Meet Reporter and Host Ben Schachtman!
Q: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A: When you’re exactly where you want to be, with who you want to be with – could be at the beach when just the right amount of breeze kicks up, a few songs into the set when the rhythm section is really synched up, the first drink on the first day of a vacation in a new city, or prepping mise en place in the kitchen with the music up and the doors and windows open.
Q: What is your greatest fear?
A: That ignorance, apathy, and cruelty win out over curiosity, passion, and kindness. And running into a spiderweb.
Q: Which living person do you most admire?
A: I don’t think I have a singular hero or anything like that. I admire people who try to live well, and do good, folks who stick up for the little guy, and anyone who take their craft, whatever it is, seriously — without becoming a bore.
Q: What is your greatest extravagance?
A: Good food, good wine, and good whiskey.
Q: What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
A: Temperance. (Sorry, Plato.)
Q: On what occasion do you lie?
A: I try not to. But sometimes, a lie can be a kindness. Also, when you’re planning a surprise.
Q: Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
A: You can guess a certain four-letter one. Also, “fair enough” and “here’s the thing.”
Q: What or who is the greatest love of your life?
A: My wife and best friend, Casey.
Q: When and where were you happiest?
A: [See above examples, I’d say.]
Q: Which talent would you most like to have?
A: Omnilingualism.
Q: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
A: I stupidly hurt my back many years ago, and I’d like to have not done that. I’d like to have more patience.
Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement?
A: Definitely building a lasting marriage. A runner up would be my journalism career. I’ve rather proud of some of my puns, too.
Q: If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
A: A housecat.
Q: Where would you most like to live?
A: A cabin on a lake, someplace where there are still four seasons.
Q: What is your most treasured possession?
A: I’m more for experiences than things. But I’m awfully fond of my guitar gear. And my stand mixer.
Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
A: Wronging someone with no way to atone for it, or being someone who cannot celebrate someone else’s joy. Also, that genetic condition where cilantro tastes like soap.
Q: What is your favorite occupation?
A: Writer.
Q: What is your most marked characteristic?
A: My beard? And maybe a dark and sometimes weird sense of humor.
Q: What do you most value in your friends?
A: Honesty and humor.
Q: Who are your favorite writers?
A: I grew up on world-builders: Isaac Asimov, C.S. Lewis, Larry Niven. I played hooky once, hiding on the catwalk in the school auditorium, to read Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit Will Travel.
Later I found the classic essayists: Menken. Didion. Baldwin. It was perhaps the most lasting epiphany of my life that you could write things and make someone, separated by time and space and even culture, feel something. They made me understand that, yes, words have meaning. But also style.
In fiction there are too many too count. Jennifer Egan has some of the cleanest, most touching prose I’ve ever read. Toni Morrison just offers more and more every time you go back to her work, I think. Vonnegut should go without saying, but I’ll say it here anyway. Stephen Graham Jones is one of the most inventive and interesting writers I know. I could go on (and I will, if you let me).
Q: Who is your hero of fiction?
A: Richard Russo’s Sully from Nobody’s Fool (and Paul Newman’s take on the role in the film version is pretty great). Like many of Russo’s characters, Sully is someone so immediately real and flawed. Empire Falls, which won Russo the Pulitzer, is probably the better book, but Nobody’s Fool is funnier, saltier and earthier. It’s worldbuilding without alien tripods or lightspeed jumps or Biblical allegory.
Q: Which historical figure do you most identify with?
A: I think ‘historical figure’ feels a little grandiose to me. But, maybe some hardscrabble reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle in the Tammany Hall days.
Q: Who are your heroes in real life?
A: People who give a shit, and show up.
Q: What is it that you most dislike?
A: Laziness.
Q: What is your greatest regret?
A: I wish I’d been a better friend, and a better big brother, growing up. Also, spent too much money on Scotch before I realized bourbon is better.
Q: How would you like to die?
A: Laughing.
Q: What is your motto?
A: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, while you can.
And if you’re feeling down, there’s always Virgil: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.”