Getting to interview Mario Vargas
Llosa wasn't really ever a dream of mine, but when I actually got the
opportunity to, I retroactively made it so. I had known about him
beforehand of course, admired him and had read his work. I was in
Peru when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature
and saw what the win meant to that
country. He is a national hero there and an inimitable talent. He's
also quite a bastard.
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| Bastard |
I arrived early to the national mall as
to not fuck up this opportunity in any way. I had the blessings of
my Hispanic family who thought me an object of pride and joy, little
did they know how much I intended to disappoint them. I came armed
with a thermos filled with homemade Pisco sour, and questions that
included whether winning the Nobel Prize helped you get laid more
often, and what was up with the Chicken rape scene in one of his
books.
Sure I had legitimate literary
questions but my priorities were whether I could get a Nobel Laureate
liquored up and, of course,chicken fucking.
I was nervous. This being my first
legit press gig, I did what any self respecting writer would do, I
drank from my stash and raped the complimentary craft services table.
Speaking of which,why they don't give journalist's an open bar, I’ll
never know. For there is nothing more entertaining than watching
someone from Politico slur stats on battleground states while being
wasted off Jack and Coke.
Meeting up with the rest of the bright
eyed misfits that made up the BYT crew that day, we waited....and
waited, and waited. We were told by the volunteers
in the media tent that as far as pseudo
legitimate, third tier websites go, we were the coolest.
As the scheduled interview time
passed, and there was still no sign of my guy, it became clear that
my hopes and aspirations were being crushed in real time.
The universe and I don't have a good
relationship, ever since I was a kid living on 17th st. It all seemed
to start on that fateful day I saw a Wolverine action figure that I
wanted at the local People's Pharmacy. I naturally asked my mom for
it, she said in a week she could buy it for me.
That entire week was filled with my daydreams of
all the awesome adventures I would have with my new mutant pal. At
home in my bed, at school while eating my dunkaroos, in church while playing with my ninja
turtle..I thought about it a lot is what I’m getting at here, and
as is quite obvious by my overall bitterness in life and early stage
alcoholism, I didn't get the damn thing.
Ever since then, the more I
think about something, the less chance I have of said thing
occurring.
It's gone way beyond simple jinxing. So
I guess it should be no surprise to me that I didn’t get to
interview the man of the hour. I still clung onto stubborn, tipsy
hope however.
As we killed time in the tent, the
ever helpful volunteers kept throwing potential substitute
interviewees at us, one of which included Maria from Sesame Street. I
briefly considered asking her questions like: "Does Sesame Street
have to deal with gentrification?" and 'Is Snufflelufagus as big of a
douche bag as he looks?" I decided to pass and kept drinking
instead. After a fellow BYTer (who also got stood up by Junot Diaz)
interviewed 2 people she knew nothing about at random, I felt like it
was my time to step up. Looking through the list, I spotted Bob "All
the Presidents Men" Woodward.
Sure, why not. Being an old school
journalism junkie and having an unnatural amount of knowledge about
the Watergate scandal for someone my age, I quickly half assed some questions that hopefully didn’t
sound too redundant, contrived and, well, half assed. So here it is:
Richard B: What are your thoughts on
the state of journalism today?
Bob Woodward: What do YOU think?
Well, uh, I have many thoughts
well go ahead, tell me one and we'll
key off that
Well, I think it' become too
corporate and true journalism, as was taught and practiced for the
last couple of, you know,decades, is being lost..
Yeah, there's not enough in-depth
reporting in the political campaign now. For instance, people are
interviewing me and saying 'OK, what should Romney do to come back?' and I'm not a
political consultant, I’m a journalist. My question is 'Who is he?
What has he done?' My latest book, "The Price of Politics" is about what happened in the last 3 &
1/2 years in the Obama White House, in terms of trying to manage the
economy and some of the economic, budget issues.
And it takes you to the room, and
there's thousands of words quoted that are not public, from the
president and the Republican leaders in public meetings.
And you can judge it, and some people
say 'Oh, Obama wasn't strong enough to do enough.." Others say
the Republicans screwed it up, and it's a neutral presentation of hard data.
Great. So, uh, as everyone knows,
the country is pretty divisive and polarized right now. And my
question, I guess, is: What is the Journalist's job in all this, or what can they do to
alleviate it, if anything?
It should be fact driven. Uh, when
Amazon.com called me, interviewing me for this book, and as you may
know, they take books and they measure whether they sell better in
Red states or Blue states, if its a Red
state book or a Blue state book, I asked them, well what's mine, and
he said, Purple. (Laughs) I said Purple? and
he says 'yeah, it's neutral' It's not
Red, it's not Blue, it's an attempt to find out what happened.
And how do you train yourself to
remain that neutral, since most journalist nowadays seem to have lost
that trait..
Yeah..It goes back to covering Nixon
and Watergate, that was all fact driven. And, uh, facts really do
matter. They don't give them to you instantly, you have to dig for them.
Also, speaking of Nixon. One of my
all time favorite writers, Hunter S Thompson, had a passionate hatred
for the guy, do you think it was justified,in your opinion?
Well I knew Hunter..
Did you?
Oh yeah, and he'd come to Washington
during the Watergate years, and uh..he was passionate about Nixon.
But, uh, he had, you know, his Gonzo way..
yeah definitely
...of looking at things. I remember
having dinner with him one night and he was suggesting that we go
kidnap one of Nixon's aides (laughs) And I was, you know
uh, 'don't write about that!" and
he didn't. But, you know, it's a different approach. That's why we
have a first amendment.
That's great
yeah, I have great affection for him
and a regard for the way he drove at describing what's going on. And,
uh, I would argue we share the same, you know..looked at things
differently, different approach, but
the goal is to find a way to describe what is going on.
The truth, to find the underlying
truth of things...
The best obtainable version of the
truth
That's true. OK, well, going back to
Journalism today, What do you think is the biggest threat..
To journalism? you know, it's actually
a corporate problem of, you know, too many corporations owning too
many media outlets. But I think the real problem
is, you have to look at..journalist
need to look inside and say 'how are they doing, what are we
covering, what's our focus, are we getting caught up in the trivia
and the manufactured controversy that
goes on, rather than describing what really occurs.
So going back to staying unbiased,
which is one of the founding principles of Journalism, how do you
remain unbiased in the face of such polarizing issues
Because you get so close to..I spend
all kinds of time in the White House, with Obama, Interviewed the
President. All kinds of time on Capitol Hill interviewing
Republicans in late, speaker Boehner,
the other key players, going back and forth, getting documents,
memos, contemporary news media notes, and you realize
that these issues are contentious, but
as the goal of the journalist is to, I think, understand the
perspective and present them, you remain, you are able to remain
neutral. Or I am able to remain
neutral, because you understand one point of view, one way of looking
at these things, but you also understand
the other one. And the deeper you go,
the more you realize that the reasonable argument..or at least your
job to present the reasonable arguments on both sides
I guess would it help to be a
centrist,in general?
Well, you know, it's by temperament.
And you know you see a lot of true believers around, on the left and
the right, and you become...makes you skeptical
of true believers, that they think it's
only one way, and that there is no possibility of compromise, of
really understanding the other side.
And I guess one final question, what
did it feel like to be portrayed by Robert Redford in All The
President's Men?
You have no idea how many women I
disappointed (Laughs)
Thank you so much
OK, good luck to you.
As
the day wound down to a close, and most of the other BYT writers and
photogs had left, I stayed in the media tent, having existential
thoughts while munching on mini cupcakes and wishing I had more
alcohol. I was set to go and make friends with the bottom of a
whiskey bottle when excited whispers filled the air. Could it be? Did
the man care to grace us with his presence?
Yes, Vargas Llosa had
arrived, 3 hours late...There he was, in all his goddamned prize
winning glory, waltzing into the nearly empty tent, where there were
only 3 people wanting to interview him at that point, including me,
surely I had a shot. I finish my mini vanilla cupcake, aligned my questions and cursed my wretched
thirst for finishing the pisco sour. I frantically tried to look for
a photographer, until I found a BYTer hanging out at the Junot Diaz
presentation (who had arrived and decided to bypass the media tent
altogether)
Photographer
in tow, absurd questions in hand, and 25 years worth of
disappointment forgotten about, I followed Llosa into the tent where
the Library of Congress was interviewing him, once they were done I
pounced.
Displaying my bilingual awesomeness, I asked him in Spanish
for a couple of words. “I'm sorry, I'm running late for my
presentation.” Touche universe...well at least I'll get an
autograph I think to myself. As he is leaving I ask him to sign my
copy of La Ciudad y Los Perros...
Quick
flashback time: Two years ago, while in downtown Lima, I was in the
search for a Vargas Llosa book. I was told of the extensive literary
black market there, so I decided to get a bootleg copy of one of his
works. Why not, “He just won the Nobel Prize” I says “He has
enough money” I says.
Back
to the present: No sooner do I give him my book that he returns it to
me.
“I
can't sign this...” He says “...it's fake, there's probably
missing words or pages” .
“Yeah
and entire chapters with no paragraph breaks” I add.
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| In hindsight, not the best place to buy a legit book. |
Well, it was
worth a try. I shake his hand, get a picture and he's off. Away on his glorious golf cart towards praise, fame and fortune. I met up with a fellow
disappointed writer and went drinking.
If I've learned anything from
that day it's that prize winners can be dicks, people still actually
love to read, and Pisco Sour holds up remarkably well in a thermos.
