February 2012
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“That’s just a story we’re telling ourselves because we’re rich and bored from...”
– A Brief Q&A with John Jeremiah Sullivan by the New York Times 6th Floor Blog
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My Debt to Ireland
Ireland starts for me with the end of “The Dead,” which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind. I don’t remember what age I was — feels like it could have happened anytime between the 6th and 11th birthdays — but I picture the scene with a strange, time-slurred clarity of detail. His offices were always in the basement, because that’s where he could smoke his...
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An Interview in the L.A. Review of Books
Q. Much of your writing focuses on music. In one interview, you pointed to an early interest in music writing as the locus of your desire to “figure out” good writing. Yeah. Actually, my brother was a big influence here. He was the first person I ever heard talk about a piece of art in a deeply critical way — critical not in the negative, but in the analytical sense. He was just a student of pop...
January 2012
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Congrats to John Jeremiah Sullivan, Finalist for... →
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The Music of Right Now
Traffic was thick now. Llewis turned up the crappy radio in the van as we moved toward the hotel. The DJ played a song called “Slow Motion” by Vybz Kartel, probably the hottest dancehall singer in Jamaica right now. At that moment, Vybz was in jail, suspected (in the vaguest terms) of having gotten involved in Dudus-related violence. “But we’re hoping he’ll get out soon,” said Llewis as he drove....
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“This book, without going overboard, exploded my brain.”
– Goodreads’ Patrick Brown on Pulphead
December 2011
16 posts
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On Reality TV
A thing we know about reality TV is that it isn’t real, and death is as real as it gets, which makes for dissonance. The whole cat-and-mouse game — “Is it real or scripted?” — the slight anxiety of which provides maybe the main pleasure of reality TV, gets squashed by death as if by a giant’s foot, leaving you stunned and waiting for the episode in which they bring these people back. You almost...
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Audio from the New York Public Library event....
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You see what I mean, I hope, about there being something off in these stories. The storks started slaughtering the chickens.
Much of the intra-animal violence seems to suggest sheer madness. Chimps have repeatedly been documented engaging in “rape, wife beating, murder, and infanticide.” Elephants on the African savanna have been raping rhinoceroses, something that is evidently just as startling...
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The Editor and the Writer
Q. You were an editor for about ten years before you started writing professionally. Do you feel being an editor has generally helped or hindered your writing process?
It helps up to a certain point. As an editor, you’re learning the whole time — learning tricks, acquiring tools. You’re getting to watch writers that are much better than you work on their pieces at the workshop level....
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Too Many Books In The Kitchen: John Jeremiah... →
Some very nice words from booksinthekitchen:
Broadly speaking, Sullivan is interested in American culture: from its sugary and omnipresent mainstream (MTV’s The Real World, Michael Jackson) to its dustier, quieter corners (forgotten blues records, ancient cave paintings in Tennessee). There’s not a bad piece in the bunch, most of…
November 2011
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The Miz
“Are you a fan of the show?” I asked her.
“Oh yeah,” she said, “I’ve already seen MJ here, and Cameran [two other, more recent Real World faves]. There’s been a bunch of Real World people here.”
“I’ve been watching it since high school,” I said.
“Oh, me too!” she said.
Then I reflected that, for me, this meant since the show debuted; for her, it meant since last season; which in turn caused me...
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Something Darker than Machismo
I suspect that on some level — the conscious one, say — I didn’t want to be noticing what I noticed as we went. But I’ve been to a lot of huge public events in this country during the past five years, writing about sports or what ever, and one thing they all had in common was this weird implicit enmity that American males, in particular, seem to carry around with them much of the time. Call it a...
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Tension
Interviewer: What is your ideal length to write? John Jeremiah Sullivan: There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you’re supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word—tension—has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer...
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Superstylized bad. Good bad.
It’s one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It’s bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like with that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my...
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The "Michael" Playlist on Spotify →
Michael wants access to the “anatomy” of the music. That’s the word he uses repeatedly. Anatomy. What’s inside its structure that makes it move? -“Michael”
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Buying Weed for Bunny
It was late afternoon now. We were heat-drunk and fatigued and still hadn’t really even begun. We discussed some more and agreed that we should take the opportunity to smoke some of the weed I’d bought, to make absolutely sure that it wasn’t shit, that we wouldn’t be inadvertently insulting Bunny with it. We would be like the king’s tasters, I suppose. Where could...
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"The Last Wailer" Playlist on Spotify →
It had long been a dream of mine to meet Bunny Wailer—a pipe dream, sometimes a literal one in the sense that I dreamed it while holding a pipe. I don’t know what it is about Jamaican music, but creatively it just seems to take place at a higher amperage. It may be an island effect. Isolation does seem to produce these intensities sometimes.
-“The Last Wailer”
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"The Final Comeback of Axl Rose" Playlist on... →
The summer before our senior year of high school, we made a sentimental journey home to drop in on everybody and see how each had fared. This is 1991, when Use Your Illusion came out. “Don’t Cry” was on the radio all the time and fun to imitate. Still, that turned out to be one of the more colossally bleak afternoons of my life.
-“The Final Comeback of Axl Rose”
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A ten-times-as-excellent version of Battle of the...
I don’t know how ready you are to admit your familiarity with the show and everything about it, so let me go through the motions of pretending to explain how it operates. Once a Real World season ends, the cast members who have emerged during the filming as the popular ones (a status that can be achieved through hotness, all-American likability, and/or unusually blatant behavioral disorders) are...
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The "Unknown Bards" Playlist on Spotify →
Including Robert Johnson, John Fahey, and of course Geeshie Wiley.
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October 2011
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Bob Marley, still the captain
Bunny started talking about the young Bob Marley, what he was like when they attended the Stepney All Age School in St. Ann together. Back then they had called Bob Nesta, his first name at birth.
“A lot of people don’t know the nature of the individual,” Bunny said. “From a childhood state, Bob was cut out to be this icon, this saint.” The pain of being biracial had deepened his sensitivity early...
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All anybody talks about with Axl
All anybody talks about with Axl anymore is his strange new appearance, but it is hard to get past the unusual impression he makes. To me he looks like he’s wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truck stop in Monteagle, Tennessee, at two o’clock in the morning about twelve years ago. He looks increasingly like the albino reggae legend Yellowman. His mane evokes...
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They called the void "central Indiana."
Given the relevant maps and a pointer, I know I could convince even the most exacting minds that when the vast and blood-soaked jigsaw puzzle that is this country’s regional scheme coalesced into more or less its present configuration after the Civil War, somebody dropped a piece, which left a void, and they called the void “central Indiana.” I’m not trying to say there’s...
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The reason twenty-nine feet is such a common...
The reason twenty-nine feet is such a common length for RVs, I presume, is that once a vehicle gets much longer, you need a special permit to drive it. That would mean forms and fees, possibly even background checks. But show up at any RV joint with your thigh stumps lashed to a skateboard, crazily waving your hooks-for-hands, screaming you want that twenty-nine-footer out back for a trip to you...