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DR. WILLIAM KELLY: Welcome to Irish Writers in America.
The thirteen part series from CUNY TV featuring
contemporary Irish and Irish American writers. We being
the series with contemporaries working in different media.
First we'll hear from Hunter College professor Colum McCann,
winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World
Spin. A novel that he called a contemplation of what it means
for life to be unfinished. And the author of the widely
praised 2013 novel, Transatlantic. Then TV host
Conan O'Brien who has written for Saturday Night Live and
the Simpsons, shares his thoughts on the creative
process speaking about what it's like to write for television
and what it means to be Irish.
COLUM MCCANN: The great lies that the writer knows
what he or she is doing. It's not true. It's not true.
♪ [Theme Music] ♪
COLUM MCCANN: My overwhelming image of New York
was being here about two or three days and
being on the Avenue of the Americas and just being
stunned by it all and I laid down on the side of
the pavement just to look up at the incredible range
of buildings and thought, you know, how could I be here?
I grew up in suburban Dublin and
contrary to that notion that you have to have an
unhappy childhood, I actually had a fairly safe,
suburban house broken sort of existence
in a very good way. I used to laugh with the great
Frank McCourt about this. Frank would say that he
had all the misery of the Irish Catholic upbringing
and that's what made him a writer and I said I had
none of the misery of the Irish Catholic upbringing,
that's what also made me a writer because I was sort
of forced into the idea of telling other people's
stories rather than telling my own. Sort of
trying to force yourself into an imaginative other,
if you will.
What's interesting to me is that
I think that immigration
is a form of wounding
one's self.
In a certain way, you want to remain
who you were and what you happened to be and so you
have to leave it and you
have to go somewhere else
to be that person and
in the way that a wound
sometimes keeps us alive,
it reminds us that we have
a body, immigration that
reminds us that we have a
country. You know,
I haven't resolved all of
these things yet for myself because I think it's a
life's project. I think it will be my life's fiction
to work on these issues and maybe someday I'll
have an a-ha moment, but now, I mean, it's very
complicated, you know? I come here, I live here and
I want to be accepted on my own terms, yet I want
to own my Irish-ness too, but I do react
increasingly against the sort of diddly-idle culture
that makes it want to be something simple and nostalgic.
READING: Roaring seaward and I go. She often
wonders what it is that holds a man so high in the air,
what sort of ontological glue. Up there
in his haunted silhouette, a dark thing against the sky,
a small stick figure in the vast expanse.
The plane on the horizon, the tiny thread of rope
between the edges of the buildings, the bar in his
hands, the great spread of space.
You write about what you
are fascinated by. You write towards what you
want to know and what I wanted to know when I
wrote Let The Great World Spin was how did I really
feel about what happened to New York in, during 9/11.
And for me, the metaphor that worked best
when talking about 9/11 was to take Philippe Petit's
tight rope walk across the World Center Towers
in 1974 and to use that as a starting point
for me to work out personally, not to tell
anybody, because I'm not interested in writers,
you know, as the lesson givers or, you know, I think
the best writing allows, it doesn't tell. So I
wanted to go into Petit's tight rope walk to allow
myself to understand how I felt about New York in
it's current incarnation and then perhaps to allow
the reader the dignity or grace to, you know, to
resolve these same sort of issues for herself or
himself. I have a pair of shoes that I just donated
to a 9/11 museum. It's interesting that now
there's a 9/11 museum started in New York.
I have complicated feelings about the notion, but they
asked me to send on my father in law's shoes and
what happened was that on the day of 9/11, he was on
the 59th floor of the World Trade Center, the
first tower to be hit, the second one to come down.
And he got out, but the neighboring tower had
fallen and he walked out into that sort of strange
glaucoma storm of debris and falling, falling
pillars and dust and there was water all around that
he had slushed through at the bottom of the building
that he'd gotten out of and he walked from the
World Trade Center to our apartment which at that
stage was on 71st Street and, you know, five mile
walk and his clothes were covered in dust. His hair
was covered in dust and he walked into our apartment
and my daughter ran up the corridor to jump into her
grandfather's arms and then she recoiled and she
ran away and she said "Poppy's burning."
And I said, "No, love, he's not burning, it's the smoke on
his clothes from the fire that was downtown."
And she said, "But no, no, dad, you don't understand.
He's burning from the inside out." And it seemed
to me that she didn't really know what she was
saying at that stage, but it was like that, one of
those prescient things that comes out of the
mouth of babes like a budding nation burning
from the inside out. And anyway, he took off his
clothes and he took them down to the rubbish
disposal and he got rid of them, his shirt, his tie,
his suit, his [INAUD], but he left his shoes inside
the door and the shoes were covered in dust and
we couldn't move them. My wife and I couldn't move
them, they just sort of sat there by the door for
about three weeks because we were trying to figure
out what it was about the shoes and finally figured
out that we were keeping them because he had walked
out in them. But when I picked them up, that dust
itself was very complicated because who
knows what was in that dust? There was maybe just
the ordinary debris of, you know, the falling
towers but there were resumes, there was, you
know, I still shiver to say this because I
remember thinking that there could be eye lashes
in here, there could be part of a fireman's shirt,
you know, carried on the dust of these shoes. So I
took them and put them in a box and put them away.
They were in my writing room over my left shoulder
for all the time that I was writing Let The Great
World Spin and I suppose in some ways, the book
itself is an examination of what those shoes happen
to mean. Like the dust, the ordinary dust of our
lives and then built up and then how do you take
those shoes and find some sort of meaning behind
them? How do you get some sort of grace? How do you
get some sort of recovery away from that? And how do
we understand them? And so in that process, it's kind
of like writing a novel. The process of having
owned something for a long time, for it being very
private and close to you and over your shoulder and
trying to make sense of it. And then suddenly you
finish it and it's gone and it's out in the world
and then it's there for other people to interpret.
You're just presenting shoes and saying:
"Well, what are they? Are they a pair of shoes or are they
a metaphor for, you know, who we happen to be?
Or are they just an empty place where no feet will
ever go anymore?" There's all these different ways to
interpret things.
I failed in between Let The Great
World Spin and Transatlantic. I tried to
write another novel all together which was set in
contemporary New York. I had a lot of pressure when
Let The Great World Spin did so well and I sort of
took on another subject that I didn't love and I
would come in here to my office every morning and
fail spectacularly and that's all right. I think
it's good, but you know, I do believe in hard work,
I do believe in desire, perseverance, stamina and
I also believe you have to look at yourself with a
good deal of skepticism and humility and if you're
not right and well enough, then you have to be
prepared to throw it away. So I threw away about a
year's work but all the time behind it was this
image of Frederick Douglass going to Ireland.
I think a fantastic image that bridges between
America and Ireland,
you know, this great big ocean
that we have that a
black slave at the age of 27
went to Ireland and
then confronted the famine
which was one of the catalysts for so many
people coming over here then in the 1840s and the
1850s. I think all these things join together in
the most sort of extraordinary way where
part of this sort of intimate fabric.
Yeah, Transatlantic weaves these three threads together
about using Senator George Mitchell's visits to
Northern Ireland, or visits to help negotiate the peace
process, Alcock and Brown's first transatlantic flight
and when Frederick Douglass went to Ireland
in 1845. They're woven together by the stories of
women who are our ultimate sort of glue. I'm always
interested in writing about women characters,
but it's also about Irish history. It's kind of an
alternative Irish history in many ways. It goes all
the way from 1845 up to 2012 and talking about how
the past influences the present and how the past
actually widens in the present tense so when we
look back, instead of being narrow, the past
actually widens up outwards. So hopefully that
works in Transatlantic.
I wrote a little book called
Everything In This Country Must back in the late
1990s, early 2000s. It's the book of mine that
really I don't get a chance to talk about so I
love talking about. To me, it's a very, very close
and personal and it's a working out, a resolving
for me of what was going on in Northern Ireland.
I grew up in Dublin but my mom is from Garwa in the
north and so from the age of five, six, all the way
up to being a teenager, I used to go up north. And I
remember things like, you know, suddenly going up
north, crossing the border and then the roads were
better and the post boxes were red and not green.
And people spoke in different ways and you had
to be careful about what you said about politics
and about where you came from and so on.
This really fascinated me and then I became very
interested in what was going on in Northern
Ireland and then things happened when I was a
youngster, there was the Miami show band were
murdered in a *** in 1975, a horrible *** of
a traveling show band that went around Ireland.
The horse, Sugar, was kidnapped by the IRA.
Dr. Herma was kidnapped too. All these stories, I used
to try and make sense of them. But I couldn't. And
I went to my mom and dad one time and I said to
them, you know, can you explain to me what's going
on in Northern Ireland? You know, why are people
dying? And my mom just said to me, she said, "I
don't know, it's just sad." Right? Which is a
beautiful answer now in retrospect, it's a
beautiful answer. At the time, it was a frustrating
answer for a kid and then my dad said to me, I'll
never forget it, he said "They're going to take all
the mad men in Ireland, all the murderers, all the
people who want to tar and feather one another, all
the people who want to knee cap one another, all
the people who want to hurt and violence, we'll
take them to a little corner of the island and
pack them all in like a few big fields because
there's not all that many of them. And we'll take a
giant knife and they're cut it off and they're
going to float all those people out to sea."
And that seemed like a, you know, why don't we do
that? And of course, this sort of thing is
impossible to do but I wanted after writing a
book called This Side of Brightness, which was in
New York, to go back home and to examine those
questions for myself so I wrote a story called
Every Thing In This Country Must, a story called Wood
and then a novella called Hunger Strike which is a
fictionalization of what it might have been like to
be a teenage boy in 1981 and I myself was a teenage
boy in 1981 though nothing like the life of the
character in the novella. One of the things that
annoys me is this sort of idea that the writer is
holy. I mean, the plumber is holy, but the cop is
holy, you know? The priest is holy, the person
getting you the coffee in the morning is holy and
they have difficulty too, you know? It is hard for
all of us to get through. The volume of grime and
dirt and difficulty that hits anybody on any given
day is not necessarily bigger for the writer.
I think the writer has to understand that he or she
doesn't speak for people but speaks sort of with
people and in that sense, I don't want to like, draw
attention to say, the writer's life over the
family life. In fact, if I were given the choice, I
would always go with my family life although,
you know, writing sustains me,
language sustains me but
my kids sustain me even
more and they sort of
scaffold me even more, my wife and, you know,
my family at home. In a very simple way, I would say to
you that I'm happy but my responsibility is not
necessarily towards my happiness.
My responsibility is towards stories about grace,
stories about beauty, but also I write very tough
stuff as well. The world
is not always pretty, you know?
We live in this place that can be pretty
nasty sometimes. How and ever, despite it's
nastiness, we have to try and find some sort of
reason and some sort of grace for being here.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I believe that there's a lot of
being Irish that is not, people even intentionally
trying to hang on to their culture. I really think
that a lot of it is in the genes. I swear to god, the
speaking loudly, the nonsencical talk,
the magical thinking, the refusal to be practical,
I think it's all in our genes. I don't think it's
learned. I swear to god I think that you could have
taken me from birth and I could have grown up in
Antarctica and I'd be
talking like a leprechaun,
thinking of weird thing,
wasting everyones time,
being passive aggressive, and getting depressed
frequently and having too much to drink. When you're
really Irish Catholic we're not the kind of
people who tell you how we're feeling, so you
can't tell people,
"I'm very disappointed in you"
or "Ya know, what you said
it really hurt my feelings".
We don't do that and we
don't say "I really love you"
and hug each other, we don't do that.
Everything has to be communicated through
humor. So that's actually, I think, why a lot of
Irish Catholics are funny is everything gets
channeled through humor. If you're angry, it's the
humorous, it's the dark acidic comment. If you're
frustrated, if you're, if you're trying to
communicate, my wife is constantly saying to me,
"why don't you just say what you mean instead of
doing sixty-five backhanded underground
over the top jokes that are veiled references to
something? Just tell me" and I'll say, "I'm just
kind of hungry". "Then just say that", "okay". Ya
know, but no, I can't. I have to do seventy-five
passive aggressive jokes, and Irish culture is very
passive. It's all pacivity. There's a theory
that because it's a subjugated culture,
because the English controlled every aspect of
our lives for hundreds of years and we had no
control, we became this culture that because
really good at just, we'd watch the British soldiers go by and
not do anything, and then just as they're out of
ear shot, say like a funny mean comment about them
and have our pint. We don't feel like we can actually do
anything to change, we don't
actually want anything to change. Things are screwed up
and we're just making our jokes, as the whole island sinks
into the ocean. So that's, I think that's where a lot of the
comedy comes from.
My big start came when I was in college, I was at Harvard and I
just dropped in on the
Harvard Lampoon Castle and went to one of their meetings for
the comp- , there's a competition to see who can
get on, and it was one of those
amazing experiences
where it came easily to me.
It wasn't, up until that point
in my life, anything I had
achieved had been through
this really hard work, and I
didn't think I had a lot of
talent, I thought it was all
just about how hard I worked.
So I was a very hardworking kid, a very hardworking student,
and then I just showed up and I started
writing these pieces and they really liked them on the Lampoon
and the next thing ya know i was the only
freshman that year that was elected to the literary board
of the Lampoon, and that just, ya know, I'm at this big school,
there's a lot of hot shots around and suddenly I'm
chosen in this way, and that was the first moment that I had
this kind of awakening, that this is really cool,
and this is an honor and the next thing you know I'm running
the Lampoon and I did that for two terms as
the President and by the time I got out of college I said
"I just need to keep
doing this". So I went out
to Los Angeles with a
friend of mine, Craig Daniels,
who's gone on to fame and
fortune for doing The Office,
and Parks & Recreation,
and anyway, he and I
went out to Los Angeles
and started writing, and I wrote for a few shows out in LA,
and then we got our big break which was
Saturday NIght Live, Lorne Michaels hired us,
as sketch writers, I did that, that was a high pressure,
high octane environment but at Saturday Night Live
you get thrown, I mean,
you show up your first day and
say, "I'm reporting for duty"
and they say "Steve Martin's
in that room, go pitch him a funny idea". "Steve Martin!"
And you just can't believe it, and you sink or swim,
and fortunately we were able to swim, did that for three
seasons, then I went to The Simpsons
in Los Angeles, and did that, and again, I always wrote,
at Saturday Night Live I wrote visually, my sketches are
very visual and silly and catroonish, and The Simpsons
was perfect for me because, my episodes were
like the monorail episode is one of my favorite epiosdes that I
wrote, but very out there, kind of silliness and very visual
and music, and that was a great outlet for me, and then
the Late Night show was a total crazy, it was like being hit
by a meteor. I've had people tell me, "How can I do what
you've done?" and then I say, well it's like asking the guy
who got hit by a meteor "How do I do that?"
"I don't know, I was walking
in a field and a meteor hit me."
I think the writing and the performing are linked,
inextricably linked, I think very visually, and so when
I'm performing oftentimes, the way I'm speaking is the way that
I write and when I write, it's always almost
been a performance. I mean,
since I began writing as a kid
I always imagined myself reading
it outloud to people and getting
laughs, and I can tell when I
read people, like, Mark Twain
that they're writing as almost
a performer, do you know what
I mean, their writing is very
much a performance, so that's
how it, that's how I've always
felt about it.
Anyone who tells you who they
love writing is lying or they're
a bad writer. I just think writing is ultimately torture
it's going off by yourself and looking at a blank page and
being a little scared.
I think a lot of times visual comedy is undervalued
as writing. Writing good visual sike gags, coming up with the
ideas that make people laugh, that's extremely hard to do,
but then when you, when someone writes that and you show it to
them and they laugh, they don't often think of it as writing,
do you know what I mean? They look at it as just that really
funny thing that happened but they don't realize that a
writer had to come up with that visual concept.
And I think writing visually, writing things that can
happen almost without sound,
and make people laugh,
that's always been an important
part of my writing. I want things to look funny.
I want things to appear funny, even if the sound was off,
I want it to appear funny. And I think writing is re-writing.
There's nothing that I do that hasn't been re-written
sixty-five time, and I just
keep poking away at it.
And actually I think that's why the medium of doing a
show every day, it's maddening but it's also my salvation
because there isn't time to overthink.
I get a few passes at it,
I keep going back at it,
the monologe, I keep going back at it, changing the order,
changing the words, too many words, let's tighten it up,
I don't like that first joke there, let's move it over here,
let's do it again, and I'm very
much a guy who works off of paper. Like I like to have my
piece of paper, look at it, draw on it, let's put it back in,
then I go to a group of people,
and I bounce it off them, and I
get some help, and then I go
back, and I'm alone, and so getting from it here to a
performace, is a process, and not always a fun one.
There's a famous story about
the guy who's clapping to keep
the elephants away, he's
standing in a field and he's
clapping, and he's clapping,
and someone walks
up to him and says, "What are you doing?" and he says,
"I'm clapping." and he says, "Why are you clapping?" and
he says, "I'm clapping to keep the elephants away"
and he said, "Elephants? There
are no elephants" and he goes,
"I know. Keeping them away".
And that is very much, in my
opinion, the Irish relationship with suffering. It's our
talisman. We feel more comfortable when we've
suffered, do you know what I mean?
We feel closer, I don't know if
it's a feeling of closer to God,
or you're closer to the truth.
I get nervous when I'm too happy
for too long on some level.
And I think that's why, I can
feel it, I can feel when I go
through difficulty, and I go
through stress, and I go
through some kind of torment,
and then I rise up out of it,
there's this feeling that you've
earned the right to feel good.
Which is strange, and I'm
constantely meeting people
who feel good all the time
and I don't understand it
ya know? Talk to one of the
Kardashian's, they're like,
"Life's good. I just had a
pizza, I'm getting married, now
I'm not married. I'm going to go
get a massage. I just got paid
eight million dollars to
go to a perfume counter
opening. Now I'm going to
go get a pedicure, and then
ya know, buy a mink"
and they're just, ya know, if
one of those things happened
to me I would be bitterly ashamed.
So, I don't know what it is,
we're just, there's a feeling of
ya know, have fun but keep
yourself on a short leash.
Is the suffereing good? Does the
suffereing benefit us? It's the age old question. I don't
know. A therapist, a healthy therapist would say no,
you don't need it, you can be
funny without it, I would
tell a good therapist,
"You're an idiot, we do need it,
ya have to have it". It's the
struggle. It's the age old
question. Do you need to be
unhappy to be, to be creative
and to be funny, and I, it's
such a mysterious thing how
creativity works, nobody really
understands it, nobody ever
probably will understand it.
They'll isolate areas of the
brain, and they'll say there's
more activity here, but it is a
magical thing, we don't know why
it works, and I know that I've
had a lot of anxiety in my life,
when I was a kid, I was an
anxious kid, I think I've had
problems with getting depressed,
and in my life, and I look at
all that, and then I look at my
desire to be creative all the
time and I think, "maybe
they're not linked but I don't
want to take any chances".
The big question is would you
rather be creative or happy?
That's the age old question,
and I don't know where people
come down, and I think that at
different stages of your life,
for most of my life I would say
that I would rather be creative,
I'd rather do good work than
be happy. And then you get
married and have kids and I
have little kids and you start
to think, "I only get one life,
and ya know, I'd like to be
happy, that would be, what's
the point?" So then you get into
these struggles, and then you
forget about it and you just
watch a lot of ESPN. That's
how I resolve most of my
emotional crices. Ya, just
sit there and eat nachos.