Podcast • September 21, 2010

Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame: The Self in the Cyber Century

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Daniel Kehlmann (40 minutes, 19 mb mp3) Daniel Kehlmann is a very funny, very philosophical young fictionist from Germany who will make you want more like him — ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Daniel Kehlmann (40 minutes, 19 mb mp3)

Daniel Kehlmann is a very funny, very philosophical young fictionist from Germany who will make you want more like him — and more playfully engaging books like his Fame, a novel in nine linked short stories, or “episodes.” A number of reviewers who seem not to have read the book suggest that Fame is all about celebrity, which it’s not at all. It’s an imaginative probe into the YouTube universe and the always-online feel of our emergent cyber-humanity — into cell-phone effects on our self-hood, or Facebook effects on our fantasies. It is also a storyteller’s bright-eyed rumination on what the digital range and speed of our lives have made possible, or impossible, in stories themselves. The new taken-for-granted info tech has realized the yearning in endless fairy tales, for example, for telepathy: if only I could whisper a word to the lost beloved… It has enabled double-lives and resurrections that used to happen only in dreams and miracles. At the same time, the ways we connect now have collapsed, among other things, the “big goodbye” scene in prose or on the movie screen. How could we summon a surge of tears nowadays hearing Ilsa tells Rick, “We’ll always have Paris…,” when we know that two minutes later, in today’s world, would come the first text message?

Flickering in the Kehlmann background are deeper, more delightful riddles. One of the central stories in Fame introduces Rosalie, an older woman with terminal cancer, making her way to an assisted-suicide clinic in Zurich. En route she rebukes the author of her story and pleads with him to save her: “Is there no chance, she asks me. It’s all in your hands. Let me live.” To which the author replies: “This isn’t a life-affirming story. If anything, it’s a theological one.”

Kehlmann’s theology, in our conversation, is richer than what we’ve often heard about authors playing God with their characters:

Any story puts me, as the writer of the story, into the godlike position of creating people to make their life difficult, to make them suffer because I have a plan for them. The plan is just to get the story as good as possible. There is a kind of teleology in getting the story right, because all the things happening to a character, causing pain to the character, ruining the life of this character, they are there for the greater good of getting a good story. And so this is exactly the same position in classical theology where the theologian tries to justify god: we are told that yes, you are suffering, but you are suffering because there is a plan. You might not understand this plan, maybe you never will, but you should trust that there is such a plan and that’s why you should accept your suffering.

When I made Rosalie protest against this, and tell the writer “don’t do this to me. I don’t care about your plan,” it wasn’t just a metafictional game. It was a very real point that in the face of basic human suffering the whole idea of a bigger plan justifying all that seems ridiculous. To me this was a very serious theologically, philosophically charged story which also had a very personal twist because Rosalie is also telling the writer “one day all this will happen to you, you will be in pain, you will be dying, you will hope that somebody, against the plan, will just save you and it will not happen.” It’s true, and she was not just talking to some abstract writer, at this moment she was talking about me and the fact that it will happen to me too.

… Even when I started the story, I had always intended the ending that the writer interferes and ruins the story and saves the character. Then the writer also says “I hope someday somebody will do the same for me.” I think, well, as you say in English, “fat chance!”

Daniel Kehlmann with Chris Lydon at the Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, September 20, 2010

Podcast • April 19, 2010

David Hoffman: A Running Tour of YouTube Nation

David Hoffman produced 88 PBS documentary features and five feature-length films over a forty-year career. But that was then. And this is a guy whose life keeps starting over. Always interestingly. We’ve shared before our ...

David Hoffman produced 88 PBS documentary features and five feature-length films over a forty-year career. But that was then. And this is a guy whose life keeps starting over. Always interestingly. We’ve shared before our adventures with the great sound-man Tony Schwartz

We’re in James Der Derian’s class on global media at Brown again, and David Hoffman is pushing through the cliche that we live in a screen culture and a YouTube world. We didn’t know the half of it. Today we’re taking his tour of YouTube nation, peopled by more 1 billion searches every day. Hoffman, who thought he’d been around the whole block, has stumbled on a sort of “Louisiana Purchase” of the media landscape. It’s homey, it’s cheap, it’s much much bigger than network television already, and it’s barely begun to chew up what we used to call media and spit it all out.

Documentary film-making was, and is, a rich person’s pursuit, as he tells us. But anyone can talk to a camera and post the result. He loves YouTube’s celebration of a messy, cheap aesthetic, helping viewers learn to love jump cuts and engage raw content. No one could be happier about this victory of moving image and spoken word: “It’s terrible to sit at your computer screen and read words,” he says, “It’s painful.”

For David Hoffman, this is just the beginning of a long-needed move away from censorship and big media control over information. But it’s a shift, he cautions, that demands a comprehensive new standard of media literacy.

Our conversation begins with this month’s release – by Wikileaks – and its viral penetration – through YouTube – of a classified US government video documenting the alleged “indiscriminate slaying of more than a dozen people” outside of Baghdad: