True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 331: Grief Is A Witch-Hag (Part 2)
Aired: 2023-11-06
Duration: 01:30:35


=== Part Two: William's Dramatic Pause (10:17) ===

[00:00:00]  We're back.
[00:00:01]  Hello, everyone.
[00:00:03]  I'm Liz.
[00:00:04]  My name is Brace.
[00:00:06]  And we are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:00:09]  And welcome to Tatruanon.
[00:00:12]  Hello.
[00:00:13]  Hello.
[00:00:14]  Interesting, interesting delay on that one.
[00:00:17]  Why?
[00:00:18]  I like a dramatic pause, communicate.
[00:00:21]  You do give it a little dramatic pause.
[00:00:22]  It's important.
[00:00:23]  Will she say it?
[00:00:24]  Won't she say it?
[00:00:25]  You got to have rhythm, baby.
[00:00:27]  Welcome to part two of our interview with William T. Vollman.
[00:00:31]  Yes, you made it this far.
[00:00:33]  And if you didn't make it this far and you're like, what do you mean part two?
[00:00:36]  Guess what?
[00:00:36]  There's a part one, dummy.
[00:00:38]  Go back.
[00:00:39]  Yeah, I cannot stress this enough.
[00:00:41]  You should listen to part one before you listen to this.
[00:00:46]  Yes.
[00:00:47]  There is just, I've got nothing more to say on the subject.
[00:00:51]  Listen to part one and read the essay that we linked there, which we'll also link here.
[00:00:54]  But listen to part one first.
[00:00:56]  It's a, it's a, the conversation.
[00:00:58]  Listen, we're just now, it's, it would be a three and a half hour episode otherwise.
[00:01:02]  So we're releasing it in two parts.
[00:01:03]  It makes sense.
[00:01:04]  You were on soft, cushiony chairs for many hours, drinking two types of whiskey, talking with William T. Voman.
[00:01:14]  You got to listen to part one.
[00:01:15]  You're not going to understand part two.
[00:01:16]  By the point in the interview that we start from here, Liz is thoroughly wasted.
[00:01:21]  No, I'm not thoroughly wasted.
[00:01:23]  She only had the first type of whiskey at this point.
[00:01:26]  She is not doing that.
[00:01:29]  She was doing what?
[00:01:30]  I'm not even doing anything.
[00:01:31]  You just tried to do, you were just doing the like wavy wiggle.
[00:01:35]  I'm doing because I'm, I'm, I have whatever disease makes you do that, which you're now making me reveal to everything.
[00:01:41]  No, I don't.
[00:01:42]  Young Chomsky is saying I don't.
[00:01:43]  I don't know which disease makes you do that.
[00:01:45]  So if it's a really cool thing.
[00:01:46]  Long COVID.
[00:01:47]  Okay.
[00:01:47]  I'm sorry for whatever one.
[00:01:48]  COVID people.
[00:01:50]  Or no, it was vaccine people.
[00:01:53]  Vaccine.
[00:01:54]  Wells.
[00:01:54]  The vaccine.
[00:01:55]  I'm trying to think of who was faking what.
[00:01:57]  It's the vaccine that they're all like shaking in the bed.
[00:02:00]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:01]  Are they still doing that?
[00:02:02]  They perished, like most people who took it.
[00:02:06]  It's just, they're all gone.
[00:02:08]  That was millions.
[00:02:11]  So at this point, there is a fourth person, fifth person in the room.
[00:02:18]  Yeah, fifth.
[00:02:18]  Fifth person.
[00:02:19]  Yeah.
[00:02:20]  Which is an attorney named Mark Maron.
[00:02:24]  Now, I want to just say because we played it cool, obviously, in the studio, in Bullman's studio.
[00:02:36]  But when he kept saying that Mark Marin was coming by, we were all very confused.
[00:02:41]  I was like, Mark Marin?
[00:02:42]  Not, you know, obviously also because I had had some whiskey.
[00:02:46]  So I was even more confused.
[00:02:48]  Liz is like, Mark Marin?
[00:02:50]  I was like, what the fuck?
[00:02:54]  Which is crazy because I guess in Mark Marin is always one of the guy who asks, Who's your guys?
[00:03:00]  No, that's Bill Simmons.
[00:03:02]  Okay.
[00:03:03]  Well, if Bill Simmons, I mean, I would have to answer, William C. Bowman is one of my guys.
[00:03:07]  Of a kind.
[00:03:08]  Well, it was mercifully not Mark Maron, the comedian podcaster, because that would not do to show us up on our own show.
[00:03:17]  It was an attorney who was an incredible character.
[00:03:22]  Incredible character.
[00:03:24]  Fantastic tie.
[00:03:26]  Oh my God.
[00:03:28]  Great.
[00:03:28]  The whole look.
[00:03:29]  His whole look was great.
[00:03:31]  He was like something out of a movie.
[00:03:32]  He was.
[00:03:33]  And his voice sounds like one.
[00:03:36]  He sounds like a very calm lawyer that would have appeared in the Ocean's 11 universe somehow.
[00:03:42]  Yeah.
[00:03:42]  Very neat, sort of like slightly almost buzzed.
[00:03:45]  Not buzz, actually.
[00:03:46]  It was just very short, but like, you know, white hair, mustache.
[00:03:53]  The tie was like a silk 1940s wide tie.
[00:03:56]  It was like hand-painted, just gorgeous.
[00:03:58]  Absolutely gorgeous.
[00:03:59]  Yeah.
[00:04:00]  He had Joe Biden socks on.
[00:04:02]  He was 80 years old.
[00:04:04]  And he really looked young, very tanned, very relaxed.
[00:04:10]  William, William Volman had met him over, I believe there was, I believe, I think it's mentioned maybe in the episode a little bit, but there was a woman who was living in Volman's lot who was getting kind of, well, she was camping there, but she was getting evicted by the county.
[00:04:25]  And he stepped in and helped.
[00:04:27]  He's a homeless, mostly, I believe, deals with homeless people, but a human rights lawyer in Sacramento who I knew about one of the cases he dealt with because it's the famous case of Nevada sending people from mental hospitals on buses to other states.
[00:04:43]  But I think it was a big deal when it happened.
[00:04:49]  But I believe William William Volman kind of just wanted him to come and maybe add some color, talk about homelessness a little bit.
[00:04:55]  I think he also just wanted to hang out with him.
[00:04:57]  It seemed like they hung out a lot.
[00:04:58]  Yeah.
[00:04:59]  He helped himself right to the whiskey.
[00:05:01]  Yeah.
[00:05:01]  He was.
[00:05:01]  He knew where it was.
[00:05:02]  He knew where it was.
[00:05:03]  He was, yeah, it was fantastic.
[00:05:05]  It was cool.
[00:05:06]  I mean, so this is about what, an hour and some change into our conversation.
[00:05:09]  This, this other guy shows up and we're just rolling with the punches.
[00:05:13]  He leaves at some point too.
[00:05:16]  We keep on rolling.
[00:05:17]  We keep on rolling.
[00:05:18]  But yeah, this is, this is, I don't know, what else?
[00:05:22]  What else happened?
[00:05:22]  Do we have anything more framing to do here?
[00:05:24]  I don't know.
[00:05:25]  We had a great time.
[00:05:26]  We had a great time.
[00:05:27]  Yeah.
[00:05:27]  And he was, again, once again, I mean, he was, you know, they're like, never meet your heroes.
[00:05:32]  But I'm like, I don't, I don't really know about his character or anything.
[00:05:35]  I just like his books.
[00:05:36]  But you know what?
[00:05:36]  The guy was a fucking mensch.
[00:05:38]  He was very, very sweet.
[00:05:40]  He's very sweet.
[00:05:43]  Very, very sweet.
[00:05:44]  I had to send him a postcard.
[00:05:45]  We do talk about it in this one, I think.
[00:05:49]  But in 2013, he wrote a book called Book of Dolores.
[00:05:54]  He, you know, he is, he's, he's, he's written about transgender people for a really long time.
[00:05:58]  And I think for a period, he, to, to know more about the experience, he decided to live as a transgender person.
[00:06:06]  Uh, we talk about that a little bit.
[00:06:09]  We talk about drugs a lot.
[00:06:12]  Uh, we talk about, we talk about all kinds of shit.
[00:06:16]  Um, but that's if the Dolores that I believe is referenced in this episode would be a reference to that.
[00:06:21]  Um, yeah, I want to lead us into this with reading my favorite Volman passage I think that I have.
[00:06:28]  That's all right with you guys.
[00:06:29]  I'll probably stumble over my words a little bit because it's a little long and it's kind of the well, it's not exactly written in the most normal grammar.
[00:06:39]  So, this is from Horrors for Gloria, which is my favorite book that he's written.
[00:06:44]  Uh, and let me tell you this.
[00:06:45]  When I read this passage, it's just about, it knocked my goddamn socks off.
[00:06:49]  It comes kind of early in the book.
[00:06:51]  Um, and it's a short book.
[00:06:52]  It's my favorite book of his.
[00:06:53]  I mean, if it's, it's, it's fantastic, uh, really in every single way.
[00:07:00]  I mean, I don't have the words to describe it, really.
[00:07:02]  Uh, but this passage in particular really stuck out with me, uh, or to me, rather.
[00:07:09]  So, it goes, when everything, everything about life makes you want to grin, and it just gets sunnier and funnier until after a while you can only see the teeth in the smiles, and then you feel, well, not on edge exactly, for the world has no edge, but as if you have always been over the edge, and the smiling and laughing is a sort of spastic reflex like crying or retching.
[00:07:29]  Really, it's all the same.
[00:07:30]  When you drink red wine in a cup and try to categorize the geometry of the gleam patterns you see on the liquid surface, and you may find, my friends, that you can almost do it.
[00:07:40]  You agree with yourself upon the existence of a light shape like the outline of a hemisphere drawn in concave at the equator, but another sip and it changes to a gleam ring all around the rim of the wine circle.
[00:07:52]  And another, and it is reddish-black everywhere with the unsteady image of your face in it, your skin redder and your mouth blacker than the wine.
[00:08:00]  And another, and you see white specks swimming in the cup.
[00:08:03]  And they're not reflections at all, but bits of grease or rice or cereal, or maybe cheek cells that got washed out of your mouth.
[00:08:10]  The age-old question.
[00:08:11]  Is the imperfection, the filth, in you or in the glass?
[00:08:15]  But then your attention is diverted forever By the ugly purple stain around the edge of the cup where your lips have been.
[00:08:21]  When everything is so confusing that you can never be sure whether or not you're whore as a woman until she pulls her underpants down, when nothing is clear and whore chasing is a merry-go-round of death.
[00:08:32]  If you don't catch a disease that will kill you, why?
[00:08:34]  You will go around again, not because you want to die, but because until you do, everything remains unclear.
[00:08:40]  When you get drunken crushes on women whose drunken mothers used to try to stab them, when the names of streets are like Nabokov's wearisome cleverness, when only the pretty shapes of women have integrity, and when you close your eyes, still see them leaning and crossing their legs and milking their tits at you, then you may on occasion, like Jimmy, find yourself looking down a long black block down the tunnels of infinity to a street lamp, a corner, and a woman's waiting silhouette.
[00:09:04]  Or else, like Jimmy, you may have another drink.
[00:09:12]  All right.
[00:09:12]  So without further ado, here's the second part of our interview with William T. Volman.
[00:09:19]  The best
[00:09:49]  way to smoke crack.
[00:09:51]  That's right.
[00:09:51]  And what is that?
[00:09:52]  I was hoping you could tell me.
[00:09:54]  Well, actually, I was going to ask you.
[00:09:56]  I don't know.
[00:09:56]  You guys would know, not me.
[00:09:58]  That's right.
[00:09:59]  Well, what is the best way to smoke crack?
[00:10:02]  Well, you know, of course, I've never done anything illegal and I'm also a virgin.
[00:10:09]  But if I had to guess, I would say the best way would be to stop after the first hit of the night and enjoy it.

=== Odessa's Catacomb Secrets (16:17) ===

[00:10:18]  The second one's never going to be as good.
[00:10:21]  I will say, with crack, it's one of the few things that I've tried in life that I'm like, I get it now.
[00:10:25]  Because you see a crackhead and you walk around when you're young and you're like, how could you so slavishly devote yourself to something that seems so stupid?
[00:10:34]  I mean, there's a name for crackhead.
[00:10:36]  It doesn't, you know, it's, and then you try and you're like, I get it.
[00:10:39]  That's right.
[00:10:40]  Yeah.
[00:10:40]  Yeah.
[00:10:41]  Well, it builds empathy, I think, to try it once.
[00:10:44]  Not that our listeners should, but I think so, yeah.
[00:10:47]  And it definitely builds empathy to be addicted to the other kind of crack, which I am.
[00:10:53]  Ah, gotcha.
[00:10:53]  Yeah.
[00:10:55]  It all works out.
[00:10:56]  Yeah.
[00:10:58]  But yeah, Mark, I got to see him working on this horrible patient dumping case in Nevada.
[00:11:10]  And it ended up being part of a chapter of this novel, which deals with homelessness.
[00:11:17]  These people were just taken by the facility and given one-way greyhound tickets with just a little bit of medication and not even any water.
[00:11:29]  And Mark litigated it and he hunted the plaintiffs down and won and then they keep slashing away.
[00:11:40]  But he never gets discouraged.
[00:11:42]  1,500 people were bussed out of Las Vegas all over the country.
[00:11:48]  Yes.
[00:11:48]  One-way tickets.
[00:11:51]  And we got each one of them because it was certified as a class, $250,000 from a jury that was furious.
[00:12:00]  And then got up to the seven compassionate Supreme Court justices of Nevada who found some reason to say that there was a basic error and that the hospital could not be responsible if they weren't even named in the complaint, which is sort of kind of craziness.
[00:12:19]  But it's back up to the Supreme Court and we'll see what happens.
[00:12:23]  This time you've named the hospital.
[00:12:24]  Yes.
[00:12:26]  Yeah.
[00:12:26]  Wow.
[00:12:26]  Yeah.
[00:12:27]  I remember when I was a kid, I remember being like told, because I knew like kind of like homeless transient kids on Haight Street, like sort of street kids.
[00:12:37]  Oh, yeah.
[00:12:37]  And the big thing was that San Francisco would buy you a one-way bus ticket to some location to get you out of there.
[00:12:44]  And I remember when the Nevada story broke, because that was a big deal.
[00:12:48]  There was all these rumors that hospitals and jails in the Bay Area and all throughout California and probably throughout the country were doing the same thing, that there was just like these buses of people, of crazy people basically being sent like hither and thither.
[00:13:03]  Well, it's one thing to do it voluntarily.
[00:13:06]  To ask, is there someplace you'd like to go?
[00:13:09]  It's totally different when you're drugged, you're not consenting, you still need care.
[00:13:16]  Yeah.
[00:13:16]  And then you're sent away.
[00:13:18]  Yeah.
[00:13:22]  I think we'll go ahead.
[00:13:23]  Yeah, you should be picking up Bill more than me.
[00:13:26]  And my voice is a little weakened.
[00:13:29]  You've got a crazy voice.
[00:13:31]  I had an intruder in my home yesterday morning, and I screamed at him and then went outside and screamed at passersby to call 911.
[00:13:42]  And as a result, I've lost a lot of volume.
[00:13:45]  What happened in your house?
[00:13:47]  Well, I caught him at the time that he had first entered.
[00:13:55]  So all he managed to get on the way out was my wife's cell phone and our credit card, which enabled us to track him.
[00:14:04]  Oh, yeah.
[00:14:05]  And then he was apprehended two blocks away.
[00:14:08]  A happy story.
[00:14:09]  And we were reunited with the cell phone and the credit card.
[00:14:16]  What did the guy do when you saw him?
[00:14:18]  Did he?
[00:14:19]  You know what he did?
[00:14:20]  It was very strange.
[00:14:21]  He was a tall guy.
[00:14:22]  He just put his, when I started screaming, get out of my house, he just put his finger to his lips to try to shush.
[00:14:30]  That's a brilliant tactic, actually.
[00:14:32]  She's like, hey, you're being too loud.
[00:14:33]  Don't, don't.
[00:14:34]  Yeah, but the cops, since I know this issue, you're dealing largely with homeless issues.
[00:14:40]  The cops, when they responded, said, was he homeless?
[00:14:44]  Was he a homeless man?
[00:14:45]  Well, is it your home?
[00:14:46]  They were hoping so, huh?
[00:14:48]  Yeah, they were hoping because they want to just check that off.
[00:14:53]  Another problem with the homeless community.
[00:14:55]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:14:57]  The two of you met because Mississippi got kicked off by the police, and I didn't know where to turn.
[00:15:06]  And Mark got the city off my back, and then I started realizing some of the amazing things that he's done.
[00:15:14]  With the resources I have, all I can do is, you know, as I was saying, try to make a few people seen or give them a little something.
[00:15:23]  But Mark has made a difference for a lot of people.
[00:15:27]  Like the Tent City over there, they probably only let it happen because of the pandemic.
[00:15:34]  And the neighbors were all against it.
[00:15:36]  And now they're okay with it.
[00:15:39]  And he's having some tiny homes built farther down this block, you know?
[00:15:44]  So he's the greatest.
[00:15:45]  Well, Bill is very modest.
[00:15:48]  I mean, his campaign in support of poor people and homeless people goes well beyond my poor efforts.
[00:15:57]  And they're continuing.
[00:15:58]  You know, he sees the beauty in everybody.
[00:16:01]  Oh, well.
[00:16:03]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:16:05]  Well, yeah, we should have a big session in the Las Vegas tunnels one of these days.
[00:16:10]  Oh, yeah, with the mole men.
[00:16:12]  Yeah.
[00:16:12]  I think I saw a documentary about that when I was a kid, about some kind of mole.
[00:16:17]  Well, not the mole.
[00:16:18]  She swears she saw a mole man by church and market?
[00:16:22]  Yeah, church and market.
[00:16:23]  Like a real mole man, not like a homeless guy.
[00:16:27]  Every time I mention this on the podcast, people make fun of me, so I don't want to get too deep into it.
[00:16:31]  Good thing.
[00:16:32]  But you can tell us.
[00:16:35]  But I saw a documentary about people who lived in tunnels when I was a kid.
[00:16:40]  You've been to the Las Vegas tunnels?
[00:16:41]  Yes, yeah.
[00:16:42]  And there's a chapter about it in my novel.
[00:16:46]  I mean, it's about a father and son.
[00:16:49]  And the father is in the CIA.
[00:16:51]  He was working on East Germany till the Cold War ended, and then they put him in charge of Iraq.
[00:16:58]  And so he's basically, you know, from an individual point of view, a decent person.
[00:17:06]  And he's, you know, involved in doing these unpleasant things.
[00:17:10]  He's just an analyst, but still, he's helping, you know, them kill people.
[00:17:14]  And his son is not very smart, but has a really, you know, wise heart.
[00:17:21]  And so the son can't stand the father after Abu Ghraib.
[00:17:27]  And so he travels around trying to get straight, as Confucius says.
[00:17:32]  And so to him, that means being homeless.
[00:17:35]  And so he ends up spending some time in those tunnels, you know, with his homeless girlfriend.
[00:17:41]  And I've been in the tunnels a few times, and they're really interesting.
[00:17:45]  Yeah.
[00:17:46]  How so?
[00:17:47]  Well, let's see, Mark.
[00:17:50]  That time that you came with Ron and so forth, was that woman there?
[00:17:56]  There was a woman who had been blinded by her boyfriend.
[00:18:00]  And then she had a new boyfriend, and she'd been in the tunnel with him for, I think, six or seven years.
[00:18:07]  They had a dog, the mattress, and she said she felt so safe there that she could hear really well, and there were no real obstacles on the walls of the tunnel.
[00:18:19]  And so she felt that this was her place that she did not want to leave.
[00:18:25]  You know, there was a huge flash flood there recently.
[00:18:31]  And one of my friends just went in there.
[00:18:33]  He said he didn't recognize anybody.
[00:18:36]  And they did stay there for a long time.
[00:18:38]  Maybe they got, some of them got drowned or they had to move.
[00:18:41]  Yeah, they do drown because although there are these escape hatches, they have metal grates over them and they're locked.
[00:18:50]  So you can imagine sort of coming up to the surface thinking you're escaping and then just being confined.
[00:18:57]  Watching the water rise.
[00:18:58]  Horrifying.
[00:18:59]  Horrifying.
[00:19:00]  God.
[00:19:00]  It's like, yeah, it's like being on a sinking ship.
[00:19:02]  Yeah.
[00:19:03]  They're locked from the outside.
[00:19:05]  Yeah, they're locked from the surface.
[00:19:06]  Yeah.
[00:19:07]  And they're really, really strange, you know, because they're how wide would you say they are?
[00:19:16]  Like maybe seven feet wide?
[00:19:17]  Oh, the tunnels themselves?
[00:19:18]  Yeah.
[00:19:20]  Yeah, maybe seven, six, eight.
[00:19:22]  Yeah.
[00:19:22]  You know, in that neighborhood, yeah.
[00:19:24]  So everyone who camps is in a line.
[00:19:26]  Right.
[00:19:27]  And you have to pass there through the dark.
[00:19:29]  Yeah.
[00:19:29]  And the deeper you go, the darker it gets.
[00:19:31]  And theoretically, the more dangerous it gets.
[00:19:34]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:19:34]  Yeah.
[00:19:36]  A lot of interesting graffiti there.
[00:19:38]  I'm sure.
[00:19:39]  And usually it'll be like four or five tunnels in a row, so they can use one tunnel just as the latrine.
[00:19:45]  Yeah, okay.
[00:19:46]  I would the issue of sanitation would be a little difficult there.
[00:19:49]  Yeah.
[00:19:50]  There's tunnels under Sacramento, too, right?
[00:19:52]  That's when I was a kid, everybody would always like kind of like talk about there was like a hidden city under Sacramento.
[00:19:58]  No, from the bay, but I came up here.
[00:20:01]  Well, there's the original street level.
[00:20:04]  Yeah.
[00:20:05]  That's what became the tunnels because they decided to elevate the city to minimize the flood hazard.
[00:20:13]  So they did that.
[00:20:14]  So the first floors became just tunnels.
[00:20:16]  And the basements, of course, that existed are still around and they have tours.
[00:20:20]  You can take tours, not quite as elaborate as the ones beneath Paris, but interesting nonetheless.
[00:20:28]  I ended up in some catacombs underneath Odessa a long time ago.
[00:20:32]  Oh, really?
[00:20:33]  Yeah, and they're 1,500 kilometers if you set them in a line straight.
[00:20:38]  Wow.
[00:20:39]  In the Ukraine?
[00:20:39]  In Ukraine, yeah.
[00:20:40]  And we went out.
[00:20:42]  It's illegal to go in them except for a very small part.
[00:20:44]  But I think it was a friend of a friend took me out, like through kind of rock and roll people, took me out to the country.
[00:20:51]  And we went in just the side of a hill.
[00:20:54]  And from that, like, I mean, this was like, this is equivalent to like going to maybe San Rafael and then being able to walk to downtown San Francisco without reaching the surface.
[00:21:04]  I mean, it's really something.
[00:21:06]  There was all this Baptist minor graffiti because it was Russian Baptists that were working the limestone cabinet.
[00:21:10]  It's really something.
[00:21:11]  How many years did it take?
[00:21:14]  I think it was centuries, probably.
[00:21:16]  No, no, because it was, I mean, Odessa is a relatively young city because it was built by, I think, Catherine the Great.
[00:21:22]  That's such a long distance.
[00:21:24]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[00:21:25]  I mean, it's, yeah.
[00:21:26]  Was it sort of militarily dictated?
[00:21:30]  During, no, during the Second World War, there was a group of, it was about, I think there was about 20 NKVD people who were underneath there, and they ended up having this sort of battle between the two groups of one was from Moscow, one was from Odessa.
[00:21:44]  Oh, really?
[00:21:45]  And they ended up killing each other, except for one final survivor, or two final survivors, one of whom shoots the other and then goes and lives on the surface until the 1970s when they found out that the guy he claims to have shot was actually living in Paris, which was completely unexplained.
[00:22:02]  Wow.
[00:22:02]  That's strange.
[00:22:05]  I've always wanted to go to Odessa ever since I read the stories of Isaac Baba.
[00:22:10]  Oh, of course.
[00:22:11]  Yeah.
[00:22:11]  Yeah.
[00:22:14]  And is Odessa getting hammered now?
[00:22:16]  I don't think so.
[00:22:17]  I think there was briefly at some point, but I think that it's sort of, I think the port didn't do well.
[00:22:23]  But in general, the city, it's all limestone.
[00:22:26]  But yeah, I'm surprised you've never been there.
[00:22:28]  No, I would like to.
[00:22:31]  When I saw my first autopsy, it was in the San Francisco coroner's office.
[00:22:38]  And, you know, this man and woman were cutting open this decomposed corpse's head.
[00:22:45]  And the woman was saying, oh, yeah, no, I'm from Odessa, and it's really beautiful there.
[00:22:51]  And do you want to go out to the movies tonight?
[00:22:54]  And then they were drinking coffee out of mugs with their gloves, with the dripping blood.
[00:23:02]  So that was a nice, a nice thing.
[00:23:05]  That's what you associate with Odessa?
[00:23:06]  Yeah.
[00:23:08]  What other tunnels have you been in?
[00:23:10]  What other tunnels?
[00:23:12]  The Paris Catacombs.
[00:23:14]  And then, have any of you been to Haver, Montana?
[00:23:18]  No.
[00:23:19]  They have this extensive 19th century city that they actually keep up.
[00:23:24]  So, you know, right next to the brothel with all the blankets, hanging over cots, there's the dentist chair, and you control the drilling and your amount of pain.
[00:23:37]  You're on a bicycle that's drilling into your teeth.
[00:23:40]  It just all kinds of things.
[00:23:42]  That sounds horrible.
[00:23:43]  I think Colexico.
[00:23:44]  Well, in Mexicali, for sure.
[00:23:47]  Mexicali.
[00:23:47]  Yeah.
[00:23:48]  Yeah.
[00:23:48]  I wrote about that in Imperial.
[00:23:50]  There are all these tunnels where the illegal Chinese immigrants hid.
[00:23:55]  And I found a bunch of letters in Cantonese and had some of those translated.
[00:23:59]  It was very interesting.
[00:24:00]  What do the letters say?
[00:24:02]  Things like, oh, you know, this is your wife.
[00:24:07]  And, you know, my in-laws are being really mean to me.
[00:24:12]  And we don't have enough money for rice.
[00:24:15]  And when are you going to send us some money?
[00:24:16]  Or please, can I come be with you?
[00:24:18]  You know, really, really heart-rending things.
[00:24:21]  Do you ever go down in the coal mines?
[00:24:23]  Because that's kind of like tunnels.
[00:24:25]  That's right.
[00:24:26]  You know, I've never been in a coal mine, and I tried and tried.
[00:24:31]  In West Virginia, they kept checking me out, saying, No, you can't go.
[00:24:36]  And in Bangladesh, I was sure I could get to go to this coal mine.
[00:24:41]  There was this big shot who arranged the literary festival who brought me over there.
[00:24:46]  So he worked it out for me.
[00:24:48]  And on this one day, they would be up there.
[00:24:52]  So I got myself driven up there.
[00:24:55]  And that one day, they just happened to have a conference in Dhaka.
[00:24:59]  And they said they would be back as soon as I left.
[00:25:03]  So, yeah, it was kind of fun.
[00:25:06]  I was in a coal mine in Tien Sin.
[00:25:08]  Oh, you were?
[00:25:09]  China.
[00:25:09]  And what was it like, Mark?
[00:25:11]  Well, it was scary because you go down in a shaft and then you take these laterals.
[00:25:18]  And the laterals, you can't stand up or anything, but they have these vehicles where you have to basically lie down.
[00:25:24]  I've seen those.
[00:25:25]  And you're lying down, and the ceiling of the shaft or whatever they call it is just inches above your head.
[00:25:33]  It's very claustrophobic.
[00:25:35]  And, you know, even though you're not chipping away at the face or anything, when you come out, you're absolutely covered in soot.
[00:25:43]  Oh, I should.
[00:25:44]  I went in one when I was a kid.
[00:25:46]  I was like six, I was like five or six years old.
[00:25:50]  And this was in England.
[00:25:52]  And my mom told me that I, because I was so tiny, I could stand up, you know?
[00:25:57]  And I just like didn't know any better.
[00:25:59]  So I'm just like marching along.
[00:26:01]  And my mom's like, you got to like, you know, hang back because you don't know how narrow it's going to get.
[00:26:07]  And I don't really remember much, but she just said that I, you know, you're a kid, you're so fearless.
[00:26:12]  You know, even going down.
[00:26:13]  Now I'm afraid of heights.
[00:26:15]  And I feel like somehow going down is like the reverse afraid of heights, but it's like the same.
[00:26:20]  It's like, you know, you're going down below, but it's still somehow related to my fear of heights or something, if that makes sense.
[00:26:26]  I mean, I think it's just a fear of depth.
[00:26:28]  For sure.
[00:26:30]  But back then, yeah.
[00:26:31]  And I came out of it and I was just covered in soot.
[00:26:34]  I bet, huh?
[00:26:35]  Yeah.

=== Underground Cities Witnessed (10:49) ===

[00:26:36]  Yeah, I've tried to, except for the catacombs, I think I've avoided, or the Odessa catacombs, I think I've avoided tunnels most of my life.
[00:26:43]  I mean, you know, tunnels I've been through, but you know, really underground.
[00:26:48]  I guess I've been in a few caves here and there, but that's sometimes you have to crawl through caves and so forth.
[00:26:53]  Yeah.
[00:26:54]  Yeah.
[00:26:54]  Cave and tunnel are two different things, though.
[00:26:56]  Yeah, a tunnel is, you know, it's, you're going to San Francisco.
[00:27:00]  You know, you're good.
[00:27:03]  Yeah, it's, it's, but they're, they're sort of fascinating.
[00:27:07]  I've always was, I mean, with the Vietnam War, the concept of the tunnel rack.
[00:27:12]  Oh, at Kuchi?
[00:27:13]  Yeah, it just is always, it's like a terrifying thing to me.
[00:27:18]  My friend has seen them.
[00:27:19]  Have you ever been there, Mark?
[00:27:21]  Those who know.
[00:27:22]  Oh, well, yeah, these tunnels in the Iron Triangle, they were just incredible.
[00:27:27]  I've seen the maps of them and all of the different kind of depths that they would reach.
[00:27:32]  They are like veins, and how they were like, this is the one for the conference room, and this is the one for the tunnel.
[00:27:36]  Yeah.
[00:27:37]  You think those Hamas tunnels are like that in Gaza?
[00:27:39]  I think they're probably, I think that they're probably students of history.
[00:27:43]  So I think that some of them are probably mapped out similarly.
[00:27:46]  Yeah.
[00:27:46]  Well, and also in Cappadocia, Turkey, they have whole cities.
[00:27:52]  I mean, right near Cappuccino.
[00:27:54]  They have cities that were created underground.
[00:27:57]  And people lived there for years.
[00:27:59]  And they had donkeys.
[00:28:02]  They grew vegetables underground.
[00:28:05]  Wow.
[00:28:07]  It was strategic.
[00:28:09]  It was defensive.
[00:28:11]  I visited those.
[00:28:12]  Those are pretty fascinating.
[00:28:13]  Yeah, that's interesting.
[00:28:15]  A donkey underground seems like it'd be a spiant experience.
[00:28:20]  For sure.
[00:28:20]  Have any of you ever heard of the underground gardens of Fresno?
[00:28:25]  No.
[00:28:26]  You've been there, right, Mark?
[00:28:27]  No.
[00:28:27]  Oh, but I think I'd shoot my work of poetry and see somewhere.
[00:28:31]  That's right, yeah.
[00:28:33]  Well, there was this guy named Baldassari who came over in 1901 to help dig the New York subway.
[00:28:40]  And back then it was all pick and shovel.
[00:28:42]  Yeah.
[00:28:42]  So he wanted to have a fruit ranch just a little south of here in Fresno.
[00:28:50]  And it was really hot and the ground was all hard pan.
[00:28:53]  So he took his pick and for the rest of his life he kept digging.
[00:28:59]  And they called him the Mo Man of Fresno.
[00:29:02]  And people would come over, you know, to see him on Sunday.
[00:29:06]  You give all the ladies a glass of champagne and give all their husbands a shovel.
[00:29:11]  And like, it's all like these crazy trees that he's grafted different fruits on that they're still alive.
[00:29:20]  And this way underground in this inverted pyramid.
[00:29:23]  So it's always cool.
[00:29:24]  I went there when it was 110 degrees.
[00:29:27]  And down there, you know, it was like 60 degrees with this constant draft coming up.
[00:29:33]  I bet that's how people are going to have to build in the next century.
[00:29:36]  It's going to be like that.
[00:29:38]  With guards at the entrances.
[00:29:40]  Oh, for sure.
[00:29:41]  Yeah.
[00:29:42]  Absolutely.
[00:29:42]  And bars on the tops.
[00:29:45]  Yeah.
[00:29:45]  Well, we know a guy who wrote a book about all of the sort of bunkers that rich people were building in New Zealand.
[00:29:52]  Oh, really?
[00:29:53]  Yeah.
[00:29:54]  And it's, I think there is a like, I guess it's kind of understandable impulse to where if you have like essentially infinite money, you would sort of set that up for you.
[00:30:04]  The Swiss do this too.
[00:30:06]  Switzerland has like, is like covered in bunkers and like these sort of like underground redoubts.
[00:30:12]  Yeah.
[00:30:12]  My parents retired there.
[00:30:15]  And at that time, the law was that every adult male has to have a bomb shelter.
[00:30:22]  Oh, I thought it was a rifle.
[00:30:24]  Well, since he was not a citizen, he didn't have to have the rifle, but his bomb shelter was a great wine cellar.
[00:30:31]  So it worked out.
[00:30:32]  That's nice.
[00:30:32]  So moving back to the subject of homelessness, and I guess the subject of also unorthodox places to live, like bomb shelters or in caverns and things like that.
[00:30:53]  You know, you got, you were, you were saying how you guys met, because you, or I don't know if you met because of this, but you have a sort of like a safe sleeping site nearby.
[00:31:02]  And that has been in San Francisco, I was able to witness, able to witness.
[00:31:06]  I did witness and participated in during COVID, especially there was this sort of push for both safe sleeping sites and to get people into hotel rooms.
[00:31:16]  But now, you know, that things, you know, it's been a few years, things have kind of died down from that.
[00:31:20]  There's this like this battle kind of beginning again.
[00:31:23]  Yeah, has the nature of homelessness changed in the past 20 years?
[00:31:27]  Because the way that people talk about it, it would seem that it had.
[00:31:30]  I don't really think it has.
[00:31:34]  But it's become this like huge, huge issue.
[00:31:37]  In fact, like the overriding issue for a lot of people.
[00:31:41]  Well, just in some kind of Marxist terminology, there's the quantitative change and ultimately qualitative change.
[00:31:51]  I mean, isn't that what you're seeing?
[00:31:52]  You know, a few homeless people on the streets in the 50s, more in the 60s, you know, like they're noticeable in the 70s.
[00:32:01]  By the 90s, you start to think, why are they here?
[00:32:05]  What can we do about it?
[00:32:07]  And then you get into our century and we realize that this is indicative of something major, something organic in our society.
[00:32:20]  And then you say, well, who has an interest in addressing it?
[00:32:24]  The fact is, no one does.
[00:32:26]  Only the victims, only the people who are discarded because they are useless.
[00:32:34]  They're not necessary for labor and they're not productive and we haven't prioritized their survival.
[00:32:43]  So they're on their own.
[00:32:46]  And when they're on their own, they're living in the spaces that they can locate and occupy.
[00:32:54]  And it's an illness.
[00:32:58]  To me, it's an indication of society's infection.
[00:33:03]  Infection and sickness, disease.
[00:33:07]  And whether we're going to be able to address that in any constructive way still remains to be seen.
[00:33:14]  I myself am hopeful that with the proliferation of numbers on the streets, obviously, they will require and demand some kind of attention.
[00:33:29]  The Supreme Court, unfortunately, is going to get to consider whether the most recent judicial salve on the homeless situation, that is staying the hand of municipalities to criminalize homelessness until they create spaces where homeless people can be legally, will be, that salve will be eradicated.
[00:33:58]  So I think we're going to be into some uncharted waters.
[00:34:05]  And whether we have violent reaction or not still remains to be seen.
[00:34:11]  Unfortunately, homeless people tend to inoculate themselves against their own situations with drugs and alcohol.
[00:34:20]  And then they get acclimated to it.
[00:34:24]  And they don't have that organizational drive to really overturn the system.
[00:34:32]  Yeah, that's one of the things that I've seen.
[00:34:35]  One of the groups that I really admire was called SHARE, and it's a group up in Seattle.
[00:34:46]  And they have, I've slept in a couple of these tent cities there to see what it's like.
[00:34:53]  And they're really, really good.
[00:34:56]  You know, the neighbors are at first resistant, and then they start liking it because everyone has a job.
[00:35:02]  You have to go and pick up trash or do this or do that.
[00:35:06]  But what's really sad is you go to these compulsory weekly meetings and some organizers saying, okay, who wants to be in charge of the kitchen this week?
[00:35:20]  And no one says anything.
[00:35:21]  The organizer says, okay, I'm nominating Jane Doe.
[00:35:26]  will everyone please give Jane Doe, you know, a hand?
[00:35:29]  And it's vanguardist, you know, and it's very, very hollow, but it has to be done.
[00:35:37]  You know, but you just think, what would it take for these people to actually get together?
[00:35:46]  There would be strength in numbers.
[00:35:49]  You know, those guys in Reno, for instance, they all just saw each other as competitors.
[00:35:56]  And that's one reason I'm so impressed with Mark's Tent City across the street.
[00:36:02]  You know, Seven is such a good leader.
[00:36:05]  He keeps order and he's also benevolent.
[00:36:11]  And so there aren't very many problems there, even though all those people wouldn't ordinarily be inside each other's tents stealing things or pooping on the ground there or whatever.
[00:36:26]  But it's really hard to make people who have been infantilized by homelessness, you know, be mature enough to actually act on their own collective behalf.
[00:36:39]  I mean, well, what do you think, Mark, is the best way for individuals to help the homeless?
[00:36:47]  Oh, you mean non-homeless individuals to help them?
[00:36:50]  Yeah.
[00:36:53]  Give them a place to live.
[00:36:55]  I mean, include them in your own household.
[00:36:58]  Try it.
[00:36:59]  It turns out it's actually beneficial.
[00:37:01]  If you take a person who hasn't just gone over the edge, if you just take a person and say, look, we got a spare bedroom, and you can occupy it, and all you have to do is, and then you just identify a few things, like take out the trash and maybe clean up after yourself and a few things.
[00:37:19]  Pretty soon, they're essential elements of your household.

=== Collectively Housing Non-Homeless Individuals (08:57) ===

[00:37:25]  Now, very few people do that, but that's a way to siphon off a group of homeless folks.
[00:37:35]  Otherwise, I think paying them to do some work around the place.
[00:37:41]  I mean, I look around and see all the fruit that's hanging on the trees.
[00:37:46]  It's not harvested, all the berries that aren't picked, and think all they have to do is organize brigades of homeless people to go harvest, and then commercial kitchens and all that.
[00:37:58]  So there are lots of things that can be done, But it does require some organization.
[00:38:05]  It's become like San Francisco more so than Sacramento, but it's become such a kind of locus for this conversation nationally.
[00:38:14]  It's become almost like a symbol of, you know, have you noticed that?
[00:38:18]  I think I feel like since COVID.
[00:38:21]  Yeah, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, for my book about the CIA because my CIA guy is born near there.
[00:38:32]  Where near there?
[00:38:34]  Just a little bit north.
[00:38:36]  You know the area?
[00:38:37]  A little bit, yeah.
[00:38:37]  Oh, okay.
[00:38:39]  Well, anyway, people were coming up to me and saying, oh, so you're from San Francisco.
[00:38:45]  It's true, right?
[00:38:46]  What they say in the news.
[00:38:47]  Yeah.
[00:38:47]  It's like Sherry Allah there.
[00:38:49]  And you'll get your throat cut if you walk past almost.
[00:38:53]  London breeds Sharia a lot.
[00:38:55]  It's like a mild sharia.
[00:38:56]  Yeah.
[00:38:56]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:38:57]  I said it wasn't quite that bad.
[00:38:59]  No, yeah, it's not full.
[00:39:00]  Yeah.
[00:39:01]  You want another shot, Mark?
[00:39:04]  Sure.
[00:39:04]  Okay.
[00:39:05]  And yeah, San Francisco, it's weird because I see it like nationally.
[00:39:22]  And I'll see people recognize people whose names I know being talked about like Fox News and things like that.
[00:39:28]  And, you know, they'll send sort of ABC in and like war reporter mode where they're like, totally.
[00:39:34]  You know, we're like a lady in like a full flak jacket and like a vest or excuse me, like a helmet, like, yeah, on 6th Street or like on Turk and Taylor.
[00:39:42]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:39:43]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:44]  Awfully dangerous, though.
[00:39:45]  I will say, though, I mean, we did a show, you know, whenever it was last year, last November, almost a year ago.
[00:39:52]  And we stayed at, what is it called?
[00:39:54]  The Phoenix Hotel.
[00:39:55]  Yeah, it was twice banned.
[00:39:57]  And now we stayed there.
[00:39:59]  We did a show at Great American, which was cool.
[00:40:01]  Oh, wow.
[00:40:04]  But, you know, I mean, I grew up in San Francisco.
[00:40:06]  I grew up in Glen Park.
[00:40:07]  You know, lived there for what feels like a billion years.
[00:40:11]  But, I mean, it was maybe the worst I've seen it ever in my life.
[00:40:16]  Oh, I'm sure.
[00:40:16]  Yeah.
[00:40:17]  The tenderloin and that, the whole area.
[00:40:19]  And it felt very much like the city was just sort of putting its hands up almost in protest and saying, like, well, we're just not going to do anything.
[00:40:27]  Right.
[00:40:28]  When I think of the future of homelessness in America, I think of Columbia because that's where you see homeless everywhere.
[00:40:41]  And they can't, there's so many that they can't survive by being these somewhat patient and submissive panhandlers you have here.
[00:40:51]  So it's very common to be in a restaurant and some homeless guy just comes in and starts grabbing food from people's plates and eating it.
[00:41:00]  And, you know, the owner hides and people just don't dare do anything.
[00:41:06]  Or you might be on a street and there's a kid has stretched a little piece of string across the road.
[00:41:13]  And so you had better stop and give that kid some pesos.
[00:41:18]  If not, there's going to be somebody waiting around the bend.
[00:41:21]  And you think that's how it's going to have to be.
[00:41:24]  Yeah, I always think about it like there's, I mean, especially seeing when I was living in LA, like seeing like the tent cities kind of underneath the like overpasses, but like on those little, you know, the hills kind of leading up.
[00:41:36]  Oh, yeah.
[00:41:37]  And I was like, wow, if we had like looser building codes, there would just be favelas all over the sides of hills and things like that.
[00:41:46]  It just, it seems like it's weird.
[00:41:49]  It does seem like there's a certain, the only real solutions I see proffered by like politicians essentially amount to camps.
[00:41:57]  Like to like, you know, we'll take it.
[00:41:59]  I think there was like one where they were talking about putting people on Angel Island, which I think had some bad connotations.
[00:42:05]  And so they didn't end up doing it.
[00:42:07]  Mark, how many people are you going to put on your lot in those tiny homes?
[00:42:12]  Well, those are studio apartments and only eight, but then another 20, we're going to do another 22 units.
[00:42:19]  Oh, really?
[00:42:19]  So we'll have 30.
[00:42:21]  And they're going to be able to occupy those apartments at the voucher level.
[00:42:31]  There's a Section 8 program that will subsidize people's rent.
[00:42:38]  And the problem is that people don't usually have the increment above the subsidization level, which will allow them to actually occupy a place.
[00:42:46]  But we're going to maintain the rent at the level so that they don't have any additional obligation.
[00:42:53]  Yeah, that's so good.
[00:42:54]  It's just to prove that it can be done.
[00:42:55]  Because we're building these at the cost of about $160,000 a piece, which is a third of what contractors are building studios for now.
[00:43:11]  Yeah, but you know, there are societies where there isn't homelessness.
[00:43:16]  And I mean, it's interesting.
[00:43:18]  I just came back from Algeria.
[00:43:20]  You don't see homeless people in Algeria.
[00:43:23]  But what you see is a very oppressive Muslim system.
[00:43:29]  And they, I say oppressive from our perspective.
[00:43:33]  They take care of their families, but it's within the dictates of the Quran.
[00:43:44]  So you have to pretty much be a believer, or at least.
[00:43:49]  So if someone's a kaffir in the family, you don't have to take care of him, huh?
[00:43:53]  Right, right.
[00:43:54]  I mean, they're just ousted.
[00:43:55]  Maybe they go to Morocco.
[00:43:59]  Yeah.
[00:44:00]  Interesting.
[00:44:01]  And we value freedom, but what freedom gives us is the obvious poverty.
[00:44:11]  Well, I mean, Stalin had a quote about, I think it was about freedom of speech, but like, you know, what use is freedom of speech to a guy living under a bridge?
[00:44:19]  Right, yeah.
[00:44:20]  Well, yeah, that's right.
[00:44:21]  Didn't Lenin say rich and poor equally have the right to sleep under bridges?
[00:44:27]  Yeah.
[00:44:28]  What a great thing.
[00:44:30]  Well, what do you think any of us can do or should do to help our brothers and sisters?
[00:44:42]  I don't know.
[00:44:43]  I mean, I think that, I mean, that's such a big question.
[00:44:47]  I think that you always run up to this problem of, well, what can an individual affect versus what could maybe be done collectively, right?
[00:44:56]  Because obviously much more can be done collectively.
[00:44:58]  I think that everyone, just sheer mathematics would prove that beside any other sort of political philosophy.
[00:45:07]  And I think that you kind of run in, you know, I think it's easy to kind of run into so many daily frustrations on the individual level, right?
[00:45:17]  Trying to sort of affect these things.
[00:45:20]  But at the same time, that can easily excuse or be used as an excuse to not do anything on the individual level.
[00:45:26]  Does that make sense?
[00:45:27]  Sure.
[00:45:28]  And so I feel like there's this constant tension.
[00:45:30]  At least I feel that.
[00:45:32]  Maybe that feeds into some of the guilt that you talk about, that you write about, you know, of like, well, what can I do?
[00:45:38]  Maybe I can't do anything, but then that'll mean that I won't do anything, but there's got to be something I can do.
[00:45:43]  You know, and so you're always kind of caught in this little triangle, maybe.
[00:45:48]  You know, the great Soviet encyclopedia had a definition of altruism, which I always hated it, but I wonder if it's true.
[00:46:02]  It was defined as a hypocritical mask to hide the antagonism of class relations.
[00:46:11]  And I like to think that, like, that's pretty good.
[00:46:14]  Yeah, I guess.
[00:46:14]  When I'm buying somebody a beer, it's not that I'm appeasing him so he's not going to steal my unjustly earned property.

=== Parental Responsibilities (08:20) ===

[00:46:23]  But, you know, I don't know.
[00:46:26]  But you have that line in the essay, right?
[00:46:28]  Where you say, oh my gosh, now I've had this whiskey.
[00:46:31]  I can't think of it.
[00:46:32]  I have to pull up my notes.
[00:46:33]  And just have another whiskey.
[00:46:34]  Yeah, then you eventually circle back to where you started from, from my experience.
[00:46:39]  Isn't that a brilliant piece?
[00:46:41]  The four men.
[00:46:42]  Yeah.
[00:46:44]  Have you read his stuff before meeting him?
[00:46:46]  Read Bill's stuff before meeting him?
[00:46:48]  No.
[00:46:49]  No.
[00:46:49]  No, we met like 10, 12 years ago.
[00:46:53]  Yeah.
[00:46:54]  Let's see.
[00:46:54]  It must have been like, what about 2007, 2008, when they tore down Mississippi's house?
[00:47:01]  Yeah.
[00:47:03]  I still feel sad.
[00:47:04]  No, but we had an instant connection, in part because Bill was wearing a t-shirt that said Deep Springs College.
[00:47:13]  You went to Deep Springs.
[00:47:15]  He went to Deep Springs.
[00:47:16]  I know, but I was saying, you said connection.
[00:47:18]  It's hard to tell you right now.
[00:47:20]  I'm in a sister institution.
[00:47:23]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:47:24]  Yeah.
[00:47:25]  Same Nunnian founder.
[00:47:27]  That is right.
[00:47:28]  Lucian Lucius Nunn.
[00:47:29]  Yeah, what a great name.
[00:47:30]  Whose twin brother was Lucius Lucian Nunn.
[00:47:34]  Yeah.
[00:47:35]  But we Deep Springers can keep him straight sometimes.
[00:47:38]  Yeah, so.
[00:47:39]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:47:40]  Creative parents.
[00:47:41]  Yeah.
[00:47:42]  And Marcus has taught me a lot.
[00:47:47]  I remember I kept saying, why don't I just talk to the mayor, you know, and get him to just do something useful with this parking lot for the homeless.
[00:47:59]  So Mark said, go ahead, you know, you'll see how it'll turn out.
[00:48:02]  Yeah, let's talk to the mayor.
[00:48:03]  So I did.
[00:48:04]  And, oh, Bill, thank you for being part of the solution.
[00:48:08]  But I never heard from him.
[00:48:09]  Of course not.
[00:48:09]  Yeah, sounds like London Breed.
[00:48:12]  Yeah, you like that.
[00:48:13]  And then we have a city councilwoman here, Mark knows.
[00:48:17]  So he talked to her, and she showed up with these guys, you know, saying, okay, we can put various tiny homes in here.
[00:48:26]  And one of them turned to me and he said, well, why?
[00:48:29]  I mean, Mr. Wallman, what do you get out of this?
[00:48:32]  Like, he couldn't imagine that it was just because I cared.
[00:48:34]  I said, oh, swimsuit calendars of homeless women, sir.
[00:48:39]  And there was a long silence.
[00:48:41]  Maybe that's why they wouldn't put any houses in there.
[00:48:45]  Well, it's funny because it seems like in a lot of your earlier stuff, you know, it's like you as sort of like an observer.
[00:48:51]  And you're giving people money and, you know, things like that, mostly just so they'll talk to you in the first place.
[00:48:56]  Right.
[00:48:56]  But it's like, it feels like, I don't know, maybe in the early 2000s, this, I mean, I guess, well, I don't know, because of Afghanistan stuff, which I want to talk about a little bit.
[00:49:06]  But you kind of feel like you actually have to do more.
[00:49:09]  Has like that been building in you this whole time?
[00:49:12]  Well, as I matured, I became a little less shy and I became a little bit more aware of what I could do and what I should do.
[00:49:26]  But what really gave me confidence was being a parent.
[00:49:32]  When Lisa was born, I instantly knew the right and the wrong, what things to do for her.
[00:49:40]  I remember when she was about 10 minutes old, these medical students took her to check her reflexes, you know, and they were sticking pins into her and she was crying.
[00:49:51]  It was all I could do not to strangle them, you know.
[00:49:55]  And there's something about being a parent.
[00:49:58]  Suddenly you look at children of all ages that might even be older than you, and you think, oh, I know how it is as a parent.
[00:50:08]  I know what this person needs.
[00:50:10]  And it really made me a better and stronger and more confident person when I was a parent.
[00:50:20]  Well, have you guys read or looked at Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness?
[00:50:24]  Not yet.
[00:50:25]  No.
[00:50:26]  It came out like two weeks ago.
[00:50:27]  It's amazing.
[00:50:29]  It's an amazing collection.
[00:50:30]  But he talks a lot about that wonderment of what can you do?
[00:50:37]  What should you do?
[00:50:38]  You see the world around you and what is your responsibility, projecting it, explaining it, and hoping that that has some effect on the viewer and on Bill himself.
[00:50:56]  I mean, I think that you show that you are transformed yourself by just struggling with what is the purpose of the photographs and the art.
[00:51:08]  For sure.
[00:51:08]  And, you know, Mark, I was telling them that one of the first times I came down after my accident and Seven hugged me, and I felt like it was worth getting my back broken.
[00:51:21]  It really made me feel so proud, you know.
[00:51:25]  But these things aren't one-to-one.
[00:51:26]  It's not like you think because you got your back broken, then you get the hug, right?
[00:51:30]  No, but on the other hand, like I remember when I was hit by the car, my bicycle broke my pelvis, and at first I thought, oh no, all the things I have to do, and I couldn't do them, and they didn't matter.
[00:51:42]  And instead, there I was in my Percocet glory days, blibber-blabbering with all my friends who I realized actually love me and care about me.
[00:51:53]  And it was a wonderful experience.
[00:51:56]  So, Mark.
[00:51:57]  What can we do?
[00:51:58]  I mean, this is a good question.
[00:52:01]  What do our efforts affect?
[00:52:04]  And I keep coming back to that image of the little girl, napalm on her back, running naked down the street in Vietnam.
[00:52:14]  And, you know, it does have a tremendous effect.
[00:52:18]  You know, whether we'll see similar reactions when the pictures of devastation in Gaza appear or not remains to be seen.
[00:52:33]  Well, as far as homelessness here is concerned, Mark, you were telling me that more and more you're thinking about trying to help the homeless as a class.
[00:52:44]  Well, it's so difficult here.
[00:52:49]  Mark was the one who told me, you're not allowed to sleep in your own backyard in Sacramento for more than one night.
[00:52:57]  You aren't?
[00:52:58]  No.
[00:52:58]  Right, even if you own the property.
[00:52:59]  How is that a law?
[00:53:02]  You'd think that American property, I mean, nothing America left.
[00:53:06]  You think that you could do whatever you want on your property.
[00:53:09]  I know, but the fear is that if you are allowed to sleep in your own property, then you can have your guests sleeping in your own property too.
[00:53:17]  What if they were, God forbid, homeless?
[00:53:20]  But what if you start a website where you can monetize that?
[00:53:23]  Yes, yeah.
[00:53:24]  Could you then get around some of those?
[00:53:26]  That's right.
[00:53:26]  Homeless BSD.
[00:53:28]  Yeah, then it's business, right?
[00:53:29]  Then it's all fair game.
[00:53:30]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:53:31]  You might have more leeway as a business, yeah.
[00:53:34]  But Mark has tried and tried.
[00:53:37]  Like so many people, you know, when they're arrested for sleeping and breaking that ordinance, the police take their stuff and throw it away.
[00:53:46]  Sweetness.
[00:53:47]  Yeah.
[00:53:47]  And kick them back out into the rain without a tent and sleeping bag.
[00:53:50]  And medication often.
[00:53:52]  I mean, San Francisco, that's a big thing that happens.
[00:53:54]  They'll take it all.
[00:53:54]  They'll take everything.
[00:53:56]  Yeah.
[00:53:56]  Well, you know, we can, we cover damages for lost property taken without, as they say, due process.
[00:54:06]  And the cities are prepared to pay.
[00:54:08]  They would rather just pay people for the property they take and just keep taking it.
[00:54:13]  Yeah.
[00:54:14]  Because they feel that the people themselves will be driven off.
[00:54:18]  It's an exclusion issue.
[00:54:20]  They want to get rid of them and discourage them from being at all.
[00:54:25]  Right, yeah.
[00:54:29]  Before Mark helped me out and got seven for me, after Mississippi was kicked off, there were some years when I would just tell anyone, you're welcome to stay.

=== Why Fonts Were Used Against Us (11:12) ===

[00:54:43]  And so often I'd come and, you know, there'd be a police car and these guys, you know, officers saying, oh, you have to go.
[00:54:50]  I'd say, you know, oh, excuse me, officer.
[00:54:53]  I'm the property owner.
[00:54:54]  Step away.
[00:54:55]  Step away.
[00:54:56]  You know?
[00:54:57]  And then sometimes the police would honor a note that I left.
[00:55:03]  Oh, this person has the right to stay.
[00:55:05]  Other times they'd say, nope, we don't care.
[00:55:08]  It's so awful.
[00:55:18]  It's a sweet thing to nurse once a whiskey.
[00:55:21]  Let's talk about the CIA book real quick.
[00:55:23]  Okay.
[00:55:24]  I heard.
[00:55:25]  No, Liz, you ask.
[00:55:28]  No, I'm just curious because, you know, we came in and we were looking at your shelves and then I saw this whole section that's, you know, CIA 9-11, Iraq, and everything in between.
[00:55:40]  Oh, yeah.
[00:55:40]  Lots of biographies of Bush, it looks like.
[00:55:43]  Yeah.
[00:55:43]  And I just inferred that maybe this was part of some of the research for your next novel?
[00:55:51]  Well, is that the rumor?
[00:55:54]  Yeah.
[00:55:55]  Well, it would have been my present novel until Viking fired me.
[00:55:59]  Okay.
[00:56:00]  So now.
[00:56:01]  Over fonts.
[00:56:02]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:56:03]  Was that, you really got fired over fonts?
[00:56:05]  Fonts plus length.
[00:56:08]  And the book originally I've been able to get a really long word count into the contract, but then they didn't want to honor it.
[00:56:16]  And nowadays, I guess fonts are just a utility.
[00:56:23]  Just like if people stream music, I'll never do it.
[00:56:26]  That's why I just stay on CDs.
[00:56:29]  What do I care?
[00:56:31]  But yeah, it all gets monetized.
[00:56:33]  And so, oh, Bill, you know, like if we use this new century school book font, it's going to cost us an extra two cents per copy.
[00:56:42]  We can't have that.
[00:56:43]  Because in Europe Central, you use a lot of fonts.
[00:56:46]  Yeah.
[00:56:48]  My designer, Carla, was still alive.
[00:56:52]  And I remember going to Berlin and getting newspapers from the flea market.
[00:56:58]  Like, here's a World War I paper with this notice printed in the fracture font, Irzon is Gefalen.
[00:57:06]  Your son has just been killed, you know, in battle.
[00:57:09]  And so Carla could drop that right in.
[00:57:11]  And then, you know, she had a nice SS font because they actually had lightning bolt runes on the typewriter.
[00:57:22]  They did, yeah.
[00:57:23]  And only for SS would you use it.
[00:57:25]  Yeah.
[00:57:26]  Anyway, fascinating stuff.
[00:57:28]  But those days are gone.
[00:57:32]  So, but, well, when I, between the Gulf Wars was the first time I went to Iraq.
[00:57:42]  And I went for Saddam's birthday, which was the same date as my father's.
[00:57:49]  But my poor dad, his birthday only lasted one day.
[00:57:53]  And I guess Saddam must have been a difficult birth because his was a three-day birthday.
[00:57:58]  Well, that's something that happens.
[00:58:00]  I guess it does.
[00:58:00]  The doula practices in Iraq are a little differently than for sure.
[00:58:05]  Yeah, when you're Saddam, they let you have the three-day birthday.
[00:58:08]  Yeah.
[00:58:08]  Yeah, I would say so.
[00:58:10]  And so I went to the offices of UNSCUM, the UN special committee that was trying to punish Iraq for Gulf War I.
[00:58:25]  And I talked with this brigadier general, this Swedish guy, who's saying, hey, I've been there for years.
[00:58:33]  We can't find a single weapon of mass destruction.
[00:58:37]  So after September 11th, I thought, oh, why would they go after Iraq?
[00:58:43]  And then suddenly you're reading in Newsweek, oh, after we go into Iraq, and you guys, God, they're going to do it for nothing.
[00:58:51]  And I remember talking to my friends saying, I don't believe there are weapons of mass destruction.
[00:58:56]  And they'd all say, oh, come on, Bill.
[00:58:58]  And then they were astounded.
[00:59:02]  But it was total bullshit.
[00:59:05]  And so that was such a horrible war crime to start a war against Iraq because of September 11th, you know.
[00:59:17]  So I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a CIA official working on this.
[00:59:28]  What would it be like?
[00:59:30]  And I interviewed this high-ranking CIA guy, Paul Pilar, who was really nice.
[00:59:36]  And I've read one of his books too.
[00:59:39]  And he said, basically, you have to do what the administration wants so that the administration will keep you in power.
[00:59:48]  And you can try to say, no, you know, we shouldn't do this, we shouldn't do that.
[00:59:54]  And you just get overruled and you have to suck it up.
[00:59:57]  And so I got really interested in foreign policy going back to the Vietnam War.
[01:00:03]  And it was the same stuff.
[01:00:05]  Like, there was this one faction in Angola that was very, very popular and sort of moderately leftist.
[01:00:15]  So that was the one that would have won this big struggle.
[01:00:19]  And so the CIA guy in charge said, listen, why don't we help them?
[01:00:25]  And they said, no, the fact is we want to pick an unpopular one and we want to just create as much bloodshed as possible in Angola.
[01:00:33]  We don't want to win.
[01:00:34]  We want to bloody the Soviets.
[01:00:36]  I couldn't believe it, you know, when I started reading this stuff.
[01:00:40]  And then suddenly, I figured, well, I want to figure out as much as I can about our foreign policy, you know.
[01:00:49]  And lots and lots of brutal, arrogant stupidities, multiply repeated.
[01:00:59]  And I don't say that we're necessarily worse than anyone else would have been with all that power, but I'm certainly not very proud of how we got to September 11th and how we got to the Gulf War, you know.
[01:01:15]  Even the first Gulf War, arguably Saddam was suckered into it.
[01:01:21]  Yeah, I think it's pretty.
[01:01:23]  Yeah, I think you can make a strong argument for that.
[01:01:25]  And really, I mean, sure, he was a hateful dictator, but wait a second, you know.
[01:01:32]  The Shah of Iran, oh, he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.
[01:01:36]  But Saddam, okay, let's screw him over over and over and over.
[01:01:41]  Let's tell him he's our ally against Iran, and then with Iran-Contra, let's sell them stuff.
[01:01:47]  It's just unbelievable what they even thought would happen.
[01:01:51]  It's so lame.
[01:01:53]  Yeah, there's a story, and I'm trying to think of any other CIA stuff that you've written that I've read.
[01:01:58]  I think the In Europe Central Airlift Idols is a story that's like kind of, but that's Mark.
[01:02:04]  A little shot?
[01:02:05]  No, okay.
[01:02:07]  Oh, really?
[01:02:19]  You think it would be hateful to be a royal?
[01:02:23]  I think I would hate the assumption that I'm arrogant and all that kind of stuff.
[01:02:31]  But also, what if you were arrogant?
[01:02:33]  You might be.
[01:02:34]  Yeah, maybe.
[01:02:34]  As a royal.
[01:02:35]  Well, I think it would be okay.
[01:02:37]  I think the only noble way to go out as a royal, well, to go out, but to do it as a royal, is to take the example of the Nepalese prince who went in and did the, I think, first and only royal mass shooting.
[01:02:50]  Oh, history.
[01:02:52]  He went in there.
[01:02:52]  And I had a Nepalese cab driver in San Francisco tell me that real Nepalese people know that he was brainwashed by the Maoists.
[01:03:00]  Oh, that was interesting.
[01:03:01]  Who knows?
[01:03:02]  Yeah, I always wondered what happened.
[01:03:04]  It was such a bizarre and shocking story, and then the media never covered it.
[01:03:10]  Yeah, because it's probably a little difficult to get a guy in there, especially after that.
[01:03:15]  Have you ever met?
[01:03:16]  You've met CIA people in your life then?
[01:03:18]  Yes, yeah, I have, met some, yeah.
[01:03:22]  And a lot of them are quite nice, really, you know.
[01:03:28]  And I'm not against any nation having an intelligence service because other nations are going to have them.
[01:03:38]  And I just wish, in fact, the CIA had been more effective to stop September 11th, you know.
[01:03:45]  But it's unfortunate that to do their jobs, they have to keep things secret.
[01:03:56]  And then it's almost inevitable that power is going to corrupt.
[01:04:02]  Well, I mean, you had your own run-ins with intelligence agencies during when they, well, I guess you FOIA and found you had had unbeknownst to you run-ins with intelligence agencies.
[01:04:13]  Yeah, it did help why the FBI detained me for seven hours in Calexico and all that kind of crap.
[01:04:21]  But it's only time.
[01:04:25]  Do you see where they're coming from with the Unibomber stuff?
[01:04:29]  Well, some of what they said in the file was pretty lame.
[01:04:40]  And some was possibly reasonable.
[01:04:43]  You know, they talked about my Seven Dreams second volume, Fathers and Crows.
[01:04:51]  It's about Jesuits and Iroquois in the 1600s.
[01:04:55]  And so they said that I was sympathetic to the Iroquois, which wasn't true.
[01:05:01]  I was sympathetic to everybody.
[01:05:04]  But because I was sympathetic to the Iroquois, that meant that I supported subversion.
[01:05:10]  I thought, oh, how interesting, you know, because this all took place in Canada.
[01:05:13]  There wasn't even a U.S. then, you know, or the fact that I traveled from a young age, that was suspicious.
[01:05:22]  And some of this stuff was just really, really nasty.
[01:05:27]  You know, when my friends were killed in Bosnia, I figured that what I needed to do was to get hold of their passports and photograph their bodies before anything else happened in case there was some kind of inquest, you know.
[01:05:45]  So in my FBI file, it talks about how, you know, I was so happy to take ghoulish pictures of my friends' corpses.

=== Words Used Against Us (02:46) ===

[01:05:55]  You know, so they always have their way of spinning it.
[01:05:58]  And then, of course, someone who comes and reads it and thinks, oh, well, this Volman guy sounds like a creep, you know, will then add more to it in the same spirit.
[01:06:10]  I would think as an author, it must be, I don't know the best way to put this, but almost like a dysphoric experience to see your words used against you in a way.
[01:06:22]  Yeah.
[01:06:22]  Especially, you know, fiction, nonfiction, whatever it is.
[01:06:25]  But as an author, to see that kind of then be used as if they're yours.
[01:06:30]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[01:06:32]  Well, maybe it won't be too different from seeing our words used against us with AI.
[01:06:41]  One of my friends said, oh, Bill, I just ran a few paragraphs of your prose into the AI bot.
[01:06:48]  You want me to read it to you, Bill?
[01:06:50]  I said, oh, that's okay.
[01:06:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:06:53]  Yeah, you don't really use computers, huh?
[01:06:55]  Well, I like word processors.
[01:06:58]  Yeah.
[01:06:59]  So I use that.
[01:07:00]  But then if I need to send something, I'll do it by memory stick.
[01:07:06]  You know, it's unbelievable to me the amount of time people waste, you know, like meaningless communication.
[01:07:18]  Oh, the train was supposed to arrive at 11.07, but, oh, it's going to be 11.17.
[01:07:24]  Oh, wait, sorry, no, I got to send you another text.
[01:07:26]  It's 11.09.
[01:07:28]  I mean, really?
[01:07:29]  And then meanwhile, every time they do it, they're surveilled.
[01:07:33]  Oh, well, this person could really use like at least 13 female urinals.
[01:07:38]  Me try to market her.
[01:07:39]  You know, it's just garbage.
[01:07:41]  Well, it's a slow creep, right?
[01:07:43]  I mean, we get used to it over time.
[01:07:46]  I mean, what most astonishes me is the way they train people to go from their laptops to their iPads to their phones.
[01:07:58]  So you watch people going peck, peck, pick with one finger when you could say it in a tenth the time or you could type it on a computer, you know, in the quarter of the time.
[01:08:11]  It's just so bizarre.
[01:08:13]  Yeah, I mean, is that because you don't have a cell phone, right?
[01:08:16]  Actually, in Lisa's last couple years, I got a burner phone so that I could call her at noon in case she needed me.
[01:08:27]  And then usually I'd call and she didn't pick up.
[01:08:30]  And I've actually kept it.
[01:08:32]  I hardly ever use it, but I like the fact that if I were stuck somewhere, I could call, but no one could ever call me back.

=== Rising Word Counts (07:26) ===

[01:08:41]  Yeah.
[01:08:43]  So when it runs out of minutes, I may get rid of it again because it was perfectly okay without it.
[01:08:53]  I went to Congo for men's journal.
[01:08:56]  This is like right around 2000.
[01:08:58]  And they said, Bill, are you going to get a cell phone?
[01:09:01]  And I said, no, why should I?
[01:09:03]  Well, in case we change the plan when you're halfway done.
[01:09:08]  And I thought, that would be the worst for me.
[01:09:10]  So no way.
[01:09:11]  No, thank you.
[01:09:12]  You're like, don't let me know if we change the plan.
[01:09:14]  That's right, yeah.
[01:09:15]  So instead, I stuck to the plan and they killed the story.
[01:09:18]  It was a glorious victory.
[01:09:20]  But I put it in Rising Up and Rising Down, so I didn't care.
[01:09:24]  There you go.
[01:09:24]  Well, actually, I wanted to go back a little bit because you said, right, because you saying Rising Up and Rising Down reminds me about, you said you put in a word count thing in your contract with Viking.
[01:09:39]  Right.
[01:09:40]  I don't know whether I read this or someone told me, but the word count for the CIA book is 1 million words.
[01:09:47]  Well, it might be.
[01:09:48]  Let's see.
[01:09:52]  When I turned it into Viking, I think it was around 3,000 pages.
[01:10:00]  And so my editor wasn't too happy.
[01:10:03]  So I did what I could and I cut and pruned and pruned and cut.
[01:10:08]  And so then I gave him a version that was 3,400 pages and he was not too happy.
[01:10:16]  Yeah, you, I, there is a, I feel like there is, and maybe I'm off base here, but like, I feel like there is a certain sort of like defiance in you writing some of the longest books.
[01:10:31]  I mean, if I, if I, you could tie together about three of your books and use it to kill almost any human being.
[01:10:37]  Oh, I hope so.
[01:10:37]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:10:38]  Well, you know, have you three seen Berlin Alexanderplatz?
[01:10:44]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:10:45]  Yeah, I mean, I think that is one of the greatest movies ever made.
[01:10:49]  It is.
[01:10:49]  And I also think that Fassbinder was sadistic.
[01:10:55]  He was.
[01:10:55]  Yeah.
[01:10:56]  So, like.
[01:10:56]  Famously, actually.
[01:10:57]  Well, sure, yeah.
[01:10:59]  He literally was, right?
[01:11:00]  Yeah.
[01:11:00]  But yeah, not just in his private life.
[01:11:02]  But, you know, he's sadistic to the viewer.
[01:11:05]  You know, it's just so slow for the first three or four hours.
[01:11:10]  And then the epilogue is just ghastly.
[01:11:13]  And then in between that, it's all brilliant.
[01:11:16]  So I'd say that's sadistic.
[01:11:18]  And I don't think I'm a sadist.
[01:11:20]  I think I have sincerely good intentions.
[01:11:26]  Like originally, Seven Dreams was going to be like one maybe 500-page book, you know, with seven different chapters.
[01:11:33]  And it's not my fault.
[01:11:35]  I just think, well, now what about this?
[01:11:37]  Oh, Bill, you can't possibly leave that out.
[01:11:40]  And then, how did it get that long?
[01:11:41]  What am I going to do?
[01:11:42]  I know.
[01:11:43]  I'll print it in a smaller font and hope they don't notice.
[01:11:46]  But they notice.
[01:11:47]  They always notice.
[01:11:48]  Darn it.
[01:11:49]  So, how are you going to get this book published now?
[01:11:52]  Well, let's see.
[01:11:54]  My Italian publisher and German publisher seem gung-ho.
[01:12:00]  And they say if they can get a third European publisher, then they might qualify for money from the EU Ministry of Culture.
[01:12:10]  They said it would only cost a million Euros for the translation.
[01:12:14]  So, I mean, that's nothing, as long as I don't have to pay it.
[01:12:17]  But you think there's not an American publisher then?
[01:12:20]  Well, let's see.
[01:12:21]  It went from Viking to Knopf, and the guy at Knaf said, you know, that, you know, it might be my best work, and he could have published it five years ago, but he can't now.
[01:12:33]  And so now it's at Grove, and Grove's saying, well, I'm partway through it.
[01:12:38]  It seems important, but I just don't know if I can afford to print all of this crap.
[01:12:46]  Do you think the publishing industry has changed?
[01:12:49]  Well, of course it has.
[01:12:52]  Everything's changed.
[01:12:53]  You know, it used to be that you could go to the pharmacy with a rash and ask the pharmacist to prescribe for you.
[01:13:04]  Now, the pharmacist is a know-nothing who says, oh, I'm not allowed to prescribe, but it's on aisle 8A, no, 7B.
[01:13:17]  And that's as good as it gets.
[01:13:19]  And that's the same experience that you have going to a bank where they don't really do much for you.
[01:13:27]  It's not their fault because they don't know.
[01:13:30]  And more and more, it's like that with publishers, you know, where They want to sell as many widgets as possible.
[01:13:42]  And, you know, Bill's widgets are kind of deformed.
[01:13:47]  You do have some deformed widgets.
[01:13:49]  Well, it's interesting because you've written really short books, too.
[01:13:52]  That's true, yeah.
[01:13:53]  Horrors for Gloria is like 150 pages.
[01:13:58]  I mean, I don't know, but it's a thin fucking book.
[01:14:01]  Rainbow Stories, it's a thin fucking book.
[01:14:03]  And then you get to, and Europe Central is a big guy.
[01:14:06]  And that was like, that's probably your most, is that your most famous book?
[01:14:09]  Is it?
[01:14:09]  I don't know.
[01:14:10]  I don't know.
[01:14:10]  Yeah.
[01:14:11]  And I was such a good sport there because I left off the chronology at the end.
[01:14:15]  I thought, well, why not?
[01:14:17]  And it actually would have been nice for readers, but that's okay.
[01:14:21]  Once in a while, I cave in.
[01:14:24]  I had a question actually about Europe Central.
[01:14:26]  I was reading something recently, and I was wondering if you came across this, about the Soviet translation or performance of Hamlet that Shostakovich did.
[01:14:40]  And what they did was the Soviets in their translation, they took all of the, I was telling the boys about this earlier, because I'm kind of like a little bit of a Hamlet person.
[01:14:51]  She's a full Hamlet.
[01:14:52]  Excellent.
[01:14:53]  I mean, you have things to be a person about.
[01:14:54]  That's not a bad one.
[01:14:56]  Yeah, there's a lot there.
[01:14:57]  Here's the Saxo Grammaticus.
[01:14:59]  Yes.
[01:15:00]  But the Soviets, like what they did was they took all of the interior scenes, they took them and then they made them all exterior scenes.
[01:15:09]  And so they made the entire play to be kind of a drama, like a state drama.
[01:15:13]  That would make sense.
[01:15:15]  That would, you know, reflect the Soviet aesthetic that the inner stuff is suspect and trivial.
[01:15:28]  Did you ever see that 1966 Bundarchuk version of War and Peace?
[01:15:36]  No.
[01:15:37]  That it's just as good as Berlin-Alexanderplatz.
[01:15:41]  They used the full resources of the Soviet state.
[01:15:46]  So they had aerial shots, they had casts of thousands digging trenches and simulated battlefields.
[01:15:55]  And it's incredible.
[01:15:58]  And in the meantime, it shows the whole Soviet perspective very subtly, but in a wonderful way.

=== Birds in War Paintings (08:59) ===

[01:16:08]  Like when Natasha is going to her debut ball, you know, it follows her up the stairs.
[01:16:16]  And at every landing, you know, there's one of the servants standing there and just watching.
[01:16:23]  And the servants are all in focus.
[01:16:25]  And you see each one of their faces, you know, as Natasha goes beautifully and obliviously, you know, past the lower classes.
[01:16:34]  It's really well done.
[01:16:48]  I know, Bryce, you had one question.
[01:16:51]  Oh, well, my question, I always, my ultimate question, I have a few probably on this tack, I guess.
[01:16:59]  What's the biggest bird you've ever seen?
[01:17:01]  The biggest bird, huh?
[01:17:02]  Yeah.
[01:17:04]  I guess an ostrich.
[01:17:07]  That's what I said.
[01:17:09]  Wait.
[01:17:09]  I'm not.
[01:17:11]  You need to explain because listeners were not with us yesterday when we were talking about this.
[01:17:15]  Liz and I were discussing this question, and she said it's going to be an ostrich.
[01:17:19]  You said it was going to be just like maybe an eagle or something.
[01:17:21]  Well, most people say, I didn't say that he was going to say eagle.
[01:17:24]  I said that most people say eagle.
[01:17:26]  And I was like, but what about an ostrich?
[01:17:27]  And you said ostrich didn't count because it's like a big chicken.
[01:17:29]  What's the burst?
[01:17:31]  What's the biggest beflighted bird you've ever seen?
[01:17:35]  Let's see, you know, when I was writing The Ice Shirt, I went to the island of Flate where Eric the Red's homestead was.
[01:17:54]  And you can still see the ruins of it right there.
[01:17:56]  It's pretty cool.
[01:17:58]  And there were some very, very energetic bird colonies.
[01:18:05]  There were like some terns and gulls and so forth.
[01:18:09]  And I don't know which one was the biggest, but they sure seemed huge because they were flying at me and threatening to like snip off my nose.
[01:18:20]  I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[01:18:23]  You know, it was chick raising time.
[01:18:26]  But they were big.
[01:18:27]  Very big.
[01:18:28]  Okay.
[01:18:29]  I feel like that's an inventive.
[01:18:31]  Are you a bird person?
[01:18:32]  Do you like birds?
[01:18:32]  No.
[01:18:33]  I mean, I like birds.
[01:18:34]  I like that they exist, but I couldn't identify a bird for you.
[01:18:38]  I was attacked by a magpie once.
[01:18:39]  Ooh.
[01:18:41]  Did you ever read, like, the short story, The Birds?
[01:18:44]  It's so much better than the movie.
[01:18:46]  No, I never have.
[01:18:47]  Yeah, the short story is happening over the entire world.
[01:18:51]  And it's so awful.
[01:18:54]  You know, the family is just like, they've nailed themselves into their house.
[01:18:59]  And whenever the tides turn, then the birds are motionless.
[01:19:04]  So then they can run out and try to get something.
[01:19:06]  But you're thinking, you know, this is not going to last too much longer.
[01:19:10]  Not sustainable.
[01:19:11]  Yeah, really awful.
[01:19:14]  I mean, you've also, you've famously kind of been like a war reporter, or at least traveled to, let's say, you have been a war reporter, but also traveled to some nasty destinations, or at least nasty at the time that you were there.
[01:19:29]  Are there things that like you've encountered or like sort of glimmers of a story that you've you've seen but haven't been able to pursue?
[01:19:37]  But like things that you you can't explain that you've seen?
[01:19:41]  What you mean or that like sort of like that have a synchronicity or the supernatural or something?
[01:19:46]  Not even not a supernatural, but like a synchronicity or like a or like a you've you've encountered somebody where you're just like there's something going on here, but like I don't have the ability to investigate.
[01:19:58]  Hmm.
[01:20:00]  I wouldn't say so with actual living people.
[01:20:06]  Sometimes there are claims and stories and so forth that I've always wanted to investigate.
[01:20:18]  I have this one, you can call it propaganda magazine from the Serbs during the Yugoslav war called the media just happened to be there and almost every page they're laying out something that claims that it was a libel against the Serbs and this is what actually happened.
[01:20:41]  And I always wished that I could throw a whole bunch of money at one of those and just follow it to the end and see if there was any merit in it.
[01:20:53]  It would be kind of fun to do that with some of our claims too, like how dangerous was Cuba really during the Cuban Missile Crisis, all that stuff.
[01:21:08]  It would be so fascinating to really get to the bottom of one of those stories.
[01:21:13]  Yeah.
[01:21:14]  Is there a, what do you get a sense of your readership?
[01:21:17]  Like who reads you?
[01:21:22]  Well, it's probably over now, but what I used to really enjoy the most was the reading tours where after reading I could go out and drink with the readers and so forth.
[01:21:40]  And so many of my readers are longtime readers and I would see the same ones at different books.
[01:21:48]  And it can be sort of a strange mix of old people and young people.
[01:21:59]  It's kind of hard to say.
[01:22:02]  But I'm always deep down a little surprised, you know, if I walk in somewhere and there are a whole bunch of people and I think, boy, I hate the sound of my own voice.
[01:22:17]  I wish that I wasn't here, but afterward I can kick back and have some beers with folks and that's the best part.
[01:22:25]  I keep just looking around at everything.
[01:22:27]  There's so much.
[01:22:28]  You have such a rich collection.
[01:22:29]  I mean, how long have you been putting stuff up on the walls?
[01:22:34]  I feel like it's just, there's so much on top of so much.
[01:22:38]  Yeah, well, I bought this place in 2004.
[01:22:41]  Yeah.
[01:22:42]  My dad died in 2009.
[01:22:45]  He was really good with his hands.
[01:22:48]  He put up that shelf for me up there.
[01:22:51]  He could saw through a really thick, like a four by four.
[01:22:57]  And it looked like it had been cut by a machine, you know, because his father was a machinist.
[01:23:03]  He did a bunch of stuff for me.
[01:23:04]  But yeah, I'm looking for more real estate.
[01:23:12]  I might figure out a way to start attaching paintings to the ceiling.
[01:23:15]  Yeah, you're running out of space.
[01:23:17]  I mean, there are paintings on the ceiling.
[01:23:20]  Well, you've painted on the ceiling, which I suppose is a little different.
[01:23:23]  Yeah, those were the old air conditioning registers.
[01:23:26]  I thought, instead of look at that ugly sheetrock, I might as well do something.
[01:23:31]  Yeah, I mean, the first time I encountered anything you've written was my friend Eric, who I won't say his last name because he, well, he and I got a lot of trouble together.
[01:23:43]  But he had open all night.
[01:23:46]  Oh, the Ken Miller book.
[01:23:47]  The Ken Miller book.
[01:23:48]  And we just, we liked this because I was like a punk kid in San Francisco.
[01:23:51]  And like, you know, there were all these crazy photos of these skinheads, which were, I mean, I'm 34, so that was, you know, long before my time, but I knew who Mark Dagger was just because of sort of like punk legends and stuff like that.
[01:24:04]  And seeing those guys in that book, and there was all this text, and I was like, who the fuck is this guy?
[01:24:09]  And then later, I mean, you yourself, I mean, obviously you had a long partnership with Ken Miller, but like you've put out a lot of photography books.
[01:24:17]  And when did that like sort of your transition from being a writer to like being like this multimedia kind of guy?
[01:24:25]  I think it was, you know, when I enjoyed Bob Guccione's favor.
[01:24:32]  And suddenly I was writing for Spin.
[01:24:38]  And after a couple of these assignments, I thought, you know, it's so interesting.
[01:24:46]  I should really start taking pictures.
[01:24:48]  So I'm glad that I took pictures in Mostar.
[01:24:53]  The first time I went to Sarajevo, I didn't take a camera.
[01:24:57]  And then once I started taking it, the magazines would always offer to pay me if I would give them the rights.

=== Lot New, Tough Mortgage Paid (04:33) ===

[01:25:07]  And I decided, no, I'll never do that.
[01:25:10]  And so often they wouldn't use my pictures.
[01:25:12]  If they did, they'd pay very little for it.
[01:25:15]  But because I did that, I was able to buy the studio.
[01:25:19]  I sold all the negatives through 2007 to Ohio State.
[01:25:25]  And so they basically paid my mortgage every year for 10 years.
[01:25:31]  And I had a 15-year mortgage, and I threw some money in, so I pailed it off early.
[01:25:38]  So don't ever give everyone the rights, even to your sound recordings.
[01:25:43]  You never know.
[01:25:43]  That's right.
[01:25:44]  Well, nobody wants these, but we wouldn't give it to them anyways.
[01:25:47]  I mean, if you sign them over to Liz, I think that's okay.
[01:25:50]  Liz is in charge.
[01:25:51]  Yeah, that sounds good.
[01:25:53]  That kind of like the price of independence is tough, right?
[01:25:57]  I mean, I think kind of maintaining that independence or especially now.
[01:26:02]  I mean, we're talking about AI.
[01:26:03]  We're talking about, you know, trying to stay away from even just having a cell phone or whatever.
[01:26:08]  I mean, there's, you know, it's tough.
[01:26:13]  It gets harder and harder.
[01:26:19]  My medical provider insists that I do things with this stupid website thing called myhealth.com.
[01:26:30]  So I just don't do it.
[01:26:32]  And so sometimes I don't get appointments, but I think, so what?
[01:26:37]  What do I care?
[01:26:38]  I mean, I've lived long enough and I just hate being told what to do.
[01:26:47]  The worst thing about my cancer operation, you know, was not all the vomiting and the pain and so forth.
[01:26:54]  But one morning I was sound asleep and this nurse came and stuck me in the arm, you know, to get a blood sample.
[01:27:01]  And I woke up and said, what?
[01:27:03]  And she said, sir, do not touch me.
[01:27:06]  I will report you for inappropriate touching.
[01:27:09]  And I'm saying, if you were sound asleep, but I jabbed a needle into you, what would you do?
[01:27:14]  You know, and I just thought, I don't want to be around stuff like that.
[01:27:19]  I'd rather die here in the studio.
[01:27:21]  And there's, I mean, one of the nice things, too, about being near the end of my career.
[01:27:30]  And when I look back, you know, I used to not take certain risks on account of Lisa.
[01:27:37]  And now that Lisa's gone, I don't really have to worry.
[01:27:41]  You know, she's as safe as she'll ever be.
[01:27:46]  And I can do whatever I want.
[01:27:48]  Whatever happens to me now, it doesn't matter.
[01:27:50]  And that's a really, really good feeling.
[01:27:57]  Do you think you're at the end of your career?
[01:28:00]  Very possibly.
[01:28:03]  I'm working on a couple little, you know, picky literary essays.
[01:28:09]  There's something about Siltzenitsen, Shalimov, and Tolstoy that's coming out in German.
[01:28:17]  And then I've been working on a long essay about Melville versus H.P. Lovecraft.
[01:28:24]  Having a great time, but you know, if I die before anything happens, it doesn't matter, you know, because I've been able to do what I want to do.
[01:28:35]  What did you want to do?
[01:28:37]  Well, I wanted to express myself and see a lot of new things, try a lot of new things, and everything comes to an end, you know.
[01:28:49]  So it feels like a lot of things are coming to an end for me, you know, losing Lisa, losing Viking, and I really miss Lisa terribly, but otherwise, it's really not that bad.
[01:29:10]  There was a period like after I put a new roof on this studio, the IRS sent me a half a million dollar demand because one of my suppliers had not paid another supplier.
[01:29:29]  So I went to my accountant's office and he put the phone on speed dial and speaker phone, and the IRS guy was talking kind of like a gangster.

=== Don't Want Government Hater (00:54) ===

[01:29:41]  Oh, yeah, listen, we know, yeah, we don't have anything against Vollman, but look, he's the closest one that we can get to.
[01:29:48]  So we're going to hit him up.
[01:29:50]  You know, so my accountant got him to back off, and then they reinstated it, and they backed off.
[01:29:55]  And I remember thinking that if they had taken the studio away from me, it would be kind of a satisfying thing, you know, to set it on fire and watch it burn as I walked away.
[01:30:15]  And I try not to think that way.
[01:30:21]  You know, I don't want to be a government hater, because what good does that do?
[01:30:26]  But it's also nice to think that you don't have to be too distraught over whatever you lose.