The New Yorker Radio Hour - Summer, By The Book

Episode Date: July 30, 2019

The cultural critic Doreen St. Félix goes to Madame Tussauds with Justin Kuritzkes, the début author of the novel “Famous People,” to talk about the nature of celebrity. Jia Tolentino heads for the children’s section of a bookstore with Rivka Galchen to compare notes on the kids’ books that still inspire them. And Jelani Cobb recommends three recent works of history that shed light on our current moment. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of The New Yorker and WNYC Studios. This is The New Yorker, I'm David Remnick. This week, my colleagues here at The New Yorker are telling us about the books they're most excited to read this summer. And Doreen St. Felix writes about, well, she writes about a lot of things, including pop culture. Doreen, what books on your mind lately? A debut novel called Famous People by Justin Kyritskus. What's it about? So famous people is a fake memoir about a fake pop star.

I'm liking it already. So it's basically written as a stream of consciousness first draft of a memoir of this unnamed 22-year-old who has been famous since he was 12 years old. And he's a really, he's kind of a heartbreaking narrator, this kid, because, you know, he's famous. He hasn't experienced the real world. And yet he's so desperate to understand what it is about him that his fans love so much. and he's totally naive. He doesn't understand what it is to be a normal person in the world because since he was a child, 12 years old,

he's been pushed into the limelight. But he's starting to very slowly and then increasingly more profoundly as the book goes on, he's starting to realize how fame affects the people around him. People are so mad at each other. People are taking life so seriously. People are losing hope. And I think, honestly, it's because people are so rooted in their own particular spot in the universe.

But something happens to you when you're touring all around the world all the time. Something happens to you when you visit some country you've never heard of, and you see your face on the side of a bus being used to sell some soda that you didn't even know existed. And you call up your people and you're like, yo, did we agree to this? And they tell you, yes, it was part of an overall deal with East Asia. Something happens. you realize how fucking tiny you are.

And it's a debut novel by somebody named Justin Carritschus. Yes. Who is that? So Justin Caritzcus is a playwright, and I've known his plays for a really long time. The last play of his that I saw in Brooklyn was called Asshole. Did the ceiling come down on us? I think we're okay. He also is a niche YouTube celebrity.

He makes these really strange but deeply brilliant videos. in which he uses photo booth, you know that editing application. And essentially what he does is he creates these little skits, and it's just him in front of his computer. He uses photo booth to manipulate his body, so he's able to play two characters at once.

And the skits are absurd. They are surrealists. They're really strange. They're not like the kinds of videos that we've known YouTube celebrities to actually get famous for. Sounds great. And in addition to that,

Now Justin is a musician. He has released an album called Songs About My Wife. It's in the tradition of being a parody of pop music, but also actually is good pop music on its own. So because famous people is so much about the artifice of celebrity, I thought it would be bizarre, but also fun, to talk to Justin at a temple of celebrity strangeness, which is Madame Tussaud, obviously, in Times Square, New York. Madame Tussaud is one of the busiest attractions in Times Square, so in order to beat the crowd, I asked Justin, who I know for a fact is a late sleeper, to meet me there at 8 a.m.

How's the going? Good, how are you? So happy to be here. So we almost had the place to ourselves. Have you been to one of these before? This is my first time at any Wax Museum. How much did you look up about Wax Museums in Madame Tussaud's? Oh, very little because I wanted to be surprised.

I didn't want to know anything about what we were actually going to see, but I couldn't help just go to the Wikipedia page for Madame Dousseau. And I found out that she was like a... She was involved in the French Revolution. Wow. What a monument to her important work. She was a royalist sympathizer in the French Revolution. And what she was doing was that she would go around and make wax figures of famous victims of the reign of terror

and display them around being like, look at what's happening. The first, according to Wikipedia, at least, the first one she ever did was Voltaire. And then from that, of course, comes Marilyn Monroe for Sinatra. And then it was straight to Gaga and all of that. But yeah, I had always assumed that it was like...

So it's really easy to make a satire on the subject of celebrities. But famous people, it's not quite a satire. I think that famous people is a work of real empathy. It seeks to access the interior of a young celebrity's mind. There are people who were kind of running through my mind as I read the novel, including Billy Eilish, who's 17 years old, some of the SoundCloud rappers, and even Justin Bieber.

Is that going to be your next book, Justin? That is the next. Oh, wow. Look who we have here. First, first on the stop. So, we are currently in the New Year's Eve exhibit at Madame Tussaud, staring at the kind of dead-eyed effigy of Justin Bieber. Were you thinking about Bieber?

I mean, I don't think it's like, the character's certainly not a stand-in for Bieber, but, you know, Bieber's one of those people who you just can't avoid. even if you didn't want to know anything about Justin Beaver, you're going to know a lot about Justin Beaver. And I guess that's sort of like ubiquity of somebody like this, and the fact that it's this guy, like with this look on his face, that this is the person we all have to follow and know about, disturbed me and intrigued me and was sort of, I don't know,

I was trying to find some meaning in that and why it's this guy. Right. And you mentioned the look on Bieber's face, which is kind of shockingly despondent, this wax statue, depressed by the massive fame that he's reached at the age of, you know, 17 years old. What's so interesting about celebrity in this era is like, there's no honesty, right? There's a lot of layers distancing us from the famous person. and what it is that they actually think.

But your famous person is actually writing a memoir. There was a part of me that needed to believe that there was something more going on there with somebody like Beaver or Selena Gomez or whoever, Miley Cyrus. Like, I'm so intimately involved in these people's lives against my will. Yeah, I kind of wanted to write into being

the character that I needed these people to be so that I could continue being invested in my will. their lives through no choice of my own. I know Justin as being a writer, but there are thousands of people online who really only know Justin through his YouTube videos and have actually kind of developed a cult following of him. There are people who think that Justin is the funniest person online. You can't handle my strongest potions.

No one can. My strongest potions are fit for a beast, let alone a man. man. Potions seller, what do I have to tell you to get your potions? Why won't you trust me with your strongest potions? Potions seller, I need them if I'm to be successful in the battle. I can't give you my strongest potions because my strongest potions are only for the strongest beings and you are of the weakest. So I think the fact that we're still talking about this video, years and years after Justin uploaded it to the internet, speaks to how popular it is.

It has, I think, right now, 5 million views on YouTube. There are subreddits, there are wikis about it. There exists a kind of person who lives online where if you just mention two words, potion seller to them, they know exactly what you're talking about. And they might even be a scholar of Justin. But what do you think about the intensity of fan worship,

you know, in this era? you're someone who has a bit of a fandom yourself? Yeah, I sort of became accidentally famous. You know, on YouTube all of a sudden, I had to reconcile my feelings about my YouTube channel with the fact that for as long as I live, probably the vast majority of people who know me at all are going to know me for these videos I make with Photo Booth.

And so if I die tomorrow, my obituary is going to say YouTuber Justin Gritzkis, who also wrote a book. you know, who also wrote some plays, but mostly it's going to lead with potion seller dies. And I sort of quickly became really okay with that, again, out of necessity, because it was just like, well, there's nothing you can do to change it. You know, like I can try all I want to change that,

but there's nothing I can do today that's going to change that. I think that Madame Tussaud, people really ridicule it, right? It seems like a very silly thing to, give your time, your attention, and your money to. But then you come face to face with some of these wax figures and you immediately understand why it is that people make this pilgrimage. I think of people like my mother who is a very religious person and takes, you know, the statues that she has of religious figures, saints like very seriously. They're not relics, right? They don't contain any element or scrap of that person's physical form,

but they are representations of the form. And I think that a lot of the people who are drawn to Madame Tussaud, are people who think that, even if their rational brain is telling them differently, when they come across these statues, they do feel like they're making a connection. Mary King is very realistic. It could slightly be a very peculiar way.

Anderson Cooper-looking. Edmond, handsome, Trent. Yeah. He looks... Who's the... Oh, this is Madame Fousseau. Oh, my goodness. I mean, this is very meta,

but it's a statue of her, and she's holding a bust of a very important-looking man's head, I say. Yeah. And what's... I mean, it's, like, kind of beautiful when you think about it. It is really beautiful.

Like, look at the pride she has. In her work. In her work. I think, obviously, we are in the campiest place on Earth, but it's nice that, people find ways to kind of like build monuments to individuals that means something to them.

Totally. I think it's also like, it's kind of emblematic of a lot of what we're talking about with pop and like the status of pop musicians as artists. Because like on the one hand, yes, this is like a multi, I'm assuming billion dollar tourist attraction that's all over the world. but in another sense Madame Tussaud is one of the most successful artists of all time like we're standing in a monument to this woman's art like the art that she popularized an entire genre and I don't think that's

anything to shake a stick at like she has a whole factory you know in the way that like the Renaissance guys would have like a whole factory of people making their work for them hers is ongoing And like, it looks like it's going to go on forever. As long as we have celebrities. As long as we have celebrities.

And there's, like, different regional varieties of it. You know, like in Dubai, I'm sure they have celebrities that we don't know about. Even though we got a baby, still got time to get crazy. When the baby's asleep. I'm a father, your mother. Still got time to be in love. The debut novel by Justin Carritschus is called Famous People. And his pop album, because of course he has a pop album too, is called Songs About My Wife.

He met up with Doreen St. Felix at Madame Tussaud's in New York. Now, if your idea of a beach read isn't a fake memoir by a fake pop star, but a big hardcover about a war or a biography of a president, you know the kind of door stops that I'm talking about. I've got the guy for you. Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and he's also a historian and a professor of journalism at Columbia. So he's a pretty busy guy, and he has to choose his reading with care. So when the summer rolls around and you put books in your bag either for the beach or you're now going to Australia for a long, you've got a long flight ahead of you, do you take thick books of history or are thrillers or how does it work for?

No, it's actually the opposite because it's during the summer that I actually get to read. seriously with history to engage really with the literature that's come out and to see where the field is going and things that I find interesting and that during the year it's hard to keep track of. So what are you going to be looking at this summer? What should we be looking at this summer in the historical field? Oh, there are lots of things. But there's a book that I have a bit of a conflict of interest in because it was written by David Levering Lewis, who was my graduate advisor. I think nobody's going to sue you for promoting a David Leather newest book. No one will, I hope.

But it's a book about a Republican businessman who's tall and blue-eyed and has kind of rough-hewn manners who comes out of nowhere and gets the Republican nomination for a presidency. Not the person that may come to mind immediately, but it's a biography of Wendell Wilkie. And the thing that I found most compelling about this book was the portrait of the Republican Party in the middle part of the 20th century. And there's some things that are familiar. There are the themes of resistance to business regulation and skepticism about foreign entanglements and international obligations. But there's a kind of improbable point in which people do something. imagine now and they think about things in the bigger picture and bipartisan relationships.

And there's a kind of line that people don't want to cross in terms of the distinctions between the two parties. And after he loses to Franklin Roosevelt in 19... And this is Roosevelt getting his third term. Did Wilkie have a good shot at winning? So he doesn't wind up winning, but he does something after that, which is that he seems to legitimately be interested in seeing Roosevelt have a successful third term. You can go in so far as to go on two separate envoy trips for the Roosevelt administration on the verge of the U.S. entry into the war. And we couldn't imagine something like that happening now. It's just a completely not even close. So David Levering Lewis's biography of Wendellke, what else have you got coming?

unexampled courage. It's written by Judge Richard Gergel, whose name may be familiar to you in particular, because you sent me to South Carolina to cover the trial of Dillon Roof. Judge Gergel presided over that trial. And it's a fascinating story on its face, but again, it also has a kind of bigger implication to it. It's a narrative about a black soldier by the name of Isaac Woodard, who is on his way back home, from World War II. He's just been discharged and he goes from the Philippines to South Carolina and gets into an argument with a bus driver and is thrown off the bus and arrested.

And what happens after this is subject to dispute, but what's not in question is that a sheriff by the name of Lindwood Scholl hits him multiple times and the result is that he loses his eyesight, permanently blind, and the injuries are much more extensive than, you know, what one might expect based upon what the reports are. Interestingly, this happens in 1946. The Truman administration gets very involved in this. He directs his Justice Department to look into this, and they wind up bringing charges against the sheriff, and there's a trial, which is presided over by a judge by the name of Waity's Waring in Charleston, South Carolina. Judge Waring, who is not liberal on matters of race, looks at this case and is outraged at what happens, but nonetheless, a jury rules in favor of the

sheriff. He's acquitted of the charges that are brought against him, and it seems to be a kind of regular Southern fate accompli. But that's fascinating. The aftermath is what becomes really interesting. It both sparks Judge Wearing to move in a much more progressive direction in the bench issuing rulings on civil rights that ultimately make him such a pariah that he leaves Charleston and lives out the rest of his life in New York. Yeah, Jelani, you teach at Columbia, but it's okay that I think I see an Eric Foner title on the table. That's okay. It's all right. I'm Eric Foner, who's like the great historian of reconstruction and Civil War as well. Foner's a is not a kid. He's got a new book coming out. He has a new book coming out.

And it's called The Second Founding. And I got an advanced copy of it in the mail and picked it up and found it to be really pertinent, really interesting for contemporary reasons. Eric Foner makes a compelling argument that the unresolved questions of the American Revolution that linger around and intensify and culminate in the Civil War aren't really resolved. and the idea of how we want to approach democracy, and specifically the question of how we think about citizenship really takes the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to put into place. And my interestedness was specifically around the 14th Amendment and the conversations we're having now as it relates to immigration, as it relates to all of the voting rights,

all of the civil rights thing. And so I think it's a good summary for people who are interested, it in having a kind of deep context for the conversations we're having right now. So just before we leave, Geline, just give us the list one more time so we can get the syllabus for our summer reading. Okay, that's great. So I have Eric Foner, the second founding. I have David Levering Lewis, the improbable Wendell Wilkie, and I have unexampled courage.

There you've got it. The syllabus for the summer is set. Jelani, thanks so much. Thank you. The New Yorker's Jelani Cobb. You can find all the books he mentioned at New Yorker Radio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Today, my colleagues have been sharing some of their favorite books for the summer. And if you ask Gia Tolentino about her favorite books, she's likely to tell you about something that she first read when she was nine years old. Gia was the kind of kid who read everywhere on roller skates, on her bike, up a tree, and she still loves children's books no matter that she's pushing 30. Hi, great to meet you, Rip Dad. It's so good to meet you. Recently, Gia went to talk about children's books with Rivka Galchin,

who was interested in them as a novelist and as a teacher and as a parent. This is not exactly my local, but I come here. Like the only coffee shop that I like to work at is like down the street, and so I come here a lot when I'm stressed and spend like $400. You know what I mean? Yeah, perfect. Yeah, that's good impulse spending. They met up at a store called Books or Magic in Brooklyn.

It's also like a good size, I feel, you know? Yeah, no, it's curated. It's curated. It's curated well. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How old is your kid? She's five.

Cool. Yeah. You grew up in Texas. I grew up in Texas, yeah. And I grew up in Oklahoma. Oh, right, right, right. So what was your bookstore when you were young? I went to the library a lot.

And when I was in like chapter book age, there was this really good use. bookstore near me in the suburbs of Houston where you could buy books and then return them. So I would come with like, you would pawn your books. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like, so I would just go there like every weekend with like a pile. What was yours like? I had the least bookish childhood of match. Really? What do you mean? I know when in my house read. It was considered strange. The only books I would find at friend's houses. Like that's where my books were, were like at other people's homes. I remember going to garage sale being really bored one summer. And they had a biography of Einstein and summer of my German soldier, which is like a sexy affair book with the

German soldier. Yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was just, you know, the wrong, in good and bad ways, it was like nobody helping curate my reading. Yeah, and did you, like, read all the Judy Blume books? Like, did you try to read all the... I was, like, always afraid of puberty. I had, like, an early fear of it. So I remember reading them, but feeling like, in a weird way, that's when I was like, I'm doing something wrong. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even though it was the opposite. I was doing something right.

I know. Where's the Judy Blum section? These chapter books are back here. Oh, yeah, they would be back here. Like, I secretly think, like, Newberry-level books are, like, the best books that exist, you know? Like, oh, no, I'm definitely on a page with you. I mean, this was my favorite book when I was little, the Pantams Hold on. The perfect book ever.

That's, like, the best book. It's so good. They should win the Pulitzer Prize. It's so good. like a perfect work of art. I love to get stoned and reread this book. That holds up. So good.

And what's interesting to me in that book? Oh my God. Incredible. It's a perfect work of art. One thing that surprised me is Milo is like willful. Not only is his primary characteristic that he's bored all the time and everything bores him. He's like easily depressed.

He's easily depressed. He's melancholy. And the only thing he has to do on this adventure is sort of wake up. Yeah. He's entering into adolescence. That's the way I see him now. Like, he's losing that special power. He must have once had of finding the world interesting.

Oh, my God. Remember the part where, like, the really synesthetic part where they play, like the... Oh, the symphony. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They clap and then, like, a piece of paper appears or something. Like, oh, my God, it's so good. I, like, one might buy a copy right now. I don't have a child, but I reread these books pretty often as partly as just like a reminder

of what clear. writing looks like. Economical, kind of pristine, very clear writing. All the Lewis Sackard books I still find like incredibly sophisticated, like the wayside school.

Holes I teach. Holes is so good. Add this to my long list of children's books that I prefer to adult literature. It starts with this kid who's just everything is wrong in his life and in every way his status is low and his family is not going to work out for him. And he's kind of like dispensed to this Work camp.

Work camp. And it has this iconic first line. They'll know what they're digging for. Yeah, it has this iconic first line. There's no lake at Camp Green Lake. And it becomes this like story about history and redemption and love. And it's full of like, as you said, it's like a masterclass and just storytelling. Oh, the plotting of it is wild.

It's like 150 years of plot. One of the things that makes me sad about these books is when they redo the covers. You know, like have you... Yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Like all of the encyclopedia. Brown books. It's not like cute line drawings.

Let's see if we can find the Judy Blume ones. Like the are you, are you there? God, it's me, Margaret cover. Like the new one is like, I message. You know, like she's literally texting like our end. It's like, come on. You know, where are they? Oh, here they are. See, I bet no. See it's like this weird conservative streak that I have. Yeah, like this is like not tight.

With kids books because you want it to be your childhood, not a new childhood. Yeah, but you know, but even when we like I feel that. You like the old ones when you were young too. Yeah. And even like the Harriet. spy cover that I had was a line drawing from like the 60s or 70s, right? And it was still like those persisted well into the 90s. And then all of a sudden now, how best to describe?

No, it's a beautiful color palette. I would buy whatever candy was wrapped in that. Exactly. It looks like a candy bar, right? Like it's like this was my favorite. Did you ever read this one starring Sally J. Friedman as herself? Ooh, this one is good. I love the Mysterious Benedict Society books.

I never read those. I don't think, I didn't read them when I was little. I think if I looked on the dates, we couldn't have read them. But I bought them as gifts for my niece and nephew. And I just think kids are waiting for a story that tells them that they have a special power. And the weird thing is that I used to think, oh, how pathetic. They should know that you have to work hard to have special power. And then I was like, oh, kids do have special powers.

They're like noticing is very different. There is tension to detail is so different. I wonder sometimes if that's why there's so many detective books. Right, right, right. They have detective powers. Here's an Anne of Green Gables here. I guess the Ann Books do get, like she gets old. She gets old.

She gets old. She gets old. Did you ever read the... She gets Gilbert. I love, did you love Gilbert? I didn't. I thought he was boring. Really?

Really? I thought he was so boring. Oh, my God, I loved Gilbert. I actually feel like before puberty, the literature of female protection. Agnes is quite incredible. There's Pippi Longstocking. Everybody. There's Ann of Green Gables.

There's just so many. There's like the Western game. There's, yeah. Like wrinkle in time. Now the Hilda series I love, wrinkle and stuff. I just feel like it's overwhelming how many. And also the like boys are great. Like Pinocchio is amazing.

And, but I actually feel like if anything, I sometimes worry about young boys. Yeah, I do too. Because it's like men read a lot less than women. And childhood is the only. only time when everyone reads a lot. And part of the reason I think is that the process of identification is so flexible in childhood. There are so many, there are so many more, like in terms of gender, at least, female protagonists that boys would identify with, like, at the drop of a hat. A thing about Anne Shirley and a thing about, like, Laura Ingalls and Joe March and all the other

bookish, writerly heroines, is they're also really headstrong. All of them have this desire to, like, work hard and like be good citizens in their little snow globe worlds, but they also all get into trouble all the time because they're extremely headstrong and make huge messes just by like clumsiness or just their natural tendency to cause trouble. And obviously like I related to that very strongly, like both the desire to be kind of a hardworking little like happy, busy, be and also to constantly be causing trouble, because that's what I was like as a kid. Yeah, I was, like, not completely well behaved. And so I related to these girls. I also think, for me, anyways, something that was magical about those books, because I actually

remember the mother across the street, read us Little House on the Prairie out loud. And, I mean, I remember so on Little House on the Prairie, they like roast the pig's tail and eat it like a lollipaw. Yeah, yeah, yeah, in the first book. I remember that one. And they inflate the bladder and make a balloon out of it. And it just seems like an incredible world. I also feel like a lot of these books are at least not for every kid, but I do think when you're a kid, you feel you have this capacity for a greater adventure than you're having.

These books sort of fulfill that dream of sort of something of the appropriate size to your heart occurring to you. Depending how the story is told, it's as if it finally calls upon all you have within you. Right, because often, I mean, I often think, like, yeah, being a kid, I mean, that's why, like, the summers are, you know, like, you're so young. All you want to do is run around in the sun. And then you just have to be in school from, like, 8 a.m. to whatever, 4 p.m. And, yeah, these books are, like, what I really want to be doing is riding horses on the prairie or, like, discovering I have a secret power or, like, proving my bravery in a situation of great import, right? Like, it's like, kids' books maybe admit that so much more than adult fiction, right? It's like what we really long for, you know, is really different than what our lives are. Gia Tolentino and Rivka Galchin had Books Are Magic in Brooklyn. Gia's book Trick Mirror will be published in just about a week, so look out for it.

I'm David Remnick. I hope you've enjoyed the show this week. Next week, Ben Tav joins us with the story of a man who is considered the most valuable prisoner in Guantanamo during the War on Terror. It's a fascinating story. Please join us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

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