verbena-19

Tomdispatch Interview: Tom Engelhardt, Adventures in Cyberspace

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: In part 1 of this interview, Reading the Imperial Press Back to Front, I offered my thoughts on how the mainstream media works, among other matters. Here, in the second part of my discussion with Nick Turse, I turn to my life at Tomdispatch. Releasing this two-parter has been my way of announcing that all the interviews I've done so far for the site are being collected in a paperback book to be published by Nation Books this October. It will be entitled Mission Unaccomplished, Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters and I'll urge it on you at the proper moment. This interview will end the book. In the meantime, I hope you'll consider checking out my history of American triumphalism, The End of Victory Culture (from which I regularly crib passages for Tomgrams). Studs Terkel called it "as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus." Or, for that vacation moment this summer, pick up my novel, The Last Days of Publishing, which focuses on the other world I've inhabited -- as a book editor. Reviewing it in the Los Angeles Times, Herbert Gold wrote: "A satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers... a skillful novel of manners -- of very bad manners." Tom]

On Not Packing Your Bag and Heading Home When

Things Go Wrong

A Tomdispatch Interview with Tom Engelhardt (Part 2)

NT: The site has become home to diverse voices. What makes a Tomdispatch writer? Is there a defining trait you're looking for?

TE: I can only explain this with an image. When I was young, we kids would go hunting for clams with our toes. The question naturally was: How do you know what a clam feels like? Of course, nobody can tell you. You just feel around until, amid the empty shells, stones, and live crabs sooner or later you hit a clam. Then you know.

Ditto Tomdispatch writers. Ditto how I operate in life. Many Tomdispatch writers I already knew. I had edited their books. Tomdispatch is a non-submission site, because I'm the only one answering the mail and I'm usually working another job or two. I just can't deal.

The real adventure of my site, by the way, is all those e-letters pouring in. This wows me. I check the site e-mail and there's a convoy commander from Iraq telling me about his experiences, or an anti-imperial conservative from some southern state, or residents of small towns all over America.

In the nineteenth century, people fled small towns for the big city. Now, when they feel isolated, they flee onto the Internet looking for company. So I get letters regularly from people who sign off with the name of a town in Kansas or Montana or Texas, and in parentheses maybe, "pop. 250." Sometimes, they'll add something like: "From Red State Hell." Wonderful letters from people I would never in a million years meet: Iraqi exiles, Germans who want to tell me about our President, an American ex-pat in Athens who let me know that a Greek college student had recommended the site to him. Imagine that!

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 1:11 AM