[upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Francis Zehrer. And I'm Daisy Alioto. And Daisy, who are we talking to today? Today we're talking to Cora Lewis.
She is a writer and award-winning journalist at the Associated Press, and her fiction debut, Information Age, is coming out on July 15th with Joyland Editions. I read this book, um, last Thursday.
I was waiting for a flight going to Canada for the long weekend, and this, this flight got- Oh, just popping up to Canada for the long weekend, Francis.
Just popping up to Canada for the long weekend for our nation's birthday. Um, but- [laughs]... the flight got delayed, like, an hour, and then it was so delayed on the, on the tarmac, I read two-thirds of the book
between the time I boarded the plane and, and we took off. It was that long of a delay, but it's also just a book that I did not want to put down. It's really... I don't know, it just kind of...
I flowed, I flew through it, I flowed through it. Two different words. Both are true. [laughs] That broke my brain a little bit. Um, yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah. That's why I stopped talking.
[laughs] It's a great tarmac book. I read it in one sitting twice. Mm. Okay, fresh.
Um, I read it when it was first sent to me, I think a few months ago as a PDF, and then my beautiful pre-ordered physical copy arrived yesterday.
And I heard it arrive, and I ran downstairs and got it, and I social media-ed it, and- As if it were Christmas morning... I read it again in one sitting last night as if it were Christmas morning. That's right, Francis.
[laughs] Uh, no, I... Yeah. It, it's really good. I, I'm gonna be recommending it to people. I'll probably pass my copy. I bought a physical copy as well.
I'll probably pass it along to a friend who- Here's another argument for novellas. Okay, they fit in your pocket. Mm-hmm. Great. But also, like, I...
It's easier to recommend to somebody because you're like, even if it... I don't- It's gonna take you just a few hours. Right. Like, I don't think there's anything to dislike about this book, obviously. Mm.
I think it's fantastic, but, like, I think some of what keeps us from recommending something to somebody, especially a busy person, is, like, we are... We automatically just think about protecting that person's time.
Yeah. Um- Mm, true... but this is truly a book you can read one sitting and by design because it is a novella, um, from a new press
made specifically to publish novellas, which have historically been sort of hi- sidelined by the publishing industry- Mm... despite the fact that readers love them.
Um, and so it's a very easy book to recommend and also an easy book to gift 'cause you know you're giving something to somebody that they will be able to finish. Mm. Um, great summer... It's summer wedding season.
I would say it's a great summer wedding accessory in that it fits in a jacket pocket. [gasps] Let's say- Yes... let's say, fellas, you're at the wedding. [laughs] Maybe you went solo. You don't really know anybody.
[laughs] You should know some people. You're at this wedding. You see a bridesmaid. She's- See a bridesmaid. [laughs] You're smoking a cigarette. You pull this out of your pocket. You post up. You know, it's [laughs]...
Let me stop this bit. Wait, um- The wedding sites... maybe I'll do this... No, I might do this on my Instagram later, so nobody steal it. Yeah. Um, have you seen those memes?
It's like, "Little something to take an edge off," and it's like- Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm... holding things like cigarettes. Little something to take an edge off. [laughs] Little something to take the edge off.
I'm doing it with the book right now, and guys, I can lift it with two fingers very comfortably. [laughs] I could lift it with one. And so if you're a man, I bet you could lift it even more comfortably.
Uh, I, I'm not gonna try. Um, okay, let's, let's go talk to Cora.
[upbeat music] Okay, so Information Age is the first novella from Joyland Editions, and what I love about it... The audience can't see this obviously. Oh my God, everyone hold up your copy. We're all looking up.
Okay, well- It's this beautiful blue color... we hope you're all having FOMO because you need to order your own copy, but there's a beautiful classy, like, number one in the upper right corner to- Mm...
signify that this is an edition. That's so nice.
And I think that's really cool because there's something about the idea of books that you not only collect but can go on the shelf together, and I know some people are sickos and do color coordination.
I don't do that, but, um, I love- I don't think any- anybody who listens to this podcast I would hope has long since abandoned that if, if it's something they ever looked at.
Look, we listen, and we don't judge, but, um- Well- Yeah... we're not, I'm neither lis- I'm not listening, [laughs] and I'm actually dictating, and I'm judging, so... [laughs] Um, the podcasters don't judge.
The other thing that I noticed, Cora, is, like, um, there's been... [laughs] Well, I'm laughing 'cause Bluets I would say is almost like an interliterary world meme at this point.
Um, it's a very good book, but it, it has come to signify, I think, more than itself.
So but outside of Bluets, I would say there has been discourse, especially kind of on the technology side about the significance of blue, like Facebook Blue, and then after the success of Facebook, other companies trying to use blue to almost form this, like, subconscious trust and affiliation with Facebook and Meta.
Um, but I was thinking about the color blue and all the smart writing I've read on it because Fitzcarraldo Editions does have- Mm... these plain blue covers.
But what I was gonna say about this cover is it's, it's more purple when I got it in person, and it is a beautiful shade.
Joyland has always used blue, and I, I feel like this might cause a little bit of a publishing trend piece to percolate on- Ooh... the beauty of a monochromatic cover. Mm. But I'm a huge fan.
Um, and it's not entirely monochromatic. There's a beautiful, um, illustration of a smartphone with a wave, and it ties in with the plot. But how involved were you with the design, Cora?
And if you weren't super involved, like, how do you feel about its packaging?
I love the size, which I guess I was involved with in terms of generating the amount of content that would go into the book.Specifically the novella length, the slim volume quality of it. Um, so there's that.
And I was shown some different ideas for the cover, some, uh, different graphics and designs. There was one of a sort of '90s mouse surfing on a wave- Mm...
um, which I, I came to realize also could signify surfing the web, which I hadn't- Mm... really been thinking about, but I liked that play on, for this cover, um, as well.
And yeah, I also love the number one in the corner. Um, I had worked at Dorothy A Publishing Project, which put out these beautiful two slim books a year, and I know, uh, Michelle Lynn King was inspired by them.
And so I think the numbers is a nice way to gesture towards that, towards being one of a series. Um, someone told me when I was expressing anxiety about the book coming out, "You're number one.
It's right there on the cover." [laughs] So- Exactly... I'm holding onto that. [laughs] Well, you and I also had an exchange, also, like, unsolicited.
Like, at no point did you say anything to me about anxiety about a book coming out, but knowing what I know about how it feels to have something in the world, I was telling Cora, um,
about some of my recent embarrassments, again, unsolicited, and that I think anything worth doing has to feel embarrassing.
Like, if it doesn't feel a little bit embarrassing, like, you're not doing enough to put yourself out there. You're not putting enough skin in the game. Um- Do you want to air any of those on the pod?
Yeah, no, I to- I think the one specifically, Cora was part of our Mrs. Dalloway- Mm...
uh, collab with Urban Stems, and I, I, I spelled Virginia Woolf wrong in, like, three different places, and it took me two days to notice.
[laughs] So, and that's like, I'll do, like, 10 of those a week, but [laughs] I mean, maybe not 10, but I feel like I, I do something at least once a day, you know, that was like, "Do one thing every day that scares you."
I'm doing one thing every day that's, like, embarrassing. Um, but it's im- This, wait, this reminds me- It's impossible... of a device I liked in the book that I think came up, it was, like, happened twice, where the...
Which I can't remember reading anybody else doing this recently, where the narrator will mishear a word, and then that's, it's written like that, and then she, she's...
Uh, uh, the one example I'm thinking of is this character says something about miasma, and- Mm-hmm... and she's like, "Miasma? What, what do you mean?" He's like, "No, my asthma." Um- Mm-hmm...
and you, you did that a couple times, which I thought was really fun. Uh, incandescent and iridescent. Mm. Mm. In that interaction between the narrator and her younger sister.
I don't know if the miasma/my asthma will play on radio, but I guess, right. [laughs] She thinks it's the Greek cloud of shame, and he means the, uh, difficulty with your lungs.
But because we're talking on the radio, you can't see that it's spelled differently. Mm. So I felt the need to do that. But I, yeah, I loved those moments. Our listeners, we make them use their imagination.
Their, their minds are agile.
And I will say, when you said slim volume, I was thinking about the narrator does like to smoke a cheeky cigarette, and somebody should, should coin the Virginia slim volume, which is when you buy a novella- [laughs]...
but there's a single cigarette taped to it. Mm. Also, speaking of embarrassing, so I'm wearing my Joyland hat.
And so taking a step back, we, we sort of touched on this in the intro, but Joyland Editions was started by Michelle Lynn King and Mattie Crum, both of whom have contributed to Dirt.
Mattie wrote a great piece about Sheila Hade- Haddy. Um, and Michelle wrote an amazing piece for our Summer of Bibliomancy last year called Is That Right?
Um, but they started Joyland Editions to address, like, a specific hole in the publishing market that's bothered me for a long time, which is, where are all the novellas? Mm.
People love the slim volume, but the publishing industry, like, you know, big publishing, is biased against it, and I've never understood why.
So I was so excited to see Joyland Editions enter the world, and I bought this hat. And so the hat says... Well, it's backwards. I haven't memorized the hat, actually.
[laughs] It's a quote from a story by Fran Hofer, and it's, "If you use this"- Dialogue in your movie, you owe me $4,000. Thank you, Cora.
Um, so I haven't worn the hat because you know when you have a hat that's, like, it's almost too clever? Mm.
I'm s- I'm afraid somebody's gonna ask me about it, and I'm, like, gonna do a bad job, like- Forget the reference... about the hat. Yeah. Like, you know, it just, it just begs somebody to ask you about it.
Um, but I love it, and the other reason I haven't worn it as much is the last time I had a white hat, somebody sent it to me, and I was wearing it, and my husband and I were eating dinner, and we had finished up.
And you know you're, like, at the table still, and you and your spouse are just, like, shooting the shit. Mm-hmm.
We're shooting the shit, and, um, I, like, reach up to sort of, like, rub my forehead, and I push the hat up, and the hat, like, in slow motion, flips forward and falls into the remnants of pasta sauce on my plate.
And Ben just goes, "Oh, that's rough." [laughs] I mean, the hat is totally destroyed. I washed it, but it's done. So- You're a great, great-... a part of me is like- It's a pretty bright white. Yeah. Mm. Yeah.
It's- You're a proud Italian. I am, I'm Italian. Yeah, I know. I'm saying that to you. You're a proud Italian. So you're saying I deserved that? No, I'm saying it's typical. It's typical for Italians. Let's move on.
Let's move on. Okay, let's move on. [laughs] Um, okay. I w- I was wondering about the title.
Uh, I, I was looking at your previously published fiction, and this was used as a title for a piece in the Yal- Yale Review published in 2022, which reading it as I did earlier, it, it was, it was, it was really interesting because the first two lines are the same as the first two lines of the book.
Um, but then the other bits are all these bits that are scattered throughout the book, and some of my favorite lines. Like, one is, umBack in New York, a booth in a bar.
"It's got Warhols on the walls," I hear a woman tell her date she's hoping to impress. "The thing about Warhol," says the date, "was he was prolific."
Which is such a great line and, and then it's a bunch of these, and I think all of these are, are scattered throughout the book. Um, so my question is, was this...
Like, where did the title come from, and was this particular piece of fiction, like, the moment when you, you were starting to form all these notes you'd been taking into this book?
Or was it, did this come a little bit after and you were kind of testing the waters? Yeah. This piece was picked from the slush by Rachel Manheimer, who's a very talented poet and editor.
Uh, I really recommend her writing, and it was my first or second year at the MFA, and I was sending out these pieces that were composed of snippets and notes that I was organizing into what would become this book.
And I think I had just found that title
and was so happy about it because it seemed to capture so much about what the book was, a kind of coming of age in a time of information overload, and it was maybe playful but also kind of, um,
you know, capacious and a little bit understated maybe. It wasn't kind of hitting you over the head with what the book would be about, but also technology.
And I was so happy that Rachel took that piece because it felt like the first kind of affirmation that I was onto something and it was okay to just string these little scenes together and the vignettes would accumulate to something that felt entertaining enough and meaningful enough to constitute a story.
Well, Francis and I both had the same question, and I'm sure that you'll get it a lot, which is like, "Does this count as an internet novel in the sense that the internet novel has been discoursed about?"
And for me, I think
it's very apparent to me as somebody who also worked in journalism similar to the narrator, similar to yourself, that, yes, there is an element in the book of thinking in fragments that the current attention economy seems to incentivize in that, like, if your attention is constantly shifting, the thoughts that you're having are shorter and they might string together in, um,
you know, unusual ways. But there's something about it that's also very, um,
timeless in the sense that, like, reporters have always kept a reporter's notebook where you're taking down fragments, where you're taking down observations, where you're taking down,
uh, you know, a single sentence somebody says, and the narrator talks about, like, always listening for that sort of key line that's going to be, like, the lead or start the nut graph or be the kicker and be the thing that ties a piece together, especially when you're working in a style that's, like, more like AP style where, and there's a line where the narrator talks about a certain type of news site where it's like
unstyled news is its own style. It is like the five paragraph essay of news stories, and anyone who reads AP or Reuters or a less styled news piece can tell you that.
There are components and there are building blocks, but those building blocks always have to include some of these lines that you're listening for. And so I think
the way that this book is like an internet novel to me is inseparable from the way it's like
a journalist's novel, um, which is part of the reason why I wanted to have you come on the podcast because I think for that reason, this really sits between, um, you know, Dirt's, th- the way Dirt writes about literature and the way that we, like, cover tech.
Yeah, I, I think all of that is so true. I'm so happy you took all of that from the book because I feel the same way. I think
Renata Adler wrote Speedboat before the internet, and it was the same reporter's notebook arranged according to her own associative logic.
And Patricia Lockwood writes in this way, and she's definitely a writer of the internet. And so the fact that there can be these connections between these two styles across time is really satisfying to me.
Or Elizabeth Hardwick wrote this way, or, um, you know, it doesn't seem to me necessarily tied to the present in all the ways you describe.
But then at the same time, of course, it's, it's really modern and contemporary to have these blips and these telegraphic dispatches, um, like tweets or Instagram posts or whatever you can scroll through really easily.
One of my favorite things, uh, that you did in this book too was, uh, very short chapters. There's one chapter that is literally one sentence.
Um, I, I'll read it, but maybe producer Tom bleep it out just to, so the read- so the listeners have to actually read the book. [laughs] Um, but okay, so it's part four, chapter six.
How about a five mile walk along Sand Point to Mt. Bainbridge?
Um, that was just, like, blew me away reading that, and then it's just, that's the only thing on the page, and then there's a number of short chapters after that.
And I was reading it as the PDF on my phone, and I started, like, taking screenshots of all of them, and maybe there was some before then. I don't know. Uh, but, but that one, I just, like, I just, like, stared at it.
It was so stark. Um, yeah, tell us about, about these super short chapters. I think that's the shortest one, but there's a couple others like that that just, like, are such a, such a power move.
[laughs] Well, I'm really grateful to Maddie and Joylan for being behind those moves and the way the book is arranged and edited that they let me include chapters like that.
I think there was a version of the book without any chapters and without any sections, and there were some where there were headings kind of grouping, you know, what's going on under particular categories, which was definitely wrong, so I'm glad we got rid of that.
But [laughs]
I do agree that, um-The way that chapters operate in the book is helpful in terms of creating, yeah, just rhythm and a cadence that you can then interrupt in a fun way, where it's kind of carrying you along in the longer chapters.
I think the juxtaposition between the few cases where there are longer scenes and you get to linger and maybe a memory or, um, something dramatic that's happening, and that put up against these very short texts or an email or a quiz, I find really fun as a reader and writer, I guess.
And I also think it mimics the experience of being on the internet or being alive right now. Definitely.
There's something about writing in fragments that reminds me of the kind of the old wisdom about painters like Picasso, where people are like, "Oh," like, "why..."
You know, children are always like, "Why is this guy able to do just an abstract shape?" And of course you're just like, "I could do that."
And obviously a lot of the artists who worked in surrealism or abstract expressionism, cubism, whatever you wanna call it, first mastered the fundamentals of figure drawing. And,
you know, I think there's a certain type of person who might say like, "Oh, well, I could absolutely write a book in fragments." But there is an artistry and a craft to, like, putting them together.
And one way that I've heard, uh, it described by one of my mentors, Laurie Stone, is sort of like, who also often writes fragmented prose, is, like, running your hand across the page and feeling where the heat is. Mm.
Mm. I also think there's something very musical about it, and as somebody who's interested in, like, ambient and experimental music, it feels a little bit like the musical corollary of a fragmented novel.
But I'm interested to hear from you, like, how do you... When you have so many fragments, you're not gonna use all of them in the book.
You're gonna have to leave some of them on the cutting room floor, as meaningful as they feel. Um, how do you know you've reached kind of a critical mass of inclusion and, and material?
And, like, when you're putting it together, obviously associations are unconscious, but is there, like... Are you picturing something in your head? Is there a little, like, bulb that goes off? Is it...
Does it feel like composing? And how do you... Like, how does it feel, like, in your body when you're like, "Okay, this is done"? I love the composing analogy. That's so nice.
And I love thinking about the musicality of it, too. Yeah, I think there is something intuitive to knowing if something is harmoniously paired or if it's, uh, dissonant somehow.
And, um, yeah, I guess I do feel it in my body or my ear when I read it back to myself. I think because it took me such a long time to write, I was submitting little excerpts of it and, as stories, for a number of years.
I mean, 2020 was when that one was published, and it's 2025. So sometimes editors would kind of affirm for me that something had a shape or enough of a shape to constitute a story.
And then there were enough stories to constitute a novella according to these two wonderful people who are publishing it, [laughs] if not the big five publishing houses.
And even then, I think editing the book with Maddie, we thought a lot about character and plot and what could...
what a reader might want at different points in the book, um, where context was needed or more characterization was needed, and the fragments, as lovely as they are and as fun as it is to have to make those jumps yourself, um, maybe didn't quite add up.
And so I think for me, always having other smarter readers was, is also really helpful- Mm-hmm... as a part of the process.
This, this, like, composition of the fragments is reminding me of, like, a, a way of writing that, uh, that shifted for me a couple years ago.
I was working at a job where we used Notion, and, like, I always joked that 90% of my job was just using Notion. Um, and in Notion, right, it's all blocks.
And before, any, like, writing I'd done was in Microsoft Word or something.
But there I was writing entire things, blog posts, articles, social media posts, whatever, in, in Notion, and it, like, led me to start taking, like, a block here and put it there, whether it's, like, in a, in a different piece or whether it's just, like, rearranging blocks because it's so easy to just pick up and drag within the app.
And now most of my writing I do in Beehiiv, which is, like, the same sort of thing, and I, and I'll move blocks around like that.
Um, but I, I just bring it up because it strikes me that, like, the idea of this, whether or not this is an internet novel, like, that kind of, like, fragmentar- fragment...
that, that fragmentary way of writing and the way that, like, over time, like, reading this, this piece from 2022, The Information Age, in the Y- Yale Review, it's like seeing how these fragments have moved.
Um, I gue- I guess may- mostly an observation [laughs] classic, but if there's a question in there, it is, like, how, how were you...
Like, actually, were you doing, like, you know, printing things out and cutting things and moving them around? How did you compose when you wrote?
Yeah, Cora, were you socially engineered by Markdown or the WordPress CMS? [laughs] Elsa, do you write in the CMS? Um, not when I can help it, but sometimes- Yeah, it's the most dangerous game. True.
I forget who this is. Like, if this is you, write in. I, I do believe it was, like, one of the older Gawker adjacent people, but somebody writes in the URL field of their browser. That's horrifying.
I also know people who still write longhand and type it up. Oh, wow. My handwriting has completely atrophied, atrophied, so I can't do that. But, uh, it is...
It's interesting how the tools that we can, we use shape the way that we think. Again, not an, not a novel [laughs] observation. Very much sort of how, what this is about as well.
But also, like, there's, like, a real, like, warmth to this book in that, like, I think it's equally about how the relationships that we're in shape the way that we think. And
it reminds me of, like-Um, this book that we put out, or Dirt put out with Night Gallery earlier this year, where, like, we solicited people's, um, iPhone note screenshots.
And it was cool to see at aggregate that, like, putting something in an iPhone note represents a certain type of thinking. Mm-hmm. Um, but there was, like, a lot of warmth to those as well.
Some of this was written in the Notes app for sure, and then into Microsoft Word, and then printed out onto paper. And then yes, I did rearrange them and cut them up and use index cards and all the things.
Uh, there was definitely a two-week period where I had this residency at Millay Arts, and I was using different color-coded, um, color codes and color, uh, highlight, highlight-highlighter colors. Sorry, I'm stumbling.
But, um,
to sort of follow her professional life and her personal life and her family life and where she was, and to try and distribute all of those things in an even way so that it wasn't too much of anyone at, at a given time.
And I do think it's really modular, and that's something that is interesting to me about the book, that a lot of these fragments could exist in different places, and maybe that would change the story.
But that, um, taken together, you know, you do arrive at the same place over this period of years. Was there a bulletin board involved in this process? [laughs] No, it was mostly on the floor in a big desk.
[laughs] There should've been a bulletin board with string, like the- QAnon style.
Da- oh, Daisy, what, what you were just saying about warmth, uh, the book I read directly before this was Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection.
Uh, so I can't help but, like, make some comparisons 'cause, you know, I read them like a, a couple weeks apart. Um, but when, what you were saying about warmth, Daisy, like, I was thinking of this.
Uh, like, these are both books about being in your 20s in the 2010s and working as a young professional in vaguely media on your laptop, um, in a city, one in New York, one in Berlin.
Uh, but the Latronico one, which I also really liked, uh, is, like, so cold and rigid. There's no dialogue. It's all told in this very, like, matter-of-fact way.
Whereas yours is, is so warm and is so lived in and, like, deals with some of the same themes.
But w- like, the Latronico is like, there'll be this one chapter that's about, like, how this couple is thinking about, like, are they polyamorous or are they not?
Or how are they and their friends dealing with this refugee crisis and virtue signaling and all that. Whereas yours touches on a bunch of these other themes of being in your 20s and 30s in a city, um,
but in this more modular, warm, lived-in way that I, I think they're very different.
I'm not trying to, like, say one is, has a quality that the other doesn't, but- And mine's almost entirely dialogue, just to top it off. Yes. Yeah, it is. [laughs] I don't know.
Um, but no, it, it was a really, it was a really interesting pairing. I really, I really liked reading them together. Um, I, I, maybe I f- I found, I found both relatable in different ways.
Like, I'll, I'll ramble for a second more. I, I, I read all of, I read all of your book on a plane last Thursday. Two-thirds of it I was, we were just taxiing, right? It was, it was very captive audience.
But, like, reading through it, some of the ways you talk about death and, like, and, and, and birth, like, I was thinking a lot that morning, um, this famous football player, soccer player had died, Diogo Jota, and just, like, reading all these, he's 28, and his brother died, he was 25, in this car crash, and reading all these tributes from people.
And then one of my best friends had had a baby born the same day too. So I was, uh, very in a mood of thinking about, like, life and death, and you have these two lines I pulled.
Um, "Over eggs, bacon, and hash browns, Saul tells me vari- varied definitions of life now going. His favorite is the sum of functions by which death is resisted."
And then there's this other one, "We think the point of a kid is to grow up because it does grow up, my father tells me by the sandbox. But the point of a kid is to play.
If you always look to the end, the point of life would be death." Um, so, so I guess to put a pin in it, like, those I found very, very warm and moving ways to, to think about death and to think about life and children.
Um- The point of life is to put a pin in it. The point of life is to put a pin in it. It is. [laughs] Uh- The point of life is to circle back. Is to circle back.
Oh, like, are you trying to circle back on something here, Daisy? No, I'm not. Well, I, I mean, the, the point of life is to piggyback off of that. [laughs] Um, [laughs] I, I...
One thing that I wrote down, I read the, I don't wanna stunt on Francis, but I did read your book twice. I read it- Mm-hmm... in one sitting- Standard it was, yeah...
when you emailed me the PDF, and then I read it again last night in one sitting, uh, to be prepped for this. And, um, I wrote down,
uh, you know, everyone, basically everyone in the book, everyone the narrator encounters has a clever line. Like, there's something about the book where it seems like everyone is capable of cleverness. Mm.
Which if you talk to most people about the majority of the population, like, are most people clever? It's like, no, most people are stupid as shit. Like, you know what I mean?
But there's something about journalism, I think specifically, that requires you to see the cleverness in every person or to want to highlight the most clever thing somebody has said in the entire time- This generosity...
that you've talked to them. Yeah, it's a generosity of spirit, and I think that that also contributes to the warmth of the book. Like, there's no character in the book who is characterized as stupid or unfeeling.
Um, and that's, like, a specific type of filtering in the narrator's worldview that I think is really informed by her vocation as well. I think that's right.
I may have said this previously, but, uh, that idea that you're supposed to quote people warmly and generously- Mm...
and accurately, and that's the ethic of being a fair-minded journalist, that you're not really trying to catch people out.
You're trying toTake the best version of their argument and put that on the page, and, um, so maybe that, that did lead to some of what's going on in the book. So the flip side of that being that
it's a fairly stylized version of life since, of course, no one is witty and clever all the time, and there isn't a zinger on every page of life and, you know.
[laughs] I mean, hot take though, I think memory is the stylized version of life. Mm-hmm. Like, experiences are not stylized as you go through them, but- You can't write life to scale. No, not at all. Alan Lightman.
Alan Lightman does. I mean, unless you're like Knausgaard, even that- Well, but even Knausgaard, uh, no, he... It's so stylized, and that's like, you know, I... That's, like, his...
So much memory in him, like, trying to remember these things, but it's, it, [laughs] it's very long- Time out... but that doesn't mean it's to scale. Which is not- Yeah... how experience feels in the moment.
Yeah, I mean, not to dip into controversy, and, like, admittedly, I did not read the Rolling Stone article about how [laughs]
the outlet seen in LA bringing back, like, anti-woke, like, whatever, um, I don't care, shut up. But- I am, uh, pleased to report I have no idea what you're talking about. [laughs] Okay, great. So you win the internet.
I think, I mean, when I've heard... I didn't read the piece, but when I've heard that type of writing argued for in the past, it's always like they feel like they're advocating for realism, right?
And it's like- Mm-hmm... how can you advocate for realism in the world of literature when memory itself, the, the second an experience passes and you retell it, you're not doing stenography.
Everything that you write is a form of curation, and your brain is [laughs] in my piece where I... about AI where I, I talk about how attention is the thing that makes us human. Mm. Like, I say, like, attention- Seminal.
[laughs] Seminal, shut up. I'm not, I'm not joking. I can't. Attention is, like, the biological curator, right? And death is the endpoint curator. Mm-hmm. Um,
so if our brain is already curating experience for us, like, what is the point for arguing for the ugliest version of realism? Like, it's more honest to say like, "I wanted to write something ugly",
um, than to try to say it's realistic 'cause it... the second it ends up on the page, you've, you've exited realism. It hasn't been real since you went through it.
Even as you were going through it, like, you were, you know, we can't... It's like, sorry, I, I'm gonna stop talking, but it's kind of the intellectual equivalent of like, you know, the physical imp-
the physics principle. Like, we're never touching each other, right? Mm. Our molecules are pushing against each other. Um- So if you're going- So we're never really writing our experience either. Right.
So if you're going to stylize it, it's just a question of how you're styling it, if you're making it more beautiful or less beautiful or higher definition or blurrier or what it is you're choosing to pay attention to.
Or AP style. [laughs] Or AP style. [laughs] You might say that- Maybe your next book should be called AP Style. [laughs] You might say that writing is the sum of functions by which ugliness is, is resisted.
[laughs] I don't know. Ooh, Francis, write that down. Wait, I missed that one. What was that? Uh, I, I was circling back on your own line saying that maybe writing is the sum of functions by which ugliness is resisted.
[laughs] By which truth is resisted? By which, I don't know, truth is found? No, now we're really- That's maybe-... getting into epist- the epistemological weeds. Yeah. So we're getting a little pedantic on here.
Um, I think I will say I didn't... I hope that the book doesn't feel sort of sanitized. That I don't think that is- Not at all...
yeah, something that I would want, you know, where you sort of burnish all the rough edges.
Like, hopefully there's still some roughness and friction, but even amidst all of the curation, the very careful years-long curation. [laughs] It definitely does not feel sanitized, and like I...
So I have had the pleasure of editing Maddie and Michelle. I've never been edited by them. Ooh. But one thing, like, they both do in their writing is, you know, like, a, a very skilled architect,
when you walk into a building that's been done by a skilled architect and it's clear that the building has been really designed to unify form and function, this is not just a utility,
you know, based space or function based space, that you don't think about the architecture of the building.
Like, when it's done well, you're not in there thinking, "Oh, and this is how the walls connect to the ceiling," um, or, you know, "This, this wall is, you know, designed to hold this amount of weight," because, you know, the function of the architect is almost to make you forget you're in the space.
But then there'll also be, like, a little bit of a hint of the structure, right? Like, you get a little bit of a peek of the craft, and that is something I've noticed both about Maddie and Michelle.
They're such skilled architects in their writing.
Every once in a while, they give you, like, a little peek of, of the beams or a little peek of the joints just to remind you that somebody has connected these things for you, and I very much felt that, like, reading this book.
It did not feel overly stylized or sanded down. It felt like walking through a space like that. I'm so glad to hear that. I appreciate that. But I have to ask, um, did you have, like, a playlist for the book?
Did you have, like, a aesthetic mood board? I guess. I... There's some art and some film, visual art and some films that I think didn't quite make it into the book that used to be there.
There was a Chantal Akerman, the movie News From Home, actually, which may be too on the nose, you know, in which she's reading her mother's letters to her while she makes a film in New York,
uh, that had been in the book. The narrator just sort of watched that movie, and there were some sort of museum trips and o- and other references to visual art. I think musically, um-Gosh, what was I even listening to?
Some Max Richter. [laughs] I, I don't always, um, I listen to the radio lately while I write, which I think is also kind of a appropriate, um, source of music
in that it's also got these voices that it feels very alive and warm, and someone's curating for you, you know? Um, so that's, that's probably part of it.
But also, just the internet was such an aesthetic for the years that I was working at BuzzFeed News and the years in which I was writing this book and the last couple of years.
So I think kind of the wash of information and data and visuals that were coming at all of us memes, if that can be an aesthetic. Wait, I want- I don't know...
I wanted to, I wanted to ask about your relationship to the internet and social media, in that I, you know, in preparing for this I, I looked up your, your social media and such as one does. Well, it's quite sparse.
LinkedIn, very sparse. Twitter, I was very quickly able to scroll to the end of your tweets. There's only like a couple dozen of them. Um- Okay, but she does have the handle Cora, which I think- Which is insane...
is a bigger flex than having tweeted a lot. That is a massive flex. Let's see about that for me. Yep. But so there's that, and then, uh, you...
I read your Creative Independent interview, and like your Letterboxd was mentioned. That's maybe your most active. You have a Goodreads. You've only logged three books, I think your, your own and maybe a friend's.
Um- Wow. But all of this to say, like w- at the beginning of this we were talking about like is this an internet novel, et cetera.
Um, but I just found it interesting that you don't seem to be a very prolific, um, user of some of these platforms. That's true. Poster at least. Maybe you're a, an addicted consumer like myself. Um, I don't know.
It's like how so many bartenders are sober. I love that. Yes. [laughs] That's a good point. I will say, like this book does take place in the same canonical universe as The Llama Chase. Um, and for that we are grateful.
Um, I actually, I like that the narrator sort of picks up on this theme and what goes viral- Mm... and what, where a lot of misinformation lives because I think I've thought about this a lot too.
Like, why is it so recurrent that like when there's like a flood, um, or a big natural disaster, people love to create a fake story about, um, animals being free from the zoo- Oh...
or like, you know- It's like the sharks swimming on the highway, and it's a climate meme... yeah. And I've like done a little bit of research. That, something like that did happen I believe in Tbilisi, Georgia,
um, and has happened other places, but most of the time it's a hoax. And my theory is like it's a way for like the unconscious imagination to imagine a, a version of freedom that we don't feel like is available to us.
Mm-hmm. Um, but I also think like part of the reason the llama chase went so viral is like we were rooting for the llama and the llama's freedom.
Um, and I think I was thinking about that the most when I was writing about Flaco the owl. But we've, we've moved past the sort of like lolcats version- Mm-hmm...
of the viral internet, but I still think there's a, a huge interest in, um, what animals are doing really at any given time. I think that's true. Recently there were two
animals that escaped and ate a bunch of treats for a week, and that was a story that became popular. It's just a timeless tale. The llamas was definitely a time when BuzzFeed was also engineering attention.
Um, another, I mean, the dress was just an optical illusion that went so wildly viral. That kind of just Yanny/Laurel. The watermelon. Yes, the watermelon. I remember where I was when the watermelon burst.
[laughs] And I was in the International Business Times newsroom I'm pretty sure. I was in the BuzzFeed newsroom. Wait, is the watermelon one that you guys wrote?
Yeah, gathered around a computer while everyone was like, "Why can, why didn't you think of this Daisy? You're our social media director." [laughs] The watermelon?
Do you remember putting the rubber bands on the watermelon and just- Oh, to make it explode... yeah, it exploded... you're not if you didn't work on the internet. Me too. Yeah. I mean, maybe.
I mean, to answer your question, I think if anything, working in media has given me this wariness of the internet- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm... and its power and what it can do.
And listening to you describe my entire internet presence, which by the way that you found everything, so good job. [laughs] Is- That's what somebody who had another secret account would say. Yeah.
[laughs] I guess it's me. That's exactly what I would say if somebody had- There's a small amount of things... well, a lot of pots calling kettles black over here... Cora, are you on Fragrantica? [laughs] Which one?
Oh, Fragrantica. No. That's okay. Got it that way. I, oh, for the fragrances. Mm-hmm. I did hear about this. Yeah. It's for the fragrances.
There's also like sometimes- It's also for, you know, the screenshots for Twitter... a banner that says, "Free Assange. Free Assange." [laughs] Oh, really? Oh, yeah. You haven't seen that. The...
Wait, the an- as an aside, the animals what are animals up to thing, um, there's this photographer Steven Gill. Are either of you familiar with him? Little bit. I don't think so.
So I, I found him because Knausgaard like wrote the m- one or two like intros to a couple of his photo books, and I read it in The New Yorker, and so I bought these books.
But my favorite one is The Pillar, and he's this British photographer, but I think, I think he... It's like rural Sweden or Norway where he moved.
Um, and he lives on some farmland, and he set up like a fence post, and then he set up another fence post facing it with like one of those like hunting cameras where it's like activated by motion.
And so there's like, I don't know, a couple hundred photos in this book. Um, but it's just these beautiful scenes of like a flock of crows going by or like two crows like grappling like in midair or eagles or something.
And then he has this other one too, Night Procession, where he did a similar thing but set up in the woods, and it's like boar and deers. And it's all kind of sepia toned because it's at night.
Um, so I'll say for fans of animals, what are they up to, uh, I, uh, S- Steven Gill, amazing photographer. Um- Trail cam?... just wanted to throw that out there. Awesome. Trail cam, that's the word. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I, maybe I follow this on Twitter. There's some really beautifully curated trail cam photos out there. Yeah. I bet some are out there.
Also, there's a photographer, uh, who did a project I wanna say called Four Eyes or Eight Eyes- Mm... where he took p-These beautiful outtakes of what the Google car, Google Maps cars were shooting.
So it might be animals, it might be people, but they're these very curated images of kind of outtakes of when they're, the cars, you know, are traveling the world and, and mapping it. So I recommend that also.
It was kind of a surreal, half automated, half human visual- Yeah... series.
It- I love the section of the book where the narrator is walking her friend's dog, Milo, and I think it's like, "Oh, you have to tell Milo what's what." And the narrator just repeats, "Milo, what's what?"
Like- It's important in the whole book. There are not- Yeah. [laughs] Spoilers top to bottom. Um- We could have Tom bleep more of these, honestly. That could be fun. Actually, I love it. I love being- I would like to-...
stopped... I would like to let, let the record show that we got 41 minutes and 20 minutes, 20 seconds into this podcast without asking Cora about how much of the book is, um, autobiography.
I'm not going to ask you that question because it is the worst question, but I am going to ask you, like, to the extent that you
combine experiences that are adjacent to ones that you clearly had, and obviously things from your imagination, like, especially as the sort of characters, like siblings are involved, but also, like, romantic scenes are involved, like, do you feel,
do you feel, like, a pressure to account for, like, the representation of the parties, I guess? Mm. Like, how do you, how do you think about that when putting it together? 'Cause we talked about in journalism, like,
your duty to your subject is to not misrepresent them or not purposely make them look bad. And, you know, in fiction or auto-fiction, there's no such requirement, but
I can tell- Famously now Scott being sued by his family members. I can tell when I read auto-fiction that's been written, like, a little too close to the divorce or whatever, and it's like, well, is this the character?
Is this the best version of the character, or is this working yourself some stuff out on the page? Um, and like, yeah, I don't know.
It's like when you have such a range of experience put into it, like the innocence of the siblings, but also like, you know, passionate, romantic encounters, old bosses, like, you know, characters that sort of don't represent the Me Too movement, but sort of gesture at it, how do you, like, what do you think your duty is when writing a book like this?
I do think one has a duty to represent
reality to the best of one's abilities or experience to the best of one's abilities, and hopefully to rep- you know, if you're drawing from life, to do so in a way that's thoughtful and not
out of spite or some other worse impulse. Um, for sure, I think that ties into kind of the journalistic energy where, you know, you don't wanna come to a project with a motive that's off.
Um, and I think I was pretty young when I started writing this, or I was drawing from experiences from when I was young, and because 10 years have passed and I'm in my mid-30s, there is this way in which this book is about a completely different set of people than- Yeah...
currently exist. [laughs] Uh, myself included, so- We're their parents. [laughs] Right. Yes. No one will know what that means, but... [laughs] They will if they do the reading. They will if they do the reading.
[laughs] Yeah, that's the kind of paradoxical and interesting and fun part, I think, of drawing from life for me. Um, that may be in a future book I'll, I'll do it less.
It just seems like such a rich source of material and energy. It's hard for me not to, I guess, in my, in my writing practice. And then moving things around also
helps me feel as though I'm exer- you know, exerting control as an author over what the story is and how it's operating, and that changes it from, you know, again, being some account of reality to a fictional-
That's a good one... you know, work. Are you- I'll s- Okay. Sorry, go. No, I've talked a lot. Okay. Go ahead. [laughs] No, I was just gonna say, you- Let the men talk. Okay, okay. Let men speak.
They're always getting interrupted. I'm just being silenced.
Um, no, y- well, you were just saying maybe in a future book, are you, like, gathering fragments in the same way, like with a mind towards something else brewing? Definitely. Yeah, always.
I think I can't turn it off, and because it's how I write, I'm, I'm still at it, and I'd love to write a full-length novel soon. Mm. And if you're doing it this way, it takes time, apparently. So- [laughs]...
uh, [laughs] yes, I'm at it. Definitely, definitely still at it. One, ugh, okay, allow me one more indulgence about another book I just read.
Uh, l- the last, over the last two days, I read another slim tome, um, The Moon and the Bonfires by, I don't really know how to say an Italian name, it's like Cesare Pavese.
Um, and I, again, really interesting to read after these two because well, well, well your book and Perfection by Lettironico are both about, like, being in your 20s and 30s and end with, like, "Okay, we're in our 30s now, and what does that mean?"
And looking back in the 20s, but not so much, like, looking forward, like, a little bit, but you're just there in, in your mid-30s. This one was interesting because it's like, it was published in 1950, and it's about...
It's some autobiog- autobiography, but not much. Um, but it's about this guy who was, like, a bastard in Italy, rural Italy in, like, the '30s, and he comes back after the war, after he's made it in America.
Um, and it's him kind of wandering this small rural area where he grew up and trying to figure out what went on there during the war, and it kind of skips all of his 20s and 30s.
But one of the things I took away from it was, like, it's about how even, how he being, you know, this poor bastard literally, um, and even, like, the rich people who worked for, and he, that, that he worked for, and even the richer people that they looked up to, it's like they all just, like, wanted more than they had, and they all had the same level of discontentment with what they had.
Um-And so reading, you know, finishing your book and the Latronico book, like, and then reading this, it's like those, they both end at this point of like,
"Well, we've had this, and we, it's kind of wrapped up, and like, what do we want next?" Um, I don't know.
For context too, like, uh, Pavese killed himself like a year after writing this, so there's like another edge there of like maybe his personal view of like, "It's never enough. It's never enough." Um, I don't know.
I just wanted to, to ramble a bit there about that.
That was a good ramble, and I will say like, I think the best books and like even the best shows, like I definitely feel this way about Mad Men, you close the book and you have a sense of the narrator continuing or the characters continuing to live their life off the page.
Yeah. And so if you start something in your 20s, it's written about somebody in their 20s, you know, you are almost carrying around a past version of that character in your head, but now like the reader is too.
But if that character was going to like actually live their life off the page and catch up to you, their life might look nothing like yours at 35. And I think that's like the beauty of lit- of literature.
It sets up this parallel experience- Mm-hmm... um, that other people are able to sort of dip into. I like that a lot.
I think sometimes that the character in this book is more passive than I would like to think that I am in some ways, or that she's drifting and a little more lost or something.
And, you know, I was laid off from BuzzFeed, but I had been accepted to an MFA, and I went and did that for three years.
And the character in the book, you know, doesn't do that, and, and that's a pretty big difference between us, um, that isn't, that isn't there.
And, and so that's sort of interesting to me, like these expressions of agency between the author and their characters, and what are the cha- you know, what do you share and what are the differences, and how do you, what do you do with that space between them if it is drawn from life and it is autofiction?
I guess the character could have done an MFA, but that would, I don't think that would have made for a good book. [laughs] Mm-hmm.
I, so, so Daisy, you just said something about like after a book ends and you wonder like how does their life go on. I'm thinking of like the way people have been using AI to do that sort of thing. Mm.
There was the thing, uh, Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder, uh- Yeah... this was doing the rounds on Twitter the other day.
It was a photo of him and his mother, and he like animated it that like if she was hugging him or something.
Obviously this caused an uproar of people, various views saying, "This is horrible," "This is good," whatever, et cetera.
Um, but I bring this all up to say the way that you write about AI, which becomes a, a topic at one point in the book, um, is really clear-headed and s- or clear-eyed in a way that like is so often not seen, um, in, in, in writing about it, whether it's, whether it's evangelism or like, you know, people trying to take it down, and
you could call it luddism, whatever. Um, but yeah, I, I just thought that was a really interesting choice to bring it in, but in such a matter-of-fact way of here's what this is. This is a machine.
You talk about it as this next word predictor. They produce language, not truth, that they generate text. You shouldn't rely on them to produce knowledge. Uh, how did that come into this?
That was straight from a training we got on AI at the Associated Press. I can just tell you that those were from the,
the guy who came in and said, "Listen, I'm gonna warn you about this technology that is going to change how you do your jobs, and here's what you need to know about it."
And it took, you know, it was a several hours long seminar, but those lines really stayed with me. I thought they were so interesting, and I thought, I just, I do.
I think AI and large language models and ChatGPT is kind of fascinating, and I'm happy you say that I'm clear-eyed about it. I might be starry-eyed. I don't know. I don't think I am
as scared or worried or negative on it as I maybe should or could be, but I guess a lot of people are doomsayers about it. So there's, you know, that. [laughs] They're doing that work for you.
Yeah, they're doing that work. So I can, I can just be interested in it.
Um, but especially for the production of information and knowledge and news and writing, uh, even fiction, and I do think it's possible that it could lead to very generic writing, and it could change the way people learn and degrade thought and all of those things.
The recent articles about how college students are using it to write essays I thought were so interesting. Mm-hmm.
And it seems so up for grabs what will happen next to writing and language because of it, just very quickly, just in the last couple of years already.
It's, it's doing a lot, and there are really fun ways to talk to it or useful ways to, to use it, I've found. Yeah. All right, popcorn, [laughs] popcorn round. [laughs] Would you rather be an information or an age?
Information. Why? [laughs] I, I, it seems so ethereal and abstract and a- ageless, and I don't, I couldn't immediately think of what it would mean to be an age, truthfully.
Hmm. I guess, yeah, if you were going to be one, it would be more like an epoch. I agree. I would prefer to be an information. But Francis- I, I also-... is obviously information, but you're an, you're an age, though.
I'm an age. Mm-hmm. Um, I'm the, I'm the humble age of 30. Um, no, I, I would much rather be an information. Would you rather be a cell or like a whole species? Would you rather be a person or a family? I don't know.
It, it's kind of that, right? Well, I guess if you're an age, right, you're an era. It's sort of- Mm-hmm... you get to be a time period. Yeah. But which one?
You could fit so much information inside that.That's true, right. The age meets the information, the information- Well, okay. We also haven't done this one in a while, so I feel like we gotta do it.
Would you rather be des- would you rather desire or be desired? [laughs] Oh, classic. If I'm desired, do I get to still- Answer for yourself, and then answer for your narrator. [laughs] Oh, no.
[laughs] I guess if you're desired without desiring yourself, that seems pretty... That seems not ideal, so I choose d- desiring. I would like to be able to desire. And I think the narrator feels the same way.
You'd rather desire than be desired, and the narrator would rather... Okay. I- that tracks with my perception of the narrator as well. Mm. It's the only... I mean, to me it's the only answer.
Well- Though I guess we need people in the world who have, who of each, of each, uh, thought. I'm telling you, it's 50/50. Every time you survey a group, it's 50/50.
But we, we live in a world where we can experience both, so. Mm-hmm. But- Thank God. Yeah. [laughs] Otherwise, we would be in trouble, right? But then people really would have to choose.
It would have to be 50/50, or we'd- Mm-hmm... be stuck. Yeah, I think they, desiring is only meaningful because one can be desired, and, like, vice versa. Mm-hmm.
I, I'll say this to the listener, would you rather have read Information Age or not? There's only one answer to that. Well, 'cause you get to read it now. You get to read it now. You should go buy it.
Um, and it- It's on-... it comes out in a week, right? The tables at McNally right now, apparently. Right now. Run, do not walk, to your local McNally Jackson. Wow. One just came in. Cora, thank you for coming on.
[laughs] This is Tasteland. See you next week. Thank you for having me.
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