Interview: Susan C. Price of her brother

Jonathan Price
at retirement

your turn to
answer the questions

By Susan C. Price

[This interview appeared originally almost ten years ago, on March 20, 2013, as “Ask Wednesday: Susan C. Price of her brother.”]

what led you to writing?
    I’m not sure I’m writing yet. I’m always a bit disappointed or reluctant. So even to admit I was “led” sounds to me disingenuous. I’ve always wanted to write, or at least wanted to have written. Great literature has intrigued me from early on, and so I became an English major rather than a math major (even though I had done well in math in high school and college) and the more I’ve read of it, the more I’ve wanted to read. And so as you read more and more literature that you enjoy, the cockamamie notion that you could, or even should, write some surfaces. The trouble is, it’s not easy...

William Faulkner

how does it feel to write (hard, easy...)?
    ...because when you first start writing or start writing anything, what comes out doesn’t look or feel anything like Portrait of a Lady or John McPhee or Ulysses or William Faulkner or The Catcher in the Rye. A writing friend of mine, years ago, wisely warned me that this was one of the disabilities of those of us who use superior literature as our touchstone, ideal, whatever. We forgot that Faulkner and Joyce and Henry James and the latest piece in The New Yorker didn’t originally turn out like what so many have come to admire and love; but when you begin writing, you inevitably and by definition turn out “first drafts.” The friend advised me to write better and more frequently by just lowering my standards.

Younger Jonathan Price at ease

   So I start writing and then after an hour I think a little about what I’ve written, and it seems pretty disappointing or limp or worthless and thus is very discouraging. I remember William Styron once described contemplating beginning a new novel as equivalent to contemplating crossing Siberia on one’s hands and knees; it’s tough. In the end writing seems to me like an unnatural act. Most of us with any social skills or education can all emit words orally, especially those of us who are glib. But when those words appear in the semifixed forms of print and electronic image we pay more attention to them, and find that they require adjustment, revision, and even thought. When you look at them in the morning, the first time, they don’t seem so brilliant. Compare that to your memory of the last elegant and intelligent conversation you think you had.

do you find yourself thinking up writing ideas/focus often?

    I get a lot more ideas than I get pieces of writing. They always seem good as ideas, when I’m thinking about them; sometimes it seems I have amazing ideas for titles of books that I’ll never write, that I have no idea what the first line will look like. It reminds me a little of Stephen Dedalus thinking of the series of books he contemplates (but never writes) with letters of the alphabet for titles, and he immediately imagines prospective readers commenting, “Oh, have you read his R? ... Isn’t his W amazing?” (or words to that effect; I didn’t go back and check out the quote). In fact in my mind I have a long list from literature of characters who are essentially failed writers or writers manqué. Characters like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses or Edmund in Long Day’s Journey into Night who complains he doesn’t even have the makings of a poet, just the habit, like a panhandler asking for tobacco to smoke. Or Donald Barthelme’s character in a future world who wants the license to be a writer, and has passed the oral exam, but is very worried about the written one.

how/why did film take such a central position in your life? you could have just stuck to the books

   That, at least initially, is pretty simple. I’ve always liked films; most films are designed to be liked, to be captivating. I remember watching Shane when I was a kid, what seemed like five times in succession. That’s still a pretty good test, though not for Shane any more. Good films repay repeated viewings (just as great books repeated readings). I’ve probably seen films like The Godfather or Shoot the Piano Player or McCabe and Mrs. Miller or The Big Lebowski 15 or 20 times. I try to see at least two films a week in theaters...just like a drug habit, and if I don’t make my two, I feel strangely bereft.
    On a given afternoon, there’s nothing more relaxing and distracting than taking in a film. All of a sudden, or at least within minutes, you’re in another world entirely. Of course its heroes are 40 feet high and you’re in a very dark room, as in a well-choreographed dream. Soon, with any luck, you forget whatever was bothering you, like back pain or the prospect of completing your 1040, or problems with people you love, or impending missiles from North Korea.

if you could time-travel back in your life is there anything you would do differently?
    A lot but life doesn’t work that way, we get the life we make, try as we might.

where have you not yet traveled that you want to experience?
    China would be nice; it’s probably one of the most exciting and varied and changing places on earth, with such a range of human accomplishment and innovation and such energy and yet all the growing pains of a culture in renaissance—and a weird combination of openness and government control. Alaska, because it is so different from the mainland US and because the way to view it is pretty much by sea, on a cruise.

other than writing, what are your favorite activities during retirement?
    Cooking is probably right up there. It’s very relaxing because in a way there are no set rules, just produce something edible and a little different, and there’s always a new technique or tool that might be worth learning or acquiring, and the cookbook section of the bookstore is among the most fecund and ever-changing. And then there’s the fact that there’s nearly always an appreciative (i.e., hungry and related and talkative) audience ready for the product: the self (the least interesting, actually), my wife, some friends, our family. It’s hard to imagine another activity that’s conducted solo but brings such an exciting and immediate return from others.
    Actually this question gets the order of importance of activities in my retirement wrong. See the question on procrastination!
    Then there’s walking and talking with a friend.

define “mblex,” “belly-button stopper,” and tell me where the elevator is/was? and riff on all that (heck, when have i stopped you from “riffing on” any topic?)

Snu and Jon as children

   The elevator does not exist. Never existed. When I was six and you were three, I was just very speedy and invisible. The nonexistent elevator allowed me to elude you mystically during two-person games of hide and seek in our two-story house which, the last time I visited it, was incredibly small—unlike in our childhood, when it was vast and contained the elevator. You didn’t ask me to explain how I beat you at map games, when we would try to figure out who could be quickest to find—on the wall world map—Vladivostok or Timbuktu or many other places I have since forgotten and dislocated. [sister editor note: He DOES know “mblex” and “belly button stopper”; he is just torturing me!]

do you have goals for the next 10 years, other than continued good health for you and those you love? what are they?
    A while ago I read a formula for living that suggested: plant a tree, write a book, have a child; I wrote two books, had one son, and now have two children who came with my second marriage, planted a redwood that grew 50 feet. I’m still looking for a formula for what to do the next ten years that seems to fit. I’m far more conscious of aging and death than I ever expected I would become; I appreciate my son and my wife far more.
    The next thought is I really don’t have any goals. I don’t like the idea of or the expression “bucket list.” I don’t like the idea that there are things I must do or have to do that I’m not doing right now. If so, I should do them the next minute or tomorrow. But I don’t. Whose bucket is it anyway? Of course I don’t like death or thoughts of death. Some day I will die. I have no plans at present. Maybe I just like living in the moment, plan a few days ahead, the longest planning is to the next vacation, which always seems a bit too far away (today it’s about seven days). I do kind of realize that my days are limited, that there are only so many years left (somehow 20 years seems much less when you are in your sixties than, say, the gap between the ages of 20 and 40), so many vacations left. There was a time when many of these seemed virtually infinite, though they of course never were. Sometimes my greatest planning is for the next nap or the next meal (which I cook).

talk about racquet ball in your life and the philosophy with which you approach the game
    Racquetball, for a very long time, perhaps 40 years, has been a go-to activity for me, one in which I reached a certain plateau years ago and now seem to be stuck at. I play at a local club, where I have been a member since 1977, and which used to have eight courts, but now has only two, an unfortunate revelation of the aging and dying nature of the sport....
    Until very recently racquetball was a special point three times in the week, a kind of plateau, and rest platform, where I somehow got good exercise without realizing it, felt better, relieved stress, stopped the inevitable thought processes that focused on various ills of the day or the week (problems at work, problems with my children, driving tickets, minor aches and pains). In this sense, it was wonderful. I won less and less as the years went by until there were only a few players left and they seemed to beat me every time. Unfortunately I have an ego, and this was not a great deal of fun every other day, to enter court and expect to be beaten. And then to be beaten. I still try to make it a game about thinking: where should I hit this serve? where do I expect the next return to hit? tell myself, “I can beat these guys,” and so on. For a while I did develop a series of backhand serves to all angles of the front wall that disoriented and surprised and unnerved my opponents, but they caught on. For non-racquetball and non-aging aficionados, I suspect this discussion has already begun to pale. So I took up squash.

oh, talk about learning the piano, why and how it feels
    Most of the time it feels wonderful or exhilarating, when I do it. But it obviously doesn’t feel that entirely or always; geez, sometimes I put off practice one day and then the next day and then feel like a recalcitrant kid, but without a parent. At this stage in my life I’m my own parent, and of course I’m learning and playing the piano because I want to. It’s exciting because basically it’s something I’ve never done, and I’m 67. In a way I have the fascination of a baby or a little kid who has discovered a new toy, and I’m still exploring it. When I was younger, much younger, I had trumpet and trombone lessons, then a little later, guitar lessons. Our parents paid for these, and so perhaps I was a little rebellious, and used to practice the trumpet and then the trombone at six in the morning in the house, which wasn’t very big. Eventually the lessons stopped; at the time, I loved arithmetic, so to me the most interesting thing was figuring out the time signatures, because they involved simple arithmetic (I was in the second or third grade at the time).
    Later when I came to take piano lessons after buying a baby grand and watching it sit around in the living room for five years, and then retiring, it was finally my own decision and my own desire. Well, I thought, I’m not going to end up at Carnegie Hall, I’m not going to play at some local club or bistro, I’ll be happy if my fingers can produce sounds that I recognize as part of a familiar tune. I started with the guidance of my wife, who can actually play the piano, to read the notes and play the right hand (that’s the melody, I now know) of a dumbed-down version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (his 9th Symphony). That wasn’t too hard. One wonderful increment was when my instructor easily taught me to start using the left hand simultaneously; I never thought I’d accomplish that.
    The piano, coming late to instrumental music, toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, is a wonderful instrument. Even the stupidest student with no embouchure to speak of and lousy bow technique and soft fingers that can’t hold down frets on a guitar, can locate a note on the piano, press it down, and usually make a beautiful sound. There’s much to be said for this. Because it’s so big, you never have to lug your instrument around in a cumbersome case or hold it between your knees or cradle it in your arms. Even I have learned to slice off a recognizable piece of Beethoven, Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” “Greensleves,” and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” This practice has also made music I have heard for years far more intriguing and puzzling, because I now have some idea of how it’s put together. I recently read The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, a book I would have ignored previously. The puzzle of Bach’s personal life and place in music also intrigues me. I find myself dreaming of a cafe where I could go, pay modest sums for beer, coffee, finger food, get drunk, and listen to the piano played endlessly.

waddo you want on your gravestone? what’s your obituary?
    Can’t think that far ahead, won’t have a gravestone, that’s for the mourners or celebrators (as the case may be) to decide.

in what ways have you been a lifelong procrastinator?
    Hardly anyone asks me about this. But I am frequently aware of it. In fact thinking about and writing about procrastination is one of my procrastination techniques, which have been developed, refined, and added to over a lifetime. If there were a Nobel Prize in Procrastination, I would win it. Probably it’s an elevated form of writer’s block or of anyone's way of dealing with deadlines, but in a way it intensifies with retirement, when you have to give yourself your own assignments, then avoid them, and answer to or prevaricate with yourself. In this battle you always win, whether it’s one side or the other. It’s like talking to yourself as a form of communication; you’re never misunderstood, you can interrupt any time, and you can talk as long as you want. What do I do instead of doing X? Well, of course there’s the old standby, sleeping. Now known as napping. Two to three hours a morning can be spent reading The New York Times and The Sacramento Bee. Seventy times a day I can check my email inbox, which regularly fills up with various forms of redundant communications, and then I can check on my stocks, which don’t change that much day to day or hour to hour, but can provide added zing on a slow procrastination day. Seeing a movie, formerly known as “flicking out,” is an old standby.

why are you teaching in an adult literacy program and what has it taught you?
    This is one part of retirement, volunteering and “giving back” or simply finding something to do. So I offered my services to the local public library to tutor adults in literacy, thinking I would get 30-year-olds or 25-year-olds or so, for whom English was a second language and printed letters were a mystery. My first student is a 50-year-old who likes to read novels now and skimmed around the edges of high school courses that involved reading because she was afraid of it. When we began, she had read a number of novels, had little trouble with many of the words in the literacy texts supplied by the library, but didn’t know what a paragraph was, what a question mark was, what quotation marks were, what a pun is, or that there was such a thing as a sentence. Or, rather, didn’t think she knew. This has been a great collaboration, since she appreciates and responds to virtually everything I have suggested, and, in addition to primer-style literacy texts we have also read The Catcher in the Rye (my suggestion, but she really and readily responded to it when I asked her to read the first page) and Romeo and Juliet (her request), and which has been a revelation to me after all these years: perhaps the last time I read that play was in high school—it’s so skillful and witty and direct and gets right to the point in plot but beats bawdily around the bush in language and in puns about every three lines. This tutoring has probably been one of the best decisions I have made in retirement, which is, after all, a work-in-progress.

what is your religion?

Samuel Beckett

    This is a question which would not have interested me much at other times in my life, but I had to state my religion on some medical form the other day and realized I had mixed feelings. My first impulse was “Jewish,” then “None.” Then I also wondered what the hell they would do with this information, send a rabbi to bless me while I was giving a urine sample? But it also made me confront a portion of my identity: how do I define myself? And certainly, at least at times, a part of my self-definition is Jewish. But is that a religion? Or is it more like a culture? Or a state of mind, or a preference for haroset in the spring or apples and honey once a year? And like most Jews, I am not observant, and perhaps like most Jews I don’t believe in God (there’s obviously an argument brewing here), or sort of don’t. I’m very drawn to the Beckett character whose line goes something like “O let us pray to God. O, I forgot, the bastard; he doesn’t exist.” And rationally, I conclude, though not very thoroughly or rigorously or convincingly, that there’s not much evidence for God, that the universe doesn’t require a God. And if it does, what’s going to happen when it runs out of steam, and collapses back into itself, in umpteen billion years? But is belief in God the essential element of religion? Reconstructionist Jews don’t necessarily think so. God himself (or itself) is a kind of evasive character in the Judaeo-Christian Bible, answering to various titles, taking various forms, and occasionally arguing with his own prophets, like Jonah.

    Or is religion essentially about morality, about what to do with your life, the kind of ethical questions my sister (and interviewer) poses in some of her blog entries. And Dostoevsky certainly suggested this in The Brothers Karamazov, that without a belief in God, ethics was self-destructive or blind. I don’t believe this, yet I do believe human beings were centrally troubled by many ethical problems, and the idea of God or the belief in God was critical to their thinking on these issues.
    Perhaps it’s clear to the perceptive reader so far that a lot of my thinking (or whatever pseudo-rational term you want to designate for the process in this part of the interview) about religion derives from literary examples; and it’s no accident, since my training was in literature. But it’s intriguing that twice in the Western tradition, major literature began as part of religious celebration, whether in classical Greek drama, or in the medieval mystery plays in England. Take religion and God away and a great deal of very intriguing literature begins to wither—whether it’s Dostoevsky or Beckett or Joyce or Salinger or Faulkner or Updike. It’s certainly the case that great insights in many wonderful literary events are intertwined with religious perception, whether it’s the “small good thing” of simple food offered to a suffering couple in a Raymond Carver story or the religious teaching of the young Jewish religious school student rebelling against his rabbi and teaching his fellow Jews that “it’s wrong to hit people over God” in Roth’s “Conversion of the Jews.”
   I realize I haven’t said much about my own personal religious odyssey, that both my (our) parents were Jewish, that we celebrated Jewish holidays and so forth, that the second year of college I joined a Christian "New Light" group (a Covenant Community) and explored that for perhaps a year, then read a lot of books about Zen Buddhism and met, for about 10 minutes, a zen roshi, and contemplated, for about two seconds, going to Japan and becoming and Zen monk, had my son barmitzvahed, joined a Jewish Reconstructionist group and gradually drifted, still celebrate Christmas (meaning the wife, the tree, the presents, the family Christmas dinner) and Hanukkah (meaning the menorah, the prayers, the presents every night), episodically Passover, for which we still have four raggedy Haggadahs, published originally in 1945.
    I don’t believe in an all-powerful or even a sort-of-powerful deity. I don’t believe in heaven or hell or an afterlife. And yet it seems there’s something behind or within what we do every day that we can’t always explain or articulate. But Pascal believed in God only three out of every five days, and I’m sure my ratio is smaller and more spotty and episodic than that. One of the things I think I learned from Judaism and Zen is that whether God exists, to which philosophers devoted much cleverness in a variety of ontological arguments, is nearly irrelevant; and it’s more important what you do pretty much everyday. That is, in Zen Buddhism and Orthodox Judaism, according to one very dubious authority, the question of whether God exists is met with a kick in the seat of the pants: which is to say, a good religion ought to be emphatic and have a sense of humor, and perhaps even be agnostic.

what do you value, or what do you wish for your country and for citizens of the world?
    I love my country almost as much as I love my family, but I often despair for it. I want, in Ferlinghetti’s words, for it to stand up and fly right. Over the years I’ve taught a short story where the famous lines “My country right or wrong, but my country” get some ironic criticism, but I have thought about them a lot and prefer to understand them as a recognition that a country can often be wrong, but you still care about it for a variety of reasons. I had great respect for my fellow citizens 4+ years ago when they elected a black man as President years before I and many other Americans thought it was possible: and some who voted for him were probably racists but they saw beyond their racism and voted, gee whiz, on merit, and picked the best candidate. I thought they, at that time, made a rational decision (as we often think others are rational when they agree with us) and I have the longing that eventually more of them will see the light and make the rational decision on a variety of issues. The majority have obviously come around and accept and approve of gay marriage: it’s a step in the right direction—of love and commitment and stability—and no threat to those of them not gay. I’d like to see them make some rational decisions in terms of gun violence—can it be that slavish devotion to and misinterpretation of the second amendment is necessary when our country’s rate of violent deaths is many multiples the percentage that of other civilized nations? Similarly, if 20 other developed countries have a medical care system that delivers health and long life to their citizens on a par with or far better than ours and costs as much less as 1/2 what we pay, isn’t that something to look into very deeply? Similarly, what’s the value of a death penalty that keeps 700+ people on death row almost indefinitely (in some cases, 20 years or more), yet doesn’t seem to reduce crime or violence or even provide much satisfaction to families of victims? Oh well, maybe some day....

Copyright © 2013, 2023 by Jonathan Price & Susan C. Price Jonathan Price was a prolific contributing editor from 2012 until 2019, becoming an emeritus in 2020. Susan C. Price was an even more prolific contributing editor until retiring to emeritus a year or two later.