Jonathan Lethem understands what being an unabashed fan feels like, and we are an unabashed, dorky fan of his many books and recent essays. When we heard that he is non-exclusively sharing some of his short stories for $1 to be reused in other works of art (films, songs, etc) and he is giving away the option to his new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, and releasing the ancillary rights after five years, we realized he was moving even further into territory very dear to our heart. We chatted with him in advance of his appearance at the Seattle Arts and Lecture series Wednesday night.

Taken collectively, your recent forays into alternative copyright feel somewhat revelatory for you--how far back was the seed for these ideas planted, do you think?

The truth is, my real origins as a...whatever I am now, a copy "left" provocateur, is rooted in all of what I do. Almost everything I do is because of my appetite as a consumer. For what I like. All the things I write about tend to come from something I adore or that I respond to from the ancient past.

In The Disappointment Artist essays, there seemed to be some cringing on your part about your adorations.

Sure, well, it isn't simple to just get crushes on all sorts of cultural stuff. Because you have to sort it out later and figure out what you can get behind or not. In the case of this stuff, it is rooted in my responsiveness to collage art and sampled music...to openly sourced material. I always liked when I was watching movies or reading material when somebody would be appropriating something or paying homage to something and be really obvious about it and do so unapologetically.

So it originates with my pleasure in these things, and my sense that there was no contradiction in celebrating sources or influence, and being original. The kind of Bob Dylan paradigm was the one I believed in, that you could be the master thief and the originator and that those things were two sides of the same coin.

So does it matter that there’s not any original ideas left?

Well, only if you look at it in the kind of either/or approach, which I believe is a mistake. Originality itself is sourced. It comes from the idea that culture is a conversation. To wish for anything else is a kind of death impulse. To say that things shouldn’t come from other things is to want there to be no things.

As an artist, how do you reconcile that with a culture that’s so dogged about ownership?

It’s irritating. It’s a problem. But another mistake is to be a purist, to try to offer some other legal philosophy that would be more ideal, that would exactly describe the reality of the life of artists and their audiences, and their relationship to cultural production. And it’s probably not the case; laws are a really evil and imperfect attempt to describe and account for what goes on, and how we would prefer it to go on. Art is impossibly rich and contradictory, and you can only understand it on a case-by-case basis.

Regarding that and your Promiscuous Materials project, you opted not to use a Creative Commons approach because of certain “contours” of your projects, is that what you’re talking about in terms of a case-by-case basis?

Yeah, I think what’s important there is for people to invent their own ways of doing things and to recognize that there is no single plan or system that is going to answer every need. One of the important things that I was trying to understand and express is that art-making is this impure act—it’s a muddle of egotistical and selfless impulses, a muddle of commercial and gift-oriented transactions with the world at large. And artists are already always giving stuff away. They may not think of it that way, and they may be encouraged by their life in a commercial culture to feel that they are clutching very dearly to the things they produce and to try to squeeze every justified penny out of them, but the fact is that…If I have a per-word value on my work, if I accept the top-dollar I’ve ever gotten out of, let’s say Rolling Stone, is the ultimate value of my words, then the fact that I’m speaking them to you now is a horrific act of giving them away.

That you could write them then, and then go speak them for much cheaper in Seattle a few weeks later?

Exactly, what a discount I’m giving, right? And there’s all sorts of other ways in which this paradox is played out. If I write a short story and I manage to place it in the New Yorker then I’ll be very pleasantly remunerated, but instead if I manage to get it in say, someplace I’m also equally pleased with like some literary quarterly, then what is my story worth? Do I think that it’s value just changed so radically, or do I think that I wrote it because it is a transmission of meaning and energy that’s important to me per se? And this other thing that might happen to it where some dollars move around is only one very small feature of the phenomenon of my wish to write it or the world’s potential reception of it.

Have you chosen a filmmaker for optioning You Don’t Love Me Yet?

No, not at all. I’m here in LA where rumor is everything, and I’m hearing that I must have picked someone already. There’s a sort of cynicism going around of “Oh yeah, that game is rigged, it’s all over.” It’s the opposite—I’m helpless to look at the proposals right now because I’m traveling so much at this point. I’m really going to keep to my promise to not even really look at everything coming in until probably the end of April and then I’ll give it away on May 15th. Anyone thinking about it should definitely be encouraged.

We’ve been fascinated by the people who are asking if you’re worried that someone will do something bad with your book.

It’s kind of a funny idea because selling your film rights doesn’t ensure that bad things won’t happen. And anyway, I’ve always felt there was a weird misunderstanding where people want you to be defiantly protective of a book. But you know what? First of all, even if you tried, you’re not a filmmaker and your energies wouldn’t really be rewarded if you tried to breathe down the necks of people adapting something of yours, and if you adapt it yourself or try to direct it yourself, well then suddenly you’ve become a filmmaker instead of a writer. So unless that’s your wish, this is a great area to practice letting go.

After the break, find out about the connection between kangaroos and elephants, what art and Yellowstone might have collectively in common, and where Lethem was during Game 7 of the World Series last year.

When you wrote You Don’t Love Me Yet, did you have this idea for optioning the book at the onset?

Well no, the idea came over me at some point. While I was writing this novel I’d been accumulating the material that became that essay in Harper’s, and thinking more and more about this stuff which is why you saw the leaking of that subject matter into the book. But I didn’t figure out that I was going to do the Promiscuous Materials site, let alone the free option. It does seem to me that it came along at the right time, but this novel has a certain receptiveness to a film: it wouldn’t be that expensive to make, it’s in an urban setting.

In fact, it felt almost written for a film interpretation; some have even called it parenthetical to your other novels.

Yeah, well this is a thing that comes up when you write a big book and then…I mean, people have called Motherless Brooklyn a big book, but the book isn’t that long. And it’s a pretty giddy book, too. If I’d written Motherless Brooklyn and then this one, all that people would say is “Oh, this is a writer who is always trying to make us laugh.” It’s totally about Fortress of Solitude that people are having this impression. It’s just so rare, and people are disconcerted by someone going from the massiveness and apparent weighty subject matter to something that is a romantic comedy. But this book, first of all, is very closely connected to other books I’ve written, like As She Climbed Across the Table. And second, it’s really Fortress of Solitude that sets this expectation, because Motherless Brooklyn is not so big and in fact it’s a comic novel too.

On that note, we have to ask: what’s up with the kangaroos?

I’m just kind of making a…I stumbled into using the Los Angeles zoo when I was researching this book and I hadn’t intended to put animals in it but suddenly they became important to me and I ended up with the kangaroo. It just made me laugh, to repeat myself in such an odd way. Knowing that it would seem like a shout-out to Gun With Occasional Music, but it doesn’t really have any kind of deeper pattern.

It just struck a note, and we do tend to read into these things, perhaps too much…

Yeah, the connections between the books, the little jokes that knit them together, are in a way embracing the people who have followed me from one bizarre project to the next. It’s my way of saying, “Look, you know that I’ve done a kangaroo before.”

As a bad animal metaphor, the kangaroo seems like a white elephant, in the context of you viewing art as a gift that is exchanged it’s that funny thing that comes back around again and again.

That’s good, I like that.

You can appropriate that if you want.

I think that repurposing within something is…I’m now a middle-aged novelist and I’ve done a certain number of things and I can fool around with my own cache of images and jokes a little bit. It’s like that way you begin to see your own material up for grabs, too.

Is your perspective on sharing your work something that’s come with age and time for you? Or is it just something more easily grasped by people of our generation who grew up listening to sampled music and other shared sources?

It’s an interesting paradox. Something that people have said to me when they wanted to be a little bit critical or skeptical is “Oh well, this is very easy for you, you’ve got a solid career and you’re doing well so you can afford to give some things away. You’re flattering yourself, but what about a young hungry artist who desperately needs to attain recognition or solvency?” And the funny thing is, I understand the thought. But the fact is that most of the people who do provocations of this kind, most of the people who are active in giving things away, are exactly young unknown artists working on the fringe. You see this in the web culture a lot, and that’s why I thought there might be a place in this for me, but that’s kind of rare. If you look at this as a sort of movement, I’m really quite late at arriving as a participant and I don’t really have anything that revolutionary to say. Public advocates like [Lawrence] Lessig and people publishing in a blog context, most of your readers are very familiar with this stuff. People like Siva Vaidhyanathan made this point, and artists like Negativeland and all sorts of web-based appropriators get it. But the reason I thought there was a place for me was that it is not common for more established artists working in these more traditional forms—and the novel is a very ivory-tower, privileged form, it’s not like novelists are under attack, we’re not getting cease and desist letters.

But you did mention with the Promiscuous Materials project that most of that is for the short stories and song lyrics, and you still reserve the novel as something separate to a certain degree.

There are a couple of reasons for that. One of the critical things that I wanted to enunciate, once I figured it out, is that it’s not an all-or-nothing thing. To let it become one was to play into the…because if copyright abolition is what’s at stake, then for that purpose the Author’s Guild and the RIAA should be up in arms. Because if there’s to be no copyright and no protection then what we’d have would be a sort of train wreck. But what’s important to recognize is this: between the two extremes that have been staked out is this enormous middle ground where you can embrace a greater freedom of connection between artists, more movement of cultural materials, a larger and healthier public domain and still have adequate protection and adequate incentive for artists to make stuff. So yeah, I’ve benefited in lovely ways from the notion of intellectual property; the options I sold on earlier novels kept me writing at times when I would have been forced to go back to a day job, forced to go back to a, I don’t know, masturbation boutique. It’s precisely understanding that I get to sell some things that makes me want to give other things away.

That evokes the metaphor you used in the Harper’s article of art being like public land: belonging to everyone and no-one simultaneously. That gave me a new perspective on the phenomenon of the “cultural collective” that really made sense.

Yeah, this image of the collective commons is a very vibrant one once you realize how it kind of applies to everything. The airwaves, which have been completely privatized and auctioned off by the government—how on earth could those belong to anyone? And the Internet, which when you talk about things like the inquisitive attempts of the cable companies to privatize the Internet by wrecking neutrality, these are all commons issues. And they can all be analogized to a public park, or a public road.

And naming it was important. In the Harper’s essay and You Don’t Love Me Yet, you touch on that quite a bit. What is it about the power of naming something?

It’s something very vital to me about that. And names connect with negotiating identities. In Fortress of Solitude, at one point I realized that one of the subjects of the book is multiple names. Every character has multiple names: a name, a nickname, a tag. Barret Rude Jr. is a member of The Distinctions but he wants to be Barret Rude Jr., and Mingus wants to be “Dose” but he also lets Dylan be “Dose” and everyone is transacting their place in the culture, their place in the world, by making up a name. And Arrowman, every superhero has two names. And You Don’t Love Me Yet, is a book about daft characters, or extremely unrealized characters—it’s almost a book about lacking names, the provisionality of names and what it feels like to not even be sure you’ve got one. I’m very interested in the constructed nature of identity, and the way selves are made up via a series of negotiations, with roles and masks as disguises. One of the other subjects of You Don’t Love Me Yet, to the extent that it has serious subjects in it, is this making yourself real by pretending. The way how becoming something in life, especially this bohemian ideal of self-creating, is all about pretending to be something, faking it before you can become real. It’s the tender, pretentious, ludicrous quality of people pretending to be something by wearing disguises, by playing dress-up.

That reminds me of the conversation you had over at Seed with Jana Levin [a cosmologist and author], where you talk about not being able to get to truth per se, but instead of surrounding it.

I’m very fascinated with that topic. People who are philosophically minded will get perturbed, because they will say that somehow I’m alluding to, now relatively discredited French ideas, that there is no there, there is no anything. But I don’t really mean that, I’m just so aroused by…my awareness is so activated by this feeling that there’s a slipperiness to mind and memory and language. That there’s this way that we make identity out of these tools that are so unstable. They are full of projection and magic and metaphor. It’s why when talking about contemporary writing, the idea of realism is so mixed up, because language isn’t photography.

It’s symbolism.

Yes. It’s infected with magic, and crazy, digressive, metaphoric, projective, wishful energy, and just to use it is like a tool that you’re trying to operate that’s not made of iron, but is instead made of mercury. And it infects everything, and makes you crazy. And memory itself is a kind of language, it’s…

Mutable and changeable.

Exactly. And it’s negotiated. It’s infected with wishfulness.

How did you find yourself researching neuroscience and memory?

Well you don’t even really have to research to be interested in this stuff, because they’re just coming out with it—something is announced every five minutes that they’ve just discovered that we’re even more preposterous than we thought. Memory scientists are persuaded now that when we remember something, we don’t go back to some original stored file.

There is no file!

There’s no file, what we do is remember the last time we remembered it.

And then it changes by remembering it.

So memory is just a series of rehearsals, for a show that never goes on.

[Seattlest sighs inaudibly at the most beautiful description we’ve ever heard of memory.]

So this isn’t to say that I’m with Derrida, who I’ve basically have never been able to understand, you know “Nothing is everything so it’s all OK.” We just need to constantly understand how much we’re awash in our own subjective, fantastical consciousness. This is why people are so interested in stories, even if they distrust them. It’s why fiction and film…it’s how we understand ourselves. By the same token, we’re all storytelling at some time.

That’s a theme that is in so much of your writing, that powerful phenomenon of identifying so personally with something in art.

Absolutely. It’s everything.

It’s that feeling of, “Hey wow, that’s me.” In the book, everyone is thinking that at the same time.

Yeah, when the song plays.

It’s kind of the same thing with sports—you’re something of a sports fan, right?

Oh, a huge sports fan. That’s a powerful collective.

So our co-editor Seth, who is something of a sports genius, wants to know : Where and with whom were you for Game 7 of the World Series last year?

[laughing] Well, I was with Christopher Sorentino, my fellow long-suffering Mets fan, and I don’t know why he knows to ask this, but we were on the 3rd base line. So: a beautiful, perfect, unforgettable view of Endy Chavez’s catch, and everything after that should just go undiscussed.

And lastly, Michael van Baker wants to know: If push comes to shove, could you take Amis?
On what playing field are we talking about, just purely a brawl? Or do I get to choose weapons? Because we could go at it at snooker, and I would probably get my ass kicked. But if I got to pick, I would go with schoolyard basketball, one-on-one, in which case I could kick Martin Amis’ ass up and down the block.

Jonatham Lethem
4/18, Benaroya Hall, 7:30pm
Tickets: $10-25