In Conversation With Lawrence Weschler

Daniel Asa Rose interviews an acute obeserver of the convergences between art and politics.

Lawrence Weschler defies categorization, and that's his point. A staff writer at the New Yorker for more than two decades, he left the magazine in 2002 to direct the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, to continue teaching at such places as Sarah Lawrence College and to author more books with titles that reflect his ability to conjoin seemingly disjointed topics, most recently "Vermeer in Bosnia" (2004). His new offering, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney's, $29), evinces a lifetime of closely examining the worlds of art and politics and finding what Magritte called "the secret affinities" between such disparate things as the ruins of the World Trade Center and a Jasper Johns painting. It is lavishly published by McSweeney's (the house founded by Dave Eggers), where he is a contributing editor and the writer they publish more than any other. Here, he is interviewed by Daniel Asa Rose, editor of the Reading Room and a regular book reviewer for the New York Observer and New York magazine.

Q : You're 54. What's a fossil like you doing in the company of McSweeney's?

Lawrence Weschler : All those incredibly intense wonderful 25-year-olds! I think they may see me as a link between them and Joseph Mitchell in some sense. You know, for all of its razzle-dazzle, the new journalism of Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and so forth didn't have that many direct heirs.

Q : Just a few years ago, everyone was despairing that 25-year-olds don't read, and now there are all these young McSweeney's-inspired literary zines showcasing the written word at length.

LW : McSweeney's is important for the reason you mention, and, second, in the crisis of this endlessly ironizing generation, the editors there took the route of ironizing themselves deeper and deeper until they broke out of the irony and into something true.

Q : Care to characterize the place they broke into?

LW : It's kind of a zone of wonder. Admittedly a knowing wonder, not a naive wonder, but a wonder nonetheless.

Q : Good thing, because it might otherwise have been difficult to publish Everything That Rises , a book that defies easy categorization.

LW : In fact, I offered it to seven or eight places -- the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic -- and everybody said, "Is this political, or is it art?" They couldn't figure out what slot it would fit into. Whereas the minute McSweeney's saw it, they said, "Great, let's do it." Their boast about this book is that it's the most Weschlerian in history.

Q : So you're an adjective now?

LW : I think what they mean is that it's kind of loose, open, unexpected, not bound, serious in an unserious way, serious play. A kind of daydreaming.

Q : Daydreaming is fine for artists who leap across arbitrary borders, but should engineers and politicians daydream more, too?