just a heads up that this episode of conversations with Tyler does contain some strong language so listener discretion is advised conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercus center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org for a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links visit
conversations with Tyler hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm very pleased to be chatting with Mary gateskill who is one of my very favorite contemporary writers I love her books mayor Veronica a lost cat her essays her short stories Mary welcome to conversations with Tyler thank you thank you for having me one thing I find so
intriguing in your writing is your understanding of people who just seem to not want want to be happy flat out such as velvet's mother in your novel mayor these people what's your understanding of why aren't they happy or why can't they be happy why do they process everything so negatively well could we talk about one character because I think they're all different sure like uh what
is that t story all happy families are the same all unhappy families are different something like all I don't think all happy people are families are the same either but I think the reasons that people are unhappy are why they seem to just kind of go to that place really easily are quite buied I think if I could come up with a general reason not talking about my characters right
now but talking about people I think people who seem like they just want to be unhappy or incurably unhappy it's doesn't have to do with what they want it's usually because they've been hurt very early on and not just once or twice there's a kind of persistent pattern of them encountering enormous adversity doesn't have to be social it can be in their family I guess that is kind of a
social basically they're very injured and so their strategy for life becomes how to protect themselves or how to cope with what they sort of see as a just non-stop barrage of shitty experiences and so that kind of puts them in a posture that they without certainly without intending to invite that in terms of velvet's mother that's not what's happening she really truly has
had a rough life I mean if you're in a foreign country and you cannot speak the language and you're in a dangerous neighborhood and you don't even understand the social signals that are being sent by the people around you and you're in a social group that's really look down on and you don't even know how to respond to that or you have no means to respond to that that's hard and if
you put on top of that that she's come from a very rough circumstance I mean there's a little about her backstory there you're going to be in a posture of real defensiveness and just locks in and that makes it very hard to move with any kind of joyous energy which is what our daughter learns in the book in riding horses that that's her exposure to kind
of free and joyous energy which she doesn't get anywhere else so in the general case is it a desire to be preemptive so you feel in control of the pain partly yeah but it's not even that thought out it's just have you ever seen like cats like I've had situations where I'm introducing a new cat to household where there's going be three other cats and I've had the situation where like
two of the host cats are aggressive and they they're ready to fight with the new one and I've seen two different responses one I had a fairly confident dominant cat she knew she couldn't fite to cats so her strategy was just to sit down stretch out her paws and look the other way and yawn that defused the aggression but another cat was just super reactive just howling in you know
fear and don't come near me don't come near me I'll scratch your eyes up they always went for that cat because of her response it magnified the aggression so it's something like that it's like getting yourself into a position of being prepared to be attacked that can draw not only from people but almost it it almost like supercharges any negative
situation not that I'm blaming the people like dlet smother like I said is is in a bad situation objectively if we're trying to understand such people there are literal answers to the question of why they're unhappy and then there are what you might call fictional portrayals of why they're unhappy do you think we need both to understand those people and do the fictional portrayals
add to the literal answers when you say the fictional portrayals you mean in the heads of the unhappy people or literally fiction like somebody like me would write someone like you would write a character out does that add to our literal explanation of why these people are unhappy or is it just mirroring what you might say I mean part of what I want to do in writing
about some characters not so much velvet's mother but also people like ginger The Other Woman in the story who seems to have a much better life who actually does have a much better life she's kind of a lost soul in a way and with somebody like that I'm not trying to literally tell people how they should understand them but what I want is to acknowledge that many people like that
exist like also I think part of velvet's Mother's problem is that she doesn't fit in with her own Community she in a way is like ginger they're both kind of oddballs they're both very sensitive people in their own ways and there are many many people like that on Earth that for whatever reason have a great deal of trouble fitting into their world around
them and even if it's not a bad world and that's really hard and it's not that I'm trying to say here are the reasons why and you should understand but it's more like I want you to feel those people I want the reader to feel them and that's something that's more unconscious almost but I think I want to create almost a feeling that you're in the room with that person and instead of
dismissing them quickly you open your psyche and and just feel feel them that's ideally what I'm wanting to achieve why are we all to be pied I don't know that you said that in the New Yorker once I believe it's hard to remember the context perhaps I meant because we're we're all weak Little Creatures finally even the strongest of us is going to either die violently or
age and get sick and become face to face with our weakness and you know the fact that we have no idea who we are what we're doing here we're not aware of that most of the time because we're just moving around in the world but on the deathbed things we think were really important may not matter very much our personality may not matter very much everybody is very connected to their
personality well I guess maybe a few people are not either by Design either because they want to look past their personality or they're crazy and their personality is disintegrative but most of us are really into our personalities and I think at certain points in life even say you were really sick or were really disad banished we've been beaten
badly by somebody or something we realize our personality is actually quite fragile and it's just a construct really and I think that's scary for people I hope I'm not answering it too great length it's just a big question so yeah great I'm doing the best I can I was once with the woman is in her house and her son was there and he was a big strong kid like 21 or something and he
really worked out and was a strong guy and she was trying to tell him to be careful about something and you know the bad people in the world go I'd like to see somebody who could he used the f- word me up and I didn't say anything but I'm like all it take is somebody with a gun and you're dead and he doesn't know that and he doesn't he doesn't feel that he probably knows it
in his head because he's so strong in the moment he's not always going to be like that now sometimes in your self accounts you claim to be confused by social situations yet your novels I would say your remarks are extremely insightful into character and Into The Human Condition how do you put all that together into one unified theory of Mary gateskill I don't have what unified theory of Mary
case do you have a disunified theory no that's too complic that's too big a question but it's certainly true that I'm often confused in social situations those are very different from sitting by yourself and writing I can have a great deal of clarity if it's you know either a character I've completely invented or I'm writing partly from Life partly from
fiction or it's a messay about something that really happened I'm just completely in my own point of view I understand my own point of view usually pretty well but if I know that's very different if you're in a room even with two other people and you're dealing with other people's not just their point of view but their whole psyche and and presence and how the tone of voice and and plus
down on top of that if you don't know them there's social rules and conventions those are what I have trouble with I often don't read those correctly though I'm much better at it than I used to be so anyway they're two different things so that's how I may come off as in fact may be very knowing in my own writing but it takes me a while to understand what's going on socially sometimes
as you know many 19th century novels they focus on social structures rather than individuals could you ever imagine writing such a novel I'm not sure because of that very reason that I don't think I understand say the education system that's the one I understand the best because I have taught in universities but even that I I don't pay much attention to the bureaucracies of
those things I could learn about them but in a profound level they don't interest me I wouldn't want to write a story about that world probably anyway or a whole novel a story maybe but other settings like I simply don't know enough about them and it would take a very long time to research them adequately and I have seen people write about things like that that I don't think they know about
them either and it doesn't stop them but I think that would be the main difficulty I had with that and to me it's not the highest possible goal I mean it's a high goal and there are people who do it brilliantly and I admire those people but I don't feel like you must do it if you want to be you know a valid writer here's a question from a reader and I quote she
has an amazing attention to the physical you might say to sensual detail the smoothness of a sea shell the hairiness of a horse's leg the inherent virtue of a beautiful pair of flip-flops how did she develop this quality end quote well thank you for one for the observation It comes naturally to me it's the way I do understand the world and I understand people that way too like by looking at
them that way not entirely I understand them by their words and actions as well but I think people tell the truth with their face much more than they do with their words and their tone of voice and the way they move their body but also to me that's a bigger world than the social World in a sense it's a very mysterious world that we come from this sort of raw
matter and the social World certainly important but it exists in that bigger world so to me that's where I'm more naturally attuned the social world comes out of that in my opinion and I feel like I claim to understand that natural world I don't understand it as like a biologist would certainly but I I'm just very natural for me to go there although I have developed it as well I have
consciously developed it as well and how do you practice that just by looking at things and asking myself how does that look and then do you draft and redraft or it just flows out and then it's there on the page and you've got it I usually have to draft and redraft it's very rare that I don't you once quoted your therapist as saying and I'm I quote I'm
quoting him here people are just horrible and the sooner you realize that the happier you're going to be what's your view I thought that was a wonderful remark but it's important to note the tone of voice that he used he was a a southern queer gentleman with a very lilting soft voice I was complaining about something or other and he goes people are horrible they're stupid and
they're crazy and they're mean and the sooner you realize that the better off you'll be the more you go to start enjoying life and I just laughed because partly it was obviously he was being funny it was a very gentle way of allowing my ranting and raving and acknowledging the truth of it I mean gee I don't know how anybody could deny that
I mean look at human history and some of the things that people do but it was being very spacious about it and just saying look you have to accept reality you can't expect people to be perfect or to be your idea of good or moral all the time you're probably not either this is what it is so I thought that was kind of wisdom actually at the margin what should we be doing more of to help
trouble teenagers more therapy more medication something else wow you like to ask big questions I I could answer that if you presented me with an individual I can't answer that I mean I'm not that's not my field for one thing but even if it was I don't know I mean I think the broadest answer that a lot of people including professionals would agree with is problem is this
can't be implemented if there was a way to limit social media I think that would help if there was a way to get people more physically active and re more grounded in their body but you know you can't like have mass meditation classes for teenagers and I can't picture that at all you could try but you see people are so different like some kid might be
very amenable to the idea of learning some kind of meditation technique or breathing technique or get interested in martial arts or something like that but you can't sort of say this is what everybody needs to do I think if there was a way to get people more grounded in their bodies that would help and not so fixated on social media but the problem is that I think no one can figure out
how to implement something like that on a mass basis a very specific question for how long will you look for a lost cat it depends again on the situation like I looked for the one cat that I lost for months probably about a year possibly even more than that no I think I actively looked for maybe 9 months but I was still keeping my eye out for months after that there was another cat
I lost most of my cats when I lose them I find that they come back but there was one I didn't and that was really terrible and I I looked for a long time then there was another one I didn't look as long for him and I'm not sure why maybe a couple months at what point do you feel justified in replacing the lost cat you might still be looking but you say well I need to move on I'm going to get
another cat if this one comes back I'll have an extra I wouldn't justify it I just whether what I feel compelled to do what do you think of the people who clone their dead or missing cat to produce a replacement this happens in South Korea fairly often right put it this way I it's not something I understand it's just not something I understand well but if you miss your cat
and you're attuned to the visual cues of your cat especially and you want what you think will be the same cat all over again I can't I could not understand that as the same cat I just no just because it looks like the cat is it's not the same thing it's just I I can't grasp how anyone could see that as the same animal is it worse that it looks like the same cat I don't know it's just
incomprehensible to me should socially awkward people focus on writing online again that would depend on the person I I think for some people it might actually be very helpful to them for a while if it helps them connect eventually to a physical world then I think it's great and I think some people that might be say somebody who lives in a place where they there's no one who
shares their sexual orientation and their sexual Orient say they're queer and that's really it's not a accepted thing to be where you live so you go online you find people like yourself and you realize if I go to a different place here's some people I could know ahead of time that's great or even if you're you know in a more subtle situation where you don't belong in some discret
category that's looked down on but you are just really awkward and you have a hard time meeting people and fitting in it might be good for you to be online for a while to you know just to feel like oh there's other people here I can connect with I can connect with other human beings if that supports you in somehow getting out in the world then I
think it's excellent but if like you're like many people we read about that that becomes the only thing you do and it actually makes it harder for you to connect with real people obviously that is a disaster and apparently that that happens a lot what are the dangers in getting such rapid feedback on your writing all the time if you're writing online I am sure but what's the danger
of the rapid feedback it drives you crazy you get too upset you always feel you have to respond you can just ignore it or for you for me it's that I feel like I have to respond it's not even that I feel I have to I know I don't have to but if somebody says anything at all interesting I want to respond it's very difficult for me not want to respond because I'm curious especially
if it's somebody who's saying something that is very different from people I know in life like I have a couple of people on my substack who comment every now and then they don't usually speak in a political way but occasionally they do and I learn they're actually Trump supporters I know very few well I know one person who may be sort of a trump supporter is person but I know very few
people like that so I'm right away quite curious about that person I don't engage them politically usually but once I did it's interesting to me if I don't know a type of person to have that opportunity to connect with them a little bit that way and what have you most learned about yourself your own writing from having started a substack I have learned something but I'm not sure I can
articulate it quickly it's been refreshing to me to be in a writing situation where I'm not so careful about what I say I go over it sometimes and see I've made ridiculous mistakes in terms of dropped words or incorrect grammar but it's worth it because it's freeing to have that kind of uninhibited flow with people and I don't know if I can say exactly what I've learned but
it's it's definitely been something and also it's been interesting for me to see how social media can be very positive in some ways I've always been extremely wary of it it's the first time I've been on anything like social media but there's a kind of politness to it like the thing about social media that everybody knows is it allows people to be really awful in a way they would in
person because it's you know it's easy to be really insulting and gross if you don't even have to look at the person's reaction or you know deal with the fact they might want to punch you in the face but it's also there's another thing I've learned that people can also be much more polite for exactly that reason you don't really know who you're talking to
so you don't want to quickly assume something about what they're saying like if I'm with a person and they say something one I feel like I have to respond quickly two I may jump to conclusions based on Old Habits or old ideas about the type of person I'm looking at if I don't have any of those cues it's just something they're typing first I don't have to respond quickly
and two I've sometimes started to be really sarcastic in my responses to people and then I've looked at it and realized I don't know if this person is meaning to be sarcastic to me I don't know if this person is joking like somebody said something I almost typed I hope you're joking you're joking right and then I looked at it again and realized I don't know that he is so I
want to clarify I'll ask a question first before I come in with a immediate response and I've noticed other people most people are very polite maybe for the same reason so that's been really interesting and why did you recently pause your substack here's the down part of it to get the quick responses does sort of supercharge my mind in a way that's both good and bad it's
stimulating but sometimes it's stimulating in a way that's weird like it's kind of jangling like it's almost like your brain electricity is crossed with other people's and it's just kind of like it's too much and it doesn't have the grounding quality that it would if you were actually seeing those people and talking over drinks or something there's a physical reality that comes
from just being with people even if there's a lot of stimulation there's something that's hard to articulate that's an animal quality of comfort if you're really with them even if you're quarreling with them it's still that grounded real quality and you don't have that when you're just communicating online and it's just this kind of electrical connection which which is to
me a little jarring and I think it is for a lot of people like I thought maybe it's just cuz I was old and not used to it but when I publish that I need to stop because I'm getting over stimulated a lot of younger people like former students emailed me and said yeah that's how I feel that surprised me why is Lolita such an intriguing novel for you
probably the same reason it's intriguing for a lot of people it's one thing it's incredibly beautiful and it the beauty is not simply decorative it's to take you to a really deep place again like that physical reality that I've talked about before he has an extraordinary ability to render the complexity of the physical world and to deepen whatever his story is about by really drawing you
into that and making you understand the vastness of the world and also how it's informing all of the people and the feelings that the weirdness of the complexity like the yearning of say Mrs Hayes and hbert and Lolita for some kind of profound connection and why it's leading them to behave in the horrible ways Lolita is innocent she's a kid she's not developed enough to be
horrible but the adults what they're doing and what their needs are that that's drawing them into these intricate ways of just evil actually and yet enabling you to feel their humanity and the way they respond to the world around them and also the way it makes you feel in this extreme case like Humber is a monster but he also has elements that we
can recognize like I can't say a developed answer quickly but I wrote about it how I feel that it makes us again in that very subtle subliminal way without thinking it out unless you have to write an essay about it that it makes you understand the relationship of pure feelings of love with all the terrible things that people are too that the rapaciousness the jealousy the cruelty
the greed the selfishness all of those things that human beings have can also be at very close proximity to our desire for love and our Thrive to love other people and it can be really hard for everybody whether you having a pedophiliac impulse at all and it can be with your sister with your brother with your friend with your parents this really complex relationship of feelings
of love with all these other really dark elements I think that's what ultimately what makes it so powerful do you agree that the kubric movie of Lolita is quite disappointing you know I haven't seen it for a long time it's certainly not as good as the novel I think it's very hard to put that novel in film because so much of it is about such precise internal observations that you just
can't put on film it doesn't work Fran kav's story in the penal colony why is it interesting to you and how do you read it gosh I I need to really think these things out before I can answer them well but I think it's very much about again for those of you who haven't read it it's a terrible story in a lot of ways it's a fic it's a totally Fantastical idea of someone from another
country coming to visit a penal colony with absolutely bizarre Society seemingly although it's quite recognizable if you think about it it's quite real but the prisoners there have a set of impossible rules they're governed by an elite set of people who have plenty of money and Leisure and if they break any rule which for example if you're supposed to sit outside an
officer's door and wake up every half an hour and salute him and if you fail to do that then you have to be strapped face down onto this machine which will very slowly over a period of 12 hours or something write with needles on your back the rule that you've broken and sometimes they'll just write it and other times they'll write it until you're dead until your body is basically
broken and the main character is a guy who just loves this machine thinks it's the most beautiful holy thing in the world and he's enraged because the Liberals in his Society are trying to banish the punishment and he's trying to persuade the visitor to write something or to say something that will make them realize we must Main M this sacred
institution of torturing people to death in front of a crowd including children and I mean that sounds familiar right away when you think of like medieval times or you know times in history when people have been tortured to death including in this country lynching and witch burning for the amusement of a crowd or the edification of a crowd and what's amazing is he makes the officer
who's pushing for this weirdly sympathetic that's one of the amazing things about it that even though he's evil in some way he believes in something something in a way that nobody else seems to and the Prisoner and the guard the person who's guarding him are oish figures stupid oish figures like animals almost and you'd have to read it to see how he accomplishes this but it's
quite remarkable but it also to me it's such a complex story it's almost like a dream that it almost exists outside any kind of rational thinking and it comes from that deep place that where nature comes from almost but it's also to me a about how people really not all people but there's a big part of humanity that craves irrational authoritarian governance that's part of what I think
makes it powerful I think it's why people vote for dictators and why people support dictators some people crave that it's beyond dominance it's just someone telling them what to do and having a heavy hand that will govern them in a way that's truly brutal some people want that and it isn't about masochism in a sexual way it's beyond that it's very weird
which do you think are the best Norman mailer writings well I haven't read all of them I haven't read for example the Executioner song which some people think is his best although other people think he actually got somebody else to write that I have no idea the first half is amazing I think but then it it somewhat falls apart but I think I think it's
real malor and it's worth reading yeah I should I'm very poorly read for a writer actually I actually love the naked and the dead it's nowhere near as sophisticated as his other writings or as weird but it's quite powerful and beautiful espe the opening innocence of this Soldier who's getting off the boat and has no idea what he's walking into and get shot within moments anyway I
really liked armies of the night and it's a horrible book in some ways but I really have enjoyed American Dream It's So kooky other some other ones that I finding difficult to call up oh the fight I thought was very interesting I don't know if I think it's great it's interesting and has some great moments harlot's ghost is surprisingly good I think you feel it has to be too long but
but somehow it isn't yeah if you think about your own writings there's some kind of inner body to them that makes them appealing to other people do do you have a a self-conception of what that inner body is you mean a strong character there's some kind of strength on the page or vividness of feeling that I think sets you apart from any other writers just what's your self
understanding of that I don't know because it's something that I would take for granted so it's hard to understand it really I think you're talking about what I describe done one of my substack essays is sort of an inner weave that I think good work has it's almost like a vision of life that the writer isn't even aware of when they're writing it because it's so integral to them but if
they are connecting their vision of life with their actual style the words they choose it can be quite strong like Nabokov has that incredibly so almost all great writers have it and even good writers have it now in some of your writing there is sex not sexual scenes explicitly but if you think about Victorian novel they pretty much always avoid the sex does that make them
inherently flawed no and I think that even Victorian novels it's there like I'm first thing that pops into mind is Bleak House you don't think Dickens is a sexual writer at all but he is he doesn't do it explicitly but lady deadlock have you read that book sure I love that book it's one of my favorites lady deadlock is a very erotic figure her intense female strength her intense
masking the idea that she's always hiding something she's like a Diana rig figure in the adventures Emma Peele you know older people might get that reference she's super elegant and the lawyer the guy talkling horn I think his name is who decides to expose her like their their conversation is quite highly eroticized in a kind of SNM way or I'm trying to think of somebody else the
name is escaping me Edith Wharton one of her books I remember House of Mirth the interplay between the male characters and the the female heroin definitely get get a sense of masculine power and feminine response I remember being subtly eroticized Henry James oh my goodness everybody knows turn of the screw is heavily eroticized so I think there's quite a lot you can do with very
subtle means without overtly referring to sexuality do you ever read children's books yes young adult fiction sometimes like a few years ago I read the entire His Dark Materials Trilogy and I I really enjoyed that what do you think is your most un usual yet successful reading habit I don't think I have any unusual reading habits some general questions at what age is it too old to
get a tattoo I've never thought about that I don't have a tattoo nor do I I feel I'm too old for one also yeah I mean the problem is as you get older you're probably going to be covering more of your body you would be less visually appealing on Old skin but if you want to get it just purely for yourself and no one else will ever see it I guess you're never too old but I
don't really have an opinion what do you think should be the ground rules for when you should be able to write about other people in fiction without their permission so we all know Canard right a lot of his family got quite mad at him some of them were not talking to him because he wrote about them so openly it's a fictional work but it it's fiction and it's not fiction
right well my own personal ground rules are well it depends if you're speaking to the person or not or also you know how to find them I've once at least and I've probably done it more than once wrote about somebody who they were in my past and I actually didn't know how to locate them it would be easier now but I'm not even on Facebook and also they
may not be on Facebook either so I went ahead and wrote about her and she got in touch with me later really hopping mad and I felt bad but I I explained it to her to me the character wasn't really you which is people never believe it when you say that but in this case it was actually true yes she was based on you but also I didn't know how to reach you and also she changed her name
legally so that made it even harder but normally what I would do if I'm on speaking terms with them if I'm not it's different story is I write it first I don't ask their permission first that's a can of worms but I write it first and then I show it to them and I ask is there anything you really want me to change and normally people are quite reasonable they appreciate it that you
ask them they'll say this and this and this and usually it's been things I'm okay changing I don't think anyone's ever asked me to change something that I just absolutely felt it would ruin the piece so those are my ground rules how much do you miss the New York City of the 1980s sometimes I do I don't think about it mostly but sometimes you know I'll walk by a place I was familiar with and
be like oh I wish things were like that still I wish I could go back to that time maybe 10% of the time what do you think of the master of arts in creative writing is it a waste is it ruining American Writers is it helping them is it irrelevant well depends on the person I hate to keep saying that but I really believe that I've come to have a more
negative opinion than I used to when I first was aware of it in the late 80s early 90s I thought it was fine I thought my basic attitude is if you are going to be a writer a writing program isn't going to hurt you it may not help you that much either but it's you know if you're going to be a writer why not it sure you could take it it's not going to ruin you or may not help you that
much but I always thought it was silly saying it's going to ruin American Writers it's going to make it uniform they're going to be grinding out people cookie cutter that I don't think is true at all writers who work in these programs you're not interested in making people write like you you couldn't why would you want to do that it's impossible and it would be exhausting to
try and people are going to respond to your comments differently that's ridiculous to think that first I do want to say that also my basic feeling about them at the beginning was some people do not belong in those programs it's not going to help them it just confuses them I would not have liked a writing program when I was younger it would have simply confused me some people do not thrive in
a workshop environment and intimidates them there are certain people who will dominate the workshop just naturally some people kind of fade in the background some people don't like that some people though it's great they love it they love the quick feedback it focuses them on their work really well they Thrive so some people it's great for but what I have come to think as
negative about it is the fact that people think they've got to do it and even some editors I think expect that people have gone through this program and that I think is quite destructive because of the reason I just said for some people they don't do well in it and it doesn't help them and it's expensive and even if it's not expensive a lot of programs do have a lot of leeway they
let people in with a lot of stipend and a lot of help but still it's going to cost them money because they're not going to be working while they're in that program or they're going to be teaching to make up for the fact that they're not paying that's hard the best case scenario they learn a skill that they can later use but if they're not a person who ever wants to be in Academia
they never get a teaching job that's a worthless skill it's a demanding of their energy and again they're going to get into debt one way or the other and they may get nothing out of this and they've gone into debt and basically wasted two or three years of their life that's a danger and I think a lot of people don't realize that I may not be a
person who can get something out of this and I do not have to go through this program you don't have to do that to be a writer and I think many people I've heard people say this you've got to do this if you want to be a writer that I think is really destructive as an undergraduate why didn't you fed into University of Michigan what makes you think I didn't
oh I think you said somewhere and you left right no so you just finished and you were happy there no it was mainly because I was older I didn't share the experiences like I had gone to Community College first and even then I got into it older because I didn't graduate from high school and and so I came with a different background than most people I had lived on my own for years I had had
experiences that most people undergraduates I didn't hang out with most undergraduates at all I was friends with older people who were either graduate students or were people who were just hanging out in an arbor because they' graduated and they hadn't figured out what else they wanted to do but even them I just came from a completely different place I had worked
as a stripper I had had just a very different experience I I didn't come from you know high school and coming right from my parents house to the university but some of the people who were living you know in an arbor didn't come from that either they had also been supporting themselves in the world for a while as well so it wasn't like I was radically different from those people
but yeah they were differences working as a stripper what do you think you learned about men well first I should say that the kind of strip club I was working in was quite different from what people most think of now it wasn't like a lap dancing place there was only one woman on stage at a time so it wasn't like there were three women and they were moving through the audience and you
know having a lot of physical contact with men there was no pole dancing which I think is Awesome by the way pole dancing can be quite amazing the women didn't have to do that it was nowhere near as demanding they just basically went up on stage by themselves walked back and forth smiled at people or didn't and created a Persona and what I learned I guess in this very particular
setting this would not apply in kind of a lap dancing venue that men can be quite romantic about women in that situation that they sometimes would fall in love with a Persona that a certain woman would have and the women would create not all of the women some women just went on there they danced around did their thing that was it but the most
popular strippers it wasn't about being beautiful nobody had artificial breasts the most popular women were women who were either very flirtatious some of them were very plain they weren't that pretty but they clearly loved being there they loved the attention they would look at the men they would smile at them and the men would feel like you know she's a girl I could date she likes
me and they really enjoyed that they enjoyed the fact that she enjoyed what she was doing and then there were the Beauties there were some beautiful women who weren't so flirtatious but they cared about what they were doing there was one girl really beautiful like really just gorgeous woman and she didn't make eye contact she didn't flirt but she was really obviously into
creating this Mystique she put a lot of effort into her show she used feathers and feathery boas and she thought about her music and the men loved her because same reason they felt she was really into what she was doing and she wanted to do it for them and I learned that that men could be really they weren't just about tits and asss they wanted to have this kind of romantic fantasy set
forth and they wanted to know that the woman cared about it or that she was just in it because she was really into it and liked them and I didn't know that and some of them could be really crude and gross like at late night if they came in drunk and they could be horrible but that I already knew I knew that men could be ugly and gross and really disrespectful those men often got thrown
out by the way they were too much there was bouncers there but I didn't know about the other side of it that really romantic longing side of masculinity I hadn't really known that yet on an individual basis yes but not on a kind of group level how have your views about sexual permissiveness changed since the 1990s social views have changed a great
deal in your case I guess I've SE the downside of it how confusing it can be I actually started to see that in the '90s I didn't see that in the 70s and 80s I was very into permissiveness and you know the more freedom the better not that I didn't recognize they were dangers always but I began to see that in the 990s it was beyond physical danger that it could be very confusing
to some people and even to me I began to see how it had been confusing to me it took me a while to understand and I'm also seeing now how repulsive it can be to younger people there's always a matter of balance like for my generation it was so uptight and so rigid and so locked in to tradition that it was awful so that's how the kind of extreme permissiveness happened but then I think
there's been a reaction to the extreme permissiveness and wait a minute this is not okay to just be saying whatever you want and grabbing people and there's a real downside to that the most powerful people are going to not even socially powerful but physically powerful take advantage of that and you know not everybody is going to be able to deal
with that so like wait put the brakes on I don't like this we don't like this so I think that's a natural reaction what did you learn working in the Strand Bookstore in New York City did there's a lot of different ways to be in the workplace that there was a workplace that allowed people to be themselves in a big way to dress however they wanted and that that can really work for some
people and it can work for some customers some customers like that kind of environment where you walk in and you might be dealing with somebody dressed in their pajamas and their hair standing out to there and weird makeup and who's going to say go find it yourself and what was your job in the Strand I was a typist I was in the basement typing up orders what are your
favorite Parts about now living in the Hudson Valley oh just the sheer beautifulness of it it's a beautiful place how long have you lived there off and on since 98 what would be your self- account of how you have kept your curiosity and intellectual Vitality for so long I don't know if I have kept it it feels like it's sagging down to my knees the people who have lost it don't feel that
way I would note really I think so well well by the fact that I up until recently I just quit teaching but up until recently teaching and having to clarify my thoughts about why I think something is important or why I think a piece of writing is working or not or writing about writing you know just the writing you have to you know use your mind quite a lot how did You observe
your students changing over the years as groups cohorts oh my god well they've gotten really they're upset they're really sometimes quite aggressive and they really need you to express things in a very conformist way a lot of people not all students some students really are still very open-minded and questing and want to know a lot about a lot of
different ways of looking at things but some of them are very rigid now and really like I handed out a piece of writing by an African-American critic very well known named Hilton OLS he was writing about flanner o Conor who he loves and in the first page you see the n-word and they didn't know that he was African-American right away and they saw the n-word and one of them says on the
first page there's the n-word and I'm like I mean honestly I think in fiction personally I don't have a problem with anybody using that word but you know my God he ought to be able to use that word and they were just so rattled by seeing it and they didn't quarrel with it eventually as I you know explained read the whole piece there's a lot of context
to this but they're so reactive to certain words or even the word it appears in a story and they were upset by that and I'm like it's a story about kids they would use that word and it's just like they want everything to be so I don't know what they right policed they're so afraid of the use of certain words and terms and exploring certain mindsets that is very difficult for me I
mean if you present it in the right way they're usually okay but you have to go through so much presentation that I I just find I don't understand why they think that's going to make the world a better place I understand the impulse I respect the impulse to want to make the world a better place and to stop insulting and attacking people who are already being insulted and attacked I
understand where it came from there used to be a lot of unchecked gross racism sometimes in schools I could tell you stories about that so I understand the impulse but this sort of really nitpicking minute over policing of language is just a nightmare and also you know the idea that most trans students are not like this most trans students if you use the wrong pronoun
they're like they'll correct you but they don't really care that they get it you just forgot but one person I had recently didn't actually clarify you get a piece of paper with their picture how they want to be referred to in terms of pronouns how they identify she did not identify as a transperson she identified as non-binary and she did not specify what pronoun so some people who identify
that way aren't particular about it they're fine with how you're responding to them how they present she presented as a female so I called her that and she didn't correct me in her student evaluation she was really angry that I didn't support her trans identity well she didn't she didn't identify that way so it's like that is a very strange mentality to me and also she could have
if she'd emailed me and said for her to be called they there I would have done it she said she was afraid to do that because I was just such an aggressive person I don't understand that she didn't even try and I don't believe she was cringing in Terror before my incredibly aggressive personality because she would know that if she complained about that to the
administration they would have been all over me so that's a a mentality that I see a lot now that it's not just that they want to be called a different pronoun than has been the norm for a long time it's that somebody like that person will act as if they have no power in the situation and that they're too afraid to to say anything to you or or unable for whatever reason that is
bewildering to me and I encounter that type not just in terms of pronouns but just generally people who don't seem to feel can express themselves and then blame you for it that is very new and that is what I find more disturbing than anything closing question what will you do next just continue to write a novel short stories essays I'm working right
now on an essay and a story great and readers that they want to find out about you they can go to Amazon Barnes & Noble Google your name independent book sellers Mary Gates go substack anything else yeah actually substack is probably it's more labor intensive but that would be a quick way to get to know me picking one of them and reading that Mary Gates skill thank you very much thank
you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app if you like this podcast please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review this helps other listeners find the show on Twitter I'm at Tyler Cowan and the show is at Cowan convos until next time please keep listening and [Music] learning