Peter Maass

Peter Maass may be based in New York, but he was born and raised in Los Angeles, and attended the University of California, Berkeley. “I’m a Californian,” Maass assured us. These days, the writer and foreign correspondent is “living the posh Ivy League life” in Cambridge while his wife is on a fellowship. “Then I turn into a pumpkin and move back to New York,” he said. Maass chatted with us briefly before taking the stage to discuss his book Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.

Q. What music have you listened to today?

A. Today I haven’t listened to any music, but yesterday, when I was [packing] what I absolutely needed to come here, I decided to bring my earbuds just in case I had a moment to listen to some music. There is an Icelandic artist I like a lot that I did get to listen to, Sin Fang Bous.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. Oil. It’s also my least favorite word.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. An adult. But really my first strong memory of what I wanted to be was somewhere in my teens. I wanted to write and I wanted to travel. I didn’t have any particular idea of how I would do those things, I just knew I liked writing and I liked traveling. When I was about 18 or 19, a light bulb went off that I should be a foreign correspondent.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?

A. A martini.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?

A. My wife would say I should go deeper into my own mind. But my journey – because I have journeyed a lot – would be to just have a house on a lake and never leave.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?

A. I’d like to paint. I don’t, I can’t, but it would be a wonderful form of expression. That’s really not a profession-that’s like a money losing proposition, however.

Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?

A. I grew up in Los Angeles, driving around after school with friends and going out to Universal City or the Greek Amphitheater for concerts. Those are warm memories – the typical 1970s teenage lifestyle, which doesn’t exist in the way it did then. I guess everybody has this – you want to go back to your childhood in some way, not to one specific moment, but to a specific kind of feeling.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. I have a painting a friend of mine did that is on my living room wall. It’s kind of a collage of pictures he took, that he laid onto each other and painted using very deep blue colors…. It’s a deep luscious color I love, but it has a foreboding aspect.

Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break the most often?

A. That I will chill out.

Q. What should you throw away but haven’t been able to part with?

A. My ego.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. Leon Trotsky – not because I have political sympathies, but because this was a man who was highly intelligent and had a fascinating life and was present at these earth-shattering, earth-making events.

To watch or read about Maass’ lecture, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.