Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars
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Not SyncedFirst I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed, then about the murders which happened later.
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Not SyncedThe robbery is the more important part since it served to set my and my sisters lives on the
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Not Syncedcourses they eventually followed, nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.
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Not SyncedOur parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank, they weren't strange people,
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Not Syncednot obviously criminals, no-one would have thought they were destined to end up the way they did.
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Not SyncedThey were just regular, although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void
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Not Syncedthe moment they did rob a bank.
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Not SyncedI always have liked beginnings that were grabbers, I always liked beginnings that would, you know,
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Not Syncedthrow down the gauntlet for the reader. The only problem with a beginning like that is that
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Not Syncedthen you've got to have a second act, and sometimes if you don't have a second act,
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Not Syncedif you can't follow up a really good beginning like that with something equally gripping then you might as
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Not Syncedwell not have it, because you've just basically created a trap for yourself and sprung it so,
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Not Syncedno I just um, I always, I think when I wrote it I knew it was OK.
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Not SyncedI thought it was just a sort of typical old fashioned narrative hook, and, you know,
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Not Syncedyou're going to have a murder down the line here, you're gonna have a bank being robbed
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Not Syncedby my parents, so I thought it was good.
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Not SyncedIt's an American family of 4 people, 2 children, twin boy/girl, mother/father, and the father has been
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Not Syncedin the air force since World War II, and the book takes place in 1960.
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Not SyncedEventually after staying in the air force, he gets out of the air force, and then doesn't really
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Not Syncedknow what to do with himself, he's been in the military his whole life, and they live in a little town in
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Not SyncedGreat Falls Montana, where none of them have ever lived before, and he just happened to be stationed
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Not Syncedthere in the air force.
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Not SyncedAnd he hatches upon a scheme to sell stolen beef to the railroad, to sell to the dining cart customers on the railroad.
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Not SyncedAnd he very quickly runs amiss and runs afoul of the Indians who he basically goes into business with to
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Not Syncedkill the beef and deliver it to him, and he finds that he owes them $2,000, which is in 1960
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Not Synceda considerable sum of money, for half a beef that is somehow or other gone rancid before they can sell it.
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Not SyncedAnd so in a fit of sort of chaotic lunacy rather than just leaving town in the middle of the night, or
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Not Syncedborrowing the money, because he had no contacts in the town, no collateral, he didn't own anything,
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Not Syncedhe determines he will rob a bank and get the money that way.
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Not SyncedAnd that sets in motion, the book actually.
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Not SyncedAnd what happens to him and his wife, who is his colleague in this bank robbery, is that they
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Not Syncedare immediately caught, and once they are immediately caught, then the children are left alone,
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Not Syncedand the children fend for themselves.
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Not SyncedI mean I invented that, so I don't really know what relation it bears to most peoples normal thinking.
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Not SyncedI did discover when I was trying to make plausible to myself the idea that 2 people who didn't
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Not Syncedhave to rob a bank would rob a bank, that anybody who robs a bank who's not already a hardened,
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Not Syncedcriminal, who's not John Dillenger or Pretty Boy Floyd, anybody who's a normal person who robs a bank
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Not Syncedis crazy because they're going to get caught immediately, so all manner of assumptions about
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Not Syncedhow you do it and how you get away with it and what happens to you afterwards, are complete lunacy,
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Not Syncedbecause none of those things is going to be true, because as Dell says, without wanting to
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Not Syncedquote my own book as though Dell was a creature I didn't write, but he says when you think you're
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Not Syncedgoing to get away with robbing a bank you forget one thing and that is that you're the only
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Not Syncedperson in town who's robbed a bank, and so you're going to stand out no matter what.
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Not SyncedSomehow or another you're not going to be, you've given up your hold on normal, yeah.
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Not SyncedFor some reason or other that was very vivid to me that you will have the discretion of all of your
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Not Syncednormal life up to a point, and I think Dell describes as being on a boat that's getting farther and
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Not Syncedfarther away from shore, or you're in a lighter than air balloon that rises higher and higher very quickly
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Not Syncedaway from the surface of the earth. For a long time you could just let go and be there,
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Not Syncedor for a long time you could just swim back to shore and be safe, but all at once, imperceptibly, you can't anymore,
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Not Syncedand then your life is totally not a life you ever understood.
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Not SyncedIn the first book, I was just thinking about this, in the first book I ever wrote there was an image which
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Not SyncedI just collected out of the culture about putting a frog into a pan of water at room temperature,
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Not Syncedand little by little by little by little heating the water up and the frog sitting there perfectly fine
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Not Syncedwhen all of a sudden he's not perfectly fine and all of a sudden he's no longer viable,
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Not Syncedand that's, there's something about that odd change from what is totally normal to what is totally
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Not Syncedabhorrent and felonious, it appeals to me, maybe that's just one of the strange perversity involved in
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Not Syncedbeing a novelist I don't know. I don't know. You know Thoreau says that a writer is a man
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Not Syncedwho having nothing to do finds something to do.
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Not SyncedI think it's all about being loved, I mean as a child I was loved, and one of the things my wife
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Not Syncedalways says to me, she says you know I grew up in a household of divorce and she says love was always
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Not Syncedconditional, she says, in regarding me, she says with you love is unconditional because I love her
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Not Syncedunconditionally, and that's because I just think that's the way life should be, and I'm far from perfect,
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Not Syncedbut on that one issue I do understand that to create a sense of reliable normality that the person who
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Not Syncedloves you loves you, and will always love you, is your due in life.
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Not SyncedAnd again I'm speculating about a book I wrote, OK?, so there's a certain fortuity to that,
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Not Syncedbut I think that's because those two children, Dell and his sister, were loved as children,
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Not Syncedthat they were most impressionably persuaded that normal was normal, that life had its normal
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Not Syncedparameters around it, and that no amount of eccentricity and no amount of shocking behaviour by
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Not Syncedtheir parents quite disturbed that sense of normal so that they were pitched off, at least in Dell's case,
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Not Syncedhis sister may be differently, so that they were pitched off into the chaos that no normalcy would describe.
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Not SyncedI always say that if the devil always was in your life wearing a read suit, with a tail and horns,
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Not Syncedyou wouldn't get anywhere close to him.
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Not SyncedBut the fact of the matter is the devil often comes with certain appeals, it's also true just in dramatic
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Not Syncedterms, that drama is interesting when the villain says something that's true.
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Not SyncedSo to create a persuasive villain, to create somebody who has the power that evil must have,
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Not Syncedbecause if evil was just dispensable none of us would run afoul of it, but to create a character who has a
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Not Syncedsort of tempting evil to him he has to be able to make sense, he has to be able to have affection,
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Not Syncedhe can't just be the antithesis of all that is good, he has to be tinctured by something that's appealing.
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Not SyncedMaybe none of us is a character at all, I mean I don't believe in character anyway, I don't believe
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Not Syncedthat any of us has a sort of a kernel, hard, essential core, that we are basically as human beings,
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Not Syncedand certainly as literary creations, we are a combination of imputed memory, wishes in will, fears,
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Not Synceddesires, all kinds of things that just kind of get laid on, laid on, laid on, and laid on, and that because
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Not Syncedthat is a such a vertiginous kind of human condition, we ascribe to people to have cores,
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Not Syncedto make that vertiginous seem less scary, so Dell is that way, but one of the things he does to establish
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Not Syncedhis own sense of persuasiveness to himself is that he tells this story, and his ability to intercalate
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Not Syncedgood with bad, violent with normal, love with not love, is a measure of his gaining dominion over it,
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Not Syncedinto the extent that he can gain dominion over it then he once more performs an act which would conclude that he has a character.
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Not SyncedAnd I think we don't. It's a kind of, it's not an heretical idea, it may be a slightly nihilistic idea.
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Not SyncedGrowing up in the south was lucky in one way because I grew up down the street from Udor Welthy
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Not Syncedand not far from Wayne Falkoner, and the idea that being a writer was a possibility, was ingrained in everybody,
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Not Syncedwriting literature was just in the air in Mississippi.
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Not SyncedThat was probably the only good thing about Mississippi, and everything else was bigoted and
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Not Syncedracially tense, and unfair, and absurd, and it made most of us who were white kids growing up in
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Not SyncedMississippi kind of absurd creatures,
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Not SyncedSo what I wanted to do to escape that sense of burden, a burden visited on me simply by the
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Not Syncedaccident of my birth, was to get away.
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Not SyncedAnd one of the things I found out when I got away was that the south had been perpetrating a great
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Not Syncedlie upon me, many lies actually.
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Not SyncedOne big lie was that the south was unique, that the south was in fact a very special place
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Not Syncedin the middle of an otherwise nondescript land country which was America.
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Not SyncedAnd what I found was that America was equally interesting irrespective of where you went,
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Not Syncedand that the values, if you had particularly good values, which is to say that you didn't wish to harm
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Not Syncedother people, you didn't want to be prejudiced against other races, that you wanted to treat people
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Not Syncedequally, that those kinds of morays and values worked everywhere, that the language in America
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Not Syncedwas English, that the currency was the dollar, that the President was the President,
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Not SyncedSo America was a much more, for me, approachable, and I won't say it was homogenous because it
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Not Syncedreally isn't homogeneous at least not superficially, but America was a much more approachable,
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Not Syncedknowable place, even for a southerner than I had been led to believe it was.
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Not SyncedYou know, you sort of think southerners only know the south, southern writers only write about the
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Not Syncedsouth, southern writers only write for other southerners, what southern writers know only
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Not Syncedother southerners can know, all baloney, it's all bullshit, complete bullshit, so I just decided to
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Not Synceddedicate my life to proving that that was bullshit.
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Not SyncedIt was worth doing because those preoccupations and those presumptions and those lies were very
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Not Syncedconfining, intellectually confining, morally confining, spatially confining, all those things you don't really
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Not Syncedneed in a country as vast as ours. You want to go, you want to see.
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Not SyncedCanada is hugely appealing to me for a lot of reasons, one is I always feel better when I go there,
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Not Syncedand I'm not quite sure why, I feel restored, I feel I'm in a more tolerant place.
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Not SyncedThere's also something about Canada which is mysterious, and that is that it is retinally
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Not Syncedsimilar to America, but that once you pass across the 49th parallel and into Canada you realise
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Not Syncedthat you are in a totally different place from where you were before.
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Not SyncedAnd that combination of retinal similarity and profound difference is to me mystifying and interesting,
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Not Syncedand I can't explain it, this book is not about explaining that but it is about putting that fact
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Not Syncedin play and seeing what can be said on the strength of that peculiar kind of nexus.
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Not SyncedSimilarity encased in mystery, mystery encased in similarity.
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Not SyncedYou don't need a book to go out there and feel what it feels like, and smell the surf.
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Not SyncedI just appropriate the language of the place and from the language of the place, which is chiefly what
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Not SyncedI'm interested in, I kind of use, I sort of co-opt the reader to in his or her mind eye envision the place,
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Not Syncedwhere these words are appropriate, so saskatchewan. I would want to write about
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Not Syncedsaskatchewan only so that I could put the word saskatchewan on the page as many times as possible.
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Not SyncedBecause I think that's exciting, but when I put it on the page then that gives me an opportunity to
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Not Synceduse other language to create descriptions and create word pictures which will help make more plausible
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Not Syncedwhat the characters are doing in the foreground.
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Not SyncedSo it's a kind of a, you know one thing, on the one hand it's just language, it's just words,
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Not Syncedon the other hand, once you have the words well you might as well describe what those words mean to
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Not Syncedmost people's experience, and you do that again so you can make what the characters do be plausible.
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Not SyncedAnd chiefly I think for me the language is pleasurable to the reader. I mean a reader finds it pleasurable
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Not Syncedto read a description and think she or he can identify that out of life.
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Not SyncedBut they also take pleasure in the fact of seeing that it's made of all of these words which can be put
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Not Syncedtogether in such a felicitous way as to become almost but not quite visible.
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Not SyncedSo the complexity of that kind of dual medium experience is very pleasurable for a reader,
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Not Syncedand it's something that we all as people who live on the earth are better if we know, we're better if
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Not Syncedwe know, we're better if we know that we look out a window and we see the surf but we also see the
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Not Syncedwindow, we also see the droplets on the window.
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Not SyncedIt's in an attempt to make lived experience be more valuable, to be more morally good, and to be alert to it.
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Not SyncedI have changed as a reader because when I was young I didn't know what I was reading,
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Not SyncedI was just reading books that I was taking on faith, that people said were great books, such as
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Not Synced'Absolum Absolum', for instance, I just dived into books like diving into the surf, and whatever
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Not Syncedstuck to me stuck to me, without my sense of knowing necessarily what that good stuff would be.
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Not SyncedNow I think I'm much more discerning as a reader, so that I know what the good stuff is when it's
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Not Syncedhappening to me, but I couldn't have done that without that act of faith which is to dive in without a clue,
- Title:
- Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars
- Description:
-
Interview with the American writer Richard Ford, who many have compared to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. In this video he talks about his novel 'Canada' published in 2012 as well as about his authorship in general.
According to the The Washington Post Richard Ford (b. 1944) is "one of the finest curators of the great American living museum." In 1995 his novel Independence Day was the first to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In this conversation with the Danish journalist and publicist Synne Rifbjerg, Ford speaks about his novel Canada, in which he explores the mysterious and consoling bonds of family in a tale about a young man forced by catastrophic circumstance to reconcile himself to a world that has been rendered unrecognizable. Ford himself grew up in Mississippi and lost his father at an early age. Later on in the interview, he reflects upon the differences between the United States and Canada, which to Ford is a much more liberal country. Furthermore Ford talks about his own path towards writing and literature, which he defines as "the lively negotiation with the ongoing."
Richard Ford was interviewed by Synne Rifbjerg.
Camera: Jakob Solbakken
Produced by: Jakob Solbakken and Marc-Christoph Wagner, 2012
Recorded at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, December, 2012.
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Meet more artists at http://channel.louisiana.dk
Louisiana Channel is a non-profit video channel for the Internet launched by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in November 2012. Each week Louisiana Channel will publish videos about and with artists in visual art, literature, architecture, design etc.
Read more:
http://channel.louisiana.dk/aboutSupported by Nordea-fonden.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- Volunteer
- Duration:
- 22:22
s.m.macey edited English subtitles for Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars | ||
s.m.macey edited English subtitles for Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars | ||
s.m.macey edited English subtitles for Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars | ||
s.m.macey edited English subtitles for Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars | ||
s.m.macey edited English subtitles for Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars |