 Aloha. My name is Roger Jelonek. I'm the host of Book Worlds, and I'm pleased to have Lee Siegel here, who is a distinguished professor of religion and also a writer and a sometimes painter. Lee, welcome to the show. Tell us a bit about yourself, where you grew up in quite exotic circumstances in Hollywood, I think. I grew up in Los Angeles, in Beverly Hills, in the home where my mother still lives, and my parents were in the film industry there, but I've left that all behind me. How did you get into academia? You're a professor, recently retired professor of UH. Well, frankly, I wanted to have a student deferment, so that I didn't have to either go to Berkeley or go to Vietnam. That seemed to be an easy, easy choice. And then while I was at Berkeley, Richard Nixon was running for a governor of California, and he wanted to lower taxes, and his argument for lowering taxes, lowering funds to the University of California, he said, people at Berkeley are studying things like Sanskrit. So I didn't know what Sanskrit was, but I thought, I'm going to take it. If Richard Nixon doesn't like it, it must be good. So you took Sanskrit at Berkeley? Yeah. And then I was interested in India, and went on, did research in India, and did a doctorate in Sanskrit and Indian studies. But you did a doctorate at Oxford? In Oxford, yeah. That was fun. But you were also a writer and an artist. How did that work? Well, in my way, I had aspirations to bring the two together. William Blake was a sort of inspiration there. But the thing about painting is so hard is you do a drawing or a painting, and you can see it, and you see how terrible it is. Whereas you write something and you can imagine that it's good because it's in the drawer or between, you know, or in the folder. So I found painting, you know, too awful to bear, whereas writing, I could fool myself, you know. Well, but you've done a lot. You've got a number of academic books and a number of literary books. Tell us about the novels. They seem to have a pretty theme that seems to run all the way through the subject of love. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, why? Well, okay. You know, I had been writing, well, I wouldn't say academic books, scholarly books, in other words, books that were true. And my field was India. So writing books about that. And I was very lucky because the University of Chicago Press became my publisher. So I had a kind of foot in the door, you know. So I then decided just for fun, my scholarly books were becoming more and more like novels, you know, trying to write them without footnotes and trying to write them as a narrative. And I decided to try to flip that on its head and write a fictitious book, a novel that looked like a scholarly book, that had footnotes and a bibliography, even though I made up all the books in the bibliography. And that was the book Love in a Dead Language about India and drawing on my studies or knowledge of India. And it just took off. I was very lucky, you know. That was a breakthrough book for you, you know. You got a front page review in the New York Times. Yeah, I was very lucky. And you've, I've seen really lengthy interviews with you, comparing you to Nabokov and other writers who are very playful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the thing is, it's interesting, of course, this is not uncommon that you have an author that has a a first book that does very well and then after it's difficult. And I would say when that book came out, suddenly agents were calling and publishers wanting to give me money. And it was so thrilling and exciting. But then the next book sold about half the number of copies that Love in a Dead Language sold. And the one after that about half of that, half of that, half of that. So I'm down to just a few copies of a book now. Well, let's talk about how that happens. You know, one of the veins of publishing is you have this algorithm that's called BookScan, which reports pretty precisely how many books are sold, where they're sold, where they're sold to. And they're telling people, my mother has been buying all my books. She's on there. And the problem that often happens is that you have a successful book and followed up by a book that's perhaps not as sensational. It doesn't do quite as well. And this is perceived as a trend. Yeah, right. And then it just reinforces itself. Sure. So you went back to the University of Chicago. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, you know, the marketing person on my last book said, well, Lee, how do you expect to sell, sell books? You don't have any Facebook friends or any Twitter account or anything like that, which is true. But telling me I don't have any friends made me kind of sad. But yeah, it's a tough business. And I think where it's going. No one really knows, you know, I, I try to I've been thinking about since she asked me to join you today, the sort of history of writing and the history of my writing, you know, placed within it. And if I think that, you know, in the beginning, there's no writing, people were still telling stories, and they had ideas and they had characters and people in those stories were having sex and killing each other and everything, you know, nothing's changed in that way. And that writing just came to make a record of things, how many bags of oats I sold you, but also to make a record of some of these stories. So our very earliest writings are really sort of putting down of what was really oral, oral literature in the area where, you know, what I know about the spoken word, the recited word, the sung word is infinitely more valuable or valued than any written word, you know. Do they regard writing it down as kind of cheating? It is kind of, well, it's for the teacher to have the notes to look down in the cantella for the reciter to have a kind of record so that when he's reciting the poem, he can look up, but people really want to hear it. And when that's the case, you get a kind of sound of words rather than the look of words that we get with writing, you know. That's really interesting because I run a book and music festival. Yes, sure. And I'm part of a movement that's global, that these festivals are proliferating everywhere. So you ask yourself how come, because the books as a medium is not flourishing. And it's because people want to hear the words from the authors. They want to hear the stories direct. And I think they value that more than they value the page. I think so. I mean, it's interesting to me because, you know, after Gutenberg invents this amazing thing, the printing press, where people are going, oh, what a drag. What are they going to be all these out-of-work bards? You know, what are they going to do for a living? And in fact, though, is that turning around with the end of, I think, the end of writing, where we've got, if you go on Amazon, so many books, you can get by the audio book and listen to it in your car. Or we were in a way returning to the bard. Yeah, you know, that's, I wonder, you know, I wonder. You know, I see, when I'm interested in the history of writing, and I don't mean writing the intellectual history, I mean the physical history, I have here a quill of feather. And when you think the association of a word, you know, with a bird, with a flight, with a flock. And this had to be carved. You had to keep carving it and then toss it and use another one. And it was very intriguing. Flaubert wrote a letter to George Stend after the metal nib was invented. And he said that metal nib is going to destroy writing because people will be able to write a whole sentence without stopping. They won't have to stop to carve the quill. And when they stop to carve the quill, they're going to think of the, just the right word, the mojus. So, you know, the quill went, by the way, to the dip pen, where you could write more. And that went to the pen that you could fill, you know, that you had an eyedropper and you filled it and then you could write really a lot. And where did that go? It went right here. And now this, my new thing is the experience of writing as typing. And this is where my history with writing comes. I remember I had a sort of contraband copy of Playboy Magazine and they were interviewing Jack Kerouac and they asked him how does someone become a writer? And he said, they have to learn to type. And you know, in my youth, I'm like 15 years old aspiring, every writer, author, type, you know, the picture of the author, you'd be at his typewriter with a bottle of bourbon, that's just a flask of bourbon, an ashtray very important in a drink, that that's what it meant to be a writer. So, I learned to smoke and drink and type in order to try to write things. And I haven't heard that sound in a long time. And isn't it a beautiful sound? And if I go far enough, we can hear that bell go fast like this, that you're in. There, that's it, yeah. The sort of music of typing as opposed to this. And then having a physical object here, having this physical piece of paper with my carbon paper making a copy of it is so much different than having something on a, you know, on a computer. But don't you find word processing is also liberating, the fact that you can compose and edit? Yeah, I'm hooked on word processing. You know, I wish I could lie and say, word processing, what's that? You know, I wish I could. The last book that I've written that you have to be published, I typed completely as a way to return. You know, I remember the exhilaration of, I took a typing class and then the exhilaration of late at night typing, it made me feel like I'm really a writer. Well, we're going to take a little break now, but we'll get back to that right away. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Despeng, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Lee was saying how the touch of the typewriter was very important to you. You've just written a book and you very kindly sent me a file of it. It's not been published yet, so I feel very privileged to have read it. I absolutely loved it. I'm not sure how to pronounce the title, but this is the, if you could focus on it, this is the cover, the projected cover. Yeah, pretty up. It's the top row of the writers. And it's a wonderful premise. You want to describe it? Well, the premise is that, like so many other people writing in the 21st century, I'm discouraged. And it's no longer, it's not a pleasure to sit and try to write a novel or something. And so the premise here is that I'm visiting my mother's home in Beverly Hills, where I grew up. And she's a big fan of mine. And so has a, which is true, has a box of my writing from college and high school and so on. And in it, I discover rummaging this box. I discover something I wrote about myself when I was, as a 15 year old, but I wrote it when I was a 20 year old. And as I started to read it, it's in a way it's somewhat purile, I suppose, and sort of desperately dirty. I had been given a band, completely banned copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. And I just changed my life is what I wanted to do. I wanted to write dirty words. But you know, cool. And I wanted to drink and smoke too. So at any rate, as I read through it, I remembered this exhilaration of late at night, sitting up and typing. And so I decided to go on eBay and get a typewriter, the same typewriter, that's this, a Royal from 1950, the same typewriter that I had typed this story on to see if I could recapture that feeling of I'm a writer, you know. And so I'm, there are two parts to the book, the part that I wrote when I was an 18 year old writing about a 15 year old. And then the part that is a 72 year old with the same old typewriter writing about that 18 year old. And you know, it's interesting to me in reading this, that what do I have in common with this person, this 15 year old? What do I have in common with him? 60, almost 60 years later. And you know, so that sort of psychological dimension of it, understanding my relationship to all the people that I've been, you know. Yeah. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a very funny, hilarious book. The way you managed to use typing as a way of making love was fascinating. From my premise is that typing is to literature what sex is to love, you know, that typing is, well, for me at that time was that, that this is literature, this is not like, you know, writing a little note or something like that. Yeah. And I can never tell in your works whether anything is true or not, which is the privilege of a literary imagination. But were you actually ever in Paris at that time? Yeah, I mean, okay, okay. I would have to go through it with you and say true or not true. I suppose I could do that. And if it's when it's published, just have a T or F in the column or actually have the reader guess true, you know, like a true or false quiz. But it seems very true. Okay. Well, at least what I wanted to be true. A friend of mine who just read it, a French woman actually, a friend of mine who just read it, a French woman unbelievably named Fanny, that's true, who just read it. So, well, I read it but I also read your other book that who wrote the book of love. Now, you can't have lost your virginity to two entirely different women. Which one was it, you know? I'm not a telling. Well, I think it's, I think has, this is, to me, seems like it's going to be a very successful book. Oh, that would, that'd be fun. You know, are you writing anything else at the moment? No, I'm writing a query letters to publishers. You know, that takes a more literary skill, actually, than maybe writing a fiction. But you find you have to write to it or be assured of an audience in order to write? Yeah, I can remember when I had a royal typewriter and I was 18 years old, how incredibly much fun it was to write, regardless of who read it. I could always count on my mom and a couple of friends, but that, you know, it didn't matter. That's no longer the case for me. I want to be talking to someone, not talking to myself, you know? Well, maybe you should have a reader's group to be assured of an audience to begin with. See, that's hard. I have a dog who will listen, you know. Actually, I, in getting this dog, I bought a book, How to Train Your Puppy. And I think the greatest first line, I may feel it in the next thing I write, better than call me Ishmael, better than it was the best of times and the worst of times or whatever. And the line is, thank you and congratulations for buying my book. Woof, woof. You think of work for my next book? I think so. When you write, are you aware of what other people are writing? You read a lot? Yeah. I read something that will help me, that will inspire me, that will get my adrenaline going, something connected. So I think I've read everything that's been written about typewriting. Uh-huh. Is there laws and literature on it? Yeah. And there's this wonderful new movie, California Typewriter. I think Tom Hanks is in it as he's a collector, he has hundreds of typewriters. You know, I'm not a collector, but I have a beautiful 1919 Corona, which came with, Mike didn't, but originally came with a tripod. And the idea was, you go to the Amazon, you set up your typewriter and write, you're on the front line of battle, and you set up your typewriter and write, that it became an instrument of creativity, but also of bravura, and of courage, and of adventure. I'd like to get that feeling again. You don't think you can? I don't know. Writing, you know, the writing's on the wall, in a sense. I mean, is there only going to be audio books? You know, someone was just telling me, oh Lee, you know, there's this program where you can just talk, and it'll turn it into type. And then you can send it to somebody, and if they don't want to read it, they can turn it into voice, okay, in any language they want, man or woman. And I thought, well, let's just get rid of the text and the paper. Let's just tell stories, not write them. If that's the case, things like books are a thing of the past, and things like the show are things of the future. You know, instead of me talking to you, I'd be going once upon a time. Everyone is, the convention is that e-books will take over, but actually it's not the case. They've plateaued, and the big stores have also plateaued, and independent bookstores are coming back. I'm sentimental and nostalgic. I love, I like books, you know, and you know, but I'm not that optimistic as the technology. A friend of mine who teaches high school here said that his students, they have computers to write their papers on. They prefer to write their papers on their iPhone. And yeah, I'm blown away, but there again, I don't want to be reactionary. I'm trying to imagine that the stories will continue to be told, beautiful characters will continue to be born, whether they'll be manifest and alive on paper, I don't know. Now you go to go full circle, you grew up in Hollywood, so movies now take up a huge amount of time, people's time, storytelling through movies, particularly these long series on television. Yeah, right, how interesting. And so we, you know, that may be a bigger threat to books. Yeah, but I think also the need of young people, they can be watching the movie, answering their email, looking on Facebook, shopping on Amazon, all at once. You know, the stimulation that I think young people can handle blows my mind. This is my technology, is my flip phone. I actually, young people have said to me, what is that? Oh, I've got a typewriter, a flip phone and a pen, but I do have bourbon, you know. Oh, that's great. Well, I think we have to wrap up now. Thank you very much. Well, no, thank you. And I wish you all luck, not only with this book on typewriting, but future as well. Thank you. Now, it's been a pleasure for me to hang out with you.