I Know Because I Read

Olivia Laing discusses “The Trip to Echo Spring,” Thursday, January 23rd at Common Good Books.

CGB: While The Trip to Echo Spring takes us across the map from New York to Seattle, the six subjects of your book live, more or less, in the same time period of the twentieth century, when alcohol, it seems, meant differently than it does now. Were you to write an account of addiction and creativity in 2014, where might you think to start?

OL: I think the story of writers and alcohol really does belong to the 20th century. It seems to me that our age is much more puritanical and clean-living, and much less tolerant of drunkenness and debauchery, though still inclined to glamourise it in a nostalgic way. The addictiveness I see everywhere now is to technology - I watch people all the time using iPads and smartphones, and there’s a kind of gratified abandon to it that’s disturbing to anyone who’s spent times with addicts. I’m not counting myself out of that - I’ve stopped using a smartphone, but I’m barely ever off Twitter. It’s a hit, it eats time, and while it promotes a certain kind of creativity of expression and connection, it shatters concentration, which of course is vital to any larger creative project.

WHEN PLANTS ATTACK!!!

Take, for instance, Rand Paul’s recent comment that to believe in the right to health care is to believe in the right to slavery. It seems fairly clear to me that the Right’s inability to escape the rhetoric of slavery, its insistence on framing all political debate within the absolutist antinomy of freedom and slavery, and to assail not even social rights but even the idea of public policy as a form of enslavement, has something to do with the history of slavery in America.

"The Empire of Necessity is scholarship at its best. Greg Grandin’s deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry is compelling, brilliant and necessary.” - Toni Morrison