Joe Rogan Experience #1726 - Chuck Palahniuk

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays)

Good to see you, man.

Hey, welcome back.

Welcome back to you, too.

Yeah.

Um, I was very excited to talk to you because it's been about three years, and during those three years, it seems like censorship issues and issues of what you can and can't say and what is and isn't acceptable, they seem to be ramping up. And you are, in my mind, one of the more interesting and dangerous writers out there, because you, you tap into these super-uncomfortable stories, and you're willing to explore areas in, in writing that I think a lot of people would avoid. When we talked about this the last time you were here, some of the more dangerous stories that you, uh, had workshopped and people have gotten upset at you for. (laughs) But I really wanted to talk to you because like, I wanted to know how this is affecting you, how this, uh, weird climate of, uh, hypersensitivity and, uh, purity tests is sort of affecting your writing.

Uh, this is the dead air part.

(laughs) Scooch up to the mic.

Okay. You know, and I- I- I don't wanna kind of shoot my wad with a big term, but have you ever heard of absurdist existentialism?

No, I haven't.

Okay.

I can piece the two words together.

You know, I used to... When I look back at the books that I really loved growing up, I see that they are now under the big umbrella of the very small phenomenon called absurdist existentialism. Do you remember the book Geek Love?

Yes.

Geek Love. Could Katharine write Geek Love right now? And it's about a man and a woman who own a failing circus, and they decide the way to sa- save their circus is to have deformed babies. So, they take insecticides, they expose themselves to radiation, and they give birth to, ultimately, uh, a whole crew of severely deformed children, plus a whole crew of children that don't live, that are... In the circus culture, they're called "pickled punks," those kind of deformed babies in formaldehyde.

Yeah.

Uh, Katharine wrote that book. It was the first banner book under the new director at, at Knopf, Suni Mehta. It was one of the top-selling books of the 20th century. It was a huge success, and it really is absurdist existentialism. And the general idea is that life is so messed up, so unfixable, that we might as well go right to the crazy. And Vonnegut wrote it, Tom Robbins wrote it throughout the '70s, Still Life with A Woodpecker and Matches, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Uh, Nathanael West wrote it. Uh, uh, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in the '20s. These people who had survived the Spanish flu and survived the First World War, and that there is a kind of a tipping point in the culture where things seem so messed up and so unfixable that you just sort of tip into this absurdist existentialism, and there's a fantastic joy and freedom in that. And so my goal is always to- to try to write the kind of book I want to read, and I want to write Geek Love because I want to read Geek Love, uh, regardless of whether or not Katharine could write it, because I don't... Even if she wasn't dead, she got, could not write that book anymore.