— John Jeremiah Sullivan, in an interview with Critical Mob
Q. Nabokov describes the term “reality” as “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.” In “Getting Down to What Is Really Real,” you seem as much appalled by “Reality TV” as you are fascinated by it. Can you talk about its complicated allure? Why do you think it’s become so popular?
John Jeremiah Sullivan: Seven or the eight years ago, the genre started expanding—to the point where now you’d be hard-pressed to find an aspect of American life it hasn’t touched—and there came a point when you started to feel that for some people, in some people’s minds, it was actually messing with reality. The boundaries were mingling. This was years before you had a spectacle like, a recent Republican VP candidate getting her own reality show, but you could feel that coming. It’s the feeling I was interested in and tried to write about. Genres can do this thing sometimes of giving us frames to shape our lives in, to make sense of them. The novel did that for a couple of hundred years. These shows are doing it now for a lot of Americans. That’s probably not good.
(Read the rest of the interview at Critical Mob.)
— A Brief Q&A with John Jeremiah Sullivan by the New York Times 6th Floor Blog
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 music from an early age. I don’t know what tripped that in him, but it was his thing. We would sit down and go through Beatles chord books together. It wasn’t just a case of rocking back and forth in front of the speaker and saying, “Isn’t this brilliant.” It was saying, “Look at this fucking bridge, look at what they did here. That’s why this is so much better”: the mechanics of it. And he and I would argue a lot. He was an early opponent. So, yes, I definitely think I was delving into and parsing music before writing, at least on a conscious level.
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 holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end—is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?
