Shooting Wide Open

From the Panorama, “Junot Diaz in conversation with Dave Eggers”:

JD: I think more than anything, my basic lesson as an artist has been humility. So when I get a bunch of stuff, like “Do you want to come to this thing, do you want to come to that thing?” I say to myself “Do I want to go to this because I want applause? Do I want applause to make up for the fact that my mommy never held me enough? Or is this something where I feel I can be of service, is this an event where I can be of service?” That’s the way I choose.

He also talked about age and the relatively low amount of options open to those starting out when older. He’s talking about writers, but it pretty applies to photographers.

Young people are more isolated from adults than they’ve ever been. Unless you’re an adult who is getting paid to somehow be involved with young people, chances are most adults have no contact with young people that they’re not related to. And the isolation is kind of a structural and it’s very deep and it’s very visible. When I came to the US, they hadn’t gotten this whole thing that, you know, strange adults were gonna rape and kidnap you, they hadn’t convinced us of that yet. Strange adults were someone you could possibly talk to – we hadn’t yet been divided by fear. The reality is that most of the raping, abuse, and attacking of young people was happening inside their families, but hey no matter, it was easier to convince people to be scared of strangers.

DE: I wonder what you think about whether the MFA programs in general are doing enough. Because I’ve had some frustrating experiences where I’ve written recommendations for former students of mine and young writers of color I’ve met along the way, and the results haven’t always been so good. A lot of MFA programs, they’re not interested in a nontraditional learner, or someone from abroad, or someone not from a polished academic background. it makes me furious sometimes.

JD: What’s scary about MFA programs is that there’s a huge amount of privilege these universities hoard. And what’s fascinating is that if you actually look at the profile of writers doing an MFA program, they look nothing like the rest of our society. They’re almost always between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-seven, so it’s almost never people with families. I think for me the biggest problem is that, again, if it doesn’t look anything like the rest of our country, what the fuck is going on? I don’t only want to read writing from twenty-six-year-old hipsters. I include myself in that category, for real. It’s like, sixty-something percent of the adults in this country have got kids. I would love to see that kind of age range represented, because I feel like it would deepen our literary tradition. And it’s not like MFAs control the bulk of everything that gets written. But it’s a lot of money and a lot of privilege that they do control. So I’m like you, I think that at least a third to half of all MFA seats should be reserved for people with families. Our literature would change in ways that would challenge all of us.

It’s that I feel like if these kids are not in a classroom with a couple of forty and fifty- and sixty-year-old people who have children, I feel like everyone loses. And the literature itself loses that as well.

Do we assume certain things about talent and youth? Or is the system set up so that a young person who doesn’t have a livelihood is favored over an adult with a living-wage day job?

And the state of the arts in America?

Audience member: My son wants to apply to MIT next year; he told me that his goal in college is not to take a single English class. How do you approach students like that?

JD: I think that at this moment we belong to a country that marginalizes and trivializes the arts. For all the lip service this country gives to the arts, I feel like your child is in some ways voicing the real code of this country, which is, like, “Can I avoid this totally irrelevant, superfluous practice?” If you live in this country as long as I have, you become really prepared to deal with that. I guess my faith is always the same: exposure to the arts, especially that passionate, compassionate exposure to the arts, always seems to melt the pharaoh’s heart. And that doesn’t mean that you’ll win every person, but out of every ten, if you win one, you’re doing more than some of our highly funded arts organizations do. I don’t blame a young person who spends his entire life soaking in anti-arts culture for not liking the arts. I believe that so much is the way this gets distributed in people’s head, seen at an unconscious level.