Shimon Peres, January 9, 2008                                                                                                           
President of Israel, former Prime Minister, Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Shankbone: Hebrew is very unique. At a time when languages are disappearing, Hebrew is the only example that I know of a language revived successfully. Although I don’t speak Hebrew, I understand that the quality of Hebrew spoken by the younger generations has decreased.

Peres: Don’t listen to the old generation. They think everything is being ruined and is decaying. It’s different! They would like that we shall still dance a hora. And the boys and the girls want to have all the jumping stuff: They want to jump, let them jump, my God! They still want that they should sing Slavic melodies and they complain the dresses are becoming shorter. What do you care? Let them have their own taste. And by the way: they can have it! Why are the girls wearing such short skirts? Because they are not afraid to show their legs; they take care of themselves. In previous generations, the women were not as up to develop the lady, so she couldn’t show her legs. Today, on the contrary.

Shankbone: You used to not want to see the legs. [Laughs]

Peres: They didn’t show because you didn’t want to see! [Laughs]

Augusten Burroughs, October 12, 2007                                                                                  
Novelist and memoirst

Shankbone: Do you believe in a higher power?

Augusten Burroughs: I wouldn't say that I believe in one. I don't know. I don't know if there's an organizing principle to the universe, or if there's a sentient being that is the architect of everything--you know, everything being the "observable-and-beyond" universe. I don't know. I would like to know. I would like to know--I don't believe in any God that has been described by man in any way. I certainly don't believe in the Islamic or the Jewish or the Christian God. I don't believe a word of the Bible, I don't believe a word of any organized religion and I don't have any firm belief whatsoever, other than I don't know. I can't say that I don't believe, because I really don't know. I would love to know.

Shankbone: You had mentioned particular issues about a father may arise in a slave-master relationship. You were sexually attracted to your father, so do you think you worked through your own issues with him?

Edmund White: Yes.

Shankbone: Where do you think that attraction came from?

White: I don’t know; I think it’s very hard to explain attraction. If I’m attracted to you right now, why? I don’t know why.

Shankbone: But that’s something people could perhaps explain more readily than attraction to one's father.

White: I don’t know; I wasn’t really raised by my father. I lived apart from him and I would spend every summer with him, but not see him much during the year. My parents were divorced from my age of seven on. I think the incest taboo sets in and turns somebody off sexually with somebody they know very well and lives with. I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister!

Shankbone: What advice would you give to couples pursuing an incestuous relationship?

White: You mean like a father and daughter who want to have a love affair?

Shankbone: Or a brother and sister.

White: God, move to a more tolerant country, first of all.

John Vanderslice: That's the trick. I would say that honestly, when Katrina happened, I thought, Okay, this is a trick to make people so crazy and so angry that they can't even think.

Shankbone: Do you think Mitt Romney's Mormonism is an issue that people should take into consideration?

Brownback: I don’t. There's no religious test for public office in this country. There shouldn't be. I think people should run on who they are and their record, and there I think he has a challenge, based on his record. But his faith should not be an issue.

Shankbone: What if someone was a Zoroastrian?

Brownback: Well, let's see what their policies are. Uhh--

Shankbone: Or a Satanist.

Brownback: Let's see what their policies are.

Shankbone: Really?

Shankbone: If you were President, how would you handle the Israeli-Palestinian issue?

Peter H. Gilmore: I don’t have a solution for that. If I did, I would be out there telling people about it, because I don’t really see myself as a politician or arbiter of people’s interactions with each other. I can see that there are issues on both sides of the fence and that when people are fighting over a territory, generally speaking the folks who have the power win and then they write the histories and the world moves on. But we have a situation here where there are bigger players behind the smaller nations, and it keeps this conflict enduring. So they will either have to have compromise and discussion, or one side will have to destroy the other side and “win” and then move on, which is usually the way the world works.

Shankbone: What about Same-sex marriage?

Gilmore: Absolutely support it.

Shankbone: Abortion?

Gilmore: I think people should practice birth control rather than use abortion as an easy way out.

Richard Hell, Unpublished                                                                                                                       
Punk rock icon, poet, author, artist

Richard Hell: That's interesting. No, I don't think so, though I think men and women are very different. But if you're talking about the qualities that I admire, I think of the people who are my ideal models. They have ideals of--

Shankbone: Behavior?

Hell: Yeah, and achievement. And values, right?  It's the same for men and women.

Shankbone: What are those?

Hell: Well, for me, it's always artists. And thinkers--but people that have certain kinds of values, and ethics. A woman who comes to mind would be Susan Sontag. And a man who comes to mind would be Godard. And I think it's the same things that I'm liking in the two of them.

Shankbone: Nobody wants to find out why a person's troubled anymore?

Eric Bogosian: No.

Shankbone: They just want to see what the effects are and how things resolve?

Bogosian: Yeah, and tell a good story, and have lots of different things going on between different kinds of armies, like 300 or whoever they are--talk about medieval, 300 is before medieval. I think you'll see more stuff like that. It isn't entirely to my taste, but the funny thing is, when I see all that kind of material, and then I go back and I look at the kinds of the things that have always attracted me, I realize that it's really the same story over and over and over again. Some troubled white male and his dick, and he's trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in this life--I mean, this is Philip Roth. It gets you to the Philip Roth novels that he's been currently writing, which are--

Shankbone: Which are critically acclaimed but not commercially successful.

Bogosian: Yeah, and they're also complete dead ends.

John Reed, October 18, 2007                                                                                                                   
Novelist and artist 

Shankbone: What do you think it is that drives many artists to sink their own ships?

John Reed: I think the inclination to be a creative person is to blow things up...and of course the nearest thing around you is yourself.

Natasha Khan: As an English person I feel equally as responsible for that kind of shit. I think it is a collective consciousness that allows violence and those kinds of things to continue, and I think that our governments should be ashamed of themselves. But at the same time, it's a responsibility of all of our countries, no matter where you are in the world to promote a peaceful lifestyle and not to consciously allow these conflicts to continue. At the same time, I find it difficult to judge because I think that the world is full of shades of light and dark, from spectrums of pure light and pure darkness, and that's the way human nature and nature itself has always been. It's difficult, but it's just a process, and it's the big creature that's the world; humankind is a big creature that is learning all the time. And we have to go through these processes of learning to see what is right.

Shankbone: Has the war affected you as a person? 

Gay Talese: I wish it had. The war hasn't affected America as a person. The only ones affected are the 165,000 troops, relatives, kinfolk, cousins. That's all.

Shankbone: It hasn't affected you then?

Talese: I wish it had! It hasn't. It hasn't affected you either. It hasn't affected anybody!

Shankbone: It's affected me.

Talese: It's affected you?

Shankbone: Every single person I interview I ask about the war because I think it's important and it has affected me.

Talese: Then you must have a human spirit unmatched since Billy Graham made his first speech! I mean you have to have a real conscience, social conscience, to care.