Getting in Marc Maron’s Head
In its nearly sixteen years on the air, “WTF with Marc Maron” has recorded more than fifteen hundred episodes, with guests ranging from RuPaul to Robin Williams to Barack Obama. In 2015, Maron interviewed the Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, who had long ago turned Maron down for a job. As Sarah Larson noted, what might have seemed a loss was really a gain, allowing Maron to arrive at “the right thing at the right time”—that is, becoming “an unhinged garage-podcast messiah.” This fall, “WTF” will end its run, after which Maron plans to spend more time acting and doing standup. (His new special, “Panicked,” arrives on HBO this week.) Not long ago, he joined us to recommend a few books about particular interests of his that he has recently enjoyed. “I wouldn’t say I’m an avid reader, and when I read, I mean business,” he said. “If I’m going to read a book, it better do its job.” His remarks have been edited and condensed.
No One Left to Come Looking for You
by Sam Lipsyte
This novel is about young people who are living through a moment of transition, when both the Lower East Side and the music associated with it are becoming gentrified. These are people who think “sellout” means something, and that some stuff is really garbage because of its mass appeal.
The plot is a pulpy detective story that revolves around this kid named Jack Shit, who’s in a noise-rock punk outfit, and who has lost his bass and his drug-addicted lead singer. He needs to find them because they have a gig in a few days. He’s singularly focussed on that, but in the course of his search Jack learns that there are bigger forces at hand—that it’s not all about him, and that not only is music slipping away from what he believes it should be, but that New York City is also about to be turned inside out by real-estate developers.
I have to be transparent—Sam is one of my best friends. But I have read him forever, and I think he’s one of the great humorists of our time. The book has a beautiful ending that takes place in an ice rink, where Jack has to go up against a hired goon who is also a great skater. I think the requirement of a story of any kind is that your lead character should probably change. At the end of this, everything around Jack has changed, but he remains, and it’s kind of touching.
Sonny Boy
by Al Pacino
Reading Pacino’s whole story was fascinating. It shows you how much he was really invested in acting from the start because of the art. You read about his influences, his beginnings as part of this kind of fringe, radical theater company—where he and Martin Sheen would be in the back sweeping up—and about the fact that what compelled him was the pursuit of truth. I know people talk about “truth” in acting all the time, but acting can be a lot of things. You can just get away with it. A lot of actors are just hustlers, they’re conmen riding on natural gifts. But he was in it, all in.
Another thing I came away with is that, with a public person like this, you judge them by their performances. Al Pacino’s always got these roles where he has a lot of swagger, but it turns out that he’s pretty shy. I didn’t know that he is this vulnerable, sensitive, neurotic artist. And he’s very honest about having to do roles for money, because he was such a nutty guy that he just couldn’t manage money at all. It was just kind of amazing to me to know that guy, the real Al Pacino, and to learn a bit about his process.
The Crisis of Culture
by Olivier Roy
Yeah, this one, geez. It’s not an easy read. I’ve always been a guy who wants to take on these books—whatever trend cultural criticism is leaning toward, I try to crack it. I’m not that intellectual, I do not have the foundations to really wrap my brain around some of the language of this stuff, but I like to look toward books like these to feed my own perception of what I see going on.
The biggest thing I took is Roy’s idea that society is breaking apart and that we are losing a shared cultural understanding—that, especially as we moved into a world ruled more by social media, we lost the ability to have a civic body. He has some really interesting stuff to say about how neoliberalism flows into the structure of digital platforms, and how that has all kinds of questionable effects, like making what people stand for meaningless in a certain way.
The book really made me think about the effects of creativity being made available, for many people, only through social-media platforms, which are corporate entities designed and built to capture eyeballs and make money and advertise—to dump things into people’s brains. It’s especially interesting to me in terms of the comedy industry. You know, I have this idea that as a comic you have freedom of speech, freedom of voice. But if your career is tethered to a one-minute clip, and to algorithms dictating what should and shouldn’t be put in front of people—an algorithm that is also chipping away at people’s attention spans—what happens then? If you’re operating in that world, which is not the real world, then maybe you don’t have any real freedom.
