Seriously, Though… Some Thoughts on Writers Who Take Themselves Seriously
In an interview with The Paris Review, the whole of which is worth reading, James Salter discussed his writing process and how he thinks through his writing at the language level. He said:
I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing. You want short sentences and long sentences—well, every writer knows that. You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make your writing agreeable to read.
Throughout the interview he speaks at length about his process and his influences and how he deliberately approaches his craft. He gives the impression of a writer who takes his craft and himself as a writer seriously. There is a confidence in his words, and he does not shirk away from being open about putting in the work of writing. Certainly, some of this confidence and self-awareness comes from a long career and the wisdom that comes with being older. He has had plenty of time to be able to articulate his aesthetic and his process. I would also think, though, that given his body of work, and the way he approached the interview, he is a writer who has always taken himself seriously.
David Fishkind—
Clear your calendars because the video goes live at 11 PM EST and will only be available for 24 hours.
**UPDATE** The EXTREMELY NSFW video is no longer available for viewing on Vimeo.
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The GZA on Writing
“One time a producer asked me, ‘what kinda beats do you like?”‘ That’s like asking me how does energy look? I can’t tell you that.”
“It should be clever. It should be fly. It should be hard. I think it should be gangsta. I can do songs that have only one profane word and it will sound just as hard as having a bunch of very profane words, because I can deliver it like that. And a lot of artists don’t realize this because they don’t control it—the environment controls them.”
“She asked me, ‘what’s your song about?’ I said, ‘it’s hip hop’ – I’m not being funny, I’m being blunt. She was like, ‘I know it’s hip hop, but what are you talkin’ about?” I’m speakin’ about so many different things… The majority of my shit is just a whole bunch of shit, but still a clear picture. You can come off deep without trying to be deep.”
“Y’know, it’s like imagine scratchin’ a lottery ticket, y’know? Sometimes you really got to go beneath to see what’s under there, if you won, y’know? It’s like listening to the album over and over. Go beneath it, listen. Listen.”
“You might not catch it for like two years or three years. You might not catch it. I’m not sayin’ that it’s deep, that what I write is so, so deep where it requires research. It doesn’t. It requires thinking.”
“It doesn’t make a difference whether you live it or you don’t. I can write about stuff I don’t live, the person who wrote Harry Potter you think they lived all that shit?! I don’t have to physically own a Rolls Royce to talk about being in one. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with talking about cars or clothes, but shit, make it interesting.”
“With the clock you can be winning on the board, but losin’ in time. It can really throw your game off. It’s like the best thing to do is not to even pay attention to the clock, like it’s not even there. If your time runs out, it runs out.”
“The majority of people are not gonna catch the lyrics at all. But I do it for myself.. Whether you catch it or you don’t, I don’t wanna make it simple. It may sound simple but…It’s like I say ‘On a man made lake there’s a sheet of ice/unskilled skaters couldn’t figure eight twice.’ I’m talkin’ about ice you can skate on. I could be talkin’ about jewelry, y’know? Then I say ‘they couldn’t figure eight twice.’ That’s sixteen, ‘cuz 8 and 8 is 16. Then I say ‘Uncut direct from the Colt.’ Now I’m talkin’ about a gun, but I don’t have to say gun. ‘Head on assault/the result was death by the bulk.’ It’s like you can see it so many different ways. That’s how it is.”
“Wu is the sound when a sword swings. Tang is what you hear when it hits an object or another sword. The tongue is a sword, when in motion it produces wind, just like when I speak. Everything is connected.”
“I don’t really know too much about astrology, but I can relate to the universe and the stars, because that’s me, that’s us, y’know.”
So Bad It’s Good: An Interview with Wolf Larsen
My wife says that I “just have a bizarre fascination with him.”
“Him” being “Wolf Larsen,” and she’s right. Like my wife, my literary-minded colleagues—and, I’m guessing, most people—have been content to indulge my fascination for a moment then brush it off, saying, “That’s great, Jamie. Yes, it’s hilarious. The guy’s crazy.”
That’s what happened when I became aware of his existence through a submission to a literary magazine (we were all together for a meeting, sitting around a large table). I kept going back to that submission, laughing intermittently for over an hour as I marveled at this literary accident. How can you not find hilarity in books with titles like Pricks, Cunts, and Motherfuckers, or Ten Thousand Penises in Your Ear? Then there’s God and the Devil Dancing through World War III Together, with my favorite cover copy for a book ever: “The characters in this book include Caligula, Marie Antoinette, Wolf Larsen, yuppie cannibals, crack whores, Adolf Hitler, the Virgin Mary, the entire human race, etc.”
What I can’t figure out is if Wolf Larsen (obviously a pseudonym, taken from the Jack London character) just totally sucks, and that’s why I sometimes find myself going back to his homepage (like rubbernecking), because he knows it and he owns it, or if he’s oblivious, or if he doesn’t care and it doesn’t matter. I’m leaning toward a combination of all these, and tossing in a little plain old crazy to top it off. Still, there’s a paradoxical value to Wolf Larsen’s existence; or maybe that’s just my obsession.
Before this interview I tried contacting Wolf Larsen for over a year. I had forgotten about him till one night with a friend I remembered him and his website and said, “You’ve got to check this fucker out; it’s hilarious.” That friend suggested this interview, so I sent emails that garnered no response. I found some online venues and poetry forums where he’d published or posted and tried getting in contact through those editors’ and other’s emails or avatars: nothing. Then the other day I googled “Wolf Larsen,” and came across a blog (mentioned below). Wolf Larsen had surfaced. A blog comment later, we started up this dialogue.
Big Ray by Michael Kimball
Congratulations to Michael Kimball, author of Us, Dear Everybody and The Way The Family Got Away, because this: “I’m having a pretty great year so far and I feel really grateful for it. I don’t even know how to explain how grateful I feel. I’m so happy to announce that I just sold the world rights to a new novel, BIG RAY. It’s the story of a son coming to terms with the sudden death of his obese father. It’s told through 500 brief entries, moving back and forth between past and present, the father’s death and his life, between an abusive childhood and adult understanding. BIG RAY went to Kathy Belden at Bloomsbury USA, which will publish in Fall 2012, and Michael Fishwick at Bloomsbury UK, which will publish in Winter 2013.”
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Vi Khi Nao}
Vi Khi Nao lives in Iowa City. Fugue State Press recently released her novella, The Vanishing Point of Desire. She appears in the 2011 edition of NOON.
POP: A Polemic on a Contemporary Language-Based “Objectivity”
I do not like metaphor. My personal education pertaining to literature takes a very French bent, and it is here that Robbe-Grillet himself, king of the nouveau roman one could say, has denounced metaphor, preferring, I suppose, some sort of metonymy, but–if anything–participating in the creation of a style of fiction in which the surface is more important than a subtext.
I think that this adherence to the surface, at least in terms of language, is good, positive, because it removes an additional level of signification, which brings us, as a reader, closer to the experience the language itself is hiding, carrying, revealing. Though often, in the creation of atmosphere, metaphor can be adequately used to help evoke a mood, I feel like there are often more interesting ways to do this (and I suppose that here, by “interesting,” I mean “heterogeneous, diverse, wildly more creative”).
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Printers
McNaughton & Gunn
Even though my experience is very basic, people often ask me to recommend printers. Here is a list of printers I have used, and some thoughts. READ MORE >