RM: You’ve described the tone of this new book in another interview as “harder, almost algebraic.”

JJS: What was I talking about?

RM: I think, that you wanted the language of the book to be more compressed, more boiled down….

JJS: See, that’s already changed like 16 times. This is part of the problem of the Internet, and one of the distortions it creates, is that people are taking pictures of your brain in a kind of snapshot way. But then it’s getting preserved in such a way that seems to lend a significance to it over time.

RM: You’re right; I read that interview out of time and figured it was still true today.

JJS: It ought to be. That’s the thing. I shouldn’t be saying things that are of such ephemeral meaning. And I could have said “no” to all of those interviews, including this one. I had the power to do it. So it’s silly to complain about it as if it’s an external force. To me it felt natural. It would have seemed perverse to do anything else, because I felt like I’d been working for among other reasons, in order to find an audience. Like anyone who writes. So it would have seemed really contra natura to turn away from it. But now I’m realizing that I really paid a price for it. It singes you a little bit. Just the sheer psychic exposure, opening yourself up to that much scrutiny.

RM: I read in British GQ that you’re growing increasingly…firm…in your politics. In Blood Horses, you describe yourself as the youngest Kentuckian to join the American Socialist Party, and yet you were also, later, an Evangelical Christian. To me, your political leaning always seemed progressive, but not exclusionary. Open-minded. Has this last election changed your views at all?            

JJS: The other side has just started to seem a lot uglier to me. I mean, I wouldn’t want to turn my back on a piece like my Christian rock piece. I think that was probably my better self. But some of my feeling —that politics had intruded too far into private life in a way that was unnaturally and unnecessarily divisive—was a lack of understanding of how serious the political questions were. And it was kind of narcissistic in a way.