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"FacebookPinterest\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan's stories, published in his new collection, Pulphead, are known in these halls by their shorthand: \"Axl,\" \"Bunny,\" \"Real World,\" \"Christian Rock.\" On assignment for GQ, JJS took the pop topics about which everything had been written, and fled this upper register of lyricism and intelligence and cultural acumen\u2014cutting his stories with both obsessive originality and mythic reverence to basically every book ever written and song ever sung. There's a quality to the research and the reporting and the construction of paragraphs that is rigorous, sometimes depthless-seeming, and yet the work somehow erases itself so that the performance of it feels easy, irresistibly likeable. Sure, we're biased, but critics have been saying as much, too: The Times Book Review called it \"the best, and most important, collection of magazine writing since [David Foster] Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.\" Time said he \"may be the best essayist of his generation.\" Beginning in 2004, after intervals writing for Oord American and Harper's, Sullivan entered into a lengthy relationship with GQ\u2014and particularly with editor-in-chief Jim Nelson and story editor Joel Lovell. Here, a behind-the-curtain glimpse at the process by which Sullivan and Lovell constructed some of the book's most memorables:\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nGQ: John, you wrote your first piece for GQ in summer 2004\u2014a cover profile of Will Ferrell. But your second story, a 13,000-word feature about a Christian Rock festival, serves as a calling card for GQ feature writing. So, start at the beginning: Had you been waiting for a while to write that thing?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: I wrote two pieces that did not work out. A Saudi Arabia story that was unpublishable, and the Ferrell piece, which became a non-disaster only because Will Ferrell was in it, so he did and said funny things. My contribution was mostly misshapen and unnecessarily thinky-thinky. Those were my first two moves. Sweet. I looked for what they had in common. In both cases I'd tried to write in a way that didn't come naturally to me\u2014or had attacked the idea in a way I wasn't really inclined to\u2014and this probably came from over-anticipating the readership, worrying about what \"a GQ piece\" was, or a glossy-magazine piece in general (I'd never written for one before). At that point I knew, if I wanted to continue as a mag writer, I needed to find a way to do my thing, or what I thought I could do, which was somewhere between a reported piece and an essay, where the first-person narrator becomes a little character that you move around inside the story. \"Christian Rock\" was our first attempt at that.\n\nGQ: How much convincing did it take to get the magazine behind you? What was the jumping-off point?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: Jim [Nelson, GQ editor-in-chief] and Joel [Lovell, former GQ story editor] were immediately supportive of the idea\u2014that wasn't the problem. In fact, that's what was amazing. They pretty much said, we don't want you to think about \"the kind of piece we do\" or any of that. Just play what you feel, and it's cool if you fuck up. It was a gift. Also slightly terrifying. I went at it in a technical way. From the start, the plan was, to do a piece that would begin in a very slightly stylized mag-writer voice, like, just your basest, most stereotyped idea of an asshole New York media person who flies to some rural area and pretends to understand what's happening (he would need also to sound like he knew he was this, in order to be convincing). That was the voice I wanted for the beginning. But for the ending, I needed a high-serious tone, a voice that completely transcended and escaped from the one at the front. The narrator was getting saved, you know. But not by Jesus, from Him. The trick lay in doing the pivots right, making them small enough that the readers always felt like they were reading the same story, while you went about shifting the formal terrain under them. Very self-conscious, but of course the piece went and became something else anyway.\n\nGQ: You once confessed a pretty funny story to me: You said that when you turned that thing in, you told Jim, \"This is the one, don't cut a word, it's the best thing I've written, and it needs to stay this length,\"\u2014something a lot of rather proud writers have probably done and said. But you also admitted that, like just about every piece, that story got much better as you all lopped out thousands of words.\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: Yeah, that story is sadly true. And what's messed up\u2014those words were mostly about Stephen Baldwin. I remember that I had attempted to re-write one of the gospels in Stephen Baldwin's born-again stage jargon.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Photo: Jessica Craig-Martin\n\nGQ: Lovell, what do you remember about the early stages of working on it?\n\n Joel Lovell: Before I read anything, I listened to part of it, driving through the Catskills on my way to my parents' house in central New York. John called and read the scene of his arriving at Creation and the guys (Ritter and Pee Wee and etc) helping him park the camper. I remember that my daughter was sleeping in the back seat and I was laughing my ass off, trying not to wake her, at the description of the woman blowing the ram's horn (\"quite capably, twice\") and the explanation of the different strata of evangelicals and the \"little guide's eyes\" looking terrified as the camper began to slide back down the hill toward the field full of Christians below. Wow, it was just so, so good.\n\n What I didn't realize then, and still didn't realize when John delivered the first 6,000 or so words of the story, was the depths he was capable of achieving in it. At that point, he hadn't yet written\u2014or hadn't yet hit send and delivered to us\u2014the latter part of the piece. I recall a conversation in Jim's office in which we all agreed that the writing was remarkable, and yet...it took more than 2,000 words to arrive at the festival, and then once there, there were lots of words devoted to Stephen Baldwin (entertaining, for sure, but did we really need a mini-profile of Stephen Baldwin in the middle of this story? Didn't we assign someone else to actually do a profile of Stephen Baldwin?), and with that faux-knowing tone at the beginning, would readers really have patience for it? We figured that what we had was a series of really funny and wonderfully written set pieces, and that we'd just have to choose the best ones and whack it way back to some reasonable and not overly-indulgent length.\n\nGQ: And so what was the move on your part?\n\n Joel Lovell: Well, right after that conversation with Jim, John called again and read part of the scene in which he realizes that Petra is onstage, and then part of the memoir portion of the piece [about his own \"Jesus phase\"], with Verm and Mole, and it was clear that he was up to something so much more profound than we'd realized. From that point on, it was mostly a matter of finding the right proportions (where the pivots were going to occur, as John says).\n\nGQ: JJ, how long did it take you to write the thing? Was there ever a moment when you thought it couldn't be done? Or was this, comparatively, an \"easier\" piece to get through since it had so much inherent momentum?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: I can't remember how long it took me to write. As Jesco White, the Dancing Outlaw, said, when his wife asked how long it would be before they might lie together again as man and wife, \"It could be an hour, it could be a lifetime.\" And I never thought it couldn't be done, but I did often think it couldn't be done well. Drinking eases you past those moments.\n\n What I will say is, I had no idea in taking the assignment that I'd end up writing as long or as personally about my own faith, what it meant to let go of that. I mean, I expected something at the festival would trigger a memory of my own born-again years and give me a chance to say, Hey, I was like you once. (The original epigraph to the piece, probably wisely cut by Joel and Jim, was from the French explorer Radisson, talking about his years among the Mohawks: \"Friends I must confesse I loved those people entirely well.\") But the whole thing of the irony falling away completely, and writing stuff about my spiritual ambivalence that I hadn't even admitted to myself at that point, all of that happened only in the doing. All of the good stuff happens in the doing, it seems like. The things you plan, the little moves you can't wait to spring on the reader, nine times out of ten those end up sounding potted, slightly stiff. There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer. This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the Paris Review and places. They're all acting. It's like watching a person in a play. They don't really know half as much as they claim about their \"process,\" or why they did a certain thing in a certain book, because when they did that thing, they weren't themselves, but this other creature, who is the writer (when the writer is any good). I'm not saying no one knows anything about what goes on in the chamber. Your knowledge of it is just like your memory of a dream. You get flashes. Faulkner was honest about this. Somebody asked him the secret to creating a convincing character. He said, \"Believing that she exists.\" He wasn't trying to describe a great moral act on the part of an artist. Well, he was doing that too, in a way, but mostly he had in mind the kind of belief a kid has in his imaginary friend, during moments when he forgets that the friend isn't real. Ask that kid what was going on with him mentally, during those times. His answer is as \"true\" as most writers', when you ask them deep questions about their work.\n\n Joel Lovell: That's nice. Nothing for me to add to that.\n\nFacebookPinterestPhoto: Jason Schmidt\n\n __\n\nGQ: Let's talk about the \"Real World\" piece. JJ's pointed out that some people absolutely dig that story, and others despise it. Where did that one come from?\n\n Joel Lovell: It's probably worth saying that there are editors at all sorts of magazines (myself included) who know they should never assign a story on a certain kind of subject\u2014a Phish tour, say, or Mitt Romney, or what's up with Cuba?\u2014and yet they do so despite their better judgment. A writer tells you he or she is interested, you convince yourself that it's all going to work out despite the pre-digested conclusions or the limited access or the fact that what you're talking about is a generality rather than a specific idea. And it never, ever does, unless something remarkable and unexpected happens in the reporting or the writer brings some stunning originality to it. And these things work in a kind of horrible tandem\u2014the lack of interesting subject matter inspiring the writer to scat out thicker and thicker layers of word jazz\u2014resulting in so many bad magazine stories.\n\n The lives of former cast members of The Real World probably belong in that category. But when John proposed the idea, it was nothing like a writer saying, Hey, wouldn't it be funny if I went and spent some time hanging out with former cast members of The Real World? It was instead a kind of cry for help. We had a few conversations and\u2014speaking of imaginary friends\u2014you kinda got the feeling talking to John that he had already communicated in his head many times with these guys. He'd spent what can only be considered a disturbing amount of time watching Real World and its spin-offs; he knew their go-to lines and their drinks of choice and their vulnerabilities. It really was something to hear him talk about them. It would have been wrong to not let him finally go be with them.\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: Speaking of trying to remember a dream, that's what thinking about the Real World assignment is like. There was no sympathy/contempt. There was only immersion/melding. That piece was me dealing with, and doing penance for, the inhuman number of hours I spent watching MTV between about 1984 and 1992. The Miz sent me a box of very nice cigars afterward, which I had fun giving out to friends who smoke them. I think it's possible that our article helped his wrestling career along.\n\nGQ: And if we can\u2014maybe artificially\u2014map some sort of change or growth in your writing, how did that story differ from, say, Christian Rock?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: It marked an evolutionary stage in my editorial relationship with Joel, because it's the first time I can remember him basically saying to me, after I'd handed in the draft, you know, this is wrong, this is weird, and we're going to let you do it anyway. It was the first time we isolated a voice that didn't know where its own irony lay, which felt like an accurate temperature-reading of the times, and we used that voice for several subsequent pieces.\n\nFacebookPinterestPhoto: Getty Images\n\n __\n\nGQ: Take us to \"Axl,\" bros. Where did the assignment come from? Were there any hesitations at the magazine?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: I'm pretty sure that assignment originated in the mind of my wife, Mariana, who teaches cinema studies at the college here in Wilmington. She finds him a compelling figure. Or did. As do/did I. With some of these pop pieces, partly what you're doing is writing your way out of a confused admiration for the subject. But Axl retains his power to disturb, always his greatest weapon. I don't remember there being much resistance from the Quarterly. Which suggests either a level of confidence for which I'm grateful, or a level of drug abuse that is worrisome. Granted the brakes did screech a little when I called Joel from Bilbao asking if we could put Axl on the cover. His manager had said it was the only way we'd get an interview. (We didn't do it.) In retrospect that was dumb of him/them, as it would have been killer PR for Axl and that incarnation of the band to grant us an interview, PR that didn't really materialize further down the road; but Axl is not always focused on the smart thing to do; he asks himself instead, what is the most \"Axl\" thing to do?\n\nGQ: Oh man, I think we may lose Lovell here... He has \"editing\" to do.\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: That's okay. I'm embarrassed to bounce with Joel, 'cause the thing I'm working on, that's long overdue, is a piece for him.\n\nGQ: JJ only, then: Axl's one of the least conventional mag \"profiles\" I've read, and yet it's the one for which you're maybe best known. It's held up as one of those atypical, satisfying writearounds\u2014where the story ends up being something totally different, and even better than if you'd had direct access to him... What was the thing you were trying to do with it? What was the picture you wanted to draw? What made it cohere? Was there a sort of macro plan in place?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: It's nice in situations like this to let someone else answer for you. A guy named Tommy Craggs, who writes for Deadspin, said that my piece \"was either a profile of Axl Rose as seen through the prism of Indiana or a profile of Indiana as seen through the prism of Axl Rose.\" That's right. When I think about every one of your (legitimate) questions, that description answers them. I didn't need to worry about whether I would get access to him. I had the whole beauty and sadness of the state of Indiana for subject matter.\n\n GQ: Lambs! You give it to us right away in \"Violence of the Lambs\":\n\n\"Last year I was asked to write an article for this magazine about the future of the human race, a topic on which my sporadic descents to the crushing mental depths of pop-rock culture crit had predictably made me the go-to guy.\"FacebookPinterestPhoto: Jill Greenberg\n\n __\n\nWere you bullshitting us, or was that really the assignment? And as a natural follow-up: How and why did you conceive of Marcus Livengood (the central figure of the piece whom you confess, only in the final act of the story, is fictional)? It pissed some people off\u2014I've read the letters. Did you ever think a little deception could incite that kind of fury?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: The piece was a hoax, in the War of the Worlds tradition. That's describing the ambition, not the achievement, though the fact that so many people did believe it, until the very end\u2014where I tell them quite explicitly what I've made up and what I haven't\u2014suggests that it worked. There was of course a totally different level on which it wasn't a hoax at all. None of the facts are invented. Only the character who delivers them. And some biologists, real ones, have written about these sorts of changes in particular species, increased aggression, new forms of violence, species attacking humans that had never done so before. There were moments when I myself didn't know exactly what kind of piece I was writing, fiction or non-fiction or what. The authenticity of that confusion, as I experienced it, is what led me to risk misleading the reader (partially, and for only part of the piece). In other words, if I was fucking with them, I wasn't fucking with them on some shallow level. \"Your sheep, that are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men.\" It gave good metaphor for the whole capitalist endgame.\n\nGQ: Was there any point in the process of editing/fact-checking when you or Joel were thinking there's no way Jim's actually going to let us run this thing? Just sort of waiting for the lawyers, or whoever, to step in and say 'No, no, sorry, we're not doing this...'?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: No, I don't think so. Jim was usually reading things pretty early in the process. We didn't spring surprises on him. He did more than once have to defend us to the lawyers.\n\nFacebookPinterestPhoto: Jim McCrary\n\n __\n\nGQ: With your Michael Jackson piece, what's the first sentence you wrote for the piece? Or the first thought that you didn't trash? And what was the directive? A reported eulogy?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: The assignment was: honor him. The sentence about Prince Screws was always the beginning. I'd read that somewhere\u2014seen his genealogical chart somewhere\u2014and thought, that's the most defamiliarizing thing you could say about Michael Jackson right now, to point out that he belongs to the story of the African American south and its music, that he was one of its flowerings.\n\nGQ: If you were forced to add a GQ story to the book that isn't in there already, which would it be?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: \"He Shall Be Levi.\" That's the only one [FSG book editor] Sean [McDonald] and I tussled over. He was probably right that its whole subject-zone possesses a repellent factor now that would have harmed the book. I may have been right that its absence strands the Tea Party piece a little, leaves it lonely, leaves my claim to have been writing about politics by writing about people looking a little half-cocked and lightweight. Also the opening, in which Levi is hunting Dall Sheep, would have made a great transition from \"Violence of the Lambs.\" The other piece we saw differently was \"Real World.\" I thought it was too crazy, written with the reckless transparency that only deadline panic can produce, that becomes almost its own bullshit. But there were paragraphs that still seemed true. I'm glad Sean won. It's some people's favorite piece. Other people's most-hated, a further sign that it should be there.\n\nFacebookPinterestPhoto: Adrian Boot\n\n __\n\nGQ: I'm guessing the answer to this question is \"no\"\u2014considering the Marcus Livengoods and Bunny-Wailer-weed that run through your pieces\u2014but was there ever anything that Jim and Joel wouldn't let you do? Any scenes that had to go?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: There were never scenes, but there were whole pieces that just couldn't get off the ground\u2014most of which I can't really remember.\n\nGQ: Any pieces where the weed had to be strained out?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: [Laughs] No, I don't think that ever happened, I tried to do some self-censoring on that. There were a lot of pieces where the weed wasn't mentioned...\n\nGQ: Unrelated to the book, but very related to the GQ universe: the Men of the Year party is right around the corner. Did you ever make it to one of those?\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: I did, actually. Jim was really cool to invite me and fly me out to L.A., you know, it was like he was throwing the writers some love. I don't know if you can tell this or not, but it's sort of a funny story. Jay-Z was there and I ended up in the bathroom with some people and one of Jay-Z's guys. Nobody had anything to smoke the weed out of but they had this really good weed wrapped in tinfoil. So I, in a rare moment of timing and dexterity grabbed the tinfoil and made it into a little pipe, which I know how to do, and then it was like: I need a screwdriver or something. Somebody gave me the stylus out of his palm pilot, so I used that to make the tube and made this killer little pipe and we passed it around for like twenty minutes it was like, \"I can't believe we're still smoking this weed!\" and Jay-Z's guy goes, \"That was some MacGyver shit.\" (Laughs) It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Many times telling this story I've changed the Jay-Z's guy into Jay-Z himself, of course.\n\nGQ: Right, naturally.\n\n John Jeremiah Sullivan: It would be a sin not to."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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