Re: Who are you?

Description: Kurt Andersen talks about growing up in a family that was engaged with culture outside of television.

Transcript:

Kurt Andersen

I think having grown up in Omaha – specifically Nebraska, the Midwest – has shaped me quite a bit.  I think going from Omaha essentially to the east – and New York, specifically – put me in a kind of . . . made me feel a little bit like a permanent outsider.  If not an outsider, at least somebody who could see the . . . the strangeness, and magnificence, and ugliness and . . . of New York with a certain amount of awe that hasn’t quite left me.  I think also there is a cliché – but like most clichés a true one – that there’s this thing in the Midwest of . . . which amounts to a kind of enforced humility.  Sometimes a mock humility, but the nevertheless a sense of . . . of you can’t . . . you shouldn’t toot your own horn too much.  And I think that has stuck with me.  And then of course the particulars of my parents and . . . and my family background entirely apart from the Midwest – or Omaha particularly – has had a dramatic influence on my life.

I grew up in a household with lots of books just around, and with lots of music being played around; and with a sense that . . . my parents went to the theater . . . the local community theater.  So the sense that . . . of . . . of . . . that there was a culture out there beyond what was on television was extremely important and . . . and sort of to the degree I’ve made a life and a culture in _________.  Those were important.  So I . . .  And in particular my mother; I mean, but both of my parents.  I don’t want to undersell my father’s influence. But my mother, who was kind of an amateur Willa Cather scholar, and just a voracious reader, and somebody who kind of . . . they both, my parents, sort of privileged books and reading very highly.  So I was sort of hard wired with that same sense very early on.

 Not really a pivotal moment in my child . . .  There were . . . there were . . . there were moments that could have gone wrong.  So that . . . I sort of avoided the negative pivotal moments, if you will.  But there wasn’t a moment where I suddenly thought, “Aha! I understand. I should be decent and civilized to people.”  Or, “I should read . . .” No.  It was . . . it was . . . it was a boringly untroubled childhood, so there was no pivotal moment.  It was . . . It was . . . it was pleasant and without much in the way of epiphany.

I had the . . . the . . . the various kind of random thoughts that children have.  I thought . . . I was told by my parents once that radiologists . . . what a radiologist was, and that it was just a matter of looking at x-rays.  And I thought that sounded good.  But I guess I thought I might be a scientist of some sort as a little kid.  But it wasn’t until . . .  I began writing in the school newspaper and things like that when I was in junior high school.  And I guess I probably began imagining that I could have a life as a writer.  But when I left Omaha for college, I thought . . . I imagined that I would be some kind of academic.  It wasn’t until I . . . I got to an academic environment until I realized, “I don’t think so.”  And indeed the fact that I could write . . . that my professors and teachers at college thought I wrote well made me think, “Well then, maybe I could write.”