There’s a kind of traveler who arrives one day in a new place and knows that this is where he was meant to be. Some crave the rush of New York. Others discover their inner Italian. Still others, with more watery blood perhaps, take a tourist trip to Holland and find that they have come home.

When the writer Halil Gür first came to Amsterdam from Istanbul in 1974, he tells me, what he felt was “déjà vu. I recognized the streets, the canals, the church spires. To me the walls of the old houses are like the pages of a novel. With this city, you can carry on a conversation.”

I had never met Gür, but when he described his street in interviews—with an old church at one end, a new mosque at the other—I knew he was talking about my street. “All Amsterdam is my house,” he told a reporter. “My own apartment is only my living room.” I was curious. I wanted to know whether he and I, writers, neighbors, foreigners, had anything in common. Two nationalities, American and Turkish, often reduced to clichés. Two groups that seldom have much contact. If we both felt at home in our street, what did that say about our idea of home?

Gür (1951) made his literary debut in 1984 with “Gekke Mustafa en andere verhalen” (“Mad Mustafa and Other Stories”). In that book he wrote about migrants living an impermanent and precarious existence. The sketches were brief, underlining the fragmented quality of the characters’ day-to-day lives. Many of his migrants were in the country illegally—as Gür himself once was. He was acclaimed as a writer who could interpret the immigrant experience.

But as Gür’s residence in the Netherlands became official and permanent, his writing changed. The more assimilated he became, the more he departed from literary convention. Instead of giving his readers a realistic account of the migrant experience, he turned to spiritual metaphors for travel and displacement. Immigration is not a condition of a class of people, he seems to insist, but an individual, even eccentric experience.

“Gekke Mustafa” was “direct, earthy, physical, straightforward,” he tells me now. For his latest collection of stories, he has drawn inspiration from a mysticism he claims is part of his Turkish heritage, and has attempted a more spiritual exploration of place and identity. In “De babykamer” (“The Baby’s Bedroom”), “riddles and magic play a central role.” The book’s title story, for example, describes an Iranian refugee who was imprisoned and tortured in his own country, and who now lives in “internal exile…in the shadow of his memories.” In therapy, during a series of visions, he sees angels who help him to heal his psychic wounds.

In his house down the street from mine, speaking Dutch, our common language, Gür tells me that his passage between two countries “was not only physical or material. It was an internal journey, a plunge into my own interior world.” The title of his latest book comes from an idea he’s repeated often in interviews: “When you enter an unknown country, you enter it as a newborn baby. In the Netherlands, I was reborn as a writer.”

Gür is a small man with intense, guarded dark eyes. The long hair and mustache of the handsome hippie who first came to the Netherlands have made way for a bookish seriousness as well as warmth. He is friendly and talkative—in the beginning I can hardly get a word in edgewise—but also formal and reserved. He wants to charm, but isn’t sure we will understand each other.

On my first visit to his apartment, he serves rosemary tea and Turkish pastries called “amulets,” a specialty of his hometown of Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey. On my second visit, he serves tea and “Deventer cake,” a specialty of that city and a gift from its public library, where he has just done a reading. Although it is the middle of the day, candles burn on the small table, between stacks of papers and letters. Gür doesn’t use e-mail.

He lives alone, in a narrow top-floor apartment. Our neighborhood dates from the 17^th century, but much of our street consists of social housing, small apartments for single city-dwellers, constructed in the 1980s on and around the site of the old Bols gin factory. In Gür’s shoebox of a living room, the walls are lined with books, most of them in Turkish, carted back in suitcases from frequent visits home. I can’t read the titles but I can make out the names of the authors: Dante, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Woolf, Sartre, Susan Sontag, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain. Pride of place is given to a two-volume Dutch-Turkish dictionary, a book that when he first came to this country didn’t exist. Gür says a good translation dictionary was only published about ten years ago. He writes in Turkish, but is published only in Dutch translation.

Above the dictionary, on top of a low bookshelf, stands a framed snapshot, taken recently in Amsterdam, of the author with a university classmate, Orhan Pamuk. They studied architecture together in Istanbul, Gür tells me, though they didn’t know each other well: Pamuk was from a well-off family in the capital, while Gür was one of nine children of a country doctor who often couldn’t pay the rent. Pamuk eventually switched to journalism school, while lack of money forced Gür to abandon his studies entirely.

Writing and traveling are similar vocations, and both are often the product of a restless, rootless childhood. Gür’s family moved “a thousand times” in and around Gaziantep. On summer nights, when the whole family slept on the roof to escape the heat, he used to gaze up at the stars and dream of other worlds. “I always wanted to be where I wasn’t. I felt lonely, like an extraterrestrial being. Longing and homesickness give meaning to life. Homesickness isn’t only a migrant problem—it’s a universal condition.”

In the 1960s, when Gür was a teenager, Western hippies discovered the Silk Road, with Gaziantep as one of its stops. Gür spent as much time with the European visitors as he could. “One time the neighbors told my mother that they’d seen me with two blonde girls. My mother was horrified. I had to explain to her that they weren’t girls, they were boys. The stories they told me made me long even more to see the rest of the world.” Later, after he left university, he worked as a guide on Sultan Ahmet Square in Istanbul, leading tourists around the famous Blue Mosque.

Though it’s Amsterdam’s architecture that he speaks of when he says he loves the city, he first came to Amsterdam for the people. He liked the Dutch tourists he’d met in Turkey: they had an openness and curiosity that appealed to him. As a guide he had picked up enough English to get by, and in his first few months here he hitchhiked all around the countryside to get to know his new home. “Everywhere I went I was welcomed as a guest,” he says. “People invited me into their houses, asked me to stay the night. They told me, ‘Halil, our country is small, but we have four big windows that are always open to the outside world.’”

If homesickness, that endemic state of the person between two cultures, is the fabric of Gür’s life, then coincidences and unexpected meetings are the pattern on that fabric. He tells a story: “When I first arrived in the Netherlands, a customs officer pulled me out of the line at Schiphol airport and started asking me all kinds of strange questions. I had only 50 guilders in my pocket, and he didn’t trust me.

But I recognized him. A week before, I had seen him walking around in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque. It was a warm day in April, and he was leaning against a pillar with his face turned up toward the sun. I went up to him and we had a friendly chat. When I reminded him, he recognized me and let me go through.”

In the middle of our conversation, the phone rings and Gür answers. On the line, out of the blue, is a woman who came to one of his readings 15 years ago in Alkmaar, and to whom he hadn’t spoken since. At the time he gave her some advice that proved useful, and now she had found his number and was calling to ask for his help. Apparently her new question is about loneliness: he advises her to go out and seek the answer among other people. He tells her he’s speaking to an interviewer from Trouw, and she says her nephew is an editor there. It must be a sign.

A few years ago, Gür had a revelation about his feelings for Amsterdam, an experience he describes in the last story in “De babykamer.” Plagued by nightmares and feeling lost, the narrator, through a series of chance meetings, encounters a fortune-teller. She reveals to him that in a past life he was a rich spice merchant, son of a founder of the Dutch East India Company, with a mansion on the stately Herengracht. To do penance for his previous life of colonial exploitation, it was his fate to return to Amsterdam as a dark-skinned migrant.

Gür still wants to be a guide, but no longer to historic architecture or the multicultural experience. He wants to help people discover the spiritual world. “I have become more aware of my own role in society,” he says, showing me a picture of Spinoza that hangs on the wall above Pamuk. “Spinoza was a bringer of light, and that’s how I see myself. As a writer and poet I’m like a lighthouse: I guide people, like ships, through bad weather to a safe haven.”

The whole wall is covered with a gallery of his heroes, some—Gandhi, Harry Mulisch—familiar to me and some unknown. Gür feels strongly connected to the Dutch literary world: “Thea Beckmann wrote a foreword for one of my books. I’ve met Jan Wolkers for coffee, sat next to Mulisch at a literary event.” [The columnist] Simon Carmiggelt is there, because Gür is sometimes referred to as the Turkish Carmiggelt.

Is that a postcard of Brigitte Bardot? No, it’s her Turkish counterpart, the actress Filiz Akın. Another shows artist Sylvia Willink in her studio: the day after Gür won the first E. du Perron Prize in 1986, she told him she wanted to sculpt a bust of him, “but you must grow old first.” The bust hasn’t yet been made, but the two are still friends.

A statuette: the Halewijn Literature Prize from the city of Roermond, awarded to Gür in 1991. A photo of Gür’s nephew, who was murdered on the street in Istanbul for his mobile phone—he inspired one of the stories in “De Babykamer.” And in a place of honor on the table in the center of the room, two framed pictures. One is of Rumi, the Persian-Turkish Sufi mystic who is associated with the Whirling Dervishes (“a dancing dervish, that’s what I am”). The other—“don’t you recognize her?”—is Maria, portrayed as Our Lady of All Nations.

Gür’s fans often feel a personal connection to the writer, and their letters and calls mean a great deal to him. Also on his wall is a hand-drawn card he received years ago. After he read from his poetry collection “Wakker het vuur niet aan” (“Don’t Fan the Flames”), a woman wrote to him to say, “Yet after all you have lit something in my heart.”

Halfway through our second conversation he stands to read one of his poems aloud. The act transforms him. His voice deepens and fills the room, imbuing the simple words with emotion, commanding attention. I can see why people come to talk to him after readings, send him letters, call him up years after they’ve met. He has a calm but magnetic presence.

For a long time, he says, he didn’t see himself as a storyteller. He was a writer, working on paper, often carrying his “office” with him in a leather satchel and working in cafés. Discovering oral storytelling traditions, both European and Eastern, he says, “opened up a whole new world for me.”

He began going to the Iranian teahouse and cultural center Mezrab, a few doors down from his house. The young storyteller Sahand Sahebdivani, whom Gür knew from literary events, had begun organizing storytelling nights there, at first in Dutch, later in English as well. Mezrab became a meeting place for a motley group of talkers and performers—and a second home for Gür.

One night, he tells me, he was walking home from the Leidseplein. “I had gone to Café Americain to work on a new story. But inspiration just wouldn’t come, and I decided to go home. It was late, almost midnight. When I walked past Mezrab I saw it was packed. I was wearing a cap, everyone thought I was a tourist, and they called to me to come inside. I didn’t see how I could fit, but I squeezed myself in.” A young man, blond-haired and blue-eyed, was already in the middle of a story about a writer he had met once as a boy and who had made a deep impression made on him. “And,” he finished, “that writer just came through the door.”

Gür’s writing has been difficult for him in recent years. He has departed from the “typical” immigrant experience, and his new, more spiritual stories haven’t reached the audience he would like. While he was working on “De babykamer,” he says, his confidence in his work nearly deserted him. “I would walk around thinking, ‘Does anyone hear me? Does what I am doing have any use?’”

After one of those lonely walks he came home to a message on his answering machine. A friend had called him from a wood near Nunspeet to tell him he had seen a plaque there, hanging in a tree, part of a project by the Dutch forest service. On it were two lines from a poem by Gür. His friend said, “Halil, your words are being heard.”

At the end of our talk, Halil and I stand together at the window, looking out at the little Turkish pizzeria that acts as the living room of our street. The owners are Gür’s friends; they keep an eye on his apartment while he’s away. He knows the nuns who share an apartment upstairs. The artist on the ground floor around the corner has a poster of Gür’s new book hanging in his front window.

I’m not a novelist; I’m not a mystic. As a European-American, I don’t generally have to struggle against prejudice or assumptions about what foreigners are supposed to write. We are very different people, Halil Gür and I. But looking out of his window at our street, our city, where we live by the grace of all our neighbors going back to the 17^th century, I felt that we recognized each other, both of us homesick and yet at home.

Trouw, October 6, 2012.

Customers are lined up down the stairs and out the door of the American Book Center on the Spui in Amsterdam. A few of them are holding well-worn LPs. But most of them—especially the kids in their twenties—are carrying copies of “Just Kids,” the wildly successful, award-winning memoir by the punk singer Patti Smith. On both sides of the cash register, Smith’s books are piled high. It’s Patti Smith the writer, not Patti Smith the rock star, that the fans have come to see.

A sign on the door says she’ll sign only one item per person, limited to books and her new CD, “Banga.” But the older fans who make it to the second floor carrying their copies of “Easter” or “Horses” don’t go away disappointed. There she is behind a little table, in her usual look: a watch cap, her long hair in braids. “Sure, I’ll sign that. I’ll sign anything,” she volunteers. She looks tired, and her voice is hoarse, but her smile makes you feel like you’re the only person in the room. Around the corner, standing near the business books, Lenny Kaye offers to add his signature to hers, though not everyone recognizes the tall, stringy, gray-haired man as Smith’s longtime guitarist.

At 65, Smith is working hard: her dates in Paradiso and at Bospop in Weert are just part of a three-month tour of Europe to promote “Banga.” But her big success in recent years has been “Just Kids,” about her life in New York before she began performing and her love affair and collaboration with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

In a brief interview the next day, in a tiny back room in Paradiso, she says she wrote “Just Kids” to fulfill a promise to Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989. “I thought a small group of people might like it.” Though she was always a poet as well as a musician, she had no idea the book would find such an enthusiastic audience. “It’s wonderful. I mean, I can’t even believe it. People every day say something to me about this book.”

At the heart of “Just Kids” is the love and support that the two young artists gave each other. After Mapplethorpe realized he was gay they went on living together, their friendship and artistic partnership closer than many a love affair. Even after Smith moved out, they remained best friends. How did they achieve such a rare collaboration?

“The important thing was that because he was so confident at such a young age, confident in himself, he instilled that confidence in me. And because I believed in him so fully, it was probably comforting and inspiring to him. And we always fulfilled those roles for each other.

I don’t know if it is rare….It might be more common than not, but what may be uncommon is that Robert and I went through so many stages of relationship….We weathered many stages of the human experience together.”

The book is also about Smith’s life on the margins: no money, largely self-taught, living hand-to-mouth, devoted to books and poetry, hanging around with musicians, writers, and drag queens. In its portrait of the artist as outsider, with the poet Rimbaud as her hero, it’s as romantic as any story of turn-of-the-century Paris. For kids now who want to live, as Smith once sang, “outside of society,” does she think it’s any different? Is there more or less room in the margins?

“Well, of course, it’s four decades later. It’s a different world. I mean, the creative scene was smaller then. To be an artist, to be a homosexual, to be a poet…these things were marginalized already. Now we live in a more open society in terms of creativity….Anyone can make a record these days. Anyone can post their work on the internet. We have a black president in America. People are not as heavily marginalized because of their sexual persuasion.”

On the other hand, she believes, “It’s tougher than ever in terms of the amount of control governments and corporations have over us….You know, we evolve as human beings, and our culture evolves, not always for the best.”

Smith herself quit performing in 1980, married, and spent most of 15 years raising children. It’s a period she doesn’t mention in “Just Kids.” Still, she insists, having children “doesn’t mean one isn’t an artist or one isn’t a revolutionary, or one isn’t a poet. It just means that you’re responsible for another human being….We shift how we deal with the social element for the sake of our children. But if one is a poet, one is a poet. Your lifestyle might be different, but your consciousness is intact. I did some of my best work when I was raising my children, because I was obliged to be more disciplined. I couldn’t sit up all night dreaming, or daydreaming, working on a poem.”

Now that her children are in their twenties and she is alone again, she spends a lot of her time working. She says writing a “companion book” to “Just Kids,” about her life after her relationship with Robert. There’s also a detective novel she’s working on, among other projects.

Despite her openness to her fans, there’s much in Smith’s life that remains unsaid. Her years as a wife and mother. Her decision to stop performing for 15 years. Her spiritual side—in “Just Kids” she lets drop that she says her prayers before she goes to bed. “Yeah,” she says now. “I might say them when I’m walking down the street at night. You know, prayer takes on many forms. Sometimes it’s to God, sometimes it’s to nature, sometimes to my mother, sometimes just a general thank you for all the elements. It’s part of my life.”

If the waiting fans have any luck, all these sides of Patti Smith may become the subjects of her next literary success.

Trouw, July 11, 2012.

To the novelist A.S. Byatt, studying history is partly a way of understanding her own time. “In many ways if you write a novel about the past,” she has said, “you find yourself saying more about the habits of mind of the present than if you take the present head on.”

In novels such as “Possession” and “The Children’s Book” Byatt has blown the dust off historical fiction and made it relevant. The historical novel, which has been associated with words like “escapism“ and “nostalgia,” has become a new way of looking at contemporary questions. In Dutch literature, where practitioners like Arthur Japin and Stefan Brijs have helped to revive historical fiction, history itself is the subject of renewed interest, as the Dutch retrieve their national identity from the dustbin.

As one of the best-known and most popular writers of serious historical fiction, Byatt is regularly asked to speak in the Netherlands. She gave the Huizinga Lecture in 2004 and received an honorary doctorate from Leiden in 2010. Last month, she gave a talk on “science and fiction” in a packed Aula of the University of Amsterdam. Saturday, at the Nacht van de Geschiedenis (“Night of History”), she will speak on the art of historical fiction.

What aspect of history is most on your mind right now?

I’m trying to research a novel which will begin at the end of the First World War and go as far as the Second. And it will have psychoanalysts in it, as a group, and Surrealists in it, as a group. It will take place in Germany, France, and England, so it’s already very ambitious. I have some of the characters now but not all of them.

One thing I’m looking at is tight groups of believers who frequently and systematically eject rebels or the inconvenient. Also I’m interested in the discovery of the unconscious. And how the First World War was behind the beginnings of some forms of psychoanalysis, and the wildness of the Surrealists.

So I sort of sit about reading biographies and history and making notes. The thing I’m looking at now is that a lot of both the Surrealists and the psychoanalysts were working with shell-shocked soldiers of the First World War. There’s a wonderful story about André Breton and Louis Aragon when they were working in a mental hospital. The patients were locked up inside, and Aragon and Breton sat down outside, on the landing, and read the poetry of Lautréamont to each other. And the patients came to the door and they said, “For god’s sake, we can’t stand this, it’s mad, stop reading this, go away!” I think the Surrealists really were madder in some ways.

When people write about the rise of the historical novel, I feel like what they’re really asking is, “May I? Am I allowed to like historical fiction?”

When I was a girl, historical fiction was very much romantic fiction. I read “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” Georgette Heyer, all those very stylized Regency romances. You wrote it and read it in order to lose yourself in it.

But I think the kind of historical fiction people are writing now is an attempt to understand. You know: we can find out who we are by finding out where we came from. I’ve now reached the point of researching the period when my parents were alive and I wasn’t. If I write this one I shall have gone from 1859 right through to about 2000, if you add all my books together.

I think there has been a huge change in the seriousness of historical fiction, a sort of sense that there are things that might be better to describe in a fiction than in a history—because in a history you get gaps. You can use fiction to find out the shape of the world a bit, just as much as if you were a historian.

I began “The Children’s Book,” for example, with an interest primarily in children and children’s writers. But one thing led to another. I researched the City of London because of a metaphor I was using about gold and silver, and found a whole new world – including the fact that no one there seems to have anticipated the outbreak of the First World War. I researched the fight for women’s education, and came to feel what it must have been like to be an intelligent, frustrated woman in those days. I found I was understanding the world which made my parents who they were – my mother was a working-class girl on a scholarship at Cambridge. I discovered the unexpected roots of many of my own pleasures and prejudices.

Historical fiction now often deals with the people who used to be left out of history: women, blacks, gays, the formerly colonized. There’s Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” and Arthur Japin’s “The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi,” and “Possession.” Does that play a role in your current work?

As I said, I found great pleasure in researching the early days of women’s university education. But I am mistrustful of writers with a mission. My own inclination is always towards agnosticism – I begin writing with a thought and an image and look to see what I find.

The Dutch don’t really trust history, partly because they connect it to nationalism.

Yes. That’s one of the reasons I love the Dutch, because they’re not nationalistic. I remember talking to a Dutch person who said, you know, we haven’t got a literary history like you’ve got; and I blew up and said, but you’ve got a visual history infinitely more interesting than anything we’ve got.

And then you come across [Dutch] novels that are just about historical, like “The Assault” [by Harry Mulisch, partly set during World War II].

Does it count as historical if you lived through the period [as Mulisch did]?

The thing about Mulisch is that he’s got both the immediate experience and the distance that makes it history. And that makes it very, very interesting. I like that in a book, that kind of double focus.

Last night we went to an absolutely lovely restaurant called the Five Flies. And it’s sort of like Holland really. Someday I’ll write a short story about it. A waiter came and said, you are sitting under a self-portrait by Rembrandt. And here was this tiny, beautiful print of Rembrandt as a youngish man in his hat.

Then opposite us there were rows and rows of archive books. And we said, “What are those?” Because books always interest us. And they fetched them down after we’d finished the meal and showed us. There were press cuttings and letters written by Winston Churchill.

And so we asked, “How far back do they go?” And it turned out that the piece between 1939 and 1946 had been burnt. It’s gone. That piece of history is unacceptable. That’s a very Dutch way of dealing with it.

A Child of the 1950s

Antonia Susan Byatt (1936) published her first novel in 1964, but won fame, and the Booker Prize, with the 1990 novel “Possession.” Its plot of researchers discovering a hidden history has been much copied since—not least in “The Da Vinci Code.”

A child of the serious 1950s, Byatt had trouble with the 1960s, when her students—she was teaching literature to artists—rebelled by refusing to read at all. “In England I think the whole thing was particularly a nonsense,” she comments. “My little country was too comfortable and too small.” Her 2009 novel “The Children’s Book” is set among utopian socialists in the early 20^th century, but her critique of the 1960s is not hard to read between the lines.

Her latest book, “Ragnarök,” a retelling of the Norse myths, will be published in translation in November by De Bezige Bij.

Trouw, October 22, 2011.

The photograph on the cover of Toni Morrison’s new book A Mercy shows a stern intellectual: the Nobel Prize winner, the author of novels that have changed the way America sees itself. In her work, too, she has been implacable in her determination to expose America’s forgotten past. A brilliant stroke of timing: A Mercy came out in the euphoric week of America’s presidential election last November. A historical novel set in 1690, it reminded readers that racism has deep roots in American culture, and that its effects cannot easily be made good.

Morrison in person, in the library of her hotel in Amsterdam, is a powerful presence, but not a severe one. Her gray dreadlocks are pulled back in a grandmotherly knot; her mouth is frank, her eyes mischievous. She conveys her meaning as much with intonation as with words, in a voice that’s warm and confiding and seems to crackle, like a fire for sitting close to. She’s in the Netherlands, for the first time in 25 years, as part of a European book tour. She’ll go to Milan next, then Lausanne.

When I ask if she’d mind a question about Barack Obama, Morrison laughs. “Ha! Always. I wish he’d get out of my books. Somebody said that he—his wife wears belts, and she looks nice in those, but there’s one belt apparently that she wears that he doesn’t like. He says it’s Star Trekky or something. And she said ‘Would you go fix the world and get out of my closet?’

“So everywhere I go they say ‘Obama,’ and I say, ‘Would you please…?’”

Still, they do have a political and personal connection. Despite her friendship with Hillary Clinton, Morrison publicly supported Obama for president. They hadn’t met—they still haven’t—but he phoned to ask her if she would back his campaign. “And that conversation began this way,” she says, lowering her voice: “‘Before I say anything to you, let me tell you about Song of Solomon…’” She beams with pleasure at the younger man’s admiration for her work.

“So we talked about books. And then he asked me his question, and I said no.” She didn’t want to make a public statement about the election. But friends who supported Obama eventually persuaded her to write him an open letter of endorsement.

Leaning forward to emphasize her point, she says, “I didn’t have the luxury of choosing by gender or race. That was for some other time. I had to figure out who I thought was really wise.”

America’s gendered and raced history has always been at the heart of her work, and remains so in her new novel A Mercy. Just as pundits were trying out the word “post-racial,” Morrison came out with a book about “pre-racist” America. She explains, “I wanted to go back before 1776, which is when we usually think of America starting. I wanted to see what it was like before they institutionalized and legalized racist difference. Before it was set in stone. To divorce slavery from race. Because the only thing exotic about slavery in America was racism. Slavery was common everywhere. I wanted to see if indeed there was a time when you could be a slave and un-raced, in America.”

A Mercy is about an enslaved mother who, to protect her eight-year-old daughter, gives her away. This is the charitable act of the title, but the daughter, Florens, believes her mother has rejected her, and her grief has profound consequences. Her situation is not unusual. On the isolated farm where she ends up, on the edge of the wilderness, everyone she knows is in some sense an orphan, and almost all of them, black and white, live in some form of servitude.

Morrison has been called “America’s conscience,” but it might be just as accurate to say she’s America’s alternate historian, searching out stories that have seldom been told. “History is full of gaps and silences,” she observes. “It gets nationalized and mythologized and distorted, and you just want to lift up the rock of the national narrative and see what is really underneath there. The possibility of truth is more fascinating to me than these little tired stories that every nation makes up about how wonderful they are. That’s called ‘teaching citizenship.’ I don’t mind that. But underneath there’s some much more interesting material.”

At the beginning of A Mercy, the characters form a makeshift family in the new world. But by the end, Florens has learned about racism, and the rest “have nothing to unite them.” The ending seems pessimistic, but Morrison doesn’t see it that way. Florens, she says, has “an epiphany. And if somebody knows something really important at the end of a novel that they didn’t know before, that to me is the purpose of the species. Florens figured out that she owned herself. She has to do something about that. So I thought they lived happily—not ever after, but there was a moment of recognition and maturity at the end that was not there at the beginning.”

So is there hope for a new American maturity, a national happy ending? How does Morrison feel about that term “post-racial”? “I’ve said I hated it,” she says. “But I understand what it’s driving at. It’s an inaccurate term for something that is really true. My students at Princeton are so uninterested in racism. They really are. The culture is full of black entertainers. They’ve seen black presidents before…in the movies.” She laughs. “Princeton is not the world, obviously, but I see a new comfort and ease in discussions about race. There’s less awkwardness, or attempts to slip into the discourse little signals of racial contempt.

“So maybe post-racial is the accurate term. But I’m a little cautious.”

Cautious or no, Morrison does view America differently since the election. Thirty years ago, in an interview, she said she’d never really felt like a “citizen.” It recalls Michelle Obama’s much-criticized remark that for the first time she was proud of her country.

Morrison drops her voice as if to make an embarrassing confession. “I have to admit—it’s sad, but it’s true—that I went to the inauguration. And you know, the right wing usurp the flag. They’ve taken it over. They say who’s a real American and who’s not, and they have flags everywhere. So forever I’d just sort of go, yeah, aah.” She makes dismissive sounds. “You know, not resistant, but just vaguely…not there?

“But at the inauguration, when I saw all those flags, and the military was doing its little number and singing, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s so nice. That’s beautiful.’ And when Aretha Franklin sang ‘God Bless America’ I thought, ‘Yes!’

“I was thinking, ‘Why am I enjoying stuff that doesn’t mean anything to me? I mean, in that fundamental, “yay! my country right or wrong” way?’ But suddenly I…I liked it. And that is attributable to that election. I belong in this place, was what I was saying to myself.”

Voices
“I’ve always been interested in voices that have no place, or have been silenced,” says Toni Morrison (1931). She grew up in a working-class town in Ohio, the daughter of a shipyard welder. There was not a lot of overt discrimination there, she says: blacks and immigrants lived next door to each other and “we were all just poor.” But there were still restrictions on where black people could sit in a movie theater or which beaches they could go to on Lake Erie.

Morrison studied literature and has published nine novels, including Song of Solomon (1977), about a young black man exploring his family’s past, and Beloved (1987), about a mother who kills her own infant daughter rather than see her enslaved. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she taught at Princeton University until her retirement in 2006.

Trouw, May 26, 2009.

Like so many mysteries, it started with a body. While Russell Shorto was working on The Island at the Center of the World, his best-selling history of New York City’s Dutch origins, he came across a footnote about René Descartes. Specifically, it was about what happened to the French philosopher’s body after his death in 1650.

Descartes was one of the great philosophers of modernity, the first to propose that the mind and the body, reason and faith, could be seen as two separate spheres. Yet when his remains were exhumed in 1666, they were divided on the same lines as his own mind-body problem. His skull was stolen and placed in a cabinet of scientific curiosities. His bones were buried in a church in Paris, where they were revered by his followers as if they were the relics of a saint. When he learned this, Shorto began to wonder whether the line between religion and the Enlightenment was as clear as it seemed.

Descartes spent most of his working life in the Netherlands, so Shorto came here to do research for the book that became Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason (Doubleday, 2008). Since 2007, he has lived in Amsterdam full-time. Just back to his apartment on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal from a book tour in the United States, he talked about history, modernity and why an atheist can’t win an American election.

Why this book?
I think I first encountered this fact about the bones in 2003—not long after September 11, 2001. Everybody was saying, ‘Apparently Western values are under attack.’ But what are Western values? This book was my non-standard way of trying to go at that question.

The whole problem of September 11, and now basically the entire Bush years, has been this rise of fundamentalism around the world: Muslim, Christian, and also secular atheist. You have people like [Richard] Dawkins and [Christopher] Hitchens saying, ‘Look, in the West, in the past few hundred years, we’ve developed these tools, this way of seeing things, and we’ve learned that religion is part of the infancy of our species. We need to grow up.’

But as I detail in the book, it’s not a black-and-white question of the theological versus the secular perspective. Really there are two secular perspectives, one radical and one moderate. And the moderate has always seen it as the job of reason to incorporate the irrational into our understanding of things. Because reason isn’t something that fits over all of reality, and certainly not over all of human experience.

That’s what I think is the flaw in the whole Christopher Hitchens argument. It’s reductionist. It’s too wild a world.
I can understand saying that organized religion has created more problems than it’s solved. But the underlying essence of trying to contemplate things that are beyond reason’s ability to contemplate—that’s why we have religion and art. Those things are valid.

I think this conflict helps explain why people are looking forward so much to this election. They see Bush as having been very much a player in this battle of fundamentalisms that egg each other on, and they are looking for some other way of approaching things.

So which candidate represents the move away from fundamentalism?
I think you can explain both Obama and McCain that way. McCain is a very strange choice for the Republicans; he’s a kind of non-Republican. He’s always kept the Christian conservative wing at bay—until recently. And I think Obama’s a pragmatist; he’s not a real ideologue either. In both of them, as well as in the overall spirit of the times, there’s this hunger to move on, past this kind of pointed dichotomy [between religion and atheism]. That’s Descartes’ bones in the election, as far as I’m concerned.

Do you think we could have an American president who was an atheist or didn’t go to church?
No.

Why not?
Well, that’s such a huge difference between Americans and Europeans, but—Americans’ faith is public, it’s part of the public discourse, and that’s held to be good. Because Americans are overwhelmingly religious, it’s part of your bio, part of your résumé. It certainly doesn’t matter to me, but I think it would be very hard [for an atheist] to get elected. Maybe in 10 or 20 years, but I don’t know. Americans are very stubborn on that point.

Your first book was about the search for the historical Jesus, the second about religion and psychiatry. And you studied philosophy. Did you have personal reasons to write Descartes’ Bones?
I was born and raised Catholic, and left it very dramatically when I was a teenager. So my first book was a way for me to come back at it from a rational perspective—and to reach this conclusion, that you can be as rational as you want, but you’re not going to get that thing, that leap. So this basic divide between reason and faith has always been a challenge for me.

And for some people, history matters. Like that building across the canal. [He points out his front windows.] Some people will walk by and say, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ Others will feel, or want to feel, a connection to everything that’s come before. And I think I have that—at least intermittently.

So that’s always an important part of what I do as a writer: try to find out what’s underneath. I don’t think I’m going to unearth anything of grand importance, but just for myself, if I’m going to try to know a thing, I want to get down as far as I can.

You’re thinking of writing a book about Amsterdam, aren’t you?
Yes, one that would mix history with the present.

And you’re working on a book with Geert Mak?
A very small book. He and I have each written an essay about Henry Hudson for the Hudson Year, 2009 [the 400th anniversary of the discovery of New York]. He did the first part, using Hudson in Amsterdam as a way to talk about the Dutch world in the 17th century. And then he kind of pushes him out to sea, and I pick him up there and bring him to New York. The book will be given out free on KLM flights between Amsterdam and New York.

What do you think of the claim, in recent Dutch debates about history, that establishing a Dutch historical canon and teaching the country’s history in schools unfairly excludes immigrants?
I think that’s completely silly. If you’re, say, Peruvian, and you come to the Netherlands, it’s absurd to think that Dutch history should somehow include the history of Peru, in order to make you feel that you’re part of things. Your job is to hold together your own personality and sense of things, and you do that by taking in what this culture gives you and blending it with what you learn from your parents, and the books your mother gives you about your home country, and all of that. You have your own identity that you piece together, and what this society chooses to do in terms of reinforcing its history and culture is part of that. It’s not the whole thing.

I think it’s useful to have some kind of canon, something that gives a basic awareness. All the information kids take in on the internet, for instance—that’s not education, that’s just stuff. It’s not the same as providing a framework.
Canons are good even if mostly what you do is react against them. It’s good to have structure.

That’s what you do in your book, too: provide a framework for thinking about the Enlightenment.
Exactly.

Amsterdam Weekly, November 6, 2008. We spoke on Nov. 3, when we didn’t yet know that Barack Obama would win the election in America.

“People who shuttle between cultures are very, very hard to describe”

Lisa Jardine’s new book Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (HarperPress, 2008) opens in 1688 with the coup that put Holland’s William of Orange on the throne of England. The “Glorious Revolution,” the British historian and biographer argues, was not a revolution at all, but a Dutch conquest. She proceeds, through personal and public documents, to trace the bonds between the two countries: connections of commerce, political asylum, intermarriage, and artistic, musical and scientific exchange.

Like her American counterpart Russell Shorto, Jardine believes that, although the Dutch “handed on” their political and cultural supremacy to the English, their notions of religious and ethnic tolerance persist to this day in European culture. Interviewed by phone from her home in London, she saw the question about Dutch tolerance coming from a mile off, and answered it almost before I asked.

As a public intellectual, you’ve dealt with a lot of issues that are hotly debated in the Netherlands, from the ethics of embryology to the question of why women don’t win literary prizes. About the question of tolerance—
I do believe—and call me a romantic—that the Netherlands continues to set a better example of tolerance than other European nations. And to the extent that Europe is tolerant, you might want to reflect on whether that tradition is Dutch.
I know perfectly well where the Netherlands finds itself now; I spend quite a lot of time there. But even so—you know, there’s a sort of note of triumph when the rest of Europe points its finger and says, “You see, even the Dutch can’t manage.” Because the Netherlands appeared to stand for inclusion and tolerance, other European nations were only too happy to see her falter. But whether that’s a stumble or an actual change, I think we have to wait and see.

In writing about cultural exchange, did you think about your own background as the child of immigrants?
Yes. My father came from Poland and my mother from Latvia, as economic migrants to Britain. It gives me a particular way of seeing European culture. Europeans have so much in common that I find it increasingly perplexing that we still put in place narrow boundaries: “Dutch culture,” “English culture.” The more you delve, historically, the more you discover a constant two-way exchange, going back as far as you can reach.

The nation is a fairly late invention. Do you think we’re emerging from a nationalist period into a more international one?
I do. And I think it’s good to recognize that this is not the first time it’s happened. We’re gradually starting to realize that nationhood doesn’t do justice to the way Europeanness has existed over a long period of time.

There’s one figure in particular you say was regarded as a “turncoat” for his dual loyalties. Can crossing borders also be seen as negative?
That’s why I struggle with Constantijn Huygens, who’s a major character in my book. It’s very difficult to classify someone who has made an impact in more than one country more than once. Until we can stop thinking in these channels of individual countries, it will be impossible to write a biography of him.

Because you don’t know how to look at him as a character?
We have very conventional ways of looking at people. They involve a birthplace, a childhood, an education, a career, a marriage in that same community or not very far away—it’s a steadiness of focus. And people who shuttle between cultures are very, very hard to describe in that way. What to one person seems like an inspired innovation can seem to others like a betrayal.

I got into difficulties when I wrote a piece for radio about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at the time at which she left the Netherlands. I continue to receive two sets of e-mails: one set from people who regard me as her champion, and another from people who say, “You see, she turned out to be a very bad thing after all.” And I know there’s no way of reconciling those two.

Where should inspiration come from at this point? Should we keep looking to the Netherlands as an example?
Well, one of the themes of my book is that the Golden Age is over three centuries gone, and yet Dutch cultural influence pervades Europe and beyond. And I suppose in the end my hope for any group is that their greatest achievements, in art, literature, music, gardens, spread widely like a net, part of what holds us all together.

Holland has not been “great” for 300 years, but look how pervasive she is, look how important her attitudes and beliefs. We’re going to be there too, and I would be quite happy if that was where Britain stood in 300 years’ time.

On June 19, Jardine will read at the John Adams Institute, with Shorto moderating.

Amsterdam Weekly, June 12, 2008.

In the Washington Post, I talk to Michael Chabon about genre, literature, and his adventure story “Gentlemen of the Road.”

What constitutes a cultural identity? Is it connected to home, to language, to being part of a group, to being on TV? Is it tied to history? Can history be rewritten? Novelist Michael Chabon and culture critic Daniel Mendelsohn have both published books in which they look at identity and its representation through the lens of an Eastern European Jewish heritage. Chabon and Mendelsohn both happened to be speaking in Amsterdam last week, and the two friends agreed to a joint interview.

As American Jews, they both feel relatively free to play with their cultural heritage, picking and choosing elements of that heritage to combine with their other interests. For Chabon, those include myth, comic books, and popular culture. His new book “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” is a mystery novel set in an imaginary Yiddish-speaking colony in Alaska.

Mendelsohn was a classical scholar specializing in Greek tragedy before he became a journalist. In 1999 he published “The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity,” about relationships among gay men. In his 2006 book “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” he describes his attempts to discover the fate of his great-uncle, great-aunt, and four young cousins in a small town in Poland during the war. “We both wrote detective stories,” Mendelsohn says. “But we also wrote about language, about narrative, about options that are available to one as a writer, to choose.”

Daniel, in an interview for your previous book, about the gay community, you said, “An ‘identity’ is something we all yearn for but which is bound to elude us, because it is a creation of our desire and fantasy about who we want to be.” Does that apply to Jewish culture as well?

Daniel Mendelsohn The gay “culture”—I don’t like to use that word, but the gay whatever and the Jewish whatever—function similarly in their relationship to the larger culture. There are the same issues of the possibility of assimilation, the desire to remain different; within each group, there’s a perceived form of “extreme” identity statement and a “modified” identity statement. To me, the two things were totally concentric. And that’s how I thought about them; and it has been a very useful way for me to think about culture in general, about the possibility of stance. How can you position yourself with respect to the larger culture? And in that respect, both Jewishness and gayness are metaphors for a way to relate oneself [to the dominant group]. The same debates rage within both cultures: should we assimilate? should we remain outside? What are the benefits? What are the compromises involved?

Michael Chabon Should we allow ourselves to be valued for the things that the larger culture values us for while at the same time it’s devaluing us for many other reasons? The things that Jews, or gays, are reputed to be “good at”—should we accept those labels because they’re positive, or should we reject them completely because they’re being used in a dubious manner?

Mendelsohn Every time there’s a really queeny character on a TV show, there’s 500,000 people saying, “Isn’t it great? We’re on a TV show!” and then there’s 500,000 people saying, “It’s horrible, because most of us are just lawyers and doctors, and we’re not all queeny decorators.” So as a producer of culture, you’re always aware that no matter how you make it, someone’s going to be miserable. When you’re writing, you’re part of the machine of cultural production. And someone’s going to be saying the same thing about you. “How could you make Jews this way? How could you make Jews that way?” It’s always a vexed issue.

Michael, I was interested in how you talk about home and homelessness in “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” I don’t live where I’m from, and I moved around a lot as a child. I found the most poignant parts of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” to be the ones where you’re wondering whether or not you need a home to be yourself, even to be a person.

Chabon I’ve always found a lot of meat in the aspects of Judaism that deal with not having a home, longing for a home. The Diaspora, the period of wandering, is what lies at the center of interest for me in Jewish history.

I moved around a lot too when I was a kid. Then in 1970, when my family finally settled down, we moved to a place called Columbia, Maryland. Columbia at the time was a brand-new city. It was being built from scratch, and it was very much being done along Utopian principles from the 1960s: racial equality, religious, ecumenical, people worshipping together in the same building, sharing one building regardless of what faith you were, trying to ease class disparities in the way housing was designed. And my parents bought into Columbia not just because they could get a nice house for a reasonable price, but because they believed in it. And I grew up very much believing in it; that was my home.

I had this sort of idyllic childhood there, in this Utopian place, up to a point—and that point was when my parents separated and then divorced [when Chabon was 11]. And after that it was sort of broken, for me.

From then on, [I had a] period of feeling homeless in some way, and moving back and forth between my parents’ houses. And then I became a teenager, and was moving all over, and I moved 22 times in 14 years, I calculated it once. I had almost had this moment of being at home, being in this place that was like a kind of New Jerusalem, and then losing it and leaving it—that partly explains why I feel it so strongly.

Mendelsohn It’s always something you write about with tremendous emotion. I still remember reading Kavalier & Clay, and there’s that part at the end where he gets the crate [containing the Golem of Prague], and he smells the waters of the Moldau, and I just was heaving.

Chabon And it’s not just a Jewish thing at all, it’s very much an American thing: rootlessness and restlessness and moving on.

Mendelsohn It’s interesting to be in Europe talking about these books, since my book is about the desire to recuperate a history by somebody who had no history, in the way that Americans uniquely are allowed, or can choose, to have no history. Because you grow up in a suburb that didn’t exist until six months before you were born.

And the idea that we’re all haunted by this parallel life, the life that could have been, the European life, the one you would have had if your grandfather had decided to stay in you know, “Vashkovitz on Fruit” —one is haunted by it, if you have any imagination. It doesn’t matter if you’re a novelist or not, this is something you grow up with. There’s always that floating around: the other life, the alter-life. And so that yearning for home is also a yearning for history.

Michael, did some of Columbia, MD, get into Sitka, the Alaskan Jewish settlement in your book?

I think so, just in the idea that you could take this empty space and fill it, with a city, and say, We’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it like this, here’s where the people are going to go, and … So much of it was about making maps and plans, the building of Columbia, and I got this very potent demonstration of how you went about imagining and then building a place. It happened right before my eyes, and it all started with this map of Columbia. And you know, the books that I loved reading at the time were full of maps. And so the idea that there was this power in imagining a place and mapping it and dreaming it up and then either writing a novel about it, like “The Chronicles of Narnia,” or even actually, if you had all the resources of money and will that the developer of Columbia had, to actually make a real place; that such a thing was possible. I’m sure it fed into my even imagining that I could write a book like “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”

Language is another important part of identity, and the most important language in both of your books, although they’re written in English, is Yiddish. For example, Daniel, you transcribed parts of your interviews in the original Yiddish.

Mendelsohn To me it was important, because I wanted the reader to hear the sound of Yiddish, as a kind of artifact. My book is a book about evidence. You’re surrounded by evidence, and it’s visual, and it’s narrative, and it’s aural.

But I grew up hearing Yiddish. It was a very strong component of my Jewish childhood, because I was surrounded by old people whose mother language was Yiddish. It’s an element of this lost civilization that to me needs to be presented, like an artifact in a museum. Because nobody—none of the people who are my kind of people speak Yiddish anymore.

Chabon It’s being lost all over again now, in that not only is there no more Yiddishkeit, no more world of Yiddish—that was lost when we were kids already—but now all those people that passed it on even in the fragmentary way that they did to us are gone, or going, very soon. I’m very conscious of that for my kids. What they know about Yiddish is again an order of magnitude less than what I knew about Yiddish. If my core vocabulary that I had as a kid, just from what I heard [from his grandparents], was, let’s say it was 150 words that I was confident I might know what they meant, for my kids it’s 20 or 25. There’s nobody to get it from but me, and—it’s like in a post-apocalyptic novel, where little fragments of civilization are handed on, but every time they’re handed on another piece is forgotten…

Mendelsohn …is rubbed away a little bit. But that reminds you: the meaning of the word culture, you know, is deeply connected to the life of living things. That’s what culture means. And that’s why I always say, and I get in trouble for saying: you can’t talk about gay culture. Because nobody is born into gay culture. They don’t grow up in gay culture. They don’t have, largely, although it’s changing, children to pass a culture on to. If there are no living people to transmit the object, then it fades away. And that’s what Yiddish means to me.
Look, I’m a student of dead languages. Yiddish is unique in the history of the world to be a language that died in six years. To have a language that is completely in the prime of its health—

Chabon It was at its peak.

Mendelsohn —at its peak, both as a language and as a literature, and then not to exist six years later, is a thing unique in the history of the world, as far as I know.

Chabon In a way, if you have the desire to live in a world where Yiddish is still powerful, vibrant, strong, and all around you, you either have to go where Daniel went or—you have to go where I went.

Mendelsohn Another way of saying that is that if you are not a novelist, the only place you can go for thriving secular Yiddish culture is in the past. And the other place you can go, if you are a novelist, is in the parallel present. And to say that is to say a deeply tragic thing.

Last night [at Mendelsohn’s reading] I was telling the story of a Ukrainian boy I saw in Bolechow [his uncle’s home town] who was playing in the Jewish cemetery. We asked our interpreter, “Does he know what this place is?” and he said “Yes, it’s the Jewish cemetery.” And we said “Does he know what a Jew is?” And he said no. And that just always destroys me. That’s extermination, when people don’t even know what a Jew is anymore.

Amsterdam, September 19, 2007.

“The best art and writing is almost like an assignment; it is so vibrant that you feel compelled to make something in response. Suddenly it is clear what you have to do. For a brief moment it seems wonderfully easy to live and love and create breathtaking things.”
—Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, LearningToLoveYouMore.com

Much of Miranda July’s work, from her early videos and performances to her recent film “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and her current collection of short stories, “No One Belongs Here More Than You,” has explored loneliness and isolation and their opposites, belonging and community. Alongside her own output, she has worked to build artistic networks. The most visible of these is the website LearningToLoveYou More.com, which July and fellow artist Harrell Fletcher began as a sort of creativity generation tool.

The website offers a list of assignments from which participating artists, professional and amateur, can choose—ideas such as “Take a flash photo under your bed” and “Draw a scene from a movie that made you cry.” The “reporters” who post their work on LTLYM range from high school kids to serious artists (or both). Though contributors are encouraged to make use of the trivia of personal lives, the results are seldom trivial or banal. The assignment “Photograph a significant outfit” (“Remember exactly what you were wearing during a recent significant moment….Lay out what you were wearing on the floor, as if you are dressing an invisible, flat person”) yields evocative images, with the empty track suits and jeans hauntingly at odds with the importance of the events.

The site is popular in part because it offers its contributors a sense of community. July has said variously that the site allows her to give back to her fans, that it helps her build an audience for work like her own, and simply that she and Fletcher came up with the idea after they confessed to each other that they secretly liked being told what to do. Certainly part of the intense response to July’s work lies in the encouragement she gives to others: her participatory sensibility seems to act as a magnet to the Internet’s charged particles of longing and belonging.

Work from LTLYM has been shown at the Seattle Art Museum and at the Whitney Biennial in New York; now a new show, curated by students from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, has just opened at MU in Eindhoven. On her way to Eindhoven, Miranda July answered a few questions by e-mail.

How does LTLYM fit in with your own work? Do you get ideas from it? Do you use ideas from your writing in LTLYM?

LTLYM does sometimes inspire my own work, but it does this most often by providing a break from my own reality–i.e., I have a venue where I can discover other people’s perspectives on the, often quite intimate, things that I am interested in. And because I am not personally exposed, it is a project that is easy to throw energy into; I don’t have to worry so much about being judged.

Is there a logic behind your assignments? What are you trying to get the reporters to do?

Harrell and I have come up with the assignments every few months over the last five years, so they reflect us over that span of time. I think we realized early on that reports that forced people to engage with other people—friends, family or total strangers—were more interesting. Right now we are writing some assignments that are slightly more political, in a personal way. [Recent assignments include “Make an educational public plaque” and “Interview someone who has experienced war.”]

What surprises has the project yielded? What assignments have made people the most and least enthusiastic?

I personally was surprised that the “write your life story in less than a day” assignment was done so diligently, and that the results are rarely boring. That’s what you realize again and again: people are interesting. But often, and I’m speaking for myself here, we don’t see the most interesting things about ourselves. We get in a rut of thinking: this is who I am. It can help to be told to reveal something that you take for granted. For example: “Make an exhibition of your parents’ art”—by which we mean the art you grew up with, be it actual paintings, or knick-knacks, whatever qualified as art in your mind, as a child. We ask people to write what they think of these images that are so familiar they almost don’t see them. And it is fascinating to read.

How actively were the reporters involved in the exhibition?

The curators (the students) had to hunt down the artists and get permission to use their work, and in some cases have the work sent to the museum. I think one or two artists hadn’t kept the originals and actually re-made the works.

Who is the “you” in LTLYM?

Could be anyone, right? Sometimes I think that the artists are learning to love themselves more, and then sometimes I think we are all learning to love them more, as they expose themselves.

A very different question: When you were here in June, reading at the John Adams Institute, the moderator, and also at least one reviewer of your book, seemed to see only a sort of hapless side to your persona and assume that that was you, or all of you. Although you spoke about hard work, he seemed to think that your career had happened more or less by accident. What’s that about?

Well, I think people sometimes get confused between the fictional characters and me. But in defense of my characters, they are rarely hapless, and actually almost always do something unexpectedly daring—and I would like to think they take after me in this!

Also, perhaps because I didn’t go to school for arts, and don’t cite any training or mentors, people think that it was not conscious. But school actually made me feel guilty, because it took time away from my own work, so I dropped out. But not in a hapless way. I was a very determined college drop-out.

Is there any particular illustration material you would like us to use? 

All I can think of are these pictures I took last time I was here, in my hotel in Amsterdam. I bought this pair of shoes at Zipper, but then I realized they didn’t really fit. So I left them in the hotel room. (They were really cheap.) I put them like this and then shut the cabinet, hoping that some guest with feet slightly smaller than mine would open it one day.

Amsterdam Weekly, August 30, 2007.