A sweet little dustup made author Sarah Vowell’s return to her alma mater even more delicious.
Not only was Vowell, a former grad student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a decent-selling author, returning to her much-loved museum — but her appearance was commanding nearly twice the general admission price ($20) of a museum reading by best-selling author Umberto Eco ($12).
“I guess it was quite the hot topic around the art history department, from a ‘who-does-she-think-she-is’ standpoint,” says Vowell, 32, walking downtown after her reading. “I think it’s funny. It’s more about how arbitrary things are. I would pay more for Mr. Eco.”
Eco’s latest effort, “Baudolino,” stands at No. 14 on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover fiction, whereas Vowell’s new book, “The Partly Cloudy Patriot,” remains a no-show on the Times’ list.
On tour in support of her new book, Vowell took time to reminisce about her art school years in Chicago, where she began working on her first book and started her long association with WBEZ-FM 91.5’s popular “This American Life.”
Pulling up to the museum’s Columbus Drive entrance was a bit surreal, she says. Vowell trekked through the same doors she did as a gray-and-black-clad grad student, to the same theater she saw art scholar Simon Schama speak when she attended the school from 1995 to 1996.
Now it was her turn.
“I was just proud,” Vowell says, preferring not to romanticize the experience. “I was glad it was in the actual museum. I love that place, as a building and a museum. I moved around so much, there are just places I think of as little homes, and that’s one of them to me.”
Known for her snappy, curmudgeonly prose and a radio voice she describes as “straight out of the 3rd grade,” Vowell has since gone on to make a name for herself as a geek icon and neo-political thinker.
Today, walking through the outdoor gardens and fountains outside the Art Institute, Vowell’s shoulder-length dark hair frames her perpetually pouty bottom lip.
Gazing at the architecture riddled with fall leaves, she stuffs her slender wrists into her tan trench coat, lapsing into silence when not responding to a question.
In interviews, she’s personable and friendly, although not too long ago, she admits, her “people chops” weren’t as well tuned. Small talk was not a strong point, especially when meeting fans at book signings. She just didn’t know what to say, she says, and would get shy. Bookish is perhaps a fair description of Vowell, although she’s much harder on herself.
“Do I look mad?” Vowell asks the photographer. “Sometimes when I’m just thinking, I look like I’m angry.”
But, perhaps ironically, it’s Vowell’s well-honed outrage and quirky, intimate prose that has led her to become one of America’s most original critical voices — even though it wasn’t her intended career path.
After attending Montana State University, and a stint in San Francisco, the young Oklahoma native imagined a future as an art historian.
“It was my dream to go to Berkeley to be in their PhD program,” Vowell says. “I didn’t get in for various reasons. One of them, they said, was that I was interested into too many things and they couldn’t see me sticking with art history. I was devastated, but they were so right.”
She adds: “A lot of the good things that have happened to me career-wise have been from not getting the things I think I want.”
Ambitious life
So in 1995, Vowell came to Chicago, to the only grad school that accepted her, to begin a new life boiling over with ambition. Not only would she be teaching classes, taking classes and writing music reviews for Minneapolis’ City Pages — she’d also spend the entire year documenting her radio listening habits, later published in January 1997 as her first book, “Radio On: A Listener’s Diary.”
Vowell says she connected with her students, even if she couldn’t keep their names straight.
“I really loved art students, just because it was like every weird kid from every Midwestern high school in the same room discovering they weren’t alone — to the extent that they all kind of looked alike. It was impossible for me to learn their names because they all dyed their hair a different color every week,” Vowell says.
Her adviser, professor Simon Anderson, calls Vowell “one of the most memorable students I’ve had in 15 years of teaching.”
“Art schools tend to attract introspective and alienated people, so she fit right in, really,” Anderson says. “She’s just indefatigable. She was prepared to try anything and strike it off if she didn’t like it.”
Vowell was interested in Fluxus, a school of radical “anti-art.” One of her projects was to re-create a piece by Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, which involved dipping her head in a bucket of paint, and drawing a straight line on a floor canvas. Anderson still has the piece.
“[Art school] actually really made me want to be a writer more, because a lot of what we read — a lot of theory we read — was really bad writing,” Vowell remembers. “Even if there were good ideas to be gleaned from it, I just didn’t have the patience to sit through page after page of impenetrable gobbledygook. That was an important experience for me.”
Although often tired, irritated and running in three directions at once, Vowell was able to sell her book and accrued enough clips by 1996 to get a job as a music critic for the San Francisco Weekly. More radio pieces on “This American Life” and a second book, “Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World,” heightened her profile and popularity outside the public radio audience. She’s now a sometime contributor to Esquire, Dave Egger’s www.McSweeneys.net and has become a favorite guest of late-night hosts Conan O’Brien and David Letterman.
“Her great strength was that she could use some of her angst as grist for the mill,” Anderson says. “Now she finds that she still likes [writing] and doesn’t need her angst to still have opinions — and she can do it on the strength of her personality, not the weakness of it. That’s maturing, I guess.”
A few regrets
When she looks back at her time in Chicago, Vowell gets a little wistful, admitting to a few regrets.
“I know they say life is short, but it feels long to me,” Vowell says. “Now I’m kind of nostalgic for things I didn’t get to do: hanging out, spending days and days in the library. My life was such a question mark. I always have a sorta plan and things never quite work out.”
Then again, how many students return to their college to sign books and answer questions about arcane pop culture trivia, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the definition of “nerd”?
“Maybe that’s why my tickets cost more?” Vowell says.
An excerpt from `What He Said There’
An excerpt from Sarah Vowell’s essay “What He Said There,” published in “The Partly Cloudy Patriot” (Simon & Schuster, $22).
Below, Vowell writes about visiting Gettysburg on the 137th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous “Gettysburg Address.”
Abraham Lincoln is one of my favorite writers. “The mystic chords of memory.” “Better angels of our nature.” “The father of waters flows unvexed to the sea.” All those brilliant phrases I’d admired for so long, and yet I never truly thought of him as a writer until I visited the David Wills house in Gettysburg’s town square.
In 1863, Wills was charged by Pennsylvania’s governor to oversee the battlefield’s cleanup and the construction of the cemetery. His house, now a museum, is where Lincoln stayed the night before delivering the address. I walk into the room where Lincoln slept, with its flowerdy carpet and flowerdy walls, with its canopy bed and its water pitcher and towels, and for several minutes the only possible thought is that he was here. There’s the window he leaned out of the night of the 18th, teasing the crowd outside that he had nothing to say. And, this being a sweet old-fashioned tourist trap, there’s a gangly Lincoln mannequin in white shirtsleeves, hunched over a small table, his long legs poking out the side. He’s polishing the speech. The myth is that he wrote it on the back of an envelope on the train, but probably he’s been slaving over it for days and days. Still, he doesn’t finish it until he’s in this room, the morning of the 19th, the morning he’s to deliver it.
To say that Abraham Lincoln was a writer is to say that he was a procrastinator. How many deadlines have I nearly blown over the years, slumped like Lincoln, fretting over words that didn’t come out until almost too late? Of course, the stakes are lower when one is under pressure to think up insightful things to say about the new Brad Pitt movie instead of, say, saving the Union.
