Amanda Palmer is an indie rock star who ran a record-breaking $1.2 million Kickstarter to fund her 2012 album Theatre Is Evil. That success, along with her high-profile marriage to bestselling fantasy author Neil Gaiman, catapulted her into the stratosphere of Internet celebrity, and she was soon the subject of intense scrutiny and no small amount of hatred. At the time she was devastated, but these days she’s more philosophical about it.
“It’s just this thing that happens that’s part of the job,” Palmer says in Episode 139 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The way that if you decide to go into stand-up comedy, it’s just part of the job that people are going to come and heckle you, and you’re going to have to learn how to deal with it.”
Back in 2012, having what seemed like the entire Internet gunning for you was new and scary, but Palmer says that by now practically everyone she knows has found themselves on the wrong end of the Internet outrage machine at one time or another, from her husband to author Daniel Handler to any number of stand-up comics, and now it all feels a bit more routine.
“Now that it seems like everybody is angry at everybody on the Internet, I feel way less alone than I used to,” she says.
She also notes that Internet outrage can be unpredictable. Sometimes she warns her staff to brace for the backlash to a controversial post, only to find that no one is bothered by it, whereas some offhand remark on Twitter can unexpectedly blow up into front page news. Though the fervor does seem to have died down lately, at least when it comes to her.
“It’s been a good couple of years since I was in a nice, big, proper shitstorm,” she says. “Which is surprising. I used to go through them like clockwork, every six months.”
Palmer reflects on those experiences in her new memoir, The Art of Asking , which explores the many ways people ask for and receive help, both online and off. And though many of her online encounters were painful, she does feel that receiving so much criticism has had some positive effects.
“It has made me so much more aware of who I am and what I believe,” she says. “As corny as that sounds.”
Listen to our complete interview with Amanda Palmer in Episode 139 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Amanda Palmer on writing The Art of Asking:
“I was at the point where I was doing printed-out proofs of the book, looking for rough spots and mistakes—it was like the 11th-hour edit. And the Harvard Lampoon —I’m a member, and so is Neil—this was in July, and the book was supposed to be out two months before, and they called me and they were like, ‘Amanda, you’re not going to believe this, but Katy Perry‘s going to be at a party at the Lampoon tomorrow!’ And I was like, ‘Good for you.’ And they were like, ‘You’ve got to come! You’ve got to see Katy Perry and meet Katy Perry.’ And I was like, ‘OK, that is something in my life that I should do.’ But I had to be editing my book, because I was at the point where I could not take any time off, so I threw my three hundred pages in my backpack, drove over to the Harvard Lampoon, and sat in their den, nursing a whiskey from upstairs and doing my line edits, kind of as a joke, but also because I had to get it done and I didn’t want to let these threads leave my brain, because I’d been working on them all day. I mostly just did it so I could say I went to a party with Katy Perry and barely talked to her, and instead drank whiskey in the basement and edited my book.”
Amanda Palmer on writing about her marriage:
“I didn’t want to throw [Neil] under the bus. I wanted to give him a voice. If I was going to literally make him a character in this book and write words into his mouth, I wanted to give him his own voice. So I sent Neil passages as I was writing them—the ones that were about him. And I would send him five pages of a Neil and Amanda argument and say, ‘This was my take on it. I’m sure you probably remember it differently, but go ahead and write your own dialogue, because I’m not going to put this out there unless you feel like it’s fair.’ And my writing the book, and giving him a hand in editing the parts about us and our relationship, was a kind of marriage therapy. … And it actually worked, because I could see things from his point of view, and he would look at things and say, ‘God, Amanda, maybe I sound like that in your head, but I would never have said that.’ And I’m over in the corner grumbling, ‘Well, you kind of did say that.'”
Amanda Palmer on science fiction:
“I was one of those teenagers—and super-judgmental college/early twenties people—who was like, ‘What I love is very strictly defined … and I don’t listen to hip hop, I don’t listen to metal, and I don’t like sci-fi and fantasy, I don’t like all that dorky stuff,’ without even realizing that a lot of my favorite books, and the stuff in my collection, particularly the stuff I loved as a kid, was fantastical realism. I loved Ray Bradbury, and I loved Kurt Vonnegut, and my favorite children’s book was The Velveteen Rabbit , which is one of the most beautiful pieces of fantastical fiction ever written. And what I’ve loved is having to confront my own outsider self as kind of this snotty girl who’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t like sci-fi and fantasy,’ and then meeting someone like Neil, and being invited into that world, and going, well, clearly I was not only wrong, I was really wrong, this world encompasses so much more than I thought, and I was a fan of so many of these things without knowing it.”
Amanda Palmer on the Internet:
“I can’t hate a human being in a room. I actually find it impossible to despise anybody, because all I do is look at this flesh-and-blood human being and see them and all of their hopes and fears and flaws, and I can’t help but love them, even if they’ve slagged me or reviewed me badly. And I think that’s true of everybody. And the thing that makes the Internet so difficult is we don’t get to have that experience of one another’s humanity. We’re so two-dimensional on the Internet that it makes it really easy to lash out, really easy to act sanctimonious, really easy to see things in black and white, even when we know, intellectually, that things are way more subtle, way more complicated, way more multi-dimensional. And if I’ve learned anything from living pretty much half-time on the Internet for the past 15 years, as a full-time connector and communicator and social media user, I think the challenge is to remember that behind every single piece of binary code is a flesh-and-blood human being.”
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