Virtual Memories Show 631:
David Shields
“I’m not a sociologist, I’m not a political scientist, I’m not a historian; I’m just a writer and half a thinker.”
Author David Shields returns to the show for a conversation about his new documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE, and the companion book, HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon (Sublation Media). We get into how the world moved from the death of God to the death of essence to the death of truth, and how deconstruction, once the province of left-wing academia, was weaponized by right-wing authoritarians for political aims. We talk about how much blame he bears for all this with his 2010 book Reality Hunger, how it feels to be a radical with deep skepticism of radicals’ language, his affinity for Werner Herzog’s notion of the ecstatic truth in documentary films, what he learned from interviewing nonfiction writers about the nature of truth, and how he feels about going to his first WWE event. We also discuss nonlinear warfare and the endless deconstruction of reality, how writing can “build a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness” (per DFW), what he’s learned from the collaboration of making documentaries, his fixation on hamartia (the tragic flaw), Walter Benjamin’s notion of pursuing the truth even if we’ll never reach it, bringing the public, social and personal worlds together in his writing, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon and A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk Into a Trump Rally!
(And go listen to our 2019a, 2019b, and 2020 conversations.)
“‘How did we get here?’ is the precondition for the question, ‘How do we get out of here?'”
“Exploring my own weaknesses is my thing.”
“The New York Times is an interesting tracer dye for what the Overton Window of discourse can accept.”
“The president fascinates me as a personal essayist gone wrong.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, LitHub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.
The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, Shields—a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions—has published essays and stories in New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, HuffPost, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.
The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 (available now as a DVD on Prime). Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (streaming on Prime, Peacock, AMC, Sundance, Apple, and several other platforms).
Go listen to our 2019a, 2019b, and 2020 conversations.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at a hotel room in Brooklyn on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of David by Tom Collicott. It’s on my instagram.
and 
), the author who started him on his path, his balance between writing fiction and essays, how readers read and misread his work, his methods for fusing the personal and the critical, why students should read some of his essays before taking his classes, whether he considered going Hollywood, why and how he assembled 
anthology, and who his favorite New York Met is. (I was surprised by his answer to that last one.)
, 
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, 
, and 
,, as well as several novels and novellas, and three poetry collections, and has edited several anthologies, including 
. His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He is the director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing. His two most recent books are the personal essay collection 
mics feeding into a 
. The intro and outro were recorded in my home office on a 
. File-splitting is done on a Mac Mini using Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Top photo by me. Bottom photo by Cheryl Cipriani.