I think art is not to be useful. It’s to be interesting or stirring or funny, confusing or any number of other things.
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 8, 2009.
Jonathan Lethem has said his novel Chronic City (2009) is about "a circle of friends that includes a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghostwriter of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange." Journalist Victoria Lautman and Lethem consider those characters to be "like the stoner Knights of the Round Table in search of a chaldron, like the cast of Seinfeld run through Darth Vader training camp." She and Lethem tease out motifs of slippery near-truths and pop-culture supertasters in a beyond-believable Manhattan.
