NL: Can you give us a short bio?
MD: I’m a cultural critic, essayist, and the author of four books, most recently the biography Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. I’ve taught journalism at NYU and aesthetics at the Yale School of Art; been a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. In my 1993 essay, “Black to the Future,” I coined the term “Afrofuturism.”
NL: What are you currently reading? Do you like it?
MD: A pre-publication copy of Mark Polizzotti’s Why Surrealism Matters, which I’m blurbing for Yale Press. I’m enthralled. I’m an atheist, but if I had a religion, it would be Surrealism. I’ve spent my whole life wishing I could move to the Republic of Dreams.
NL: If you could have any author speak at Nyack Library, who would it be and why?
MD: Living or dead? If we’re talking immortals, Oscar Wilde, the wittiest man who ever lived, and whose table talk was, by all accounts, even more effervescently brilliant than his writing. If we’re talking living authors, Robert Macfarlane, the English nature writer, whose The Wild Places I just finished. He not only writes heart-stoppingly beautiful prose but is eloquent, erudite, and funny (in the usual drily self-deprecating English way).
NL: What character in a book do you most identify with?
MD: Fifty-percent Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, 50% Tom Ripley in The Talented Mister Ripley.
NL: What books are on your nightstand?
MD: A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema by David Pirie; Lafcadio Hearn, Japanese Ghost Stories; Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life (On-Order), by the philosopher John Gray; Polizzoti’s little biography of Lautréamont, the patron saint of literary grotesquerie (“little” because we know next to nothing about the man, which gives Polizzoti’s attempt to biographize him a Quixotic charm).
NL: Are there any books that you feel are overrated?
MD: Anything by Malcolm Gladwell, a Deepak Chopra for tech-bro “disruptors.”
NL: Do you have a literary “guilty pleasure”?
MD: Every now and then, when I’m feeling insomniac, I like to listen to Charlton Heston reading Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. The book is embarrassing enough—Hemingway at his most mawkish—but hearing it delivered by Moses really takes the cake.
NL: Would you ever organize your books by color? Yea or Nay?
MD: Nay. I have enough obsessions and enough compulsions.
NL: What do you plan to read next?
MD: Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by the British nature writer Roger Deakin, Macfarlane’s mentor. I’m thinking about trees these days for something I’m writing, a sort of gothic-naturalist essay on uncanny forests.
NL: What’s the first book that you remember reading?
MD: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Either that, or Fox in Socks.
NL: What’s your least favorite book?
MD: The Bible, that user’s manual for misogynists, homophobes, and self-appointed morality squads. Thin-skinned, petulant, and given to genocidal tantrums, the Yahweh of the Old Testament is a malignant narcissist with the morals of Pol Pot. He thinks nothing of drowning the human anthill when its inhabitants are insufficiently servile. If only the Gideons had placed a copy of Tom Paine’s Common Sense in every hotel room…