It can be difficult to be John Reed.  
Christopher Hitchens called him a "Bin Ladenist" and Cathy Young editorialized in The Boston Globe that he "blames the victims of terrorism" when he puts out a novel like Snowball's Chance, a biting send-up of George Orwell's Animal Farm which he was inspired to write after the terrorist attacks on September 11.  "The clear references to 9/11 in the apocalyptic ending can only bring Orwell's name into disrepute in the U.S.," wrote William Hamilton, the British literary executor of the Orwell estate.  That process had already begun:  it was revealed Orwell gave the British Foreign Office a list of people he suspected of being "crypto-Communists and fellow travelers," labeling some of them as Jews and homosexuals.  "I really wanted to explode that book," Reed told The New York Times.  "I wanted to completely undermine it."
Is this man who wants to blow up the classic literary canon taught to children in schools a menace, or a messiah?  David Shankbone went to interview him for Wikinews and found that, as often is the case, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Reed is electrified by the changes that surround him that channel through a lens of inspiration wrought by his children.  "The kids have made me a better writer," Reed said.  In his new untitled work, which he calls a "new play by William Shakespeare," he takes lines from The Bard's classics to form an original tragedy.  He began it in 2003, but only with the birth of his children could he finish it. "I didn't understand the characters who had children. I didn't really understand them. And once I had had kids, I could approach them differently."  
Taking the old to make it new is a theme in his work and in his world view.  Reed foresees new narrative forms being born, Biblical epics that will be played out across print and electronic mediums.  He is pulled forward by revolutions of the past, a search for a spiritual sensibility, and a desire to locate himself in the process. 
Below is David Shankbone's conversation with novelist John Reed.
[Conversation in progress...]
David Shankbone:  How is that?
DS:  All the alternative media is either becoming a conglomerate, like the Village Voice, or it's dying, like the New York Press.
DS:  I interviewed Michael Musto, and that was one area that I wanted to touch on, but we got involved in so many other things.   I don't even know how much I could really get out of somebody who's working there, but--
DS:  How does the Rail make its money in order to operate?
DS:  What about this theory that the drop in advertising for the print media, even though it's going to go through a period of growing pains, in the end might actually be better for the literary press like the Brooklyn Rail, because people who have keys to funding will see more of a need to do grants, which will allow them to be more experimental as opposed to worrying about, "Are we going to offend our advertisers?"
DS:  I interviewed a musician named John Vanderslice, and off-the-record he talked about how the mainstream music press has almost lost all influence--Spin, Rolling Stone; those kinds of magazines.  He said that whenever he did some small blog interview his web site jumped up in hits.  But when he got a favorable review in Rolling Stone he said, “I barely heard a word about it.”
DS:  Do you think it's becoming like the pharmaceutical industry?  There the really big drug companies don't have a lot of drugs in the pipeline, but there are all these like little drug companies that are existing for one-or-two-drug clinical trials, and the big drug companies are watching them.  Once they have a seller, big pharma goes in and snaps up the little companies.
DS:  How does the business model for small presses make up for a lack of blockbuster books?
DS:  It's more of an idealistic enterprise, then?
DS:  But they're not like that anymore, are they?
DS:  Why did you decide to take on Orwell?
DS:  How it reads in general?
DS:  Christopher Hitchens called you an "Osama bin Ladenist.”  How do you react to that label?
DS:  I photographed many of the New York academics who are featured in the David Horowitz book, The Professors:  The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and every single one of them held it up as this badge of honor.  They all received emails like, "How did you get in there?"  It gave them stature that they may not have had before.  Is it the same?
DS:  He coined a philosophy for a terrorist.  Like ‘Trotskyite’--there never really existed this phrase "Osama bin Ladenist."  Do you think it elevated bin Laden?
DS:  But the thinking is there.  Right after the Soviet Union ended--you could sense it, you could feel it in the air--this "Who do we set our sights on?"  I think that all of us felt that way to a degree, if not just because we were socialized to think that way.
DS:  Denouncing ‘Islamofascism’...
DS:  Do you think it's a little bit trying to fit a square peg through a round hole, like the old paradigm of the Soviet Union as the evil empire, and now the evil empire is this very disparate range of peoples from Indonesia to Iran and trying to make them into a ‘Soviet Union?’
DS:  It's worked.  It's sold.
DS:  They are going to be spending a lot more; it'll be a trillion dollar war.
DS:  Was there a moment where your switch was flicked, where you were like, "I've had enough." Was there a breaking point?
DS:  [chuckles]
DS:  Did you really?
DS:  Is he dead?
DS:  Or suffering--
DS:  Orwell forms such a fundamental basis for so much neoconservative thinking, almost as an ideological text.  Like The Outsiders forms our sense of what a rebel is to a degree, and Orwell gives us a worldview of--
DS:  What about 1984?
DS:  All of a sudden you'll be in an Orwell genre:  Orwell criticism--
DS:  1984 is used by both liberals and conservatives to attack each--each in different ways--
DS:  As a writer there's always a desire to be innovative and original, but you can't be original anymore in writing.  It's very difficult.  Almost everything has been done.  I think that I read somewhere that the only genre of art that hasn't fully been mined is maybe poetry.
DS:  How do you handle the challenge with wanting to be--
DS:  What are they?
DS:  Can you conceptualize that to an example?
DS:  On an Internet forum.
DS:  Once you can envision it, the technology will follow, though.  Once you can start seeing it.
DS:  A very common thing for a writer is to be riddled with self-doubt, and that can often ruin a lot of inspiration and creativity and make you lose your way in what you're doing.  How do you handle a challenge like that?
DS:  Do you have a memory that has stuck with you that--where you continually turn back to it to learn new lessons?
DS:  Is there one that stands out?
DS:  She smells like a street urchin?
DS:  And that brings back a lot--the olfactory memories?
DS:  No, I'd love to hear your dream.
DS:  Sure.
[both chuckle]
DS:  Do you do dream analysis?
DS:  Like Animal Farm?
DS:  What's a book that every kid in high school reads that you think should be removed?
DS:  Clearly a lot can be gained from literature, and as you've have shown talking about Shakespeare here.  But you think there might be a problem with building a new generation of readers, in that we train people to read things that they can't relate to?  It would be like raising kids to watch Bette Davis movies, and then you get to watch the Harry Potter film.
DS:  Is there at all a movement for that?
DS:  But can't you see such a reaction against that change?
DS:  [laughs]
DS:  There's a magical thing that happens when people feel they discover things that went to the wayside--think about bell bottoms!  I remember in the early 90s, the idea of bell bottoms, or even just large pants at the bottom, was just anathema.
DS:  And then all of a sudden it's like people get bored with the same thing, and boom! Bell bottoms are back.
DS:  People who are raised watching "Die Hard" and Schwarzenegger, all of a sudden they discover old Joan Crawford films.
DS:  Do you believe in a higher power?
DS:  How do you raise your children?
DS:  How do you circumvent that in the rearing of children, then?
DS:  Why would you be afraid to have it published that you're part Jewish?
DS:  [chuckles] As a big "Fuck you" to Judaism, or--?
DS:  So you're going to be baptized into the Gnostic church?
DS:  It's an odd concept.
DS:  Southern Baptist?
DS:  They're one of the least intolerant.
DS:  I went through a Southern Baptist phase when I lived in Georgia.
DS:  Yeah, yeah.  The Southern Baptist convention is probably the most conservative out there.
DS:  If you were forced to choose, which war would you prefer to fight in, Iraq or Afghanistan?
DS:  On the side of the United States.
DS:  Afghanistan?
DS:  Hillary or Barack?
DS:  If you remain that lean on the campaign trail, when they're having all those--
DS:  [laughs]
DS:  How would you choose to die?
DS:  You think that most men, pre-parenthood, lose their sense of mortality and their fear of it?
DS:  Were you ever afraid of it?
DS: Did that affect your behavior?
DS:  "Where does it go?"
DS:  An afterlife?
DS:  What's a trait you deplore in yourself?
DS:  Isn't that always the case?
DS:  How is it your best trait?
DS:  Is that also how it's one of your worst, then?
DS:  What’s a time that this trait screwed you over.
DS:  How so?  Typical drug, alcohol problems, or--
DS:  Like Joseph Grand in The Plague where he was rewriting the same sentence over and over?
DS:  What do you think it is that drives many artists to sink their own ships?
DS:  Do you think that Norman Rockwell had that inclination?
DS:  I don't know, either.  No by his popular image.
DS:  What's your most treasured possession?  You can't include kids, because they're not really possessions.
DS:  Is it your most treasured?
DS:  Yeah, definitely.
DS:  Mmm.  I feel that, yeah.
DS:  What makes it a scraper?
DS:  You could be scraping meat off bones.
DS:  I have treasured possessions, but I also have treasured memories.  I found a suicide in the woods when I was thirteen: a kid my age, who was probably fourteen.  It's a treasured memory in some ways, one that’s lasted my whole life, and it's come back in a lot of ways.  On my MySpace profile, I make an allusion to that in my narrative.  I don't think people actually read that.  I think that people look at pictures, and then they move on.  But that's not really true.  I have been contacted by both that individual's younger sister, who was eight when he killed himself, and the girlfriend he killed himself over. Separately.
DS:  Really?
DS:  Gives it depth and also maybe opens you up to a new audience.
DS:  Especially based in New York.
DS:  Do you find that when you have friends outside the city, and they know you're raising kids here, they bate their breath?  So many people still have this vision of New York from like "The Warriors,"; from the Abe Beame days of New York.
DS:  So many parents think that--my sister would be one--the preference of that controlled atmosphere is better for the kids.  They don't realize what they lose not living in an urban center.
DS:  People creating this thriving environment where we can influence each other, and kids --
DS:  --have more stimulus.  When you see news reports that on the discovery of an Earthlike planet does that affect your perspective or does it go unnoticed?
DS:  If you had to choose, and you had to choose or both would be devastated and destroyed, which continent would you have blown up, Asia or Africa?
DS:  Or they both go.
DS:  So it would be a sum total of human life, as opposed to your judgement of cultural significance, or--?
DS:  What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
DS:  Augusten Burroughs made the exact same point; the death penalty came up when we were talking, too.
DS:  He's a very dynamic person to talk to.  He was like, ‘I'm not one of those people who cares about the whole taking another life.  I feel like when you damage a child, you've damaged them.  You've given up your right to be here amongst us.’
DS:  I'm pretty ambivalent on the death penalty.  It doesn't bother me on some philosophical level, like the death, you know?  But I think that the argument that makes me ambivalent as opposed to pro- what worries me is the idea that there's innocent people being put to death.
DS:  They're still out there.  Just recently, there was some 15-year-old girl who was--
DS:  What do you value most in your friends?
DS:  Loyalty?
DS:  Before you got married, what would have been a bigger turnoff for you with your wife, her speaking in a baby voice, or her being overly flatulent?
DS:  Say, both scenarios in bed.
DS:  Than a baby voice.
DS:  Like what?
DS:  Is there a lot of brainy pillow talk in your household?

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!
Share this: 






This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.
Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.
Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.
Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.
Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.
John Reed on Orwell, God, self-destruction and the future of writing