← Live Wire with Luke Burbank
Live Wire with Luke Burbank
Chuck Klosterman, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, and Laura Gibson
00:51:41
This episode features author Chuck Klosterman, poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney, and music from singer-songwriter Laura Gibson.
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- [00:03]
Luke Burbank
Hey, there. Welcome to Livewire. I'm your host, Luke Burbank. All right, this week on the show, we're talking to the author and essayist Chuck Klosterman, who is tackling the game of football, which happens to be the subject of his latest book, the economically titled Football, which I promise you this is not a book that you have to care about football to actually find entertaining. Now, Chuck does love the sport, but he also says it's not gonna be around in like, 75 years, and he's fine with that. Then the poet Sasha de Vebic McKenna, one of my favorite collections of the last couple of years, it's called Joy Is My Middle Name, is gonna stop by to read some poetry and talk about her obsession with dead presidents. Then we're gonna hear a new song from the singer, songwriter, and gardening enthusiast Laura Gibson, who was literally weeding her garden about five minutes before the show. We've got a great Livewire coming your way, right? Hey there, livewire listeners, it's Luke letting you know that we are gonna be back at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon on May 14th with a great lineup of guests. Podcaster Sarah Marshall of the youe're Wrong about podcast will be there.
- [01:17]
Chuck Klosterman
Now.
- [01:18]
Luke Burbank
She's got a new series. It's all about Satanic Panic. It's a fascinating show. Plus, we're gonna have the author Camille Dungy stopping by. She's got a new collection of poetry, which is her first in nearly a decade. Then humorist and writer Angela Nissel on her latest memoir, and some music from jazz performer Casa. Overall, you can get your tickets right now@livewireradio.org and we'll see you on May 14th.
- [01:45]
Odoo Sponsor Voice
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- [03:24]
Elena Passarello
from prx it's livelier. This week. Writer Chuck Klosterman, I guess I shouldn't
- [03:38]
Chuck Klosterman
be surprised by this, how upset people are by the premise that someone is saying football won't be mega popular when they're dead.
- [03:49]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Poetry Sasha Debevik, McKenney, I think sometimes people think of poetry as like inaccessible. So a title is a good place to be. Like, here's what's going on with music
- [04:00]
Elena Passarello
from Laura Gibson and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello. And now the host of Livewire, Luke Burbank.
- [04:13]
Luke Burbank
Thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thanks to everyone for tuning in from all over America for this week's Livewire. We got a great show in store for you. We got to kick things off, though, the way that we always do with the best news we heard all week. This is our little reminder at the top of the show. Helena I keep thinking someday we won't have to do this segment, but it's more relevant than ever.
- [04:40]
Elena Passarello
We won't have to start the show by saying, maybe you need some best news.
- [04:45]
Luke Burbank
Gee, I wonder why exactly there is good news happening out there in the world. Elena, what is the best news you've heard all week?
- [04:52]
Elena Passarello
Okay, the best news is the news. The worst news is that I'm going to have to pronounce Dutch words. So stick with me here. Burbank. This is a classical music story from Amsterdam. They have a huge concert hall there called the Royal Concertgeboov, okay, Which I think just means the Royal Concert Hall. But it's known around the world for its supreme acoustic and all the world class musicians that it attracts. And like most symphonies and classical music spaces, they're always on the lookout for ways to bring younger generations into the venue, which can be kind of tricky.
- [05:28]
Luke Burbank
Yeah, it can seem a little stuffy if you're a, you know, teenager or not for you.
- [05:32]
Elena Passarello
So during the pandemic, when students were looking for places to study, the Royal Concertgebove opened up their doors because it's a big, massive, cavernous space. And then they were like, well, if everybody's here studying in our beautiful plush red velvet chairs, why don't we have a couple of musicians come and play music for them? And of course, that was extremely soothing classical music. You know, if it's not opera, it doesn't have any words in it, so it doesn't crowd your language center. And the students, the college students around Amsterdam were really into it. So now it's a regular thing. Certain afternoons, folks can pay under $3. It's like Euro 2. And they come in, the WI fi is posted everywhere. You can get a cup of coffee and come and sit. And the footage is great. It's of these very studious looking younger adults with their laptops out, kind of huddled together, working through problems and equations. And then on the stage are these two or three musicians in their beautiful concert gear, like long dresses, playing cello like Paco Bell's Cannon and D, which we used to call Taco Bell's Cannon and D when I was an orc dork growing up in Gwinnett County, Georgia. They also play like Studio Ghibli soundtrack music, you know. So, yeah, it just seems like such a great way to meet people, people who love music where they are. And I hope that we have something like that close to me soon and I can pretend to be a young person and go participate.
- [06:59]
Luke Burbank
I got really fortunate because growing up, my very best friend Peter Williams was a very serious cellist. So I was sort of dragged to so many classical music performances throughout my teenage years. And I ended up really loving that style of music. But if not for that, I mean, I would have no exposure to it, you know.
- [07:18]
Elena Passarello
Yeah, it's such a great part of human culture and Western culture. So any chance to get people closer to it is such a great idea.
- [07:27]
Luke Burbank
Love that. The best news that I heard all week comes to us from the Orkney Islands off of Scotland. When I say Scotland, what do you think of Elena Plaid Bananas, where There's a Tesco in Kirkwall on the Orne Islands, where the guy was trying to order 380kg of bananas. That's about the amount of bananas they sell at that Tesco in a given week. But there was a typo and they ended up sending him 380 wholesale boxes of bananas, which is over 38,000 bananas.
- [08:05]
Elena Passarello
That's like the Harry Chapin song. 30,000 pounds of bananas.
- [08:11]
Luke Burbank
Exactly. Here's the issue. 38,000 bananas is more than twice the number of bananas that there are people that live in Kirkwall. So the whole island is trying to figure out what to do with. They can't send the bananas back because there was some storms, and so the return ferry was not able to go back to the mainland. So they've got all these Facebook groups that have popped up for tips on what to do with bananas, like make banana bread or freeze the fruit or chop them up or all these things. They've got kids, soccer teams are showing up to get the bananas. Retiree groups, all kinds of different people are just grabbing as many bananas as they can take because they got too many bananas.
- [08:55]
Elena Passarello
Yeah. Smoothies for everyone, right?
- [08:57]
Chuck Klosterman
Exactly.
- [08:57]
Luke Burbank
They need to do what? My mom was a big banana bread maker when I was a kid, and I think it was because she would often buy marked down bananas that were very, very bruised and unappealing at the grocery store. And then she would freeze the bananas until she decided to make some banana bread. And I remember she would pull this chunk of frozen bananas out of the freezer, and she had this joke she would do where she would pretend she was really mad at the bananas, and she would throw the entire ice ball down onto the kitchen floor and say, I've had it with these bananas.
- [09:29]
Elena Passarello
That's what they're saying in the Orkney Islands right now, too.
- [09:31]
Luke Burbank
That's right. Yeah. The thing is, Elena, this is not the first time they've had a problem like this. A couple of years ago, a guy was trying to order some Easter eggs. Oh, no. He was trying to order 80 Easter eggs for his shop. They sent him 720 Easter eggs.
- [09:46]
Elena Passarello
Too bad they didn't have that and the banana at the same time. Cause you could make some kind of a Bundt cake or something, some sort
- [09:51]
Luke Burbank
of a parfait of some kind or some sort of dessert. But anyway, so it sounds like everybody is banding together to make use of these bananas and everything is turning out great for these folks. Free bananas for people in Kirkwall. That's the best news that I heard all week. All right, let's invite our first guest on over to the show. He is probably the only person who both served as the ethicist for the New York Times Magazine and also self Identifies as a football psychotic, which is something that he explores in depth in his latest book, the very economically titled football, which is a deep dive on the sport that has come to dominate life in this country despite being designed kind of terribly, actually. Esquire calls this another masterwork from one of our greatest minds. Take a listen to Chuck Klosterman, recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon. Hello, Chuck. Welcome back to the show.
- [10:56]
Chuck Klosterman
It's great to be back.
- [10:59]
Luke Burbank
You have described yourself as being kind of a football psychotic. What is the most football psychotic thing you've done or what is an example of this in your life?
- [11:08]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, I mean, mostly just the amount of lying that liking football requires me to do.
- [11:14]
Luke Burbank
In what ways?
- [11:16]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, okay, like, let's say it was football season now, and instead of being on stage, I was invited to be here tonight. It's like someone's guest. And I would think to myself, like, there's some game tonight in the sun belt where if a team continues to win, they will still not make the playoffs, but people will argue that they should. And I should probably watch this game. So I'll have to tell people that somehow I'm doing something like, oh, I don't know, me and my kid has tuberculosis or something. I tell for some reason not to go out. I do. Like, it's almost relief that when football season ends, because I no longer have to make up all these reasons not to do things.
- [12:01]
Luke Burbank
This book, football of yours, you say that living people are not really the target audience for this book. Who is the target audience in your mind?
- [12:09]
Chuck Klosterman
Yeah, this is like a new marketing technique. I'm attempting to have the book appeal to people who don't exist. My idea with this book, Sober Division, it was kind of like all the things that I've thought about football for 45 years. I was unconsciously thinking about this almost my whole life. And then at one point, I decided I wanted to do a sports book. And it seemed very clear to me that it had to be football.
- [12:33]
Luke Burbank
Cause you considered basketball for a brief moment, right?
- [12:35]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, yeah. I mean, basketball when I was growing up was my favorite sport as a sport. In a vacuum, I think basketball is a better game. But like, writing about sports and culture in America, to pick anything other than football is just insane. It would be like if I was like, well, I'm gonna do my, like, all encompassing book about how music has informed the American. So I'm writing about reggae. That's like. That would be like. It would make no sense, right? It would make no sense to do that. So, like, if you're going to write about sports in a meaningful kind of like socio cultural way, football is the only choice in this country. Like, it's not just the most popular sport. It is more popular than all the other sports combined. One thing that I mentioned in this book, it's kind of a known thing that like in the year 2020, three of the hundred most watched television broadcasts in the country, 93 were NFL games and then three more were college games. And everything else in society fits into those last four slots. You know, it's like there's no comparison of that with any other sport. There's no comparison of this in other countries. Like, you know, it's, you know, soccer is the dominant sport in Europe and South America. It doesn't have this kind of sort of consumer popularity in terms of that. It just kind of overtakes not just the other games around it, but everything else to experience. Like baseball's huge in Japan, but there would never be a situation where 93 of the most watched television shows in Japan are baseball games. That would never happen.
- [14:11]
Luke Burbank
Well, you put forward a really interesting theory in this book about why that's the case for football, which I want to talk about after this quick break. That's called a forward promotion, people. It's Livewire from prx. We're talking to Chuck Klosterman about his new book, football. We gotta take a quick break, but we'll be back with much more Livewire with Chuck in just a moment. Stay with us.
- [14:45]
Chuck Klosterman
When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to help me with that.
- [14:54]
Laura Gibson
My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself, we're suffering. I really needed help.
- [15:00]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
I was ruminating a lot.
- [15:01]
Odoo Sponsor Voice
Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing.
- [15:08]
Luke Burbank
Discover what BetterHelp online therapy can do for you. Visit betterhelp.com today. Welcome back to LIVEWIRE from prx. We're at the Alberto Rose Theater in Portland this week. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are talking to the great Chuck Klosterman about his latest book. It's called Football. You actually played football as a kid, but you point out in this book that that actually is an increasingly more unique scenario, which is to say most people don't play football and fewer and fewer people are. And that's one of the weird things about the Popularity of the sport is that most people don't have a strong personal connection to it, having grown up doing it. And it's also, you point out, impossible to recreate like in normal life. Unless you're in an NFL game or a college game, you have no way of making that kind of thing happen.
- [16:17]
Chuck Klosterman
It's a unique aspect of the game in the sense that it's very difficult to simulate it recreationally. Like, you know, if you're a high school basketball player, you can go to a gym and get into a pickup game, and it might feel in many ways similar to the game you played when you were a younger person. If you ran track in high school, you can always go for a run. You know, if you golf your whole life, almost every other sport there is, there's some way, even if it was like a, you know, you've played baseball and now you can play slow pitch softball, which isn't the same, but similar. But football isn't like that at all. I mean, you. If you got. If we took 22 people from the audience here and we broke them into two teams and said, like, okay, we're going to figure out a way to like, stage a football game, it would take several hours just for everyone to figure out, like, where they're supposed to stand. Like, what plays are we going to use? We got to get all these officials. The game begins, six people go to the hospital immediately.
- [17:09]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
I mean, it's like, because every, every
- [17:13]
Chuck Klosterman
version of football that is not official is sort of, I hate to say fake, but sort of is. It only works for the kids in high school playing the small sliver of people who play at college and the very small sliver of pros here and in Canada and stuff. That's it. Those are like, you know, like the number of people in this country who can actually play football. Not even. I don't mean the ability to have the opportunity to. Is extremely small. And then kind of paradoxically, it is by far the most popular thing to consume as entertainment. I mean, there are so many things about football that are so counterintuitive that it would make no sense if you explained it to someone who had never heard of it before. And yet all of those sort of incongruities together sort of make it separate from the rest of society.
- [17:59]
Luke Burbank
Yeah, like you point out that if you were inventing football in 2026, you would never make the rules the way they are. You would never show it on TV the way they do. Like, what are the things about football that seem like a Deficiency that actually for some reason make it popular.
- [18:14]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, I mean, okay, this is the most obvious one, is that. So the game takes about three to three and a half hours on television. And in 2011, the Wall Street Journal did this sort of, I guess, research project where these guys measured how much football actually happens in those three and a half hours. And it's 11 minutes. Right.
- [18:34]
Luke Burbank
Okay, now this is confirming the suspicion of a lot of non football fans.
- [18:38]
Chuck Klosterman
No, exactly. Because whenever this comes up, this is always used as a way to sort of detract from the sport. It does sound crazy if we were say, focus grouping a new sport. And my thing was like, okay, here's the deal. It's going to take all afternoon and most of the time guys are just standing around while the clock is moving. People be like, I think you got to kind of retool this or whatever you'd say. But here's the thing. Our conscious brain tells us that what we want is nonstop excitement, that we want wall to wall action. That's what we're sort of conditioned to think that we desire. But that's not what we want. Subconsciously. Subconsciously we want little moments of intense energy with these periods where we can think about what we saw and what we might see next. You know, a football play lasts a four to six seconds, but it's like it's hyperkinetic, it's very violent. There's 22 guys moving kind of in a rehearsed way. You're hearing collisions, you can'. There are often moments where say the quarterback throws the ball deep and everybody is unaware if a guy is open or covered or he's throwing the ball or what. We have no idea the way it is shown on television. And then it stops and there's. You can think about what you saw, maybe have the analyst explain it to you, and you can think about what's going to happen next and you can sort of contextualize what it means in the larger game. And you can look at your phone and you can drink and you can talk to your friend about the football game or about something else entirely. You can daydream about your job and then immediately re engage for these five seconds of intensity. And they're so intense and so violent that it gives the illusion or at least maybe the sensation of almost non stop action, like you've witnessed something that you feel almost like you're watching, like you know, this almost a continual mechanical process or something. But that's not how it is. That's one of these interesting things. About the game, because you would have never invented it with that intention. I mean, football was invented after the Civil War. And though it's kind of hard to verify, it's a very strange thing. But people after the Civil War were like, what are our young men going to do now? They're not going to face adversity and see their friends die. Like, they're not going to have the conflict of warfare. We need to create a simulation of this. So they create football. Then football kind of evolves on its own for 70 years, and then about 1950, it collides with the rise of television. And that's when all this happens. And that's what changes everything. Because football is a media event, even when there's no media involved.
- [21:02]
Luke Burbank
What do you mean by that?
- [21:03]
Chuck Klosterman
I mean that when you, like if I said to the audience right now, it's like, close your eyes and imagine a football game. Everybody just do this for five seconds. Like, imagine a football game. Now, in all likelihood, there are people here who've played football. There's certainly many people here who've attended football games.
- [21:20]
Luke Burbank
I don't know if you know that much about our audience, Chuck.
- [21:22]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, they might have children who did or whatever. They went to high school at a place where it was popular. Regardless. The thing is, I'm guessing most of you, when I said that, imagine seeing what you see on television, Even though this event lives in your reality, the two dimensional simulation of that, it kind of overwrites your actual experience. And I think people now do this all the time, transposing it in your mind automatically to how it looks on television. A camera shot from midfield, you know, down for the players are moving horizontally across the stage. You know, all the things that we sort of describe football as a television product is how we process it in our mind.
- [22:08]
Luke Burbank
Do you think football is the greatest television show ever created?
- [22:12]
Chuck Klosterman
I think that it is the best thing ever made for television. Yes. That they're. That, you know, particularly at the lowest level. At the highest level, it gets complicated. You know, great World Series game, a great Final four game, a good episode of Succession, a good episode of Lost or whatever the case.
- [22:29]
Luke Burbank
Now you got these people back at like throwing some Rick Steves and they're eating out of your hands.
- [22:38]
Chuck Klosterman
At like the highest level, everything kind of becomes almost as tie. You can all kind of, you know. But at the lowest level, a bad football game is watchable in a way that sort of defies logic because of the form of it. Like, we think what we like from television is the Content. But I think what really affects people's relationship to art is the form of the thing. And, like, the formal construction of football is accidentally perfect for television. And that's why this has happened. That's why it is so dominant in our culture. It is kind of the forced marriage with television.
- [23:13]
Luke Burbank
Now, there was a kind of a lot of speculation, I don't know, 10 years ago from a lot of smart people, Malcolm Gladwell comes to mind, that football was going to go away pretty quickly. And this was because of people suffering brain injuries from playing the sport. How and why were those predictions wrong?
- [23:34]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, a few things. One is that I think that a lot of the people making that argument exaggerated the degree to which people would feel a moral problem about this. It was almost as though they perceived that, well, if this bothers me, it must bother everybody. I mean, people are always kind of projecting their feelings on other people. Another thing was that they said, well, we just gotta change the way these guys hit. We gotta teach kids to tackle differently. I never thought that would work. I was like, that will never happen. But it kind of did. They have made some adjustments. I think one of the biggest changes is that every time a guy would come forward with interesting research about cte, the NFL would immediately hire him. This was a very smart, diabolical move, that anytime that there's a person who might have the ability to criticize the idea, say, like, oh, we need you. Come work for us now. That's part of why it went away.
- [24:30]
Luke Burbank
Now, the thing is, even though maybe those predictions of football going away in the near term maybe didn't turn out to be true, your premise of this book is that football is going to go away. It's just gonna take longer. Why do you think football, for all of its sort of, like, popularity now, will maybe not be around in 70 years.
- [24:47]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, you know, it is interesting that every time I get interviewed, people really get into that fact. They really want to talk about that aspect of the book. Now, that's partially my fault because I made it the beginning and the end of the book.
- [24:58]
Luke Burbank
Well, ye.
- [25:00]
Chuck Klosterman
You know, but also what is interesting is what I am essentially saying is two generations from now. So I kind of use the year 2070, where I kind of think two things will happen. And it's a long section of the book at the end. But it's like, one has to do with. I think there's gonna be changes in sort of the economic relationship specifically with television advertising to these things. And because pro football and now college football is both sort of in this situation where it can only get bigger, it cannot stay the biggest sport. It's got to be bigger, bigger, bigger. It's got to expand. It kind of puts it in a precarious position economically if anything goes wrong. And my secondary suspicion is that as the average person has less of a real relationship to football, and what I mean by real is that they only see it as an entertainment distraction. They didn't play, but also none of their friends played, their dad didn't play. Like, their only understanding of it is as something they watch on television on Sundays and Saturdays, a video game they play, something to gamble on, the fantasy league that's in their office. It has no application to the game itself. And when that happens, when there is this sort of labor shutdown in 2070, which right now would make people lose their minds, I don't think that will happen to people in that time. I think people will be like, oh, well, I'll watch something else. And football won't. Just won't be like, it's gone forever, but it will recede from the center of the culture. But also the weird thing to me is that I'm saying this is gonna happen in 2070, right? So what I'm basically saying is, like, the way things are now will not be this way in the future. And people are like, no, it will be exactly the same.
- [26:37]
Luke Burbank
By the way, people, none of whom will be here.
- [26:39]
Chuck Klosterman
Yeah, it's really been surprised. I shouldn't say it surprised me. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this. How upset people are by the premise that someone is saying football won't be mega popular when they're dead. Like, it really does illustrate how meaningful it is to people. I mean, I kind of feel like you can make a bunch of arguments why I might be wrong about this. I probably will be. I'm wrong about lots of stuff. However, the point in my favor is that, like, what in the history of mankind has stayed mega popular forever? Nothing. Nothing that you know. Of course, as the society changes and it's gonna change, the biggest things are the least sort of suited to change. They're the least flexible. Small things are able to sort of evolve, but big things just kind of implode. And that's what's going to happen at some point when I will be dead and so will you.
- [27:34]
Luke Burbank
That's right, yes. Final question. I don't know if this is really fair to ask you to try to weigh in on, but you're good at this stuff, so let's try. Do you think whenever football kind of moves off of the center stage of our lives in whenever this point is when most of us are not here and they're trying to look back on the era of when football was so dominant, were our lives made better by the existence of football or worse? Like, is it a net positive or negative in your opinion?
- [28:05]
Chuck Klosterman
You know, I do think in some ways it is close simply. And the reason I say that is because anything that big and that dominant seems in some ways troubling. Right. Like nothing in society should be that sort of culturally all encompassing or whatever. But I wouldn't have written the book if I didn't believe that overall, football is a net positive for society for a whole bunch of reasons. You know, some of them are kind of superficial, I think, but some of them are more profound. An argument that is often made against football will be like, you guys are all sitting around on Sunday watching these people pretend to hurt each other for nothing. It's all an exhibition in a lot of ways. There's so many more important things happening in the world. But, you know, we're always doing this thing where we're sort of like, well, you know, this is just something that has been invented to keep people from thinking about things that really matter. But when we talk about things that really matter, what are we talking about? Well, the lives of other people. Right. The value of other people's lives. Well, what makes anyone's life value valuable? It's things like art, fashion, music, football, sports. These things. If you're going to find meaning in life, you can find it through anything. And the fact that football seems to be the thing that Americans are most able to access as a way to give their life sort of something that they can care about where the stakes are low, but their intensity can be high. They can have all the feelings you would have, you know, about 9, 11 or whatever. But you can put it into this, you know, game between Michigan, Ohio State or whatever and sort of pretend that that meaning is the same. Like, I do think that is valuable. And this is one situation where the magnitude of something changes the meaning. Like football becomes more important because of the magnitude of its popularity, which you can't say about most other things.
- [29:57]
Luke Burbank
The book is Football by Chuck Klosterman. It's a great read, Chuck. Thank you so much for coming on livewire.
- [30:02]
Chuck Klosterman
Yeah,
- [30:08]
Luke Burbank
That was Chuck Klosterman recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland. His latest book, football, is available right now. Hey, special thanks this episode to Heidi McNamee of Portland, Oregon, and Duncan Haas of Seattle, Washington. Duncan and Heidi are part of the Livewire member community, and they are generously supporting our show with a donation each month. And we are incredibly grateful for that support because it allows us to keep this whole thing going. So a big thanks to Heidi and Duncan. This is Livewire from prx. Okay. Our next guest's debut poetry collection, Joy Is My Middle Name, was called An Essential Read by the New Yorker, which also describes the book as being a sharp, funny debut, by turns zany and deadpan, ecstatic and enraged. Her poems perfectly describe that experience of sort of crawling through your 20s and then emerging into your 30s without figuring out as much as you thought you were going to. It's also about US Presidents and the movie Babe. Take a listen to this. It's Sasha Debevik McKenney, recorded live at the Patricia Research center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. Hello, Sasha. Welcome to Livewire.
- [31:43]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Hi. Thank you for having me.
- [31:46]
Luke Burbank
I absolutely love this book of poetry. Joy is my middle name. It is like. It is just so funny and heartfelt and just covers such a kind of wide range of topics and moments in your life and U.S. presidents. When did your, like, real fascination with U.S. presidents start?
- [32:07]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
When I was, like, 4 years old, because me and my little brother used to fight over the placemats, and I was like, I want the president's one, probably because he wanted it. And then I just got, like, really obsessed. And I grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and Windsor, Connecticut, technically. And, you know, like, my parents were nerds, and they wanted to bring me to museums all the time. So we went to the FDR Museum. It's like my first memory. It was like being at the FDR Museum.
- [32:35]
Luke Burbank
Like, your first conscious memory as a kid? Mine was my parents buying the Sound of Music on vinyl at a JCPenney in Eureka, California. That's the first, like, thing I can remember of life. Yours is.
- [32:49]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Yeah, I was really scared because there were, like, bomb noises, and I was like, this is. Yeah. And then I went home and I, like, literally named all my dolls for, like, five years. Eleanor,
- [33:01]
Luke Burbank
you've got a really great poem in this book about Lyndon Johnson. I'm wondering, what is it about? I mean, you've traveled to Austin to visit the museum down there and the library and everything. What is it about Lyndon Johnson that has you so interested? I guess.
- [33:16]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Well, I think I read the Robert Caro biographies, and he's just the famously
- [33:22]
Luke Burbank
extremely long Robert Caro books.
- [33:26]
Elena Passarello
Like, if you were moving, they would take up an entire box.
- [33:29]
Chuck Klosterman
Yes.
- [33:30]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Absolutely. Yeah. And I just think he. It doesn't make sense. And so you're like, maybe I can figure this out. But then I don't think you can. But then maybe you can. It's like, just. I don't know. They all have mommy issues and stuff.
- [33:44]
Luke Burbank
The titles of the poems in this book are really phenomenal. I Don't have a Racist Bone in My Body is one of them. I Don't Want to Fall in Love because I Don't Want to Gain Weight. It's another one. I'm curious. Do you write the poem and then come up with the name of the poem, or do you ever have a name and then what's the process?
- [34:04]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
I think sometimes people think of poetry as, like, inaccessible. So a title is a good place to be. Like, here's what's going on that we can start. Like, here's the information you need to know to enter the poem. And also, sometimes I think my poems come from, like, you know, instead of being like, what do I want to write about? It's like, what have I been thinking about? You know, instead of being like, I want to write a poem, what should it be? You're like, oh, I've texted my friends five times the same joke. Like, maybe that should be in a poem. You know? And so a lot of times that's where the title comes from, because I just was like. I kept laughing at something or couldn't stop thinking about something, you know?
- [34:43]
Luke Burbank
Can we actually hear a poem from the book?
- [34:45]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Yeah. Okay. This is called what Am I Afraid Of? The silence. The thoughts that come with it. The sinking suspicion that something more is wrong with me than anyone knows, including myself. Including the doctor who hooked me up to the EKG machine and said that though my heartbeat was irregular, the irregularity was normal. It was nothing to worry about. The doctor told me there are two kinds of unhealthy people who refuse to get help and healthy people who always think they're dying. Nobody's in between, but I've met so many kinds of people. People who stretch before they get out of bed, People who walk through life unstretched. People who think their body is a house, and people who don't think of their body at all. People who peel their carrots, people who don't. People who stand on the roof and let the wind make them cry. People who are afraid to cry. People who step on all the leaves on the sidewalk. People who look straight ahead. There are people who aren't like me. They don't know the names of all the different apples. Once when I was cashiering, a woman said to me, wow, you really know your kale. And once at the butcher shop, a man said to his dog, that's the nice lady who smells like meat. And I'm afraid I don't know what kind of person I am. I thought I would get a chance to do my life over in all the ways anyone could think of. Dying would be like changing the channel. I hate that. You can't hold on to anything. I was washing an apple and then I was coring it and then it was cut. And that was weeks ago now. It was a honeycrisp, and it lived up to its name.
- [36:51]
Luke Burbank
Sasha Debevik McKenny, Reading from her book Joy is my middle name. There's a line in this book that just absolutely blew my mind. And I think maybe it's a line that you sort of borrowed from somewhere else. But it's basically saying, like, if the apocalypse happens, it wouldn't be the worst thing, because if everybody dies at once, it's like, nobody died. Yeah, I believe that maybe because of the current political climate that really rocked my world.
- [37:25]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Yeah, I think that was from Rory Scoville. Stand up. The first poem in the book is like a collage poem of 100 standup lines. And that was one of them. Because you hear stuff like that and you're like, that should be in a poem.
- [37:38]
Luke Burbank
Right. And you listen to a lot of standup comedy, like, as a kid and also as a person just who was making poetry. But you're like listening to, like, Daniel Tosh in your.
- [37:50]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Yes, literally. Yeah. And I think, you know, I like to make people laugh. And like, when I was in high school, I read a poem once about to, like my other students about getting my teeth knocked out. And I read it and everyone was like, that's gross. And it felt so good to get a reaction, you know? And like, I think people think poems can only make you sad, but it's also. It's nice to make people laugh.
- [38:14]
Luke Burbank
Have you tried stand up comedy?
- [38:16]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
No. No. Maybe I should. I have one poem that kind of has a punchline, so maybe I'll try it out.
- [38:22]
Elena Passarello
Does a poetry punchline? Is it subject to the same rules as a stand up punchline? Or is it a different breed of cat?
- [38:30]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
I think so, but maybe it's harder because the last line of a poem, it always feels like it's gonna hit you over the head anyways, you know, so you gotta be careful.
- [38:39]
Luke Burbank
Could we hear another poem? Could we Hear Stand up Routine.
- [38:43]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Absolutely. Also, I wrote this in probably, like April 2020. So that's the mental state.
- [38:49]
Luke Burbank
Okay. This is pandemic era, Sasha.
- [38:52]
Laura Gibson
Yeah.
- [38:52]
Luke Burbank
Or like, yeah.
- [38:53]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Not that I'm less crazy now, but okay, this is called stand up Routine. So I was watching Babe last night. You know, the movie where the pig herds sheep? And I can't stop thinking about the people in the crowd at the sheep herding competition who saw the pig herd sheep. I mean, go rewatch the movie. You can see some of these extras giving the performance of a lifetime. Their lives change on their faces. They've just seen something truly remarkable. Like imagine you've been going to sheep herding competitions your whole life. You grew up doing it. Your father did it, his father. And now you want your grandson to herd sheep. It's only right and natural. And so one Sunday, you take them to lunch at your favorite diner and you tell your favorite waitress you don't need another refill. And then the two of you drive out to the sheep herding competition, and you sit smugly on the benches, knowing exactly what to expect. And then the pig comes out and herds the sheep. It's almost as if. And you feel crazy for thinking this. The pig is actually talking to the sheep. Your face opens. Your world changes. What sporting event could ever top this? One weekend, your grandson invites you to his football game. He never got into herding sheep after all. And that's fine, because you love him. And he scores the final goal and the team lifts him up on their shoulders. And the whole time you're thinking, well, this isn't as impressive as when I saw the pig herd sheep. It's true, you're proud of your grandson. He's got a scholarship in the fall. But it isn't as impressive. Nothing is. You used to love the bacon and tomato sandwich at the diner. And the bacon was thick and the black pepper was freshly ground. Salt flakes fat. But it's not as good as when you saw the pig herd sheep. I don't think they use freshly ground pepper anymore. You say to your grandson. I mean, the sandwich is still good, but it isn't as good as the time we saw the pig. He finishes. He makes eye contact with the waitress. Talking about that pig again, Gary? She asks, dropping the check. You pay the check. You kiss your grandson on the cheek. He leaves for school tomorrow. You promise yourself you will relearn how to be impressed by your life. You will try to see something every day that could possibly be better than seeing the pig herd sheep. You go to the grocery store, you buy white bread, name brand mayonnaise, thick cut bacon. You thank God it's tomato season. You remake the sandwich from the diner exactly the way you like it. It isn't even hard. The sandwich is perfect. You're impressed by yourself, by your innate ability to make a punchline of the world. Right back, you laugh out loud into your empty kitchen.
- [41:58]
Luke Burbank
That's Sasha Debevik McKenney here on Livewire, Reading from her book of poetry. Joy is my middle name. I feel like what really struck me about that is this idea that when something really good is happening, a moment, a relationship, a radio show recording, when something is so sort of perfect, it's bittersweet because you know everything's gonna pale in comparison to it.
- [42:29]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
I visited a class and they had read that poem, and I was like, I don't even know. I didn't really know exactly what that was about. To me, like, when I was writing it, and they're like, oh, well, it was about you being scared that the world wasn't gonna go back to normal. And I was like, thank you. Thank you for telling me that. It was so easy for them to see that.
- [42:49]
Luke Burbank
Right. Something else about this book that I really appreciated was sort of at the end of the book where maybe the acknowledgments would be or bibliography or whatever. You kind of go back and explain a little bit about each poem and kind of what you were thinking, or, like, the fact that one of them is, like you said, a bunch of comedy punchlines from other comedians that you sort of put together. And I, as a person who's not particularly smart, would really like for all poets in the world to start doing this because it was so helpful and it caused me to enjoy the work even more, having some more understanding around it.
- [43:23]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
Yeah, that's what I want, I think, to be understood, probably, maybe.
- [43:28]
Luke Burbank
But is that normal? Have I mostly just been reading poets that don't do that?
- [43:33]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
I never want to be like, I did that first because I haven't read every book, right? You know, like. But I grew up a history nerd. Like, every book I ever read that I loved, it was like, here's all this other stuff in the back, you know, the extra facts, like the Robert Carroll biographies. It was like, those are. The notes are like the 500 pages. It's like, clearly all the stuff he didn't want to cut out of the book they told him to. And that was the energy I wanted in the notes. Like, I think I have, like, a like a, like a forward, you know, like can't stop talking energy. And I didn't, I wanted that to like keep going. And then, you know, in the back of the book, I would have got to be like, I didn't really like this poem, but my editor liked it or like put in extra information or like the truth. Because I think a lot of people also think that poems are true. And I'm like, oh, actually that was a lie or whatever.
- [44:22]
Luke Burbank
Like, yeah, well, every page of it is just absolutely riveting and fun and heartbreaking and all the things you would hope that a reading experience would be. It's super good. The book is Joy is My Middle name. Sasha Debevik McKenney, thanks for coming on Livewire. That was Sasha Debevik McKenney recorded live at the Patricia Reeser center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. Her poetry collection, Joy Is My Middle Name is available right now. You're listening to livewire. We gotta take a very quick break, but do not go anywhere. When we come back, indie rock legend Laura Gibson will. Wait, let me check this. Yeah. Promote her gardening skills. I'm not kidding. That's mostly what we talked about. But then she also played some amazing music. Stick around. More Livewire coming your way in a moment. Welcome back to livewire. I'm Luke Burbank. Okay, before we get to this week's musical performance from Laura Gibson, a little preview of next week's show. We are going to be celebrating National Poetry Month with some of our very favorite poets. We've got the celebrated essayist and cultural critic Hanif Abdulraqib, who's gonna read us a poem about a ghost in his house, which he says is a true story. We're also gonna hear some readings from the poet laureate of Oregon at one time, Anees Moshgani and bestselling author Kavi Akbar. Then we've got a conversation with the one time poet laureate of Utah, Paisley Rechdal, about her latest book, which actually teaches you how to look at poetry forensically. So make sure you tune in for that. Plus we'll have some music from singer songwriter Casey Anderson. That is next week on livewire. In the meantime, this week's musical guest is an internationally acclaimed multi instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, producer and writer who actually played on the very first NPR Tiny Desk concert. And look how that turned out for them. Between her third and fourth album, she went off and earned an MFA in fiction writing, completing her thesis in the back of a tour van. Fader says her most recent album, goners is so incessantly beautiful that one cannot help but want to gently crack it open and get to its beating core. She is currently working on a new book and a new album. This is Laura Gibson, recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon.
- [46:51]
Laura Gibson (singing)
Hello.
- [46:52]
Luke Burbank
Hey, Laura. It is so nice to see you. It's been too long.
- [46:57]
Laura Gibson
It's been too long. It's been a little while since I've had. Well, I don't have, like, a record to promote. I thought maybe I could promote gardening as a thing to do.
- [47:07]
Luke Burbank
Absolutely.
- [47:08]
Elena Passarello
Great.
- [47:08]
Luke Burbank
I'm all ears. What's going on with you on the subject of gardening?
- [47:13]
Laura Gibson
Well, I live quite close to the Alberta Rose, so I actually sound checked and then went and did some weeding in my yard and then came back. No. So I was in a little creative rut last summer, kind of between projects, trying to figure out what I was going to do and just sort of getting into the songs that I've just been working on recording. And so I started gardening. My mom is a master gardener, so she had great advice. And it was really nice because I got working on the front yard, and Portland is so encouraging. And so it was this moment that I wasn't sure what I was doing. And suddenly everybody that walked by would say, you're doing a good job.
- [48:00]
Luke Burbank
Oh, nice.
- [48:02]
Laura Gibson
And then I just like people, like, it's the thing you always want to hear. And then people would walk by and be like, you're making good choices and your hard work will pay. And so it was very, very. It was very affirming.
- [48:19]
Laura Gibson (singing)
And
- [48:21]
Laura Gibson
you can tell. And I also was like. I started it as this thing that was my. This is just for me. It's not for. You know, because I've spent a lot of my life on stage and receiving attention from people. And it's very nice, but I didn't mean to garden to that way. But it ended up being very, very affirming. And I know this. I know because my backyard is quite. I became quite overgrown. It's like a mullet.
- [48:48]
Luke Burbank
You were growing.
- [48:50]
Elena Passarello
I can't see that. You can't get your compliments in the backyard.
- [48:53]
Luke Burbank
You were gardening towards the affirmation, which was the front yard.
- [48:57]
Laura Gibson
It's true. Yeah.
- [48:58]
Chuck Klosterman
You can't get away.
- [48:59]
Laura Gibson
I just made a stage out of my front yard.
- [49:02]
Luke Burbank
Well, Laura, what song are we gonna hear?
- [49:04]
Laura Gibson
I'm playing new stuff. Potentially terrible idea to try out new songs on the radio, but this is a song called Sylvia.
- [49:14]
Luke Burbank
All right, this is Laura Gibson here on Livewire.
- [49:35]
Laura Gibson (singing)
Sylvia, I swear I heard you laughing in your sleep. It was a rosy melody. It was the sisters singing vespers in the twilight evening. Sylvia, how foolish. I once took you for my twin. But we are not the same. Your movie is a smile. Mine is a knife in mid swing. I have seen you clean among the roses. I have known you to paint oceans with a dozen words or fewer. I have seen you pleased among the dogs in running prolis in your house dress. I have nothing to declare about yourself. Sorrow. Sylvia, O fearless one. You ask if I regret that I never had a child. I say some days I feel an aching in my hips as though I had. Sylvia, forgive me, for I am no prophet and I have no language for the end. I get embarrassed every time the priest says Christ will come again. Sylvia, O filthiest of saints, to you alone I admit every seed I mean to plant slips through my fingers. You know I am too quick to undress, to let my body be possessed. Oh, you know I have no will to speak of. Sylvia. There is a beast in me I cannot tame, A want I cannot name. A monster and a liar. You admire me the same. Sylvia, I cannot be the bearer of your fate. I have my own life to waste, my own bridges to burn, my own destruction to unleash. Besides, I end up screwing every wayward soul I meant to save. Who am I to sing for womankind? I have no patience for the type of woman I find I'm becoming. But when I see you cranky and ashamed, I see you gleaming, so ordained, you tell me. Blessed are the hungry.
- [52:55]
Luke Burbank
Oh, my goodness. Laura Gibson, right here on Livewire. That was Laura Gibson recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon. Be on the lookout for Laura's new album and book. They're both on the horizon. All right, that's gonna do it for this week's episode of Livewire. A huge thanks to our guests, Chuck Klosterman, Sasha Debevik McKenney and Laura Gibson.
- [53:27]
Elena Passarello
Lara Haddon is our executive producer, and Melanie Sevchenko is our producer and editor. Evan Hoffer is our technical director. Trey Hester is our assistant editor, Valentine Keck is our operations manager, and Ashley park is our marketing manager.
- [53:42]
Luke Burbank
Our house sound is by Dee, Neal Blake and Aaron Tomaszco. And our house band is Ethan Fox, Tucker, Ben Grace, Jacob Miller, Alex Radakovich, Eyal Alves, Sam Pinkerton, and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Trey Hester.
- [53:58]
Elena Passarello
Additional funding provided by the Marie Lamprum Charitable Foundation. Livewire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff.
- [54:06]
Luke Burbank
This week we'd like to thank members Heidi McNamee of Portland, Oregon and Duncan Haas of Seattle, Washington. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head ON over to livewireradio.org I'm Luke Burbank. For Elena Passarello and the whole Livewire team, thank you for listening and we will see you next week. Hey, if you appreciate the work that Livewire is doing to amplify riveting and unexpected voices to a national audience, and I gotta tell you, it's a big audience these days, please, please, please consider offering some monthly support by becoming a member of our League of Extraordinary Listeners. Here's how it works. Membership starts at just five bucks a month and there are great perks at every level, including a special shout out on the broadcast. Impress your friends by being shouted out on Livewire. It means the world to us and really does make it possible for us to do the show. So please, if you can help, support us by visiting livewireradio.org Memberships.
- [55:26]
Sasha Debevik McKenney
From prx.