Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels (

There’s so much to read and so little time. I’m always looking for a reason to put a book down and not pick it up again, and one of the best reasons a writer can give me is to use the word then as a conjunction without a subject following it.

She lit a Camel Light, then dragged deeply.

He dims the lamp and opens the window, then pulls the body inside.

I walked to the door and opened it, then turned back to her.

If you use comma-then like this frequently in the early pages of your book, I won’t read any farther unless I’m forced to, because you’ve already told me several important things about yourself as a writer, none of them good.

You’ve told me, first of all, that you’re not listening to the English language when you’re writing. No native speaker would utter any of the sentences above, except in a creative-writing class. Here’s what actual English speakers would say:

She lit a Camel Light and took a deep drag.

He dims the lamp, opens the window, pulls the body inside.

He dims the lamp and opens the window. Then he pulls the body inside.

He dims the lamp and opens the window and pulls the body inside.

When I got to the door, I turned back to her.

I went to the door and opened it. Th en I turned back to her.

English speakers really like the word and. They also like to put the word then at the beginning of independent clauses, but it appears there only as an adverb, never as a conjunction. The sentence “I sang a couple of songs, then Katie got up and sang a few herself” is actually two sentences run together into one, for propulsive eff ect. Given a similar sentence containing only one subject, rather than two, native speakers will always balk at using then without an and in front of it. They’ll say, “I sang a couple of songs, and then I asked her to sing some of her own.”

Obviously, written English employs all sorts of conventions seldom found in spoken English. The reason I’m sure that comma-then is not among these useful conventions—the reason I know that it’s an irritating, lazy mannerism, unlike the brave semicolon or the venerable participial phrase—is that it occurs almost exclusively in “literary” writing of the past few decades. Dickens and the Brontës got along fine without comma-then, as do ordinary citizens writing e-mails or term papers or business letters today. Comma-then is a disease specific to modern prose narrative with lots of action verbs. Sentences infected with it are almost always found in the company of other short, declarative sentences with an and in the middle of them. When you deploy a comma-then to avoid an and, you’re telling me either that you think comma-then sounds better than and, or that you’re aware that your sentences are sounding too much alike but you think you can fool me by making a cosmetic change.

You can’t fool me. If you have too many similar sentences, the solution is to rewrite them, varying length and structure, and make them more interesting. (If this simply can’t be done, the action you’re describing is probably itself not very interesting.) The only difference between

She finished her beer and then smiled at me.

and

She finished her beer, then smiled at me.

or, even worse,

She finished her beer then smiled at me.

is that the latter two sound like fiction-workshop English. They sound unthinking; and the one thing that all prose ought to do is make its makers think.

See Also:
The Paris Review “The Art of Fiction No. 207″ Interview with Jonathan Franzen

“Farther Away,” The New Yorker

Laurent Binet: My first question is about something you said in Lunar Park. Actually, your character, Bret Easton Ellis, said that he is the greatest living American writer under forty. Would you have any comment about it, now, today? Or do you want to add something?

Bret Easton Ellis: Well, it’s a joke! I was making fun of myself. The Bret Easton Ellis character actually says that out loud. But no, I never thought I was one of the better American writers of my generation. I thought there were always better writers. And that’s why I’m always shocked—

Binet: Over forty!

Ellis: No, my age! Well, I wrote Lunar Park when I was under forty, so . . . No, I always though there were better writers than me. There were better writers than me when I was in college. We talked about this: my friend Eric, the famous Eric, who actually never got published. He was the best writer of us all. But he got derailed by drugs and things. He should have been the one who had the book published. And I’ve never rated myself against my contemporaries, I’ve never felt I’m part of a literary tradition or a literary scene, and I don’t really pay that much attention to the rankings of who is considered the best writer. But I do read a lot of writers, and I do kind of keep up with people my age. Though less so than I did when I was younger.

Binet: So which writer is impressing you the most today?

Ellis: Jonathan Franzen is impressing me the most. His new novel, Freedom, is the best American novel I’ve read in maybe twenty years. Major, major novel. Not only a major piece of storytelling or piece of narrative but as a statement of purpose it’s a hugely important novel, just by the very nature of what it insists the novel can be. Franzen is, what, five years older, six years older than me? I still regard us as the same generation. I’m forty-six, he’s fifty-one. I still feel that I’m part of his generation of writers, and it’s true, most of us did get caught up in a kind of technique over feeling, technical tricks instead of emotion. He’s arguing for the social-realist novel, kind of the social realism of Tolstoy. But doing it as an American, and bringing back narrative feeling and narrative emotion to this kind of fiction that for most of the men of my generation—we were interested in other devices, other tricks, whether it was David Foster Wallace or myself and minimalism and my own aesthetic—was not particularly an emotional one. He’s bringing it back to that, and it’s very important.

Binet: In The Rules of Attraction, there is a chapter written in French.

Ellis: Bad French! Someone translated it for me when I was very busy, and she did not do a good job, I think, because many people have complained about the French in that chapter.

Binet: I mean, it’s correct, but you can feel it’s not a French guy who wrote it. So was it a friend of yours?

Ellis: Yes, it was a friend of mine who said she was much better with French than I think she actually was.

Binet: Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel to Less Than Zero, so we meet the same characters again twenty years later. But in all of your books, we encounter some characters from the previous books. Is it that you have the same ambition as Balzac, to build a comédie humaine? Do you want to build a parallel world that would challenge the real world?

Ellis: No, I’m not doing that. I don’t have that kind of ambition. I’m just writing these novels, and every now and then I like to use characters from one novel and put them in another one. I don’t know why. I wish there was a plan, because this is the question I am asked most. Sometimes I think it’s just fun to do. I think with the Mitchell Allen character from The Rules of Attraction—I put him in out of the blue—I was figuring out who Bret Easton Ellis’s neighbor would be in Lunar Park, and I thought, “What do I want to talk about with this neighbor?” I want to go into this, this, and this . . . Oh! Well, what if we have Mitchell Allen, who Bret went to college with, then I can talk about their history, and also talk about what it was like to be in college at that time, too, which I kind of wanted to do somewhere in the book, and that was the perfect way to do it. So it can happen like that sometimes. An inelegant answer, but the truth.

Binet: (In Imperial Bedrooms) Clay says to Troy, “I imagine there are several versions about what’s happening now.” Don’t you think that sentence could sum up your work? Because in all your novels, neither the reader nor the characters are ever really sure if they understand what’s happening and if they have the good version, and I believe it’s almost your main topic in your books.

Ellis: I think it’s because that’s how I feel. I think there is this question: What is reality, what is illusion? Oh yes, our old friends, Mr. Reality versus Mr. Illusion. Look, it’s just life. I mean I could give a really fancy theory as to why I’m interested in that in my novels, but right now my answer is that I look back on the façade of my upper-middle-class childhood in Los Angeles, where it all seemed very lovely, with my handsome father, my beautiful mother, my two sisters, the perfect house with the swimming pool, we were all nicely dressed, we looked like a perfect family, and then, behind the façade, there was a lot of misery, there was abuse, there was alcoholism. You know it’s an old story, it’s not a new story, but it does have an impact on you and you begin to wonder: Well, the reality we’re presenting is not the reality. The reality is sort of like a performance and that’s why I think there are so many allusions to actors, to actresses, to performing in my books. I also think there was a shift when I became well-known, when I was twenty-one, with Less Than Zero. My perception of the world became skewed and it became what’s real and what’s not real. Are these my real friends? Is this my real lover? Is this person really interested in Bret, or is he interested in Bret Easton Ellis? And look, you can deal with this without going crazy, but it still alters your perception of the world in a way that I think has probably affected my fiction. There’s no way around it.

Binet: That’s why you wrote the Rules of Attraction, which is one of your novels that explores that question the most.

Ellis: It is exploring it the most and it’s very interesting that it is the most popular of the novels, because it’s not divisive in the way that American Psycho is, which has many passionate defenders and also many people who hate it and think it’s terrible. But for some reason Rules of Attraction is the only book of mine on Amazon that has four stars. The other books get one star, five stars, one star. Rules of Attraction gets four stars, three and half stars, four, three and half, four, and people don’t seem to be so bothered by that book.

Binet: I’m always astonished by how you deal with your dialogue. Even when your characters are talking about nothing, they are very full of energy and tension. I wanted to ask if you use a special technique to write your dialogue. Do you follow some rules or do you—

Ellis: I just do it. It’s just one of those things, I can’t explain it. Look, when you’re working on a novel, everything is very emotional and you kind of have the novel in your head and you know or you feel what people would say back and forth to each other, how they would communicate with each other. It’s something that as a novelist is easy for me to access; it’s easy for me to go there and to do it. But it is true that I will write the dialogue many times and see if it works or not, see if I like it, see if it seems authentic, but I have to say that in Imperial Bedrooms the dialogue is slightly different from the dialogue that I’ve written in the past because it’s the dialogue of a screenwriter and it’s very expository, very much how movie dialogue is, which is a series of reveals. It’s a question and an answer, a question and an answer, over and over again, which is what movie dialogue is. I was very conscious of a screenwriter narrating this novel and of using the techniques of screenwriting to tell the story. But thank you for your compliment.

Binet: Your novels, most of the time, are set in Los Angeles or New York. So which do you like more, Woody Allen or 24 (the TV series)?

Ellis: I like both, you know? I like 24 and I like Woody Allen. I don’t really think of a book as being about place so much. People tend to think that I write about Los Angeles or that I’ve written about New York, but I think I’ve just written stories that take place in those cities because I’ve lived there.

Binet: What do you think when people say your atmosphere is like the atmosphere of David Lynch’s films?

Ellis: I say that I wasn’t thinking about that when I was writing. We’re talking specifically about Imperial Bedrooms? As in Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway and those movies? You know, I wasn’t thinking of those films in particular, but I understand why people make that connection. I was just reading something about David Lynch this morning, something someone was writing about Mulholland Drive, and it was a very interesting idea about what that movie is about, I think, which is that it’s a movie about people trapped in a movie and it’s a movie about how people behave when they’re in a movie and realize they’re in a movie. It’s so complicated, but anyway . . .

Binet: But it’s a connection with Imperial Bedrooms, I mean could you say that’s a bit the same?

Ellis: Well, then again, when I look back, I’m shocked at how many actresses and actors are characters in my novels. There are a lot of them, from the girls in Glamorama to the wife in Lunar Park to Rain in Imperial Bedrooms. The woman-as-actress is very prevalent in many of the books.

Binet: You didn’t grow up in that milieu?

Ellis: No, but my mother wanted to be an actress.

Binet: I read that when you write a book, you make a big sketch, and before that you make a big plan. In Imperial Bedrooms did you know from the beginning where the story was going?

Ellis: Once I’d figured out who the narrator was, which took a long time; when I realized who the narrator was, then the story stems from the narrator. Because of who the narrator is, I go: “Oh! Well then this is the story of the novel.”

If the narrator is going to be this person, then the story is going to be this, he’s going to be involved with an actress who’s going to be involved with a friend, it’s going to be about a betrayal and then this plot announces itself.

Binet: But when, at the beginning, the narrator realizes that someone got into his apartment while he was away, do you have in your mind what the explanation will be at the end?

Ellis: Yes, I will know all that. I make a much bigger outline of what is going on in the novel. The first draft of the book is two or three times longer, four times longer sometimes. And then when I become the technician and I start to shape it into a novel form, a lot of things are discarded.

In most American novels, no matter if it’s a poor girl who lives in a shack in the woods, or a working-class guy who works in an auto-repair shop, everyone sounds like a college professor, everyone waxes lyrical on the sky, on the fields.

Binet: Is it painful to cut?

Ellis: No, not at all . . . uh, one time it was. There were two cuts in Imperial Bedrooms that were very painful to make. One came about because my editor and I got into an argument over the Palm Springs sequence near the end, with the boy and the girl. And he thought I went too far and that there were some details that he found too grotesque, and he said, “You have to remove them, because they are distracting to the reader. Your point for the scene, you’ve made it, in fact you’ve made it too much, so please, for me, take a couple details away.” And I did, and I regret it, I wish I’d kept them, but it was a bad week and he’d ground me down.

And then the other one, there’s a sequence early on in the book where Clay takes an actress to lunch in a restaurant, which is based on a restaurant that I go to a lot in Los Angeles. In the back of the restaurant there’s this silver wall and I had written five sentences describing the wall, and I thought that they were fantastic writing. I was very proud of myself. I thought that they were beautiful sentences about the silver wall, and it was just like pure poetry and so cool sounding, and then I realized Clay would never notice that wall, and I kept trying to keep it in there, but the whole point of this scene is that his focus is on this actress he’s trying to fuck and it’s just like, there’s no way that wall is going to come into play, it’s just me showing off, or thinking I’m showing off, and I had to cut it. So I did cut that . . . but that happens a lot.

That happened a lot in American Psycho where in the notes on how to have the narrator narrate that book there were no metaphors because Patrick Bateman doesn’t see things as something else. He sees them only as their surface . . . whatever. It’s just that I like working within a narrator’s voice, but at times there is a limitation. To make the narrator sound authentic, there are some things you need to give up.

Not every narrator should sound like a college professor. And in most American novels, no matter if it’s a poor girl who lives in a shack in the woods, or a working-class guy who works in an auto-repair shop, everyone sounds like a college professor, everyone waxes lyrical on the sky, on the fields.

Binet: Maybe you could explain something I didn’t get, just a detail. When Clay is asking the doorman of his building if anyone came in while he was away, the doorman says nobody came, and I think that there is no explanation. It seems to me that in your books there are a lot of things that aren’t really explained. Do you do that for aesthetic reasons? Or is it just that you don’t want to bother with explaining stuff?

ELLIS (laughing): I just don’t want to bother, I just don’t care . . . Yeah, I forgot, someone was up in the apartment, but it’s not . . . No, for this particular novel, there is a lot of menace and there is a low hum of fear. Not knowing what’s going on, the paranoia, the quiet isolation of it all . . . I think there’s a logical reason as to . . . there was someone in that apartment, yes there was, Clay’s not making it up, he notices it, there was somebody in that apartment, and I know who it was.

Binet: But how did he do it? Did he pay the doorman, or—

Ellis: I don’t know. Rip says at one point that he has friends in the building. There’s a scene later when Clay comes back to the apartment and Rip’s sitting on the couch drinking tequila.

Binet: In Less Than Zero, Clay remembers that once he found an empty pack of Lucky Strikes next to his swimming pool in his Palm Springs house and nobody in his family smokes them. Do you remember that?

Ellis: Yes, I do remember that.

Binet: And there’s no explanation, Could you tell me the meaning of that scene?

Ellis: I think the meaning of that scene was that there was someone hanging around the house who didn’t belong there. I don’t know who, it could have been a burglar, someone who intended the family harm, but the empty pack of cigarettes suggested that there was an outside force somewhere that was about to come into this family.

Binet: For me, because it’s your first book, it becomes the symbol of paranoia that gets developed in your later work.

Ellis: Yes. But you have to understand that one of the first words in Less Than Zero is “afraid,” people are afraid.

Binet: Another word, another sentence in Imperial Bedrooms is “disappear here.” Why is that so important for you?

Ellis: It’s everywhere, isn’t it? It’s in Lunar Park . . . I don’t know . . . Writing a book is very emotional, it’s not very logical—logic is not good for a novel—and I think a book is a dream, a lot of it is your fantasy, a lot of it doesn’t have to make sense, it’s kind of poetry in a way.

Binet: But do you feel it as a fear, or fantasy, or something you want, or something you’re afraid of, that program, “disappear here,” is it something you want often—

Ellis: I think the meaning of those words changes in every book. Its meaning in Less Than Zero is very different than in Imperial Bedrooms. In Less Than Zero it’s more cultural, almost political in a way, because it’s on a billboard, announcing itself, looming over a city, looming over Sunset Boulevard, those words “disappear here.” And now in Imperial Bedrooms they’re written on a mirror in his bathroom, so it’s now gotten closer to . . . You know this is why I cannot explain why I do what I do, because it often sounds really dumb. But that’s what I was thinking, often I don’t answer these questions. But for you I’ll make an exception. It’s the end of the day and you get one, and I’m not going to explain anything else about the book.

Binet: What happened with The Informers movie? I read that you didn’t like it. It had Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke . . . and you didn’t like it.

Ellis: Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger didn’t like it, either. It’s not just me, there were many people involved who didn’t . . . The problem was ultimately that there was a director and a producer who mishandled the material and I think they would admit that they mishandled it. The director signed on to something, or promised something that as filming started we began to realize he wasn’t capable of doing, and by that time it was sort of too late. We thought we could save the movie in the editing room, but we couldn’t and there were drugs involved and it was just not . . .

You know, a hundred things go wrong when you make a movie, and I realized that when I oversaw what was going on with The Informers. It is really kind of a miracle if a movie turns out good, if it turns out well. But it’s not by any means a terrible film, it’s just kind of a mess. There are some good things to it, but there was a much better movie there that everyone signed on for. This is why we got all the money, this is why we got the actors. There are so many good actors in that movie, from Winona Ryder to Billy Bob Thornton to Kim Basinger to Mickey Rourke to Chris Isaak, I mean it’s a very good cast and everyone signed on to be in this vision of what we all thought it was going to be, Things interrupted that vision, so it didn’t turn out that well, but, really, because of the cast and because it was based on a book of mine, it was slaughtered by the U.S. critics and kind of deservedly so. I can’t say they were being totally unfair. But it was a high-profile disaster.

Binet: Do you have a definition for modernity, can you define what it means to be modern?

Ellis: No, I can’t . . .

Binet: Because you are sort of symbol for being modern, for what’s modern in literature.

Ellis: I know, I know, but I didn’t make myself that symbol, you made me that symbol. I don’t think I’m that symbol. So I don’t think I’m modern.

See Also:

“What Animal Are You?” Read by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Mourner’s Meal” Read by Shalom Auslander

“Mystique” Read by Willem Dafoe

The man who knew what I was about to say sat next to me on the plane, a stupid smile plastered across his face. That’s what was so nerve-racking about him, the fact that he wasn’t smart or even sensitive, and yet he knew the lines and managed to say them—all the lines I meant to say—three seconds before me. “D’you sell Guerlain Mystique?” he asked the flight attendant a minute before I could, and she gave him an orthodontic smile and said there was just one last bottle left. “My wife’s crazy about that perfume. It’s like an addiction with her. If I come back from a trip and don’t pick up a bottle of Mystique from duty-free, she tells me I don’t love her anymore. If I dare walk in the door without at least one bottle, I’m in trouble.” That was supposed to be my line, but the man who knew what I was about to say stole it from me. He didn’t miss a beat. As soon as the wheels touched down, he switched on his cell phone, a second before I did, and called his wife. “I just landed,” he told her. “I’m sorry. I know it was supposed to be yesterday. They canceled the flight. You don’t believe me? Check it out yourself. Call Eric. I know you don’t. I can give you his number right now.” I also have a travel agent called Eric. He’d lie for me too.

When the plane reached the gate he was still on the phone, giving all the answers I would have given. Without a trace of emotion, like a parrot in a world where time flows backwards, repeating whatever’s about to be said instead of what’s been said already. His answers were the best possible, under the circumstances. His circumstances weren’t so hot, not so hot at all. Mine weren’t all that great either. My wife hadn’t taken my call yet, but just listening to the man who knew what I was about to say made me want to hang up. Just listening to him I could tell that the hole I was in was so deep that if I ever managed to dig myself out, it would be to a different reality. She’d never forgive me, she’d never trust me. Ever. From now on, every trip would be hell on earth, and the time in between would be even worse. He went on and on and on, delivering all those sentences that I’d thought up and hadn’t said yet. They just kept fl owing out of him. Now he stepped it up, raising his voice, like a drowning man desperate to stay afloat. People started fi ling out of the plane. He got up, still talking, scooped up his laptop in his other hand, and headed for the exit. I could see him leaving it behind, the bag he’d stashed in the overhead compartment. I could see him forgetting it, and I didn’t say anything. I just stayed put. Gradually, the plane emptied, till the only ones left were an overweight religious woman with a million children, and me. I got up and opened the overhead compartment, like it was the most natural thing in the world to do. I took out the duty-free bag, like it had always been mine. Inside were the receipt and the bottle of Guerlain Mystique. My wife’s crazy about that perfume. It’s like an addiction with her. If I come back from a trip and don’t pick up a bottle of Mystique from duty-free, she tells me I don’t love her anymore. If I dare walk in the door without at least one bottle, I’m in trouble.

See Also:
The Something Out of Something tumblr

Nerd Jeopardy is much like the game show. Contestants answer in the form of a question. Daily Doubles appear with laser sound effects. There is a big blue board.

But unlike the game show, our clues are entirely book-centric. If you know your logos from your pathos, and your Brontës from your Bashō, this is the game show for you.

Three teams compete in three-person teams for glory and prizes. If you’d like to compete, corral two friends and drop your team name in the hat at the beginning of the night. The audience can and will cheer, heckle, and hiss at their leisure. Wine is consumed throughout.

The good folks at Small Demons have graciously donated drinks, including Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos and Stephen King’s Under the Dome. (It will make sense later, trust me.)

Hope to see you there.

Work in Progress and Small Demons present Nerd Jeopardy
Tuesday, April 17th, 7pm
McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St., NYC

(Facebook details)

• “Book Review: ‘Suddenly, A Knock on the Door’ by Etgar Keret,” by Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
• “Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story,” The Atlantic Tumblr
• “The Aquarium,” by Aleksandar Hemon, The New Yorker
• David Foster Wallace’s postcard to Don DeLillo, The FSG Tumblr
• “The Best Recent Stories,” HTMLGiant
• A Mad Men Reading List, The FSG Tumblr
• “A Slow Books Manifesto,” by Maura Kelly, The Atlantic
• “MLA Rankings of American Writers,” by D. G. Myers, Commentary

John Jeremiah Sullivan: I’d like to begin by saying what an honor it is to talk with Geoff Dyer, a writer who has inspired me all my career. In fact there has been more than one occasion when an editor has expressed incomprehension at an idea I wanted to do, and I raised my fist and said, “It’s like you’ve never heard of Geoff Dyer!”

Geoff Dyer: Well, I mean obviously it’s just awful at these events—it’s just two people slapping each other on the back. In John’s book—it’s not been published in Britain yet—and when it came to the round-up of the books of the year, inevitably everyone chose Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens as their book of the year, but I was so ahead of the curve. I chose this book of essays by this American guy, sort of, seven-eight months before it was even published in England. There is a problem being ahead of the curve—it can seem like you’re ‘round the bend. There’s this huge wave of expectation, and when you come to England, you’ll discover that nothing that happens can quite live up to that sense of expectation in the land of disappointment. So enjoy it now!

Sullivan: Thank you for warning me. Well, I’d like to just talk a little bit about your new book, which I’ve been devouring in recent days.

Dyer: Yeah, that’d be great!

Sullivan: Thank you—I’ll try to put it on thick… I wanted to read a passage that will also give some sense of its method. It’s a book-length response to a single film, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which I’ll go ahead and admit is a film that I didn’t know well. My wife is a film scholar, and part of the reason that our relationship works is that I stay really dumb about films and she doesn’t read any of my work. We have this harmony that we share…

Dyer: There are those who would say that you stay rather dumb about music as well, John. But let’s keep it friendly for the moment…

Sullivan: [Laughter] I’m just absorbing that… But one of the magnificent things about this book is that it manages to stay in a very close dialogue with the film technically and critically and at the same time, is producing all of these beautiful tangents in the form of footnotes that somehow never go too far away from the spine of the filmic thread to snap, and so it has a kind of beautiful tension to it and a kind of balance.

[Sullivan reads an extended passage from Zona]

Over and over your book is doing that in these loops, daring us to think that you’ve gone one step too far off the path, and we’re saying, “Have you forgotten you’re writing a book about Tarkovsky?” And then you snap back with a beautiful little epiphanic insight. I was dazzled by that.

Dyer: The thing is though, I have spent so much time in my book saying embarrassing things, that it means… Actually, let me loop this back to something. Edmund White is a great confessional writer. He’s always telling stuff… There was a time they were discouraging gays from being in the secret service because that could make them susceptible to blackmail. And I just love someone trying to blackmail Edmund White. You know, it’s like, “Yeah? I’ve done that, and I’ve told everybody I’ve done that.”

The key thing it seems to me, this is the wager, really, is that it’s only by being absolutely faithful to my own experiences of the film and my own perceptions—however ludicrous they might be—that means there might be some chance of arriving at some kind of universal truth.

Sullivan: Another thing making it possible to hold those two aspects of the book together is a very artful wielding of footnotes. You did something with footnotes that I hadn’t quite encountered. You patterned them in such a way that we never had to flip back to find out what was working. If we were reading a footnote at the bottom of the page and it came to an end, the next page would just be a footnote completely. I was just wondering how much attention you gave to that. Did you make a study of that or did it happen naturally while you were going along?

Dyer: The footnote thing really was an expedient. When I was writing the book, it was this long kind of screed of writing the summary and whatever came into my head. And occasionally I would put a bracket around something that was obviously so extraneous. And then it was a question of just finding a way to reconcile my other thoughts about the film with my ongoing summary of the film. And at one stage I thought, “Oh, we’ll do it as a parallel text, with the summary on one page and the footnote and other stuff on the other,” but they were so out of whack that there would have been regularly a blank page on the other side. I liked the idea that, as one of the reviewers said, eventually the footnotes grow over the main body of the text like ivy or some sort of weed over a building. And I liked that that was in keeping with the nature of the Zone itself—that the manmade is always being reclaimed by the natural world. It’s funny, there’s this assumption that David Foster Wallace invented the footnote, and having written the thing in the British paper about how I was allergic to DFW, I then started copying him (I didn’t—it was just a technical expedient).

[Looks at Pulphead.] I remembered there being substantial footnotes, which it doesn’t have. I think what it is is that you don’t even put your footnotes as footnotes. It’s embedded in the Sullivan paragraph.

Sullivan: Yes, I just keep writing instead of putting it as a footnote. I just keep going.

Dyer: I was talking to someone last night, and I said about these essays of yours that there’s no telling what you’re going to say next. And that carries at the level of the paragraph—you’ve got no idea of what’s going to happen next, and so it’s got that weird version of suspense—then within the larger structure of the thing, that turnaround in the opening story when you talk about your teenage years as an evangelical Christian, and within the paragraphs, each sentence can be followed by something you’re utterly unprepared for. And that’s exciting.

Sullivan: I’m glad you think so. I think it sometimes has to do with changing substances in the middle of a piece, moving from coffee to a cocktail or something. [Laughter] And then there will be a random-seeming, very abrupt change.

Dyer: The key thing is—and this is something we have in common—with these abrupt reversals or changes, the tone can accommodate that, so there’s this overriding kind of cogency.

Sullivan: I agree. I was wondering about that in the context of your career as a whole because it seems that very early on, you decided that the form of your work—that would give it a coherence across the different genres you’ve worked in and the different approaches you’ve tried—would be your voice and also just the circle of your interests. That’s the thing that has become the real signature quality of your work—that confidence that the shape of your own thoughts will be enough to give a formal structure to your books. How early on in your writing did you begin to feel this way, and what gave you the confidence to do it?

Dyer: It’s funny. I think that so often, what can give one the confidence, weirdly, is a kind of despair. Despairing of being able to do anything else. Or maybe that’s hyperbole. Maybe it’s more like resignation, really. Of just arriving at a particular style, which is what you default to given all the other things that you can’t do.

For me, I’ve always found that I was so susceptible to influence but so unable to sound like the person I was being influenced by. So it always ended up sounding like me, even when I was under the impression that I was writing this beautiful, Anglicized version of Barthesian French. It was still just this—weirdly—Gloucestershire English. I’ve said this before, but it’s so true. I think it’s been so determining for me, this absolute inability to tell a story, or to think of stories and plots.

And sometimes, as can happen with any critic, I’ll then go too far, and I’ll take my own inadequacy and use that as a rod to start beating other writers over the head. I’ll say, “Oh, I just don’t like X’s books, or it’s too story-driven.” And then that becomes some weirdly inappropriate thing. But if you can’t think of stories, then what are you left with? Well, you’re left with structure and voice.

And what about you? Do you feel that the style you’ve arrived at is some sort of compensatory thing? Did you start out to be a straight-down-the-line novelist?

Sullivan: No, I never did. And I really relate to what you said about helplessness. Because you know that you do your best writing when you follow your interests, even when they don’t go the way you’d want them to, out of a kind of politeness. I’m often sheepish about forcing my obsessions on the reader, but I know that when I indulge that, I write better. So that became the guiding thing in my work is that I kept indulging that.

Dyer: That’s something we have in common. Too often, self-indulgence is used in the pejorative sense.

Sullivan: Let’s reclaim it! [Laughter]

Dyer: And I feel like we’re here to indulge ourselves. Whenever someone says to me of a book, “Oh, that’s so self-indulgent,” I think…

Sullivan: “Do you have a copy?”

Dyer: Exactly that. And you can tell when writers are really enjoying themselves. And they tend to be in those self-indulgent passages. …So you started by saying “despair and resignation,” and I chipped in and added “helplessness.”

Sullivan: That’s the beginning of a plot forming, there… Well, should we ask how many people in the room have seen Stalker, so that if we start talking about it, we won’t… How many people have seen the Tarkovsky film? A third? That makes me feel less ignorant. I ended up watching it in Russian, too, so I probably have a skewed view.

Dyer: That is extremely interesting because I got a note from the German translator the other day, and there’s a key moment in my book when he’s quoting from the English version of the film (which I’ve seen). And the subtitle says: “Here we are, home at last” when they’ve gotten in to the Zone. Of course it’s a big moment. And the German translator (who of course doesn’t just have two languages—it seems he speaks Russian as well) says that in the Russian and German versions he doesn’t say, “home at last.” He just says, “here we are.” I like the way that this thing—the Zone—is reconfiguring itself according to what people bring to it. So the film is not absolutely a fixed entity but is manifesting itself in these different ways. I’ve actually seen a slightly different film from you. How is your Russian?

Sullivan: I speak hardly a word. But it’s a good film to watch in a foreign language. It’s almost like watching mime. There’s so little dialogue, and you can tell without it what’s going on emotionally with the characters, and so I was able to follow. And also having read your description of it. But an interesting thing: you first mentioned the film in a paragraph in your work about the Burning Man festival out in the southwest—in Nevada. You attended Burning Man several times, did you not? I think you’ve mentioned it in five of your books? [Laughter] I’m positive about that. I maybe don’t know about music, but I know about that.

Dyer: Yes, well at least I’ve not been to—what’s the name of that festival that you’ve been to?—Crossover Festival?

Sullivan: Haven’t been yet, you mean.

Dyer: Yes, I first went to Burning Man in 1999, and for four or five years I was so evangelical about it. It was the biggest thing in my life, and I still regard it as my greatest achievement, that I’ve gone to Burning Man. I still believe in it—absolutely. I certainly never want to go again. [Laughter]

The Zone in this film is this imaginary place, of course, but it seemed to me (and this is something I forgot to say in the book) that it’s of a piece with other things I’ve been interested in. I’ve always been interested in real zones—places that have this kind of special power. I’ve looked through the books I’ve done, and I’d liken it to these places where if you have some sort of Geiger counter, you go there and the Geiger counter would start going mad because these places have some special power. So—

Sullivan: A vortex, as our hippies would say in this country.

Dyer: Yes—what’s that dreadful place in…

Sullivan: Sedona?

Dyer: Yes, exactly.

Sullivan: That’s the vortex. A lot of power there. [Laughter]

Dyer: If there was some power there, they’re really merchandized it out of existence, haven’t they? Yes, so, loads of places like that. The cemeteries on the Somme have that incredible kind of power. And this idea of the Black Rock Desert. The first time when Burning Man moved out to the desert, and 80 people drew a line in the sand and said, “On the other side of this line, there’s a different world.” And then they all held hands and crossed that line, and incredibly, created a different world. And then later on I went to the lightning field—I mean, the power of that place. And then the most powerful place I’ve ever been, in Varanasi, in India, where if you had any kind of Geiger counter there, it would just break. The whole thing would shatter because of the vibrational power that that place has as the result of the Hindu practices that have taken place there. I don’t know if Richard Dawkins has been there, but he would be irrational not to see the molecules of the buildings have physically changed as the result of thousands of years of—you don’t have to believe that the world was created when Shiva wept a tear—to think that this is a place where different rules of physics attain. I really, really like the Zone. In a weird way, even when I’m listening to music, that’s all that I really want to do is just get into a trance-act with music in some sort of zone. You’ve been in that zone with Guns N’ Roses, haven’t you?

Sullivan: [Laughter] About once a week. But that connects directly to many of the things you say about the film.

There’s an amazing description on page eight of the book that shows how much visual attention had gone into your watching of the film in a way that reminded me of John Berger, someone you’ve written about. This is a description of just the look of the film in Stalker:

Even to describe the black-and-white of Stalker as black-and-white is to tint what we’re seeing with an inappropriate suggestion of the rainbow. Technically this concentrated sepia was achieved by filming in colour and printing in black and white. The result is a kind of submonochrome in which the spectrum has been so compressed that it might turn out to be a source of energy, like oil and almost as dark, but with a gold sheen too.

Not having seen the film, I would have admired that anyway just as a piece of prose, but having seen it, it is just so dead-on for the way the film looks. And there were many other things that you noticed that showed that level of attention. One of the most beautiful observations in the book is your note that Tarkovsky is often very subtly zooming in or zooming back out in a way that’s almost imperceptible, but as a result the film itself seems to breathe. I found that very moving and beautiful.

That’s not a question, but it’s praise. [Laughter] So… respond to that praise.

Dyer: It felt good! [Laughter] That chakra was really being unblocked.

Sullivan: Another amazing thing that maybe you could elaborate on (that’s one step closer to a question). This is one of the many places in the book where you mention a very strange and seemingly significant fact in the most glancing way, just in a sentence, and you don’t return to it. But the fact that many people died in the making of this film: the original film editor burned up in a fire with the original film stock; Tarkovsky had a coronary working on the film; there was a poisonous creek running through the landscape, and many people believe this gave cancer to some of the people who worked on it. Is that true?

Dyer: I believe so, although the whole thing is so saturated in myth. This film about a mythical place is itself accreted with myth. But it seems to me this is not at all uncommon. It’s not really often that we hear about these great masterpieces where it all went smoothly, we all had a great time, everyone got on, it came in under budget, and we got it done early.

If you think of the documentaries that have been made about Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo, it’s always this thing about epic falling outs, disaster being courted, huge financial danger—typically the film is right on the brink of collapsing, and then somehow it gets made.

I don’t know the extent that we want to totally geek out on Stalker, but what happens, I think in maybe all of these instances, the troubles they have end up becoming integral to the success of the film.

So in this case, it turns out that they’d used up half of the budget, and everything they’d shot had turned out faulty. There’s a huge debate about whose fault it was, and everyone blames everyone else. But the film was just over with. And that long pause—the stress of it nearly killed Tarkovsky—that proved to be really important because it was in that hiatus that he reconceptualized the character of the stalker and changed him from being a hustler—I think the word Tarkovsky used is a ‘bandit’ or ‘drug-dealer’ type—changes him from being that to being this real, passionate believer and apostle in the Zone. And I think one of the things that affects us so deeply is the stalker’s absolute belief in this place.

I’ve watched it so many times now, and there’s that moment when he gets to the Zone, and he goes off to have a little walk on his own, and he collapses into the vegetation in this state of just bliss that this place that he loves so much, that he’s pinned his whole life on, is as he remembered it. And it’s just—I find it incredibly profound and moving.

One of the simplest motives for me in writing the book was when Coetzee is talking in Diary of a Bad Year about some passages in Dostoevsky, and he says, “I’ve read these pages so many times, and still I find myself sobbing uncontrollably when I am moved.” And then he says, “Why is it that I’ve never become inured to their power?” And for me, this film’s power seems to me to have been increasing over time. You know, it’s been thirty years since I first saw it. And in a way, Stalker is collapsing with relief that it hasn’t disappointed him. And this is another way in which my responses to the film are embedded within something I’m seeing on screen. Because yeah, I’ve seen this film so many times. And its power is undiminished.

Sullivan: And the film is woven into your life whether or not you want it to be, and so there is a feeling of natural recording with the footnotes and with the ancillary observations. I think that’s part of what makes it sing.

Dyer: Exactly.

Sullivan: How many times have you seen it?

Dyer: It’s funny. It’s difficult to say now because I’ve actually had it running on my computer in different bits. But I think I must have seen it on the big screen fifteen times.

If you were to write a long essay about a film, what film might it be?

Sullivan: Hmm. The Wizard of Oz? Which you confess to never having seen in the book—how is that possible? That’s something I wanted to ask you. Is that strange for an English person never to have seen that film? Here you’d almost have to be raised in a basement chained to a radiator or something not to have seen it at some point.

Dyer: Yeah, you know, it’s one of the unfortunate things about this layer to the book is any change that I make has a huge knock-on effect because there are no chapters. That was one of those. At the end of that note on The Wizard of Oz I say I’ve never seen it and I’m not going to. It was one of these things… Sometimes one’s professions of ignorance are in themselves illuminating, and that seems to me to be, well, that was just stupid. And several people have pounced on that, and I’ve realized, yeah, they’re right to have done that because it was foolish, but I can’t do anything about it. Normally, with a more traditionally organized book, you can cut things. But that idiotic remark, which has served no purpose other than to irritate people, is stuck there.

Sullivan: To me it was refreshing because it disarmed you as a film snob and made us come to the book a little more with our defenses down. And so you can maybe just incorporate that as a reason to have done it.

Dyer: Oh, OK.

Sullivan: If anyone asks about it.

Dyer: One of the reasons it comes up is that it’s that shift from black to white in both films that’s important.  Again, at the risk of geeking out, when it was first transmitted on TV in Britain, the film starts in black and white, and so they just transmitted it in black and white. Because one of the unbelievably lovely moments is when they arrive in the Zone and we go into color.

Sullivan: I was curious if maybe writing the book will rob you of the pleasure of watching the film. Sometimes I hate going back to things I’ve written about unless they were really, really important to me (and I know that this film is important to you). But I wondered if maybe it would rob you of some of the pleasure of watching it because now it’s associated with your own work, and it’s no fun to think of your own work.

Dyer: Well, tomorrow we’re showing a DVD of Stalker, and we’re going to interrupt it and talk over it.  I’m quite looking forward to it, actually, and not just for the interruptions, but for actually seeing it again. I feel this film is so inexhaustible. I feel it’s like Garry Winogrand or something. You know, I would just never, ever get sick of looking at Garry Winogrand pictures. And then with other stuff, when you’ve written a book about something, you really know a lot about it. With jazz, I really went through a long period where I couldn’t listen to a note of jazz. And then of course you end up coming back to it. Strangely for me, I’m not at all going through a period of allergy to it where I can’t be alone in the same room as this film.

Garry Winogrand, "New Mexico," 1957

Sullivan: Are you still into rave and trance music?

Dyer: No.

Sullivan: You were for a period, no? Which I thought extraordinary in a man who would begin with a swipe about music tastes. [Laughter] This puts us on common ground.

Dyer: They say it’s the punch that you don’t see coming! I didn’t see that coming.

Sullivan: A counterpunch…

Dyer: No, I mean certainly what happened with music was that I immatured with age. I liked jazz, and through jazz I got into Indian classical music. And then I did get really into electronic dance music, and thank God I did. To have missed out on that would have been—I was just about young enough to have got into that. And I think for a while, musically, it was the most exciting thing happening.

Sullivan: And you could write to it. You mentioned that somewhere in one of your books, that you could write to it because it was kind of timeless—it has a floating time signature, so it doesn’t distract. Is that accurate?

Dyer: This is one of the greatest advantages of being the world’s leading expert on the work of Geoff Dyer. I can put you straight on that. No, it was not that kind of music (which is entirely distracting) but more than kind of zero-beat or ambient music. Obviously, words in music are hopelessly distracting. Rhythm is distracting. So it’s in this book where I say I was listening to a lot of William Basinski or Stars of the Lid, where it puts you in that—I’m going to use the word “liminal” though I don’t actually know what it means—but I think that kind of thing can put you in some sort of liminal space. By which I might try to mean subliminal, I don’t actually know. What do you listen to when you’re writing?

Dyer: I can’t listen to music at all. My thoughts just scatter when I do. White noise can be helpful sometimes, just even the sound of the city is better than total silence. But I’ve never been able to do with music.

Even instrumental music… If you start, then the music tends to have some sort of narrative in it. Even classical music, I get too drawn into the narrative of it, and it just demands too much attention. And so you want music where almost nothing is happening—

Sullivan: Like Guns N’ Roses?

Dyer: [Laughter] Yeah… Do you feel that one of the tests of nonfiction is that one becomes absorbed of it irrespective of the subject matter? So for me, with your Guns N’ Roses essay, which I know I’ve been rude about… I know I’ve not been rude about it in print, but…

Sullivan: I think you’ve been very kind about it.

Dyer: I really couldn’t be less interested in anything than Guns N’ Roses, but of course I really loved your essay about Guns N’ Roses in spite of its subject matter. It seems to me that that’s a key to all of this stuff, isn’t it?

Sullivan: Yeah, I completely agree because the thing I’m writing about is already an attempt to write about something else 99% of the time. And so it’s more important to me that the reader just get into the spirit of the metaphor, whatever it is. And I’m already hoping that whatever the immediate subject matter is will just be a vehicle on the way to this other thing. In a way, it’s even OK if the reader hates it and reacts with a kind of inner violence against the subject. That can be just as useful because then you feel like, OK, we’re both trying to crawl out of it together. Rather than, I’m attempting to purge myself of this misguided affection for whatever it is (Axl Rose in this case).

Dyer: This seems to me to be something we have in common, but you’re not obliged to agree. It seems to me that the essays here and many of my essays are journeys, really, of one kind or another. Sometimes they’re physical road journeys like in your first piece, but more usually they’re some kind of epistemological journey from either relative ignorance or bafflement— curiosity—toward some kind of knowledge and/or understanding. And you know, people talk about Montaigne or whatever, but that aspect of the essay is something that is not often emphasized.  Do you feel that’s what your essays are?

Sullivan: Absolutely. I mean, I pray that’s what they are because that’s their potential value. I rarely set out feeling that I have an opinion on the subject that’s interesting enough for the reader. I try not to get into opinion mongering. I hope that the quest, or as you’re saying the journey to understand the thing better, will itself be intense and pure enough to bring the reader along to a place of greater understanding. That’s the only way it’s going to happen. It’s about sensibility. It’s about tacking into your own ignorance and trying to eliminate it somehow.

Dyer: I know even before we started tonight, we were disagreeing about the form this would take. John kept saying, “I want to talk to you about your new book.” But if it’s OK, let’s turn the tables a little bit.

Sullivan: Sure.

Dyer: In the essay on Mister Lytle, you talk about your apprenticeship years of arriving at your own style. I’d love to hear a little bit about the writers that you were influenced by. How you arrived at this totally distinct style of yours.

Sullivan: I don’t know—I just feel like a chronically bad answerer of that question. I feel like every writer I have come into contact with has had some influence on my style. But definitely that year spent living with Lytle was formative, and he really drilled me in 19th-century French and Russian novelists. And from the American tradition, Hawthorne has meant a lot to me. DeQuincey is a writer who means a lot to me. And Hazlitt I know is someone who is a guiding spirit for you too, right? His eclecticism and insistence on his own eclecticism and lack of an apology for it. That’s someone I think of whenever people say, “I like this book, but it seems to go all over the place.” Well, there’s a long tradition of going all over the place that is as long a tradition as anything else.

Dyer: Yes, there sure is…

Sullivan: I don’t know, it seems to be earlier writers for me who end up giving me more by way of influence, probably because I feel like I can read them and digest them in a way that’s less complicated. When it comes to thinking about your contemporaries and what they meant to you, there’s so much static of competitiveness. Even when it takes the opposite manifestation, and you feel like someone is a comrade. All of that makes it harder to see what the writer has done and what you can draw from it or steal from it. So, I like dead writers. [Laughter]

Can I ask you about a remark you made in the book about the Coen brothers? Which did not seem flip—you accuse yourself of being flip with the Wizard of Oz thing, but you describe their films as “witless.” I’ve heard a lot of Americans criticize the Coen brothers, but it’s usually the opposite criticism that’s made—that they’re too clever by half, that it’s all wit and no heart. And so I just was hoping you could expand on that.

Dyer: Oh, with great pleasure! [Laughter]

There was an occasion when The Threepenny Review was hosting this symposium on Almodóvar, and I was really pleased to contribute to that because I really hate his films, but then I duly wrote something and they didn’t publish it because they thought it was too abusive. And I’ve been waiting for a symposium where I can really pitch into the Coen brothers, and it’s really quite simple, I think.

Here is the fact of the matter: I have a G.S.o.H. I really do have a Great Sense of Humor. We’re not going to debate it—just accept it. [Laughter] And when I’m in a Coen brothers film, in a cinema, I’m surrounded by all of these people laughing their heads off, and I’m sitting there stone-faced. And the reason I’m not laughing and they are is because I have a sense of humor and they don’t. What one realizes is that even people without a sense of humor want to have a laugh. Because it’s fun to laugh, of course. I always come back to this one bit. You know how sometimes you can see someone make a gesture in a novel, and it’s some kind of insight into their soul? It’s that sequence in Fargo, that bit where the guy says, “I need unguent.” Do you remember that bit? That is humor for people with no sense of humor. And after that I just despised them with every fiber of my being. And I even thought that the stoner film, what’s that one called? [An audience member suggests The Big Lebowski] Yes, even that is—well, I can see that we all love Jeff Bridges and all this kind of stuff—but that became tiresome so quickly. Then just the pointlessness of many of the films. I’m a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy. I think Cormac McCarthy is a great genius, but I thought that book No Country for Old Men was basically a kid’s book, really, because it had such childish attitudes toward violence. So, weirdly, that seemed to me to be a successful film, in a way. It seems to me that they are childish filmmakers. And then the remake of True Grit. It just seemed entirely pointless to me.

Sullivan: What about Raising Arizona, though?

Dyer: Oh, that is just unspeakably… [Laughter]

Sullivan: Satisfyingly shocking, is what you’re saying?  But he’s talking about the pajamas. When the cops are asking the father who has had his child kidnapped, and they’re asking him to describe the pajamas and he says, “I don’t know, they had Yodas and shit on them. They were pajamas.” Come on, that’s witty.

Dyer: I don’t know, it might be. I can’t remember Raising Arizona at all, this is the problem. All I can remember is the vehemence of my own aversion to it.

Sullivan: That’s what makes us essayists. Your reaction dwarfs the reality, and so we write about the reactions.

Dyer: One of the characters you so movingly portrayed in [“Upon This Rock”] is this guy, Pee Wee, and in the dedication, of course, he dies in 2007. Would you be able to tell us what happened?

Sullivan: Yeah, it was terrible. He was very young when I met him and still quite young when he died. He got a job working in railroad safety. This is what I was told because I keep in once-a-year touch with another of the guys from that crazy band of Christians that I ended up running around with. He said that Pee Wee had been given a job on the railroad moving big pieces of equipment on and off the tracks, and one of them fell on him one day. And this was apparently not an uncommon thing. The group of guys was really messed up by it, and I think drifted apart as the result of it. He was some kind of glue in that whole thing.

Dyer: The passage I was looking for, John, is early on. It’s one of these things that happens. Obviously, I read this after I finished my book, and this description here of these Christians that you’re hanging out with, “They were accepting of every kind of weirdness, and they had that light that people who are pursuing something higher give off.” And had I read that—that’s exactly the light that the Stalker gives off, isn’t it? That radiant look that he has in spite of his abjectness as well. I say “in spite of,” but of course it’s absolutely wrapped up in his wretchedness and abjectness. When you’re writing stories about people, is that something that you’re always on the lookout for in them? Some sort of light like that? Even Bunny Wailer has it in some sort of blasted-apart way?

Sullivan: Yes, I think so. A lot of it depends on the age of the character when you encounter them, or where they are in their lives, because that light can also turn into a kind of darkness. But whatever it is, it’s a separateness, a devotion to something that has caused their destiny to become warped somehow relative to what it might have been or to the destinies of people around them. And I do seem to go like a compass toward people like that.

Dyer: What’s that lovely phrase that you use in the Mister Lytle essay? It’s that description of the South—you were under “the tragic spell of the South.” And do you feel there’s a greater chance of finding people like that in the South?

Sullivan: A greater chance for me to find them. [Laughter] I’m keyed to it. Probably everybody has a landscape they’re keyed to that way. They seem to pop up for me when I go down there. Often in my own family.

Let me just read one thing from Zona – one sentence. I’m sorry. There is no other writer on Earth who would have made this observation, so to me it’s just a distilled little drop of Geoff Dyer. In the Zone, this phone rings, and you make the observation that this would also happen in Stalingrad as the soldiers were picking through the devastation, strange things like that would happen: a phone would ring, or they’d find somebody making breakfast. Something normal and civilized-seeming.

It says, “[The phone has] a rotary dial, so this sequence has added fascination as gestural archeology. It evolutionary terms the index finger enjoyed a long period of dominance in the era of the rotary phone but this action is now close to extinct. The index finger is entering a phase of quietude and disuse while the thumb enjoys a renaissance in the age of texting and mobiles.” [Laughter]

Now, we’re laughing, and it does have humor to it, but it’s also dead on. I don’t know how you do it.

Dyer: I came to the mobile phone very late. So when I got one I noticed that…

Sullivan: Your thumb was hurting?

Dyer: That’s an example of, the sort of thing—we began by talking about that embarrassing stuff. Putting in the little observation that rings true for you, and the chances are the more stupid that observation is, the greater the chance other people will have noticed something similar.

See Also:

“Reader’s Block,” by Geoff Dyer

“My Debt to Ireland,” by John Jeremiah Sullivan

When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.

Surprising as it may seem, I had friends, some of whom read more than I did. I knew a good deal about Constantinople and the Cromwell revolution and chivalry. There was little here that was relevant to my experience, but the shelves of northern Idaho groaned with just the sort of old dull books I craved, so I cannot have been alone in these enthusiasms.

Relevance was precisely not an issue for me. I looked to Galilee for meaning and to Spokane for orthodonture, and beyond that the world where I was I found entirely sufficient.

It may seem strange to begin a talk about the West in terms of old books that had nothing Western about them, and of naive fabrications of stodgily fantastical, authoritative worlds, which answered only to my own forming notions of meaning and importance. But I think it was in fact peculiarly Western to feel no tie of particularity to any single past or history, to experience that much underrated thing called deracination, the meditative, free appreciation of what ever comes under one’s eye, without any need to make such tedious judgments as “mine” and “not mine.”

I went to college in New England and I have lived in Massachusetts for twenty years, and I find that the hardest work in the world—it may in fact be impossible—is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling. On learning that I am from Idaho, people have not infrequently asked, “Then how were you able to write a book?”

Once or twice, when I felt cynical or lazy, I have replied, “I went to Brown,” thinking that might appease them—only to be asked, “How did you manage to get into Brown?” One woman, on learning of my origins, said, “But there has to be talent in the family somewhere.”

In a way Housekeeping is meant as a sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood. It was my intention to make only those allusions that would have been available to my narrator, Ruth, if she were me at her age, more or less. The classical allusions, Carthage sown with salt and the sowing of dragon’s teeth which sprouted into armed men, stories that Ruthie combines, were both in the Latin textbook we used at Coeur d’Alene High School. My brother David brought home the fact that God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. I never thought to ask him where he found it. Emily Dickinson and the Bible were blessedly unavoidable.

There are not many references in Housekeeping to sources other than these few, though it is a very allusive book, because the narrator deploys every resource she has to try to make the world comprehensible. What she knows, she uses, as she does her eyes and her hands. She appropriates the ruin of Carthage for the purposes of her own speculation. I thought the lore my teachers urged on me must have some such use.

Idaho society at that time at least seemed to lack the sense of social class which elsewhere makes culture a system of signs and passwords, more or less entirely without meaning except as it identifies groups and subgroups. I think it is indifference to these codes among Westerners that makes Easterners think they are without culture. These are relative differences, of course, and wherever accident grants a little reprieve from some human folly it must be assumed that time is running out and the immunity is about to disappear.

You’ll notice our print advertising is nothing if not consistent: the notice for In My Father’s Court isn’t terribly different from its modern-day counterparts.

All images courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Typewriter photography by Pete Smith.

See Also:

Paris Review editor Lorin Stein’s Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Magician of Lublin

I’m making a documentary about Girlchild’s book tour. Let’s take a moment to consider how crazy this sounds.

Yep, totally insane.

Before Girlchild had a pub date, in the years spent in the trenches of editing, commas splicing the air over my head, I dreamt of all I would do on the release of my first novel and I made a single rule: say yes. So: I’m going to far-away cities, book clubs, and schools, I’m surfing couches, slinging merch, and, I’m filming the book tour.

I raised funds to buy the gear and thanks to my 40+ “producers,” got a swanky camera. (Since I’m no kind of photographer, I figured the equipment, at least, should be quite good.) I got a serious tripod (the second time around, the first one broke a leg on the night of Girlchild’s launch). I got batteries, a charger, memory cards, a card reader to transfer each day’s footage to a hard drive. I got a hard drive. Plus, all of the respective cables. And it all goes inside a bag along with the manuals I am constantly referencing. All, that is, except for the tripod. Oh, and film releases. The list becomes less romantic the longer it gets, and yet, my original love for the idea grows, because a film about what happens on a book tour is one I want to see.

Lugging all of this through airports and train stations, having the suspicious-looking tripod sent through again by airport security, I’ve had plenty of reason and time to reconsider, especially given how embarrassing it is to be seen with no less than four pieces of luggage at any one time, but I’m still intent on capturing the mystery that is a book tour. Not the mystery of a first-time novelist on the road (we know that story); the mystery of a novel meeting its community for the first time.

People who show up at bookstores are heroic. They got out from behind their computer screens, they got out from behind their steering wheels, they got out from behind every single excuse that gives us permission to stay at home with another episode of Law & Order: Sweet Vicariousness Unit, and they went to a bookstore. This type of heroism can go unnoticed, but not today.

Whether or not the reader is a dying breed is not Hardbound’s argument. But it’s my hope that the film will still be a record of what these creatures are like; live readers who leave their houses to encounter a book in person, ethereal as unicorns. But better than unicorns. Yes, better than unicorns! While still being magical. More like narwhals or meerkats. The meer-readers who forage for narrative, while remaining, like their cousins the meerkat, not easily domesticated. Hardbound will capture these creatures, horned, sharp-clawed, or opposably-thumbed, capture them just briefly on film, and send them back out into the wild to read another day.

If I remember to take the lens cap off.

See Also:

Read an excerpt from Girlchild on Scribd

Visit Tupelo Hassman on Facebook

• “What Isn’t for Sale?” by Michael J. Sandel, in The Atlantic
• “Diving Into the Shallows” by Jesse Miller, in Full Stop
• “A Common Faith” by Marilynne Robinson, in Guernica

• Toni Morrison Cancels Her Memoir, Cleveland Plain-Dealer
• “How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?,” The Atlantic
• “Recovering Lolita,” Imprint
• “Let’s Welcome Alex Star to FSG,” The FSG Tumblr
• “Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Richard Ford, Dennis Cooper, Peter Carey: Freshly Pressed,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine
• “17 Successful Adaptations of ‘Unadaptable’ Books,” The A.V. Club
• “My Oscar Picks: Judy Blume,” The New York Times
• “Little, Brown to Publish J. K. Rowling’s First Novel for Adults,” BookTrade.info
  

We’re rewarding subscribers with an advance edition of Richard Lloyd Parry’s

-Ryan Chapman

Sean McDonald, the book’s editor, is the executive editor and director of paperback publishing at FSG.

Two of my favorite books are In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song. My favorite city on the planet—after New York, I suppose—is Tokyo. So, for me, the set-up of People Who Eat Darkness is as alluring as they get: A young woman named Lucie Blackman moves to Tokyo, where she stands out like, well, like a tall, blonde, 21-year-old in Japan. And then she disappears. Her friend receives a mysterious message saying Lucie has joined a religious cult, but no one believes that. The Japanese police seem helpless and hopeless. Lucie’s family comes to Japan, hires a series of investigators, digs into leads on their own that take them into the craziest, darkest corners of Tokyo’s subcultures.

And this is only the beginning of the story.

Richard Lloyd Parry has been reporting from Tokyo for over fifteen years, and now runs the Asia bureau for the London Times. He understands Tokyo as well as anyone, and explains it to the outside world with not just practiced fluidity but with elegance and unusual insight. He has seen a lot, but the case of Lucie Blackman grabbed him with unusual force. He’s covered the story from the beginning. He became close to her family and friends, won the trust of the police detectives. He covered the trial—which confounded the Japanese legal system and it’s 99.8% conviction rate, achieved largely on the expectation that every defendant will ultimately confess, but not this one, whom the judge would describe as “unprecedented and extremely evil”—from beginning to end, gained access to documents and inner workings no journalist was ever meant to see. He covered the case so closely that the defendant ultimately filed a bizarre lawsuit to try to stop Lloyd Parry from writing about him.

Everyone who you’d want to testify that this is a brilliant and gripping book has done so. When it was published in London, The Economist, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and others declared it one of the best books of 2011. Old Tokyo hands like David Peace and Jake Adelstein have celebrated Lloyd Parry’s knowledge of Tokyo and how well and how far he guides us into a culture that guards itself thoroughly; bestselling crime writers like Mo Hayder and Minette Walters have talked about how suspenseful and chilling it is. Geoff Dyer has said how compelling it is. Chris Cleave has called it, yes, “In Cold Blood for our times.” So does Esquire, which compares it favorably to Executioner’s Song for good measure. So you don’t have to just trust me that this book is good, that this book is satisfying, full of surprises I haven’t even hinted at. I’ve blathered on all this time and I haven’t even told you what happened to Lucie. For that, at the very least, you should read the book. And we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for you—simply subscribe and we’ll follow up with an email on where we can send your copy; the first 500 will get one for free.

Special thanks to photographer Joshua Simpson.

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. He is the author of the novels The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, Specimen Days, Flesh and Blood, and By Nightfall. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories, and he is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Hours, which was a New York Times bestseller, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1998 by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly. He is a Professor at Brooklyn College for the M.F.A program.

See Also:

“Found in Translation,” The New York Times

You may have already seen Amelia Gray reciting book passages from the back of a moped, or declaiming threats to a boisterous audience in Washington, D.C. So with Gray’s novel THREATS in mind, we built a site that addresses one question: Would you like to send vaguely menacing epistles to friends, loved ones, and enemies?

Now you can, thanks to Cautionary Notes. Think of it as an anti-Valentine’s Day message. Click the note below to begin:

See Also:

An excerpt from THREATS in VICE Magazine

What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your friend?

In an essay he published in The New York Times in 1981, the writer Leonard Michaels cited the works of three writers who influenced him—Saul Bellow, Wallace Stevens, and Chekhov. He then wrote: “Finally, the writer who influences me more than any other: Isaac Babel. I never talk about his work.” Implicit was the idea that, if you were a writer, you were a fool or a heretic to say anything about your deepest and most fundamental influence.No matter what you said, you would never get it right, you would unmask yourself, and you would—quite justifiably—suffer the shame of profaning a sacred thing. Or, to put it another way, here is a verse from a poem by William Blake:

Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.

I found this verse in one of the last things Michaels wrote, a short essay called “On Love” that appeared in the San Francisco-based magazine Zoetrope at the time of Michaels’ death, in the spring of 2003. Though Michaels was writing about romantic love, I think that his sentiment applies equally to love of any kind, including literary influence, which is another form of love. In the poem, the caveat is less oblique: the moment you so much as attempt to talk about the thing you love, that love is doomed. But, as both Blake and Michaels understood, people have always felt a powerful compulsion to put words to their most intimate feelings. As for writers, this paradoxical compulsion defines their work. Writers know that talking about love is a bad idea, a losing proposition, and yet they also recognize that it is the only thing worth talking about.

Having said this, I will now—and not without apprehension—go against the advice of Leonard Michaels and talk about the writer who influences me more than any other: Leonard Michaels.

In 1999, I was a graduate student in film at the University of Southern California, pursuing with futility a career in Hollywood. I’d ended up there as a strange concession to my parents, having convinced them and myself that cinema—with its endless credit roll of technical specialties—would offer the professional security they desired and creative gratification I sought. Writing—what I really wanted to do—appeared by comparison to be amorphous and fantastically improbable. But that winter, having fulfilled all of my course requirements, I enrolled in a creative writing class offered by the university. One day, the instructor suggested that I look up the work of a writer he thought I might like. That same afternoon I descended into the basement of USC’s Doheny Library looking for a collection of stories called I Would Have Saved Them If I Could by Leonard Michaels. In contrast to the library’s grand, sunlit exterior, its basement was like a bomb shelter, with metal stacks painted a dismal military gray-green. Filed on a low shelf, I found a selection of titles by Leonard Michaels, though not the book I was looking for. Arbitrarily, I opened one called Shuffle and read the first line. It went like this: “Sobbing like a child, he phoned his wife at her lover’s apartment.” Instantly, I was drawn in. Through the thicket of conflicting words—child, wife, lover’s apartment—I saw the husband in his animal misery set against the cool urbanity of the wife and her lover. Rereading the line now I see them again, as I’ve seen them on countless other rereadings. This one line, dramatic and succinct, epitomizes much of what I came to admire about Michaels’ writing. There is humor, pathos, and an appreciation for the absurdity to be found in everyday life. There is also the invocation of the subject that fuels much of Michaels’ work, which he once defined as “the way men and women seem unable to live with and without each other.” Turning pages, I stayed in the cavernous Doheny stacks for a long time, unwilling to stop reading even long enough to go upstairs and check the book out. It was the most powerful reading experience I’d ever had. I felt as if I’d found a writer who had managed to express the world the way I saw it. The effect was both exhilarating and humbling.

This was in January of 1999. Over the course of the next year I sought out everything I could find by Michaels. This proved harder than I expected. At the time, all but two or three of his books were out of print, and the ones that were available were published by Mercury House, a relatively obscure nonprofit press in San Francisco. So far as I could tell, no bookstore carried their titles, which meant that they could only be acquired by mail order. Nevertheless, gradually, in a piecemeal way, I assembled my Leonard Michaels library. Any time I visited a used bookstore I would go and browse under M. Usually I found nothing between Fern Michaels and James Michener. But occasionally, I had luck. Once, passing through San Luis Obispo, I discovered a hardcover copy of Michaels’ first collection of stories, Going Places, published in 1969. It cost $10. When I paid, the bookseller mentioned that Michaels had once read at the store. He recalled nothing particularly memorable, but the mere knowledge that I stood where Michaels had read was thrilling to me.

To Going Places I added I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, Shuffle, and The Men’s Club, Michaels’ 1981 novel. Mercury House sent me a compilation of stories and essays titled To Feel These Things, published in 1993. I read everything assiduously and voraciously, eager to start and loath to finish. Michaels wrote with precision and economy, with what people sometimes describe as “a poet’s attention to language” (high praise to poets, in my opinion). His books are not long. I typically finished them in one sitting and was affected and impressed almost uniformly by everything I read. Here, for instance, is my favorite line in all of literature. It derives from “Murderers,” the first story in I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, about four boys who climb onto a tenement roof to watch a rabbi have sex with his wife: “We sat on that roof like angels, shot through with light, derealized in brilliance.” The line is an inhalation, a caesura. Iconic, it has the precision and charm of a souvenir postcard, in the manner of Cartier-Bresson or Robert Doisneau. In the space of a breath, it captures the final moment of childhood, celebrating innocence and prefiguring tragedy, climbing, comma by comma, from nostalgia to apotheosis. Much more can be said besides, about the pleasure to be found in the language, its simplicity and complexity. After reading this line, I concluded that the man who wrote it was, by far, the best writer I’d ever encountered. (This is still how I feel.) I idolized him, and found it rather baffling that hardly anybody else knew of his work.

I should say at this point that though I was a dedicated reader and entertained writerly ambitions, I knew next to nothing about the practical realities of publishing. I paid no attention to and couldn’t distinguish between the various publishing houses and knew nothing about their relative merits or reputations. I knew nothing about the arcana of lists, deals, rights, advances, tours, covers, print runs, or anything else. All books looked the same to me. They all participated equally in the wondrous, enviable state of being published. A more savvy reader, noting the poor availability of Michaels’s books, might have deduced from this something about the state of Michaels’s career, but this never occurred to me. I thought that anybody who wrote as well as he did had to be a great success, on par with Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or any other writer deserving of serious consideration. That his books were almost completely out of print I perceived only as matter of personal inconvenience to me, not anything that would be of consequence to Michaels himself. After all, he had written the books and they had been published. They existed. I imagined that anything beyond that was trivial.

As it happened, my discovery of Michaels coincided with a kind of creative resurgence for him. Individual stories about a mathematician named Nachman appeared in The Threepenny Review,The Partisan Review, and The New Yorker beginning in the late 1990s. And in June of 1999, six months into my infatuation, came the publication of Time Out of Mind: The Diaries Of Leonard Michaels. I read a review of it and then secured, not without difficulty, one of the only copies in Los Angeles. I drove across town to an independent bookstore near Griffith Park, bought the book, and then returned home to huddle with it in my tiny studio apartment—one room with a kitchen, bathroom, and “cloffice”: a walk-in closet I’d converted for dual purpose. It was a gloomy Saturday; a day I’d spent waiting for a phone call from a girl. She didn’t call and I read late into the night. Michaels’ moody and insightful entries about the tribulations of the heart and of life in general made for suitable company. A representative entry reads:

Sept. 30, 81

Possible story. Lucy, in Lincoln, Nebraska, said that one night she slept with her best friend, a boy her age. She’d known him for years. They’d never been romantically involved with each other. After the sex he got up, dressed, and started out of the room. Lucy watched him until he reached the door, and then she yelled at him, called him a son of a bitch, demanded that he come back. He did. He took off his clothes and got back into bed with her. Thus, she saved the friendship. They never had sex again. Lucy lived in a trailer with her mother, and made money by offering herself as a subject in psychological and medical experiments.

Around this time, a screenplay I’d written attracted the attention of an agent who took me on as a client. The man had once worked for a large agency but had since left to start his own boutique operation. Even though he ran his business out of the pool-house of his Sherman Oaks home, he was intelligent and reputable. When I went to meet him, I saw, parked in his carport, the reassuring evidence of a red Mercedes Benz convertible. The screenplay I had written was unconventional, but my agent sent it out to elite production companies and also to very famous actors, hoping to entice them with an eccentric role. I had just turned 26. For about a week, I walked around feeling hugely optimistic, imagining the imminent call that would herald the start of my new and desirable life. When all of the actors and production companies declined, I still retained some of my optimism. Nobody had offered to buy the script, but a few had said complimentary things about the writing and invited me to meetings on studio lots. The impenetrable seemed slightly less impenetrable. If I had any ideas, I was invited to come back with them.

That fall, I reread a Michaels’ short story called “Honeymoon” included in To Feel These Things and decided that it could be adapted into a movie. The story is set at a Catskills honeymoon resort in the 1950s. In it, a young bride, “married a few hours earlier in the city,” falls in love with her waiter, an arrestingly handsome dental student, mambo dancer, and handball champion. Many complications ensue. The story is very lively, funny, but also darkly menacing. There is something inscrutable at its core, relating to the atavistic nature of love and lust. I contemplated the prospect of adapting the story for some time, debating the various reasons for and against. My Hollywood career was not progressing. I showed no talent for generating ideas with potential mainstream appeal. Once, intrigued by a historical footnote I heard on the classical music station, I pitched an idea involving Bach, Handel, and a lesser-known Baroque organist named Dietrich Buxtehude. I sensed my agent’s enthusiasm dwindling; it took him longer and longer to return my proverbial phone calls. Out of desperation, defiance, or some combination of the two, I resolved to adapt “Honeymoon.” At heart, what motivated me more than involuted commercial or creative considerations was having a valid excuse to contact Leonard Michaels. I gathered my courage and called the UC Berkeley English department where Michaels had been a professor. At that point, Michaels had retired mostly to Italy, and a colleague agreed to forward my request. I composed a short, professional-sounding email, expressing my admiration for his work and briefly citing my qualifications. Two days later I turned on my computer and felt my pulse quicken. Michaels wrote a warm and receptive note, its tone personal and conversational, very much like his essays and stories. He asked me to provide some indication of my capabilities, but not in any lofty or forbidding way. “My experience with movies has been rather disappointing in the past,” he wrote, “but I remain hopeful that something good can always happen.”

This initial exchange proved the beginning of a correspondence that lasted for three years. At first we spoke mainly about “the possible movie.” Michaels—or Lenny, as he was known to his friends—wrote to me about his experience as a busboy and waiter in the Catskills, and particularly of his love of Latin music and dancing. He wrote about the vernacular of the time, and also about what it had been like to be a young American Jew in the 1940s and 50s, with the heady, idealistic promise of Israel, and the bleak, gruesome knowledge of the Holocaust. I posed questions and he answered expansively and intimately, as if we had known each other for a long time. That we had never met and that I was 40 years his junior didn’t seem to matter. We corresponded like this for months as I prepared to write the screenplay. Then I wrote it. I planned meticulously, and completed it in something like five days, faster than I’d written anything before. The script required the invention of characters and dialogue which were supposed to coexist with what Lenny had already written. To do the work meant, more than ever, to quell the single and unremitting question: Who do you think you are?

Looking back now, the script seems incidental, though at the time it meant quite a lot, not only to me but, I think, also to Lenny. We discussed its possibilities earnestly and at length. When I sent Lenny the script, he wasn’t effusive, but offered suggestions; he seemed generally to approve. For me this alone was a huge relief and the highest validation. In the months after I wrote the screenplay I put it and myself through the demoralizing circuit of submissions to “people in the business.” It came to nothing. Lenny tried to help by recommending friends of his who worked in movies, but none of them warmed to the idea. Many were of the opinion that Dirty Dancing had exhausted the subject.

“It’s a horrible business, I think, asking for money,” Lenny wrote, “and if you could do the movie in video for cheap it would be fine with me.” What animated him was the prospect of committing to the screen what he had committed to the page: a true and unabashed rendition of Jewish life, one that allowed for Jewish physicality and gracefulness. In other words, a portrayal of Jews like normal people—complementing the musical prodigies and lefty intellectuals with athletes, gamblers, and mambo dancers. I felt the same way. Lenny had grown up on the Lower East Side, and played varsity basketball at NYU; I had grown up among Soviet Jews, and had, at a young age, and for the purposes of instruction, watched my father repeatedly shoot a puck through a cardboard target.

In the time I knew Lenny we communicated almost exclusively by email. On several occasions we spoke by phone and twice met in person. The first time, in the summer of 2000, I visited him at his house in Kensington, near Berkeley. He looked older than I had expected, rumpled, and he asked me to project since he was hard of hearing in one ear. The effect made me conscious of his mortality in a way I hadn’t quite considered before. We spent a few hours together, talking, and Lenny made a tuna salad, which we ate without ceremony. The scale of everything was modest and unpretentious. The house resembled its owner, rustic and benignly disheveled. No exorbitant attention was devoted to furnishings or objects. Here and there, on the walls, I saw the papery husks of spiders. These came from the trees that surrounded the house, Lenny explained. Thus they were natural, harmless, and not worth disturbing. My visit alerted me to the disjunction between reality and my preconceptions. It reminded me of a comment Lenny had recorded in his journals. The comment had been made by his eldest son, who, still a child, had watched his celebrated father sweep the kitchen floor. He’d looked at Lenny “with weary incomprehension” and said: “You’re practically famous, and you’re sweeping the floor.” I suppose I felt a version of that.

Our friendship forced me to confront such dichotomies. To reconcile my perception of the authorial persona with the author as a person. In his work Lenny exhibited incisiveness, self-awareness, and control, and yet in life he sometimes appeared to me to be innocently childlike. He was often very emotionally candid. He talked freely and unguardedly about himself and about his friends and acquaintances. Though not trying to be mean-spirited or malicious, he could be indiscreet. Once, in conversation, he mentioned a friend, a man with a recognizable name, who had impregnated his much younger girlfriend to keep her from leaving him. I understood that Lenny had mentioned this in a flow of social feeling, not to sow gossip, only to remark upon a peculiar incident that he’d found illuminating and amusing. Still, the disclosure seemed at odds with the image I’d constructed of Lenny based on his work.

Another time, he spoke angrily about a critic who had reviewed Time Out of Mind. I had read that review but had been so excited that I hadn’t paid very close attention to what the reviewer had actually written. Lenny accused the man of taking things grossly out of context, of misquoting, and, worst of all, of calling Lenny a misogynist. (Now, reading the review again, I see Lenny’s point.) Lenny said he knew this man and described him as a Jew who’d converted to Catholicism, an intellectual mediocrity, a cripple with a cane and a limp. He said that he was prepared to go after him. Or if he didn’t, he knew that Gore Vidal would. On this point, Lenny said with all seriousness, he and Vidal were in the same camp. The scenario struck me as ludicrously comic. I pictured an irate, septuagenarian Vidal pursuing a terrified, gimpy Jewish convert to Catholicism. When I pointed this out, Lenny laughed.

Far less funny was when he asked if I or someone I knew might be able to review A Girl With A Monkey, a compilation of new and selected stories published by Mercury House in 2000. I was a literary nonentity and couldn’t imagine anybody allowing me to write a review. Other than Lenny, the only other writer I knew was the professor who had recommended Lenny’s work. I asked him.

“If it takes more than two phone calls, don’t bother,” Lenny wrote. “The book isn’t going to make money. I just don’t want it to vanish instantly.”

It was depressing to think that he expected his book to vanish. And it was depressing that someone like him should have to ask someone like me for help. I felt embarrassed and sorry for him, which was the opposite of the way I wanted to feel. I also didn’t quite understand how he’d gotten himself into this position. Were stories in The New Yorker no indemnification? I wondered what accounted for the glaring disparity between his talent and his profile. True, he hadn’t been as productive as, say, Roth, Updike, Bellow, or Malamud, but I could think of other writers who had established enduring reputations based on far less. What was it, then, that had caused his name to slip so far below the horizon?

One explanation was provided by Lenny himself. In the 1990s he’d elected to leave his New York publisher and sign on with Mercury House. He went there when he “decided to become marginal, rather than have any more to do with commercial giants.” It was a move he later regretted. Throughout his career it seemed as though Lenny had a conflicted relationship with success. Though he was socially gregarious, he was also temperamentally averse to promoting his work. When The Men’s Club—a book which he acknowledged later as “receiv[ing] more attention than anything [he'd] ever published before”—was published in 1981, Lenny declined opportunities to publicize the novel and instead drove alone from Baltimore to California. In Time Out of Mind he wrote: “I’ve never been able to sell anything and I didn’t think I would do the novel or myself much good.”

After the success of the novel, he also descended into a silence that lasted the entirety of the 1980s. Previously he’d published a book every five or six years, but a decade elapsed betweenThe Men’s Club and Shuffle. Partly to blame for the silence was the unfortunate screen adaptation of The Men’s Club, released in 1985. By any estimation it was a terrible movie, and one whose badness Lenny took exceedingly personally, as if he were morally culpable.

When he started publishing again it didn’t help him that the book he published in 1990, Shuffle, was an unusual hybrid of processed journal entries, personal essays, and memoir. The writing was excellent and formally inventive, but difficult for a publisher to market or for a bookstore to categorize.

The three books that succeeded Shuffle—Sylvia, a fictional memoir of his first marriage; To Feel These Things; and A Girl With A Monkey—all either reprinted or enlarged upon work that Lenny had previously published, and opened him up to the criticism that his formal experimentation amounted to little more than creative repackaging.

It might also be that the traits I found endearing in Lenny—his generosity of spirit, his accessibility, his enthusiasm, his total lack of imperiousness—were antithetical to career advancement. During the time that I knew him, he contributed essays and reviews either for free or for some token sum to small online arts publications as favors to former students or artist friends.

“I just wrote a brief review of the short stories of Yasunari Kawabata for an internet website called Tipworld,” Lenny wrote, inviting me to do the same. “A former student of mine is one of the editors and she asked me to do it. Reviews pay 40 dollars.”

And to some degree, Lenny also believed that the quality he prized and worked so hard to attain in his own work disconcerted and alienated readers.

“Almost everything I write is praised and damned,” Lenny wrote, “and often these responses are passionate…. People get pissed off by things in the stories not because they don’t feel true, but for the opposite reason…. Even the sentences, regardless of their meaning, annoy some people because they sound more or less too much achieved, so to speak.”

In his journals, where he made many fine observations about the nature and craft of writing, Lenny articulated this idea another way:

My writing feels warm until I revise, make it better, and then it gets cold. I should revise further, mess up my sentences, make them warm, make money.

Trenchant and concise, this statement says essentially everything that needs to be said about writing and I reflect on it often. And in its very trenchancy and concision it also exemplifies Lenny’s point.

That said, I’m reluctant to concede that the nuanced, wonderfully calibrated, and introspective quality of Lenny’s writing played any role in marginalizing him. His writing seems to me unimpeachably good. More than that of almost anyone else, Lenny’s work satisfies my standard for good writing: an ability to engage a reader if opened randomly to any sentence on any page. Most books have the reverse effect. The phenomenal quality of Lenny’s prose, power of observation, emotional acuity, and pace make this possible. He is never boring. Here, for argument’s sake, is a short passage taken from Sylvia:

Outside the Carnegie delicatessen, I took my money out of my pocket to see if I had enough for tickets and dinner. I needed about ten dollars. Sylvia said, “You’re not going to count your money in the street, I hope.” After that, I had no choice but to count my money, but I didn’t do it. I stuffed the bills back into my pocket. Irascible and silent, we waited for Roger and his Rosalie. The minutes in the afternoon heat stood like buildings along the avenue, utterly still.

The placement of each word is so specific, always there to maximize effect. For instance, Sylvia’s “I hope,” placed not at the beginning but at the end of the sentence, tweaking with passive-aggressiveness. And the last two words, “utterly still,” tolling bell-like, but also, physically, in the verticality of their “Ts” and “Ls” resembling the buildings themselves. This kind of writing is present on every page Lenny wrote.

In the end, however, the thing that hampered Lenny more than any other was the fact that he was, by constitution, a writer of short stories. Writers, like runners, have their distances, and Lenny wasn’t built for the novel’s marathon length; instead, like Roger Bannister, he was a world-class miler. But, to his misfortune, he lived at a time when any mediocre marathoner garnered more respect than the best miler. (Granted, this remains the case; perhaps always has, perhaps always will.) In the most pragmatic sense, Lenny understood this, but there was little he could do about it. And though he prevailed upon himself to write two novels—The Men’s Club and Sylvia—these didn’t conform to the conventional idea of the novel. Instead, they were more like extended Leonard Michaels stories. Both books come in under 200 pages.

Once, referring to an aborted attempt to expand one of his stories, Lenny lamented: “I’m afraid I don’t think like a novelist.” He didn’t specify what he meant by “thinking like a novelist,” but I interpret it as his recognition of the inherent incompatibility between the rigor and discipline of his craft and the sweeping, garrulousness of the novel. Throughout his career, he was frustrated by this problem, and tried many times to overcome it.

Of the life advice Lenny dispensed to me, prominent was the exhortation to turn certain things I’d written into novels. Once, it was to expand upon an email in which I’d described how, on summer afternoons, my grandparents walked over from their apartment building to sit quietly in the backyard of my parents’ house, admiring the bushes and trees. And how I used to watch them, in their simple goodness, through my basement window, where I sat at a computer writing an account of my experience working on the set of a pornographic movie.

“As written, there is really only one scene,” Lenny wrote, “but you say you have pages on the experience of watching porno productions…. I’m curious to know if you could even begin to imagine a novel?”

Another time, when I’d sent him an early draft of a story, he strongly encouraged me to consider it as the beginning of a novel. I was very flattered but also anxious and unsure of how to proceed. I understood that he was trying to help me, to give me the benefit of his experience, to keep me from repeating what he perceived as his mistakes, but the task seemed daunting, beyond me. What’s more, at heart I’d aspired to nothing more than a story. I confessed most of this to Lenny, but he didn’t think much of my tortured protestations.

I wish you would just start writing your novel without anticipating all the stages of the whole process and without waiting for a wide and encouraging readership to urge you to continue before the book exists. What you have written so far might even be publishable if the ending were slightly more like an ending. Even as it stands now the chapter, so to speak, could be used to get the interest of a publisher. Do you want I should ask around maybe a little?

Lenny sent the chapter to his agent, who kindly declined, and thus spared me the terrifying obligation of turning the story into a novel.

At that time, defeated and disenchanted, I had left Los Angeles and moved home to Toronto with the intention of writing stories about Soviet Jewish immigrants. Occasionally I sent these to Lenny for his reaction. He did the same, sending me things offhandedly, dispassionately, almost as an afterthought. Some of these he termed experiments, others were drafts of Nachman stories which I would later see, remarkably, in the pages of The New Yorker. I never knew what kind of response he wanted. But if I had reservations about a story, I would be hesitant to voice them; and if I was genuinely impressed, I tempered my admiration, so as not to appear too fawning. I know now that I should have responded honestly, but I was always sensitive, probably too much so, to the balance between being Lenny’s friend and his admirer. I believed that tacit rules governed our friendship, rules which I could not subvert. And yet there were highly intimate things which I confided only to him, knowing that he would be uniquely sympathetic. Peculiarities of family life, romantic life, writing, financial straits, existential doubts, and matters pertaining to Jews and what might be called “the Jewish mind”: we discussed these things in a way I hadn’t before, and haven’t since.

In the summer of 2002, a friend I had made through Lenny—like myself, a fledgling writer, and part of a spontaneous, far-flung, and loosely affiliated society of devotees to Lenny and his work—passed a typescript of a story I’d written to a young editor at a New York publishing house. After reading the story, the editor contacted me and asked if I’d written any others. I sent him what I had and that fall I received an offer for publication. I was ludicrously happy, but also completely unprepared. I didn’t have an agent and was tentative about how to proceed. I wrote to Lenny and received his sober, well-intentioned, and idiosyncratic direction.

When it happened to me I had no real idea about what was going on, but mainly I didn’t like it, and didn’t think it was a wonderful experience. I never even read a contract, which I regret today, but I’m not sure things could have been different. My books go out of print but the publisher doesn’t return the rights…. This won’t seem important to you now, but when you have a book in print it may come as a shock to discover that it is hardly different from a can of sardines in the business world. It is a commodity…. Anyhow, don’t hesitate to ask me questions. I don’t know much but I have had enough bad experiences to know more than other people.

Primarily, Lenny thought I should take the deal offered by the publisher, forget about the agents, and just settle down to finish the book. However, if I was determined to hire an agent, he believed I shouldn’t allow myself to be misled.

The only serious differences between one agent and another is that one takes fifteen percent and another takes ten, and one actually reads the work and thinks about it and the other doesn’t care about anything but money…. When it comes to money I suppose women are more ferocious. Men are competitive with each other, but basically more sympathetic. Regardless of how much warmth a woman offers, it’s merely natural. From a man warmth is offered against murderous resistance, so it’s probably worth more spiritually. You never hear about a woman flinging herself onto a live hand grenade to save her buddies. Men do that all the time. OK? Now everything should be clear about choosing an agent. So either pick the woman who will make you rich, or the man who will fling himself onto a live hand grenade to save you from certain death.

I met with half a dozen agents and, perhaps fittingly, was most impressed by a somewhat effeminate gay man.

That fall and winter I was uncommonly busy, working on the book and on a documentary. Sometimes weeks or months would pass without me hearing from Lenny. This wasn’t all that unusual since our correspondence had always been cyclical. Through the friend who’d submitted my manuscript, I would sometimes hear updates. When I communicated with Lenny, we spoke of possibly meeting when he next came to New York. Also, I started to make preliminary plans to go to Italy. I wanted to write a novel which would be set primarily in Rome. Previously, Lenny had extended invitations for me to come and visit him in the Umbrian countryside where his wife managed a number of tourist villas. As much as I’d wanted to go, there had always been reasons, mainly financial, which precluded me from accepting. But now, somewhat liberated by the advance for my book, and needing to do research, I planned to go with my girlfriend and live for four months in Rome. Lenny kept a small apartment in Trastevere and I anticipated the prospect of seeing him regularly, of being in his company in a way that hadn’t been possible before.

Then, sometime in the spring of 2003, our mutual friend wrote me to say that Lenny had been admitted to an Italian hospital. The severity of his condition wasn’t clear. Shortly thereafter Lenny left Italy and flew to seek medical care in Berkeley. Everything seemed to happen without warning and with terrible speed. Through the same friend I learned that Lenny had been diagnosed with lymphoma. An operation was scheduled but apparently Lenny was in reasonably good spirits, ready to fight. At the end of April he experienced severe complications from the treatment, and barely survived. I was given a number for Lenny’s daughter, the youngest of his three children. We’d never spoken before and she didn’t know who I was, but she’d assumed the unenviable task of fielding confused and awkward telephone calls from people like me. She was still in her early 20s, her father was dying, and I was a complete stranger, but she described everything patiently and with great empathy, as if my grief merited equivalent consideration. Less than two weeks later, she wrote me to say that her father’s liver and kidneys had failed and that the family was starting to plan the funeral. He died that same day, May 10, 2003.

Two days later, one of my stories appeared in The New Yorker. Another had appeared a few weeks earlier in Harper’s. And another in Zoetrope. This was my grand debut, but I looked at the magazines and thought mainly that Lenny hadn’t lived to see them. A hideously egotistical thought, but it colored everything. I’d wanted to make him proud, to demonstrate in some tangible way that I’d been deserving of his friendship and his time.

In the days immediately following his death I immersed myself in his books and essays. Now that he was gone, it became impossible to read his stories the same way. It felt as though, before, I’d read inattentively, and glossed over the deeper meaning. Now that meaning was eminent. A deathly shade seemed to hover over everything. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been aware of it before. I had. It had always been there, but at a remove. But now, particularly in his later work, I saw that it had crept closer, like a sinister premonition. It was as if he’d been rehearsing his farewell, and now he’d gone.

In the four years since his death not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of him. Sometimes, in a personal sense, as when I hear a certain anecdote or see something that I know would have appealed to his sensibility. More often, though, it is when I pick up his stories and essays, which I do with great regularity. I also hear his voice whenever I sit down to write. I hear his tone, his mood, his syntactic rhythms. I also hear isolated lines, snippets of dialogue or description, which I know much better than my own. They serve as my models and guides. When I feel that I’ve lost my way, I use them to reorient my soul. I rely on two lines in particular:

Whenever I write anything, my presence and absence are in constant tension—especially when writing about myself.

The way I write about myself or anything else is, I’m afraid, personal or it’s nothing.

Both of these lines come from Lenny’s brilliant essay “The Personal and the Individual.” I’m aware of them every time I sit down to write. I think of them and feel not only the tension between my own presence and absence, but Lenny’s as well. I sense the ineffable pressure of influence, corrective and not unpleasant. It informs every sentence I write, including this one.

This essay originally appeared in Nextbook in 2007. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

See Also:

“Writing About Myself” by Leonard Michaels, originally published as “The Personal and the Individual.”

David Bezmozgis’s Favorite Reads from 2011

February is one of my favorite months of the year, a time to appreciate romance with all manner of crimson-colored trappings—hearts and roses, of course, but also, for those most drunk on love, blood.  What’s a Valentine’s Day, after all, without an affectionate recollection of one of the greatest cult horror films of all time, My Bloody Valentine?  Show your sweetheart your true devotion by screening this 1981 slasher—Quentin Tarantino’s favorite in the genre, by the way.  Nothing says “I love you” like a man dressed as a miner sending people to hell with a pick-axe.

Below, I try to understand why such gory films remain so popular in our culture and wonder if watching horror flicks—the good (Rosemary’s Baby, for instance), the bad (My Bloody Valentine, alas), and the ugly (savage fare like Hostel)—might actually be good for us.

Many challenge the catharsis theory, and not for the same reason Pauline Kael does (it’s confusion, not purgation, that draws us to horror). A popular argument against the idea goes like this: Watching violence doesn’t cleanse us of destructive impulses at all, but actually exacerbates them. Certain reformers, usually right-leaning espousers of “family values,” are of course in love with this notion, since it justifies their projects to clean up our smut-filled and violence-ridden society (going to hell in a handbasket) through censorship laws. Some studies have shown that violence in media does indeed cause aggression in “real life.” But the evidence, as we saw in the earlier discussion of Gerard Jones, is far from conclusive. Meanwhile, regardless of scientific data, many humanists and artists continue to take Aristotle seriously, maintaining that the catharsis theory convincingly explains how we experience violent media and why macabre spectacles are valuable.

I put myself in this last category, and not because I’m a fan of Aristotle (really more of a Platonist), and not because I want to close ranks with my fellow humanists (English professors are some of the most tedious people on earth), and not because I’ve never really met a social scientist that I liked (I’m sure the problem’s with me), and not because (am I lying to myself ?) I need to ennoble what I like to do anyway: watch horror films.

I’m a defender of the catharsis theory, at least partially, and probably more than I’d like to admit, because I hate Tipper Gore. Not necessarily Tipper in her current form—troubled, I imagine (but maybe relieved), by her separation from Al—but the Tipper of 1985, when she went before Congress to lobby for warning labels on records containing lyrics that might be inappropriate for children.

Though I was only a freshman in college and woefully underinformed about current events, much less free-speech-versus-censorship debates, I took an interest in the hearings because I was obsessed with loathing poor Tipper. Fresh from resigning from West Point in protest of all things self-righteous, and otherwise in a general funk of sullen rebellion against my goody-goody Southern Baptist upbringing, I saw in Tipper everything I hated about the world just then: upright living, positive thinking, the G rating, and sentimentality, not to mention big hair. I also happened to be a fan of her opponents in the debate. First, Twisted Sister’s front man, Dee Snider, with his crazed waist-length blond coif and loud French-whore makeup and deeply guttural passion for not taking shit from anybody. Next, Frank Zappa. I didn’t know his music well but I liked his two children, Dweezil and Moon Unit, mainly for their names, and I liked that Frank said to Tipper, “May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face.”

Watching those hearings on afternoons when I should have been reading Aristotle, I felt a visceral aversion to anything even approaching censorship. I realize that this was a simpleminded view—some things, of course, need censoring, such as child pornography—but it expressed a sensibility I still retain, and that I can now articulate more clearly: rarely, in the human world, can we establish clear causality.

This conviction—and not Tipper, truth be told—is the real reason that I can’t join those scientists who dismiss catharsis and condemn violence in the media. I emphatically agree with Jones, who reminds us that a plethora of factors, some unknown and some graspable, generate any given human event—such as a nine-year-old saying “fuck” or a high school boy, hopped up on Hostel and Saw, committing a violent crime. To try to reduce these or any other societal phenomena to a particular cause—profane lyrics on a rap album or a horror film’s gore—is to ignore the world’s complexities, nuances, and contradictions. It’s also, this reductive thinking, a kind of puritanism, whether it’s applied to profanity, sex, or violence, since puritanical logic, in a general sense, is the narrow-minded attribution of evil to a set number of causes a little too well defined.

And so, now, twenty-five years after Tipper the good mother went head-to-head with Zappa, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, I continue to have a personal aversion toward people—be they social scientists or ministers or strict parents or conservative pundits—who claim that cinematic violence is responsible for some of our culture’s ills. And now I’m prone, of course, to lean the other way: morbid curiosity arises from heterogeneous and complicated factors, and is quite possibly of value to society, either as a catalyst for purgation of aggression or the incorporation of the shadow.

Say that this view is an example of my immaturity, that I’m letting teen petulance inform adult views. Say that I’m narrow-minded in my unwillingness to engage the sophisticated research of social scientists. Call me perversely contrarian, someone who needs to counter mainstream sentiment in order to get attention. Say what ever you want: I’ll stick with Hitch and Stephen King and claim that violence in cinema isn’t such a bad thing and might well be good for you. (Though I must admit that I’m a bit uncomfortable finding myself on the side of Dee Snider again; he’s traded heavy metal for the horror film, writing and starring in the 1998 release Strangeland, about a sadist named Captain Howdy [Snider's character] who kidnaps teens and subjects them to gruesome body modification rituals.)

It’s really not all about my aversions, of course. I’m drawn to the catharsis theory—as well as the notion of the shadow—because both ideas have helped me explain how my fascination with the macabre has made my life fuller and richer.

If it’s not clear by now, I’m a serious horror film fan, though I haven’t seen Strangeland and probably won’t. I’m especially in love with the artier ones, like Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (the original), Kubrick’s The Shining, the first Alien film. I’m also an addict of the cinema’s early efforts at terror: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Bride of Frankenstein. And more recent literate fare draws me as well: Seven, Twenty-Eight Days Later, Verbinski’s The Ring, Pan’s Labyrinth, Let the Right One In. I also adore Hitchcock’s dark psychodramas and I admit a penchant for more straightforward scariness—Carpenter’s first Halloween, Craven’s initial Nightmare on Elm Street, even Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

One common thread among these—a strand shared with action films, violent television, and video games—is almost so obvious that we forget it: each relies on the storytelling techniques that separate fiction from nonfiction. Real life is mostly jumbled, confusing, and unpredictable. Fictional narratives often counteract the chaos with clear causal connections, reassuring rhythms of rising and falling action, characters who are complex yet consistent, revelations coming at just the right time, parts conforming to a harmonious whole, and conclusions that unify seemingly disparate events. These stories are meaningful: they push toward a discernible end and offer coherent messages.

In his Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carroll has argued that one of the primary attractions of scary movies is cognitive satisfaction. For Carroll, horror movies don’t draw us so much for physical or emotional stimulation as for the pleasures of their plots, which explore problems—such as how to understand a monster and how to contain it—in riveting, suspenseful narratives that conclude with all questions answered. Take the Dracula story. The vampire fascinates us. We marvel at his supernatural powers, but also fear them. As the tale unfolds, his mysterious abilities are examined, explained, and eventually neutralized. We love this rhythm of problem and solution.

We miss this cadence when we witness violent images devoid of narrative finesse. Imagine an amateur videotape of a dinner party. Several people, maybe twelve, sit around a large table. In the center is a living monkey. With a hammer, one of the diners knocks the monkey unconscious. He splits open the skull, scoops out the still-beating brain, and serves it on a platter.

Switch scenes. There is a slaughter house. Bewildered, bellowing steers stagger through a chute. At the end of the line, a worker strikes each cow in the head with a sledgehammer. Another man slices the throats. Still another hangs the bloody beeves from hooks.

Another sequence: a surgeon and his team surround a young girl prepared for an operation. The doctors sever the child’s face from her skull and turn it inside out.

These are not images from a surreal Buñuel film, nor are they from Faces of Death, the 1978 mondo movie depicting actual dying. Instead, these crude, raw scenes were part of an experiment designed to determine reactions to seemingly real violence, and to understand how these differ from responses to obviously fake Hollywood mayhem.

In the study, male and female college students were shown the three films described above—none of which, I should add, was enhanced by sound effects, such as a musical score. Each student had the power to shut off the video whenever he or she wished. Most quit watching about halfway through, expressing disgust with the gory scenes. In contrast, students found an excessively violent scene from Friday the 13th, Part III, fully scored, to be “involving, exciting, and not boring.” When this same clip was shown without the audio enhancement, it was less riveting.

It appears that the trappings of Hollywood movies, especially sound tracks, can make a horrific experience grippingly dramatic. The psychology professor Clark McCauley, who conducted the experiment, accounts for this result by invoking a Sanskrit text, the Natyasastra, written around AD 200–300. This work explores the concept rasa, “aesthetic or imaginative experience.” In discussing tragedy—which shares traits with horror—the Natyasastra claims that although we try to avoid actual sadness, we are attracted to aesthetic renderings of grief because they pull us away from our “preoccupations with ourselves” and open us to the suffering of others. We transcend narcissism and empathize.

This transcendence grows from catharsis: normally self-interested feelings, like pity and fear, are purified of their egotism and connected to more altruistic concerns, such as how to assuage the suffering of the collective. Fiction encourages this emotional free play. We are invited to explore without the pressure of consequences.

McCauley applies the Natyasastra to horror films. The fear and disgust inspired by such films invite us to sound the depths of our humanity, to contemplate the origins of our own disgusts and fears, or to put ourselves in the place of the characters in the story, killer and victim alike. In either case, if we could respond positively to the invitation, we might be expanded, awakened, enlightened—to a great and possibly transformative degree when we behold the more brilliant works of horror.

Of course, life is messy, as likely to be selfish and stupid as expansive and wise, and so it’s the rare occasion that making or watching a film is devoid of egotism’s blindness. Some scary movies will exploit suffering more than open us to its transforming depths. And most fans of the horror genre are probably going to be ignorant of their favorite films’ invitations to transcend selfishness. Still, the potential is there: viewing a scary movie, especially one by a true artist—a del Toro or a Kubrick or a Polanski—can, however infrequently, call forth what is best in us and maybe make us a little more empathetic and charitable than we were before.

The real story behind the recent blowup over legislation regulating piracy on the Internet has less to do with the fears of motion picture studios or the intransigence of technology companies than with the legislative process itself. By taking their lead exclusively from copyright owners, and failing substantively to consult with technology companies, committee members in the House, much like their Senate counterparts earlier, forfeited the opportunity for a workable solution.

© Lizzy Goldstein

Copyright lawmaking has not always been like this. In the years leading to the present Copyright Act, committee chairs in both houses negotiated the difficult intersection between copyright and the then-new technologies of photocopying, computers, and cable television by bringing all interested parties to the bargaining table. Senator Orrin Hatch may have been exaggerating only slightly when in connection with a 2004 copyright-Internet bill he said, “If I have to, I will lock up all of the key parties in a room until they come out with an acceptable bill that stops the bad actors and preserves technological innovation.”

Safe harbor provisions enacted by Congress in 1998 are the product of such a locked-door discussion between copyright owners and technology companies. To be sure, the safe harbors they designed for Web 1.0 are experiencing some strains in a Web 2.0 world, but they continue to provide a widely accepted set of red, yellow, and green lights for copyright traffic on the Internet.

And there are better reasons for Congress to consult all sides than just striking a deal. One benefit of cross-industry discussions like those that led to the Internet safe harbors is that technologists can explain to the creative community what kind of tinkering will and will not work. Another benefit is that properly designed legislation can give technology companies an incentive to apply their particular genius to produce innovations that will further reduce piracy without disrupting lawful life on the Internet.

Responding to the present legislative impasse, former Senator Christopher Dodd, now the head of the Motion Picture Association, has said that he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet and content companies. This is a fine thought. But if a law is to be passed, it is the responsibility of Congress to ensure that all interests are fully represented in the process and that the solutions they reach conform to the public interest.

Nothing should be easier than talking about ways in which I write about myself, but I find it isn’t at all easy. Indeed, in writing about myself I encounter a problem that engages me even as I write this sentence. The problem is how not to write merely about myself. I think the problem is endemic among writers whether or not they are aware of it. The basic elements of writing—diction, grammar, tone, imagery, the patterns of sound made by your sentences—say a good deal about you, so that it is possible for you to be writing about yourself before you even know you are writing about yourself. Regardless of your subject, the basic elements, as well as countless and immeasurable qualities of mind, are at play in your writing and will make your presence felt to a reader as palpably as your handwriting. You virtually write your name, as it were, before you literally sign your name, every time you write. Spinoza wrote his Ethics in Latin, a language nobody spoke anymore, using a severely logical method of argument. The last thing he wanted was to make his presence felt, or to write about himself. The way he wrote his Ethics was rather like the way he lived, determined to remain obscure, uncompromised by a recognizable identity in the public world. The impersonal purity of his Ethics, then, couldn’t have been more self-expressive. The book wasn’t published in his lifetime, partly because it would have been recognized as his book. In his obscurity, he was too well known.

Shakespeare isn’t discoverable in a personal way in anything he wrote, and yet it is generally agreed that we know what Shakespeare wrote, or what only he is likely to have written. His sonnets, which are among the most personal poems ever written, are remarkably artificial in their quatrains, couplets, puns, and paradoxes, devices that are manifestly impersonal. It is curiously relevant that, in Shakespeare’s various signatures, he never spelled his name the same way twice, rather as if he thought his personal identity had very little to do with a particular way of spelling his name. A particular way would simply be individual.

Montaigne said of his essays, “I have no more made this book than this book has made me.” I think he means his writing revealed him to himself, and the revelations weren’t always consciously intended. Again and again in his essays he seems to discover himself inadvertently, which is to say only that your radically personal identity, with or without your consent, is made evident in your writing. Like a fingerprint. Or, what is even more personally telling, a face print: according to experts, there are eighty places in the human face that can be used to identify a person. These whorls and aspects are unique, if not exactly personal in the same way as your sentence structure.

One rainy night many years ago, I went with a friend to a jazz club called Basin Street in Greenwich Village to hear a Miles Davis quartet. There was a small, sophisticated crowd. It applauded in the right places. At a certain point Miles Davis began turning his back to the crowd whenever he played a solo. I don’t know what he thought he was doing, but the effect was to absent himself from the tune, as though he were saying, “Don’t look at me. I’m not here. Listen to it.” He gave us a lesson in music appreciation, or the appreciation of any art. With Davis’s back turned, the music became more personal.

A professor of mathematics at Berkeley told me that, while reading a newspaper article about the Unabomber, he suddenly realized the man had been his student. The professor then went to his files, pulled out the Unabomber’s math papers and reviewed them. He said, “B/B+.” Mathematics couldn’t be further from the kinds of self-presentation and self-revelation to which all of us are constantly susceptible, but even in the absolutely neutral language of equations, the Unabomber had declared his identity. From the point of view of a mathematician, B/B+ was the man.

I think we name ourselves, more or less, whenever we write, and thus tend always to write about ourselves. When people ask if you write by hand or use a typewriter or a computer, they are interested to know how personal your writing is. But even now in the age of electronic writing when the revelations of handwriting have become rare, a ghostly electronic residue of persons remains faintly discernible in words and sentence structure. A more familiar example of what I’m getting at are phone calls. Imagine answering the phone and hearing a voice you haven’t heard in years, a voice that says only your name or even only hello, and you say instantly, “Aunt Molly, it’s been so long since you phoned.” There’s a joke that touches on this experience: The phone rings. Molly says, “Hello,” and a man’s voice says, “Molly, I know you and I know what you want. I’m coming over there and I’m going to throw you on the floor and do every dirty thing to you.” Molly says, “You know all this from hello?”

In another kind of personal revelation, you see a picture that you’ve never seen before and you say, “Hokusai,” or “Guercino,” or “Cranach.” With the names you announce that you have recognized a unique presence. The sheer existence of a human being, let alone personal presence in an artist’s style, tends to be an announcement, virtually a name. This is no less true of my uncelebrated aunt Molly than the great and famous Hokusai. Adam was required to name the animals, but how could he have done that unless their names were already implicit in their individual being? Obviously, this beast is Lion, and this can only be Pig. In regard to animals the case is more individual than personal, as far as we know. If an animal could spell its name, it would be spelled the same way every time. Existence moves in the direction of names.

Diction, grammar, imagery, the sound of a person’s voice on the phone, the way an animal looks—if a thing has any sort of sensational existence, a name is being announced, and this is true even if it goes unrecognized. It is God who says, “I am that I am,” and remains nameless, accessible only through the via negativa. As Spinoza puts it, substance is conceived only in and through itself; that is, only in terms of itself. As for us folks, or any other finite individual entity, we are among the modes of substance and, ultimately, “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.” This mournful line is from Wordsworth’s profoundly personal poem about a woman who is never named. What makes the poem so haunting is that, regardless of the woman who is its subject, it is almost entirely, and desperately, about Wordsworth. Inevitably, we are names or nothing. To say Henry IV or John Smith III is to say a name that precedes the being it names. The fourth Henry, the third John Smith.

I once wrote a story in which I quoted a freshman theme that had been submitted to my class. The student wrote: “Karl Marx, for that was his name . . .” It’s as if Marx’s father had said to his wife, “I’ve decided to name our boy Karl,” and his wife said, “No, no, anything but Karl,” and the father said, “I’m afraid I have no choice, for that is his name.”

For reasons I understand very imperfectly, though I suppose they are obvious to anyone else by this point, it has always been more difficult for me to write about myself than any other subject. What I know for sure is that writing about myself always entails writing about other people, and there is a chance someone will be embarrassed or hurt even if my intentions are innocent. According to the Torah, this is an extremely serious sin. After death everyone goes to Gehenna, but only those who have not “embarrassed their neighbor” ever come back.

One of my brightest and most likeable students was named Canterbury. He wanted me to direct his dissertation. I told him that he ought to ask one of my colleagues who is well known as a scholar or critic, and has connections and will help him get a job. No. Canterbury wanted me to be the director. Finally, I agreed. Canterbury wrote a brilliant prospectus, and then became amazingly casual about the prospect of writing any more. Eventually, he left for West Virginia, his home state, where he made a name for himself in politics. Like Miles Davis, he’d turned his back on the audience that was me. Canterbury had to escape individual distinction, to achieve something personal. Before he left for West Virginia, I asked him to find a certain kind of old handmade tool, an adze, and bring it to me when he visited California. About six months later he presented me with the tool used in As I Lay Dying to make a coffin. I was very touched. Nothing remained of our professor-student relationship. We had become purely friends.

When I was writing my novel The Men’s Club, it occurred to me that Canterbury was the right name for one of the characters. The character looked nothing like the real Canterbury, and his personality couldn’t be more different, but my friend, the real Canterbury, was shocked. How could I have done this to him? “So that’s what you think about me,” he said. He went on and on reminding me of what I had done to him. I couldn’t tell if he was serious.

Usually, when writing about myself, I will disguise the people I talk about and never use their real names. Occasionally, when I want to say something innocuous or affectionate, I’ll ask permission to use the real name. One of my writer friends, also a former student, found it mysteriously impossible not to use real names when writing about herself, though it could make no difference to the quality or the sale of her book. She simply couldn’t bring herself to change the names. As a result, people were hurt and family relations were irreparably damaged. There is something horrific about seeing your name in print. For some of us, it’s almost as disturbing as a photograph. Even when writing only about myself, I’m reluctant to use my name in a sentence and I do it only when I have no choice. It gives me the creeps to write “Leonard” or “Lenny,” except in letters.

I think I know why my student couldn’t help using real names despite the consequences for her family relations. In my experience when writing about myself, the moment I begin making up names for the real people in my life, there seems to be a loss of seriousness, and then I can’t get rid of the feeling and everything begins to seem like a lie, even if everything—except for a few names—is true. The impulse toward truth is built into our existence just as the shape of our eyes is built into our genes, and the truth, like murder, wants out. My friend should have changed the names of the real people in her book, but she couldn’t do it. She was possessed by a sort of demonic righteousness. “I’m writing the truth and nothing but. These are the true names.” People often say, when accused of slanderous gossip, “But it’s the truth,” as if that were a justification.

Another reason I have trouble writing about myself, aside from what it entails in regard to other people, has to do with the essential nature of writing. As Freud says, “Writing is the record of an absent person,” which is a condensation of what Socrates said about not writing. He said, if you have something to say, you ought to be present to answer questions from your audience, because truth lies only in the practice of the dialectic and is extremely difficult to seize. When it happens, it is like a sudden flame. In Plato’s seventh letter, he goes on about the frivolousness that is inevitable to writing, and says that any man who tries to write the truth, as it is known to himself, must be insane. There is no better definition of insanity.

Freud’s way of restating Socrates’ point, “the record of an absent person,” is very suggestive. If you are absent when you write, it follows that you must be absent to the second power when you write about yourself. I’m trying to reconcile the idea of presence when writing about oneself with the Socratic-Freudian idea of absence at the heart of writing, itself. First a joke that touches on the dreadful complexity of simultaneous presence and absence:

The king and his court are out hunting elk in the royal forest. A poacher sees them coming and becomes terrified. He leaps from behind a bush and cries, “I am not an elk.” Immediately, the king shoots him. One of the courtiers says, “But, Your Majesty, he said, ‘I am not an elk.’ ” The king slaps his forehead and says, “I thought he said, ‘I am an elk.’ “

When I write anything my presence and absence are in tension. It becomes extreme when writing about myself. What makes things worse for me is that, because of this tension, I feel very much out of fashion, since it is now common for writers to be more than usually present, even outrageously present, in their writing, whether or not they are writing about themselves. Some writers don’t know how to be otherwise than fully present. There has never been such extraordinary directness and candor. The effect is comparable to pornography—not because of explicit sexual content, but rather because such directness and candor tends to be shockingly impersonal.

The way I write about myself or anything else is, I’m afraid, personal or it’s nothing. This means I must always find some appropriate form. One example of being personal and finding an appropriate form can be seen in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in which he thinks about suicide. He says, “That it should come to this.” As opposed to Hamlet, a contemporary in the same situation might say, “Incredible,” or some version of “Incredible,” which is a cry of me-feeling.

The difference between the contemporary speaker and Hamlet isn’t simply in the loss of the subjunctive mood but rather the loss of a significant intervening form between speaker and audience. When Hamlet says, “That it should come to this,” he is noticing the convergence of terrific forces outside himself. One force is justice. The other is necessity. A grammatical form, the subjunctive mood, makes it possible for the reader and Hamlet to convene in the understanding of his personal situation. This convening is the experience of the personal. In order for it to have happened, Hamlet absents himself in the sentence as definitively as Miles Davis turning his back to the audience.

When the contemporary says, “Incredible,” we are forbidden to convene in any understanding and obliged merely to notice a figure of emotion, all of which emotion is locked within his cry, “Incredible.” This kind of expression, where meaning and feeling are at once sensationally apparent and completely unavailable to you, resembles greed. I take this to be emblematic of much contemporary writing and also much else that is contemporary. It’s probably somehow related to the culture of capitalism, in which we are incessantly assaulted by images of things that we can’t have, mainly beautiful faces and bodies, but also a lot of other things—vast fortunes, celebrity, power, love—almost anything you suppose people want.

The haiku, a poem of three lines and seventeen syllables that is usually about nature, offers a form in which writer and reader personally convene. I can’t write haikus, but, when writing about myself, I feel the impulse to write in that terse and essentializing way. This is the intended form of my book Time Out of Mind, a selection of journal entries made over thirty years. In these entries I say more about myself personally than in any other place. I also say less since the entries contain far more implication than explication. For example, I made an entry on December 12, 1993, in Hawaii, that reads:

Birdcalls wake me, a sound like names, like the trees repeating themselves in the dawn mist, each holding its place, awaiting recognition, like names.

The context for this entry is omitted. A reader could figure it out somewhat from things said in other entries, though many autobiographical details that might seem relevant to a biographer or a gossip aren’t given. I don’t say that I woke up beside my girlfriend, who was twenty-seven years younger than me and would soon leave me, which I knew, though I didn’t know she would leave me for a businessman.

My girlfriend and I had gone to Hawaii, the Puna coast of the Big Island. We were staying in one room of a primitive but elegant shack in an artists’ colony. The shack had no windows. You could sense the magnificent luxuriance and vitality outside, the trees, the weather, the light, the ocean. In the other room of the shack, there were three men. One of them coughed all night. He had AIDS and so did several other men at the colony. The wall between our rooms was a thin sheet of wood. Listening to him cough, and knowing my girlfriend would leave me, are elements of the journal entry, and a reader might get a sense of them from other entries, but they aren’t emphasized. I don’t say that her youth didn’t make me feel young, but rather the opposite, and I don’t say that the coughing all night was heartbreaking and that it intensified the heartbreak I’d begun to feel, knowing I was much closer to the end than my girlfriend and knowing she would soon leave me. I don’t say that, in the beginning of our love affair, she said she would never leave me. I don’t say that I didn’t pity myself, but felt an overwhelming melancholy. I say only that the birdcalls and the trees were like names. I watched the trees emerging in the mist, and I listened to the birdcalls. I was struck by the repetition of things and by the pathos there is in the way individual being is always emerging and calling its name as if to distinguish itself amid the mindless proliferation and density of life in general.

I don’t say much of this in the journal. When writing about myself, I find that I am interested in the expressive value of form and its relation to the personal more than I am interested in particular revelations of my individual life.

“Writing About Myself” from THE ESSAYS OF LEONARD MICHAELS by Leonard Michaels. Copyright © 2009 by Katharine Ogden Michaels. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

See Also:

David Bezmozgis on Michaels and “Writing About Myself.”

• “The 10 Greatest Kisses in Literature,” Flavorpill
• “Seamus Heaney’s Writing Room,” The FSG Tumblr
• “Erdogan Vs. Auster: Why is the Turkish Prime Minister Feuding with a Brooklyn-Based Writer?,” TIME’s Global Spin
• “The Believer Interview with Joan Didion,” The Believer
• “The ‘Downton Abbey’ Bookstore Display,” The FSG Tumblr
• “Denis Johnson’s Motivational Notes for Writing,” The FSG Tumblr
• “15 Famous Authors’ Beautiful Estates,” Flavorpill

• “The Guardians” by Sarah Manguso, in The Paris Review
• “My Debt to Ireland” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, in The New York Times Magazine
• “The Autumn of Joan Didion” by Caitlin Flanagan, in The Atlantic