Lawrence Weschler is a difficult man to find at a bookstore. The former New Yorker staff writer has covered such a breadth of topics, from solidarity in Poland to Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, that it’s difficult to pin him down to one specific section, although Arts usually works. Or History, maybe.

His latest book, “Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences,” deals with his most recent obsession: the pairing of two objects or concepts that change the way we perceive them both. Or, as his publisher, McSweeney's, puts it on its Web site: "For those of you who still aren't quite clear on this 'convergence' concept, it's kind of like Celebrity Look-Alikes, except instead of Nick Nolte and Gary Busey, it's a cuneiform tablet and the Chicago city jail, followed by a series of brilliant, spiraling ruminations."

On Wednesday, Oct. 10, Weschler joins Geoff Manaugh, a senior editor at Dwell magazine and the creator of the stunning blog BLDGBLOG—at the Hammer Museum as part of the conversations series. What they'll talk about is anyone’s guess.

While on a recent New York visit, we met up with him in Manhattan’s Bryant Park to chat amid the Sunday library crowds and dive-bombing pigeons.

What will you discuss at the Hammer? The Web site it doesn’t really say, and on Geoff’s site he says: “We’ll talk about maybe everything, and maybe not so much.”
Have you seen the Convergence contest that’s happening on the McSweeney’s website?

I haven’t.
Pretty much right after we published “Everything That Rises”—we’re in our 50th week now—there’s been a contest going on where people can send in their own convergences.  At the Hammer, they’ll have Geoff and me hooked up to the Internet or a computer of some sort, and we’ll probably just trawl back and forth between our two Web sites. We’ll be very nerdy. Very geeky, I guess.

Any recent discoveries?
We’ve been doing video YouTube convergences. I just put one up recently. I started with the now-famous image of poor Ms. South Carolina. I talked about the way that, in America, the famous saying is that “War is our way of learning geography.” We invade you, therefore you are. And with that in mind, I was reminded of this other video clip from about a year ago. The military Hummer in Baghdad? Have you seen it?

I haven't. I could barely sit through Ms. South Carolina.
It’s the view from the passenger seat of an American Hummer roaring through the streets of Baghdad. And suddenly you understand everything you need to know intrinsically about our involvement there. This Hummer just bumps into every car it comes in contact with. It comes up to a small car that’s stopped. Bumps it off the road. Bump! Pushes them off the road. But then you see this huge, teeming bus, and you’re thinking, no—but it bumps it too! This American Hummer is to Baghdad traffic what that girl’s speech is to American education.

When you’re writing, you have a system of using note card for cross-referencing?
When I’m working on a piece I go out and I do all the reporting, and report the thing to death, and then I come back and I index my notes. Hand-written indexes that are insanely thorough and take weeks and weeks to draw up. But by the end of that process, I’m bored out of my mind by the subject. I start thinking all sorts of things that aren’t related to the piece, like, Hmmm, how does dust work? So then, I’ll take some time and start playing with blocks.

Blocks?
When I’m writing and I hit a block, I play with blocks.  I have a lot of different kinds. For days at a time, I’ll be at the dining room table trying to build elaborate cathedrals and space stations and so forth. My poor daughter, she was told from a very early age, “Those are not your blocks, those are Daddy’s blocks.”  So she’d go off to school and my wife would go off to do serious work, and they’d come home and I’d have a huge structure of some kind, and they’d say “Well, you’ve been busy!”

It’s just another structural way of thinking abut the piece you’re working on.
What is symmetrical, what is asymmetrical …. Say if I put this paragraph here, how does it change the complete picture? After a bit of shifting around, the piece gradually becomes new to me and I can get excited about it again. You come to things you didn’t know about Poland or about Bosnia because paragraphs that you didn’t think would work beside one another are thrust against each other. And this is true of the world! When you make formal adjustments, you see things.

It’s like a convergence in paragraph form.  
Like when you go to the eye doctor for your glasses, he pops down the lens machine and says “This … or this. This … or this.”  It’s a series of discrete determinations. But when he puts them all together, you can see incredibly clearly.

I get really nervous about those machines .…
You’re not really sure if what you’re seeing is completely clear?

Right!
Don’t worry about it. The optometrist is cross-checking them as they go. You can’t get it wrong.


Lawrence Weschler and Geoff Manaugh get geeky at the Conversations series banter fest on Wednesday, Oct. 10, at the Hammer Museum at 7 p.m. The erudite dorkiness, like everything good in life, is free.

George Ducker is a contributing editor for Metromix Los Angeles.

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