www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001695.html
me August 27, 2007 Matt Taibbi Interview A while back I spoke to Matt Taibbi by phone. Technical difficulties prevented me from getting to it immediately, but here it finally is. I can't claim it's timely now, but Taibbi was just as entertaining as you'd expect.
Well, I was a real nerd growing up and moved around all the time, so I read a lot. Then sometime in high school teachers made me aware I had some ability writing-wise. And since I didn't really have anything else going for me personally, especially after high school, I basically locked myself up in my room in my late teens, doing nothing but writing fiction, plays, all kinds of crap, and all of it sucked. My heroes were mostly all Russian, although I was a big fan of guys like HL Mencken and Saki and Evelyn Waugh, too. I've pretty much wanted to be a writer since I was thirteen or fourteen, but mostly by default, since I was clearly not qualified to do much else. What Russian writers in particular and what other funny writers did you like? The books I read when I was really young were things like Catch-22, some Waugh books like Decline and Fall, then Fear and Loathing, all the Hunter Thompson stuff, Woody Allen, etc. And then somebody turned me onto Nicholai Gogol when I was about seventeen -- the first thing I read was his story "The Nose," and then I read "Dead Souls" about forty times before I was twenty. well, not to be Nicholai Gogol, because he was an insane and miserable boot fetishist who ended up becoming an overbearing religious bore before starving and bleeding himself to death with leeches, but to write like that anyway. But you should see how pathetic it is when a modern American tries his style. From then I started reading all the other Russians, guys like Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Leskov, Babel, Zoshenko, etc. Among the modern guys I liked Trofimov and Dovlatov, both of whom were really funny. The Russians have so many funny writers, a lot of people that don't really get read here in the states -- people have this image of Russian writers being these guys who write these huge, baggy, pretentious novels that you need 300-page Cliff's notes for, but it's not like that. I basically finished my studies at the University of Leningrad. I don't know what Thai sounds like, but it's a real cool lookin' language. There's something about Russia that captures a certain kind of person from elsewhere. There's definitely a certain kind of person it agrees with. The Russian way of looking at life--there's a real what-the-fuck element to living there. Everything in America is so strict, the rules are ironclad, you know. Your life is regulated by these ironclad structures that are part of being part of a rule-based society where everything works. There's a real carefree, completely chaotic atmosphere there that's appealing. They have this expression there, na avos, or avos prenesyet, which means "avos brings"; to do something na avos means to do it and just basically leave the matter of whether it will work out or not in the hands of fate. Like once, for instance, I quit my job and moved to Mongolia na avos. In the States, there's so much pressure on a person to succeed, to not fall behind, to not be a loser. Whereas in Russia, except for the very few super-rich, everybody's a loser. Solzhenitsin said something about that after he came to America. Everybody got to be part of the ongoing Russian enterprise. the Russian expression is "v govne," which means "in shit." There's an expression in Russian, "sovok" which roughly means a Soviet mentality. The literal translation of the word refers to a tiny shovel you use in a sandbox. There is a legend about a Soviet film director who was getting drunk in a sandbox with some friends of his in the seventies;
" The story, of course, is total bullshit, means nothing, and certainly has nothing to do with the origin of the expression sovok. But placing so much stock in this long-winded, idiotic, totally fictional story is very sovok in itself. Anyway, Putin is draining the life out of sovok a little, which is too bad. I think of somebody like John McCain, who does the most incredible groveling at the feet of Bush.
Mike thinks the Bush people are blackmailing him with something, but I think what they have on him is just ambition. If you have a certain kind of ambition it just destroys you. People will do humiliating, grotesque things for ambition. Do you know that thing Hunter Thompson wrote about the bull elk? He wrote this thing bout how it's normally the craftiest animal in the forest, and normally you can't get within 2,000 yards of it without it bolting. But when it's in heat, the town drunk can walk right up next to the fucking thing. It's just so horny that its judgment is completely clouded. I'd been working in Moscow and I played a lot of street basketball and I ran into this Mongolian kid who told me there was a Mongolian basketball league called the MBA -- the Mongolian Basketball League. So I just packed up my shit, na avos like I said, and got on a train and moved to Mongolia. I got a tryout and I ended up this team called Altain Burgid, which means "Mountain Eagles." I got pneumonia and had to leave the country to be treated. Mongolia was great, but its health care system nearly killed me. At first their doctors thought I had bronchitis, and their idea of treatment was a sort of Buddhist acupressure thing. I started coughing up blood a few weeks later and ended up being airlifted out of the country. In the latter stages of my illness I continued to play in the basketball league, despite the fact that I was losing ten pounds a week or so. At one point I caught an elbow in the mouth and had three of my teeth shattered. Then in another game I got scratched in the eyeball, which left my left eye completely blood red. Meanwhile I had long before shaved my head and grown a goattee as part of this Dennis Rodman look I was trying for on the court. So by the time I left I had pointed fangs, a bald head, a bloody eyeball, and I weighed about 50 pounds below my usual weight. When I finally got off the plane at JFK I looked like Nosferatu. Incidentally the one tooth the Mongolians did fix, they fixed using cement, like industrial cement. I bring it up as an example of hideously mistaken medical treatment. One of his grandfathers fell off the roof of his house when he (his grandfather) was a kid and broke his arm. The town doctor showed up drunk, and was convinced that he had a separated shoulder, and his arm had to be put back in the socket. I never read Roald Dahl, his books scared me, but I guess that makes sense. What is it about English writers -- they all seem to have mutliated aunts and uncles. Wasn't Saki's mother trampled to death by a cow or something? And I'm very, very jealous of anyone who's ever able to get paid for paying sports. And they split the goat literally right down the middle of its body with a saw. I was also working as the head of the English-language department of Montsame, which is the state news agency. So I just threw my half-goat out on the balcony at work. And since it never gets above minus twenty during the winter, the goat was fine. Then around the holiday season one of my co-workers got drunk in the morning and came up to me and asked me if he could have it, so he got the goat. Well, getting paid in goats would be good enough for me. For playing sports, I wouldn't mind getting paid in, you know, tadpoles. So even though I wasn't making a ton of money and it wasn't a real high level of the game, we had the lifestyle of pro athletes. there was a guy on my team named Batzaya, the national slam-dunk champ, he was like the Michael Jordan of Mongolia. If you were rolling with Batzaya, you weren't going home alone. I remember once he and his girlfriend crashed at my girlfriend's place and he came in to our room in the morning and asked us both if we had been listening to him and his girl have sex the night before. It was very important to him that we tell him how long he'd lasted. During the next game, in a timeout, he pulled me aside and said, "No tav minute!
There are only like 600 people in the stadium, everyone could...
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