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May312006

Remnick: "There’s a reason things taste better when they simmer"

Filed under: Headline Shooter

In New York Metro, Amy Benfer asks Remnick some questions. It's nice when he gets a lot of space and time to express his opinions. Here are several:


You have a degree of intimacy with your subjects — you follow them to their homes, you meet their family. How do you decide what is fair game?

These are experienced people. They know very well how to say this is on or off the record. I make those agreements all the time and keep to them. Obviously, there are things people probably wish they didn’t say. Lillian Ross, who also wrote a book called “Reporting,” has said she believes in writing profiles only about people she admires. There are plenty of people in here that I admire, but I don’t think you can write about politics and public life and only write about people you admire.

Would you profile Bush?

I’d be thrilled to do a profile of Bush, but I don’t think Bush allows that kind of thing. I don’t find that heads of state give the most interesting interviews, especially while they’re still heads of state. I’ve interviewed, for example, Gorbechev many times. The least interesting interviews he gave were while he was in office. The much more revealing things were said afterwards. Look at rock ’n’ roll. Who’s more interesting to read about? The next young thing who’s got one album or Bob Dylan or James Brown? People are a little bit like cooking. There’s a reason things taste better when they simmer.

Besides politicians, you seem to have an obsession with boxers.

I’m not proud of my interest in boxing. It’s not a guilty pleasure, it’s a very guilty pleasure, because almost every boxer you can imagine who stays in it for awhile — male or female — they end up a mess. So if it disappeared tomorrow, or even today, I wouldn’t shed a tear. The interesting thing about boxing is we live in this age in which athletes make so much money that they really don’t need reporters. They don’t deal with reporters in an easy way and they armor themselves with cliche and deflection. As a writer, that’s uninteresting. Derek Jeter doesn’t need you. Remember that scene in “Bull Durham”? Kevin Costner tells Tim Robbins how to talk to the press. He teaches him to talk in cliches. Boxers are different. If you know them, after a while, they will tell you their innermost secrets. In talking to Tyson, it’s like some sort of combination of reading Freud and Dostoyevsky.

I'm looking forward to the book Remnick's out promoting. I'm still thinking about that piece he wrote about the Russian translators back in November; there's quite an extensive discussion of it here. Read it for the riveting linguistic spats: "Compared to French the Russian verb is a paragon of logic and efficiency."



And speaking of Russian, if you haven't seen Funny Ha Ha, a tiny American movie, do; then watch the special features for the most unusual DVD extra I've ever seen, a "commentary from an outside Russian scholar," presumably a grad-student friend of filmmaker Andrew Bujalski. From the anonymous scholar's stinging rejection of American first names as inadequate to tragedy, to her remarks that despite her love for the film its characters' mute unrequited agonies wouldn't even be considered relationships in Russia—where love is all and worth dying for!—to her dissection of a scene in which there are no books and extrapolation to the bookshelves in Eugene Onegin, to her confessed inability to read the semiotics of t-shirts, it's a tour de force. More or less in time to the plot, she constructs dreamily complex sentences into which Existentialists and Tartofsky stroll without fanfare. It's pure passion for books and movies and the impossibility of relating to other humans, which the movie is all about, if not in so many words. Rent it, then listen. Thanks to N.W. for the life-brightening tip.

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