I vividly remember the first time I encountered the work of Lawrence Weschler. It was in the spring of 1998. After a three-year hiatus in Arizona, I was back, and gratefully so, in Los Angeles, promising myself I would never leave again. My friends and family members around the country couldn’t understand it. I wasn’t the beach type; Hollywood held no special fascination for me. I couldn’t explain it. There was just something about LA that I loved. Then the California edition of the New Yorker arrived in my mailbox, and Weschler’s essay “L.A. Glows” put it’s finger on LA’s most arresting quality: it’s light. Over the years, I’ve mailed dozens of copies of the essay to friends, for it’s that rare piece of writing that enables those who don’t know LA to understand it, and amplifies the understanding of those who think they do. But I won’t have to send it out anymore: “L.A. Glows” is included in his new book Vermeer in Bosnia. I met with Weschler, Ren to his friends and colleagues, for a brief conversation on a beautiful spring day in LA.

TGP: I would like to talk with you about California and writing. Let’s start where you’re from: Van Nuys, California.

LW: What is now the porn capital of the world.

TGP: Is it really? I thought that distinction belonged to Chatsworth.

LW: I read that it’s the porn epicenter. It’s very funny for me because when I was growing up, I don’t recall much porn going on in Van Nuys. I was born in ’52, and I remember orange groves. They were pushed back a mile every year for the first 20 or 30 years of my life, so it got to be you literally had to go 30 miles to get to orange groves.

TGP: Where did you go to high school?

LW: Birmingham High. I’ll tell you a story you might enjoy. Tina Brown came to me at one point while she was editing the New Yorker. She said, “Ren, we’re doing a California issue, and I know you come from California, so you have to be part of this issue. We’ve already got an exclusive interview with David Geffen.” I said, “No, you’re kidding! How did you do that? Tina, you are amazing!” (We had a very interesting relationship.) She says, “You have to come up with an LA story, a California story.” “Okay,” I say, “Here’s my story. I arrived at my high school – Birmingham High – in September of ’66 and graduated in June ’69. The graduating class of June ’66 – just before I arrived – the student body Vice President was Michael Ovitz.” And she said, “No!” and I said, “Yes! The head cheerleader was Sally Field.” And she said, “No!” and I said, “Yes! The head yell-leader [male cheerleader] was Michael Milliken.” And she said, “No!” and I said, “Yes! I want to do a piece on the one truly successful person in that class. I want to do a piece on the student body President. She was very excited, she said, “Who, who, who?” I said “Bruce Cantz.” And she said, “Who?” I said, “He’s a hippie farmer. He has a little goat farm on a hill in Santa Cruz. A little vineyard. He has never had to look at himself in embarrassment a single day in his life.” She said, “Get out of here!” So I came from a high school that had this funny pedigree.

TGP: Where did you go to college?

LW: Santa Cruz. I had a very good education there. ’69-’74. There were 200 people in my graduating class at Cowell College at UC Santa Cruz: three of them became New Yorker writers.

TGP: Wow.

LW: William Finnegan, Noelle Oxenhandler, and I. It was a pretty good general education, but when asked what I was doing, my grandmother would say, “Nothing that will bring him any good.” I’m not sure if it equipped for anything but being a New Yorker writer.

TGP: How did you make the leap from the LA Weekly to the New Yorker?

LW: What happened was I came back to LA and ended up living in Santa Monica. I worked at UCLA in the Oral History program from ’74-’76, and the reason I got involved in that is because they had done an oral history of my grandmother, the widow of my grandfather, Ernst Toch, who was a composer. It was an 850-page oral history, and they figured I would be able to capture her accent. So I edited that. She had died right after she finished it. After that I stayed on specialized in two areas: émigré history – the days when Schoenberg and Brecht and Stravinsky were living in LA – and the LA art scene. I didn’t particularly know anything about the LA art scene at the outset, but we had gotten a grant to do an oral history of the LA art scene, and there were a lot of interviews being done and I was the principle editor. So I was mainly editing and interviewing, and on the side, I was writing articles. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to be a freelance writer or what I was doing, but I was writing things and the general thing that I found was that it was incredibly difficult to crack national magazines if you were a freelancer in LA. This is before faxes. Everything was by mail. Telephone calls were expensive. Editors were then, as they are now, generally assholes. In fairness to them, they’re incredibly overworked and they’re getting hundreds of manuscripts, but the flip side is they’re getting paid and you aren’t. I went through a lot of work to do a piece for a national magazine, which was a profile of Mel Brooks when he was making High Anxiety.

TGP: Who was the piece for?

LW: Village Voice, which in those days was much more of a national magazine than it is today. But it was just so hard that I decided instead to pitch my stuff to the independent papers in LA, and it was literally the time – I think it was ’77, ’78, ’79 – when both the LA Weekly and the LA Reader were simultaneously starting. I was in a pretty good situation because I think I was the only writer who was allowed to write for both of them. I wasn’t a staff person on either one, and they were both willing to take my stuff. You didn’t get paid much, but at least you built up a portfolio, and you talk to your editors, and the stuff ran at the length that you wrote it. I must have written over a period of two or three years, 20 or 30 pieces. In those days, they were magazines that you picked up at liquor stores. Bales of them were delivered to liquor stores. It’s funny, some of those early LA Reader pieces of mine are incredibly valuable. If you go online and try to find the LA Reader with my cover stories, you’ll find they’re worth a fortune. Not because of me. The circulation direction of the LA Reader, which is to say: the guy who owned the Toyota pick-up truck, fancied himself a cartoonist. In exchange for his grunt work as a delivery guy, they let him have this cartoon. And he could not draw. It was the most poorly drawn cartoon ever, but it was really funny.

TGP: Who was it?

LW: It was Matt Groening. So the early numbers of Life in Hell. Are in the back of issues of the LA Reader that happen to have my cover stories on the front.

TGP: This must have been around the time when he was working at a record store in Hollywood near Joan Jett’s apartment.

LW: He’s a great guy. It was a lot of fun in those days. But the main thing was that I went slowly and I would recommend it to young writers today. Build a portfolio, and do it places where you don’t get paid much. In my book on Robert Irwin, he has this wonderful chapter on money and art, in which he says, “If you’re going to be an artist – or in this case a reporter – you have to treat yourself well.” You can’t live a sackcloth and ashes existence. At the end of the day, the tool you’re using is your sensorium and you don’t want to bust it all up. His slogan to some extent was “Modest needs lavishly met.”

TGP: I love it!

LW: But it was also critical that you found some other way that was not your art to make your living. In my case it was working in the Oral History Program and then it was freelance editing. This was a city filled with doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists, all of whom thought they had a book in them and, given the shabby state of American education, couldn’t stream sentences together. And since they were charging hundreds of dollars an hour for their services, you could charge them $20 an hour, or whatever it was, with a straight face and work for a day or two a week and be able to do your own stuff the rest of the time.

TGP: Before we move on to the New Yorker, I would like to know what, in your opinion, makes LA so special?

LW: Obviously the light is one of the things, which I write about a lot. One of the things that makes LA so special is it’s where I come from. I think anywhere you come from is really special. I don’t want to fetishize it, but having said that, one of the things I think that LA is not, is stupid. I think LA is intellectually really lively. It has this interesting confluence of influences. Obviously you have influences from Mexico and Asia and things like that, but then you have weird things on top of that: German-Jewish -- who would have thought? Texas black – the Water Mosley thing. It’s a cliché to say that LA is a global city, but it’s true.

TGP: How often do you visit?

LW: I come back four or five times a year, whenever I can really, but my impression is that it is being strangulated by the traffic in a way that it didn’t used to be. There was a whole kind of aesthetic that came out of driving the freeways, zooming along, your thoughts taking shape in a way that couldn’t happen in New York on the subways. It’s a little bit less the case now.

TGP: True, but there are almost always alternatives to traffic, and one of the results of our urban sprawl is that now you can find neighborhoods that are less spread out, more self-contained. What are some of your favorite places in LA?

LW: When I lived in Santa Monica I lived 15 blocks from the Palisade, and I never went to the ocean because I hate sand, but I loved being 15 blocks from where it all stops. On the one hand, it’s where all the pressure of population comes to an end; and on the other it’s where tomorrow’s weather arrives. That kind of feeling. In more recent years, obviously, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. For that matter, Culver City is a really quirky, funny place. It has all kinds of wonderful, weird stuff. The Hare Krishna Temple, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Culver Hotel. I love hanging out in Culver City, going to India Sweets and Spices for a nice chai.

TGP: Have you been to the Center for Land Use Interpretation?

LW: It’s a terrific place. I was just there yesterday and there were people there who had just come back from a two-day bus trip from the Owens Valley. In some ways it’s this really wonderful and, quite consciously, complement to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in that it is an incredibly grounded museum – literally -- next to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is kind of floating off the ground. The Center for Land Use Interpretation thinks about stuff you never think about as stuff to think about. Sewage systems. Drainage. Abandoned oil fields. Some really cool stuff.

TGP: Thanks to repeated visits, and, in large part, your book, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, I feel like I have a handle on what the museum is all about. When new things arrive or when things change it doesn’t throw me off, but the last time I went and saw the Center for Land Use Interpretation next door, I didn’t know what to make of it. Is this part of it? Is this real? It took me back to that first experience of walking into the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I experienced the whole gamut of feelings – This is amazing! I’ve been tricked! – in about five seconds, right there on the sidewalk. I didn’t realize it was indeed a real and reputable institution until I read that they won a Guggenheim.

LW: That’s what I mean by the vibrant intellectual life in Culver City. Who would have thought? But there are lots of smart people thinking smart thoughts on both sides of that wall, which is quite porous. If you go into the innards of the place they are connected back there. They are like Siamese twins: the blood flows between them and so forth.

TGP: Yet the stereotype of LA as a shallow and vacuous place persists. What’s the impetus for that? Even San Franciscans, who ought to know better, do it.

LW: Well it is spread out. So it’s harder for new places to form, but when they do form, they’re very interesting.

TGP: Let me put it another way, why do you think more Californians read the New Yorker than New Yorkers?

LW: There’s a statistical glitch there in that California is 38 million people and New York is a much smaller number, but having said that, Steve Wasserman claims that LA is the single best book buying market in the country, and my response to that is, Why is that surprising? It jives completely with my experience of going to people’s houses all over LA. They’ve got nice libraries. People are reading. It doesn’t surprise me. The whole premise of this conversation, parenthetically assumes that it’s between LA and New York. I suspect there is great stuff going on in Tulsa, too. Or Chicago. Chicago is a really great city.

TGP: When it was still in existence, Los Angeles wasn’t as prominent as The New Yorker, but how many New Yorkers do you think subscribed to it?

LW: The New Yorker is a different phenomenon. How many people here read New York Magazine? The New Yorker has a very strange history how it became what it is. Right after World War II there was this escalator prosperity that lasted 30 or 40 years, and for some reason The New Yorker became their badge of cultural identity and sophistication. Why the New Yorker and not some other magazine? There was tremendous amounts of advertising, and by some complete fluke, it was edited by William Shawn. William Shawn was the world’s most phobic person. He couldn’t go on bridges or in tunnels, but he was also this incredibly curious person. He had an unlimited budget and he would send people out into the world to find out what was going on. So it was a confluence of these two things: this strange person editing the magazine and the weird significance it had for its readers. Mind you, a lot of people didn’t read it. They looked at the ads and the cartoons. That’s how the magazine became what it is: a national/international magazine that doesn’t think of itself as a New York magazine so much, and people in LA are just as curious about the world as anywhere else.

TGP: You were at the New Yorker for 20 years.

LW: Yes.

TGP: Was there a big cultural shift at the New Yorker when you left or did you decide to pursue other opportunities?

LW: Well, let me go back a ways to how I got there, and then, how I left. I was working at the Oral History Program doing all that freelance stuff. One day I was editing an oral history of Robert Irwin, whom I had never heard of before, which shows you how little I knew. He was really articulate and very interesting. He was deeply philosophical without any training. At Santa Cruz I had majored in Philosophy and Cultural History and I sent him a note: “Have you ever read Merleau-Ponty’s The Primacy of Perception? The next day he shows up at my door. Now if I had sent that letter to him six months earlier, he never would have opened it. He had nothing but contempt for academics, but for some reason, at that time in his life, he was somewhat curious about philosophy. After that, we basically had lunch together for the next three years. He set himself up outside the UCLA North Campus Library and read philosophy twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week. I was at the Powell Library and three or four times a week we’d sit together and talk. We talked about all kinds of things. We talked about philosophy and I would tell him what he should read next. He in turn talked about art and the book that came out of that is Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin. At that point, coming on like five years out of college, I had finished the manuscript and I sent it to the New Yorker on a whim. The really lucky thing I did, by the way, was I sent it to Calvin Tompkins, the art writer. Shawn would not have looked at it because he would have thought it rude to Mr. Tompkins for him to be looking at another art writer's work. But Tompkins liked it and he passed it on to Shawn and some months later, like eight months, I got a call, a voice on the answering machine and I can date when answering machines began to be used because it was right around this time in 1981. The voice said, “Hello? Mr. Weschler? This is William Shawn of the--. Oh dear. I don’t know-- Am I supposed to be talking into this thing?” It was completely hilarious. I thought my friends were pulling my leg.

TGP: You must have been pretty skeptical.

LW: I got extremely lucky. My feeling, and I’m not being falsely modest, that year The New Yorker got thousands and thousands of manuscripts of which 30 or 40 were of the quality for the magazine, and for whatever reason, they took one or two of those, and it may very well be that they wanted some Los Angeles writers. At that point I had a whole portfolio of things to show them, that I wasn’t just a flash in the pan. In my mind, where I proved myself a writer, wasn’t that piece, but being able to do the next one. Quickly. It was all that training I had doing the writing for those small places [the LA Weekly and the LA Reader]. By the way, that’s also important. Once I had those places I was writing for, I wasn’t spending all my time pitching stories and trying to contact editors. I spent time being a writer. So that served me in good stead. I’d done 30 pieces at 0-60 mph, and now here I was. “Do you want to do another piece?” Yes, I did, and I was able to do that.

TGP: Did you know in advance what that next piece was going to be?

LW: Well Shawn asked me if I had any other ideas and there happened to be a museum in Denmark I was interested in because I was interested in Ed Kienholz, another Los Angeles artist, and he had had a show at this wonderful museum in Denmark. So I pitched that and he said go ahead and do that, and while I was in Denmark, just on my own, I went to Poland because it was the middle of Solidarity time and that seemed very exciting, and I started writing about Poland.

TGP: So one thing led to another.

LW: Yes, I was there through Shawn -- late Shawn, the Gottlieb period, and the Tina Brown period, which was somewhat more contentious. Then two years ago I got offered this teaching job at NYU. At that point I had some utopian ideas about the magazine that I would like to start so I told them I’d come if they let me start a magazine.

TGP: What exactly is your title at NYU?

LW: I’m the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. It’s basically a playpen; I get to do whatever I want. It’s an organization with about 150 fellows, most of them non-academics, people like Susan Sontag, Oliver Sacks, Janet Malcolm. I program a series of lunches for fellows, we have internal seminars and we have public events. I do like 6 or 7 of them a year. I’m a cheap date as far as NYU is concerned. They pay me and my assistant and they get tons of publicity for all of these things that we do.

TGP: So is NYU backing your magazine?

LW: They said I could go ahead and start the magazine if I could raise the money, which turned out to be much more difficult than I thought because it’s out-of-control utopian. It’s called Omnivore. I don’t know if you’ve seen a copy yet.

TGP: I bought one at the UCLA bookstore.

LW: It’s nice isn’t it?

TGP: It’s gorgeous.

LW: It’s hopeless!

TGP: The production is very high quality. It’s like a museum book piece.

LW: That was my idea partly. In other words, in an era when certain kinds of information are conveyed so effectively on the Internet, what would it take to make a magazine that lounges in your hand? So there was that interest in making something that was a beautiful, sumptuous object to hold in your hands. Beyond that, the mode of address was something I was also interested in. By that I mean a magazine that addresses you as a potentially stupefiable individual, as opposed to a consumer or a Pavlovian dog. Really addressing your capacity for marvel and wonder, which in some way is the common thread through almost all of my work. One of my problems as a writer is that I write about all sorts of different things, and yes, I’m continually told that it’s a problem.

TGP: It makes you hard to classify.

LW: They don’t know how. A huge problem for me in bookstores is that my work gets put in all kinds of places. I have a hopeless crusade going that if a work is literary, if it’s writerly, if the writing matters, then it should be put in alphabetical order by author in the literature section. Regardless of whether my work does or doesn’t reach that level, Janet Malcolm and so forth should be on the shelf with Marquez as writing. This completely artificial distinction between fiction and nonfiction is weird. In my case what happens is my stuff gets scattered all the hell over the bookstore. My book on the Museum of Jurassic Technology? They have no idea what to do with that. I literally find it in Psychedelics, New Age, places like that. The companion book to that book, Boggs: A Comedy of Values -- was meant to be read side by side; it has the same typeface, the same trim size – yet it’s always in the Economics section. My book A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers about torture in Latin America is in the Latin America Literature section. Calamities of Exile, which is three nonfiction novellas about a South African, an Iraqi and a Czech, just blows their mind completely so they don’t stock it. Now this book that’s coming out now, Vermeer in Bosnia: Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies, is a real challenge: Tell me where you’re going to put this! It has three pieces about Los Angeles, three pieces about Polish survivors, three major art pieces, a profile of Roman Polanski. I’m kind of fantasizing that it becomes this center of gravitation that draws all the other pieces of mine in one place because they are in fact intended to comment on one another. There are these common themes running through them. Passion, the workings of grace, what comes alive when a place or person comes alive and can you repress it? what’s involved when you try to resist repression, exile. These are themes that are in the work, but the books are scattered all over the place and they don’t draw people to each other. It’s one of my battles I have going.

TGP: At the Westchester-Loyola branch of the Los Angeles public library, I recently found Harold Bloom’s brief overview of Thomas Pynchon in the young adult section. When I asked the librarian she explained it was because young adults need those books for their term papers, even though the library record has it listed with the rest of the criticism, where it belongs.

LW: It’s completely arbitrary. I teach this class called the fiction of nonfiction and the stuff I teach is not reporting technique or interviewing technique. I assume that you are fair and accurate and that you are scrupulous and that you should be, and if you are not, you should be more so, and so on and so forth. But then things get interesting. Form, structure, voice, irony, freedom -- which are essentially fictive issues. Storytelling. So that’s the main thing I’m interested in, and the writers I’m interested in, nonfiction writers and, parenthetically fiction writers, because all I read are novels really. I love to read novels. But these are exactly the same sets of issues so the distinctions are completely artificial. That’s what my magazine is trying to address. Interestingly, I have lots of visual stuff, but I don’t particularly tend to have fiction and poetry because they already have their own magazine.

TGP: In your introductory rant, I think that’s what you called it earlier, toward the end you talk about the mid-‘70s and you give the example of Polish oppositionists. “You want a free trade union? Form one! You want a free press? Print something! That’s exactly the same thing that was happening in music around that time, especially in places like New York and Los Angeles.

LW: Exactly. Omnivore is a retrograde version of that kind of passion. I want to make something that’s a really beautiful object. So go do it. So we’ll see how it works. It happens to be a period in my writing life where I’m consolidating a lot of stuff. I have four books coming out in the next two years, like one after the other. Vermeer in Bosnia. Then six months after that, you know how I’ve been doing these Convergence pieces for McSweeney’s?

TGP: Yes.

LW: There’s going to be a Giant Book of Convergences. There are about 20 that I’ve done for McSweeney’s and 20 for other places. My fantasy right now, we’ll see if it happens, is to do it like a Victorian Giant Book of Mother’s Goose Rhymes. I’ve been writing about David Hockney and Robert Irwin for the last 20 years. And whenever I write about one, the other calls me up and goes, “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” So, in effect, the next one is always a refutation of the earlier piece, and then the other calls me up, “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” So, for example, I did the Irwin book, Hockney called me up and said he disagreed with it. When Cameraworks came out in ‘84 and Irwin called me up and said, “That’s ridiculous.” I ended up doing the Irwin MOCA catalog. Hockney thought that was ridiculous. And while the work was completely valid, there was this whole subtext going on of their debate, yet they never talked with each other. They’d been fighting with each other for 20 years through me. They were very much like Schoenberg and Stravinsky who were living here at the same time and never talked to each other. My sense is that in some ways Irwin and Hockney are two of the major LA artists. But they’re very aware of each other. So I’m doing 20 years of writing about each of them in a boxed set and you’ll be able to see this very interesting argument they’re having. That will come out in two years. So Omnivore will keep me busy for a while. [Note: Weschler is also the current in-house oracle at Transom.]

TGP: Are you going to try to maintain Omnivore’s production values?

LW: We’ll see. Omnivore exists entirely as a prototype at this point. For the first time at the festival [LA Times Festival of Books] we’ve bled out a few copies. I keep getting letters from people asking for copies and it’s not for sale. I never paid the writers. Some amazing people. Oliver Sacks, Breyten Breytenbach, Ryszard Kapuscinski, David Hockney. I let out about 150-200 copies quite consciously hoping that they would turn up on eBay so I could tell people to go there. [Note: Omnivore can be purchased at the online bookstore of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.]

TGP: I should have tagged the copies at the UCLA bookstore so I could track them down in the future.

LW: I still hope. For this to work, it really needs the support either of a patron or foundation. In the same way that this society supports art galleries and ballets because they are amenities of culture, I continue to hope that someone will have that vision for Omnivore. It’s relatively cheap compared to an opera, yet it’s a beautiful object. It’s there. We’ll see. It’s hopeless.

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