Lindsay’s arrest on July 24th 2007 for drunk driving was an unwanted punch-line to an already overlong joke. Before my current “glory days” at Forth, I was a cheap entertainment journalist, desperate enough to do a stint at the National Enquirer but contemptuous enough to piss people off and not keep the job for longer than a month. I never DID publish a single word with them, and in hindsight getting paid to sit at a desk in their corner and pretend to look busy was the easiest money I have made so far. Back in those days, I was hungry for dirt, worms and all, and my research into the ’07 Lohan case yielded some shocking revelations. Revelations that a sorry excuse for a rag like the Enquirer could not comprehend.

If the Santa Monica Police Department’s blood-tests of the troubled starlet were true, it would indicate that she was not only above the legal blood/alcohol limit and had traces of cocaine in her system, but that she also shares the same basic DNA of “Periplaneta Americana” …also known as the American cockroach. Such insight suggests genetic tampering for “youth retention” purposes, or perhaps some extraterrestrial origin that we are too afraid to contemplate. Either way, this information spells trouble, as Lindsay’s resilience could render her indestructible to the penal system, tabloid criticism, and worst of all, fire and pitchforks.

“We’ve tried everything,” said an anonymous source working at the undisclosed treatment center Lohan was located in ’07, “Electro-shock therapy, synthetic cerebral injections, even exorcism.”

Exorcism?

“Well, yes, a priest was called in and performed a seven hour purification.”

And the results?

“He packed up his things and shook his head.”

If such reports were true, if she was really locked up in some secret facility in the outskirts of the Utah desert region, and if she was really beyond the helping hands of science and Jesus… the question for 2010 is: what now? At 24 years-old, Lohan has already been to rehab three times, faced two DUI arrests and served approximately 84 minutes in jail. Her recent 90-day sentence is either the poisonous crescendo to a cursed life, or the set-up for a sordid porn to be shot on prison guard’s iPhones — maybe both. How long will this poor fair-skinned creature be left to wallow in such heartbreaking conditions? Would you let your dog suffer this long? Or would you take pity and finally have her put down, the humane way? Here’s a glass of warm milk, Lindsay, good girl Lindsay, drink every last drop Lindsay…

“Just look at her mug-shot,” James Butts, chief of the SMPD told me in a phone interview after her ’07 arrest, “Look at her expression. I’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands of mug-shots in my day, but this one really stands out.”

How so?

“Just look at how her eyes are pleading to us. Her eyes are begging us, please, please world, please believe in me. Don’t give up on me yet. I am a mixed-up little girl and I have a lot of love to give…” Butts cleared his throat and resumed a professional tone, “At least, that’s what I see.”

The jury is out on whether Lohan is, in fact, mortal, or if when she dies she will simply implode and instantly re-appear in some other terrestrial form, like a jellyfish or a cloud. Reincarnation is NOT the prevailing theory at the local church, as His Eminence Roger Cardinal Mahony attested over the phone. As the archbishop of Los Angeles, Mahony speaks for nearly five million members when he says, “Nonsense. This girl is flesh and blood. If we burned her at the stake, she would very much catch fire and not come back.”

Could Lindsay have been sent among us to be punished for all our sins?

“If you are insinuating that this troubled young woman is the Second Coming, I am afraid this interview is over.”

Well, if God’s first and only son was a poor carpenter who partied at weddings and hung out with prostitutes, is it really such a leap in logic that perhaps his only daughter might come in the form of Lindsay Lohan?

“My son, there is no redemptive quality within that girl. If anyone has sent her among us, it was the devil.”

Brittany may have shaved her head and flashed her hot-pocket all over town, and Paris may have released a porn and done her stint at prison, but all of these things seem to pale in comparison to Lohan’s current state of affairs. She has remained in the unflattering limelight long after her peers have all but faded into irrelevance. Perhaps Brittany and Paris were mere test-patterns, perhaps Lindsay is the devil’s TRUE magnum-opus — as the Archbishop would attest — his David or Sistine Chapel of cocaine sluttery. It is true that Lohan is not the first and only celebrity train-wreck to hit rock-bottom. Robert Downey Jr. is no stranger to the Man Downstairs himself, but Downey is removed from Lohan by one slight distinction: he can act, and act well, whereas Double L has freckled cleavage and… that’s about it. Watching the verdict being laid down on her on CNN was like watching an anguished baby seal realize that the club looming over her head is not for providing shade, after all. Her pathetic balling showed signs of some base instinct still kicking around her addled head, a tiny echo of an ember of the little girl who once had a bright future in front of her and has no idea how it all went wrong.

Surely if the actress was a 24 year-old black male, none of this would have happened. She would have been maced, tasered, arrested and thrown behind bars back in ’07 faster than she can do a bump in the bathroom at Hyde. Her privileged stature has gotten her this far, and how much mileage is left in her withered karma is hard to say. It is the opinion of this humble journalist that the collective media perform a “Lohan Blackout” effective immediately. No more reports, articles, pictures or sound-bytes. No updates, interviews, rumors or hearsay. Maybe, just maybe, if we all ignored her she would cease to exist… poof …out of sight, out of mind. The real question remains: how can we expect Lohan to overcome her addictions when WE are incapable of overcoming our own? Can it be that we are all locked into some kind of sick, symbiotic relationship from which there is no escape?

Deep thoughts and heavy questions on a topic that has as much nutritional-value as a worm’s semen. But in 2010 America, worm-semen can be quite the lucrative commodity, and a strung-out 24 year-old girl the perfect target for our sins.

courtesy of Showtime

So Showtime has a little series called “Californication” about a compulsively hedonistic writer who also happens to be a devout family man. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Tom Kapinos created the splendid walking contradiction that is Hank Moody, who is played with mellow charm by David Duchovny in a performance that makes us forget he once chased aliens for a living. Struggling to reignite his earlier success, Hank is constantly torn between settling down with his girlfriend and daughter, or letting his raging id steer him into one sexual collision after another. Currently en route to its fourth season, the series has become one of the hottest on cable and has recently spawned a literary spin-off in the form of Hank’s infamous novel, “God Hates Us All”. That’s right. You can now purchase and read the book that put Hank on the map, with his very name on the cover and a brief bio on the back. And it’s not only a bona fide work of fiction, but a damn good one at that.

Jonathan Grotenstein taken by Marco Mannone

Fans of the raunchy-yet-bittersweet comedic series will be able to decipher some semi-autobiographical back-story on Hank’s youth in New York, but the novel defiantly stands alone as its own narrative, independent of the show. This is thanks exclusively to the novel’s real writer, Jonathan Grotenstein, whom I had the pleasure of sitting down with at a coffee shop in Eagle Rock to discuss the nuts and bolts of his creative process. Jonathan’s story centers around a young, nameless narrator living in New York City in the late 80’s. He is a blue-collar kid with a psychotic ex-girlfriend, an adulterous father, a flirtatious best friend and no real direction in life. Recklessly quitting the food-service industry, he finds himself running pot all over the city for a powerful dealer called The Pontiff. This new vocation affords our narrator the ability to move into the famous Chelsea hotel, and to begin consorting with a colorful cast of characters that shade-in the term “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll”. But his newfound life in the fast-lane comes with its heavy share of heartache and stark, personal revelations.  From one writer to another, our conversation went something like this…

MARCO MANNONE: How did you get the job to write Hank Moody’s infamous novel?

JONATHAN GROTENSTEIN: I got the job because of the relationship I have with the editor on the book. The first book I ever wrote was “Poker: The Real Deal” with Phil Gordon, and the assistant editor was a woman by the name of Cara Bedick. Cara became an editor in her own right, and she was given “God Hates Us All” as sort of her first book that she was going to shepherd through the process. She needed to find someone who could work quickly and cheaply.

MM: How long did you have to write it?

JG: It’s for a division of Simon & Shuster called Simon Spotlight, that generally has really, really tight deadlines. Probably not more than four months (for a nearly 200-page work of fiction).

MM: Were you a fan of the series before you ever got this job?

JG: Yeah, I watched all of the first season, and when I started writing it, the second season was just about to get underway. I liked the show. I have to confess I didn’t love Season One, but as I was writing the book and watching Season Two, which I thought was much stronger, I very much fell in love with the show. Also getting to meet Tom Kapinos, who created the show, and sort of hearing his voice and realizing what he was trying to do with it, helped develop an appreciation for it. But yes, I had seen all of the episodes (at the time) before I was ever approached to write it.

MM: What aspects of the show did you connect with — as a male, as a writer, also living in Los Angeles… any specific aspects you could identify with?

JG: Yeah. I mean, I like to think that one of the reasons Cara thought of me was… Hank and I are similar in certain ways and very different in other ways. I’m not in any way the ladies man that Hank is, or as brilliant as Hank is supposed to be, but I definitely have my angry moments, my darker moments. I didn’t have an old, beat-up Porshe that I was driving around, but I did have an old, beat-up Mercedes convertible that I was driving around. I’m a guy from New York who’s been out in L.A. for a while, and sort of has the same kind of love-hate relationship with the city that he seems to have. I’m also a recovering entertainment industry person. I found that industry to be a lot more bullshit than I could tolerate. I think that helped me relate to where Hank was coming from, as well.

MM: In the series the book’s story is never revealed. How much freedom were you allowed to create it from scratch?

courtesy of Showtime

JG: A lot. An insane amount of freedom. I’m not even sure how much a huge fan of the book Tom Kapinos is. First of all, it’s very hard for him because Hank is his baby, and has a very specific voice, and he thought of the book in a very specific way.  And having someone else write that, I think… He wasn’t going to write it, not in three months or four months. But he had a very definite idea of how he wanted it to be, and the sort of tone it should have. We met once and talked about it on the phone a couple of times and exchanged a bunch of e-mails. Ultimately, I latched onto the idea that Hank was a writer in the 1980’s, the late 80’s in New York City. The book that Tom and I sort of hit on was (Jay McInerney’s) “Bright Lights, Big City”, and he thought that was a book that Hank might have written. There’s another book called “The Fuck-Up” (by Arthur Nersesian) so I went back and read “Bright Lights, Big City” and “The Fuck-Up” and I thought, alright, if Tom thought that Hank would have written those kinds of books, then I’m gonna sort of go in that vein. But you know, I’m not the writer that Tom is, especially when it comes to Hank’s voice, so I was forced to go with things that I knew. And a lot of the book are things that are semi-autobiographical to my life, or people that I’ve met or encountered and I had as much leeway as I wanted. Especially with the first draft. With the second draft after Tom had a chance to read it, we sort of figured out some ways to help what I had written converge with the idea he had for the book all along.

The Doors are like a religion unto themselves. This may sound utterly pretentious, but 40 years after the fact, they remain the unique kind of band one either chooses to believe in or not. For seculars, The Doors were just a weird rock n’ roll band, good for nothing more than an acid trip in the desert… but for believers such as myself, they are a potent and generous source of dark magic – simultaneously contagious and healing. Tom Dicillo’s epic-yet-intimate documentary “When You’re Strange” manages to contradict itself in a wonderful way: it both deconstructs the lore while also adding new depth to it. Exclusively utilizing vintage footage of the band, including never-before-seen film of a bearded Morrison navigating an existential journey through the desert, “WYS” is a truly transcendental experience. A documentary such as this is proof-positive that The Doors might have opened in 1965 on a sunny day in Venice Beach, CA… but they remain open in 2010 for anyone willing to walk through them.

And on a sunny day at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons in April, I was more than willing to Break on Through. As a recovering entertainment journalist, I was accustomed to doing interviews at this hotel, but it seemed far too posh and clichéd a venue to house The Surviving Doors, even if just for a few hours. But there they were, and there is no decisive way to convey the surreal experience of sitting next to your idols, even if they are barely recognizable and utterly mortal as they sit inches away from you.

Because of a still-unresolved dispute that John Densmore (percussionist) has with Ray Manzerek (organist) and Robby Krieger (guitarist), the trio has yet to coexist in the same room for several years. Such was the case when for their 40th anniversary back in 2006, Ray and Robby played without John at the Whisky A Go Go. This was pretty disappointing, but the fact that I was even standing feet away from half The Doors playing on the same stage they got their start on, was a mini-miracle. My then-literary agent was able to get us close to the front of the epic line wrapping around the block by giving away a bag of weed she got from her apartment across the street. My agent using weed to get us into a Doors concert at the Whisky was one of those classic L.A. moments I will not soon forget.

courtesy Rhino Media

Back at the Four Seasons, Ray and Robby interviewed separately from John and the film’s director Tom DiCillo. For the sake of efficiency, I’ve decided to interweave the questions and answers into one continuous dialogue. Ray and Robby strolled into the Burton Suite and joined us journalists like they were arriving late to a party. Robby was shy and barely made eye contact, while Ray was working on a bottle of red wine that he had been apparently lugging from interview to interview, and by this point, it had thoroughly lubricated his already-philosophical nature.

Whoever said Los Angeles is lacking in arts and culture has certainly NOT visited Barnsdall Art Park, and has especially not visited the park on the second Sunday of the month. That’s right, the arts are alive and well here. This I am sure of after Sunday April 11th when I headed over to the art park, being a first timer myself, for a night of vibrant, living art.

Given to Aline Barnsdall in the early nineteen-teens, the property that sits high on a hill in Hollywood had, from its early days, been intended to house a theatrical community with a theatre and living places for actors. Barnsdall, a bit of an eccentric, experimental dramatist, commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to do the trick, but due to lack of funds only three residences were built including the famous Hollyhock House, where Barnsdall lived until she gave the property to the city of Los Angeles in 1927, leaving also specific instructions for arts programming. Since then, Barnsdall’s vision has come to life as a theatre, an art gallery and studios have been built on the 11 acre property. Curator, Michael Miller was kind enough to explain the rich history of the park to me. Nowadays, he says, the gallery is home to only contemporary art from mostly southern Californians that are either emerging or mid-career artists. The exhibits change about every two and a half months, the next one up being the C.O.L.A exhibit which is the City of Los Angeles’ artist grant show in which each C.O.L.A. grant recipient receives $10,000 to create new work. What I take away with me after chatting with Miller is that the art park is a place of artistic expansion and inspiration that is truly dedicated to providing art education to the general public, both young and old alike.

Now you may remember I implied that something special happens at Barnsdall Art Park on the second Sunday of every month. And that something is an event hosted by spoken word artist Sally Shore and The New Short Fiction Series. I briefly met Shore when I covered one of her offsite events back in December, but more recently I was able to interview her and get some great feedback and insight into her series.

1) Can you give Forth readers who are unfamiliar with The New Short Fiction Series an overview of what it is?

The New Short Fiction Series is L.A.’s longest running spoken words series, sponsored in part by Barnes & Noble, and takes place every second Sunday of the month at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park in cooperation with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Each performance presents new works of short fiction by that month’s featured West Coast writer. The work is performed by a rotating guest cast of incredibly talented working L.A. actors. It’s a spoken word series,…not a reading, literary performance. Combined with the Gallery’s exhibitions, its now a true multi-media experience. Our Feb. 14 program incorporated Indian classical dance in one piece, the Mar. 14 program has a piece in which the actor will be singing opera. I like to mix it up whenever the story calls for it. We’ve been directly responsible for placing 6 newly released books on the Los Angeles Times’ bestseller list and many of the unpublished collections have gone to publication following presentation in our series.

2) When did you first start the series and what inspired you to begin?

The series began in 1995 when I was disappointed with the L.A. theater scene. I really wanted to be part of something that was well written, well acted and left the audience glad they came. I approached Kimberley Heinrichs, a playwright I had worked with before, to see if she had anything new, but all she had was short stories. After reading Kimberley’s stories, it hit me that they could be performed in their own right, and we presented 2 consecutive evenings at The Actors Workout Studio in North Hollywood, a tiny 30 seat space. We sold out both nights (audience had to sit behind the actor onstage), and on the second night, Los Angeles Magazine had a writer doing a piece called “So Ho, No Ho”. We got a couple of great paragraphs in the article and word spread. By 1996, we were given a monthly berth as part of the LA The Bookstore’s alternative performance line up, and we’ve been going strong ever since.

3) As producer of the series, how do you go about finding authors/works of fiction? Are there any particular qualities you look for in the works you choose to perform?

Submissions come to me in many ways. Publishers contact me if they have a new story collection release by a West Coast writer they’d like us to launch, previously featured authors often recommend students and colleagues, and authors find me either on line or after attending a performance. I also keep my eyes peeled. I try to go to as many local readings that feature new authors as I can. Sometimes I see a story published on line, in a journal or discussed in a write up somewhere and I’ll hunt the author down. If Book Expo America is on the West Coast, I always attend.

My criteria is very subjective. I read the submitted collection and, essentially, I look for a voice. I’m not particularly attached to genre or style, the writing just has to grab me in some fashion. When that little bell goes off while I’m reading, I can picture the stories being performed in our format.

4) Can you take us through the process of how the works of fiction go from page to stage, so to speak? Are there rehearsals or table work? Also, are the authors usually included in this process or are they seeing their works performed for the first time at the actual event?

For the stand alone evenings, I pick at least 4 stories from the submitted collection and cast them according to type call for in story. If the stories are very short, we’ll present more than 4. For our annual Emerging Voices Group Show, we present one story per featured writer.

All pieces are table rehearsed once or twice with myself and the actor (or a co-director who works with me on my performance). I try to keep each story performance no longer than 20 minutes long in rehearsal (its my experience that anything longer, the audience leaves their bodies and stops listening!). If a story requires excerpting, I work with the writer to craft an excerpt that best combines the writer’s intent and what the actor brings to the performance. We have a run through with the full cast and the writer present, which allows the writer to experience our format before an audience is present. Since most of the writers are strictly literary writers (not playwrights/screenwriters), it often proves a very different experience for them to see their stories presented in this format. The run through also allows the cast and the author to ask questions, hammer out details, etc. before the public performance.

5) What about Barnsdall Park makes it the perfect new location for the series?

I love Barnsdall! I love performing in the Gallery which expands our show with a mixed-media element. Its really exciting to “weave” our performances into the changing exhibits at the Gallery. Barnsdall is centrally located (and Metro Rail accessible) and is a very busy place art/performance wise – art classes, Shakespeare in the park and outdoor concerts in summer, music/dance performances at the 300+ seat Barnsdall Gallery Theater, and even the public who come to picnic/walk their dogs. Its’ all very happening. The Gallery curators and staff truly embrace all forms of art/performance and provide a very generous home for all artists.

5) Moving forward in the future, what are your hopes, goals, or expectations for the series? Any upcoming events you can share as a preview with our readers?

I’m thrilled with our 2010/14th season schedule (attached). It reflects the breadth and quality of literary voices in L.A. and on the West Coast. We have two wonderful book launches on the schedule.

As to the future, most immediately I’m enjoying reading submissions for 2011. We’d like to reinstate our online clips/presentations on our YouTube channel and are looking into live streaming of our shows. Mostly, I look forward to more and more people joining us to discover the many, wonderful writers and actors I’ve had the honor of presenting these past 14 years. I’m a proud California native and am adamant that we have the best writing and acting talent here in our own backyard!

Shore’s event on the evening of Sunday April 11th presented four short stories from Robert Morgan Fisher’s “Cabaret Nation.” The four stories, some of them excerpted, were performed by actors Edwin Craig, Richard Tanner, Sally Shore and Matt Ferrucci respectively. The stories range in plots from a hobo dying of cancer who looks back on his life as a once circus performer; A regular, forty-something year old Joe who discovers his idol of a folk musician is actually a passionless grump; A young girl whose curiosity leads her to learn of her father’s gruesome war stories; And a struggling actor in LA who learns a meaningful lesson about show business through his director, writer friend. While the subject-lines may seem a bit heavy, Fisher expresses them through characters whose endearing honesty in even somewhat embarrassing situations leave readers or listeners in this case, in stitches more often than not.

I sense a theme linking the stories and find that I am correct when I get to speak with Fisher at intermission. Having been trained as a screenwriter, Fisher uses the components for writing screenplays and adapts them to short stories. He is inspired by several things, sometimes the news, sometimes personal life, but always he starts first with a theme that is the basis for each story he writes for a particular collection. In “Cabaret Nation” the author gets specific with his theme, revealing it to me as this: “all peripheral performers enforce a sacred contract with the world.” I suppose the beauty of fiction is that each reader can interpret underlying themes differently and while I think I understand what Fisher is saying, what I mostly take away from the four readings is the importance of passion and how it is truly a necessity for maintaining and carrying out a meaningful existence.

Perhaps each person in the sold out audience of Sunday’s performance of Fisher’s work by The New Short Fiction Series will be touched in different ways. In any case, no one I’m sure will shortly forget these stories and that is due to not only Fisher’s talented writing, but the cast and crew’s flawless presentation of the texts. Catch a different author and surely a different theme next month when the series presents the work of Martha Ronk.

—Fool’s Errand, Louis Bayard

Although novelist Louis Bayard undoubtedly deserves a much longer introduction, all you need to know is that he’s as hilarious over the phone as he is in print. Enjoy.

Julia Ingalls: You’ve written five novels. Fool’s Errand was about the quest for love, Endangered Species was about the quest for family, whereas the novels Mr. Timothy, The Pale Blue Eye, and The Black Tower seem to be about the quest for identity.

Louis Bayard: Oh, wow! That sounds good.

JI: We’ll put it together as a blurb, I guess. But do you agree with that? What made you want to write in the past?

LB: You’re talking about binding all this together, that implies that I put much forethought into this than I really did. What happened is that I’ve written these two books. They were put out by a small press, and they sold decently for a small press book, but I got an itch for a larger audience. I had this particular idea about Tiny Tim, of all people. I’m not even sure where it came from. I was talking to my agent, and I mentioned it, and he got intrigued by it. This historical thing grew out of writing about Tiny Tim.
I didn’t set out to be a historical novelist. I’d never written that way before. I’d never written a thriller before. It was really a self-education to put that together. That’s the logistics of how that happened. Because the book did well enough, the publishing industry being what it is, they kind of want you to do more of the same thing. The next book was about a real-life French detective who inspired Poe [François Vidocq]. They’ve all been linked that way. There’s at least some tangential link. Maybe the second and third book, not so much. But I can see where identity plays a part, and where family plays a part in a lot of these books. Mr. Timothy is the creation of an alternative family. The Black Tower is about trying to reconnect with his parents after their deaths. I can see all of these things resonating.

JI: The Black Tower specifically seems to be written at a much more cinematic clip. The chapters come at you much faster. Was that intentional?

LB: Cinematic is probably a good word for it. I definitely wanted to keep that moving. I was just remembering a key thing in the writing of that book for me—I usually just write the whole way through, and then read it all whole way through, but because I was going on vacation and I didn’t want to bring my laptop—see, these are the way things happen, like these silly little things—so I just printed out what I had. I was astonished by how much fat there was in the book. There was a lot of larding—most of it, research. One the traps of being a historical novelist is you do a lot of research usually, and then you want to shoe-horn it in there wherever you can to reassure people that you’ve been working really hard, and you deserve a gold star for all your hard work, and then you go back and read it with an unbiased eye, and think, “I really don’t need that. Readers don’t really need to know that.” I wound up scissoring away a lot of that stuff, and the result was so lean that it forced the whole book in that direction. I liked that it was moving so rapidly.

JI: It really does accentuate scenes. For example, the scene in the morgue at the beginning at the book with the piano forte in the next room, is incredibly realized. It’s fun to read because you’re there, you know.

LB: Good. That came out of research, which is where a lot of great ideas come from. I read something about the morgue and how the morgue-keeper lived in the same building, and his family was next door, that was inspired by the reality of it. I was fascinated by that juxtaposition.

JI: It comes across really well.

LB: Good!

JI: To give you your gold star for all your research.

LB: [Laughs.]

JI: You got a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern. You must have always wanted to be a writer from when you were growing up. Why did you choose journalism as opposed to trying to write fiction directly?

LB: I should say my college senior year thesis was a book of short stories. If somebody had rushed a printed collection and turned me into the next David Leavitt—I’m trying to figure out who was the ideal at the time—um, I would have gone that way, but nobody was rushing to publish these, so I liked the idea of journalism because it I thought it get me out in the world and introduce me to some more reality than I had experienced at that time in my life. Since I had anticipated going into journalism, I realized I would need to get some clips. I thought a master’s program would be the best way to go about doing that. I left there fully convinced that I was going to become a newspaper reporter. But I couldn’t get a self-respecting newspaper to hire me. So I became a flack in Washington and stayed on there in that capacity for various people and organizations. And eventually became a freelancer, which is what I’ve been since ’95.

JI: Wow. Congratulations on that.

LB: I’ve served a lot of masters. A lot of the work I’ve done is not by-lined. I write junk mail, I write newsletters, I’ve paid the bills in a lot of different ways.

JI: Is that difficult to switch from one style of writing to another? How do you make sure that your writing remains what you want it to be when you do a lot of commercial work and then you get back to fiction?

LB: I do the fiction work the first thing in the day. I’m at my freshest. If you wait longer in the day, things always come up. It’s like those people who put off exercise until 4’o’clock, something happens, the phone rings. I write as long as I can, which some days is all day, and some days it’s just an hour, but I try to get at least an hour a day. The discipline comes in stopping and going on to the other stuff that is frankly less interesting but is more immediately remunerative. I’ve developed a pretty good balance over the years. I sit down and do it. Any professional writer just kind of has to do it. That’s how bills get paid. You don’t have time to futz around. But we all have our own procrastination tools.

JI: It seems like you consistently write really hilarious, wonderful columns. I’m thinking specifically of the work you do for Salon.com. Specifically, there’s an essay you wrote called “Attention: All You Memoir Fabulists.” My favorite example is Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ where you say, ‘Reviewers have flagged the following line: Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.’ And you say, ‘We should change the second line to ‘Sorry.’”

LB: That article was prompted by an example of a memoirist who had been fabricating her story. People saw it as a fabrication, but really, the issues we think are uniquely modern have an ancient providence. And the whole question of telling the truth about one’s life lies outside of time, because we all tell fictions about ourselves and our lives, whether we’re conscious of it or not. We’re all fictionalizing. It’s a vexed area, trying to decide if something is fiction or non-fiction and where the line is.

JI: Would you consider doing a novel in a slightly more contemporary historical period like the 1960’s or the 1980’s?

LB: I would love to. I’m not wedded to horses and carriages by any means. The book I’m working on now, half the story is told in the modern day. It’s really quite refreshing not to have to ask myself, ‘What the hell would they be wearing?’ I have this basic frame of reference. On the other hand, I found to my surprise I had to do almost as much research about modern day stuff because there is only so much in the world I experience on a daily basis. It’s taken a lot more work on the front end than I thought it would.

JI: Is the book about the Elizabethan “School of Night?”

LB: Yes.

JI: And the contemporary period that you’re working in, is that literally modern day?

LB: It’s literally modern day. It’s like, now. And it’s Washington, D.C, where I live. In a way, I’m revisiting some of the terrain of my first two books. And using a little more comedy as well. Or trying to, anyway. It’s interesting; I’m right in the middle of it, and I’m conscious that I’m using different registers. The historical tale is set in 1603 England and has a more tragic register. The modern day is more of a caper, has more of an antic quality. I’ll be interested to see when I do the critical stuff of re-reading the manuscript, whether those different registers come together or clang against each other.

JI: How much time do you allow yourself to edit your work after you write it?

LB: Part of it is that when I have it to where I want it, I send it to my editor and she goes through it pretty diligently. I make response to her edits. The Pale Blue Eye was substantially re-written between the first and second drafts because of what my editor rightly suggested about structure and shape of the story, things like that. But I don’t know. I give myself a few weeks to go through it and hack away at it. Usually, it’s hacking away. Most writers are like that. We write more than we need to. There’s a great quote by Roger Ebert, in an obituary for Paul Newman. I think they quoted Roger Ebert saying, “He spent the first half of his career figuring what to put into his acting, and the last half deciding what to take out again.” I think that’s true. As you get older, you realize it’s much more of a taking out. You know the stuff, you know you don’t need as much. That’s the mistake I see in aspiring young writers. They blast you with words. They want their voices to be heard. It’s hard to convince them they could be heard much better if they just pare away a lot of that stuff.

JI: It seems it also has to do with structuring it so you don’t get lost in tangents—which, I suppose, is the same as cutting it down.

LB: Sometimes it is a plot fix. I honestly think plot is relatively easy to fix, or it can be. The stuff that can’t be fixed is if the voice is insecure. For that reason, I always take the longest time with the first chapter. The current book, I spent several weeks on the first chapter, because I wasn’t happy with the voice, and who the narrator was, and it took me a while to get fine with it. Once you get that in place, it goes much faster. There’s no substitute for a sure, confident voice. Plot–you can lift things up, move things around. In The Pale Blue Eye, I actually removed an entire character. Not a main character, but a secondary character. She served no plot or function, she was there really just to entertain me. And that was harder in a way than killing off a character, to remove a character entirely. It requires a lot of juggling. In the end it was worth doing.

JI: What do you think is your ultimate ambition—well, that’s kind of a strange question. Let me put it a different way.

LB: [Laughs.]

JI: Do you feel accomplished? Are you looking to write ‘The Perfect Novel’?

LB: I don’t know. I think I may have given up on writing the next “Great Gatsby.” I think that falls to one or two people in a generation. I like writing in genre, I like the idea of writing entertainments. I have no belief that my work will necessarily outlive me. But I think you can write some thoughtful things in the context of genre. Some of my favorite writers have been genre writers. Raymond Chandler, Ruth Randall, Patricia Highsmith, in the same way that Dostoevsky did, but they do it in the context of a particular entertainment form. The trends I like in literature today is that a lot of those genre lines are being blurred, and you’re seeing people like Michael Chabon writing detective novels.

JI: For a while there, it seemed that literary fiction was at an incredible remove from plot or narrative based fiction. I think it’s good to weave them back together. I think either extreme becomes dull, but if you somehow interweave them.

LB: I agree. I wonder how much of that had to do with academia. For a while, in parts of academia, the whole idea of a story was cast in doubt, the idea that fiction should tell a coherent story. I was rather frustrated with the idea that we should always remind our readers that this is fiction. I love the illusion of being swept up into a story, and not having the writer constantly nudge me and say, “This is just fiction you’re reading.” Well, I know that.

JI: Do you pick the cover art on your novels?

LB: I get to weigh-in. I suppose if I ever chose to exert it, I would have veto. I try to be open-minded about it, because I recognize that I don’t always know what works in the marketplace. If I truly hated a cover, it wouldn’t fly. It becomes more of a collaboration between me and my editor and my agent. I feel lucky to have a team helping with this stuff. Authors are frequently not good at anything but writing. We’re not good self-promoters or marketers, and certainly not visual artists.

JI: Why do you think that real-life 18th century French detective Francois Vidocq [a principal character in The Black Tower] is no longer as well known as his fictional counterpart Sherlock Holmes?

LB: That’s a question I asked myself. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to make him better known in America. He was back in the 19th century—his memoirs were best-sellers on both sides of the Atlantic—he was well-known enough that Poe and Melville and Dickens could allude to him, and readers would know who he was it. I’m not quite sure what happened to him. I’m not sure why he ended up in the dustbin of history. I sometimes wonder If it’s the funny spelling—the ocq at the end of the name—people don’t know how to pronounce that. Holmes, of course, is such an easy thing to spell.

JI: That’s sad, but you’re probably dead-on. I have to admit my ignorance: I had not heard of Vidocq before I read The Black Tower.

LB: I hadn’t either, until I read the Murders in the Rue Morgue. That was the first time I saw his name in print. Because the character Dupin was immediately at pains to elevate himself above Vidocq’s example. It’s like, who is this guy? It’s a slaying of the father impulse, saying ‘I’m better than this guy.’ Kind of like Holmes would later do with Dupin. There’s this whole history in detective fiction of the next generation of detective rising from the ashes of the previous one.

JI: Who is the 21st century’s detective? Who embodies that?

LB: Among the writers currently out there? I think the model is still Chandler and Hammet. I’m not sure we’ve had our 21st century guy yet.

JI: Do you think the prevalence of crime drama on television could be the template?

LB: Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the forensic scientists. All the CSI guys. The idea that we can solve crimes by putting attractive people in laboratories.

JI: Don’t forget the cool music.

LB: Yeah, the cool music. And these very dramatic lighting effects! Which I’m thinking in any laboratory would be like, “I can’t see.” These like, Chiaroscuro compositions. “Can anybody see through their microscope? I can barely see you.”

Louis Bayard’s new novel is The School of Night.