Lawrence Weschler

Last night I saw Lawrence Weschler in conversation with Ricky Jay as part of City Arts & Lectures ongoing series. Many of you may recall that a couple months ago I saw DFW and Rick Moody in the same venue and came away . . . well, a little underwhelmed. I believe the events of last night (as well as this report on Paul Auster's appearance last week) allow me to coin an new rule as pertains to City Arts & Lectures (& perhaps just author interviews in general): Stick with the non-fiction authors.

Lawrence Weschler proved to be every bit as witty, urbane, intelligent, and just plain charming as his writing had led me to believe he would be. So far as I can remember, my first introduction to the man came when Max posted a reading list culled from Weschler's own NYU grad school class. Last summer, I tried out a few books on the list (as well as recognizing others I had already read) and took Weschler's own excellent Vermeer in Bosnia for a spin. The results were unambiguous: I found Weschler not only to be in possession of extremely good judgement, but also to have had the good sense to extend said judgement into such diverse realms as to make himself a genuine polymath.

So what did he talk about last night? Well, between interesting anecdotes, Weschler spent a good amount of time discussing his new book, Everything That Rises. This book is published by McSweeney's and it's rather striking--the format is slightly oversize, like a coffee-table book, and it's filled with full-color reproductions. The latter is quite necessary, since Weschler's book, is all about convergences, taking two things that somewhat resemble another and teasing out the interesting aspects of their relationships.

As Weschler himself noted, part of the difficult in convergences is finding ones that work. He cited the example "Mick Jagger looks like Don Knotts." OK, sure, that's true, but beyond a certain amount of humor, that particular convergence isn't really worth much. Much more intriguing was, for example, Weschler's comparison (which he read from the book) of a painting by Rothko and images we were getting back (in the same year the painting was made) from the surface of the moon.

Weschler's point is nothing so simple as "Rothko was inspired by the moon landings." Rather, he discusses how both images act on the mind in similar ways and considers what that would tell us about art and the impulse to comprehend. The greater message of the book, as explained by Weschler, was that we all work from a large storehouse of images and ideas, much of it unconscious, and that we're actually trading in these common signs more often that we would think. In essence, the book itself is one large demonstration of this idea. (Weschler summed all of this up nicely by explaining that when Robert Frost once wrote a book of 24 poems, he said that there were actually 25 poems in it, the book itself being the 25th. In a similar way you could call Weschler's book of convergences the final convergence.)

Weschler also briefly mentioned his previous book, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder, which is about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, a museum that Weschler described as being a door next to a bus stop, and that you come to the door one day, knock and don't get an asnwer, come the next day with the same results, and on the third day you finally get admitted. He said it was difficult to write about the museum because he was fearful of demystificating it in the process of describing it (itself a great description of the muesum) and he described one of the exhibits: A diorama of a jungle with an ant, and through a telephone an institutional-sounding voice explains to you how the ant gets attacked by spores from the jungle's canopy which turn the ant into a cross between a zombie and a spore-generator.

Also, I should not forget to remark that Weschler recommended Joseph Mitchell as possibly the greatest writer he's even read, and would put his book, Joe Gould's Secret (about a homeless man trying to do an oral history of civilization) as his best stuff. (I should also note that Weschler repeated made enthusiastic recommendations throughout the evening of all kinds of crazy-interesting sounding stuff, including (I believe) this video of an octopus, which he billed as having the capacity to give you a stroke.)

To end this, let me take us back to the beginning, in which I said this evening was far more successful than the DFW & Moody one. Weschler was clearly much more comfortable discursively discussing all sorts of things than either Moody or Wallace, which may just be attributable to his status as a journalist (in his line of work, he's got to be much more comfortable going out and being with people and talking). However, it was also quite clear that Weschler and Ricky Jay (the interviewer) were good friends that had known each other for a number of years. They easily played off each other's friendly energy and were knowledgable enough about each other to get to the good stuff and prevent excessive flights of tangent. Moody and Wallace, by contrast, might have met for the first time on the evening I saw them. Although I would be quite honored to be present for such an historic occasion, it didn't really make for all that great of a conversation.