Radiolab - The Universe Knows My Name

Episode Date: January 11, 2011

In this new short, we explore luck and fate, both good and bad, with an author and a cartoon character.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From W. N. Y.

C. C? Yes. And NPR. Could you, uh, could you introduce yourself? Yeah. Oh, uh, my name is Paul Oster. And what do you do?

What do I do? I sit here and talk to people like you. He does. And he's, Paul Oster is one of the most prolific writers we have. I do the best I can. But I went to see him because any time you open a Paul Oster book, you notice that he is noticing that in the world, there are lots of strange repeats. He calls them rhymes.

Rhyming events. What is a rhyming event? Well, a rhyming event would be something, for example, the girlfriend I had when I was very young, college freshman, sophomores, had a piano in her apartment, and the F above Middle Sea was broken. It was the only note that didn't work on the piano. That summer, we got together and we went out to Maine, way, way out in the wilds of Maine, there Eastport. And we were walking through pretty much an abandoned town, and we walked into what It looked like an old Elks Lodge or Moose Lodge.

And we walked up to the piano that was sitting in the room. And my girlfriend could play very well, and she tested out the piano. One key was broken, F above Middle C. So that, to me, is a rhyming event. Rhyming. The Fs always break. I don't know. If that doesn't impress you, and I'm going to give you another one, this is a true story, by the way, the one you're about to hear.

And it's a whopper. This is too weird. Well, it is. the room, just five pages in. During the war, M.'s father had hidden out from the Nazis for several months in a Paris, Chambro de Bonn. Eventually, he managed to escape. What's a Chambaud de Bun?

A maid's room. It's a small room on the top floor of a Paris apartment building. Chambot de Bunn. Eventually, he managed to escape, made his way to America, and began a new room. life. Years passed, more than 20 years. Em had been born, had grown up, and was now going off to study in Paris. Once there, he spent several difficult weeks looking for a place to live. Just when he was about to give up in despair, he found a small Chambot de Bun. Immediately upon moving in, he wrote a letter to his father to tell him the good news. A week or so later, he received

the reply. Your address, wrote Em's father. That is the same building I hid out in during the war. He then went on to describe the details of the room. It turned out to be the same room his son had rented. Wait a second. So the father flees the Nazis, stays in this room in Paris,

leaves 20 years go by, the son happens to be in Paris, needs a room. He finds a little. So you're saying the same room? The same exact same room? Exactly same room? And this really happened. It didn't happen to Paul.

It happened to a friend of Paul's. Wow. That is weird. Yeah. And what do you make of that? Well, I'm not sure what to make of it, except that it gives you a funny sense that sometimes in your life, when something happens and then weirdly it happens again, that maybe that's intentional or maybe...

Like the script has already been written somehow. Exactly. Right. But, you know, it's interesting. You see people, there are people, it seems to me, who attract bad luck. we know these people. We've all known them. Absolutely.

And there are people who are accident prune also. They're always breaking their toe or breaking their leg. Well, speaking of which, let me get our producer, Pat Walters, in here. Wait, maybe before you do that, you should just mention that this is the, this is the radio lab. We haven't done that yet. Oh, right. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. Right.

I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crulwich. And our subject is fate. really. We always seem to talk about things. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, like, we will have sometimes scientists on the show, and we talk to them about whatever it is that they study.

But it always ends up being the case that the real topic of conversation is destiny. Like, is it there? Yeah. If it is, can you beat it? We could be talking about flowers, and somehow this would come up. So we thought today we would attack it a little more playfully. And Pat, our producer, got kind of obsessed with something to do with fate and bad luck, and I don't really know. Pat, do you want to just roll the tape?

Yeah. Just one second here. You live in Arkansas? Is that right? That's correct. Yeah, yeah. I don't think you have road runners down there, do you? No, they're roadrunners. I think they've maybe gotten into the far western part of the state. You know what that is, Chad? I hate that freaking bird. Yeah, exactly.

It's a roadrunner. And who is this dude? This is Mike Barrier. I'm the author of a book called Hollywood cartoons, American Animation. He's basically the guy you call if you have a big, profound question about Looney Tunes. Looney Tunes. Yeah, a few months ago, Lulu and I started wondering, like... Lulu Miller, our former producer. Why is Roadrunner so good?

Because I'm at least in the case. That's your question? Yeah, but before we get to the answer, I just want to give you a little background on the cartoon. All right, go for it. It's 1949, you're at the movies with your wife. You go in and you take a seat, and when the movie starts, one of the very first things you see is a cartoon.

And in the 40s and 50s, most of these cartoons were Chase cartoons. Tom and Jerry being the prime example. Problem was, this chase thing was a formula. It was rigid, and it got a lot of cartoonists kind of bored. Yeah. So one day, this kind of famous cartoonist named Chuck Jones sitting around with his buddy Mike Maltese.

Just talking about what oddball combinations of characters that could be chasing each other. I think Maltese thought about having an ard bark chasing a gnu or something like that. What's a ganoo? I don't even know what a canoe is. But just to cut to the chase. Eventually, they decided let's make a cartoon about a coyote chasing a roadrunner. And when this cartoon came out, it was huge.

It was a hit. What does it mean for a cartoon to be a hit? Like in those days, cartoons usually only ran one time. Huh. But this one was different. Six months after it came out, they started making another one there. Which was almost completely unheard of. Which brings us back to Lulu's question.

Why is Roadrunner so good? because I'm at least in the camp that it's way better than Tom and Jerry. And Mike says it's actually all about... The coyote. He's an extraordinarily human animal. And not just like in the facial expressions that he made and the ways that he looked at the camera a lot. Yeah.

But actually, it kind of was about the predicaments that he found himself in. Meaning? Take, for example, this one really famous cartoon. Like always, coyote has got a plan. He has made a painting. of the road. Showing the road continuing over a chasm. Like he's put this painting right at the edge of the cliff.

Glad he being the roadrunner would run through the painting. Gravity would take hold of him and he would plunge into the chasm. Roadrunner comes flying down the highway and gets the painting, but he doesn't fall. Instead, the roadrunner runs into the painting, as if it were the road were actually continuing. But then when the coyote tries to follow the roadrunner into the painting, he runs through the painting.

and falls. And he looks up at the camera and he shrugged and he's like, why did the bird get to run into the painting and not me? Gravity isn't this uniform in different force. It's a malignant force that actually comes in and out of play according to how inconvenient it can be for the coyote. But that's interesting. The roadrunner isn't his real opponent at all.

It's the universe. Right. Oh, yeah. No, he's chasing the roadrunner, but the universe is his opponent, absolutely. And that's kind of what makes the coyote seem so, human. He's in that situation that all of us feel like we're in sometimes. Like the very laws of physics are against us. Yeah, yeah, it's almost a primitive way of thinking, but I think all of us lapsed into this, you know, that how can this happen? Right, the universe is out to get me.

Yeah, yeah, you can't be human and not feel that way. On the other hand, even though the universe is screwing you, at least it's noticing you. It's kind of flattering in a way. It's totally flattering, yeah. And this, Mike says, is why the cartoon works. Like, on the one hand, it confirms. It's terms are paranoias, and then the other kind of plays to our vanity. Flattering. When you said flattering a second ago, is that really what it is? You don't see it that way? I don't know.

I've never liked this cartoon, because he never wins. It's like, what's more flattering to live in a world that actively screws you at every turn or one that just doesn't care about you? Like a Nietzschean void? Um, I don't really know. That's kind of tough. I go with The Void. No.

What do you mean? Totally ignored by the universe? Yes. The worst. As opposed to being actively screwed by the universe? Yeah, sure. Ignore me. You don't know.

What you don't know. Let me tell you the story. I went to ABC News and I did a story that went very well. And then the next week I did a story which went very badly. And the head of the place, Rune Arledge, called me into his office. And this was Rune Arledge, a legend in broadcasting. And then he put his face right in. front of my face, his nose almost touching my nose and said to me, I hated this, I hated

that, what's wrong with you? And instead of being sad and upset, inside my head, like Wiley Coyote himself, I thought, wow, he knows my name. He watched my story. But if Rune Arlidge had said that to you every single day. He didn't do it every single day. I know, but in cartoon form, that's essentially what's happening here. Yes, but the cartoon is yelling at him. The reason I like Wiley Coyote is because I admire the guy. He has no evidence at all that anything good will ever happen to him, and yet he wakes up every day with hope. But some people really are what we call losers, and it's fascinating to try to understand why that person's always getting fired from his job, or is unlucky in love all the time, or just

It can't seem to make a go of it. But now let's suppose that unlike Mr. Coyote, you can't really be sure whether the script that's been written for you, if indeed there is one, is going to get you deeper and deeper into do-do or whether it's going to make you a star or what. Yeah, and when those moments come along, you know, when you feel like you're getting a peek at the script maybe, and then you think, well, A, is this real?

And if it is... What do you do? Yeah. In fact, Paul got to one more story, which... You want to read it? Yeah, why don't I read it? I know where it is. Yeah, it's the last one in the Red Notebook.

It is a very strange story. My first novel was inspired by a wrong number. I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn, one afternoon sitting at my desk and trying to work when the telephone rang. If I am not mistaken, it was the spring of 1980. I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he was talking to the Pinkerton Agency. I told him no, he had dialed the wrong number and hung up.

Then I went back to work and promptly forgot about the call. The next afternoon, the telephone rang again. It turned out to be the same person asking the same question I had been asked the day before, is this the Pinkerton Agency. Again I said no, and again I hung up. This time, however, I started thinking about what we were. What would have happened if I had said yes? What if I had pretended to be a detective from the Pinkerton agency?

I wondered. What if I had actually taken on the case? To tell the truth, I felt that I had squandered a rare opportunity. If the man ever called again, I told myself, I would at least talk to him a little bit and try to find out what was going on. I waited for the telephone to ring again, but the third call never came. After that, wheels started turning in my head and little by little, an entire world of possibilities opened up to me. When I sat down to write City of Glass a year later, the wrong number had been

transformed into the crucial event of the book, the mistake that sets the whole story in motion. A man named Quinn receives a phone call from someone who wants to talk to Paul Auster, the private detective. Just as I did, Quinn tells the caller he has dialed the wrong number. That happens again on the next night, and again Quinn hangs up. Unlike me, however, Quinn is given another chance. When the phone rings again on the third night, he plays along with the caller and takes on the case. Yes, he says, I'm Paul Oster. And at that moment, the madness begins.

And not just for the character in the story, but for Paul Oster himself, because when he wrote this book, the City of Glass, it became a enormous success. And this is now, I'm writing in 1992 here. I finished the book 10 years ago, and since then, I've gone on to occupy myself with other projects, other ideas, other books.

Less than two months ago, I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author. I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn that afternoon, sitting at my desk and trying to work when the telephone rang. This was a different apartment from the one I had in 1980,

a different apartment with a different telephone number. I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he could speak to Mr. Quinn. Quinn, remember, is the name of the man in the story who got the call. He had a Spanish. accent, and I did not recognize the voice. For a moment, I thought it might be one of my friends trying to pull my leg. Mr. Quinn, I said. Is this some kind of joke or what? No, it wasn't a joke.

The man was in dead earnest. He had to talk to Mr. Quinn. Would I please put him on the line? Just to make sure, I asked him to spell out the name. The caller's accent was quite thick, and I was hoping that he wanted to talk to Mr. Queen, but no such luck. Q-U-I-N-N, the man answered. I suddenly grew scared, and for a moment or two, I couldn't get any words out of my mouth. I'm sorry, I said at last.

There's no Mr. Quinn here. You've dialed the wrong number. The man apologized for disturbing me, and then we both hung up. This really happened. Like everything else I have set down in this red notebook, it is a true story.

So it really did. It really did, I get into it. Did you, at the moment, when you could have said, well, this is Mr. Quinn. You could have said that. I was shaken, I have to say. I was not in full possession of myself. It really disturbed me.

And it'd take a while to settle down in you? Because it's such a weird. Yes. It's inexplicable. But interesting, because of that. Paul Oster is the author of The Red Notebook, which these readings are from, New York Trilogy, of course, which is what he contains the city of glass.

Also, man in the dark, invisible, sunset park, he writes book, gift to book, gift to book. We should be off. Thanks for listening. I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Krelwich. We'll see you later. Start of message. My name is Alvaro Lovana Roberto.

I'm originally from Spain, but live in Hopkins, Massachusetts, and I am a radio lab listener. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P.S. Lund Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Adios and thank you. End of message.