Jonathan Lethem

But What If We're Wrong is a book of original, reported, interconnected pieces which speculate on the likelihood that many universally accepted, deeply ingrained cultural and scientific beliefs will someday seem absurd.

Chuck Klosterman cites original interviews with a wide variety of thinkers and experts, including George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater.

A flashback to episode 423, my conversation with Chuck Klosterman, is coming up.

A quick reminder here at the top of the show that the Other People podcast turns 15 years old on Monday, September 14th, and I would love for you to mark the occasion by sharing your favorite episode or favorite episodes on social media, and then say a couple of words about why you picked it.

i think like yeah and i wasn't married to that being a trilogy it was i said all these questions were leaping off points but to roberta's points about the collage and the fragmentation um during that presentation rob virginio and i kept looking at each other and saying how is he not a modernist Like, you know, because modernization, modernism is all about fragmentation and kind of taking the fragments and putting them back together.

And Jonathan Lethem says that this album seems to survey a broken world through the prism of a heart that's worn and worldly.

And so then we look at the broken world and he's putting it back together and all these pieces with the diversity of the musical influences and the literary, cultural, historical influences.

And we do get, like I said, a bricolage or a collage that in effect layers all of the different, like you're saying, old timey, like all, all of the things to the 18, you know, to the 1800s through the 20th century, where he's layering those illusions for us to kind of pull apart.

I'm going to hold you to that.

I'm not going to not read the next Jonathan Lethem novel.

I'm going to hold you to that.

Okay, well, because I still haven't

When we did the Ed Park ep- uh, season and we talked to him, he mentioned this book as, like, this great book, this big, fat book, and I had the Kindle version probably from that day, and JFK's face is on the cover.

So I was like, "Oh, maybe I should read this." And I am gonna tell you that this introduction, it's got an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, who was friends with David Bowman, who died tragically young.

That introduction might be the best introduction I've ever read to get you involved-

Hm

Nobody...

Unless your name was Jonathan Franzen or Jonathan Lethem or something.

Nobody was sitting at home.

Very few people were sitting at home writing, you know, getting paid to write essays.

Just became super obsessed with that.

I think his performance, Jonathan Lethem just wrote an amazing essay for it, for the Criterion.

on their website and says that's his greatest performance.

I'm wondering if it's actually in the box set.

Um, and then it wasn't really, um, un- until even maybe a decade after that, that I, I, I came across, um, Philip K. Dick.

Um, and I had, uh, I came across him because I was reading Jonathan Lethem's book, um, Gun, With Occasional Music, which is a book I love.

Um, and there were just...

I think one of the blurbs mentioned Philip K. Dick, and I'd heard about him a lot and thought about him.

Your video- There you are ... you go.

[laughs] I'm sorry about that.

It's cool, um, Brian, that you found PKD through Jonathan Lethem, because Lethem is just a glorious dickhead, um, in, in many ways.

Yeah.