About the imaginary area it was exciting to be somehow in my boyhood terrain and is deeply familiar to me in one thing or another the books are easy to write, i did feel for was enough in the last word and forth book is enough but then i had a half book ten years later. People would murmur robert rabbit when i go by, does not happen too often anymore, im not exactly like him, our books are short in rough background but he stayed and i left is one way to put it. Every ten years readers were treated to look back on the decade filled with historical features of the decade and understanding through his eyes, where you catch me up to date on your reel of america 2005. What did rabbit make of iraq and bush and all that, i really dont know, a lot of robert observation is about the small changes in ease very interested in women and how they dressed and theres been quite a few changes and carried among female dress, he was struck by the rollerskating in the online skating and women began to jog outside, i dont know what he would see now, certainly as he was loyal to nixon during the vietnam years, he happened to be fairly loyal to bush, all passion spent in a way though, you get and the less real news items become. One thing that strikes me as a writer is her computerized the world has become in the 50 years since i been riding in the last 20s, suddenly i feel its almost the first time out of it, i dont really understand how to move around on the internet and i dont dig the lingo, in the first being American Writer and now increasingly locked in to the benefit. My question was not so much how robert wouldve viewed america how youre feeling about the country now. I think iraq is like it wont go away and all the headlines in six more marines killed and its very painful in the sense that its hard to see progress or clear label on objective, i was an adolescent world war ii which had problems we beat the jobs and the not teasing kicked hitler out and now in the more ambiguous and ambivalent world, ive been a democrat all my life and they would not be sorry to see george bush for all of his good qualities, he does not have many good qualities and is able to make contact with the average american in a way not every political candidate put forward by the democrats does, that said i would not be sorry if democrats were elected in 2008 and follow with the elections in 2006. Your current book is a collection of essays on american art but i heard that youre already talking about the book that you finished and sent to the publisher for spring about a terrorist. Is called terrorists its about a terrorist, the only one and its not exactly a thriller, its kind of exciting trillian and its about an 18yearold boy in new jersey who is a product of the mixed marriage and his mother is an Irish American that was kind of flighty and the father a fellow student who abandon her and the boy at his age of three, he has become an ability to the absent father and muslim him hey dont want to tell the hopeful hot i had to feel my way, but i tried to bone up when the areas windows not too familiar and its meant to be a take on terrorism now in the whole world situation, the angry islam and the fact that the world seems more and more painfully divided between the haves and the havenots and if taken the resentment of the u. S. And the general resentment of the third world which is self coping welcoming immigrants and racial minorities, this is europe not america, the world and process in the world that always is. I wonder you mentioned internet and we live in an age of raw information coming out as interested citizens from live reports to raw data on the internet, where does your art sit in for an understanding of the world in a time like this was so much wrong information coming out people. How much raw information gets to me are probably a lot less than it gets to you, i do read the newspaper and i picked it up for my grandparents many years ago and i tried to watch the tv news although i dont always get it to that extent, i try to keep up but im not very politically savvy or interested in a way, i am interested in the american phenomenon in this nation of 200 years plus old and a kind of experiment not kind of i was an experiment when it was created and where is it going to go now as a patriotic really an american even oldfashioned the patriotic one concerned that the world hates us, i dont see much evidence of that in europe but maybe i did not expose myself to it, i was one tourist in their kind of welcome and generally pleasant, i think it is to untrue trutruesite and goodnessn now inside to see you and perhaps its inevitable and no country can remain top dog for over into remain top dog in terms of cars is one thing and morality is another. I think we were a symbol of opportunity and immigrants would still like to come here, more people trying to get in and trying to get out, there is a certain tarnish on everything now that maybe will go away. For those people who are picking up your novel, how did they help them in this world understand this world. It depends a little bit on which novel they picked up, suddenly all of them have some information as far as the texture and the incidentals of life, you cannot write a novel without something that has not been said that we before. That was written with my own experience in a number of americans who were stars of adolescence and i tried to write about one and my father had gathered in many years being a schoolteacher and he would bring back the tales fallen on bad days and robin was a symptom of what might be wrong, its not a terribly gang whole book about eisenhowers america, he feels stuck and a lot of people feel stuck back then in the 50s, some people felt stuck in the 90s, its hard to be human enough to feel someone stuck but it was a kind of being stuck in the book was ambiguous and we seen running but we dont nobodys running to her whats going to happen next and enough people ask me what happened and after ten years no better idea, i tried to write a political book about James Buchanan. I love buchanan and i did a lot of search in the most research ive ever done and i tried to get to understand the atmosphere and the maneuvers and so on and we became very close it seemed to me but i cannot produce the novel i met to produce, something about it struck me as fill me on some deep level, i cannot write it but i wrote a play out of it and am trying to write a novel, was all rather impulsive and lastminute. But the second book received for me are fairly well received committed myself to a set of them, you never know how long youre going to live i might not live to write for what i vote for was about right its meant to be an american life. Let me tell our audience how we can join in, he will be with us for three hours, this is our indepth program and the idea is to involve your questions and comments, if you like to do that by telephone, if you live in eastern half of the United States 202 7370001 mountain or pacific time zone telephone number is 202 7370002. You can also send an email book tv. Cspan. Org the email address or include your questions right away. I guess wed like to get more of your roots on the record before we get to calls from reviewers. I heard you on interview saint pennsylvania is not an ironic place. I said that to susan very impulsively and i dont know quite what i meant except it was a place that it was serious, a lot of the people in my area in pennsylvania were german ancestry and the worth ethic and the german solemnity to it. In earnest yes, there was a rigidity to it in the ironing that has been to my short life in new york and my long life in new england and we dont encounter in pennsylvania. There is humor, if im writing about pennsylvanians much bigger than writing about any other kind of people state wise. Your father was a schoolteacher but the way you described every year he was required at the end of the semester to quit his job. It was during the depression and it was a way of keeping them from rising somehow but it was mentioned in my childhood home and he was a son of the presbyterian minister who had a hard time making a go of that. So my father was haunted what he perceived of a father to american standards and success in enterprise. So he began his postcollege career about being a telephone lineman. He loved to be on the move and he liked climbing the polls, not allowed to climb telephone poles but it was in his, he took up schoolteaching as a result. Sorry getting an elderly throat. He was running scared for much of his life, i dont think they asked him during the war it got sadder and easier and whether they stopped firing him. I remember the figure, he made 1200 a year, not just i and my mother by her parents, all five of us lived on that and what he could make in the summer and i think is my grandfather he was an elderly man also worked. But they were pinched circumstances that i grew up in, when i later talked to my father about it and he apologized for not getting a good bike, the schwinn that he wanted to get me, and i thought it was nice and i had everything that i wanted and i was happy and he said we were poor, that was and beyond to my growing up. He wants to know how you got into writing, your mother i have a photograph of her and yourself, your mother was a masters educated but worked in the local department store. She was very corrosive, she was an only child and it ripped through the Country Schools wherever she grew up which is in southern berks county and was called the normal school, and got out at 15 and she had this record and i dont one partner life of being a writer in the time she was in college and she took a masters to cornell in english lit by walter scott but it was outer canal that she emerged and wish to be a writer. In the magnetism between may 2 parent in the freshman registration remain and they got married at some point in her post tragic life, im not quite clear what happened and it was between my birth in 1932 in their graduation in 23 from her son which is a gap of years and she wanted to be a writer. Her working on short stories and working as a typewriter as one of your earliest memory. I remember being in bed with a fever and if you are sick in bed you got the privilege of being in the front row and that was also where her desk was, there i was and he was a child communicating and i tried to talk to her why she was riding in for her it was severe with me that i stop talking and that was my introduction with the write writers, i watched her type those things and i saw the typewriter that she had a little remington portable in the stacks of paper that she bought, that whole era in the physical thing that interested us but i remember running into the Office Supplies and i remember his stationary store and the kinds of paper and typewriter racers, the pencils and all about having romance for me when i was six, lets say that has remained now that im 72 73 pardon me. But it was the tools and the effort and the pleasure of mailing something that had came back, that was too bad but the notion of being in contact with the writer and still remaining in your cave but you could also send out the feelers to the world at large. We have folks back to talk to ready, this is the magazine the new yorker who is responsible for bringing into the household tell me about the influence of tad on the fx. She was my only sister and she is rather sophisticated and she knew about the new yorker and decided both my mother and i could benefit from a subscription and i think it began to come in the warriors lets say 42 i would say ten and 42, lets say it was 44, at any rate i was impressed by the magazine which was seen much more elegant, the word cool was not around but it was cruel to having an evening post which was a hospital in the refrigerator add and housewives and illustration of stories. I was drawn to even before even for for i was wise enough to read it and i looked at the cartoons and i would be a cartoonist at this point and i fell in love is not too much to say within your worker in my ambition when i came out of college was something to get into the new yorker. Fairly humble ambition but i got a lot of rejection slips already from them so i knew it was not an easy one to crack and it seemed very worthy and the only magazine to aspire to and with magazines, the new yorker as within ambition you get what you pay for and i did, i did get into the new yorker in a bid on it often on into be in closing, last question for calls, explain how it was that catherine right, the new yorker came to you as you were student in england to interview for a new yorker position. The first story in the first poem i wrote after he graduated from harvard in 54 were accepted so i became a contributor and you look very different to the new yorker when ive gotten anything into the magazine because they know it is not easy and that year i was trying to move my writing career forward and they did get a few more stories accepted and a member en vogue and i was very keen to write but it was a stories that show them that i was promising and they happen to be in england and it was not only to see me but not to see me at all but at any rate they both came along every road in oxford and i was in all and it was not real for meeting one mans need for the description and they offered me a job, the new yorker was a proprietary real that can help the magazine and always up for youngblood if you can find it and i was at that point young and promising writer and it was an awesome visit and we had to get babysitter so we can go out to lunch and as we went the job was where most writers began in the talk of the town as a talk of the town reporter and a reporter was somebody who would go out and do the legwork in the interview and a six page account that would be boiled down to the threepage new yorker by one of the Staff Writers and and i was able to write and you had to show up and quite enough for me, then a hundred dollars and that was sent against the stories and it was very pleasant, it turned out to be a job which not every promising fiction writer has but that was it, i love being in new york because thats where he wanted to become a that is where he wanted to be but after two years it was a deadend for my wife and daughter, living in new york is a lot of work and even then and my friends are mostly callings and my wife had very few friends and one thing or another, we are never going to get much Better Writing talk stories in the genre which was a limited genre to in the story of my life, i have the revelation that we should get out of new york and try to live modestly and let me freelance and see if i can do it. Go ahead, i think its my responsibility to push the button in the book you read about your childhood selfconsciousness is a wonderful book and when he left the new yorker, i read once an interview when you wanted to draw your bright for living and that was my first question, the second question, when you first started out in the 1950s, were there any writers who are well known then who have fallen into what is unjustified, people that were big in 1955 and we just dont hear about anymore. Thats a good question, let me tackle the first part, it was the 1950s and i was in my early 20s and it was a possibility and it did not set up to be a novelist and set out to be a cartoonist in four years at harvard and the drawn image in a one to be a magazine writer as a bird you said, and right for the new yorker, this is the sum of my ambition, it was only after several years and i maybe should try to write a novel and americans were expected to land in this is Mount Everest and one novel i was written in the office called home and i showed up early before i did my talk and i would write three pages of this novel but in the end is seen better to let it go, is a youngs persons novel in my life up to then so i abandon that but once i moved to new england and settled down in experimental novel and let me change that, i did and for the first 15 20 years expect them to support me but the trade was to be a magazine writer because they brought in something and they have rather slowly begun as enough, the first novel and the only one which came on 68, as a writer for over a decade in your second question, there was a kind of image they came out of the literary world to make it different now and they wean myself, he was a very gregarious man and in your publisher and the storyteller and he took it upon himself to assemble at the roundtable, ethical lot of the writers are faded and he was not a member of the roundtable in certain writers who required in my vision gotta have one who came from nearby county and he was proof or the pennsylvanian could become a national writer, how many people reader has two read the short stories which are magical into the novelist which are pretty well faded and another writer that is quite big who could do anything and they revived and also his novels were much admired and i dont know how much hes read which is another job reputation but they do subside as one of the conclusions that ive drawn as your life as a human being that is limited and now that we all these are mine we become faded reputations and i dont know if thats true of me or not i treaded not think about it too much in American Writer lives to see himself ridiculed and conned in sudden by younger writers, there is a turnover in the Public Library and whole shelves and the stuff that was very congenial and i went back recently in the same books and of course i was wrong to a turning of their life. My next call comes from san diego, good afternoon. How are you, i always enjoy listening to you, good morning, i have a couple questions, the first ones what in the painted word gave us a negative respon response, you said it was a passive scam but on the back of your book on the upper part of it there is a quote who praises the book but he has been for 20 years promoting a negative aspect in saying the are is dead today and has no meaning for us anymore and how can he remain positive others go so negative in the art and a look at the new book it is mostly some sculptures were long dead, i think the last school i relate to with pop art, it was kind of relief which i was afraid i was not getting and i often went back to new york and then trying to keep up with what was in because it seemed to do what was doing to glorify the ordinary and what theyre really seeing and living among these top artifacts are like nature now, this is our grass and birds, coke bottles and funeral boxes and things like that, since then i cannot argue with the notion that it is drifting into the eclecticism and whats wrong with writing that they have had read too much and theres too much backlog in their heads of the classics or the wouldbe classics and every painter is cautious of all of this that have preceded in the last 100 years or the last 1000 years, in a way it needs a cleansing and from other. In new jersey good afternoon to you. I want to thank him for his for his selfconsciousness in his fiction and how do you feel about your role as a critic and i think you been a very good critic and a fiction writer and ho