May 26 2005

Today is the day to make the perfect margarita.

Zulkey.com is taking a three-day weekend, as most of you are, to celebrate Memorial Day. My prediction? Best summer ever.

According to his website, today's interviewee is a writer, speaker, and maker of mischief, although to be honest, I haven't seen him make that much mischief. Anyway, his new book is about The Book. Being an uncool person, I never knew that the book was 'over,' but that's not necessarily true according to the 2004 NEA report Reading at Risk. His project, Bookmark Now, gathers together many a shining author to disprove the theory of a disappearing reading public.

The Kevin Smokler Interview: Slightly Less Than Twenty Questions

If you don't believe that The Book is so over, do you believe that anything is actually over? The Joke? Irony? The Scripted Sitcom?
Nope. Nothing is ever over, particularly thanks to the Internet And our "best week ever" attention span. I did about five minutes of googling and found savebetamax.org, several Laser disc collecor shops, and about 3 dozen tributes to "Your Hit Perade." Welcome to the continuously archiving future, where Everything Is Here Forever.

How did you begin your career as a lecturer?
Three years ago I'm at the California Book Awards in San Francisco and I see a guy with the word "Kevin" printed on his name tag trying to convince a local book critic to come to his Writer's Club that day and speak. That day I'd been torturing myself by cycling through the Steven Barclay Agency's website, a speaker's bureau that reps every famous author in the known universe and thinking that was a racket I had to get in on. So I marched up to "Kevin" and said "I'll speak to your club" and then told him my topic was "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers." He liked it enough to give me a chance. I guess I did well because not only did it give me the best high I've ever had but I got two other invitations to talk to other clubs that day. It grew from there. I thank Kevin Ferguson in the acknowledgements of "Bookmark Now"

Are you sick of promoting your book yet?
Why no. Did my babbling at the furniture give you the wrong idea?

You not only promote your books but others, via Virtual Book Tour. How do you maintain enthusiasm for your projects and not feel like you're repeating yourself or getting bored or stale?
Promoting books are like reading those Choose Your Own Adventure Mysteries which I loved. What's the book got going for it and whom do I know who would be interested in it? How can I make this choice or build this bridge and get that result?

I also come from a long line of Jewish matchmakers so I love to pair up books and readers in hopes they'll settle down with one another.

Getting bored: I only take on projects that I think will hold my interest because I consider boredom worse than physical pain. I decline maybe 25 titles for every one I accept. It's the only way I can keep myself engaged.

With your taste for promotion, have there been any recent books that you felt could have been promoted differently, and better, by you? Which ones and what would you have done?
I met AJ Jacobs, who read the Encyclopedia Brittanica and wrote a book about it called "The Know-it-all", at a book festival. We totally hit it off so by the end of the weekend, I felt comfortable giving him hell for not even having a website! I mean, that book did fine, but it's tailor-made for blogging and the bite-sized culture of the Web. That struck me as a gaping missed opportunity.

Why is everybody I know mentioned in this book but I am not? Come on, Kevin, what's up? (Or where is it if I didn't see it?)
Claire, I barely knew you when I started "Bookmark Now." Had I, I would have given you a whole page, the back end page maybe. But I wouldn't even have your whole name there. Just a large Z in Helvetica Font. Everyone who's anyone would know whom I owed my sacred fortunes to.

What are you reading these days?
"Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation" by Jeff Chang.

"The Jane Austen Book Club" by Karen Joy Fowler

and a biography of the Berenstain Bears. I'm enjoying all three.

What have been some of your favorite anthologies or books of essays?
I keep a pile of essay collections on my desk that keep me humble and dig me out of holes. Right now it includes

John McPhee's "Pieces of the Frame"

Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

"Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader" by Anne Fadiman

"The Impossible H.L Mencken"

"Travelling Mercies" By Anne Lamott

And "Up in the Old Hotel" which is the collected articles of Joseph Mitchell.

What have been some of the most overrated books you've read?
I've tried on six different occasions to read Tom Wolfe and have never succeeded. I once had to review a Robert Coover novel and found the experience way too hard to forget. Several people recommended I read David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" as research for "Bookmark Now" but I think he's too smart for me. Either that or I don't see the virtue in being opaque for its own sake. Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" I find an annoyingly vague and aimless novel about main character not interesting enough to spend a novel with. Really as I reader, I'm quite a simpleton. Good characters, clear strong narrative, memorable plot. Fancy author tricks and narrative fancydancing sends me sulking back to the TV.

Do you think that the attitude of "Get it now," especially with ordering stuff online and through the mail, has decreased the popularity of libraries?
I think it's changed the role of libraries. Used to be you went to the library to find what you couldn't find elsewhere. Now libraries serve that function for patrons who can't afford computers at home, which I would say is an equally important responsibility. For patrons who do have computers, I think libraries need to pump up their role as intellectual gathering places and get in on readings, author discussions and seminars. Which is probably the last thing an overworked, underpaid librarian wants to hear from me!

Was there anything you wanted to cover in the book that you didn't have room for or felt like was outside the scope of the book?
I only got to touch on the influence hip-hop culture is having on contemporary literature in Paul Flores's essay about spoken word. I also would have loved a good essay about geography, about where writers grow up and live and how that influences their work. The section on "The Future" is a little shorter than I would have likes but maybe that makes sense.

Do you think that there is a potential to use technology for reading, i.e. ibooks and podcasting, or are people not responding too much to this? I know I personally just prefer a plain old book.
So do I but I'm not the typical reader. I we let books play in as many sandboxes as they can.

So about all the book stuff, if you had to switch to a career in writing that did not have to do with books, i.e. screenwriting, TV writing, etc, what do you think you would choose?
I'd love to me a newspaper columnist like Mike Royko or Herb Caen or those guys who were voices of their cities for decades on end. That or a "consigliare" on a famous public radio show like Sarah Vowell. Or script doctor. I'd love to be the guy they went to when they needed a character to sound "more Midwestern."

According to Amazon, people who looked at Bookmark Now also viewed the following books: Pick Me by Pamela Ribon, The Insomniac Reader : Stories of the Night by Kevin Sampsell, Bulletproof Girl : Stories by Quinn Dalton, Wild East : Stories From the Last Frontier by Boris Fishman, In The Red Zone: A Journey Into The Soul Of Iraq by Steven Vincent, and Cold Feet by Heather Swain. Does that seem like good company?
Pam and Boris are friends. I've been meaning to read Quinn's book. The other's I'm not so familiar with but overall, I'd say yes.

What do you hope to have accomplished five years from now?
Two more books, my own radio show, visited Asia and Africa, see my kitten grow into a cat, survive the next big quake here in San Francisco and learn how to cook.

When do you think blogging is going to stop being treated as an exciting new trend?
When the next "exciting new trend" elbows it aside. Hasn't podcasting done that already? If it hasn't, I'm ready for it to.

How does it feel to be the 125th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
125 is 5 to the 3rd power, right? Is there a list of who is interview #8, #27 and #64. Because I feel a mathy kinship to them now. No, actually its pretty friggin cool. Claire, when you gonna hang a shingle and give Oprah a natural successor?