"Children’s literature," he continues, "is getting a lot of attention right now, and there’s also a lot of experimentation happening. Another children’s author told me that she thought it was like rock & roll in the ’60s — that all of the sudden everyone’s looking at it, and there’s money being made from it, and because there’s money being made from it, that the people who are sort of minding the gates are allowing a lot more experimentation.
"I’m not enough of a historian of children’s literature to know if that entirely rings true, but certainly it’s a time when . . . I mean, if you read 12 novels published for teenagers that are out by major publishers right now, the amount of experimentation — in terms of subject matter, style and language — is just way to the left of the same 12 novels that are gonna be published during the same period by the same publishers but for adults. There’re novels from the point of view of fetuses. Feti? Fetuses. And characters who go blind without reason midway through the novel. And all sorts of things that, if you were writing that for adults, you would only be published by some crazy, leftist, independent press, at best. And instead, if you write that for children, you’re being published by Simon & Schuster."
* * * * *
In college, Handler had a narcoleptic seizure disorder, which led to an interest in sleep and dream theory, which led to the bottom of our current glasses of delicious, dangerous drugs: "There’s quite a sizable school of thought," Handler says, "that believes that your dream comes from a narrative urge entirely due to the outside stimulus that wakes you up. And sometimes, you know, that makes sense: You have a dream with a bell going off, and you wake up and it’s your alarm clock. But sometimes you have these long narrative dreams that you can’t believe would be invented by your brain in just the split second before you wake up. But that is the school of thought."
"Isn’t your assistant or publicist named Darla?" I ask.
"Yeah."
"I’ve never met her or spoken with her, but my editor gave me her phone number, and I wrote it down, and last night I dreamed I was having an affair with a woman named Darla. I mean, we weren’t, you know, doing anything . . ."
"She’s available . . ."
"And I’m sure we’ll be married within the hour. Dreams are even better than books. All I did was write down the name Darla in my notebook, and in return I got all that free entertainment, and caught up on sleep at the same time."
"I recently had this dream that I was onstage with this sort of indie-rock woman named Lois — she’s out of K-Records, up in the Pacific Northwest — and I’ve met her a couple of times. Not friends. I mean, we get along very well, but not close at all. But I had one of those incredibly vivid dreams that she and I were onstage at the Great American Music Hall, which is a real medium-size club here in San Francisco, in front of a really hostile audience, performing covers. Cover after cover after cover, and nothing pleases them."
"What were you playing?"
"We were playing everything. We’d say, ‘Okay, let’s do Robyn Hitchcock. Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s do U2. Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s do John Coltrane.’ And that didn’t work. But we keep trying."
"And you’re playing accordion?"
"I’m playing accordion and singing, and she’s playing guitar and singing."
"Can you do Coltrane riffs on the accordion?"
"No. That was probably part of the problem. We weren’t any good."
"Only a dream. So what’s Darla like?"
