THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.164 - COLSON WHITEHEAD

Episode Date: October 10, 2021

DESCRIPTIONAdam talks with American writer Colson Whitehead, whose novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys made him only the fourth writer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, about writing routines, anxiety management and the challenges of trying to look on the positive side of life, literary influences, music, getting stoned and watching 'Platoon', his new heist novel Harlem Shuffle and one of the many memorable parts from The Underground Railroad.This conversation was recorded remotely on 1st of July 2021Thanks to Matt Lamont for conversation editing and Séamus Murphy-Mitchell and Becca Ptaszynski for production support.Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSTHE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD WAS NO FANTASY (by FERGUS M BORDEWICH) - 2021 (WALL STREET JOURNAL)GUARDIAN INTERVIEW WITH COLSON WHITEHEAD (by SEAN O'HAGAN) - 2020 (GUARDIAN WEBSITE)REVIEW OF HARLEM SHUFFLE by COLSON WHITEHEAD - 2021 (KIRKUS WEBSITE)HOW BARRY JENKINS AND COLSON WHITEHEAD MADE THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (by HUNTER HARRIS) - 2021 (TOWN AND COUNTRY)TOURING TRUMP'S AMERICA ON COLSON WHITEHEAD'S UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (by RAJEEV BALASUBRAMANYAN) - 2016 (THE RUMPUS WEBSITE)YES, MALE WRITERS CAN WRITE FANTASTIC FEMALE CHARACTERS - 2020 (BANG2WRITE WEBSITE)EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS by PETER BISKIND - 1999 (WATERSTONES)SPOTIFY PLAYLIST BY FOUR TET (KIERAN HEBDEN) - 2016 - PRESENT (SPOTIFY) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how are you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here. I am back in Norfolk and looking out over the fields at another great, great sunset.

over the fields at another great, great sunset. October, when it behaves itself, October, and isn't absolutely just chucking all the rain at you, you get some very high-quality sunsets, especially out here. Hey, I've got a new segment for you. Have a listen. You have to identify what this is. Did you get it? It's an orange segment. Oh my gosh. This is amazing stuff right out of the gate. And

I'm just going to eat it. I know some of you don't like the sound of eating, so I will eat it away from the mic. I'm eating my orange away from the mic, because I know that eating is a sound that some people don't like. Nice formation of geese there. In the V, the classic V, low to the ground, off they go. Good effort, team. Ah, this is a good orange too, which is great because recently I've been having some very disappointing experiences with oranges. I thought that I'd found the solution to the whole bad orange problem. By which I mean the problem of investing time and excitement in an orange. You know, it takes a while to unwrap that

thing, get all the pith off and everything, which I like to do, only to find that the ends of the orange are all dried up. It's like a smack in the face. Worse, in fact. It's worse than a smack in the face. Often you just have to bung it. There's no point. There's hardly any juice in that thing. And I thought that the solution was to always buy navel oranges with the big orange belly button on them. They tend to be nicer. Anyway, recently I had some bad navel oranges too and I thought, what? There's no rhyme or reason to anything anymore. But I'm glad to say that I'm back on track with today's orange. Not a navel orange, just a large orange. This is a good story. It's probably even a story that I've told before.

This is a good story. It's probably even a story that I've told dog. Rosie! Hey, the podcast missed you last week. Rosie was so pleased to see me when I got back from Bexhill-on-Sea. What is better than a high-quality welcome from your dog friend? That's what I want to know. Who does welcome home better than a dog? I always screw up welcome home like when my wife gets back if she's been away for a few days I'm so happy to see her I love her she's the best but often I just get it wrong you know what she wants is me to just jump up and down and run around and lick her legs and go and sit on the sofa and bring her in a squirrel that I've killed and just look at her with I love you eyes and not really speak but instead too often there's other stuff going on or I've got to ask her a question about something

boring or I've got to tell her that something's broken or someone's died or I don't know what. I'm trying to get better. Luckily, Rosie is showing us the way in that department. Wow, this is more inconsequential waffle than normal. Let me tell you about my guest for podcast number 164. This week, I'm talking to the American writer Colson Whitehead. Whitehead facts. Colson, currently aged 51, is based in New York, America. He grew up there, the child of successful entrepreneur parents, along with his three siblings. After graduating from Harvard University,

Coulson worked as a journalist, writing about culture in New York's Village Voice newspaper. His first novel, The Intuitionist, was published as Coulson was turning 30 at the end of the 90s. The novels Zone One, Sag Harbor, John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt followed. He also wrote a book of essays about his hometown, entitled The Colossus of New York, and a non-fiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker called The Noble Hustle. In recent years, Coulson's writing and profile have shifted a few gears, with the publication of two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys,

that showcase Whitehead's gift for combining exciting cinematic storytelling with grim historical fact. The Underground Railroad, published in 2016, charts the efforts to find freedom of Cora, an escaped slave in pre-Civil War America. It was recently adapted as a streaming series by Barry Jenkins. 2019's The Nickel Boys was based on the real story of the Dozier School, a reform institution for young men in Florida, where horrific abuses took place over decades in the 20th century, but only became widely known about relatively recently.

Both The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Coulson only the fourth writer ever to have won the prize twice. The other authors, in case you're interested, were Dan Brown, Barbara Cartland and Donald Trump. No, they weren't. They were actually William Faulkner, John Updike and Booth Tarkington. No, I hadn't heard of Booth Tarkington either.

He wrote The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. I mean, I don't think that you should necessarily judge a person by their prizes, but he is a very good writer, Colson Whitehead. whether it's books or films or even music, I suppose. I tend to favour slightly more escapist stuff. But my producer Seamus recommended The Underground Railroad and it is really an amazing book. Very exciting, but I mean really grim, as you would expect of something that is an account of the kind of things that happened to slaves at that time in American history. And the Nickel Boys, even though it

is a fictionalized account, is a very sad reflection of real events that took place at this reform school. But they're both so well written and exciting and compelling that you sort of go along with this stuff while being horrified by a lot of what happens there. And also there are elements of hope in the books. And we talk about some of this. I was trying to kind of figure out a little bit where Coulson was coming from with some of this stuff in probably a slightly clumsy way.

When I spoke to him him which was at the beginning of July 2021 and we spoke about writing routines anxiety management trying to look on the positive side of life music we talked about the music that accompanies Colson's writing sessions and why iTunes can do one. Getting stoned and seeing Platoon. Fly past from the hairy bullet. We talked about the heist movies that helped inspire Colson when writing his most recent book, Harlem Shuffle, which is set in the New York of the

1960s and is, according to the Waterstones website, a meticulously plotted and paced tale of petty criminals and failed heists, which masks a deeper meditation on morality versus expediency and the difficulty of leading a good life in a bad world. You know all about that Rosie don't you? Tell me about it. And Colson also talked me through one of the many memorable passages from the Underground Railroad. Back at the end for a larger than usual slice of stodgy waffle but right now with Colson Whitehead, yes, yes. Hey, nice to meet you, Colson. I'm Adam. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, hang with the family did you say grilling i'm grilling i'm smoking i'm a big smoker i smoke big hunks of meat whoa and uh that's my sort of hobby you're an expert grill meister

yes yes i've inherited this gift which is you know keep me occupied and prevent me from thinking about death and stuff like that good all right to be distracted from my death thoughts. All right. Well, I'm going to bring you right back around to death thoughts. Do you want to get death out of the way quickly or should we work up to it? You're pretty much exactly the same age that I am. And yeah, I think about death a fair bit as well. How long have you been thinking about it? Well, it's always there. I mean, I think, you know, definitely in the last year of lockdown and COVID, etc., the limits on one's longevity become more apparent. So I guess I quit smoking like three years ago. And I was like a big step in terms of, okay, I don't want to die. I want to see my kids

growing up. And then, you know, I was talking about this with a friend, like like how did i go through all of lockdown without like having a cigarette or breaking down like it just seems really weird i didn't you know relapse as usual so um something in me is fighting for survival and yet uh there is always that specter sort of hanging on your shoulder yeah and you haven't quite reached the age i mean you are still too young to die that's the problem you've got to hang on for a couple more decades before everyone says, well, you know, he had a good innings. Yeah, you've had a good run, which is what I say. Like I keep saying when I put out like a lamp doesn't work. Oh, I had a good life. You know, I had the lamp for 20 years.

It's time to move on. So eventually your run is over and it's time to be put out by the curb. Yeah. Well, I hope that time is a long way off. I'm sure it is. Yes, for all of us, yes. Yeah. Did you find it easy to give up smoking?

You know, I tried for many years. I'd go off work a year and then I had a dream about smoking. And then something would happen, some minor annoyance. I'm like, I'm going to smoke. And then two days later, I'm back to like a pack for a pack for pack and a half you know it's always there sort of calling me it's a good companion when you're working and i was gonna say i mean that is for a writer a very valuable crutch i would think and something to sort of keep you focused that's your treat rather than perhaps going to the fridge and getting some ice cream or, you know, watching something on Netflix? I don't know. What are your routines like?

Well, back then it was fuel and a companion. So, you know, people are terrible, but your cigarette and your ashtray are always right there. My ritual now, I have to say I like it. You know, I do about eight pages a week seems to be a good rate for me. That can be four days a week or three days a week or six, working from like 10 to three. I can't write every day. Some days I wake up and I don't feel like doing it. So I see a movie or play video games or walk sadly down the promenade.

But if I can do eight pages, I feel pretty happy. And I figure if I do eight pages a week, that's like 30 a month. And then after 10 months, that's like a decent sized book. You can't work every week, you know, it's holiday, somebody's birthday, some relatives are coming and you're off your rhythm. Yeah, that's good. Well, that's a refreshingly level headed approach to the whole craft of writing. Normally, I hear writers say, well, you got to do it every day. Otherwise, you're not a writer. Well, if you do it every day, that seems like a real kind of imposition on my lifestyle.

So I think whatever works for you, you know, you hear about people who write from like 5am to 6am and then get up with the kids. And after five years, they have their book for writing one hour a day. And Graham Greene, you know, they say wrote like 300 words a day or something. And he wrote 50 books. So that worked for him. For me, you know, I know that after a year, I'll be pretty close to the end. And if I can see like the end of something, like a book, or a children's birthday party, if I know the end is there, I feel pretty happy. I think I heard Martin Scorsese at one point saying that he never used to get up much before midday. And on his films, I don't know if this is true, and maybe it's no longer the case if it ever was true,

but he apparently liked a late start. You know, mostly in the film world, everyone's getting up at 3 a.m. or something miserable. But he was very keen that he would start late and keep kind of rock star hours, you know, work late. I think that's the way to go, surely. Well, yeah, I was rereading Easy Rider, Raging Bulls, a story about Hollywood in the 70s. And there's a big bit about his early days.

And he was like so coked out. I was like, how did you function? And of course he didn't function. I think he had a heart attack and had to clean himself up around, you know, raging bull time. But yeah, he definitely kept rockstar hours. For me, you know, I used to have a shift, like a late shift from like 10 to 1 and I would write notes for the next day or revise. But then I had kids and after seven o'clock, I'm out, you know, there's nothing, there's nothing good happening. I'm watching TV,

you know, hopefully reading a book. But definitely that late shift, which, you know, those quiet hours when no one else is up. They were good days, but, you know, like cigarettes are kind of a crutch. You don't need them. If you're sitting in your chair in front of the notebook or the computer, you know, that's where the work is.

Yes. So your accompaniments never got more hardcore than cigarettes you weren't sitting there like completely baked or just drinking hemingway amounts of booze or no there's still time though you know i'm 51 there's still time you look good for 51 do you mind if i ask you if you dye your hair? I don't. I have some gray hair in my little goatee. And I have one or two on my scalp. But you know, the oil of LA, worshiping Satan, you know, the sort of sacrifices you make. Yeah. I heard you talking about your childhood and how some writers talk about, they are described as sickly children who developed a complex fantasy world

because they never left their rooms and you said that you weren't the sickly child but you were the child that seldom left his room is that right yeah you know i was raised on tv and comic books and so my while other kids would you know play outdoors and do baseball or soccer or whatever. My preferred activity was just laying on the living room floor watching Twilight Zone reruns. I'd read my mom's annual Stephen King entry. And so just hanging around the house, availing myself of the horror comics and superhero comics and popular literature my mom brought in.

That was my perfect afternoon, just sitting around. And, you know, as I've written books that are realistic and books that are fantastic, and I think my fantastic grounding came from The Twilight Zone. I'm a big fan of the twist, and I, you know, the shock Twilight Zone twist at the end, and I've used that in some of my books. Things are normal, and then suddenly you take the wrong turn, and you're in this alternative universe. And definitely in, say, a book like The Underground Railroad, where you have fantastic elements that are made mundane, you know, people call it magic realism. My first exposure to that was The Twilight Zone. Things are all normal and then suddenly they're

not. Yeah. Were you already, I mean, do you think of yourself as an anxious person? Oh, I think, you know, here and there, but I think I find various ways of being more zen about it and keeping things in the right perspective. So maybe one of my coping mechanisms is making jokes about being depressed or anxious and that sort of keeps it at bay. You know, when it was more of a real thing in my life,

it was hard to joke about. And now that it's sort of receded joking about it or laughing at my own eccentricities I think diminishes some of the power did you find that having children took the edge off the worry or I mean it amplifies it as well I have three children as well and certainly I'm well aware that in certain respects it is almost unbearably amplified but then in other ways you i don't know about you but i feel a little more fatalistic and relaxed in some ways well i think you know it's a big turning point you know having my daughter 16 years ago and that i could no longer just think about myself i had to think about this other human being and so um you know some of the will I be all right becomes will my daughter be all right, will my son be all right. And it's incredibly scary, you know, worrying about someone else.

And then it's also this, you know, sort of galvanizing force to be better and take care of yourself so you can take care of them. And also, I suppose, find within yourself the ability to communicate an optimistic view of the world to your children rather than focusing on everything that's terrible, because you don't want to bum them out too early, right? No, you know, my books can be fairly bleak. And my last couple outings have been about slavery, about Jim Crow, you know, the Jim Crow South. And there's not much hope in those books. But in my household, I have to at least pretend to be hopeful for their sake. You know, if I really thought the atrocities I've been writing about and exploring through my characters and their

situations were going to be true for them, you know, it'd be hard to go on. And so I have to believe that, you know, the world is improving, however slowly, you know, for their sake, believe that the world is improving, however slowly, for their sake, even if in my work, that small aperture of hope doesn't actually exist. But presumably the reason, part of the reason you focus on some of the darker themes in your books is that you feel there's something positive to be gained from having those conversations or discussing those things with your readers, as it were, telling those stories rather than just not confronting them? Yeah, I don't think about my readers when I'm working, but I think about myself and, you know,

writing these books is a way of working through different ideas about myself or the culture, whether it's a sort of funny book like Sag Harbor, my novel about growing up in the 80s, or a more bleak book like The Nickel Boys about two kids trapped in a reform school in the Jim Crow South. I'm trying to figure out how the world works for me. And I guess that's why I keep going, because I'm trying to figure out how the world works, how I work. And writing books is a way of doing that. Speaking of Stephen King what were the stories that made the biggest impact on you as a youngster yeah you know I was born in 69 and so his mid-70s late 70s run I remember a fifth grade reading Night Shift which is a

collection of his short stories and then around that time going up to the early 80s to be incredibly specific to your question do it um Cujo Shining, Salem's Lot, we had all those books and they would circulate around the house between me and my brother and my sisters. And so it seemed natural that writing books about werewolves and vampires was a perfectly worthwhile job in life. Writing horror novels or comic books, X-Men, Spider-Man seemed like a perfectly nice way to make a living. And that's what I wanted to do from like seventh or eighth grade, like write comic books or horror novels. And what changed then? What set you off on a more, well, I don't know, for want of a better word, serious path? Sure. I think it was later in high school reading 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

And then the next year going to college and reading more people like Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon and reading Beckett and Borges. And seeing these, you know, so-called serious writers using the fantastic. You know, Beckett's plays take place in this fantastic space. People are up to their necks in sand and ash. Obviously, Garcia Marquez has these fantastic elements. And so it seemed, oh, I could use, I could bend reality in the way that Marvel Comics bends reality and Stephen King and Peter Straub and William Gibson alter reality and write so-called, you know, serious books. And how long did it take you to start developing a style? Or do you think you have a style when you write? Or are you constantly changing? I mean, it seems to me that the voice of your

narrator changes as appropriate to the each story. Yeah, I mean, I think the book determines the voice. You know, you pick the right tool for the job. And so the voice of the Nickel Boys is very sort of plain spoken. I think of the narrator as Harlem Shuffle as being sort of jazzy and slangy. So, you know, there's no reason why book one should sound like book 10 unless there's about the exact same thing. You know, some books can accommodate humor in the narrator and some books can't and some books are more serious and some books need this kind of narrator that kind of narrator and speaking of jazz are

you a jazz guy are you putting on music while you're marinating those hunks of beef on your grill? Jazz is like, you know, 5%. I'm more of a hip-hop, electronic, post-punk, weird dance music. So I have a playlist when I work, and it's, you know, 3,000 songs, and it goes from David Bowie to Sonic Youth to Run DMC to Edith Piaf to Daft Punk, and it's fast and it's slow.

And there's no sort of rhyme or reason, except that I love these 3,000 songs. Is that a Spotify playlist then that you've made? It's on iTunes. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's all my digitized collection of CDs I digitized like 20 years ago, floating around. Yeah, man.

It's new stuff. It's, you know, it all goes in there. So am I to take it that you haven't updated iTunes in the last three years? I do. And it's always just like, what's it going to do to my collection now? There's always this element of horror

of what, you know, some weirdo in California has decided what people, music fans want in their player. But I submit myself to the torture. Actually, I don't even know how to opt out. Like, I just feel like I'm stuck with their terrible updates. I found that the updates have now rendered it more or less unusable. And they've also erased all the playlists that I made. Because everything, it's sort of, it only wants to recognize

what I've actually bought through apple or everything else that i spent years and years burning and archiving and naming like i mean hours and hours weeks and weeks of ludicrous work making all these plays yes yes i've been there you know like my master playlist. Oh, suddenly Pylon is, what happened to Pylon? You know, Pylon is not on iTunes or something. So I have to find like some old backup and like bring it in. Yes, it is torture. Yeah.

A lot of the artists you named are people I like very much too. And you talk about kind of weird electronica. One of the best things that happened to me so far this year was discovering the Fortet playlist on Spotify. Do you ever listen to Fortet? They've come up on my various weird electronic noodling. You know, you put it in can and then you get like generations of can influenced people. Yeah.

So they've come up. I have this weird thing where Spotify knows like they do sort of sort of know me, the algorithm that's figured me out. And it'll be some new band I've never heard of. I'm like, who is this person? And it's like, you know, Jack Scipio recorded eight songs on a Radio Shag tape recorder in his mom's basement in 73. And it was lost until like last year when, you know, Big Booty Records reissued it. And so they keep digging up these demented music smiths for me to enjoy and i like them and they only have like two songs yeah no it's good i like

making those discoveries i mean the fortet playlist on spotify has about 40 000 songs on it he's just kept it going since 2016 he started it and so he just adds to it every now and then so you've got hours and hours and hours hundreds of hours of music on there you just put it on shuffle and it throws up all these weird things some of which i've heard before and i'm familiar with others maybe they're artists like alice coltrane who i knew of but i'd never actually listened to then it's like wow this is what Alice Coltrane's like okay and then stuff that I've never heard of before that just sounds like people dropping pots and pans and farting and things like that well there was you know the hunt in you know the 80s and 90s like oh I've heard the Velvet Underground you know they keep being referenced

in these rock magazines who are they and then you find the vinyl on your record store hunt and you bring it home like, oh, that's why they're talking about the Velvet Underground. And now, of course, you just go and if you're curious, you can get it in two seconds. But there is, you know,

now instead of The Hunt, there is Spotify saying, actually, we know you better than you know yourself. Here's X, Y, and Z. I got Alice Coltrane yesterday on the Discover Weekly. She came up and I didn't really know her work.

I was like, oh, okay, that's kind of early 70s jazz stuff. It's cool. Yeah, it's good. I mean, I think I prefer the old Hunt, though, don't you? I mean, the modern algorithm-led Hunt, I'm just old, I guess, but to me it seems wrong and a bit creepy. Well, you know, I mean, I think some of the best times in my high school life were, you know, going. I lived on the Upper West Side.

I would go down to the village and hit sounds and all these other record stores. There's a zine store called See Here, which had every rock zine, but also a lot of alternative music press stuff. And me and my friend Chris would just make this tour, buying remainder birthday party records and all the stuff that we were hearing on the one college radio station in town. It was just a great time of coming into yourself as a teenager and figuring out what you like and what you don't like and being oppositional to what your friends are into and your family and your sisters and then finding an ally, the one kid in school who's heard of the Stooges. I'm like, you're my Stooges, buddy. I guess we have to see concerts together. Yeah. And I don't imagine that you were living in the absolute scuzziest

parts of 70s New York, or maybe you were, I don't know. But did you have a sense of that world and what it was like and a sense of seeing New York transforming in the decades that followed? You know, when I think about New York in the early 70s, it is like Death Wish or Dog Day Afternoon. Like it's a place of danger and terror. It's so incredibly dirty. And, you know, the sense of impending doom was definitely grilled into me. And, you know, the sense of impending doom was definitely grilled into me. In the 80s, the city, you know, comes out of bankruptcy and we get the kind of glitzy 80s idea of New York. But at the same time, you know, the crack epidemic is starting to ravage Harlem and Brooklyn. And so that's there as well.

So, you know, when I got out of college, I lived in very scuzzy parts of the Lower East Side and un-gentrified Brooklyn and got a taste of it. But, you know, that was the backdrop of my 20s, being sort of broke, finding my way as a writer, hanging out with other people who were fine their way, and the city getting, you know, cleaned up year by year. I think the most dangerous year in the city was 1990, and I was like a senior in college. And then when I came back, the city started to pull out of its sort of drug spiral. But as you know, and many other people listening know, New York came out of it and New York in 2019 is not New York in 1979. Yes, but the New York of the 70s is mourned by some people, a lot of people who overall prefer it to the modern version and say, well, you know, there was there was a lot of things wrong with it, but they prefer it to the kind of gentr. In Harlem Shuffle, I talk about Black Harlem coming to being in the 20s and 30s, displacing the German immigrants, the Jewish immigrants, the Italian immigrants who came in, lived, suffered, endured, became middle class and moved away.

There's a cycle of the city of boom and bust. And with the lockdown, New York did enter into like this terrible state that was reminiscent of the early 70s and walking around, you see people selling their possessions on the street the way they did in the 70s and 80s and there was like this return to those sort of battle days that we've seen in the last year or so

as people have lost their homes, lost their grip on reality and the city has returned like this sort of debased place. But I miss a lot of my old neighborhoods. I miss a lot of places I used to feel at home in. But that's the life of a city. You know, generations come and go, populations come and go. And the place that's great and gleaming and clean right now

will probably be disgusting 20 years from now because that's how cities go. Yeah. Now, I visited New York, yes, towards the end of the 80s. And I mean, I don't know. It seemed fine to me because I didn't drive. And I was too frightened to take the subway. So I just used to walk everywhere. And it was nice.

I got stoned and went to see Platoon. And it was the first time I'd ever had a joint i was stoned when i saw platoon too oh yeah how did it go for you um well you know i saw it then and then it was on cable for so many years after that and i think i was always coming home like at 1 a.m and platoon was on there's a whole era when platoon was always on hbo on cable and i was usually loaded in some way. I think I took one drag on this joint. I was with some friends of mine who are New Yorkers.

And they said, dude, do you want some of this? And, you know, I wanted to fit in. And they were funny and nice. So I thought, yes, okay. Yes, I'll have some. And immediately my legs buckled and all the blood drained. And then when we finally got in, I was still, you know, I was completely away with the fairies, really.

I felt as if I was drifting around inside of myself. And then you remember quite early on in the movie, there's the big firefight in the jungle. It's overwhelming. Yeah, it's overwhelming. Yeah. Yeah. It's overwhelming. Yeah. And I really felt strongly that I was inside this firefight and I couldn't

figure out, you remember the tracer bullets? I was like, I was whispering to my, yes, yes. I was like, why are they got lasers in the jungle?

And he said, dude, it's tracer bullets. And I didn't know what that meant at all, but it made a huge impression on me. Yeah. I mean, it was on cable and, uh, last summer showed showing my daughter and i was like oh that's charlie sheen like it's cast incredibly with these really young actors who are now sort of you know my age and life is throwing them some curves but in this movie they're sort of like these young beautiful guys swept up in this know, jungle hell, like so many of the soldiers who actually went.

Charlie Sheen now seems like a character who was in some ways a glimpse of what was to come as far as celebrity and a strange, kind of crazy version of celebrity and altered personalities. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, he's a harbinger. Harbinger is the word.

You know, also John Depp is in it. And I think it's his first movie. And he's also gone through various transformations. Yes. You know, when I was that age, I was like a little younger. I remember, you know, Matt Dillon would be in a movie. And like all the girls like Matt Dillon. I was like, oh, Matt, you know, they're so shallow.

Just a pretty boy, whatever, Matt Dillon. Now I'm like, when I see Matt Dillon in a movie, I'm like, oh, he's working. That's so great. You know, it's hard to keep a career for 40 years and pay your mortgage. Like, go Matt Dillon. If you're still kicking around, you're still working after all this time through, you know, all those ups and downs, you know, good for you. Yes. It's sometimes a curse, isn it to be to be too pretty when

you're young i think uh from the outside i imagine so and are we uh yeah he's he's a talented guy he's um creative quirky that's my friend who is a film director uh used to tell me about going to pitch meetings in Los Angeles. He told me this story about an executive who just leafed through one of his notebooks or maybe a book of possible ideas that he'd written down. And he just sort of creative, quirky, creative, quirky. Yeah. Just repeating the two words over and over again. Yeah, quirky became like a cliche in like the book world in the 90s. I was working at a book review for the Village Voice.

And whenever a book was described as a quirky debut, it was like, oh, no, it's like not a quirky debut. Yeah. And so it was a joke around the office. And then with my first novel, it was sent out to some people and we got some blurbs. And a guy worked with Gary Indiana, a novelist and an arts writer, sort of phoned in the blurb and was like, you know, his quirky sensibility. I was like, no, you quirked me. No one wants to be quirked. No one wants to be quirked. I mean, Harlem Shuffle is, I guess, quirkier, at least than your previous two books. You could say that, but it's not exactly. I mean, I think quirky would be

a stretch to describe Harlem Shuffle. What was the spur for it? How did you set off down that path? Sure. Just thinking how much I love heist movies, you know, whether it's Ocean's Eleven or Rafifi, you know, going back to the good old days. And I think it wouldn't be fun if I could do a heist novel. And then, you know, why not? So I started planning Capers. And I was about to start writing The Underground Railroad. So I knew I'd be immersed in the South and I was going to be very grim. And so a lighter crime novel seemed like the antidote. And I usually do toggle between a serious book and a lighter book. I ended up doing The Nickel Boys instead of Harlem Shuffle. But when I finished The Nickel Boys, I had all this great material and I started writing it like, you know, pretty quickly after being done with that last book.

So, you know, I think there's a in my work, there's a place for a deep, serious book about capitalism and institutional racism. And there's also and hopefully I can find a place for humor and satire and a little bit of quirkiness. humor and satire and a little bit of quirkiness. And I find going between a serious book and a lighter book has been a good method of keeping it fresh for me and not doing the same thing over and over again. I was really burnt out when I was done with the Nickel Boys, just the grimness of the material. So having a work where I could cut loose

and have fun with the genre and tell jokes and have weird minor supporting characters was a real blessing. Why did you decide to go with the Nickel Boys as the next project after the Underground Railroad? I mean, when did you start writing the Underground Railroad? I had the idea in 2000 and I kept putting it off and committed to it in 2014. Something happened in 2014. It was like the most creative, you know, in terms of ideas. I got the idea for the Nickel Boys. I came across a news report that described the school that the book was based on.

I had the idea for the heist novel and I committed to Underground Railroad. So whatever I was drinking or smoking or that year was really good. So I saw the report about the Nickel Boys, this reform school in Florida, and I thought there was a book in it. But there was a queue, as you guys say, there was a line, I was going to do Underground Railroad, I was researching it, I was not going to switch streams. I didn't want to do two depressing books back to back. But then in the summer of 2017, it was time to get back to work. Underground had come out. I was done traveling. And I was taking notes for Harlem Shuffle.

You know, what's the crime? Who's the main character? But in those early days of the Trump administration, which is past tense now, it seems so crazy. I had to reconcile, you know, being hopeful for my country or being despairing. You know, is our country actually going on the right track or are we stuck in this inane racist groove we've been stuck in for 200 years? And the whiplash of going from someone like Barack Obama

to Donald Trump made me choose the Nickel Boys. You know, the two teenage main characters have to wrestle with their ideas of hope and hopelessness. Can we affect change in society? Are we just subject to the brutal winds of powerful people? Or can we make a life for ourselves? So that's the more compelling in the spring of 2017, as opposed to the heist book. Yeah, more compelling, but more depressing, I would imagine to immerse yourself in was it all

it was all done and dusted. The writing of the book that is, by the time the pandemic came around, though, wasn't it? I feel the trollam shuffle in May. So it's, you know, two months into lockdown, I've written most of it. So it's all sort of downhill. So once I figured out how to get the kids on their video schooling, I was able to finish the book. But the last section does take place in the 1964 riots in New York, which were occasioned by the murder of a black teen by a white police officer. So I finished the book. I was done writing about the 64 riots. And then the next day was the first day of the George Floyd protests. You know, I woke up and Minneapolis was on fire. So there was that weird juxtaposition of writing about

police brutality, an incident from 50 something years ago, and then being reminded yet again, you know, tiresomely how little, you know, things have changed. And we're still protesting the same things. We're still subject to the sadism and homicidal influences of a depraved law enforcement. And I mean, those conversations about things like that were obviously taking place in 2014, when you started writing The Underground Railroad. But since the George Floyd murder, obviously they've intensified and they've transformed somewhat and they have been transformed,

I think, by the experience of the pandemic, by the intense pressure that that's put on people. It's just been an atmosphere where all these things seem to have come to a head. That's not to say that they've in any way been settled and it's now an ongoing process to see if we can get something good out of the whole thing. But you seem to prefigure a lot of the atmosphere of the conversations we've been having over the last year about race, particularly in the Underground Railroad and in the scenes in the kind of weird

museum of natural wonders. Is that what it was called? I believe so, in the Underground Railroad, yeah. Yeah, the Living History Exhibit. So at one point your protagonist Cora finds herself in South Carolina having escaped the plantation in Georgia on the Underground Railroad. in georgia on the underground railroad and what was the spur for that scene for putting her in this strange living exhibit which we're familiar with well certainly in the uk i guess it's a big thing in the states as well to have like museums and things where people are wandering around in

costume and doing that thing that's always been not... Not so much now. But, you know, definitely in the 19th century, they would have slaves and then dress them up in jungle attire and have them pretend to be African. Yeah, I mean, I don't mean... I've never seen a slave version of that, I'd like to make it clear. We don't enjoy those kinds of things on a regular basis in the UK,

I don't think. But, yeah, talk me through how that scene came together in the Underground Railroad and what you were thinking about with it. Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of, you know, different things. Cora, our main protagonist, starts working in the museum and they have, she's a part of a living diorama where she plays a captive on a slave ship. She's in the fields and she goes through these different roles. She's in a village and a racist idea of what an African village is. And she puts on these different costumes day to day and people come in and watch her.

So a lot of different things. One is describing museums and circuses at the time that put black people on display for entertainment, in this kind of P.T. Barnum type of way. And there's also trying to give Cora agency. It's the second section in the book. And she's been an object, you know, a piece of property, and she's coming into her own. So as she walks through these different fake phases of a slave's life, she can process them and say, this is not true. This is not my experience, and start to comment on the world. She's seeing the world through the white world's idea of how things work and can say, this is not my experience and it's wrong. So it moves the story forward.

It moves her character development forward and also provides this commentary on how we make museums and how we display people and how we digest culture we whitewash what actually happened and make it into a tidy display in a window yeah because at that point she's living with a white family and they've given her the job right she has um you know through the social programs in uh south Carolina, which are an echo of, you know, social programs in the 1960s America. So the former slaves have been given housing in a black dormitory. They've been given jobs, job placements. And she works, she is a domestic for a white family, and it gets promoted to this other job, because she's so clever. You know, the white people sort of pat

her on the head and give her a promotion to work in this museum. Yes, and Miss Lucy, who is one of those people, when confronted by Cora about the inaccuracies that she sees in the exhibit, you know, she kind of pulls her up on it. And Miss Lucy's response is, if you can't see the difference between good upstanding people

and the mentally disturbed with criminals and imbeciles you're not the person i thought you were in other words how ungrateful and impudent of you to question what we're trying to do here which is you know things could be a lot worse for you blah blah blah so it's very much a uncomfortable reflection of a certain type of white liberal attitude to race, I suppose. That's how I read it, at least. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, the different states in the book have different sort of takes on racial politics in American history. There's the liberalism of the social programs, education, housing. And then what's the flip side of that? And where does it go wrong? You know, the way you're describing it just reminded me of what's happening

to black athletes now. Like, you make so much money, why, you know, shut up. Don't protest. You should be grateful for everything you have. Keep your mouth shut. And so if you get, you know, one tiny thing, if you get one crumb, you should be happy with your lot and stop complaining and that's

sort of reflective and uh the attitude of miss lucy and of course you know a lot of uh people now why can't these guys just play on the field that's what we pay them to do shut up about the other injustices and indignities we subject them to every day yes and sadly almost as if to explain why you get I don't know how much it was reported in the US, but we just had the finals of the European Football Cup over here. And the day after there was just a whole screed of racist abuse for some of the players in the British in the England team at a point where you just thought, what? Sure, yeah. I mean, you know, those, a lot of the people who we pass on the street are quite terrible. And they're not dying off in the numbers that we really need to get a productive society. So, I mean, that way of looking at the world, though, puts me in mind of your protagonists in The Nickel Boys.

You got Elwood Curtis, who is the idealistic hero of the book and jack turner who is his mate who he meets in the reform school and he's much more jaded and cynical and i suppose he's much more pessimistic about human nature and i've heard you talk about the fact that those were very much the two sides of your own personality. And at this point, July 2021, which side do you feel is winning out? Well, I mean, you can't be entirely optimistic because there's too much evidence to refute your worldview. And you can't be incredibly pessimistic because then why go on? I think, you know, you have to borrow from Elwood. You have to borrow from Turner. You have to borrow from a pragmatic point of view. And you can't be incredibly pessimistic because then why go on? I think, you know, you have to borrow from Elwood, you have to borrow from Turner, you have to borrow from

a pragmatic point of view, but also have an idea that we can improve as human beings. And so I think, you know, last year was a big test in terms of the pandemic and the election in America. So I feel a sense of relief. And then you go back to the newspaper and see that California and Oregon and Washington State are burning because of climate change we dodged one sort of bullet and everything else we've screwed up is coming to the fore so I'm in a better place like a lot of people than I was last year

when we didn't even have a vaccine and things were quite terrible. But I think both the Nickel Boys and Underground Railroad are animated by hope in the end. If you don't believe that there's a place of safety in the North, you don't leave the plantation. You've never been off the plantation grounds, but if you can believe in this abstract idea that there's a place of safety and normalcy, a refuge, then you're still alive. And if you can make it through a place like the Dozier School for Boys, the model for the Nickel Academy in my book, and make a life for yourself, find a way to be loved and love someone else, you've escaped the tragic paradigm that seemed to define your life. So, you know, obviously, if I felt everything was terrible, why would I, you know, bring kids into this world? I have to believe, if not for my sake, for their sake, that

somehow we're going to get it together and make a better world bit by bit you know brick by brick yes exactly i mean do you think that this i mean this is i don't know what how i would respond to this question but i'm going to ask it anyway but do you think in terms of there being just some people who are fundamentally bad and evil or do you think that actually people are there are just some people who are too easily influenced and too easily make the wrong decisions who aren't necessarily at core terrible but they just get swept up by bad ideas well i mean i think um when I think of the whatever 60 million people who voted for Donald Trump, you know, I don't live in that America, but they're there. And those people aren't going anywhere. So, you know, 40% of the country loves this incredibly racist demagogue,

accused rapist, Lex Luthor type business criminal, and are happy to look the other way, as long as what they get a tax cut, or he's denigrating some group they don't like. You know, I can't even, I've blocked out all my theories of who votes for him. Yes, there are people who are swept up by bad ideas and have a poor education, not a lot of exposure to people who aren't like themselves. But I think people are pretty terrible. You know, when I was traveling with the Nickel Boys, I would, you know, I'd be in the UK and someone would say, oh, this reminds me of these homes for unwed mothers in Ireland, where, you know, 20 years later, you find out that all sorts of terrible abuses happened, like the ones you described in the book. In Canada, you know, I was aware of the indigenous schools where they would

take native children and put them in boarding schools to teach them about white culture and terrible, terrible things happen. And so it's not an American thing. It's, you know, people around the world are quite terrible. I think George Carlin put it best when he said, you know, the average person is pretty dumb. And if the average person is really dumb, then that means like 49% of the population is even dumber than that. So we're stuck with a lot of dummies and racists who, like I said before, are just not dying off in the numbers we need. You know, they're not dying off in a great rate. No, they're getting into podcasting. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace.

Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional i love browsing your videos and pics and i don't want to stop and i'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop these are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code Buxton to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. That's enough. Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was Colson Whitehead I was talking to there. And I'm very grateful indeed to Colson for agreeing to make the time to talk to me. If you haven't read any of his books thus far, personally, I think maybe I would start with The Nickel Boys.

Even though it is a sad story, it's so well told. And the characters are great. And there's so many wonderful details, as there are in the other books I've read of Coulson's. It's quite short, which is always good. And it is just, I'm sure they'll make a film out of it at some point i could see it very clearly as a sort of stephen king type yarn you know on the one hand fairly straightforward genre prison movie type thing boys in an institution setting but then you get these other

issues running through it racism in this case and then just sort of institutionalized abuse and but it's a good story and very well told and the underground railroad i suppose is the big one i haven't actually watched any of the episodes of the barry jenkins streaming series version uh i don't know if i want to i really like the book so much and also found it quite hardcore so um don't know if i want to go through it again in a visual way you know what i mean anyway colson whitehead i'm very grateful to him it's very peaceful evening out here it's a sat Saturday night my wife my wife is away so is my daughter

my son is here with some of his mates they're planning to watch the Tyson Fury fight tonight little snapshot for you of the past as you're listening who won the Tyson Fury fight

which doesn't start till like four in the morning or something grim and the tv room is beneath the royal bedroom so i'm gonna get woken up aren't i by teenage boys shouting punch him harder punch him in the face so he doesn't forget it punch his nose all flat punch him in the ghoulies i'll get angry messages now from boxing fans for trivializing the no ball sport is that what it's called anyway this afternoon i spent quite a long time communicating with a help assistant on eBay because you remember I did the auction earlier in the year of various bits and pieces of memorabilia in aid of Médecins Sans Frontières.

It was my first rodeo charity auction-wise on eBay. And there's a certain amount of admin you have to do, not very much, but you kind of set it up as a charity auction and then I think this I got a bit confused basically I wasn't sure like do they pay the money over to the charity or do I do it anyway basically I paid the money myself. Once the money had come in from the bidders onto my eBay account, I transferred it to my bank account and then paid it myself to MSF. Anyway, then I got a few messages from eBay saying, it's time for you to pay the money to MSF from your charity auction. Failure to pay the money will result in you getting a strike against you and it'll threaten your future

charitable auction status or something. So I got in touch and ended up speaking to a help assistant to try and explain to them that I'd paid the money to MSF, I have a receipt for it and it's all good, everything's above board. But I had this quite weird exchange, just typing messages to this live help assistant, or at least I thought it was a live help assistant. I couldn't quite figure it out. You know what I mean? Like sometimes it's very hard to tell if it's an automated help assistant. Usually it's a combination when you ask for help online. Anyway, I thought I'd read you the transcript they sent me afterwards. So first of all, they say, hi, Dr. Buckles, I'm going to hand you over to Darius. And I'll put

Darius over in this channel. And Buckles will be over in this channel for the conversation. So Darius starts off by saying, hello, welcome to eBay. My name is Darius. Please allow me a few moments to review your details. I see you opened this account 11 years ago. Thank you for your loyalty. Hello, Darius. Then there's a long pause. And after a few minutes, I say, Are you still there?

Darius comes back. Thank you for patiently waiting, Adam. I understand that you have a question regarding on the charity and no worries I can help you with that Thanks Can you please provide me more information

about your query for today? Yeah just to say the payment for the charity Médecins Sans Frontières has already been made the MSF reference for my donation is W045678910. Thank you for that information, Adam. Upon checking here, I can confirm that it was already paid. And once the

item delivered to the buyer, the payment will be processed to be sent through to the charity that you have chosen. So at this point, I'm thinking, hang on a second, all the items were delivered to the buyers ages ago. But do I want to start explaining that? All I really want them to do is to get off my back and stop sending me messages. So I say, OK, thanks. Do I need to do anything else at this point? To which Darius replies, No, Adam, there is no need for you to do anything. All you need to do is ship the item so that once the item is delivered, the payment will be processed to be sent to the charity that you choose. I wish I was able to

resolve your concerns for today. And aside from this, is there anything else that I can assist you with? So then I say, I'm not sure what you mean by ship the item. All the items for the charity auction have been sent, received and paid for. And the money raised has been paid from my Right. So then I come back and say, The items have all been delivered successfully. I needed to get in contact with eBay because I was told in an email that failure to pay your donation may result in future listings being made ineligible for charitable donations. But the money has already been paid. Darius says, yes, Adam, that is correct.

And in this case, the payment will be processed immediately and will be sent to the charity that you have chosen. So I'm thinking, Darius isn't really listening to me. I keep saying it's all been paid and there's no further action required really. And all they need to do is stop hassling me to pay the money because I've done it. And then I think, well, maybe Darius is an algorithm, but I'm not sure. So I think, well, I'll ask and see what happens. And I say, Darius, may I ask, are you an AI?

And the reply comes back fairly quickly. No, Adam, I am human. And I'm so sorry for the miscommunication a while ago. And then I feel bad because perhaps English isn't Darius's first language and maybe he's using a translation app or I don't know what. Could be any number of things. And now I've gone and called him a robot. So I say, OK, no disrespect intended. Just want to be sure that we're on the same page. There's no payment waiting to be processed and the money has been received by the charity. And then Darius says, yes, Adam, and thank you for that.

I'm just having a hard time right now and I do apologize for this inconvenience. I wish I was able to answer your concerns for today. And aside from this, is there anything else that I can assist you with? So I say, no, that's everything. Thanks, Darius. I'm sorry to hear you're having a hard time. Are you working from home? Darius says, no, Adam, I am working on site.

And thank you so much for your understanding. I do really appreciate it. Again, this is Darius from eBay customer service. Thank you for using eBay live chat. I will close our chat now. And then the chat ends. But I didn't quite know what to make of it afterwards. I think Darius was a human, but I'm not 100% sure.

I think probably what it is, is that they have humans and maybe they're dealing with all sorts of inquiries from around the world and they are using translation apps. So sometimes the use of language can sound a little bit robotic, but then I think that they also have certain phrases that they pop into the conversation every now and again which do seem very robotic but it's really hard to tell and at some point probably already in some cases

it will be an AI and they probably will be pretending that they're not an AI because a lot of people would rather deal with a human. But it's weird, isn't it, the modern world? And it's going to get weirder. There you go. That's the moral of my quite long story about the eBay help assistant.

No, that's fine. You're welcome. Hello, look. I'm being buzzed by a bat i hope you're having some flappy bat fun or any kind of fun out there despite all the challenges of the modern world as it currently is take your pick anyway yeah hope you're doing all right thank you so much once again to colson whitehead thank you very much indeed to the production team for the podcast especially seamus murphy mitchell for all his production support and becca tashinsky thank you very much indeed to matt lamont for his wonderful edit work on this episode.

Cheers, Matt. Thanks to Helen Green. She does the beautiful artwork for this podcast and for Ramble Book. All right, that's enough. That's enough. Until next time, we share the same outer space. Please take jolly good care.

Let's have a quick hug, shall we? All right. I love you. Bye! Bye. Thank you. Thank you.