2DM Blogazine

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Guest Interview n° 39: Paul Holdengraber 2/2

Last week we kicked off the first part of a lengthy conversation with Paul Holdengraber, the New York Public Library’s dexterous Director of Public Events. A master conversationalist, Holdengraber continues to redefine the role of public discourse with his program “LIVE from the NYPL” and, more recently, The Paul Holdengraber Show. Conversations can run the gamut from pre-war Vienna and psychoanalysis (with Eric Kandel) to Americana, Poppers and Johnny Mathis (with John Waters). He’s held court with the likes of Chris Blackwell, William Kentridge, and Javier Marías; upcoming talks include Van Cliburn, Jesmyn Ward, and Slavoj Zizek.

See upcoming events from LIVE From the NYPL here. Watch The Paul Holdengraber show here.

Below is Part II of Holdengraber’s conversation with 2DM’s Lane Koivu. Read Part I here.

You think that tradition [of oratory discussion] is dwindling for my generation?
Well you are substantially younger than I am, but I partake in part of your generation in part I suspect, because I have a little machine of torture sitting there, and we’re all in the city walking around as if praying in front of some wall with this machine and people are constantly―though not that much, considering how much they do it―bumping into each other. But when you walk around the city all you see is people with their Blackberrys. Wherever they are―in restaurants―carrying on a romance or a conversation while sitting next to somebody. I think all of that maybe lessens the art of conversation.

Do you think information is lessened? Or do you think it’s for nothing?
I don’t know exactly.

Let’s talk about your research process.
It’s a mixture of many things. Just as you came in here I was with my research assistant. I have a research assistant who helps me greatly. Anthony.

But basically I spend an enormous amount of time reading. As much time as I possibly can thinking about [the subject]. And then I construct in my mind the arc of the conversation. What I like to talk about is an organized web of obsessions. Just before you came in, Anthony said “Where do you think you’ll start?” And I said, “I think in this particular place, we’ll start square in center, with Vienna that he left at age 11, and the Vienna that my father, who’s 93 years old, both my parents are Viennese and left Vienna to spend the war years in Haiti, where my father left after his second year of medicine. And what promises Vienna still offers us as today a model for knowledge, and what was destroyed with the assassination and destruction of the Viennese and other Jews in Europe. I think I want to make it rather personal at that moment and bring my own body into the conversation. I’m not an impartial interviewer. I bring my own personality and sense of self into it. When you came to Werner I wasn’t absent, I was there. Hopefully I didn’t interrupt him but brought to the conversation my own experience. Some things I didn’t know. I don’t know about linear B, I don’t know what he was talking about.

But you manage steer it back to the focal point of the conversation.
Well, I try.

It can’t be easy with someone like Werner Herzog.
Unless you’re in Iceland for five hours. So the preparation is very important. It’s a bit like theatre in that there’s so much more behind the scenes. I had 120 clips and images ready for Werner. I had what he taught me, which is: Never give names, only give numbers. 17, 12, 19, 55, so that any people can get the clip right. Because also―like you―when you talk to someone you don’t want to constantly be in your notes. But you’re going to need some things.

That’s what I noticed watching you: you never look down.
Very little. As little as possible. The goal is to arrive on stage with nothing. When I grow up, that’s what I’d like. But as little as possible. With John Waters, that was just… he was so wonderful. There another case. I just fell in love with the book. It was like Patti Smith’s. Reading “Just Kids” or reading “Role Models”, I just love it.

With “Role Models”, it’s very conversational writing. It’s almost as if he’s in the room. And the way he brought up Leslie Van Houtan and the Manson murders.
Oh, God! Yeah. It’s amazing that you remind me of that, because in a way he tests the limits of empathy. He manages to make you understand a person so dissimilar from you. Which is not unlike my fascination for someone like Jay-Z. I mean, what do I know? I know nothing about hip-hop. But somehow “Decoded” got me to understand a world I didn’t know. I never listened to hip-hop until very recently. In the fall I interview Peter Townshend. So what do I know about that world? Nothing. But I’ll discover everything. And what a joy. So I always say, using the line of a famous Italian historian named Carlo Ginzburg, he always says that he approaches his subjects with a euphoria of ignorance. That’s exactly it: you know very little and then it becomes euphoric just to learn about it.

So each time I approach a subject with as many possible tools for understanding what it is the writer, filmmaker or musician wants to express. And I put myself in the position of you, the audience. What do you want to know? You try as you close your eyes the night before in a sheer utter panic and anxiety, because I feel it each and every time. People say, “Oh, it must be so easy.” Are you kidding? It’s terribly difficult. Consider this person here, Eric Kandel, 82 years old, a Nobel Prize. Well, he’s talking to me. What do I know? Speaking to Harry Belafonte. He is a man whose work’s behind him. Not that he doesn’t have enormous work in front of him. But such an incredible life, such an incredible story. What do people want to know? What are the claims on his story that we want to bring out?

You possess an endless curiosity that is central to your work.
Yes, the more interests we have the more interesting we are.

You often say, “Digression is the sunshine of narrative.”
Yeah, it’s sort of my favorite line, I never can’t use it. I’ve said it many times because it’s certainly the way my mind works. When we start to talk, things fall out of our pocket. We talk and the sheer power of continuity and serendipity enliven a conversation. You go by many roads to arrive at some point. The side road, the back road, is often so much more interesting than just straight on.

Are you more concerned with a conversations end, or just the beginning?
The arc of the conversation when I think of it is the beginning and the end. I knew where I started with Werner, and I knew where we would end. And Werner loves endings, so you may have noticed that he nearly got up. He doesn’t want anything beyond that. He knows that we’ll take it up again. I try not to go beyond two hours. [Pulls out a metal stopwatch] I always have this on the table next to me. Always. And about ten minutes before the two hours, I might say something like “In closing,” just to give the audience a sense of relieve that they can go and have dinner. And you also need to leave people hungry.

When you construct a conversation, is it all in your head?
What I’m trying to figure out between now and Wednesday is, “What is the thread?” So I can’t quite say. The process is hard to answer, because it’s a mixture of taking notes, of course. I do believe there’s a relationship between one’s head and one’s brain. I do write by hand, and with a fountain pen.

You don’t write on the computer?
I mainly take notes. And then I try to dissociate myself from them, not to have them too much. Another way of putting it would be, I try not to be too worried. Or perhaps not to be worried at all by the next question. You know, here you are in my situation. You know, “Holdengraber’s going to finish saying something, what do I ask him?”

Yes!
You know that situation―I know that situation. It’s an uncomfortable one when it’s predominant and when it dominates. Partly because when you have this great tool here you don’t have to be too worried that you miss something because it’s there. But in a live conversation there ain’t nothing, except my mother’s favorite comment: two ears, one mouth. The only thing you have is to listen to the person. So when I talk about the arc I try to relax; well, I don’t relax at all I’m completely on edge, but I try to be as porous as possible, and not let the anxiety get in the way of dictating what it is I need to move on to. And also not to be too afraid, and that’s really hard.

Are you thinking of your audience?
I’m trying to forget them, and in the good conversations they’re no longer there. You saw with Werner, it’s very palpable. But I don’t want this relationship of distancing, I want to be as close with someone else as I can and talk to them. You and me, we could have done this interview over the phone, and I’ve done plenty of interviews over the phone, but I think there’s a difference.

I wanted to ask you about influences, but I think that could take a lifetime to sort through.
Partly, I will say that I was brought up in a culture of conversation and dialogue. A lot of it happened around the kitchen table arguing with my parents. My parents together now are 180 years old―93 and 87. And I grew up in a world where ideas and trying to sustain an argument was important. And so I think the influence came from that world in no small part. From a world where what mattered is also the stories you could tell. Among world literature there’s so many things. I find myself so catholic in my tastes, and they go all over the place now. As I grow older I am more and more interested in things that people might have discovered when they were very young. The fact that I discovered Patti Smith when I’m 51 when most people listened to her when they were fifteen. At least now since I turned 52 I can look 25. I’m catching up very quickly.

What’s a day in the life of the NYPL Director of Public Programs?
It varies so much. It’s a mixture of discovering what is new and worthwhile, a mixture of reading and preparing for an event, of listening to something that has come my way, like talking to the city of Geneva and talking to Harry Belafonte and then seeing if I can make an arrangement to meet so and so; organizing a trip to go to France to visit Claude Lanzmann, to coming back from a board meeting from a Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, which I just did. It’s so many different things, and speaking to so many different people. It’s never predictable, there are no two days are ever the same. But it is very idea-driven, it’s very much, even like the conversation we have now, it’s the substance of what I’m trying to accomplish. I’m always in the mixture of thinking, who I can pair with who. If I do this, when will I do it, who will I bring, would it be exciting to do events that are more scientifically inclined? Conversation begets conversation. I’m constantly on the go of talking. I spend a lot of time talking.

It suits you well.
It would seem. Even with my cold, I am still able to talk my way through a day.

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Guest Interview n° 39: Paul Holdengraber

You know you’ve made it when Paul Holdengraber asks to speak with you. An ever-curious intellectual with a quick tongue and wry sense of humor, the New York Public Library’s Director of Public Events has through the years worked to establish himself as the renaissance man of public discourse. With “LIVE from the NYPL” he’s created a world in which the most forward minds of our time to talk about, well, you name it: literature, art, the death penalty, psychoanalysis, whether or not the 20th century was a mistake, the founding of Def Jam Records, the role of God today, Vienna in 1900. His goal, he says, is simply “to make the lion’s roar and shake the foundations of this massive institution.” If only our Congress had people like him.

Before coming to New York Holdengraber was the founder and director of the Institute for Art and Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and since joining the Library in 2004 he’s held court with heavyweights like Christopher Hitchens, John Waters, Brian Eno, Errol Morris, Paul Auster, Jay-Z, David Chang, Norman Mailer, Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, and Werner Herzog. A master of conversation, he believes―like Laurence Stern before him―that sunshine is the digression of narrative, and his interviews are applauded for deviating from the road well-traveled into deep and unfamiliar corners of the mind.

Last January he kicked off The Paul Holdengraber Show, a thirty minute program that finds him debating with the likes of David Chang, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Colum McCann. As always with him, there are many more people to come, many more subjects to explore. 2DM met up with Paul at the NYPL recently to talk about his work, the role of libraries, and why everyone should be reading at least twenty-eight hours a day.

See upcoming events from LIVE From the NYPL here. Watch The Paul Holdengraber show here.

I recently came to Werner Herzog, and you two spoke as if you’d known each other your entire lives.
Yes. We’ve spoken five times and each and every time it’s a wonderful occasion for me. It’s a great discovery, the way he fulfills every thing I hope for in a conversation: To be surprised and taking on territory that is new. To provide what he believes is culture is all about. You know, his definition of culture is incredible. He says: “Culture is a collective agitation of the mind.” And that’s what, hopefully, in conversations such as the ones we have done, is that it gets people excited about thinking, about wondering what it feels like to have ideas. Was that the first time you saw Werner Herzog?

Yeah, and as we walked into Astor Hall my friend nearly bumped into him. You were giving him a tour of the library.
Yes, we took him around, but we did something very particular. With many of our guests, I take them to special collections. And in the case of Werner, we took him to the Manuscripts Division and he saw some late nineteenth early 20th century photography of death row inmates. And underneath [the photographs] the curator had written “successful,” or “very successful,” in terms of execution. And we have some extraordinary pictures of Werner looking over those photos with sheer and utter intensity.

I don’t consider this at all a venue. It’s a storehouse of knowledge. People need to know that when they are in the Celeste Bartos Forum that it’s a place where above them is this amazing reading room and 52 million items in this library. Seven floors. One should be inspired and feel it.

Must be a great place to work.
It’s not chopped liver.

How did you end up here?
Well, they found me.

While you were at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art?
My goodness, you know a few things. Yes, I was in Los Angeles. I founded something called the Institute for Arts and Cultures, creating havoc in a way that basically set me up for here. The then-president came out to LA and said that he wanted me to “oxygenate” the library.

So the NYPL brought you out here to breathe life into this institution.
Yeah, to oxygenate the library. I often say my goal here is to make the lions roar and to make a heavy institution levitate. It’s really to animate the shelves, to make people understand that the library is not just a repository of books. Alfred North Whitehead, in his book “The Aims of Education” talks about inert ideas and the whole notion of culture is that ideas are not inert. They are alive. But here it’s not unlike a very large conversation. Imagine if all these books started to talk to each other.

Is that your goal? To translate this wealth of knowledge to your audience?
Yeah, it’s to make the audience feel that nearly nothing as quite as exciting as thinking and reading. There’s really a great pleasure in being together in a room. I think particularly in our day and age, when we spend so much time in front of screens and home pages, but we don’t necessarily have homes, I think it’s important to bring people together in room and have communal experience. It’s another form of ritual. Ever since people have been able to talk to each other, they’ve congregated.

Your discussions require a great deal of focus for a few hours. In this day and age people are more inclined to absorb information in short, quick bursts. Being the director, are you trying to remarry people’s interest in coming to the library, sitting down, and exploring things on their own?
There are many things in your question. One of the things it implies is the notion that you go down to the Celeste Bartos Forum and you have an experience. Hopefully with a Hegelian frame of mind. You graduate to the idea and you go upstairs to the reading room and you go and explore the various ideas that were expressed in the conversation. So there is an idea, very strong here, of being in a place for these ideas to come together in some form or fashion, to be able to enable people to know that these ideas are readily available to them. Remember what Werner says to his students at the Rogue Film School: “Read, read, read, read, read.” That is his motto. Because if you don’t read, the world is lost on you.

There’s also a trust in the intelligence of the public. Famously enough, Oscar Wilde said “Either you make the art popular or the people artistic.” I personally believe that a public can enjoy two hours of sustained conversation. The notion that we’ve all been dumbed down and can only stand a three minute clip is not right. For example, Werner and I have been invited down to Iceland and will probably go next summer. One condition under which Werner said he will accept is if we can do a five hour conversation! And you laugh, but I think he will do it. And certainly I will.

In a way I’m asking from the public the most precious commodity that anybody has, which is time. And I’m somehow trusting that 120 minutes is not too much. Therefore, I’m also believing that the public is very eager and strives towards knowledge, wants to know. Curators of public curiosity sometimes don’t think that the public is curious. I actually think they are and I think they can be curious about death row, about an artist talking about Japan, they can be curious about Jesmyn Ward, they can be curious about a great chef talking. So part of my goal is also to create a program that is not predictable where people from all walks of life come. And that is very important.

How many hours a day do you spend reading?
Twenty-eight, on average.

Do you ever get intimidated by knowledge?
I’m intimidated by children.

I watched your new show [The Paul Holdengraber Show], and during one episode with David Chang you said—and I don’t know how serious you were—that you strongly believe that “people don’t make sense.”
I am very serious! It’s funny you should bring that up. This is something I dearly, deeply believe in. I don’t think we make sense. We are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sending our five children to the Assistance Publique and we are writing the great treatise on education. We are speaking about the importance of marriage and we’re the great philanderer. Our tastes are catholic and divergent, and sometimes you see one side of a human being, and there’s a whole other side that seems different and when you learn about it you’re so surprised, but you’re surprised only because you think that human beings are—

Rational.
Rational, yeah.

Libraries can also intimidate people. Is that something you think about? That someone could walk in and be overwhelmed by the scope of the library?
I do, and I actually am not sure, to tell you the truth, that that’s such a great thing if it stops there. In other words, again to invoke Hegel, when you come in this building and you go to Astor Hall, you think—

“How am I going to get through all of this?”
Yeah, and another thing to think about is, not only how am I going to get through all of this, but what is there to find here? You arrive here at the bottom of the stairs and you don’t see what’s here, you don’t know where you are. I see a lot of people come and leave because they are so amazed by it.


When you came here in 2004, what was missing from the library?
I think what I was brought here for was… one way of adding a public engagement forum. A way in which the library could not only invite the usual suspects, but bring people from all walks of life to discuss, and debate, and converse. I think the intimidation, what we were talking about before, is something I’ve been striving to rectify. It’s not just me. There are so many people at the library who are striving to make this institution be more alive. For me the word “public” in New York Public Library is the most important word. Within twenty minutes of arriving at the library you can go up into the special collection and have access to “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman. We have the drawings of William Blake, we have Virginia Woolf’s manuscripts, we have Charles Dickens’ pen. When I interviewed Patti Smith she had in her hands “A Room of One’s Own”, she had in her hands journals of George Eliot.

It’s in your hands. The memory of the world is there, and it’s ours. You have to think about it. If you go to France you have to have 27 letters before you get to see such and such manuscript. Here it’s open. This is the Ellis Island of New York. If you think of it, 100 years ago all the immigrants came to the library because it was a warm place to sit, but also because in a way it reminded them of home. You know, it reminded them of the great coffee shops they knew. I think that’s really important. In some way that great moment in Vienna in 1900 where intellectuals from all walks of life came together—that’s what I want to create.

Kind of rekindling the tradition of oratory discussion.
Yes, very much so.