It remains the only book on law that I've ever read, cover to cover, and it's weird and wonderful and very, very funny. The perfect book to give your favorite wise-ass know-it-all, which, in my case, is probably my father.
So Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, now has a debut collection of stories out -- The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, and Other Stories -- and he's here to talk fiction, law, [laughter], puppets, love, eagle feathers, Bo Derek, and Moby Dick.
Enjoy!
Current obsessions -- literary or otherwise.
I’ve been
obsessed by bald eagles and eagle feathers for at least two years now.
I’m a law professor, and my fields include law and religion,
environmental
law, and American Indian law. Native Americans believe eagles are
sacred creatures, and many use eagles and their feathers in their
religious ceremonies. But possessing even so much as a single feather
is illegal under federal law. That law also allows
the Fish and Wildlife Service to grant permits to members of federally
recognized tribes to possess feathers and other eagle parts, but the way
that FWS has gone about implementing this has primarily been to
establish a bizarre agency called the National Eagle
Repository outside Denver which collects dead eagles from all over the
country and then distributes them to American Indians who apply for
them. The agency has also granted a couple of permits for tribes to run
aviaries for injured eagles where the molted
feathers can be collected and distributed.
I’ve visited the Repository and written about it, and I just came back from the aviary
run by the Iowa tribe in Oklahoma. For about 18 months I was trying
to convince publishers to give me a contract to write a book about the
history of the bald eagle as a contested symbol in the United States,
but to no avail. Instead, the eagle story
will be one part of the book I’m working on now about what happens when
religious practice and environmentalism collide. It should be
published sometime this century by Beacon Press.
What's your advice to a writer who's looking for a
lifelong partner? Any particularly useful traits to suggest in said
partner? (Do you want to tell us a brief love story here?)
I wish I knew
how to answer this. All I can do is relate my own story, which involves
marrying someone who couldn’t give two shits about what I write.
Karen did read my first book, and her major reaction to it was that the
size of the book was kind of weird. She hasn’t read either of my other
two books, and the notion that she would ever read any of my scholarly
articles is laughable (not sure I can blame
her for that). She’ll tell you that if she showed too much interest in
my writing, it would give me a big head, and my ego would explode out
of our house, and she might be right. Luckily we have other things in
common. Both of us hate cell phones, for instance,
and we’ve never had one.
What kind of child were you, inside of what kind of childhood, and how did it shape you as a writer?
I’m
an only child, so I grew up muttering to myself and talking to my
extensive collection of puppets.
I would write puppet shows and put them on for friends. Many of the
puppet shows were spoofs on movies, like “Zero,” which was a spoof on Bo
Derek’s “10” and starred Discombobulated Duck (a duck puppet that got
permanently squished in the suitcase my father
brought it home from vacation in) as a particularly ugly woman. My
parents got divorced when I was twelve, and I think they felt pretty
guilty about it, so they let me do pretty much whatever I wanted, which
explains why my mother let me put on a show called
“Friday the 13th,” which involved lots of squirting ketchup
on the walls and blowing up fireworks inside the house. I think I was a
character myself in one of the shows and I think I may have pretended
to have sex with one of the puppets on the
stage. It might have been Munchie the mouse. I’m not proud of this.
What’s your reading life like? Do you have any current favorites or sleepers that may have flown under our radar?
I
read primarily fiction. This past summer I took Moby Dick with me on a
three week vacation. It
took me six weeks to finish it. I’m not sure I’d recommend it as
vacation reading. I don’t read as much non-fiction, but here are two
very cool books that I like a lot and that people might have missed:
Jason Fagone’s
Horsemen of the Esophagus, about the world of competitive eating, and Robert Sullivan’s
A Whale Hunt, about the Makah Tribe’s quest to hunt and kill a
whale as a way of revivifying their traditional culture. The book is
fascinating and hilarious, and Sullivan carries on this side
conversation in the footnotes about his reading of Moby
Dick while he was researching the book. This was why I decided to read
Moby Dick.
Have you learned to strike a balance between your writing life and the other aspects of your life?
Yes, but it
wasn’t always easy. For the first seven years or so of being a
professor, I would write these crazy stories and humor pieces and
scripts
on the side to keep me sane while the rest of the time I was writing a
bunch of bloated, footnote-infested academic articles so I could get
tenure. It’s the crazy stories and humor pieces and one of the scripts
(and also the associated paintings of angry
fruit, etc.) that I put together in the Ed Tuttle book. Once I
got tenure, I found I could more easily reconcile my professional
interests in constitutional law and the Supreme Court and religion,
etc., with my story telling and humor side. My first
two books were the result. I still want to write a novel, probably
about the Tuttle character, but I can’t get myself to sit down and start
it.
What project of yours was the easiest writing of
your life? And, flip-side, which one was the most like wrestling bears?
(And could you tell before you started or did they turn
on you, for better or worse?)
Jay
Wexler is a professor of law at Boston University, a former law clerk
to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the author of three
books, Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battleground of the Church/State Wars,
The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions, and the recently released book of fiction,
The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, and Other Stories.
His stories, reviews, humor pieces, and essays have appeared in places
like Barrelhouse, the Boston Globe, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency,
Mental Floss, Monkeybicycle, Opium, Salon, and
Spy. This is his website.
