National Bookfest 2012 or: "Pisco Flavored Failure"

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.

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.

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.

Book festival pics courtesy of Joshua Feldman Photography