the current generation, at least on Little Cranberry Island, was inculcated into those practices and they’re very serious about it.

What did you do on the boat as a stern man? I went out with a friend once who used to lobster on the weekends, though I wasn’t able to help much. I couldn’t get over the smell and the rocking boat. So assuming someone isn’t useless like I was, what do you actually do?

When you become a stern man you’re under the wing of the captain, but economically you are also technically self-employed. You get paid a share of the catch at the captain’s discretion. So if you go out for the day and you don’t catch anything, you don’t get paid. There were slow days where if I computed my hourly wage it would have been a dollar an hour or something abysmal.

Most lobster boats function with two people. The captain runs the boat and owns everything and figures out where to put traps and when. He’s the brains of the operation, and there are a lot of brains involved. These guys are very aware of the weather and the tides and how the boat interacts with the ocean. They also know where the lobsters are going to be at what time of year, what they’re doing, how they’re running. It’s a family thing. Bruce Fernald, the guy who hired me, is a fifth-generation fisherman on this little island.

The stern man is mostly in charge of the bait, which is crucial and totally disgusting. My job was to stuff these little mesh bags the size of a grapefruit with bait and I have only a few seconds between traps to do that. Some lobstermen claim to like the smell, but it’s certainly nasty. I spent 8 to 10 hours a day hunched over a bin the size of a kitchen table full of rotting herring. It’s not intended to be ripe — people have a misconception that rotten fish attracts lobsters — it’s just the nature of storing raw fish. You throw it in a barrel with a bunch of salt and make do.

Meanwhile the boat is constantly swinging and bucking. The height of fish season is the fall and the weather sucks in fall because it’s kind of windy. When the sun’s up people on land are happy, but on the ocean you don’t care about the sun at all, the wind is your nemesis. An overcast rainy day with no wind is far preferable to a sunny day with a breeze. So if there’s any breeze at all, and there usually is in the fall when you’re fishing really hard, the spray is flying, the deck is constantly heaving. It’s totally draining and exhausting.

The other part of my job is to help the captain sort through whatever comes up with the trap. When he throws open the top, and it’s full of gunk, there are tons of things in there. Sea urchins, which ended up cutting through my gloves a few times, and a piece of embedded spine landed me in the emergency room with blood poisoning. These nasty, nasty spiny fish called skultons, which we kill and then slice open and use as additional bait. There are snails and little crabs, and hopefully some lobsters.

How much of the catch can you keep?

The majority of the catch actually goes back overboard. You have undersize lobsters and oversize lobsters and females with eggs that have to be thrown back, so you’re sorting through all these and measuring and putting rubber bands on their claws with little pliers. The borderline lobsters you throw in a bin to sort later on and the obvious ones you throw back overboard. The minimum size is 3-1/4 inches on the body shell and you can’t keep any with a body shell larger than 5 inches. The maximum is because if they’ve avoided the lobstermen and managed to make it through the gauntlet, they deserve their retirement. It’s also so there will be more mating lobsters. So it’s like populating a big sex club for retirees.

What did you and the other lobstermen do to blow off steam?

Well, there are a lot of practical jokes. People were always putting stuff in each other’s traps. A can of Spam, stuff like that. There was one guy who had little kids and he kept tripping over his kids’ toys in the morning when it was dark. So he started taking whatever toy he tripped over and later put it in one of his friends’ traps, so one day someone would haul up a little frog in his trap or a stuffed bear. One fellow tied a small fridge onto a trap so when his friend pulled up the trap he pulled up a refrigerator. Silly stuff like that.

One time, my friend was looking for a practical joke to play. He went to a Barbie doll outlet on the mainland and he got a skirt, blouse and high-heeled shoes on one of the V-notch lobsters and stuck it in this guy’s trap. When he hauled it up it was very funny and it was a big joke and everyone was talking about it on the marine radio. But then the guy throws her back into the water to see if she would show up in any other traps, because these females migrate in and offshore during the season. She showed up in trap after trap. Bruce caught her at one point; one of his brothers caught her. She was walking several miles in high heels between each trapping and gradually losing pieces of clothing along the way until she finally lost it all and returned to her unclothed dignity.

How much money is there in lobstering? Do these guys get paid well for all this hard work?

In the past 15 years the lobster catch in Maine has tripled, so lobstermen have been doing extremely well lately.

What caused that kind of increase? Most of the other fisheries I’ve read about have had the exact opposite dynamic.

Nobody is really quite certain and this is one of the scientific mysteries of the book. Of course, for the management folks in government, this is a disaster. Basically they’re seeing a replay of the cod fisheries where the size of the catch increased exponentially and then the whole industry crashed. So they’ve had an almost knee-jerk reaction, which is totally understandable, by saying, “Oh, my god, we have to get this under control before something disastrous happens.” But the situation is more complicated because while the number of traps has increased dramatically, a big increase occurred a number of years before the catch went up. So there’s no evidence that just putting more traps in the water means you’ll catch more lobsters.

One of the key things the scientists in the book try to figure out is the relationship between the size of the lobster population and their habitat. They’re beginning to think that the size of the lobster population is actually controlled by environmental factors. What appears to have happened is that environmental conditions and other favorable factors, such as other types of predatory fish like the cod being caught up, caused the lobster population to expand, which is totally the opposite of what happened in the cod fisheries. The cod population was diminishing and technology was improving so they were catching more and more until it was gone.

With lobsters, at some point in the mid-’80s the population started to expand, but it didn’t show up in the catch until the early ’90s. So the ’90s was a story of lobstermen ratcheting up their efforts with an increasing supply of lobsters. That’s what the evidence suggests, and that is totally contrary to every other commercial fishery story out there. So in a sense, the lobster fishery is a great success story and lobstermen in Maine take a lot of credit for it. They say, “Well, we’ve been protecting the little lobsters, the egg lobsters, the big lobsters, so the resource is doing well.”

But the problem is, if environmental factors change again, we now have more lobstermen, more traps, and they’ve all been doing really well. For the previous generation, they didn’t make a lot of money, but they had a good life and they made enough to get by and they didn’t have a lot of expenses. Bruce’s father took out one loan his entire life and paid it back in six months, but now people are taking out $200,000 and $300,000 loans just for new boats, so there’s a big problem with overcapitalization in the industry and banks loaning way too much money.

You got the complete view of the Maine lobster, first from two years on a lobster boat, then you spent a year interviewing lobster scientists in their laboratories on the Maine coast and at Woods Hole, Mass. You even went on a research ship where they were using submarines and underwater robots. Did you find out more from the scientists than you expected?

After two years of working on a lobster boat I thought I knew a lot about lobsters, but when I started researching the book and talking to the scientists who study lobsters for a living, I had no idea.

The most amazing thing is how the lobsters socialize, communicate, and their mating ritual. It turns out that lobsters do most of their interpretation of the world and their socializing through their sense of smell. Their nose is actually a pair of little flickable antennules, or mini-antennae. They’re packed with chemo receptors and they flick them in the water to detect odors, like sniffing, and if they’re in a good current they can hold them up like rabbit ears and pick up all the chemicals in the water.

They also have this little interesting feature of their anatomy where they have a big bladder in their head and they piss out the front of their head. So they’re constantly pissing in each other’s faces. When a female wants to seduce a male, she comes by the door of his apartment and he sits inside and pisses out the door at her. If she likes the smell she comes by and sticks her head inside his apartment and pisses back at him.

Um, when you say apartment …?

They live inside little rock hollows, basically, and they’re very attached to their homes. That’s not to say that they don’t move from one to the next, but they’re very defensive creatures despite all the armor. They really like to hunker down and they have a strong preference for backing into tight places with their claws out and ready so they can defend themselves.

So when scientists started studying the mating habits, there was very little information about crustacean mating and how it worked. The anatomy had been investigated for a long time. At first the scientists couldn’t figure out how lobsters mated and no one was sure if the male lobster had a penis at all, and then it turned out that it had two.

That’s real vindication.

Yeah, so they knew the anatomy, but they still couldn’t figure out how the social part worked. Normally lobsters hate each other. If you put a male and female lobster in a tank with each other they start fighting right away and try to kill each other. In nature they have a pretty complicated set of procedures for interacting with each other that are designed to actually avoid real injury, so that a smaller lobster can immediately tell that a bigger lobster is dominant and get out of the way. But if the lobsters are evenly matched in a tank they just continue fighting and the whole thing escalates.

So one of the scientists I write about, Jella Atema, thought the female lobster might be emitting a pheromone to attract the male but it turns out to be exactly the opposite. They did these experiments where they set up a social situation in a 20-foot tank. The males would fight with each other to figure out who the dominant male was, and once he was proven dominant he would go around and beat up all the other lobsters every night. All the lobsters in the neighborhood would be dealt a daily dose of humiliation, both males and females. He’d kick them around and then go back and hang around his shelter, which was the best shelter in the tank, of course.

What happened then is that the females started to take up residence nearby and they would come by his shelter. Then one of them began an elaborate social ritual where she’d come calling to the door every day and eventually he would let her inside the shelter. Then she actually moved in, and it turns out she was ready to shed her shell at that time. So within 15 or 30 minutes of her molting the male approaches and turns her over and they copulate while she’s soft. Then after about a week, once her shell has hardened up again, she leaves without a backward glance. So they’ve pair-bonded for about two weeks. And then? The next female lobster shows up and moves in with the dominant male. And this goes on in sequence. The female lobsters are keeping tabs on each other to figure out who’s mating with the dominant male, and they wait until one of their sisters has done her business and then the next moves in. So they all take turns. It’s called serial monogamy.

It’s funny, sometimes people use specific mating habits of animals to prove a certain point about human sexuality, though I can’t imagine what group would claim lobsters as their example.

The Mormons might like it. But it’s not all at once. It’s in sequence, you wouldn’t be able to keep a harem going. The male just waits at home once he’s proven his dominance by beating up everyone every night, which really arouses the females. And it turns out they’re recognizing his smell, because he’s pissing in their faces all the time while they’re fighting.

They’re violent little creatures. What’s with all the aggression? And the pissing? They look so passive and harmless floating in those restaurant tanks.

Jella Atema set up a boxing ring in order to study lobster fights, and when he staged rematches on consecutive nights, the loser immediately recognized his former opponent and backed down, forfeiting the fight. It wasn’t that lobsters had become cowards — if the loser was paired with another lobster he would fight aggressively again. So something was going on and the lobsters were recognizing individual opponents that had beaten them before. Blindfolding the lobsters didn’t make any difference. So the scientists catheterized some lobsters, put these little tubes over their urine slots on their face and made a little urine bottle and measured outflow.

It turns out that the lobsters were accompanying their most punishing blows with intense squirts of piss in each other’s faces. The scientists actually charted the results, so clearly the smell is what they pick up on. The funny thing is that the winner was almost always the lobster that pissed first, the first one off the draw, like down at the OK Corral, but in this case whoever pissed first wins.

They realized that this pissing was going on in the bedroom, too. When the male lobster was fighting with everyone in the tank he was pissing in everyone’s face and when the females would come by they would piss in his face. The scientists think that the females were also pissing a drug at the male when they’re getting ready to molt. So after the females are satisfied that he’s the toughest one they would drug him to tone down his aggression, which puts him in the mood for courtship and then the females convince him to mate. So the males are out there fighting, but the females really choose which one they mate with. They’re in charge and they have this sisterhood deal where they’re basically cooperating so they all get to nail this one lobster who they’ve chosen.

In terms of simple outright aggression, lobsters are brutal. One guy in New Hampshire did an experiment to see if lobsters preyed on each other. He tethered a juvenile lobster to the bottom of the shallows so he couldn’t get away. Very quickly big lobsters showed up, and when they figured out that he was helpless, they attacked the young lobster, crushed him, and then ate him.

That’s not exactly the “Finding Nemo” version of lobster life. Talk about the arguments that organizations like PETA have put forth against killing and eating lobster.

PETA protests lobster fishing at various times, it’s one of their favorite little sideline things. I think a lot of what PETA does is worthwhile, because they’re opposed to the industrialized slaughter of animals. I also think there’s a coherent case to be made for vegetarianism. But if you’re going to eat meat, protesting against eating lobster is the last thing you should be doing. I mean, put it in perspective. If people could see how cows were being produced and dying for those burgers at McDonald’s, the lobster going in the pot would be a glorious example of humanely and appropriately prepared food.

Lobster is the perfect example of how meat should be produced and eaten. It’s the ultimate free-range, sustainably harvested and locally produced meat. And it’s healthier, as long as you don’t eat it with too much melted butter.

There’s been a lot of lobster writing this past summer. I didn’t see the piece, but apparently the novelist David Foster Wallace wrote a long feature about lobsters in the August issue of Gourmet magazine. Some of the quotes I saw indicated that he might not agree with your assessment.

I have to say, having read that piece, it made me wonder where his reputation for brilliance comes from. As far as I could tell, he got almost everything wrong he could about lobsters and lobstering. And he misses very interesting points, sometimes stumbling over them. He also just comes across as an arrogant snob. I guess he has a reputation as being a smart aleck, but I was just appalled.

He was assigned to write about the Maine lobster festival and most of the article is a big put-down. I mean, it’s true, the festival is kind of tacky. I’ve been there a few times. There are silly carnival rides and people eat fried dough and buy trinkets, but I mean it’s a festival. Lighten up! There are also fun things, like eating fresh lobster down by the sea, which your average tourist might not have another opportunity to do. There are cooking demonstrations; they have this cute parade down Main Street. Local people work hard to build floats for the parade. But David Foster Wallace is so busy being snooty, he writes, “These homemade floats in the parade are cheesy and boring.” Those are his exact words. I mean, of course they’re cheesy. They’re homemade!

And a lot of his facts are completely wrong. Like he says that lobstering is a warm-weather business — excuse me while I laugh very hard with a touch of bitterness in my voice while I remember the fact that half our catch was caught in nasty fall weather starting in October and November and the many days I spent in December and January and March in freezing cold conditions. Most Canadian lobstermen and a few Maine lobstermen only fish in winter. So he has no idea what he’s talking about. He basically can’t be bothered to find anything out, which is really kind of annoying.

But most of all he’s trying to earn all these big moral points by taking this stance about cruelty to lobsters. That view represents a misallocation of moral concern. People put all this worry on lobsters because they see them going in the pot. But these other meats we don’t see are treated much, much worse. He’s got this big spread in Gourmet magazine and he picks lobsters to write about and he’s capitalizing on our squeamishness and he doesn’t take the next step and say let’s consider what that means, which is that all animals that we eat die. He doesn’t consider that there is a spectrum of morality in the issue. It seems like a lazy and cowardly thing to do as a writer.

It’s the boiling alive part that gets a lot of people upset.

Well, there’s the ethics of actually killing the lobster, which is a separate issue. But scientists have studied lobsters pretty extensively and we know that lobsters don’t have the sort of pain receptors that mammals have, so we don’t even know if lobsters feel pain. If you’ve seen lobsters engaged in combat, they don’t exhibit pain behavior at times that you’d expect them to, like after losing a limb. And the movement of the lobster while in a pot of boiling water could be a standard stress response, the sort of escape reaction that occurs when they’re approached by a predator or see something above them in the water. They sense something’s wrong, and they try to get out of there. The movement itself is no proof whatsoever of pain, let’s put it that way.

Now, none of this is to say that there aren’t other neurological receptors that cause something akin to pain in lobsters. But even if they do feel pain, their nervous system is the equivalent of a mosquito or a housefly. And any meat you eat — especially most of the kinds of meat we eat — the question is not whether they feel pain or not, because you’re not going to find an animal that doesn’t have a self-protective neurological mechanism, so you’ve got to face this with everything.

The funny thing is that PETA often quotes Jella Atema saying, “I believe lobsters probably do feel pain.” But the rest of that quote, the quote in full, is “When we kill them for food we should do so quickly, but we should also honor them with thoughtful appreciation for what they have done for us. We should strive for this in all corners of our lives.” He eats lobster, he loves to eat lobster. PETA never points out that the man they’re quoting in defense of lobster liberation loves to eat lobster. Almost without exception the scientists I write about in the book, who spend hours and hours with lobsters, love to eat lobsters.

I think there’s a spiritual dimension in there about cooking lobster, believe it or not. To me, it’s an opportunity for us to reconnect with the web of life that sustains us, not that everyone’s going to want to take that opportunity. But that puts it into a different perspective than the way we usually think about cooking lobster.

How about ending up with a little practical advice? What’s the most humane way to kill a lobster?

You turn it upside down on a cutting board and take the largest kitchen knife you can find and plunge it straight into the bottom of its head and then quickly slap the knife down so it cuts through the middle of the head, through the nose and between the eyes. That’s the way Julia Child killed her lobsters and that’s how professional chefs kill their lobsters. It seems more gruesome but it’s very quick.

For people who don’t want to do that, there’s a more humane way to boil. You put the lobster in the freezer for 10 to 15 minutes before you boil them. It slows their metabolism way down and their reaction to being in the pot is much shorter. So that’s a good way for people who are a bit squeamish.

Over the past couple of decades, the memoir has become a familiar staple of American literature. Almost every season one or two books from the lively “I’ve lived through this!” subcategory draw the sort of media attention that is, unfortunately, more of a testament to the author’s wily self-promotion or an unbelievable premise than to the quality of the book.

There’s a common cycle that most burgeoning literary genres go through, and the hyperpersonal memoir is no different. Since the late ’80s, a seemingly exponential number of writers have been gleefully violating tacit boundaries of taste as though punching through tissue paper, producing a motley catalog of risqué adventures and uncomfortable confessions. Many became underground sensations or the sources of literary gossip, but with the emergence of Oprah and her peers, a new level of fame was possible for the confessional memoirist. Combine that with a creative-writing industry churning out higher and higher numbers of self-conscious graduates every year, and a crush of authors emerged to publish their own stories, like prospectors converging upon a newly discovered gold find. Eventually the genre became so glutted with familiar-sounding stories that the entire genre ended up a limping parody of itself.

Of all the brands of reminiscence — pained childhood secrets, grimly determined autobiography, the faux-exquisite (and sadly, often exaggerated) reports of sexual excess — the frequently shrill drinking-drugs-disease-depression beacon is a popular destination. Part of this is because over the years a number of brilliantly wry and moving books have appeared, such as Fred Exley’s quasi-fictional “A Fan’s Notes,” Jim Carroll’s “Basketball Diaries,” Jerry Stahl’s “Permanent Midnight” and, more recently, titles such as Andrew Sheehan’s “Chasing the Hawk.” But these kinds of memoirs have increasingly become fodder for late-night TV hosts’ monologues, the province of sensationalists who traffic in stereotype and Silly Punctuation Gimmicks.

Among all these there’s Jim Knipfel, one of our most talented memoirists, who has just published the last book in what he terms “an accidental trilogy.” Knipfel is an oddity in that his unadorned writing understates the many horrific incidents he recounts. His first book, “Slackjaw,” chronicled his physical deterioration; then he took note of his mental breakdown and incarceration in a mental ward in “Quitting the Nairobi Trio.” Now he delves into his soul in “Ruining It for Everybody,” which begins with “Whenever I hear the word ‘spiritual’ I reach for my revolver.’” Knipfel’s books aren’t the type of easily summarized, life-affirming tales you find on talk shows, though his expert storytelling and sardonic humor make them compelling, sometimes exciting, reading.

Perhaps most impressively, Knipfel somehow avoids the self-pity he’d be within his rights to invoke: He has gradually lost most of his sight to retinitis pigmentosa, a rare eye disease that has left him with a view of the world “kind of like peering through two toilet paper tubes all the time.” He also suffered a lesion on his brain that caused seizures and bursts of uncontrollable rage and depression, which prompted numerous suicide attempts that led to intensive care and stays in mental institutions. Yet his books are suffused with such guileless, bracing honesty and such a finely tuned sense of humor that his tale ends up being tragic and funny and memorable all at once.

His previous work has received critical praise from such disparate sources as Thomas Pynchon, who called “Slackjaw” “an extraordinary emotional ride,” and Newsweek, which termed him “a master of making art out of illness.”

While Knipfel appreciates the recognition, it’s an uncomfortable predicament for him. Unlike many authors who double as carnival barkers, Knipfel is an intensely private man, a somewhat unusual paradox for a memoirist and a full-time columnist who has published over 850 columns in his journalism career. (He is currently a staff writer at the New York Press. About his employment, he says, “In general, I find myself a job and do what I do there until I’m asked to leave.”)

After taking this interviewer’s arm to navigate a dim restaurant that to him represented total darkness, Knipfel talked about his new book, his dislike of readings and the writing scene, and a favorite ’70s TV horror show that prompted him to become a journalist.

How is “Ruining It for Everybody” different from your previous two memoirs?

It’s the first thing I’ve written that has a happy ending. Also, I kind of look back at some of the things I was recounting in the first two and assess them with an older set of eyes, after having been through more experience, to kind of look back at these things that I had done that were less than pleasant and begin to reconsider how to deal with the world as I get older and my body continues to break down.

At heart, it’s really just another book about a bunch of stuff that happened, but it was later stuff that happened.

How long did it take you to write? It’s not your longest book, but you said it actually took the longest to complete.

The writing process can be very tedious one, and I’m not a big fan of publicity, to my publicist’s dismay. I find it remarkable that I can make a living telling a story like this, but the process has its ups and downs just like any job.

I prefer to write in marathon fashion. I take a week or two off and lock myself in my apartment and sit down in front of the machine for 10 hours a day. “Slackjaw” took two weeks to finish, 10 days for “Nairobi Trio.” But it didn’t work out that way this time. I finished “Ruining It for Everybody” in 1999 or 2000 but then I had to go through a number of different editors and I wrote a novel, “The Buzzing,” before it was finished.

My books are just about a bunch of stuff that happened. You look back and see them as independent incidents, but it takes a good editor to take what can be an incoherent mass of three or four dozen stories and see in them a larger theme that I would ignore or even deny myself. For example, my editor pointed out that “Slackjaw” was about moving toward blindness, which put the idea in my head and I began looking at the stories in a different way and trying to find something that flows and has a rhythm. Something indefinable.

The tone of “Ruining It for Everybody” seems much different from that of your previous two memoirs.

One of the things explored in the book is that I’m much calmer now than I used to be, and much less angry than I used to be. Of course, I can still be irked sometimes. I can be annoyed at times and frustrated. But I used to be riddled with this uncontrollable rage that came out in different ways. And it’s just not there anymore for a variety of reasons. It burned itself out of me and I fell into a little rut. I just don’t have that much to be pissed about.

But what distinguishes your memoirs from others is real, sometimes insurmountable crises. You suffer from retinitis pigmentosa [R.P.], you’ve had a serious brain lesion and seizures, you’ve attempted suicide and ended up in a mental ward.

I’ve heard that before, but I think a lot of things happen to a lot of people — a lot of things happen to most people. It’s a matter of looking at it the right way; I mean, you can do a 1,000-word story about something as simple as tripping on the curb — and I have. There really is a story in everybody. This morning I heard a fellow describing Ronald Reagan as a man who looked at the world in terms of anecdotes and narratives. You sort of have to do that, to make a life interesting. That’s how people are measured by others, by the stories we tell. You know, you talk to people in a bar and what do you do? You tell stories. It’s just a matter of looking at everything from the proper angle. I think everybody’s got it in them, I just happened to type ‘em out.

When did you find out you had R.P.?

I always had bad vision, like 20/100, that was completely unrelated to R.P. But the R.P. first appeared at 11 or 12, when I could no longer see in dim restaurants or see at night. I didn’t think there was anything strange about that — I thought no one could see like that. I thought other people could read menus or stroll down the street at night because there was a trick that no one had shared with me. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s — I think I was 23 or 24 — when I went in for a routine eye exam and the ophthalmologist told me what I had and told me that I was going to be blind in a few years.

It’s a congenital condition. At my grandmother’s funeral when I was about 12, my uncle came up to me and said, “You better start learning Braille now.” I already had bad vision, and considering the family history he already suspected. He gave me a head’s up long before any doctor did.

There’s not much I can do about it. There’s lots of research going on but nothing they can do now. There are lots of technological gizmos — chips in eyes and electronic cameras — but for people in their 70s or 80s. They’re also working on gene therapy where they could correct the genetic problem, but they would only be able to do that on the youngest of infants. Neither works for me, so I just deal. Losing sight like this is a gradual, slow process. I was told that I’d be blind at 35 and I’m 39 now, so I got a little more time on them, but I have no idea when I’ll go totally blind. One treatment is to take massive doses of vitamin A every day, which is supposed to slow the process while destroying your liver at the same time. So that’s what I’m doing.

What about the brain lesion?

The brain lesion happened when I received a very bad concussion in 1985. I was walking down the street with my friend Grinch and I walked into steel lamppost. The next morning I couldn’t move. After a battery of tests no one could say anything about what was wrong. Then in Philly I got an MRI and a doctor there pointed to a spot on my brain. I can’t do anything about it but take lots of Tegratol, which is an anti-convulsive.

In other memoirs, parents are often the only source of definable evil in the universe. But you write very warmly about yours. Have you always been close to them?

We didn’t have any of those teenage fights. The only things we ever argued about were religion and politics. They were a very Christian religious Republican family, German Lutherans, and I didn’t last very long with that. When I went off to school and got into trouble, burning buildings and breaking things, I still talked to them but I mostly stayed out of touch. I wasn’t going to call up and say, “Hey, a cop beat me today!” or “Guess what I stole this afternoon?” But after the suicide attempt, when they sat at my side in the intensive care unit, we’ve been exceptionally close.

One time I talked with Teller of Penn and Teller, who wrote some kind of biography of his parents. I was shocked that anyone else would admit that they liked their parents in this day and age. As to memoirs, you’d get the idea that we’re a nation of victims, and to many people their parents are the source. That’s been thick and heavy throughout the entire culture for the past 40 years. But not me. I had a great childhood.

Did the stories you told and heard during the not insignificant time you’ve spent in bars inspire the stories in your memoirs?

Most of them, yes. In fact, all of them. A lot of these stories that I tell, taken individually, are things that that I would tell to my girlfriend while the two of us were just talking and, you know, a story would come together. And if I have the chance I’ll try it out on a few people and if the story gets a good response I’ll write it down. A lot of these stories got their start from talking in bars.

Do you ever drink and write?

No, I do most of my writing as early as possible in the morning. I just work better that way. My brain starts to slow down around 3 in the afternoon. So I just cram in as much as I can in in seven and eight hours and then I stop. And then I start drinking.

What’s your favorite New York bar?

I never divulge that.

Probably a wise idea. You’ll have all these groupies all over you …

No, no — scary people.

Really?

Well, 99.99 percent of the people who come up and want to talk to me are great, but that teeny tiny percentage is totally insane, which I think you’ll find is true of anything in life. I’ve had guys follow me home or hang around in front of the office or hang around in front of my apartment. They’ve gotten bad over the years. Every new receptionist [at the New York Press] has instructions from me that if I don’t know them, I’m not expecting anyone.

People pop up on the street and try to talk to you?

Well, talking to me is fine, but a few would start following me and I can’t get rid of them. And a few of them are very, very creepy. Very disturbed people. It starts off innocently — they want to talk about a story or they want to talk about one of my books — but then, I don’t know, things start to get stranger and stranger. I’m not ever sure what it is that they want, other than to sap my energy. I’m an extraordinarily private person. The novels I write are basically about my private life, but when it comes to my private life I just want to be left alone. What I keep thinking is, Who am I? I mean, why don’t they bother someone worthwhile?

You’ve said that you don’t have much to do with literary events. How come?

Literary parties are the most miserable goddamn things in the world. I mean, I don’t like parties anyway, but literary parties are the most boring, dry affairs, with all these egos in one room. There was a rash of book parties that friends of mine had, so I told my publicist that I didn’t want a book party. He told me, “To be honest, we weren’t planning on one.” They preferred to spend the money on advertising or book copies. They throw book parties if they feel an author’s ego needs it, if their ego is fragile enough that it needs that type of boost. I guess my ego is fine. In fact, if they’d had a book party for one of my books, I wouldn’t have shown up.

Last time I went to a literary party, my girlfriend and I ended up getting into a fistfight with some little screwhead.

What? How did that happen?

Well, we were sitting at this party with some friends, and this youngster came up to us and he and his friend started hitting on this woman at our table in the most unimaginative, crude fashion imaginable. She eventually gets up and leaves, and after she’s gone this guy sits down in our booth. Morgan, my girlfriend, and I are trying to figure this out. We asked him in a variety of ways, not too subtly, that we’d like him to leave, that he acted like a jerk and scared this woman away and that he was not welcome at this particular booth. But he just sat there. We had a few drinks in us, and he was a very rude young man, and Morgan finally stood up at one point and slapped the free martini out of his hand. I mean, this had been going on for some time and we had tried to be very rational. Clearly he didn’t know the writer, he just saw the open bar. If you’re going to be a party crasher, know how to do it. This wasn’t how you do it.

So she slaps the martini glass out of his hand and he actually takes a swing at her. And that, I mean — that just isn’t done. So I listened to where his voice was and aimed a tad south and I ended up kneeling on his chest and I was choking him for a little while before we were broken apart. He threatened to call the police but he never did. I was kind of hoping he might. I’d love to hear the cop asking him, “So you were beat up by a blind man after you swung at a woman?”

That must have livened up the party. What about readings?

I’ve never been in a fistfight at a reading.

No, I mean, do you like them? The mood at most readings usually reminds me of attending some sort of family event.

I don’t attend very many. And I’ve never done that many. When I did, I used to puke beforehand, though I don’t do that anymore. They’re just basically unpleasant for me. When I’m trying to read aloud I blow up these pages as big as I possibly can but still usually after a page and a half everything goes dark and I have to start making things up. So it’s very difficult. And also I just don’t like the whole idea of performing.

So you’re not part of the whole New York writer scene?

No, no. Back in high school when I got into punk rock, even the punks rejected me and didn’t want me around. I’ve never been part of any scene. I know a few writers in town, but we don’t sit around and talk about writing. I tend to avoid the company of writers. I know some very, very nice ones, some really wonderful people. But for the most part, they’re just obnoxious horrible people. Especially in New York. There’s so much backbiting, so much one-upmanship. It’s a very ugly, very competitive business. They’re always going into print badmouthing other writers, badmouthing their contemporaries — I don’t do that. It’s tough enough to just get by, just to make it anyway. There’s no point in trying to build yourself up by gutting someone else.

I heard you on a radio show the other day — do you like radio? It seems like the sort of thing you must be used to, talking to people without seeing them.

As long as it’s not a call-in show. Those are nightmares. Those shows just kind of collapse around me. For “Slackjaw” I did this call-in show in Madison, Wis., and there was dead silence the first half of the show, and then there was call after call after call — mostly people telling cripple jokes. Then you had people calling in weeping over lost wives. It was a disaster. Even my dad called in. He was like, “Hi son, we’re going to see you in a few days, right?” He was just calling to check in and I said, “Dad, I’m on the radio,” and he said, “Yeah, I know, I’m listening to it.” The whole thing was a disaster, but what was funny was that a couple minutes after the show the producer came out and came right up to me and said, “That was the best show I’ve ever done.”

I was doing a call-in for my novel “The Buzzing” a while ago, which is about a fourth-rate newspaper reporter who ends up covering the kook beat. There’s a conspiratorial subtext to the story, so every conspiracy nut in Urbana, Ill., called in — I mean, they’re at home, they don’t have anything else to do, they’re conspiracy nuts. So on the show we’re talking about UFOs, we’re talking about Kennedy, we’re talking about AIDS, we’re talking about 9/11, every conspiracy in the world. And I’m just there trying to tell people about my novel.

I did one for this current book and I started getting calls because people heard that it’s a spiritual book. It isn’t, but the host read the back cover quote about the book being “Buddhism for Drunkards” …

Doesn’t the back cover also have the line “Whenever I hear the word ‘spiritual’ I reach for my revolver”?

Yeah, that’s on this book, too. So the host reads that and suddenly all these people call in asking questions about the soul. I tried to tell them, “I don’t know about that, it’s just a bunch of funny stories.” I mean, I don’t think it’s anything more than a metaphor we use to explain human behavior, but what do I know? Then another caller asks a complex question about Buddhism, and I’m like, “I don’t know …”

Have you read a lot of other people’s memoirs?

No, I don’t really. Nowadays because of the eyes I listen to a lot of books on tape and so mostly I listen to a lot of crap — thrillers and mysteries and horror novels. In general, the people who do the audiobooks tend to only go after those that they know will sell a bunch. So as a result you get the bestsellers.

There’s been an explosion in memoirs over the past 15 years. Everybody has a story to tell about some awful misery that they’ve been though, or a story of their life as a professional hockey player, or whatever. Lots of mountain climbers have written memoirs, it seems to me. I have not paid much attention to them but I know that they’re out there. I guess I took it as evidence of what an awful, whiny nation of navel-gazers we’ve become.

What do you think about people in their mid-20s writing memoirs? The type that tend to boil down to “I drank a lot, I did a lot of coke …”

Sure, and that’s certainly what I did. To be honest, I think putting out three memoirs before the age of 40, which is what I did, is insane, it’s asinine. But that’s just the way things turned out. There’s a quote from Thomas Pynchon’s book “V” where he says essentially you should never write a memoir until you’re absolutely certain when you’re going to die. Because if you write one before, who knows what magnificent things you can do during the rest of your life? Or if nothing else happens to you, how disappointing would that be?

Mostly the what I call “Oh my God, I have a horrible disease” memoirs are at a point where they’re very whiny and very victim-oriented and very self-centered. But on the other hand, sometimes when I’m riding on the train or walking down the street, if I feel particularly generous toward the world that day, I look around and think, All these people have got some sort of big story of their lives to tell. So we do all have stories. I just don’t think all of them should be published.

Are you able to read books at all, or can you only listen to them on tape?

Actually, I do carry a book and a magnifying glass with me at all times, and I can get through maybe a page or a page and a half at a time. The other day I just finished something that surprised me, an old novel by Stanislaw Lem called “The Investigation” about a guy trying to figure out a case involving revived corpses. It was brilliant, it surprised the hell out of me.

That sounds like that old TV show you like so much –

Yes, “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” It was on for two seasons in 1973 and 1974. It’s about a rumpled, world-weary journalist in Chicago who every week uncovers evidence of monster activity in town and tries to simultaneously thwart the monsters and get the story past a perpetually skeptical editor. I liked it as a kid because it was scary and there wasn’t much else on then that was scary. The monsters attracted me. Now I look at it — I have a handful of tapes — and I see other things. The main character was one of the main inspirations for me to become a journalist.

Really?

Sure, I thought I’d be covering monster stories, though there isn’t much activity around here.

I would have thought New York would be the place to find them.

Well, there are plenty around here, but all of the human variety. The place to go for monsters is India or Russia. They have all sorts of sightings and encounters. We’re just about to get into the monkey-men season in India right now. Every summer the monkey men supposedly come back and there’s mass hysteria that travels from village to village and everyone becomes convinced that they’ve seen the monkey men, with different descriptions as to what they look like. Some even have different magic powers. The monkey men don’t hurt anyone but people do get hurt jumping off roofs trying to run away from them. Or they get trampled by a mob or get hurt by other people who think their neighbor is a monkey man.

There was a murderous Bigfoot in Russia a few months ago. Lots of UFO sightings there, too. Also — this took place in Iraq prior to the war — but I read off a Russian news wire that there were reports Saddam had contacted aliens and managed to combine alien DNA with scorpion DNA and breed giant scorpions that were guarding his palaces. We haven’t heard much about that since the troops moved in, but they’re probably still out there.

Most of my career decisions as a child were made for me by the movies. I wanted to be a seismologist after “Earthquake,” I wanted to be an ichthyologist after “Jaws.” I wanted to be a theoretical physicist after watching “Cosmos.” Those other things didn’t pan out, and after about six weeks at University of Chicago I found out I wasn’t cut out for theoretical physics. So I decided to take a much easier route and took philosophy instead.

This is an obnoxious question, but do you see yourself as part of any literary tradition?

There are a lot of authors I love, a lot of authors I have the greatest respect for. My library is filled with books that I go back to whenever I can. I think this is true for anybody: When a person starts writing, you have these authors that you love, so when you start out writing you imitate them. I was mimicking a whole slew of people in my 20s: Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski. Whatever the other angry drunken white people were reading in those days.

In the late ’80s I got a job in Philly writing a column and I was being somebody different every week. Once a guy stopped me at a party and he could tell me exactly what I had been reading the week before from what I’d written in my column. He could tell me obscure things like “you were reading this essay from Norman Mailer last week” or “you were reading this section of this book.” He was just a guy who read a lot but it was astonishing and it actually put the fear of God into me. I didn’t realize it’d been that obvious but we rarely do until somebody points it out to us.

Have you gotten better at the publicity demands of your writing career?

I hate to say it’s become old hat, but I’m much more comfortable. I do much, much less publicity as time goes on. The first time I had a book come out, they sent me out on a 10-city tour. Putting a blind man on a plane to 10 cities he’s never been to before stuck me as cruel and funny. It was exhausting. Everything went fine but I never want to do something like that again.

It was like an ongoing episode of “This Is Your Life.” I didn’t think I knew anyone going into these towns, but I’d get to these readings and people from grade school and junior high school would pop up afterwards. People I hated. It was never people that I liked. I was like, “Ugh, why are you bothering me this way?” I had no idea they’d remember me. In Milwaukee a guy that used to beat the shit out of me in junior high school showed up afterwards. It turned out he was an ophthalmologist. Also a couple of creepy people came: One woman who found out where I was staying and left a 20-minute phone message that had nothing to do with me, it was just a long rambling message. I was glad I wasn’t there to pick up the phone.

Then at the end, when I thought I was finally going back home to Brooklyn, they sent me down to L.A. — and I hate L.A. — to talk to these two TV people about making “Slackjaw” into a television series, which was mortifying. So I went down there, and in describing how cutting-edge the show would be, one of the TV people said that it would be “like that ‘Ally McBeal’ show!” It was totally demoralizing.

Are you satisfied with what you’ve done or, like many writers, do you feel a frustrating lack of completion with anything you do?

I’ve never really been satisfied with any of the books I’ve done. I think back to them and cringe. If I could — but I wouldn’t want to at this point — I would completely rewrite them. I just don’t fret about them as much. I’d still redo it if I could, but my favorite is the second one ["Quitting the Nairobi Trio"]. It’s a singular story. I hate to use terms like “narrative arc,” but it’s one story and I wrote it straight through. I think it holds up.

Was it difficult writing about that — the suicide attempts? Some of it’s pretty grim material.

Actually, I thought it was pretty funny myself. No, it’s not difficult for me. I’ve been through it so many times and I’ve gone over it so many times with people that it wasn’t a big deal. I can’t explain why I [attempted suicide] so many times, and how I did such a horrible job of it.

That particular time, I was living in Minneapolis and one night I tried to hang myself, which I did badly and it didn’t work, and then I tried to O.D. by gobbling a double handful of pills and washing them down with a fifth of Scotch, which I did a little better and which almost worked. I was in my apartment at the time and I stumbled out into the hallway and made such a commotion that the cops came and they ended up beating me up. As suicide scenes go, I thought it was pretty funny.

After that you spent time in a mental hospital. You’ve obviously written about it, but what do you remember now when you think about your time there?

When I think of the hospital I think of my first night there. It sounds like fiction, but my very first night there I had a roommate and we never spoke to each other. He was a very nervous sort. I went to bed and I was awakened in the middle of the night by some maintenance guys in there swabbing big pools of blood off the bathroom floor. I asked them what happened and they said it was none of my business. There’s a huge pool of blood on the bathroom floor and it’s none of my business? If he’d had a twitch three synapses over, my roommate would have been cutting me up instead. The next morning the doctor wouldn’t give me my electric razor, fearing that I would try to do myself in with it.

But there wasn’t much violence there except for that — well, that’s not really right. There were other times, but nothing like that first night. Mostly, life there is boring and slow. You learn a lot about waiting. You wait for the breakfast cart or for a doctor to show up once every two weeks. Those are the things I remember.

What future writing plans do you have?

I’d like to do more novels. I had so much fun writing the first one. I’ve written a couple since “The Buzzing,” but they haven’t gone over very well with the publisher. I’d like to take a little — or a long — break from the memoir game, mostly because I’m kind of tired of talking about myself. At least I’ll have to wait until something else horrible and funny happens to me that I think I could get a book out of.

Sounds like you’re feeling pretty good.

When I look at myself now, every day is pretty much OK. I think part of it too is that — and I know writers who do this — I can’t pretend to still be so angry and still be pissed at everything anymore. You can never pull that off. It’s just sad. So I’m not going to pretend.

In a way, my eyesight is something I grew into. With anything, we take a look at what we have to work with. I don’t have eyesight, but I have plenty of other things. I work around the eyesight. Look at Ray Charles, he couldn’t see, but he could play the piano. We deal with what we’ve got, we make do. I go through bitter phases. There’s nothing noble about this; it’s like if I’d been left-handed or born an idiot, you deal with it. You do what you can.

For the most part, I sit in my apartment or I sit in my office and write my stories. My dealings with the publishing industry have been for the most part been very good. And I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve always had another project lined up to work on. I’ve always had something to do. I mean, it’s no way to make a living — you’re never going to make a ton of money except in very rare exceptions — but I get paid to write stupid stories. I’m happy with that. It’s a rare opportunity.