The Rumpus Interview With Jennifer Egan

I interviewed Jennifer Egan for the great literary online magazine The Rumpus. You can read it in full here, but here’s a teaser:

Look at a book like Tristram Shandy, which is so crazily experimental in a way we still have yet to match. There’s such a desire not to just say:  this happened and then this happened and then this happened. The tension is between the incremental and inexorable passage of time and the leaping, stuttering quality of consciousness. The two do not match up. One result of that is that time is passing gradually, but we experience its effect as very sudden. Our perception of time is full of all these gaps. That really interests me, and I think it informed the fragmented structure of the book. I wanted to capture as many shocking discoveries of time having passed as possible, which is difficult to do if you’re just moving forward in time.

World Cup Reading

  • Njabulo Ndebele.
  • J. M. Coetzee
  • Zoe Wicomb
  • Ceridwen Dovey
  • Niq Mhlongo
  • Nadine Gordimer
  • Lisa Fugard
  • K. Sello Duiker
  • Deon Meyer
  • Zakes Mda
  • Phaswane Mpe
  • Rozena Maart

Touching the Stanley Cup

One of my earliest sports-related memories, apart from being forcibly drowned by the summer camp bus driver/swim coach, was going to a Blackhawks game at the old Chicago Stadium, pre-MJ. I was maybe six, too lanky to play, didn’t know how to skate anyway. Plus I was already permanently embarrassed due to a bad stutter, which nearly kept me bedroom-bound. The first game Dad took me to, during Denis Savard‘s first stint with the Hawks, was an eye-opening experience: I was doused with my first Budweiser, ate my first Vienna Beef Chicago-style hot dog (Mom’s dogs were slathered in nothing more than ketchup), and I almost caught my first puck. Or Dad did. He’s pretty adamant he was the one responsible for reaching up and knocking it down before it peeled off into a deeper row, and now that I think about it he’s probably right. But, in my youthful nimbleness, I was the one who darted between foreign legs and picked the puck up. We still have it, all these years later.

Last night, after raucous all-night celebrations on the streets of Chicago, my brother got to touch the Stanley Cup. Which I think is illegal, or frowned upon.But that’s the way we do it in Chicago: there ain’t nothin’ on a pedestal, not even the stinkin’ Stanley Cup. As it well should be in what’s supposed to be this democracy of ours.