Alexander Chee: Believe in your pretentiousness—it wants to grow up into something you should pay attention to.
Scott Listfield: Let's just say, it went well.
Chee: I didn’t think of it that way.
Listfield: These are small complaints and, in fact, often add to the fun of traveling abroad, but you just get used to things feeling unfamiliar.
Chee: Fingers crossed, right?
•••
Listfield: Because it’s a day job.
Chee: People do give that answer a lot.
Listfield: They reset me somehow.
Chee: None of that is now possible, of course, with COVID, or, at least, currently.
Listfield: It always feels like we're on the brink of some catastrophe.
•••
Chee: Go through the papers, the emails, the social media archives, the unfinished blog posts, the password protected things a scholar won’t be able to perhaps get through after you’re dead.
Listfield: Instead I was living in the world's tiniest studio apartment eating single serve pizzas and watching garbage TV on my tiny television.
Chee: That protected me, because it did happen.
Listfield: People complain about it all the time.
Chee: Each of them were about different subjects—roses, Tarot, AIDS activism, recovering from sexual abuse, the MFA.