Fancy Dinners, George Saunders, shitty philosophies, and how to be good when you're your own hero

It's August 24th, nine in the morning, and it's so cold that I wrote my journal standing up today. Fall is coming. Now I'm drinking hot tea, sitting at the table, and I'd like to tell a story that starts in a Thai restaurant and then discusses George Saunders, dog sex, and the idealized notions we have about our place in the world, if that's okay. I'm predicting that it'll be a bit of a rambler, but hopefully it ends at a place that pulls it all together and shows the through-line. We'll see.

I found myself sitting at a somewhat upscale restaurant in Brookline last week on a date, nervous as all get-out, sipping a pink beverage with smoke drifting off of it, desperately trying not to get a layer of green papaya pad thai sauce all over myself while maintaining eye contact.

The person I was sitting across from was smart. Very smart. (Uh oh.) We were dipping cubes of chive cake into soy sauce and talking about aspirations for the future, about travel and work and what it meant to be 24 and 27 and how to figure out how much money you needed to care for people around you, about how to live a life that felt adventurous while still achieving the things we've been walloped over the heads with until we want to achieve them. I told them I appreciated their sense of adventure, that while they had so much of the other things figured out (career, money), they still strove to live an exciting life and thought about doing something big. I like that. I like it when people think big.

They asked me how it all fit in my head. Upcoming twelve months of travel, abandoning friends, family, career, etc. I appreciated the question because it made me verbalize something I've been thinking about but haven't been able to calcify succinctly -- the answer to, well, why?

I wiped peanut dust and seafoam and whole chive off my chin and I said it the best way I could: "I've got one more push in me."

---

This wonderful, smart, intimidating person also asked me about writing, about whether I would ever do anything with my creative writing degree I clawed tooth and nail for. They are a photographer and a fashion-person, have a great eye for lighting and aesthetics and mood, and I asked if part of their big thing would include something with film or photography or design -- it was something they were thinking about. And that conversation -- this time sitting on a dock on the Charles River, watching people windsurf and the clouds shifting and the patterns of the waves against the dock (them pointing all of this out, me still nervous) -- that conversation coupled with the one from the restaurant, and it coupled with the thought of this trip and the blog, and it coupled with a trip to the bookstore, and it made me think: "I've got one more push in me." Maybe that applies to writing, too.

So. So I'm slowly but consciously drifting back into the world of short fiction -- it's a world I lived in for four years of undergrad, a world I associate with part-time class schedules and the Georgia spring and a sort of willful pulling back from the real world. I figured, I'll listen to the best short story writer I know. And on one of the two-hour drives back and forth from Boston to White River Junction, Vermont, I listened to George Saunders talk on the Armchair Expert podcast, and then I listened to it again, and then I read the transcript, and now I'd like to write about some of the wonderful, wacky things he said.

But first, some key terms:

-George Saunders: Arguably the best American short story writer alive. Funny, inventive, acclaimed. All-around good guy.

-Objectivism: A philosophy discussed in the podcast. Objectivism is when you're a (probably) white, (definite) piece of crap. It means that the world is the way it is (objective realism), and that individualism is an ethical imperative. So egoism is good, selfishness is a virtue, and laissez-faire capitalism is key. Objectivism holds that going after the things you want is the right thing to do, and that if you don't get them, it's because you are a lesser person. Zoinks. We can thank Ayn Rand for creating this foundational shit-pillar of the modern red-pill phenomenon.

Objectivism, now that I think of it, is like that squirrel thing in Ice Age, constantly chasing his nut for three movies. 10 hours of run time, maybe 40 hours of footage time, just trying desperately to get that nut. He should have talked to the others, found some other squirrel things. Then they could share their nuts. They could all get their nuts together. There's enough nuts to go around. But not if you're an objectivist.

Ok, end of key terms. Back to George Mothalovin' Saunders. Another trip back in time.

I remember reading George Saunders for the first time the summer after freshman year. I was reading Tenth of December, a short story collection, and was sitting on the couch in my parents' house. The story was "Escape from Spiderhead." It's very Saunders-esque. There's a strange, strange premise -- it opens with a man receiving a chemical drip as part of a human experiment -- snappy, inventive language that captures the way (I believe) people actually think -- "What happened next was, Heather soon looked super-good. And I could tell she thought the same of me. It came on so sudden we were like laughing. How could we not have seen it, how cute the other one was?" -- and, most importantly, a deep, deep sense of empathy. To me, the heart of Saunders is, well, the heart of Saunders. He takes strange people in strange situations, and he writes these heart-wrenching stories of doing your best and not quite getting there, of insurmountable odds, of being downtrodden and trying to get up. Single mothers, carnival workers, sad men in cold rivers. The stories are funny, graceful, and kind above all. Reading Spiderhead, I thought, this is what it's all about. He's not trying to be cool, he's trying to be kind. The coolness is just a byproduct.

(Spiderhead was published in The New Yorker in 2010 -- you can read it online, here)

And when he reads! He has a gentle, nasally voice that oozes the same kindness. He has a whispy goatee, squinty eyes. He looks like your nicest uncle. He's not from the midwest but he should be. He says things like "super duper."

So imagine my surprise. There I am, blasting up I-93 with a belly and a T shirt full of pad thai, listening to Saunders tell the host that he was no good in high school, and that he went to college for...mining.

Mining!? Get-rich-quick!? Pillage the earth!? Say it ain't so, George!

So began his foray into objectivism, his belief that the world was his for the taking, that life was an adventure no matter the collateral. (He even wrote a piece in The New Yorker about his descent into objectivism as a young man: I was Ayn Rand's Lover.)

He's a great storyteller. The podcast was about the craft of writing, but he worked in anecdotes, little snippets filled with meaning. Here's one:

"I worked in the oil fields in Asia for my first job out of college," he said. "I had, you know, about a third Hemingway and embarrassingly about a third Indiana Jones. I even bought one of those hats."

Young, dumb, 24, and filled with his big idea: "I thought, OK, I'm going to go to Pakistan, I'm and get in there and I'm going to write the great Afghan War novel. So I went to Peshawar, I guess it was, and I met some of the Mujahideen and they had a place where they would stay when they were sort of between engagements."

His idea was to work his way into the graces of the Mujahideen, get invited into their camp, and from there, well, Hemingway it up until a book popped out.

Finally, he gets the invitation to the camp, on a few caveats. One -- no glasses; helicopters can see the glare. Two -- if he dies, they're leaving him. This is it, George! Chase the dream. Live the adventure. They'll write about it in the blurb.

He's in the hotel room the night before, pacing over the invitation, wringing the Indiana Jones hat in his hands. Can't not go. And then something curious happens.

"What happened at that moment was my mom started kind of being in the picture, and I thought, well, she doesn't even know I'm over here. There's no Internet. I could just go missing -- that would kill that wonderful person."

The "immature, egotistical idiot" of himself -- "very forceful" -- was debating with another version of himself, a more mature, 40-year-old version. And something happens.

"And I said, well, you know, I want to be a writer. And then this voice said, Are you writing anything?"

What a moment! He's forced to reckon with the fact that he's doing everything but write. He's wearing the costume -- the adventurer's hat -- and not doing any of the real work. Hemingway wasn't famous, Georgie reflected, because he fought in WW1. There are plenty of non-famous people who fought in WW1. He was famous because he did the work. Young George realized he didn't need to pony up next to the Mujahadeen in a bunker in Pakistan, lose a limb after being spotted by a chopper for the glint of his nerdy glasses, his one weakness. He needed to go home. Hug his mom. Write.

It's about 30 seconds of the podcast. It hit me like a mortar strike after being spotted by the shine of my spectacles. It gets to the heart of storytelling; there are moments, in life and in fiction, when things, when people, change. Those are the moments to explore.

---

He does this throughout the interview -- drop these weighty life stories in the mix of talking about Russian lit. I'll add a few more. To an extent, I think all three are about George grappling with his life philosophy, about moving from an objectivist to an altruist, from ego to empathy.

Saunders tells another tale from his oil man days. He's in Singapore, still 24, walking back to his hotel after a hell of a bender. It's early morning, still dark, the sky blanketing his view above all of the buildings, all the new construction -- the signs of progress, capitalism, wealth, growth, me-me-me. He thinks, "I'm so cool" (direct quote).

He walks past a hole in the ground, a construction site, and looks down. The rest of the story in his words:

"I looked down and there was something moving in the foundation, and it was all these very elderly Chinese and Malaysian women who were hired at night to clear the the boulders, you know. And something in me -- I'm from a working class background, and I had seen people in my extended family struggling under the capitalist boot. When I saw that, I just went, oh, wait a minute. Something's untrue about Ayn Rand, because it certainly wasn't the case that they were doing that because of some lack of virtue or something.

"So that was a kind of big moment where I just went. I think I've been believing bullshit."

To me, the story almost sounds like fiction, like the sort of thing you would write if you wanted to tell a story about the loss of the aggrandized individual. Which is even better, because that's what it is about, and it's real. Life and art and imitation and so on. Saunders is just fantastic at recognizing it.

---

One more tale, this time from the jungles of Sumatra. At this point, late in the interview, I've come to terms that George Saunders was not always the midwestern ideal of empathy, but that it developed from a more confused, jumbled, less confident place. But he still has to reckon with his capitalist values, something that everyone who travels will come into contact with. His contact, again, pithy, literary, strange and empathetic, is about an orangutan.

Saunders: "We were really out in the jungle, and we were in places where there had never been trails even, and we were prospecting for oil out there. So I don't know who they were, but they were kind of from the village. They brought a little gibbon to our camp and they said in not so many words that they'd obtain this baby given by killing the mother. Right. And did anybody want it or would they'd have to release it and it would die."

Yikes. It's a cold, cold world. What's a young man, desperately trying to hide his heart under a cowboy hat, to do? Of course, he buys the monkey.

"They they named a price. So I bought this little monkey thing. And again, it's right out of Indiana Jones. It's perfect.

"But what they didn't show you in the movie is that the monkey really thinks you're his mom, you know? And so it's I'm working at my desk and he's on me and he's shitting on me."

If you're getting shit on at your desk by a baby monkey that thinks you're it's mother, it's a good time to pause and ask, How did I get here? Saunders did that. Here's what he came up with:

"I realized that just by being wealthier, essentially privileged, I had disrupted things. You know, my very presence in that forest with the money sign over my head had made these people who probably would leave the monkeys alone, go up there and kill the mother and bring her."

Hearing that, white-knuckling the wheel and covered in peanut crumbs and thinking about adventures and the person I was sitting across from at dinner and my own upcoming trip, I went, Oof, out loud. It suggests that we are all complicit. That the global forces at work that leave some people born rich and others okay and others totally destitute, asking for change or doing anything they can to get by -- that we are wrapped up in that, too. That to travel, in some ways, is to push the boot down harder.

"Imperialism," Saunders sums up, "is sitting at my desk being shit on."

---

Here's the last quote, and this time it's not about getting your nut or dead monkeys or exploitation. It's about writing. He's quoting a poet, Gerald Stern. So it's a quote of a quote, so forgive the expletives.

"If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking."

The thought is that, if your writing does exactly what you want it to do, you've done something, well, somewhat unpleasant.

---

In fiction, there is a wonderful sense of discovery. You step into the world of another person, a person of someone else's creation, and if you're writing it or reading it there should be a moment of surprise, of learning something, of seeing something in a new way. Writing and reading should adhere to some rules but they shouldn't follow a predictable formula. The joy is in the discovery.

I'm trying to connect this to the whole thing. I have my own connections to Saunders' stories, my own feelings of aggrandizement, my own adventurer's cap I'm hiding under as I set off on this year-long, fairly egotistical globe trot. I don't think I need to buy a monkey to see it crumble. But I do think that I have this plan -- I'll go travel the world and come back different, better -- and I have other plans -- like what will happen this summer, like what will happen with the smart, funny, intimidating person across the dinner table -- and that's not too different from the poem about the dogs. If it goes exactly the way I plan it, that is selfishness. Empathy is listening. Empathy is valuing another perspective. Ultimately, empathy is welcoming the adventure and change and nuance that comes from consideration of others.

The work, then, is to be open to the unknown. It's the near-impossible task of living life the only way we know how -- as the protagonist -- while trying to be a little less obsessed with ourselves and a little more considerate of those near to us.

Saunders built his own worldview of empathy, one that is adventurous and unpredictable but, ultimately, thinks of other people and how our actions and thoughts and words affect them. There is a great unpredictability to human interaction, to travel, to connections. If we can hold on to that sense of adventure, and hold on to a worldview that values kindness and connection and respect, it's way more than dog love, baby.