On The Same Page; John Jeremy Sullivan

Welcome to on the same page I'm Tommy Sanders were here at that bookstore at mana Bank place in Conway Arkansas and today our book is this one blood horses by John Jeremiah Sullivan It truly is a fascinating book actually a book in three parts one part a memoir about the author's late sportswriter father. The other part a history of the horse in civilization and believe it or not the third part a trip to the races will sit down with a group of Arkansas readers and writers to discuss blood horses in just a few minutes but right now Rex Nelson had the opportunity to sit down with the author at Lawrence and Company bookstore in Little Rock Arkansas to talk about horses. John Jeremiah Sullivan is the author

of Blood horses is the book. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. It's going to be a little rock hard I'm going to get it straight from the all clear is is this a book about fathers and sons is a book about modern thoroughbred racing is it a history of the horse or a collection of the great little tour about the horse through the years. Or is it all of the above. It's a question I was hoping you wouldn't ask me. I think the whole the whole impetus behind the book in a way had to do with the fact that I didn't quite know which of those it it was about the process of writing it was largely about all of those things you mention kind of swimming around together in my head and creating connections with one another and in the end in the end it was clear to me that it was about all of those things and I hope you know if I succeeded also about. About something something separate that was a kind of synthesis. You know but yeah that was it was definitely it's it's it's all over the place in a good way I

hope. Well you're the son of a sports writer which is part of the subtitle of the book How about a sports writer and didn't have the pleasure of knowing your father but boy he reminded me of a lot of people I worked way up and it worked and I was going to say must have been one of those people that could be awfully funny at times an awfully bad thing at times as that's the way of a lot of career sports writers and certainly how my mother would describe them. Yeah he was he was a lot of fun but maddening maddening in the sense that everyone who knew him and and loved him wished that he had taken better care of himself and as I'm sure you know that's another thing that's common to them to the profession it's rough on rough on the body. And it's just it's a hard living. You know it's a hard life style was a great writer though. You talk about some of his strange writing but a lot of the sports writers just the best sports writers I know these these guys produce a litter tour and they did it on deadline. That seemed to be the way of your father and I know he was fortunate not to take up

our interview with a lot of newspaper history but I know he came along when the cool your journal was pretty good it was on but the Bingham family and was really recognized as one of the great newspapers in America and they were they would let people reach a little bit you could take a minor league baseball game and do something a little different because you would just give this go through. It's it is in some ways the last at a lot of papers the last refuge of literary writing that section. And when I grew up what you saw of the Bingham's still in the paper it was getting quoted on the national news on a regular basis and I think it's still a good paper. You know I haven't I haven't been able to say I've been able to keep up with it as much since we left. But don't you know my father was. It's funny when he died after he died. A good friend of his at the Columbus Dispatch belike and Berger sent out an e-mail just kind of as a friendly gesture asking his colleagues to nominate their favorite sentences that my dad had written and I think his intention was to forward them along to us. And just about everybody in the paper had one and they all came back within a couple of days these are things that

have been you know sort of in the frontal lobe. Exactly. He was he was a strange writer but a memorable one. You know he wanted to I think I say in the book his ambition was purely to generate interesting copy and if that meant talking about the game great but if it meant talking about some experience you know in the parking lot before the game that was enough for him. And you write about hanging around in press boxes late at night. The Redbird games long after everybody's cleared out you said there'd be a few drops wander in and try to find some beer with a player but that's that's a very different view of sports you had as a child than most people did. Growing up the son of a sports writer and seeing the the artist do his work if you will after the lights are off and all that actual fans have gone home and as you point out sportswriters aren't fans. It's all if you can be a fairly lonely existence and that was that in some ways is my memory of the arenas and stadiums and places where big sporting events happen is that that pier it's my memories of that period after the game when it's emptied out that the

emptiness and the and the the loneliness. And also the beauty of those spaces as physical spaces in the and of being there with my dad when he was writing. And yeah I think you know it's funny I said I said he's not a fan of The New York Times when they review the book interpret that to mean that he didn't like sports which wasn't what I meant more that his I think the sports writers relation to the game and to the event itself is is more abstract because you know you can't survive emotionally being a fan. And in that job it's just too much exposure to the ups and downs and today it can get very rough if you're if that's your investment in one team winning or losing it's the investment is more in the game as a spectacle and as a as an art form. I think what a book about baseball you're dead is best known as a baseball writer. Well horseracing. You'd have to ask the horse. I don't know. I don't you know it part partly it's the the. The

irony of the fact that my last conversation with my father ended up being about Secretariat's Derby in 73 Needless to say I don't know that's the last thing he was ever going to say to me but it turned out to be. And I think part of my task in writing the book was answering those questions why. Why had this event stuck in his memory so indelibly when when in fact he as you say had been much better known as a baseball writer and certainly seen a lot more baseball games and seen some great moments take place and you know on one baseball you know on the field. But it's also that the horse as a symbol always seems to want to stand in where death is concerned and where absence is concerned and that's not that's not a discovery of mine it's just something that I think is is that you find repeatedly in in literature and art. And so I was surprised myself at the way the ways in which these things started to sort of. To to to co-exist and to spark off of one another and that became that became the

the sort of the the journey in writing the book was to try to answer that try to try to figure that out I don't think I ever did but it is obvious to anybody who reads the book in addition to loving your dad you've you've come to love the sports you've come to love the horse Secretariat that he was talking about. I really enjoyed how you get about having these old grainy clips of Secretariat's three Triple Crown victories on your computer and calling them up and listening to the call of the great chick Anderson. Some of our older viewers here in Arkansas a member of pre Terry Wallace chick Anderson was the voice vocal on park is that wrings Arkansas was part of the circuit he did around the country when the Oakland mate was just that and you write about the tremendous machine called in the Belmont which is which is one of the most famous audio clips in sports history. But you're going to love the sport and then love that horse did you not enjoy it as it were. It's hard not to love or not to be in all of physical perfection I

think it's rare that nature gets around to making something that perfect and. Yeah those the clips that I had of his derby and of chick Anderson's call were in a way spoke to me of the remove I was out from secretariat and from that year it had taken place before I was born and sort of experiencing at that in that in that sort of grainy low fi context it just I don't know it struck me somehow that of the Harpers assignment that led into this come about they say this guy used to live in Kentucky must know about horses or that's how things work sometimes the tendency in New York's to think of Kentucky as a foreign country so I think they felt they were kind of you know sending me on a foreign assignment but you know I. Lewis Lapham at Harper's was always very encouraging of younger people in the stuff you wanted to write and he there was an open invitation essentially and I initially just said that I wanted to write about the derby as a spectacle and maybe write about my hometown. But this conversation I've had with my

father was in there knocking around two things that I was coming across in my reading and and almost without my really being aware that it was happening I was building this structure in my head and then the process of writing the book. It was partly one of true of tracing that you know you're sort of getting it down and fixing it somehow before you began work on the article did you have in your mind I'm going to write a book or did the book kind of flow out of the water. In all honesty I didn't realize I was going to write a book until I'd already written one in some ways I mean the oracles assigned to 5000 words and I wrote it out I think to find the draft I handed in to Harper's was forty six thousand So already a short book. And you know a lot of times when you read a magazine article you're right long because you're trusting your editor pre-New about it but I found that a lot of the material I had to lose to to make the piece short enough to run in Harper's was in fact essential to the way I saw the project. And luckily FSG agreed and in fact they asked for

another 25000 words. There was there was a month when I was cutting an outing at the same time sort of a schizophrenia month there. It's a great book on so many levels I mean for anybody interested in Kentucky itself in the south I think it's got a history book in a cultural book and I don't know if I had an aunt and uncle who lived many years and Lobel and I always love Lexington also but I always thought of Lexington as a Southern city and level as a northern industrial city even though there's less than an hour apart and you point out some of those differences in the book. Yeah yeah. It's when Lexington are two poles of my consciousness I guess in a way I mean I grew up constantly shuttling between them and those differences were made very very real to me and there's a saying about will which I quote in the book which is that Southerners call it the southern most northern city you Northerners call it the northern northern most southern city it has this strange. It occupies a kind of. Limbo like

space almost or it's regionally confused and as a result I think I grew up pretty regionally confused not knowing which I was. And yet this great sport of thoroughbred racing ties them together. Keeneland you describe as the Vatican of American horse racing and of course the great farms there but of course the Derby the great spectacle spectacles in lieu of all the first Saturday ever. So they're kind of tied together that's it and I don't like Lexington's like to think that you know we we go to Louisville for the big show TV people come and that's where it gets crazy but then we retreat back to Lexington and you know this is our this is the sort of sanctum sanctorum you know. Now how would a tough question I know but how would your father have reviewed this book do you think if he were writing or writing a book with it that is a really good question. I like to think he. I know I know he would have enjoyed the parts about about racing with the material about him. I'd like to think that he'd be honored by it. There are places where he'd disagree with me

but what I tried to concentrate on was making sure that when I was talking about his life and criticizing his life choices he made. I tried to always take into consideration his own version of him of himself and of his life in the way he saw himself and make clear that I was you know that I was disagreeing with him and not not trying to sort of undermine him by writing or writing a story of his life that he wouldn't he wouldn't have recognized. So I think you'd have liked it but I don't. I don't know you know that's that's that was one of the. Painful things and I guess you say in the book and I know this is the way with a lot of fathers and sons no matter what their profession you never read much of his stuff till after he was gone. That's true. It was just it was just too familiar it was one of those things it's so obvious that it's invisible to you I mean his stories were coming out every morning you know and there would be mornings when I'd come downstairs and my mother would be at the table laughing about something he'd written and I'd get to hear it read out loud but it was mostly something that other people talked

to me about I mean that sports writer sons one of the tough things about being sports writer son is and your school years your teachers are always or always you always have one teacher who's sort of perpetually ticked off about something that you know something or Ted's written or a perspective your dad's taken on one of the teens you know so I would have to come in and hear about oh you know your dad was wrong about that play in the eighth inning it was a good call and that sort of thing and it just you know it all the sort of you know all the sort of blew past me so it was one of the it was one of the best things about writing this book was just getting to spend time with his prose and it was a way of spending time with him again. That impose on you to read a very short segment of the book. Now I'd be delighted to. I would love to hear that. This is a section. In fact I'm describing watching those clips that you were talking about the little Internet clips of Secretariat's three races.

It's in a section called the cold. Once more I put on my headphones and click on the sorry little clips in my ears I hear the calls. Once more I close my eyes and watch them run the Derby the Preakness the Belmont Stakes one thousand seventy three. I listen to Chuck Anderson as he struggles and fails in the human way to describe perfection to describe what no one had ever seen and what no one there would ever see again. And still the old question hangs over it all why why did he run as he did with no one forcing him or even urging him with no one or thing to defeat anymore with no punishment waiting for him. If he slowed for this morning at least at last the answer is clear. It requires no faith. He ran that way I know because he could and we cannot. One does not. If one is beauty have to know what beauty is.

I hope we've convinced our viewers to write out read this book if we've succeeded at our mission the interview will end here. Thank you very much. All right we are ready to go with our discussion of blood horses want to introduce our panelist for you here first off we'll start with Mark Smirnoff who is the editor and publisher of The Oxford American literary publication now based here in Conway Arkansas at the University of Central Arkansas. You know Keogh is a writer based in central Arkansas as well as also on the talent committee which brought the author in the town with the literary festival which allowed you that that interview there so thanks for that. We appreciate that. Jason Moore he was a writer and a musician here in central Arkansas who actually wrote the review I believe for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette of blood horses. Thank you all for being here today and I guess we could start by addressing the same thing that Rex did in by asking

what sort of animal are we talking about here what kind of book is this we'll start with. Well I think the heart and soul of this book is his relationship with this father to mean that's what resonated the master. But then of course you've got. I think it's a book about history it's the history of the Father and the son the history of racing in the history of horses and and they all kind of collide together and into this one you think you successful and making them collide together and make sense together and build on each other. I think so I think some of the threads are very subtle and you have to pay attention sometimes especially if there was one point where he was talking about a Lexington well digger. And at some point if you really had to work to see where where's he going with this and so. But but overall I think he was very successful. What we deal with what kind of book is it Jason. Well I think he's doing a couple Lou's doing using a lot of things that would be weight

structured as like two to four to six page passages. Some of them dealing with his relationship with his father which is very straightforward and that alternating sort of after a personal passage will do one thing out of left field. Similarly. About the history. Something relating to the history of the horse and sort of like this. And you know I thought I believe John when he was in town describe it maybe it might've been a result of his attention deficit disorder or something. The way the book is structured. But it's this cumulative effect that that that really grips as you read the book and it's it's very suggestive and it's sort of sly and can be challenging because you will start to read about something that you know you have no idea where he's going where he's taking you or why you don't really know if you want to go there. But it's a really unique animal. Yeah it really is. Mark what's your take on. Well.

Solving the literary hero is another Kentucky name guy Davenport in fact Sullivan interviewed Devonport for the Paris Review. And to me there's a very telling Devonport quote in the book which phrases all art is a dance from form to form. And I think Sullivan took that to heart and he. Dances from form to form in the sense that he experiments with looking at his subject from as many angles as he can think of which is why you find the discussion of painting of toys of a lot. Yeah yeah. So he is working for freedom here. I mean he doesn't feel constrained by the standard tone of a memoir or the structure of a of a novel or something like that would give us. Are there any comparable books that our

readers or listeners might be familiar with right now that you can bring to mind that you would compare with this book. Well this is of God or come to mind. Goalie that this is not some some people have said you know what Melville did a lot of the same thing you know in Moby Dick all this arcana about whaling and shipping and so forth along with the story and so forth and we get guys like you know I guess David Foster Wallace with footnotes of take up half the page you know and things like that but it's it what it seems to do is it makes a little daunting as Jason pointed out you don't know where he's taken you and you really have to sort of have to stick with it and it kind of comes around after a while would you say Jane. I think it does I think like you said it's a cumulative effect and I think it's almost as if once you finish the book and you start going back over the different sections and maybe things that didn't seemed jarring while you were reading it you can kind of go back and think about the whole framework and say OK I can cut.

I see where where the threat is or where he's going with this and so it's it reminds me of another book called The Marriage of Cadmus and harmony and I can't remember the author unfortunately but he took the great myths and kind of it gave an explanation of them and then showed how they reverberated throughout the world and in different themes in different parts of history and I get that same sense that with this book as well. Well that you were referring to about the seemingly. Unkillable Kentucky and Sullivan is a cannot tell you this is about as sort of a metaphor for how my father lived hard. But you sort of after another 50 pages say it occurs to you so that's a strength I think of the book is that it's very suggestive and very interpretable. I mean I think some people can read it as a book just about horses or a book about losing a loved one which is a song I think is a big strength and I think a lot of people were going to read the book and I'm

probably one of them and think that the real heart of it is the memoir about his father. And do you think his his approach to his father is one of total admiration or do you think maybe it's sort of a little bit of a little bit of everything thrown in. I understand what you're all saying about the discussion of John's father may be the centerpiece of this book. For me it was. How the house all of them felt compelled to be so thorough and curious in the way they research the subject and you always just see this mind at work trying to and this curiosity at work just go into the subject you think is going to overachieve or solve and turned into forty thousand words on the $5000 Simon. Yeah like you said and yet another layer that's in there is. Is this another sort of survey of Lexington and Louisville and the

people who live there. That's a that's yet another element that's drawn any and he gets in some pretty interesting stuff to go on there as well when you said I think so I think there is kind of such a dichotomy in the southern consciousness between the inbred hillbilly and then the other the blue bloods that act like royalty and try to distance themselves as much as possible from the other stereotype to the point where they can almost seem to like. Space of themselves and so I think you did a great job of juxtaposing asked him. Has anyone else tried the Sullivan betting system. Let me think and I had actually asked him when he was in town to sort of explain it more in depth so you won't try to rob wrote about even our under you that actually. Yeah yeah yeah actually to be totally frank corrodes not I get a shot at a local I don't and he weren't in

really alarmed to me said Wait number four you start using the system. You've got to know something's a really broken down I got this really long email from him. After weeks and weeks later just like here's really the system doesn't really go in as I would have liked more of the betting system than the boy you placed your bet right. Yeah absolutely Well now that you know the real story. Get a second money try it one more time. Juveniles is the key. Yeah OK. To the rescue. Yeah and maybe I got lost on us that the juveniles are the 3 year olds Are they younger than 3 and younger than 3. Before wrap it up I guess we have to all agree was kind of a well timed release of a book on his part with all of the high profile the Seabiscuit the book in the movie the Triple Crown attempt for a Smarty Jones this year and everything so it's maybe that's garnered some extra attention as well. I think it most of it as you mentioned earlier Mark has been favorable from critics. It is a literary trial. Well there's no doubt the solver as a great writer.

And this is first book so that's very excited and he's he's original. It seems until you mention Moby Dick I can't think of any book that was quite like this in its structure. His original thing and it's certainly well worth a look I think it may be slow going at first but I think it would agree if you will stick with it it's really quite fascinating and a great memoir three books in one. It's kind of what I think about is called blood horses. John Jeremiah Sullivan is the author I want to thank Mark smear not Jason Morphew for coming here talking about this this really neat book thank you for joining us on the same page. But is this really your home doing as

you say doesn't feel good right.