Chapter 1: What is Tim Blake Nelson's background and early influences?
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What emotion do you understand better than all the others? Feelings of vindictiveness and recrimination are important as fuel in an artistic life. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life, questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me.
My guest this week is Tim Blake Nelson. I wake up every day in search of creative truth and creative moments. There are certain actors I'm just going to watch no matter what. Tim Blake Nelson is one of them. Whether it's O Brother Where Art Thou or Watchmen or smaller appearances like his episode in the show Poker Face, if Tim Blake Nelson is in it, I am watching. I think it's his face.
His face seems like it's holding a lifetime of stories and all the joy and pain that goes with them. He puts all his storytelling experience to work in his latest novel. It's called Superhero. And I am so very, very glad to welcome Tim Blake Nelson to Wildcard. Hi, Tim. Hi. You're not as glad as I am to be here. It's great to meet you. Oh, you're very, very kind. I'm such an admirer of your work.
I have long wanted to have you on the show, and I'm so glad that we could make it happen. So round one, memories. I hold up three random cards, and you pick, even more randomly, one, two, or three.
Two.
Two. What's something you took away from your first job? Well, my first job was working at the Tulsa Beef Company, which was a meatpacking company. And this was in high school, in part to pay off legal debts from having been arrested for public intoxication. This is already the best answer to this question of all time. And spending my prom night in jail. Whoa. And so, yeah.
I woke up at 5.30 in the morning, every morning, the summer before I went to college. And... I had to be at work by 6. I worked until 2 in the afternoon. They called me college boy. I mostly cleaned the latrines where meat packers would go to urinate and defecate. And I cleaned out the trucks with... With entrails and organs and maggots and with a high-powered industrial hose.
And I was pretty much the bottom rung. Yeah. And that was a great prelude to going off to college and putting everything in perspective. Indeed. Yeah. Your parents were supportive of this? Or maybe it was their idea that in order to pay this off, you need to get a job and this will suit. It was my second infraction. By that point, my parents were divorced, recently divorced.
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Chapter 2: How did Tim Blake Nelson's childhood shape his artistic journey?
That is a different culture. And I was very young when we started going there. And one of the aspects that... My siblings and my parents loved about Jamaica was at that time, certainly, they could just do what they did in Oklahoma and open the door and let us roam and do whatever it was that we wanted. So I would venture out on my own every day and fish.
And I made friends in the local community, Jamaican kids my age. And I couldn't get enough of it. And so I was gone from about 9 o'clock in the morning till 6 o'clock at night. Wow. Just out on a boat on the water with my Jamaican kid friends fishing. But then also, I did it a lot on my own.
When friends didn't want to hang out or weren't able to hang out, I would spend the entire day – I could spend the entire day just by myself. And I think that prepared me most of all as a writer because it's a solitary pursuit. Right. And –
I just learned as a kid to go off on my own and crack little snails and put them on a little hook and catch a fish maybe that big, a little parrotfish or maybe a mudfish, and then use a bigger hook and catch a barracuda or a needlefish and spend the day Doing that. And no one's—I mean, if you're not with your friends, you're by yourself. There are no adults.
That is—I mean, you're just wandering the world, fishing. That is—I imagine that was like the pinnacle of freedom to a young boy. Barefoot on volcanic rock with calloused feet and as happy as I've ever been. Yeah. Okay. Last one in this round. One, two, or three. One. One. Who'd you eat lunch with in high school? There was a group of us in AP Latin, and we were very serious about our Latin.
I imagine. And as people interested in the classics generally are, there was also an obsession with with politics and current affairs. And that was always a great time. I guess you just said there's a natural relationship between people who are interested in Latin and political affairs. And I was someone who was very interested in politics and international governance.
And I'm 0% interested in studying Latin, Tim. So make this connection for me. What was it about the classics when you were like, whatever, 15 years old? You're like, yes, Latin. So, in terms of your response, what I didn't say is that people interested in politics and international relations are invariably going to be interested in classics. It's more the other way around.
At that time, and I don't think this is as true anymore, if you were studying Latin, you mainly read beginner texts that by Tacitus, Livy, and Julius Caesar. And all of those texts were either about military exploits or Roman history. If you remained interested in Latin, you usually weren't bored by reading about the military and politics in ancient Rome.
And so, therefore, you were probably interested in current affairs. I'm giggling because did you catch this little cultural moment when there was a lot going around on the internet about how a certain type of man, when left to his own devices and when he's just sitting in a state of emptiness, the thing that came into his mind in this prototype of a man is the Roman Empire.
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