I interviewed Mr. Wesley Stace, author of Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, a few weeks ago for Metro, and the article is in print today, but it’s very short, so I thought I’d publish the full interview here, because Wes is a witty, interesting man.

At the Charles Bock fundraiser last night I was seated next to Darrin Strauss, and after you finished performing your first song, he leaned over and said to me, “If you can do that, then why would you bother writing?” What does writing fulfill for you that music cannot? And don’t you understand that all writers wish they were rock stars?

Writing is very solitary, and music is very sociable, so they make very good bedfellows. Plus, everything I try to do in a song – economically and allusively – is completely different to what I want to do in a novel, so they require very distinct exercises skill-sets. Clearly, at some point, I felt music wasn’t quite enough – or I had an idea that felt too big for a song. (The latter was how Josh Ritter recently described it, and it felt right to me.) But the point is well-taken: I’m lucky to be able to do both. By the way, my Cabinet of Wonders show is predicated on the fact that writers want to be rock stars and rock stars want to be taken seriously.

How is promoting a book different than promoting an album? Do you think one industry is more doomed than the other or is there hope for them both?

Promoting a book, particularly with a book tour, is way more grueling than touring a record, not least because you don’t have the emotional pay-off and release of the gig at the end of the night, just a reading in a bookstore or library, which may or may not be fun. The rest of book and record promotion is more or less the same – trying to find different ways to explain the same things in a vaguely interesting way. It’s always great when an interviewer has clearly read the book and picks on some little detail you hadn’t thought of; and that’s the same with a record. Oddly, I read all my book reviews with interest (because I like the feedback) whereas I don’t care so much about my music reviews – perhaps this means I’m much more confident about my music. I’ve done it twenty years longer, I guess.

There is hope for both industries, but the hope lies in rediscovering the beauty of the physical object and then finding a way for it to work in tandem with an electronic version. I am more optimistic, for up-and-coming musicians, about the possibility of creating a life as a musician than I was fifteen years ago. But I think it’s always been hard to be a writer – harder work, longer hours, less reward.

What is the best tool for an author to promote their book? Have you ever done anything really strange to promote your work?

The best tool is the bribe. Or the hammer. Or maybe the internet. I don’t know.

I once lived in ice for three weeks to promote a book but no-one noticed because there was another guy doing it just down the street. He was also promoting a book, as I remember. I also once sculpted butter.

Can you speak a bit about your relationship with Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, with whom you’ll be speaking at Hunter on February 23rd?

I’ve met Alex once, right when I started writing Jessold. I asked a mutual friend to introduce us because I’d read his sensational book The Rest Is Noise and I knew he’d be able to guide me to some critical voices that carried the slightly mandarin tone of the day (which is what I needed for my narrator.) I later read a wonderful article he wrote in The New Yorker about the history of fictive composers – which is itself fascinating – Proust’s Vinteuil, Mann’s Leverkuhn etc etc – and I read those books to see how and why these non-existent composers failed or succeeded on the page. And when I’d finished my novel, I wrote to him again: “Hey, remember that book I started writing three years ago? It’s done and I have another fictional composer for your list.” And thus our conversations, and my following him on twitter, began. And we’re talking about these various non-existent composers at Hunter on 23rd Feb.

What’s the most fulfilling part of organizing your Cabinet of Wonders events?

We’ve done them for two or three years now. There are many fulfilling aspects to “curating” (buzzword for “throwing together”) the Cabinets. I believe genre to be dead (or very tired), so the mix of writers, artists, musicians, comedians is a lot of fun: particularly because everything is something I like. Of course, the idea of Variety is as old as the hills, which is why I always begin the shows with various vaudevillian verses. (See that alliteration? I’ve gone into MC character just thinking about it.) The ambience of the show makes a reading more relaxing, and provides a good listening environment for the musicians – comedy is the fulcrum: a comedy audience expects to come and hear someone talking, but also to provide laughter and applause, so I think the comedy relaxes everyone and makes for the best atmosphere. I can’t really have primadonnas on the show, because everyone kinda has to muck in together – it reminds me of entertaining the troops in World War Two. (Funnily enough, that was a big subject in my second novel by George. Perhaps I was preparing for the Cabinet.)

The audiences seem to leave very happy – the great thing about Variety is that if you don’t like something, they’ll be something great on in ten minutes. The pitfall is if people think they aren’t getting enough of the particular person they might be there for – so it’s all about balance, and collaboration, so people slip on and off stage, and then reappear unexpectedly, rather than doing their bit in splendid isolation. Then the show really flows. I love doing it. Eugene Mirman is half the reason for that. When the show begins, it’s just like making a little snowball at the top of a hill and giving it a kick. It’s so much fun. The set-ups and planning are work – the show is easy.

Which of your characters in Charles Jessold did you most identify with? And which was the hardest to let go of when you were done with the book?

I can’t really say I identified with any of them entirely. The narrator is more uptight than I could ever be; and the composer, his subject, the title character is too deeply in thrall to the idea of artistic genius, and way too much of a loose cannon. They’re the only two characters that I could possibly identify with – either of them could have been the title character, in truth, purely because it’s as much Shepherd’s book as it is Jessold’s. (Critics get possessive about their subject matter.) I couldn’t even say I’m somewhere in between the two, though I certainly used some of my experience of the haphazardness of creation – and the way that necessity (often financial) is so often the mother of invention – to make the composer believable. To me, Jessold is like Bob Dylan. Dylan used the protest movement in folk music as a stepping stone to greater expression, and those stepped upon felt rejected when he moved on, and they booed. My critic is definitely one of the people who would have booed Bob Dylan. Though, as Dylan noted in the 60s, “there’s a little boo in everyone”.

How did you end up moving to Philly and how do you like it so far?

A thousand reasons. A beautiful house found us. My wife, Abbey, happens to be from here, though we were both living in Brooklyn when we met. And our two children (4 and 2) are of the just-going-to-school stage and I felt that putting them through the NYC/Brooklyn version of that process might warp them irrevocably. Philadelphia has always been good to me – XPN is a wonderful radio station: one of the last great ones in the country, along with FUV of course – so I’ve been here many times over the years. It’s very close to NYC, so (as you have just witnessed) I can get up there and back very quickly. Plus, and the best reason, is that over the last 21 years in the USA, I have lived, in order and for various brief or lengthy periods in:

Atlanta
Los Angeles
San Francisco
Seattle
Brooklyn

so, directionally, I had no choice but to move to Philadelphia. The weird thing is I’d now have to move to DC and, having been there just the other day, I know that’s not going to happen, so it’s probably back across the Atlantic for me, whenever it’s next time to move.

(02/22/11) | 1 Comment »