The Believer

GEORGE ORWELL’S THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, A PROPOSED PREFACE TO ANIMAL FARM, EXPURGATED AND FOOTNOTED (WITH A BIAS). — BY JOHN REED

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:09:33 -0400

“Perhaps now, as in Orwell’s time, censorship is not a problem of compliance—people are not ordered, or not as a rule ordered, to comply. The ogre of Orwell’s age was complacency; alas, the ogre of our age is more formidable: complicity.”

Read the entire online exclusive at believermag.com

Nick Hallett and David Grubbs in Conversation

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:10:00 -0400

On April 9, Nick Hallett sat down with New York City based composer, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, David Grubbs to discuss David’s new album, The Plain Where the Palace Stood. The two were familiar with one another’s work from having collaborated on numerous performances in New York of “Essential Repertoire”—including works by Luc Ferrari, Terry Riley, and Pauline Oliveros—as part of Hallett’s and Zach Layton’s new-music series Darmstadt “Classics of the Avant-Garde.”

In anticipation of his new album, David, who is also a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol, appeared in a handful of monumental performances in Europe in the past few weeks, including a performance in Rhys Chatham’s “Guitar Trio” alongside Nina Canal and Chatham himself, sharing a bill with legendary No Wavers UT and Lydia Lunch in a program entitled “From No Wave to Post-Rock: New York – Chicago” at the Ecole Nationale Supériore d’Architecture, which you can watch online.

This meeting took place in the relative corporate splendor of an unspecified midtown Manhattan cafeteria. David had sushi and Nick had a salad.

NICK HALLETT: Where have you played most recently?

DAVID GRUBBS: I just came back from three weeks in France. I did a collaborative performance called The Wired Salutation with the visual artist Angela Bulloch in the theater at the Pompidou Center, and it was a blast. In the past I’ve done soundtracks for several of her pixel-box pieces, which are generally extremely low-resolution pulsating grids of color that are derived from familiar cinematic texts, like Zabriskie Point or the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We’d talked about making that process visible—the transition from perfectly recognizable cinematic image to its taking the form of 48 large pixels. Fairly far along in the process, she became interested in working with 3-D avatars, which she made of the four musical performers. In one section there’s a double quartet, as all eight figures are visible to the audience.

NH: Where do you see these collaborations with visual artists in relation to your new album?

DG: The danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor—in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.

NH: Where do you draw the line between writing a composition and recording a track for a record? Or are those divisions useless to you?

DG: The instrumental pieces are compositions, certainly, although that’s not the language that I instinctively use. They’re not scored, and arrangements are often arrived at collaboratively. I always choose to play with people whose input I desire.

NH: Do the songs exist in a similar framework? Are they art songs?

DG: The question of art songs always came up with Gastr del Sol. I think Jim O’Rourke had it right in being clear that there’s a tradition of art song—Ives being the touchstone for the two of us—and what we do doesn’t belong to it. It wasn’t important to advance those kinds of distinctions, but clearly he thought it was fanciful for anyone to speak of what we were doing as being in that tradition.

NH: There’s a song on The Plain Where the Palace Stood called “Ornamental Hermit.” And for me, it’s a different kind of song than what I’m used to on your records. It approaches a verse/chorus format where more of your songs are based in recitative or a more internalized kind of poetry.

DG: I don’t write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. “Ornamental Hermit” was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me. Typically a song like “I Started to Live When My Barber Died,” which has very little repetition, and all of these different line lengths, is put together over the span of weeks or months.

NH: Conventional songs can be the result of a crazy amount of inspiration, and the best songs normally come together in the shortest amount of time, for me at least.

DG: I don’t feel that way about my own work. I think about Stephin Merritt at one point saying that it doesn’t take him more than fifteen minutes to write a song. What a different way of working …

NH: I’ve spent ten years working on some songs but my favorites are the ones that appear to me in a moment.

DG: For me, it’s good to have those dissimilar modes of songwriting sit side-by-side on a record, because they yield such different results. The ornamental hermit is a figure that I came across in Denton Welch’s novel Maiden Voyage. In eighteenth-century England, there was a practice of hiring a picturesque hermit who would inhabit the beautiful ruin on your estate. To me it rhymes with certain kinds of pop-music entertainers and eccentrics—both touted and tolerated. If the records that I make have one thing in common, it’s that there is little recapitulation, and the idea is that it should end in a place very different from where it began, and that you’ve heard musicians undergo a change or be irreversibly transformed.

NH: Is there a precedent for this in other records of yours?

DG: It’s more like the Gastr del Sol records, where there are longer expanses of instrumental texture.

NH: Should we expect more of this in the future?

DG: It feels consistent with live performances that I’ve been doing lately, where the balance—the imbalance—with a tilt towards instrumentals. The album feels like the kind of set that I’m happiest playing now.

NH: You want to fully inhabit the work. One reason why we’re drawn to collaborations is to play around in areas we’re not fully comfortable or skilled in.

DG: And it’s the best possible education.

David Grubbs’s new album The Plain Where the Palace Stood is out now on Drag City Records.

Nick Hallett is a NYC-based composer, vocalist and impresario who works across genre and media to create innovative, multidisciplinary music-based performances.

THE BELIEVER INTERVIEW WITH TODD MAY, PHILOSOPHER

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:06:28 -0400

TODD MAY: There’s an image from, I think, ancient Chinese philosophy that tries to get you to understand how long immortality is. It says, imagine you have a beach with grains of sand—let’s imagine the size of the Sahara—and imagine a bird comes and takes one of the grains of sand and flies off. Ten thousand years later, that bird comes back and takes another grain of sand and flies off—and this happens every ten thousand years. Now, by the time the bird emptied the beach, emptied the entire Sahara, not a millisecond of eternity will have gone by. In other words, you have to realize that immortality lasts a really long time.

Read the entire interview by Matt Bieber on the Believer website. »

Go Forth (vol. 7)

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:54:15 -0400

Have you any books from Siglio Press? I think if you saw one you’d remember it, because they happen to rock. Siglio Press has been putting out basically some of the best hybrid art books for half a decade now, with incredible success. Want to start an art press but you’re also into majorly legit writing? Would you like to learn about varying contemporary art movements and then wow a dinner party without sounding like a jerk? Siglio Press Publisher Lisa Pearson made some time for us—which, that was cool, and you might enjoy reading this. If you’re a square, don’t bother. Love, Nicolle

NICOLLE ELIZABETH: Hi, Lisa. We’re interviewing publishers, authors, and editors in an effort to share information with readers on what it is like to work in the many facets of publishing. Siglio is a publishing house that has brought many things, such as the works of Spero and Brainard and Calle, to better light. Can you walk us through the differences between publishing novels and publishing art books, with regard to the specifics of the process?

LISA PEARSON: Collaboration and conversation. The novelist generally writes in isolation and most often thinks of “the book” as a kind of delivery system for the language she has so carefully composed and honed into a work of literary art. If she works with an editor, it is on the writing itself; the physical qualities of “the book” are out of her hands and may be of little interest other than wanting a really great cover and decent paper stock. For an artist, and particularly for the kinds of books Siglio publishes—which are more like artists’ books than monographs or catalogues—the physical manifestation of the work as a book is not only critical but intrinsic to the work: it mediates the reader’s relationship with that work in a way that is much less transparent than with a novel, a nonfiction book, or a collection of stories. There are a thousand decisions, large and small, to get the work to really live on the page and as as an object the reader holds in her hands. That’s a dynamic process in which publisher and author/artist engage together: it’s creative and conceptual, but also practical and logistical. And I bring that same kind of attention to the fiction and prose I publish. For instance, in the novel SPRAWL by Danielle Dutton, there are no actual images, but the shape of the book itself, the wide margins, and the space between lines of text, make an essential contribution to nature of the reader’s experience with the book. It’s subtle, but it makes a difference.

NE: How much time does it typically take for an art book to be birthed to the world, from acquisition to shelf?

LP: “Acquisition” isn’t quite the right word for what I do, though I hope it will be sometime in the future (and make my life a little easier). Many of the books I publish are nurtured, developed, shaped into form out of conversations with the artists and writers (or those who represent their estates) I approach or who approach me. Sometimes it takes as little as six months from an initial breakfast meeting of coffee and latkes to a press-ready book (as with The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett and myself). Other times, the gathering, editing, designing process can easily take more than a year (or three as it was with It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers, so that I could consider hundreds of works and narrow the selection down to a couple dozen). And in some cases, a conversation gets started without necessarily a specific project in mind, and we just see where it goes. Of course, when an unsolicited query lands in my inbox and yields a book like SPRAWL (which required minimal editing), I’m thrilled.

Once a book’s on press though, the timing is pretty standard. I have to print overseas in order for the books to be affordable. Six months is generally the norm from going on press to the book appearing on a bookstore shelf—and the norm is generally full of mishaps so it shouldn’t take six months, but it always does. Anything can happen. From tsunamis and earthquakes to sunken boats and lost trucks, not to mention recalcitrant (or just plain slow) printers can add weeks to the schedule.

NE: Do you believe that art books are a niche market or can they transcend into the literary realm as well, and if so, how? Siglio seems to transcend genre.

LP: The books I publish straddle both the literary and art worlds. Though most look like “art books,” they are all very literary—language, narrative structures, poetics, lexica of various sorts, voice, character, etc. play essential roles in various ways in all Siglio books. Or as in the case of SPRAWL and the kind of fiction and prose I publish, “the visual” inflects or infiltrates the text in sometimes literal and sometimes oblique or even invisible ways. Siglio is all about that hybridity which actually means many niches, many audiences. And I think niche is just another way of saying small—so yes, the market is relatively small, but it’s diverse, and a little different for every title. What matter most to me—after developing as wide an audience as I can for each individual title—is building a core audience of readers who are curious, adventurous, and fascinated by the unexpected connections that a shelf of Siglio books might yield. The readers who can make the leap from radical geography to abstract tantric painting to a visual archive of a fictional alter-ego to nonsensical, Victoriana collage to pop appropriation to… Well, that’s a very small niche of readers, but I’ve found them—and they’re finding Siglio. I love those readers most. They transcend.

NE: If one, just one of our readers wanted to start an art book press, what would you tell them?

LP: Go to Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair (every year in September at MoMA P.S.1) or the new one they’re organizing in Los Angeles (at the MOCA Geffen) in January. You’ll see all kinds of amazing presses doing extremely interesting things and giving it absolutely everything they’ve got. If you don’t see there the kind of work you believe deserves a space in the world—and you’re willing to give it every ounce of your being to make it happen—then go for it. There are plenty of us somehow making it happen. Why not you?

(Image Courtesy Siglio Press)

"One of the things that I’ve tried to evolve in writing—not always successfully—is to break through a..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:34:40 -0400

“One of the things that I’ve tried to evolve in writing—not always successfully—is to break through a conceptual paradigm, or being programmed in a traditional way, with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s always the frontier of my mind that I’m reaching for. Sometimes that takes place in a more concrete way, in terms of the actual western frontier, but it isn’t really the West that I’m so obsessed by. It’s really about leaving my own set of descriptions, and leaving the traditions that I was raised in.”

- Rudolph Wurlitzer, interviewed by Alan Licht in the May issue of The Believer. Fantastic interview, excellent issue. (via twodollarradio)

saltcathedral: “The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t...

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:34:00 -0400

saltcathedral:

“The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate [against] people and doesn’t have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them.” — artist Florentijn Hofman

(Image by Shary Boyle) INTERVIEW WITH MAGGIE DUBRIS Poet Ali Liebegott took an epic road trip...

Fri, 10 May 2013 12:50:12 -0400

(Image by Shary Boyle)

INTERVIEW WITH MAGGIE DUBRIS

Poet Ali Liebegott took an epic road trip across America. Destination: the Emily Dickinson house. She interviewed female writers — mainly poets — along the way. In previous installments of the series, she introduced the trip, spoke with Maggie Nelson, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum and others. Here is her interview with Maggie Dubris:

I first discovered Maggie Dubris in 1998 when a friend gave me her 59-page prose poem, Willie World, largely drawn from her experience being a 911 paramedic in New York City. The slim chapbook, with cover art from David Wojnarowicz, an x-ray of an anatomical heart with an arrow through it, became an instant favorite of mine. Dubris later published Skels (Soft Skull), Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow) and most recently In the Dust Zone (Centre-Ville Books) illustrated by Scott Gillis. We spoke in her East Village apartment. –Ali Liebegott

The Believer: I want to talk to you about your sign on the door of the apartment coming in. Why is this the Ezra Pound Apartment Complex?

Maggie Dubris: Years ago me and my friend, the poet Elinor Nauen, and my friend Rachel, went to Ocean Beach, and there was someone selling signs like, “The Hansen’s House”, it was so suburban and I thought we should give our apartment building a name. We thought, well who was sort of crazy and might’ve lived in our building, who else? Ezra Pound.

BLVR: That’s so excellent. I love New York so much. What is the city’s effect on you as a writer?

MD: It’s been huge for me because I didn’t go to high school here. I moved here right after and I had this idea in my head—I wanna be a New York poet. That was my total goal. I thought I was going to make a living as a New York poet somehow (laughs) but at that time you didn’t need that much money, it was the 70’s—you could move in and if you couldn’t pay the rent you just got another apartment. They didn’t ask for a bank account they just wanted the rent for a month or two and then you got your new apartment and it was 80 bucks a month so I moved here.

BLVR: Where did you move from?

MD: Michigan. But New York is really my home. I came here and did what I dreamed of, which was to meet Ted Berrigan and be a poet but then, of course, I discovered you couldn’t make money being a poet. So I had to get a job and such. It had a huge impact. I feel like I pretty much grew up here and grew up on the ambulance and grew up in my neighborhoods that I lived in and if anything shaped me it was New York.

BLVR: I am very interested in the question of work—as a writer what do we do, and I know for years you drove the ambulance. Can you talk about how that fit in with your life? I know your book Willie World uses some of that material.

MD: Yeah. I felt the paramedic thing worked really well because I personally don’t believe I could live with my own thoughts 24/7. I need to be torn out of myself and I need something like the ambulance to do it. So it was great. I felt like I got material—not medical material but material like I could go into people’s lives and talk to people I never would’ve talked to and get to know a scene I never would’ve gotten to know—like a midnight street scene, which, as a woman, is no place for you—there aren’t that many places for men either but definitely not for a woman in that scene. You could be a whore or that’s about it.

BLVR: Did you always work graveyard?

MD: I did for most of my time. I started out working four to twelve and then I went to day shift and then, for 15 years, I was on midnights—7pm-7am. I would write at work. A medic was a good job when I had it. I had insurance, which made it easier for me to be a poet because I didn’t have to worry. You can’t make money at poetry. But you can try. And that ruins a lot of poetry to try and make money at it. Now I’m doing two things. I’m doing hypnosis, which I love and I’m working with little kids in a cancer hospital doing martial arts.

BLVR: As a woman writer who was looking for other models of women who’d written longer poems it was such a miracle to find Willie World. It was a very, very important book for me growing up as a writer. I love the fact that at that time there were only 500 copies and with those chances I could still find it.

MD: You know, for years I couldn’t get it published. And then I met Richard Hell. I didn’t know him as a Rock n’ Roller. I only knew him as a writer. He was in charge of the Poetry Project or one of the reading series and he asked me to read and I’m not sure where he heard about me but I read from Willie World and he really liked it. He said, “Can I have a section for CUZ?” And then in ‘97 or so, he called me and said, “Hey I’m thinking about starting this press and if you give me Willie World I’ll do it, and then I gave him a re-written one and he called me up and said, “You ruined it.” I was like, “Oh, I did not.” But he was right. And I had a hard copy. I didn’t even have it in my computer anymore the way it was and I re-typed it in and gave it to him and he put it out. That led to a lot of good things for me. It led to Black Sparrow. For being only 500 copies and he gave me 100 so 400 copies he got distributed it opened up my world so much.

BLVR: When did you first think of yourself as a writer in the world?

MD: Out in the world? I guess I started when I was in 9th grade. I was totally depressed and I had no idea what I wanted, but I didn’t want what I was seeing. I knew I wanted to somehow be creative and I had this secret idea that I could write poetry. And then in 10th grade, I got into a poetry class with Andrew Carrigan, who is a great poet. I wasn’t doing particularly well in school, but I went in and turned in a poem and I had this hope that it was good but I didn’t think it was that good and he Xeroxed it and said, this is great, you should be a poet. So I went home that day thinking I’m a poet and I’m going to be a poet. And that was really my idea so in 10th grade I had this picture of myself, “I’m a poet.” And that was my identity for ages.

BLVR: It’s so crazy how much power a single person could have in another person’s life. Like a teacher. What if they hadn’t Xeroxed the poem?

MD: I know. What if I hadn’t gotten his class? What if I’d gotten someone else’s class who thought poetry should rhyme? I would’ve ended up a drug addict if Andrew Carrigan hadn’t been there. Because I just didn’t see a way out.

BLVR: The trip I’m taking right now ends at Emily Dickinson’s house. And I like to ask everyone I’m interviewing, do you remember the first time you read or heard Emily Dickinson?

MD: You know I must’ve read her before I decided to put her into my novel. But I’m not sure, really. I didn’t have any patience with that kind of poetry but then I wanted to put a woman in and she was weird enough that she could fit in my novel so I started reading her and because I was older I felt like I got her. She’s not my favorite poet. But I felt like she’s a poet who sees smaller and smaller until it blows up. And that is really interesting. She lived in sort of a small world and yet she exploded it.

BLVR: Have you been to her home?

MD: No.

BLVR: It’s pretty cool actually, in Amherst. It’s just really interesting to look out the window you know she must’ve been looking out when she was writing those poems. Have you ever made any literary pilgrimages?

MD: Yes. I went to Père Lachaise. I was looking forBaudelaire’s grave and we met this Frenchman and he said, “Are you looking for Jim Morrison?” and we said, “No, we’re looking for Baudelaire.” Even though I wanted to see Jim Morrison too. He was so happy to find people who weren’t looking for Jim Morrison that he took us to Baudelaire’s grave. You know these people are real but to actually see the place they’re buried is so strange. If you can see someone’s grave you’re not their contemporary but you’re in their time in a certain way. Like we can’t see Homer’s grave. We can’t see Sappho’s grave. We don’t know where they’re buried. We don’t even know what they looked like. But Baudelaire—we’re contemporary enough we can go to his grave or Emily Dickinson—you can sit in her chair. It’s interesting because it expands your idea of who’s your contemporary.

BLVR: I know you write in different forms and I see that you paint and I know you do music—you’re a Renaissance lady.

MD: A dilettante.

BLVR: Can you describe any kind of psychic differences you would need for poetry versus more prose things.

MD: Sure. Poetry is tactile almost and it comes in the same place as music does for me—it feels like it was already there, and I’m carving it out. Even Willie World, which was very much my experience, felt like the words already existed and there were only certain right words and I had to smooth them out and get them to be this kind of river, I guess. I feel that way about music too. If I want to right a tune I kind of just unfocus my eyes. Whereas prose, it’s not like that at all. It’s like the words and the story aren’t there. The words serve the story, and the story is difficult for me to get to. Whereas poetry is easy. And I can’t tell what’s right in prose. I love prose. That’s what I read mainly but it doesn’t come as naturally at all as poetry.

BLVR: Do you miss driving the ambulance?

MD: Sure. But I miss the driving more than anything. You know I miss being in that world. And I don’t know. If I hadn’t gotten sick, if the Trade Center hadn’t happened would I still be there? I don’t know. Like how long do you do the same thing kind of thing even if it’s a really fun thing—not fun like ha ha but really absorbing, really engaging—it’s still the same thing. So I don’t know if I would still be there.

BLVR: Were you working on the ambulance when 9/11 hit?

MD: I was not at work. But everyone who was a paramedic ended up down there. At a certain point they just called people in. So what happened was, I was here, and it came through the radio, and I was talking to my partner who lived in Brooklyn Heights. We were both like we shouldn’t go down there—then the second one went in and we both thought, it’s going to be a total nightmare down there as a paramedic. And then the Tower collapsed and my partner called me right when that happened and he said, “We gotta go, our friends are all dead.” So he came to pick me up and went to Bellevue thinking there’d be some kind of organization there. It was chaos! There was no organization there. So we just got in an ambulance with these guys who are all covered in dust and went down there and ended up south of the south tower with a bunch of firemen and basically no equipment. We broke into an ambulance just to get equipment and my story is also a lot of paramedics story—if you had an ambulance when the Towers fell you lost it. So people were basically down there with nothing not knowing what was going on.

BLVR: So when you were down there as a paramedic you knew that the towers collapsed because of the planes?

MD: We thought they’d gotten blown up and I didn’t know where they were. Like I heard on the radio, “Oh my God, it’s all disappearing.” So when we got there, there was just nothing there but dust and big dark brown-red clouds. And I didn’t know if it had just fallen over, like tipped over and landed on some people or on some blocks. We didn’t know if there were bombs in there. If it was a bomb they often put one bomb one place or have a diversion first and then blow it up. So is that what happened, the planes went in and then there was bombs in the planes and then everyone got drawn in and BAM. So such massive confusion plus your memories were fucked with—mine were, because I was there and then when I came out—what I actually experienced, which was all disjunct and discombobulated and I lost huge chunks of time. And then there was this narrative on TV that was different from what I experienced and then there was all this strangeness about millions of people coming in from all over the country and offering everyone massages and I was only down there the 11th and I felt like everyone’s dead there’s no question, there’s no reason to be here and I was there until 8 and I was talking to some supervisor and I said, “Should I stay?” and he said, “Why stay, there’s no one alive in here,” And I was like, “Yeah you’re right. I’m going home.”

BLVR: So was the digging for bodies a performance?

MD: I think psychologically people may have needed it, initially. But I think it should’ve been stopped—that’s my opinion. Because people ended up really badly injured because they were down there for weeks and months and even if you thought someone was alive for the first three or four days, it was very obvious after a week to anyone, no one’s living in this burning hot thing that’s there and yet they still sent people down there to dig. So I feel like people should’ve been stopped.

BLVR: Selfishly I felt like it was probably really great I wasn’t living here when that happened because my tender psyche could barely handle it in Providence, Rhode Island.

MD: It was truly horrible. For my entire life that will be one of the pivotal events and not in a good way. Ultimately, you make sense of it and you’re like, Okay I was here, it was a historical event and I was actually a participant in it and as a poet it’s my job to write. Like you can’t not write about it. I finished Dust Zone about six years after the Trade Center so it took me that long to get past everything that was phony into something that I feel actually represents my experience. I don’t know how much it represents anyone else. But I feel like it really got to the heart of what, for me, that time was.

BLVR: I think about this a lot because I still haven’t finished my book that revolves around the media of 9/11 and it’s been nine years. I always feel as a writer I’m dealing with stuff that happened ten years before anyway so it will be interesting to see how literature that came out right after 9/11 varies from work that gestated awhile. What’s your advice to people writing today in this non-1970’s New York?

MD: If I was talking to someone who was young who was just starting out, go to college for something other than writing. Like don’t go to writing school. Go for science or something that’s really interesting and then write about that. That would be my advice to them. Do you know Murat Nemet-Nejat? He’s a Persian poet but he lives in the states and he had a workshop at St. Mark’s and he said to us, “Well, the nice thing about being a poet is you’re making bread that no one wants to buy so you can make it as salty as you’d like.” So when I think of that, that’s when I’ve written my best stuff. There’s no stakes in poetry. The best poets have not made their livings off it and possibly weren’t even acknowledged much in their lifetimes except for maybe other poets or a few people. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change that they were great. When I read something I know if it’s great or not. It doesn’t matter who wrote it and it doesn’t matter who else likes it. To me that’s an inherent quality and if people want to be poets that’s what I would go for. Go as hard and deep as you can into your own vision and make it pop into the world and shape it and make it exactly you—and what you’re seeing. Make it into a solid thing. Then just put it out and don’t worry if people like it and don’t try to adjust it for anyone. If they don’t like it, it doesn’t change it. That’s my advice.

BLVR: I love your advice. We shape our whole lives around being able to write despite that there’s virtually zero cash and prizes. To me it’s constantly perplexing what sacrifices we do for this thing.

MD: Right. And when I look at my life I wouldn’t pick any other life.

This coming weekend at Frieze art fair NYC will include two...

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:15:00 -0400

This coming weekend at Frieze art fair NYC will include two Believer-related events:

Sunday, May 12th

12pm: Ben Marcus + Rachel Kushner in conversation

1pm: Ross Simonini (interviews editor of The Believer, musician, artist) and John Maus in conversation

Here’s the premiere of The Black Constellation’s short film...

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:04:50 -0400

Here’s the premiere of The Black Constellation’s short film (Sparkles)…Recollections of the Wraith, named after (and featuring) two songs by Shabazz Palaces, the Seattle-based hip-hop collective led by Ishmael Butler and Tendai ‘Baba’ Maraire. This film is the twelfth part of An Ode To Octavia, a thirteen-part adornment, performance, and object-based ritual that began in the fall of 2010 and is dedicated to science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. See more in our interview with Ishmael Butler in the upcoming July/August Believer music issue.

“Words—the older you get, you realize they’re just concepts, and they can be mixed and matched, juxtaposed. Flipped, inverted. Nothing is concrete, necessarily, in terms of the meaning of things. The mood of things varies, not only from person to person, but within the same person from minute to minute, however situations carry and deepen.” (Ishmael Butler)

JOSEPH PLATEU'S PHENAKISTOSCOPE 1841

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:40:37 -0400

chiseler:

To celebrate the last day of our tenth-anniversary month,...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:58:49 -0400

To celebrate the last day of our tenth-anniversary month, we’re having a MUG HOUR! From noon to one PST, any Believer subscription or renewal will net you a free Believer mug. READ HARD!

THE BELIEVER INTERVIEW WITH MARGARETHE VON TROTTA, GERMAN NEW WAVE FILM DIRECTOR

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:32:19 -0400

“People thought that it was a lesbian film, which was not the case. I responded at that time that if I wanted to make a film with lesbian characters, I would have had lesbian characters. I think what actually caused the scandal was the possibility of a transformative relationship between two women. And when they are together, they are not competing over a man but talking about art… The two female characters lived in a dimension that the male critics weren’t used to seeing.”

Read the entire exclusive interview with Margarethe von Trotta on our website.

Stories from the Other Side: Polixeni Papapetrou Exhibits at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, NYC

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:00:30 -0400

Australian photographic artist Polixeni Papapetrou, whose Process interview was featured in January 2013’s issue of the Believer, has tantalized her international following for years with haunting, otherworldly imagery recapturing, recasting, and recreating childhood reverie. In her most recent exhibition, a solo show on till June at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in New York City, Papapetrou has combined chimerical pieces from Between Worlds, where pondering animalistic creatures splash out from their natural landscapes loud with feeling, with pieces from her latest series, The Ghilies, where animalism has retreated into something subtler and more spiritual. Stories From the Other Side craftily combines images of exteriorized longing with images of interiorized yielding.

Writer and media maker Caia Hagel has written several articles on Papapetrou and her work; through their long correspondence, they have become spirited pen pals. They caught up at the NYC opening—where Hagel, unable to resist, asked Papapetrou a few more questions.

(Papapetrou with her model children, Solomon and Olympia. Photo by Robert Nelson.)

THE BELIEVER: You traveled across the world to attend your opening. How was it?

POLIXENI PAPAPETROU: I was delighted to meet people at my opening who came because they wanted to look at the photographs. It was reassuring that most of the questions asked of me were about ideas rather than technique, although that is also a good question! There was a terrific opening address by Susan Bright, who spoke about my connection to the Australian landscape, among other things related to humans and especially children. It was good for the people at the opening to hear about the Australian landscape and to feel that it gave them insight into the works.

BLVR: What kinds of ideas did people ask you about?

PP: In particular I was asked about the meaning of the ghillie. And it was quite hard to explain, because while the origin of the word has something to do with a helpmate, a ghillie suit, is a type of camouflage clothing designed to resemble heavy foliage. It is used in the military for camouflage purposes, but it is also adopted now in a popular way, such as in acting out roles from video games and in paintballing games. The suit is typically a net covered in loose strips of cloth or twine. The suits can be augmented with foliage from the area to further enhance the camouflage aspect. The military, snipers, hunters, and gamers wear the suits to blend into their surroundings or to conceal themselves from their enemies or prey.

People were very curious to know how I first came across this suit and how it is used. I may have mentioned already that my son started to talk about dressing up as a sniper in a ghillie suit, a folly or fantasy that was inspired by the video game Call of Duty. I soon realized that he wanted this fantasy to become a reality, and after I bought him a suit he wanted to be photographed in the bush, completely camouflaged. But we compromised and he allowed me to photograph him silhouetted against the landscape. I couldn’t bear the thought of suppressing his presence completely. And then I discovered that if he stood in the ghillie on an open platform, his presence was bizarrely exaggerated, as if somehow essentially a figure, not necessarily a person, but an essentialized human eminence who also embodies nature. I love the fact that the ghillie is thought to reference Ghillie Dhu, the traditional Scottish deity of trees and the forest. I think that the figure in these works takes on a spirituality connected with the land. I’ve thought of the figure as a spirit being.

(The Ghillies, Ocean Man, 2013)

BLVR: When we met in Brisbane in February, you told me that The Ghillies relates to your mourning of [your son] Solomon’s growing up. Can you explain?

PP: I think that there comes a point in the life of every young person to break away from the intimacy that they share with their parents. It is not to say that the intimacy is lost, but that it needs to change as children forge an autonomous identity and make their way into the adult world. In a sense the physical connectedness that you feel with your children as a mother changes as they become independent. I miss their childhood. The transition into adulthood is so exciting and remarkable to witness as parent, but a pivotal stage in their life is has now passed and it is this that I miss.

(The Ghillies, Shrub Man, 2013)

BLVR: Maybe related to this—you always seem to be surrounded by gorgeous young boys, Why do you think that is?

PP: I had not noticed this before you raised it. Perhaps I am just surrounded by my children’s friends, who are always welcome in our home. But young people are gorgeous anyway. I look upon youth in admiration and admire them for their curiosity about the world, their shape shifting, their ideas about the future. Sometimes I think that I stay young and in touch with contemporary culture because of my children’s interests. I’m so lucky to be surrounded by their talent and vibrancy. I love young people because they are always looking ahead, and older people because they can look back; and both make sense of the world so economically. You can learn so much from the wisdom of the young and the old. I’m just in between!

(Papapetrou surrounded by boys at the opening of Stories From the Other Side. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery.)

BLVR: Is it weird to be standing in a space full of your own work? How do the pieces feel to you, and how do you interact with them, when they’re larger than life and on display in public?

PP: When I see my work in a gallery I often wonder how I got to this point. Sometimes the process of making the work feels like a blur, and I look at the work and wonder how I actually made it. I don’t look back and judge the work, nor do I see myself as interacting with it. I think that I go through this process when making the work, but I am interested in how other people respond. Perhaps this indicates that I become detached from the work once it is made. I feel though that once the works are in a gallery that I don’t have any control over them. I liken the experience to seeing my children growing up. Once they reach a certain age and have some independence you have very little control over them.

(Between Worlds, The Watcher, 2009)

Photo

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:49:05 -0400

McSweeney’s is excited to be a part of the 2013 PEN...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:06:34 -0400

McSweeney’s is excited to be a part of the 2013 PEN World Voices Festival happening in New York from April 29th through May 5th!

Join PEN for the opening night reading: BRAVERY on Monday, April 29th, 7pm at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, 7 East 7th Street, NYC.

The reading features Jamaica Kincaid, A. Igoni Barrett, Najwan Darwish, David Frakt, and more. RSVP at festival@pen.org.

And be sure to stop by An Evening with McSweeney’s on Tuesday, April 30th, 9pm at Joe’s Pub. McSweeney’s contributors will read excerpts from their translations in McSweeney’s Issue 42—an ambitious experiment that took twelve stories through six phases of translation into a variety of languages, granting each translator a liberal creative license to change the story at will. Readers include Michal Ajvaz, Francisco Goldman, Clancy Martin, Wyatt Mason, José Luís Peixoto, Francesco Pacifico, and others!

thedizzies: Coming in June—NYRB Classics’ reissue of Russell...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:38:33 -0400

thedizzies:

Coming in June—NYRB Classics’ reissue of Russell Hoban’s TURTLE DIARY! Introduction by “Ed Park.”

Photo

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:38:00 -0400

Via MOCAtv: “In 1965, Sol LeWitt wrote fellow sculptor Eva...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:20:00 -0400

Via MOCAtv: “In 1965, Sol LeWitt wrote fellow sculptor Eva Hesse a four-page letter of encouragement, urging her to stop doubting herself and to simply continue making her work. Despite the fact that some would consider their friendship unlikely, the two sculptors were close friends and wrote to each other frequently about their ideas, work, and personal lives from 1960 until Hesse’s death ten years later. Often quoted, LeWitt’s letter has become a source of inspiration and a vote of confidence for many artists the world over.
Producer Aaron Rose (Beautiful Losers, Become a Microscope) worked with punk rock band Rancid to remake LeWitt’s words into a bold and boisterous song. With wild and wavy LeWitt-inspired animation, this video energetically embodies the message of its writer.”

Read the original letter in full: http://blog.art21.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/sol-eva-letter.pdf

Ben Greenman and Darin Strauss Discuss How to Write Fiction Now

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:39:00 -0400

Darin Strauss and Ben Greenman live in Brooklyn. Both have written large amounts of published fiction: Strauss’s most recent book is a memoir, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award-winning Half a Life. Greenman’s new novel, The Slippage (Harper Perennial), comes out in May, and on its occasion, the two men sat down to discuss novel-writing, as well as writing that doesn’t result in novels.

Darin Strauss: Your new book is about a suburban couple and their marriage. It’s a departure for you, in some ways, and it reads like modern Cheever, at first—it’s that realistic and precise. Then slowly you add more and more helpings of DeLillo. You haven’t written exactly this kind of conventional novel before, and I wonder if those writers were your touchstones as you moved through it.

Ben Greenman: Maybe deep down, yes, but there are other writers I keep closer to the surface: Stanley Elkin and Joseph Conrad and Emily Dickinson and the Barthelme brothers. Maybe all of them add up to Cheever and DeLillo. I was very mindful, from the beginning, of writing a realistic novel. The first chapter started as a short story, and one with almost no strange effects or shifts. It was almost an exercise to see if I could write accurately about the ordinary world of suburbs, cities, day jobs, comfortably blinkered marriages—the world that I have inhabited for my entire life. In my fiction, up to now, I have mostly ranged out into uncharted territory: surrealism, origami metafiction. This time, I started in my own backyard. The tension, as I went, came from the pain of that process. When you start close to home, can you stay close to home without having your doublet come all unbraced?

DS: I’m interested in that notion: “the world that I have inhabited for my entire life.” People think of you as a Brooklyn writer.

BG: Same to you!

DS: But you say that you have inhabited this suburban world your entire life.

BG: I live in Brooklyn, but I was molded primarily by the suburbs. That’s where I grew up, where I was grown. It meant long stretches in cars with the radio on. It meant tremendous amounts of meaningless space. That’s where I learned to read tons of books to keep from being bored.

DS: So is The Slippage a book that is closest to what you set out wanting to do when you became a writer? I’ve heard writers talk about this or that mid-career book as the one they could only have writte once they got some others out of the way first. Is there a sense that you wrote your earlier books to lead you here?

BG: I always saw books as objects floating in space rather than points on a line. I kind of believe that each work is independent of all the others. On the other hand, you’re right: earlier projects allowed me to offload certain thoughts, which then allowed me to look more clearly at my own life: marriage, boredom, (in)fidelity and so forth. So now let me turn the question back on you: You’ve moved from historical fiction to contemporary fiction to memoir. Was it an evolution, or could it just have easily have happened in the reverse order?

DS: I always comfort myself with a lie. And this lie is: that my professional life is all a progression, that I’m getting better always, that this is the book where it’ll come together, finally.

Do you feel that, as you get older, there’s the urge to write more about your life? That’s not to say The Slippage is autobiography; but as you say, it contains more of you in its pages, at least on the story’s surface. I’m thinking of Please Step Back, say, which is about a funk musician from the nineteen-seventies.

BG: Oddly, maybe, Please Step Back was more autobiographical. Up to now, I always thought the way to do it was to load myself into characters that looked nothing like me, after which you could be as honest and straightforward as you wanted. If you put your thoughts in the head of a black funk musician in San Francisco in 1968, well then, no one sees you there. That displacement—time, place, race—was half the job.

DS: I began my career by thinking that conspicuously fictionalizing was the way to go. My first book, Chang & Eng, was about a pair of conjoined Asian twins. I wrote it because in the MFA program I went to, everybody was pushing out semi-autobiographical stuff. I thought: my life isn’t that interesting, so if I tell an obviously more-interesting (and invented) story, I’ll be further up the wires than my classmates. There’s truth to this: people like stories that are obviously interesting. But then you start to think the opposite. You start to think about the kinds of books that Martin Amis calls “voice books”—books that rely on the author’s talent to get over, and nothing else. Those may be more challenging to write and even to read, but they’re generally the books I cherish. So much of what we’re talking about seems like an arbitrary choice: do I write this kind of book, or that one? But it ends up defining a writing career as clearly as the choice between representational and abstract painting. Which is silly. Do you feel the requirements you set for yourself here— the “conscious effort to set aside unregulated inventiveness”—made it much harder to pull the book off?

BG: I had a (bad) habit of going hellbent for trickery, or flash, or acrobatics, or degree of difficulty, because the alternative was unthinkable. As I wrote this book, there were times when I felt myself wanting to go overtly comic, or to play with chronology, or suddenly come in from left field with some invented dialect – all tactics I was comfortable with. But the longer I held out and refused to do those things, the more I felt comfortable with the discomfort that resulted. One of the characters in the book creates self-referential charts, and for a time I thought to include them, but I ended up holding them out and letting the book be a somewhat traditional fiction. And that foregrounded a somewhat traditional theme: the book is about structures—marriages, houses, corporations—and how they come apart.

DS: Real estate is the stake I’m planting my next novel around, too. I wonder if that topic now more than ever pulls at the insides of what it means to be an adult in this culture. You say that the book was about structures. Was it consciously about them? Or did it come naturally once you had your characters in mind?

BG: Certain elements were there from the start, but others quickly appeared to canopy them. I should say: I am suspicious of the novel. Not of my novel or your novel, necessarily, but the whole broad idea of the novel, period. How artificial: we drop in on these representative characters at a certain point in their lives, see how they’re doing, watch them work through their conflicts over an eventful span of time. It’s a largely middle-class construct and thus not exactly real. Real people are messier, more contradictory, more nightmarishly neurotic or tragically benighted or even sometimes tragically one-dimensional. The trick, maybe, is how to create shapes that interlock perfectly with the shapelessness of human longing.

DS: I often think of some advice Helen Schulman gives to her students. A story has to answer one of the Passover questions: “Why is today different from all other days?” Out of a character’s whole life, why is this day (or year, or fifty years) most worthy of being told? I guess a piece of realistic fiction has to be like life (which is the title of a great Lorrie Moore collection), but not like most of life. I mean, A fictional narrative doesn’t show the most representative days, which are people just sitting around, doing little that’s important or unalterable. But it’s not just that the important, unalterable stuff is the most fun to read about; dropping our characters into some drama also shows in a fuller way what those characters are like. I think we reveal our contents under pressure.

BG: Something else – and I think this is more important than people admit—but we’re planning careers. It may not be conscious, but we never think that the book we’re writing will be our last. So there’s a sense that we’re parceling out parts of our brains, souls, whatever: showing some but reminding people that there’s more where that came from.

DS: I often think about something David Foster Wallace told my friend and now occasional writing partner David Lipsky. Before Infinite Jest, Wallace felt he was holding a bit of himself back with each book, as a defense. Then if the book failed, he could console himself: Well, that was just me doing funny; that was just me at eighty percent. With Infinite Jest, he said, Well, this is me working at full power. This is me doing everything I can do. If they don’t like it, they don’t like me. It was risky, to put himself in totally. Philip Roth once said: Make sure your novels are smarter than you are. By this, I think he meant, put everything you know in the book you’re working on, and then also learn some new stuff.

BG: I have always been interested by how much (or how little) happens in great works of literature. Sometimes, everything happens (The Bible). Sometimes, only one thing (The Metamorphosis). Sometimes, nothing (Waiting for Godot). And then there’s everything else all along the way.

DS: I have more respect for plotty books now. I am working on a YA project with David Lipsky, and we read The Hunger Games as research. Initially, I dismissed it because the prose and characterizations are bad—and I still think they are bad, and that stuff is what I usually read for. But the plot in that book is expert, and takes a kind of mastery I didn’t have. I will say that good fiction stimulates four or five pleasure centers, at once. Most plotty action books—e.g., the Jack Reachers, which I also read—attend only to one, and they rub it raw. They work like porn: the same inattention to any detail that doesn’t get you off; the same degree of unrealism to the heroes, to the situation; the same deal between producer and consumer that for all those convolutions, the story will never end in someplace unexpected. The appeal lives in the inevitability of it all.

BG: This articulates something that unnerves me: the thing that novels do is getting leveled, or rather placed at the same level as other things like movies, TV shows, serial writing online. And it’s not the same at all. I recently saw the movie Looper for the second time. I love that movie. But I love it as a movie. There are certain things it does right because it realizes it’s a movie. It doesn’t try for an interiority that more properly belongs to the novel. It doesn’t sacrifice plot propulsion. I’m not saying that novels shouldn’t do these things. Maybe that’s one of the things about the best genre novels: they occupy the border between books and other narrative art forms. Literary books – whatever exactly literary means – are a step away from the border. They are in their own nation.

DS: That’s exactly right. Even the TV shows everyone says are “the new novels” are not. I was once asked to be one of the judges of “the best TV show of the last twenty-five years” and part of that discussion focused on whether the best TV shows were outpacing the best novels. I objected that TV shows were Literature 2.0; that the Great American Novel aired every Sunday, 10 p.m., on premium cable. The Sopranos was great, and so was The Wire, but they don’t add up to Tolstoy or Ulysses. Because there’s just so much more that books can do—interiority, as you say, and messing with time. You can write fifty years going by in a paragraph, and you can spend twenty pages on a minute. That’s something TV can’t do.

BG: TV is expert at holding your attention over long spans of time. That is its only real goal: tune in, tune back in. So TV calculates what will maximize the chance of your return. Literature seems more like a contract. When you open it, you are agreeing to give it the benefit of the doubt for a certain number of pages, after which the contract expires. Literary literature doesn’t generally have sequels.

DS: And yet, there’s so much pressure to be creative with the form (a condition known as David-Mitchellirium). I think today’s literary writers put that pressure on themselves. Readers don’t care. I console myself with a line from Saul Bellow: “Since when did everyone get too smart for storybooks?” Having said that, it is so hard to capture this particular moment in our culture. Roth said something similar forty years ago, in Reading Myself and Others: “The world was too violent and shocking to be believed.” Well, it’s gotten even harder to write about. The world is not just more violent, but more diffuse. Thanks to the web—where everything is available simultaneously—there’s no signature fashion to the last decade and a half. Think about music or clothing: what outfits or songs signify 2013 the way bell-bottoms did 1972, or “I Want to Hold Your Hand” did 1963? Here’s how Douglas Coupland put it: “The zeitgeist of today is that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist: an aura-free universe in which all eras coexist at once. That’s really hard to get down on the page.”

BG: Right. And one way to do it is to resist taking direct aim at the culture around us, to resist the impulse to satirize Hollywood or big business or K Street. Then what happens is that the setting grays out a big and characters, vividly, come forward.

DS: But don’t you think that the books that reveal the most about the times in which they’re set are those that haven’t made doing so their number one priority? In Anna Karenina, did Tolstoy set out to tell us about 1870s Russia, or was he examining a world of moral dilemma as embodied by these characters, who happen to live in that time? The whole “Great American Novel” neurosis makes writers try to “capture the times” – as if that’s a necessary part of the U.S. novelist’s brief. Don’t you think Chekhov, when he’s getting really specific about a few people and noticing their details, actually makes us forget the differences between times and places? Specificity can give a peek, maybe, at kind of general truth. If artfully rendered, a concrete desire may be made to stand for all human striving and wish. Do you think Fitzgerald said, “With Gatsby, I want to show what the USA is like in 1925?” Or do you think he said, “Here’s a story that says something about people?”

"I HADN'T YET FOUND THE FORM THAT RELEASED MY BEST INTELLIGENCE." - INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SHIELDS

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:21:00 -0400

After about twenty-five emails back and forth, David Shields wrote to say he was flying into Los Angeles and that I should come by his hotel on Sunset to talk. We walked around the area for two hours–at one point trying to get into the Getty. (David Shields: Can we walk up to the Getty? Is the Getty open tonight? Security Guard: No sir. DS: I realize it’s closed, but can we walk up and see it? Security Guard: No, no, no.)

In Bookforum, Minna Proctor calls Shields’ latest book, How Literature Saved My Life, the heart to Reality Hunger’s mind–collage and storytelling which have come together to form “a giant, thrilling riddle.” When we spoke, Shields made clear that it’s important for him “not to be a bland admirer of general literary history,” and that “you’ve got to find those writers who speak to you.” For Shields, it “goes back to Heraclitus’ Fragments and comes through Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. And that,” Shields said, “is my tradition.” – Hayden Bennett

I. THE ULTIMATE BOOK

THE BELIEVER: You re-use a lot of passages in your books–and re-use them from books that have re-used them. Do you view your work as evolving into one thing, like a hall of mirrors that you’re constantly trying to polish?

DAVID SHIELDS: I like that–an MC Escher kind of thing. I’m very interested in a whole series of artists who know they have one story to tell and they keep on telling it, trying to finally get that story right–Montaigne, endlessly revisiting the same essays; Munch’s Scream, which he painted over and over and over again; Monet’s water lilies. I’m terribly interested in having the reader feel, in a very direct way, how radically the story or the essay changes in its new context. I’ve been delighted by several reviews that have pointed out that I recycle, and that, given what my project is, it would seem very weird to criticize it.

BLVR: Right.

DS: In Reality Hunger, I was stealing, or pilfering, or remixing or sampling other peoples’ work for a very specific purpose. Namely, to try to show that the most exciting work exists in a difficult-to-name area, whether it’s slipperiness of genre, or provenance of quotation, or whatever. Well, in How Literature Saved My Life–of the 200 pages, maybe 20 of them are resampled from previous books, and to me, that really accomplishes a lot in trying to argue for the excitement of literary collage. A lot of my project is about trying to resist this idea of defining non-fiction downward. There’s this idea that it has to be memoir, it has to be true, it has to be scholarship, it has to be footnoted. It has to be journalism, it has to be vetted. All of my project is an attempt to make us rethink non-fiction in much more poetic and literary terms

BLVR: Has this changed since your book Enough About You? In that one, you mention that you took a passage from an earlier book, but you don’t mention that when you put the same passage in How Literature Saved My Life, it was about watching a baseball game.

DS: Well, it’s interesting that in one book I felt a little more careful or reverential toward the conventions. It drives me crazy that that in say, poetry, you can quote all you want without citation: Paradise Lost, The Wasteland, and there aren’t citations expected. But somehow when we do this thing that we call an essay, we’re supposed to be producing a more sober text. Well, I’m really opposed to that.

BLVR: Do you think that there is an evolution toward one sort of ultimate book on your part?

DS: One thing I say––I probably have said this a lot, and I don’t think I’m by any means the first person who has said it, but every person finally has one story to tell, and you just keep on telling it. Some writers disguise that. But there’s another kind of artist and writer who embraces that kind of unified field theory, and he or she is on this one glide path, and keeps on studying this material. I mean, it’s a very risky thing.

BLVR: Yeah.

DS: At worst, it’s incredibly boring and incredibly monotonous and incredibly repetitious. But at best, it has this unbelievable depth and solidity to it. There’s a book of mine that’s going to be published in 2016, when I’m 60, called Other People: A Remix, in which, to a very large degree, I try to take a lot of things I’ve written over many years, completely rewrite them, and make this book I’ve been trying to write my whole life: a sustained meditation on otherness—can one person know another? How do we live through other people? How do other people live through us? Is the gap between people fillable? If not, how does or doesn’t art fill the gap.

II. YOUR STRANGEST SELF

BLVR: In This Is Not A Novel, David Markson writes, “You can actually draw so beautifully, why do you spend your time making all these queer things?” Picasso: That’s why.” and then, “Writer has written some relatively traditional novels. Why is he spending his time doing this sort of thing? That’s why.” Do you think you have to spend some time writing traditional novels, drawing beautifully, or whatever, to kind of get to that point of doing something else?

DS: Yes. Some people say it makes sense for me to do this [current work], because I wrote three more or less traditional novels from ages 20-35. So sometimes I do question whether I should be saying to college students, “Okay, try to write collage.” It’s a little bit of putting the horse––how does it go?

BLVR: The cart before the horse, yeah.

DS: The reality is that I tend to teach graduate students collage, but I teach undergraduates courses in brevity.

BLVR: You’ve stopped teaching Joyce.

DS: Yeah. All I can say is that it’s the way my writing has evolved geometrically. I wrote a traditional novel, a less traditional novel, a novel in stories hovered between essay and fiction, and then Remote, and then I was off to the non-fiction races.

But it wasn’t as if Markson had been writing splendid traditional novels. He had not found his form yet. This thing that I probably keep on saying is: you have to find the form that releases your best intelligence. I’m proud of those three novels in varying degrees––especially the latter two, but I hadn’t yet found the form that released my best intelligence. My strangest self. My most interesting self. Again, I do question sometimes the value of teaching young students collage, but I literally can’t teach the other thing.

BLVR: You’ve kind of gone past the point of no return.

DS: Yeah. There’s a wonderful line from one of Coetzee’s later novels in which he is implicitly criticizing his own work for not having the mark of greatness, which to Coetzee is that you have to deform the medium in order to say only what you can say. In Coetzee’s opinion, he himself never did that. Which is an interesting critique. Anyway, what I’m very interested in is altering the face of an artform. That’s what excites me. That’s what interests me. If my work is no good, it’s just a kind of random gathering of notes, and if it is good, it’s maybe pushing the non-fiction form a little bit forward. Without pretending I’m by any means the only person doing this, but I’m quite a champion of it.

III. A HUMAN WITH A SKULL

BLVR: One of the things I felt in How Literature Saved My Life was that the reader has to be complicit with what you’re doing. It starts out with Ben Lerner, and how you’re sort of obsessively comparing yourself to him. As a reader, I felt I was doing that to you, doing that to him. One of the things that I really appreciated was that it forced me to take my own stance against everything going on.

DS: I think that’s a really, really good reading of it, yeah. And I do think that people who read that book, the people who allow themselves to, as you say, be complicit, which is a very big word for me… they might actually get something out of it. Then there are those readers who use me to get, well, they pretend I’m a toxin, and they are uniquely healthy. And that’s just a really juvenile response.

BLVR: Is there something you hope the reader takes from How Literature Saved My Life?

DS: I think the last couple of lines are the target the whole book has been aiming for, which I didn’t realize until I got there. It goes: “I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness but nothing can assuage human loneliness––literature doesn’t lie about this, which is what makes it so essential.” You come to realize, I think, that loneliness is the real subject of the book. And you’re meant to ask yourself to what degree you as a reader are alone in the world, just by being human. Not the fact that you got divorced or that you’re estranged from your mother-in-law. But that it’s just part of being a human with a skull, with your own consciousness. So basically I just want––at the end of that book––for the reader to ask himself or herself, how do you wrestle with the fundamental quality of your own alonenessI have obviously found literature as a beautiful bulwark against it. Without any pretense that it solves it. But it’s a beautiful bulwark against it. It may not be the same thing for the reader––but at least I want you to come away with, how do I wrestle with a similar darknesses? The writer is copping to his own loneliness. The reader is copping to her own aloneness, and there’s a funny marriage of the minds and of the hearts where you just feel completely joined. That’s a pretty serious communication. It’s not a trivial thing; it’s a really, really serious exchange between people. I take literature as a really serious human activity. It’s not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it’s really serious.

IV. AMUSING YOURSELF TO DEATH

BLVR: Do you feel like readers are looking to read the same book over and over?

DS: Undeniably. How else could you explain things like Twilight, or Harry Potter? I’ve been traveling around the country over the last couple months on planes, and it’s striking to me how many people are reading the same disposable texts. How many of these are you going to read? This is called amusing yourself to death. They’re all the same book. To me, it’s a kind of madness. This guy who was a teacher of mine at Iowa in the poetry program, Henry Carlisle, had a stamp he would put on stuff––this is not art. I guess people have long days, they want to escape, and more power to them, but that’s not my job as a writer. I really take seriously this idea that art moves forward. Art, like science, progresses. Culture dies, and the forms change. To me it’s preposterous that we still have literary models that would be recognizable to Jane Austen in 1827. If you look at the other art forms, we’re not endlessly recomposing Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony, unless it’s done ironically. We’re not endlessly reshooting DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, or repainting the Sistine Chapel. It’s terribly important that art try to disrupt the flow. In my own little way, I feel like I’m part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.

BLVR: Is there a difference between the creative and critical side of you? Is the critical side less emotional?

DS: I would resist that dichotomy. Just think of how emotional Borges’s work is, or how emotional Barthe’s work is. I’m immensely moved by the intellect. A friend of mine said about How Literature Saved My Life that I had never before gotten to serious melancholy in my work, or serious regret. I’m not here to say I did or didn’t, but there’s a sense in which I think that book is pretty naked. I clearly am pretty melancholy in the middle of the book, and I claw my way out into writing and literature, and I talk about my own emotional impasses, numbnesses, flatnesses… It’s a pretty naked book, I think.