Jonah Lehrer > Gaucho Joe?!
Posted by paulrivas on:
Partly because he went first, but mostly because he has a good story, Gaucho Joe O’Brien has been the biggest hit of the 30 guests interviewed on Real Gauchos. Yet when I last saw him, I warned him that his title was on the line. Best-selling author Jonah Lehrer was coming to speak at UCSB Arts & Lectures, and my associate had arranged for me to interview him for the UCSB CLAS Writing Lab and play it on Real Gauchos.
I liked Lehrer’s lottery story in Wired, I saw him talk about his new book Imagine with Colbert, and I read his interview with The Rumpus. I read the bad New York Times review of Imagine, but didn't read the good one Lehrer referenced in his rebuttal. I read the book, took a page of notes, and went looking for people to talk about it with, only to find that no one outside the UCSB CLAS Staff Book Club had ever heard of it.
Lehrer did come though, and the standing-room only crowd loved him for it. I forgot to turn the recorder on, but I had remembered to turn the backup recorder on. The resulting recording is the second LIVE episode of Real Gauchos, in which Lehrer drops science on writing and creativity.
Everybody and their mother has interviewed Lehrer since Imagine, but surely his half hour at the UCSB CLAS Writing Lab, when he talked about how to actually write stuff, is the most useful of these conversations.
Jonah Lehrer’s a cool guy; a real gaucho. So far he's not even sniffing Gaucho Joe, but it's still early.
(Photo by Caitlin Dawson)
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