Interview with Alan Rolnick Author of his important work status Landmark Status is a wonderfully funny book. Alan Rolnick uses Miami as a backdrop, and real estate as the weapon, taking the reader on a journey mad that I can guarantee that you will enjoy. When I put down the book and wrote this comment, I knew I wanted to talk to this guy. Anyone can create bizarre characters and incredibly funny scenes that I encountered in Landmark State must be a very interesting person to talk to. Alan had given an interview.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I grew up in Newburgh, New York, a small town on the Hudson River. It was a beautiful place, old, proud and certainly not aware that it had been rendered obsolete, detached from history moorings and adrift in changing times. As a kid I played in an abandoned brewery, took bus trips to Yankee Stadium and collected signatures of Hector Lopez and Moose Skowron (we never got close enough to Mickey and Yogi). Once, a large child sitting on my hand for the entire journey by bus, leaving welts striped velvet that lasted one week, but it was not really his fault I could not throw strikes.
In my teens, Beatlemania struck. My brother Paul and I decided to be rock stars, the savings for guitars with money washing car battle game tape on the circuit picnic fire. Paul was an exceptional guitarist and singer, destined to become an award-winning producer in New York. I did not, but rejoined after graduating from Johns Hopkins with a Major in Frisbee. Together, we made some brilliant recordings that few heard, won fifty dollars to open the Buffy St. Marie at the Philharmonic, and casually at home equipment instead of leaving for the concert next weekend at the Mercer Arts Center (which collapsed later that night).
Taking journalism to put me in my career, I became the guy at the New York Times who used computers to rank college and pro football teams. In 1983, pollsters rights assigned to the Miami Hurricanes national championship, but my favorite computer Auburn. I was in Miami, who fell in love with the place and decided it was time to go to law school (as my family had asked since I was six, usually with comments like "He talks a lot, it will be a lawyer"). The idea of living where balmy breezes caress you out of the door in December was particularly attractive.
Atoning for error of my computer, I learned in classes of offenses landlocked and draw all the sleepless nights on the law review, winning induction into the society of the wig and gown (which, fortunately nor the required port). After twenty years of schooling, they put me on the day shift, working one of the best legal sweatshops Miami, which represents the "robber barons" in complex cases in federal courts. Years later I switched sides and began representing Davids against Goliaths in class actions.
Finally, I decided it was time to throw a rope around the places and people I met that I was, and began to write the kind of story I liked to read.
What with lawyers, are you all closet authors? In the last year, I read at least a dozen books by people in the profession, oh and they have all been very good. I came to the conclusion that every lawyer must have a book to them.
Jeez, is there so much? Seriously, the lawyers have to write to eat, and they have been trained to turn models "fact" in the stories. Many of these stories are stranger than fiction, and they make you aspire to bring your own. Storytelling is crucial in litigation, where victory requires the development of compelling themes, keeping the character witnesses, and distilling all the legal arguments in paragraph pithiest possible. One classmate used to say he was imagined to hear the words, "yes, you f___," after every sentence of the ORDER.
Posted on February 6, 2010.
