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[MUSIC PLAYING]
MALE SPEAKER: So I was expecting to do an interview
with Lemony Snicket.
DANIEL HANDLER: You must be disappointed.
MALE SPEAKER: I'll get over it.
DANIEL HANDLER: You've been disappointed before.
MALE SPEAKER: It's happened in life, yes.
DANIEL HANDLER: Your life has been a slow spiral down.
MALE SPEAKER: More of a fast one.
DANIEL HANDLER: You were going to do
something with your life.
What happened?
MALE SPEAKER: Now I'm talking to you.
DANIEL HANDLER: This is sad.
MALE SPEAKER: Who are you?
DANIEL HANDLER: My name is Daniel Handler.
I'm sorry, we didn't really meet before.
MALE SPEAKER: What happened to Lemony?
DANIEL HANDLER: Mr. Snicket is always nervous about doing
anything that might look like it was encouraging people to
read his work.
So he's wandering randomly around Book Expo America.
And you're forced to deal with me, his legal, literary, and
social representative.
MALE SPEAKER: So you're authorized
to speak on is behalf?
DANIEL HANDLER: More or less.
MALE SPEAKER: Well, why don't you tell us about Lemony
Snicket's new series?
DANIEL HANDLER: I put the "author" into "authorization."
Sorry, what would you like to know?
MALE SPEAKER: Tell us about Lemony Snicket's new series.
DANIEL HANDLER: Why?
Why would you want to know something like that?
MALE SPEAKER: It's kind of what we do.
DANIEL HANDLER: Is this how search engines are built-- is
through personal interviews?
I didn't realize this.
So every time someone looks for something, it's because
someone's been interviewed and then it's been
entered into Google.
That seems tedious.
MALE SPEAKER: There's a lot of Oompa Loompas
working away at it.
DANIEL HANDLER: That gives me comfort.
I was worried there might be some labor issues.
But if it's Oompa Loompas then it doesn't matter.
I'm sorry, I've got distracted.
MALE SPEAKER: Lemony Snicket has a new series.
DANIEL HANDLER: It's true.
He does.
But I don't think I should talk about it.
I think it's the kind of secret information that people
shouldn't have access to.
I guess if it was only limited to Google users it
would be OK to say.
MALE SPEAKER: We'll keep it a secret.
DANIEL HANDLER: But there's a new series.
And it's called "All the Wrong Questions."
MALE SPEAKER: OK.
DANIEL HANDLER: It is a four volume series.
The volumes are being released sequentially to try
and dull the pain--
the way you don't take a bunch of Advil all at once.
I guess some people do.
You can probably find them on Yahoo.com.
MALE SPEAKER: On what dot-com?
DANIEL HANDLER: You could just look in your Hotmail account.
MALE SPEAKER: You can Bing it.
DANIEL HANDLER: You can go over to MapQuest.
The first volume is a question.
All of the volumes are titled after questions.
And the first volume is titled "Who Can That Be At This
Hour?" which I think is something that a lot of people
ask themselves late at night.
And then they perhaps go to a search
engine to find the answer.
HotBot, for instance.
MALE SPEAKER: This is just going to go on and on.
DANIEL HANDLER: There are wonderful
search engines out there.
MALE SPEAKER: AltaVista.
DANIEL HANDLER: There's a big one I can't think of--
some kind of a huge number.
Thousand?
MALE SPEAKER: Why don't we talk about Harry Potter?
DANIEL HANDLER: Oh, if you'd like.
There's something you can't find online.
MALE SPEAKER: Actually, you can now.
DANIEL HANDLER: Oh, really?
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, There's a whole thing called Pottermore.
You can get all the Harry Potter books.
DANIEL HANDLER: I thought that was just a ceramics community.
I didn't realize.
They like that scene in "Ghost."
MALE SPEAKER: I'm going to keep trying here.
DANIEL HANDLER: Sure.
You have--
it looks like four or five questions
written on index card.
I would hate to see all that effort go to waste.
MALE SPEAKER: It's actually double-sided.
DANIEL HANDLER: I could ask them myself,
come to think of it.
MALE SPEAKER: No, it's in code.
You wouldn't understand the scroll here.
So Lemony Snicket is in this book.
DANIEL HANDLER: Yes.
He wrote it.
And it's autobiographical.
It's an account of his own childhood and apprenticeship
in a secret organization.
MALE SPEAKER: All right.
I was going to ask how true these adventures are, but you
just told me.
DANIEL HANDLER: They're as true as Lemony Snicket
himself, absolutely.
They are often, puzzlingly, filed in the fiction section.
But being as no one in publishing appeared to know
what they're doing, I guess they're puzzling after all.
MALE SPEAKER: There's a line that jumped out at me in this
first volume.
"Knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway happens
often in life."
DANIEL HANDLER: Wouldn't you say?
MALE SPEAKER: I would.
It struck me as very, very true.
DANIEL HANDLER: Lemony Snicket wouldn't lie to you.
MALE SPEAKER: OK.
So there's a place called Stain By the Sea?
DANIEL HANDLER: Yes, he spent his apprenticeship in a small,
dreary town called Stain By the Sea.
Difficult to find on maps, but perhaps some kind of
satellite-linking search engine could help with that.
MALE SPEAKER: MapQuest?
DANIEL HANDLER: MapQuest, again, would be a
good source of that.
The town contains many mysterious goings on and Mr.
Snicket finds himself embroiled in a sinister
mystery while serving as apprentice.
It's a hard time for him.
He learns many sinister things, deep, dark secrets,
that he put in a book in the hopes that people would not
learn about it.
MALE SPEAKER: Who do you picture as
Lemony's average reader?
DANIEL HANDLER: I think someone crying.
I was at a hospital not so long ago because a
baby had been born.
And there was the room where they kind of
stack all the new babies.
And they were weeping.
And I realized then that obviously Lemony Snicket's
books were even there in the hospital.
So wherever you see weeping and pain, you'll find the work
of Lemony Snicket and, by extension, little brown books
for young readers.
Proud supporters of weeping and pain in the young.
MALE SPEAKER: In this first volume there are lots of shout
outs to other youth fiction.
DANIEL HANDLER: Shout outs?
MALE SPEAKER: Shout outs.
We try to stay hip here.
DANIEL HANDLER: Nothing says hip like an
expression from 1995.
MALE SPEAKER: Hey, Emma Straub said "what's up" to you.
DANIEL HANDLER: Shout outs.
I'm sorry, you were saying?
MALE SPEAKER: I was saying--
DANIEL HANDLER: I got distracted
by your dated slang.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL HANDLER: I'm focusing now.
Shout outs.
MALE SPEAKER: There are lots of learned references to other
youth fiction in this volume.
DANIEL HANDLER: Well, Mr. Snicket is quite widely read.
He doesn't waste too much time online.
MALE SPEAKER: Do you have a sense of what he thinks makes
for good youth fiction?
DANIEL HANDLER: I think interesting stories told in
interesting ways, maybe where something terrible is
happening or looks like it might happen.
It's the same thing that happens interestingly in life.
You might take a walk and nothing would happen.
But then if suddenly a grand piano fell near you, you would
be having a most interesting day.
I think that's duplicated online.
For instance, if you go to Google.com--
I guess it's http colon slash www.google.com--
and you Google something like the number
three, it will be dull.
But if you Google "otters attacking" you'll get
something more interesting.
It's the same with literature.
MALE SPEAKER: What if you Google "Lemony Snicket?" What
do you get?
DANIEL HANDLER: A lot of weeping and moaning and
occasionally disturbing fanfiction, I think.
MALE SPEAKER: And what if you Google "Daniel Handler?"
DANIEL HANDLER: I don't know.
I've never Googled myself.
I wouldn't know.
It's an interesting idea, actually.
You might learn something about yourself.
MALE SPEAKER: Hypothetically, what might you find?
DANIEL HANDLER: I think a suspiciously meager literary
career, almost as if he spends a lot of time writing books
under someone else's name, or at least pretending to do so.
What do you find when you Google yourself?
MALE SPEAKER: Really embarrassing--
DANIEL HANDLER: An angry ex-girlfriend blog, maybe?
MALE SPEAKER: No.
DANIEL HANDLER: No?
Of course not.
Now I'm curious.
MALE SPEAKER: You can Google me afterwards, or Bing.
There aren't a lot of adults in the book.
And the ones that do appear are kind of doltish.
How true to life do you think that is?
DANIEL HANDLER: I think the majority of adults are either
useless or sinister or both, in my experience.
How about you?
What would you say?
MALE SPEAKER: It's fairly accurate.
DANIEL HANDLER: You think it's a higher percentage of useless
or sinister adults at Google or at Bing?
Be honest.
MALE SPEAKER: I don't know.
I've never been to Bing.
So I couldn't say.
DANIEL HANDLER: But you could Google Bing and find out.
MALE SPEAKER: I've never Googled Bing.
DANIEL HANDLER: And then alternately,
you could Bing Google.
MALE SPEAKER: As soon as this interview is done, I'm going
to Google Bing and Bing Google.
DANIEL HANDLER: What fun will you have.
You'll be on a Bing Crosby fan site in no time.
MALE SPEAKER: I think I've got time for one more question.
DANIEL HANDLER: I think we have tons of time.
I think you're just interested in leaving.
No, I actually have the majority of
the afternoon free.
MALE SPEAKER: I think I've wrung everything good out of
you I possibly can.
[LAUGHTER]
MALE SPEAKER: But I'm going to ask one more question anyway.
DANIEL HANDLER: Said the Boston
Strangler to his victim.
You're going to ask one more question anyway.
I'm ready.
Focus.
MALE SPEAKER: So for the last Lemony Snicket series, the
Gothic Archies ended up doing some music for it.
Is there a chance of something like that
happening with this one?
DANIEL HANDLER: I think there's a very
good chance, yes.
But Stephin Merritt, the songwriter of the Gothic
Archies, is often on the brink of being
overwhelmed by despair.
So this new series by Snicket might be the
tipping point for him.
MALE SPEAKER: So yes is basically--
DANIEL HANDLER: Stay glued to Yahoo!
News to find out more.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you very much.
DANIEL HANDLER: You're quite welcome.
It was a pleasure.
MALE SPEAKER: All right.
[LAUGHTER]
MALE SPEAKER: All right.
Excellent.
DANIEL HANDLER: All right.
We going to film it?
MALE SPEAKER: Huh?
[LAUGHTER]
[MUSIC PLAYING]