“You’re no savage, right?” That’s what you asked me. But you know as well as I do that we’re all savages in due course. Our love gets hammered into something sharp and we stab the people around us, for the unpardonable crime of refusing to abandon us.

Steve Almond from Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions

I wanted Normal and I was willing to accept the bargain. First, you hand over some basics-overwhelming joy, existential angst, a giving-in to desire, etc. And then you promise to withstand talking idly about the weather, to encourage cliche, to uphold the virtues of average. You hand over the need to be understood and, in return, you get a bar of Normal soap. And you can wash in it and be daily reborn to a safe world of modest, enduring love or, at least, mild, well-mannered bonding.

- Julianna Baggot from Which Brings Me to You

I thought about the little girl I’d seen in the window, how she had offered up her performance to me. It was what children did, naturally - they drew love from the world. And they did so not because they were inherently good and pure, or any of that other Shirley Temple garbage. But just the opposite: because they knew how much the world could hurt them, at any time, how quickly the fates could turn, and this made them desperate to charm.

An Interview with The Days of Yore (read the whole thing).

And you have two kids now. Kids are shit magnets.

[Nodding.] Oh my god. People give you shit. Shit just comes into your life. There’s this endless stream—preschool shit, and Target shit, and it’s plastic and awful and life is too short.

I guess I look back romantically on those days when I was alone. I put crazy stuff up on the wall; there was no design scheme, no fancy furniture. I bought my clothes from thrift stores. I still do that. But it’s an ongoing moral battle: we’ve reached this place where we must get nice stationery to write thank you notes to the people who come to our party, because they wrote us thank-yous when we went to their party. And I’m like, really? We’re them? We’re that?

You mentioned that you teach, and that makes me think of the time you publicly resigned from your adjunct position at Boston College in 2006 because they invited in Condoleezza Rice as their commencement speaker. You’ve written about your admiration for Vonnegut; he was very vocal about moral issues and politics. I was going to ask whether you think writers have an obligation to address political or societal problems, but what I really want to ask is: how do we fix it?

I don’t know. Americans have to make a decision that convenience is not going to be their godhead. Until they are willing to see what the dividends of inconvenience might be—spiritually, emotionally and intellectually—I think we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Everything’s become convenient, even war. If we’re sending young people into terrible, violent situations, how about everybody has to sacrifice? How about there’s a war tax, and everybody has to pay five percent of whatever they’re making to pay for that war? How quickly do you think people would say, “Fuck that, let’s not have that war. Let’s find out whether that war is really crucial.” How about if you want to support the troops, then the price of that bumper sticker is two percent of your annual income, or five percent on purchases you make in the retail outlets closest to your home? That would make it clear: “If I want to have a war, I have to support the war. I can’t just privatize it and send off one percent of the population and wave a flag when they come back all fucked up.”

Public transportation should be required. There should be a luxury tax on the use of private vehicles. You can have them, it’s capitalism, nobody’s trying to take them away. But you’re going to have to pay more for them. And meat. If meat cost what it actually costs, we would use less meat. My wife and I get our meat through a CSA [Community Supported Agriculture], so it actually does. And corn syrup, all this stuff is subsidized, and it all comes down to us wanting convenience.

That’s what Facebook and other social media are about, too—making the gathering and disbursement of little ego moments very convenient. It’s so deeply threaded into the way we’re moving through the world that I don’t know how it gets undone. Part of me thinks we’ll have to reach the end of peak oil, and then we’ll have to make collective decisions. Since we don’t seem capable of trusting that scientists are right, the shit’s going to have to hit the fan.

I could say that I think people should read more and engage with acts of imagination, but it would be naïve to suppose that that’s going to bring us into harmony. The world is way out of balance, and the only way it starts to change is if people make an agreement to abandon a need for convenience.

[Smiling up at a customer browsing a nearby shelf of books.] Howdy.

So what do you see as the role of the writer or the artist in that? Does having a megaphone of some kind mean having a duty to speak out about these things?

Everybody decides for themselves. I’m outspoken about my distress, but the only duty that writers and artists have is to do their thing, and to be good to the people closest to them. That’s your central duty as a human, and it’s where we mostly fail— in being nice to the people right around us, our family and close friends.

A writer doesn’t have to speak out for this or that moral agenda—their art does that. I mean, say I read Sam Lipsyte’s story in The New Yorker. I recognize the kind of person he’s writing about, and there’s this astonishing, moving sense of an entitled person who’s damaged in many ways and stuck, and it’s heartbreaking. I read it, and I feel more than I did before. That’s the artist’s only real responsibility.

- Steve Almond 

“Or consider what Hughes does with a visit by our heroes to the Art Institute of Chicago. Backed by a soft, symphonic score, he offers us lengthy shots of the most beautiful paintings in the world: Hoppers, Modiglianis, Pollocks. There is no ulterior plot motive; he is simply celebrating the majesty of the work. We see Cameron, Ferris, and his dishy girlfriend Sloane stand before a trio of Picassos, transfixed.

As the music crescendoes, we see Cameron standing before Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. We cut to a shot of Ferris and Sloane, the happy couple, necking in the blue light of a stained-glass window, then back to Cameron, alone, staring at the Seurat. Another one of these magical things happens: the camera begins zooming in on the little girl in white at the center of the canvas. We cut back to Cameron, closer now. Then back to the little girl. We see his growing anguish as he realizes that her mouth is wide open, that, in fact, she is wailing.

Okay, good enough: Cameron recognizes himself in the figure of this little girl whose mother is holding her hand but making no effort to comfort her. Got it.

But then Hughes takes us even deeper. He gives us an extreme close-up of Cameron’s eyes, then cuts back to the canvas, to the girl’s face, then to her mouth, then to the specks of paint that make up her mouth, until we can no longer resolve those specks into an image; they are just splotches of color on coarse fabric. This is the true nature of Cameron’s struggle: his anxieties have obliterated his sense of identity.”