“I aspire to dread . . . ” begins June’s online short story, “Knausgaard in Space.” And with these words, we knew author Tyler Stoddard Smith had nailed the Nordic icon and we were in for something very funny. And boy, did we need it. Here we talk Weird Al, the legendarily awkward meeting between Knausgaard and Jeffrey Eugenides, and the potential hilarity of having no escape.
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Erin McReynolds: This story is hysterical; do you have a background in improv or writing parody or something?
Tyler Stoddard Smith: Thank you! I have no background in improv. I’m a masochist, like all writers, but improv I think takes something fantastically unique, which is being able to stand up in front of people you don’t know and trying to be clever without soiling yourself out of fear. Just thinking about it now makes me nervous.
I have written some parody, but I try not to do it too much, because I think in the end, the parodist is often just killing time, waiting until he/she is parodied him/herself for writing things close to their own heart. That’s the dream, isn’t it? To be so relevant that people want to poke fun at you. And you can’t really parody a parody unless . . . unless, nothing. Can you imagine somebody doing a send-up of Weird Al? The cosmos (much less the public) couldn’t take that kind of self-annihilating inanity.
EM: That’s a great way to put it: “to be so relevant that people want to poke fun at you.” Did you ever see the episode of 30 Rock where they try to write a song that’s impossible for Weird Al to parody, and they end up writing a ridiculous song about farting, but he turns it on them and writes this moving patriotic anthem?
TSS: I’m trying to think of somebody who is relevant that nobody pokes fun at, but I can’t really. Even the most benevolent folks around, if exposed enough, they take heat. Which is as it should be.
I haven’t seen that 30 Rock episode—I’ve been without a TV for about seven years now, but not because I’m holier-than-thou. It’s because, if given the opportunity, I’ll watch Law & Order reruns and play old-school, gray-box Nintendo games until my eyes cross.
Speaking of Weird Al, the older I get, the more I respect his art. Should I say that? I’m going to say that. He’s got more staying power than almost everybody except, like, the Rolling Stones and Henry Kissinger.
EM: I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t respect Weird Al . . . and I may or may not have a DVD of all his videos. Also that old-school, gray-box Nintendo. When did you decide to write a Knausgaard (literal) send-up?
TSS: I’d just read his piece in the NY Times magazine about his (mis)adventures in Russia. I’d already loved his piece on America, where he sits around smoking cigarettes and clogging up toilets throughout the Midwest, hamstrung over what/why he was writing the piece, and thought: What if they sent him to space? All of his anxieties would be amplified, and the claustrophobia of the environment (space) is kind of inherently funny.
My favorite writing conceit in the world is when people aren’t getting along, but have no means of egress—from a room, a marriage, a job, a spaceship, etc. It’s divine comedy. From Jane Austen to Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel to Evelyn Waugh‘s The Loved One . . . you can’t beat that bathos.
EM: Okay this gives me a morbid idea: what three authors, living or dead, would be hilarious/awful in a house together for eternity, a la Sartre’s No Exit?
TSS: Yes! I’ve always wanted to be asked this kind of question. We already know that Knausgaard meeting Jeffrey Eugenides was a huge bust, and both of their accounts of the awkward meeting are great. Eugenides tries to enlist Knausgaard in a coffee klatch with no success, because Knausgaard just sits there and says nothing. Later, Eugenides writes to him and says the meeting was a bad idea and that he (Knausgaard) shouldn’t reply and basically apologizes in the way Americans are always apologizing for things. Karl Ove is confused and says something to the effect of “I don’t talk to people I don’t know. Nobody in Sweden does.” It’s such a painful, awkward, and true kind of moment that exposes all the wonderful ways in which communication is relative.
But to answer the question, I think you couldn’t go wrong with an eternity of Colson Whitehead kicking the shit out of Richard Ford while Dorothy Parker pours the drinks.
EM: Great answer. And that Eugenides anecdote is spectacular. Why do we find Karl Ove Knausgaard so funny?
TSS: He is, like all of us, torn and tortured by the minutiae of life, but he’s the best (in my opinion) at articulating the absurdity—and very real comedy—at the heart of all our anxieties.
There’s a great Mel Brooks line: “Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.” Knausgaard stubs his toe all the time, and he’s also always on the lookout for open manholes and almost welcomes the idea of falling in. It’s a rare trick, being able to do both and keep your head. Nobody does it better.
Sometimes I wonder how much of this I am basing on his very, very earnest author photo, where he’s looking into your soul and smoking and everything. He demands to be taken very seriously. Then he writes ten pages about tea and saucers, or he clogs a toilet and we’re in the middle of an extended, existential poop joke.
EM: You’re quite the serious writer, as well, though. Can you talk about your work with The Telling Project?
TSS: The Telling Project has been such a wonderful divergence from any kind of typical writing I’ve ever done. We interview veterans and, from their responses, I’ll craft a dramatic “play,” so to speak, from those transcripts. I’ll mine narrative threads and take (verbatim) from the responses the vets give us, and from that, the vets themselves will perform the dramatic rendering, usually at a local theater, although we’ve done productions at Lincoln Center and other, larger venues.
Through their performance, the veterans and military family members can share their stories with their communities, which really helps bridge the civilian/military divide in a novel way. It takes every last bit of that stupid writer-ego I have out of the equation, and makes me realize how valuable art can be as an anodyne to intolerance and misunderstanding.
EM: What are you working on now?
TSS: A historical novel centered on the Siege of Leningrad, which I hope will one day be published and taken seriously and then lampooned mercilessly, assuring me a kind of immortality.
EM: I mean, that is the dream, right? What drew you to that particular event?
TSS: I was reading somewhere about how the composer Shostakovich composed his 7th Symphony to honor Leningrad during the siege. It’s an amazing story. The Russians had to fly the score in under German attack. The whole city was starving and at the brink of death, and this rag-tag symphony is put together—the score calls for like 50+ musicians, many of whom could barely breathe much less have the stamina to play the piece. The first movement alone is 30 grueling minutes of exhausting work for a hardy musician.
Anyway, I thought I’d write about that, and I’d started to, when a book came out about that very thing, so I ran an audible on myself and just started writing characters of various types and wrote them through the siege. The symphony doesn’t figure into my novel, but the city and the resilience of the people during the siege kept me interested.
Plus, Westerners aren’t really exposed to what happened on the Eastern Front in WWII and what happened in Leningrad—it’s a really compelling testament to the human spirit. While Hitler laid waste to the city from the outside, Stalin and his minions did their damndest to wreck it from the inside, through paranoia and terror. And yet, the city survived to reemerge stronger than ever. There are some interesting parallels happening at this moment in our country, so I’ve tried to explore the situation in Leningrad in the context of the US today.
Tyler Stoddard Smith’s writing has been featured in McSweeney’s, Esquire, UTNE Reader, Tin House, and Texas Monthly, among others. He is also an associate editor at The Nervous Breakdown and The Big Jewel. By day, he is a writer for The Telling Project, a national performing arts nonprofit that uses theater to deepen civilian understanding of the military experience.