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More spilled spaghetti | page 1, 2
That's exactly right, because in a
clean, narrative life, all those messes
are cleaned up. You have explained
things to yourself, things about other
people and about your own life. All the
blotches are gone. I think American
fiction needs more spilled spaghetti. At
some point, fiction gets purified from
abject moments and moments of spillage.
And there's something so false about it,
it becomes unbearable. The projection of
life as either clean and pure, or if
there are ugly little things, they're
completely controllable and containable.
Right now my apartment is a terrible
mess, and I'd like to clean it but I'll
never be able to because life always
spills over. The Question of Bruno By Aleksandar Hemon Also Today Espionage and exile Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon recommends You say you'd like to clean it, but you also must like it a bit. Well, I have to like it. Otherwise, I'm screwed. In your stories about living as an immigrant in Chicago, feeling almost invisible and the pain and loneliness of that experience is really palpable. But now that you're married and you've had some literary success, do you ever miss your old invisibility? The advantage was you could watch without being seen. Watching without being seen is a privileged situation for a writer. But it's a question of how can I adjust my identity so I can still watch without being seen. It's a spy question. There are spies who surreptitiously watch other people, break through doors and crawl in the night. And there are spies who are in the sight of everyone but they don't know exactly who they are. There is always a spy fantasy that can help me! What do you do now when you want to be unseen, go to places where no one knows you? No, because at some level, you're always being watched. There are cameras in every store or the neighborhood watch. A large number of people here, I've found, have a need to roll down their shades at night because they think that they may be watched. Do you do roll them up? No, I just roll them up so I can see ... a man pissing under my window. But it's really how you behave as you know you are being watched, and anticipating the watcher's reaction. Some people might want to hide in some absolutely secure place, but I don't think that place exists. And even if you hide, there's nothing to hide ultimately. You're sitting in darkness. Are you still as interested in spies as you were as a kid? Yeah. Is Richard Sorge still your favorite spy? Yes, I guess you could call him my favorite spy. Do I have a list of some of my favorite spies? Yes. Who are some of them? Oh, what is his name? Actually he never got to be a spy because he was such a klutz that they caught him. What is his name? ... Miller. That's my name! No, no, no. In 1985 he was an FBI agent in San Francisco and he was consistently overweight, but somehow he passed all the physical exams and had an avocado farm with his wife and had eight kids and had to feed them. So he would sell Avon products out of his FBI car. Then he was seduced by some Russian woman who suggested he might earn a buck by spying for Russia. Once he forgot the key in the door of the FBI office in San Francisco! She took him to the Soviet consulate, which was the single most monitored object in the Western hemisphere, packed with FBI agents. So she left him in the car while she went to talk to the Russians, and while he was sitting in the car, they saw him. [Laughs] He got a double life sentence. He's not exactly what I'd call a master spy. No. He was someone who was such a klutz and he was at the center of the Cold War, mind you, and was completely wiped out by it. There are other spies. I like Sorge because he did it out of conviction. The Soviets normally controlled their spies, told them exactly what to do and how to do it. That was standard practice of the KGB. Whereas Sorge had free range. They'd send him to Shanghai and let him do whatever he wanted, and his information was first rate. But he was also an old-fashioned spy because he was a completely public person, a journalist, a bon vivant, drank a lot and was a womanizer. He would meet everyone and talk to everyone and people would come to him for information. His defense from being discovered when he was being watched at all times was to be visible at all times, but visible as someone else. He had a role he grew into. My favorite detail about him isn't in
the story [in my book]. When the German
ambassador in Tokyo found out that there
might be a spy at the embassy, he told
Sorge, "There might be a spy here." And
Sorge said, "Yeah, I know." I like that.
It's remarkable how much spying is done
in the light of the day and doesn't have
to be surreptitious. A lot of the
information Sorge got was from the
newspapers and conversations, accessible
to anyone who would pay attention. It
was information anyone could get; it was
just a question of how to organize it,
which is a process remarkably similar to
fiction.
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