X
Scrolling down the index of posts, I see that it has been more than a month since I last posted a pithy quote from one of The Paris Review Interviews. As fate would have it, my benefactor in the acquisition of this set of amazing volumes (and lifelong friend) Jim, called me yesterday morning just to pose a general wtf? Happily, I was able to report to him, during the course of our brief conversation, that I was three-quarters of the way through the interview with Kurt Vonnegut and would have a quote up on Rodak Riffs in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I elaborated on that proud pronouncement by declaring that the quote had already been chosen. It would, I declared, be only slightly more wordy than “Jesus wept,” consisting of a single sentence.
But, predictably, the final quarter of the interview has since laid a quote on me that I just cannot leave lying there in good conscience. I will therefore use them both. Rules are made to be broken. Here is the first:
My relatives say that they are glad I’m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.
To the extent that I can call myself a writer, I’ve certainly been there (except, of course, that I’m not rich.)
The final quote was generated within the context of Vonnegut discussing himself as a humorist. His novels, he said, were constructed by stringing together series of jokes. The interviewer asks Vonnegut if it’s true that he prefers Laurel and Hardy to Charlie Chaplin. In response, Vonnegut provides my second chosen pithy quote:
I’m crazy about Chaplin, but there’s too much distance between him and his audience. He is too obviously a genius. In this own way, he’s as brilliant as Picasso, and this is intimidating to me.
That is a new idea to me, and strikes me as precisely spot-on.
_______________________
Consider also this timely UPDATE
X
Showing posts with label Paris Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paris Review. Show all posts
Friday, November 19, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Readings: The Paris Review Interviews #5
X
The interview that I chose to read next was that of Brit novelist, Graham Greene. I have enjoyed several of his novels immensely; most notably The Power and the Glory, Brighton Beach, and The Heart of the Matter. The interview, unfortunately, proved to be a disappointment. Perhaps Greene simply dislikes being questioned. Perhaps he was in a shitty mood. Or perhaps the great man is simply a bore. In any event, his responses to the interviewers' questions did not provide me with that one pithy quote for which I was looking, in order to stay true to the ground rules I established to guide this enterprise.
The best Graham Greene quotes to be had in this interview were some of the ones embedded in the questions put to Greene by the interviewers in the expectation, I'm sure, that they would evoke something comparably memorable to submit to The Paris Review.
Well, the best laid plans of mice and men...right? An example of these would be: "You made Scobie say in The Heart of the Matter: 'Point me out the happy man and I will show you either egotism, selfishness, evil or else an absolute ignorance.'" Now, that one could have been the centerpiece of this post. But, alas...
In the same question, the interviewer quotes from The Power and the Glory: "The world is all much of a piece: it is engaged everwhere in the same subterranean struggle...there is no peace anywhere there is life; but there are quiet and active sectors of the line." Yeah. That's why I love the novels.
The one "live" quote in this interview which I found mildly amusing was Greene's response to the question "Do you see much of your fellow authors?" Greene replies:
Not much, they are not one's material. A few of them are very dear friends of mine, but for a writer to spend much of his time in the company of authors is, you know, a form of masturbation.
That's about as good as it gets. Granted, the question wasn't very interesting in the first place...
Probably the quote that best describes the way the whole interview went (and perhaps best characterizes the man as well) is the one with which the piece ends:
[The telephone rang. Mr. Greene smiled in a faint deprecatory way as if to signify he'd said all he wished to say, picked up the instrument, and spoke into it.]
Hello? Hello Peter! How is Andrea? Oh, it's the other Peter. How is Maria? No, I can't do it this evening. I've got Mario Soldati on my hands--we're doing a film in Italy this summer. I'm coproducing. How about Sunday? Battersea? Oh, they're not open? Well, then, we'll go to my pleasant little Negro night club round the corner...
One can see why the piece abruptly cuts off right there.
X
The interview that I chose to read next was that of Brit novelist, Graham Greene. I have enjoyed several of his novels immensely; most notably The Power and the Glory, Brighton Beach, and The Heart of the Matter. The interview, unfortunately, proved to be a disappointment. Perhaps Greene simply dislikes being questioned. Perhaps he was in a shitty mood. Or perhaps the great man is simply a bore. In any event, his responses to the interviewers' questions did not provide me with that one pithy quote for which I was looking, in order to stay true to the ground rules I established to guide this enterprise.
The best Graham Greene quotes to be had in this interview were some of the ones embedded in the questions put to Greene by the interviewers in the expectation, I'm sure, that they would evoke something comparably memorable to submit to The Paris Review.
Well, the best laid plans of mice and men...right? An example of these would be: "You made Scobie say in The Heart of the Matter: 'Point me out the happy man and I will show you either egotism, selfishness, evil or else an absolute ignorance.'" Now, that one could have been the centerpiece of this post. But, alas...
In the same question, the interviewer quotes from The Power and the Glory: "The world is all much of a piece: it is engaged everwhere in the same subterranean struggle...there is no peace anywhere there is life; but there are quiet and active sectors of the line." Yeah. That's why I love the novels.
The one "live" quote in this interview which I found mildly amusing was Greene's response to the question "Do you see much of your fellow authors?" Greene replies:
Not much, they are not one's material. A few of them are very dear friends of mine, but for a writer to spend much of his time in the company of authors is, you know, a form of masturbation.
That's about as good as it gets. Granted, the question wasn't very interesting in the first place...
Probably the quote that best describes the way the whole interview went (and perhaps best characterizes the man as well) is the one with which the piece ends:
[The telephone rang. Mr. Greene smiled in a faint deprecatory way as if to signify he'd said all he wished to say, picked up the instrument, and spoke into it.]
Hello? Hello Peter! How is Andrea? Oh, it's the other Peter. How is Maria? No, I can't do it this evening. I've got Mario Soldati on my hands--we're doing a film in Italy this summer. I'm coproducing. How about Sunday? Battersea? Oh, they're not open? Well, then, we'll go to my pleasant little Negro night club round the corner...
One can see why the piece abruptly cuts off right there.
X
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Readings: The Paris Review Interviews #4
X
I chose next to read the Paris Review interview with the eminent scholar and literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom is almost bigger than life and trying to sum him up in a short introduction to a brief excerpt would be a mug’s game. Bloom is a contrarian, a hyperbolist, a dogmatist, an effective iconoclast, and probably a genius. He is not in any way predictable, which makes his many, many books highly interesting reads.
As a literary critic, his most important text is probably The Anxiety of Influence. The general reader would also profit immensely by reading The Western Canon, as well as Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (the title alone of this one should adequately explain why I called Bloom a “hyperbolist” above.)
Bloom also writes extensively on Freud, and on various aspects of religion. In this realm, his most controversial text is The Book of J, in which he maintains that the author “J” who wrote the texts which have formed the very heart of the Hebrew scriptures, was probably a woman. Another interesting read is The American Religion, in which Bloom proclaims that American religious life, and therefore the American socio-political agenda, is not founded upon a true Christianity, but rather a newly-evolved, particularly American, species of Gnosticism.
The Harold Bloom interview is very long, and incredibly dense. By the time I was half-way through it, I had already selected three excerpts as possible candidates for use here. I could have picked at least another three in the second half. I finally settled on the one that follows, because I feel that it gives an overall impression of what Bloom is all about. A young reader with any intellectual curiosity and dexterity encountering this excerpt should be launched by it into a lifetime of deep, fruitful reading. In the course of the interview, Bloom quotes his idol, Emerson, as having said “That which I can receive from another is never tuition but only provocation.” That pretty much sums up Harold Bloom for me.
Interviewer:
You teach Freud and Shakespeare.
Bloom:
Oh, yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that I’m not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. There’s a lot of resentment on Freud’s part because I think he recognizes this. What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Freud himself says “the poets were there before me,” and the poet in particular is necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that. Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare. It doesn’t happen in the Bible. It doesn’t happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesn’t even happen in Euripides. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s true precursor—where he took the hint from—is Chaucer, which is why I think the Wife of Bath gets into Falstaff, and the Pardoner gets into figures like Edmund and Iago. As to where Chaucer gets that from, that’s a very pretty question. It is a standing challenge I have put to my students. That’s part of Chaucer’s shocking originality as a writer. But Chaucer does it only in fits and starts, and in small degree. Shakespeare does it all the time. It’s his common stock. The ability to do that and to persuade one that this is a natural mode of representation is purely Shakespearean and we are now so contained by it that we can’t see its originality anymore.
I will end by disclosing that I learned from researching this post that Harold Bloom grew up in the Bronx, where he lived on the Grand Concourse and where he exercised his love books at the Bronx Library. This is the same library to which I walked—up Bainbridge Avenue to E. Kingsbridge Road—on many an occasion during my decade-plus sojourn in that borough. Had I only known!
X
X
I chose next to read the Paris Review interview with the eminent scholar and literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom is almost bigger than life and trying to sum him up in a short introduction to a brief excerpt would be a mug’s game. Bloom is a contrarian, a hyperbolist, a dogmatist, an effective iconoclast, and probably a genius. He is not in any way predictable, which makes his many, many books highly interesting reads.
As a literary critic, his most important text is probably The Anxiety of Influence. The general reader would also profit immensely by reading The Western Canon, as well as Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (the title alone of this one should adequately explain why I called Bloom a “hyperbolist” above.)
Bloom also writes extensively on Freud, and on various aspects of religion. In this realm, his most controversial text is The Book of J, in which he maintains that the author “J” who wrote the texts which have formed the very heart of the Hebrew scriptures, was probably a woman. Another interesting read is The American Religion, in which Bloom proclaims that American religious life, and therefore the American socio-political agenda, is not founded upon a true Christianity, but rather a newly-evolved, particularly American, species of Gnosticism.
The Harold Bloom interview is very long, and incredibly dense. By the time I was half-way through it, I had already selected three excerpts as possible candidates for use here. I could have picked at least another three in the second half. I finally settled on the one that follows, because I feel that it gives an overall impression of what Bloom is all about. A young reader with any intellectual curiosity and dexterity encountering this excerpt should be launched by it into a lifetime of deep, fruitful reading. In the course of the interview, Bloom quotes his idol, Emerson, as having said “That which I can receive from another is never tuition but only provocation.” That pretty much sums up Harold Bloom for me.
Interviewer:
You teach Freud and Shakespeare.
Bloom:
Oh, yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that I’m not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. There’s a lot of resentment on Freud’s part because I think he recognizes this. What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Freud himself says “the poets were there before me,” and the poet in particular is necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that. Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare. It doesn’t happen in the Bible. It doesn’t happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesn’t even happen in Euripides. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s true precursor—where he took the hint from—is Chaucer, which is why I think the Wife of Bath gets into Falstaff, and the Pardoner gets into figures like Edmund and Iago. As to where Chaucer gets that from, that’s a very pretty question. It is a standing challenge I have put to my students. That’s part of Chaucer’s shocking originality as a writer. But Chaucer does it only in fits and starts, and in small degree. Shakespeare does it all the time. It’s his common stock. The ability to do that and to persuade one that this is a natural mode of representation is purely Shakespearean and we are now so contained by it that we can’t see its originality anymore.
I will end by disclosing that I learned from researching this post that Harold Bloom grew up in the Bronx, where he lived on the Grand Concourse and where he exercised his love books at the Bronx Library. This is the same library to which I walked—up Bainbridge Avenue to E. Kingsbridge Road—on many an occasion during my decade-plus sojourn in that borough. Had I only known!
X
X
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Readings: The Paris Review Interviews #3
X
The Paris Review interview that I chose to read next was that of John Gardner, writer, medieval scholar, and teacher. Gardner was among the very first contemporary novelists whose works I collected and read in depth, beginning with the masterpiece, Grendel, his retelling of the Beowulf saga.
The Gardner interview in The Paris Review is actually a composite, featuring questions posed to him by three different interviewers over the last decade of his life. It was very difficult to select one excerpt to share here. Gardner’s responses to his interviewers are detailed, thoughtful, profound, and “pithy” on every topic proposed to him. But I have established my ground rules for this feature and I must stick to them. Ergo, just one excerpt from the 27-page interview have I chosen, and just one excerpt shall I use.
I will, however, first present an excerpt from another source that I believe you will see only here. As you may know, John Gardner died tragically young, in a motorcycle accident, on September 14, 1982. I was recently privy at work to a letter written upon the occasion of Gardner’s death by his friend, the poet Dave Smith, to Smith’s former teacher and mentor, poet and novelist, Hollis Summers. The letter was written in the immediate aftermath of Smith’s having been notified of Gardner’s demise. Smith writes:
Gardner said something to me once that I care about
and l’ll stop rambling and say it. He said that the main character in
everything we write or ever would write was Death. Our task as writers
was to confront that and live with it well.
John Gardner’s œuvre is the embodiment of the “moral fiction” of which he was a strenuous and consistent advocate. On the basis of this, he has been considered a “conservative” in certain circles. In his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, Gardner accuses us all of potential bad faith in our personal confrontation with death; his aim to force us to fully examine this existential stumbling block. His message to other writers is that to possess real meaning, and ultimate value, their work must show the reader how it is possible for the individual to live according to knowable, objective, moral standards.
With these things in mind, please read the excerpt I have chosen from The Paris Review:
As I tried to make plain in On Moral Fiction, I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life in the twentieth century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss. If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skulls, you’ve got two main choices as an artist: You can either stare into the volcano and count the skulls for the thousandth time and tell everybody, There are the skulls; that’s your baby, Mrs. Miller. Or you can try to build walls so that fewer baby skulls go in.
I believe that it is precisely those “fashionable” skull-counting whiners to whom the great poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, was referring in his song, The Future:
“…and all the lousy little poets coming round / tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson…”
You may not agree with John Gardner’s philosophy. It is, undeniably, the expression of a conservative perspective on art. But whether you confront it as an artist, or as a consumer of art, you fail to give it serious consideration only at great personal risk as a moral agent.
X
The Paris Review interview that I chose to read next was that of John Gardner, writer, medieval scholar, and teacher. Gardner was among the very first contemporary novelists whose works I collected and read in depth, beginning with the masterpiece, Grendel, his retelling of the Beowulf saga.
The Gardner interview in The Paris Review is actually a composite, featuring questions posed to him by three different interviewers over the last decade of his life. It was very difficult to select one excerpt to share here. Gardner’s responses to his interviewers are detailed, thoughtful, profound, and “pithy” on every topic proposed to him. But I have established my ground rules for this feature and I must stick to them. Ergo, just one excerpt from the 27-page interview have I chosen, and just one excerpt shall I use.
I will, however, first present an excerpt from another source that I believe you will see only here. As you may know, John Gardner died tragically young, in a motorcycle accident, on September 14, 1982. I was recently privy at work to a letter written upon the occasion of Gardner’s death by his friend, the poet Dave Smith, to Smith’s former teacher and mentor, poet and novelist, Hollis Summers. The letter was written in the immediate aftermath of Smith’s having been notified of Gardner’s demise. Smith writes:
Gardner said something to me once that I care about
and l’ll stop rambling and say it. He said that the main character in
everything we write or ever would write was Death. Our task as writers
was to confront that and live with it well.
John Gardner’s œuvre is the embodiment of the “moral fiction” of which he was a strenuous and consistent advocate. On the basis of this, he has been considered a “conservative” in certain circles. In his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, Gardner accuses us all of potential bad faith in our personal confrontation with death; his aim to force us to fully examine this existential stumbling block. His message to other writers is that to possess real meaning, and ultimate value, their work must show the reader how it is possible for the individual to live according to knowable, objective, moral standards.
With these things in mind, please read the excerpt I have chosen from The Paris Review:
As I tried to make plain in On Moral Fiction, I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life in the twentieth century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss. If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skulls, you’ve got two main choices as an artist: You can either stare into the volcano and count the skulls for the thousandth time and tell everybody, There are the skulls; that’s your baby, Mrs. Miller. Or you can try to build walls so that fewer baby skulls go in.
I believe that it is precisely those “fashionable” skull-counting whiners to whom the great poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, was referring in his song, The Future:
“…and all the lousy little poets coming round / tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson…”
You may not agree with John Gardner’s philosophy. It is, undeniably, the expression of a conservative perspective on art. But whether you confront it as an artist, or as a consumer of art, you fail to give it serious consideration only at great personal risk as a moral agent.
X
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Readings: The Paris Review Interviews #2
X
I chose, for some reason, to next read the interview with Evelyn Waugh. I suppose the fact that Waugh is so often cited by Catholics on blogs as being among their favorite "Catholic" novelists, was the impetus. The Waugh interview is extremely short. It is, in fact, so short that the interviewer, a person improbably named "Julian Jebb," is rather apologetic about it in his introduction.
Unfortunately, Waugh does not get into his Catholicism very much. Nor does he get very deeply into much of anything else. This being the case, I've decided upon the following quote, which is a response to the question, "Do you think it just to describe you as a reactionary?":
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.
Of Americans Waugh had earlier opined, "I don't think what they have to say is of much interest, do you?" Just a bit after the central quote above, when asked why his novels contain so very few working class characters, Waugh replied, "I don't know them, and I'm not interested in them." Evelyn Waugh: Catholic to the bone.
X
I chose, for some reason, to next read the interview with Evelyn Waugh. I suppose the fact that Waugh is so often cited by Catholics on blogs as being among their favorite "Catholic" novelists, was the impetus. The Waugh interview is extremely short. It is, in fact, so short that the interviewer, a person improbably named "Julian Jebb," is rather apologetic about it in his introduction.
Unfortunately, Waugh does not get into his Catholicism very much. Nor does he get very deeply into much of anything else. This being the case, I've decided upon the following quote, which is a response to the question, "Do you think it just to describe you as a reactionary?":
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.
Of Americans Waugh had earlier opined, "I don't think what they have to say is of much interest, do you?" Just a bit after the central quote above, when asked why his novels contain so very few working class characters, Waugh replied, "I don't know them, and I'm not interested in them." Evelyn Waugh: Catholic to the bone.
X
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Readings: The Paris Review Interviews
X
The other day, Big Brown delivered a package to me containing a priceless gift from my good friend, Jim, in Arizona. There was no occasion; that’s just the kind of guy Jim is. The gift was a boxed set of the four-volume The Paris Review Interviews. It includes interviews with 99.9% of the twentieth century literati with whom I wish I’d had a chance to have a beer and a conversation.
Given the magnificence of this gift, I was inspired to launch a new feature here at Rodak Riffs: Readings: the Paris Review Interviews. The premise is this: as I read these interviews over time, I will make an attempt to isolate and share here a quotation from each one. These quotations will not necessarily be ones most likely to show up on a googled list of author so-and-so’s quotes. It will, rather, be something they said which struck a responsive chord in me—a belief, attitude, predisposition, taste, opinion, or (perhaps) defect, that I find myself sharing with that writer.
This idea did not come to me until I was half-way through the reading of the interview with a less-than-cooperative, drunk, and surly Jack Kerouac. I had begun with Marilynne Robinson’s interview, followed by that of Haruki Murakami, and then Kerouac. So this first installment will contain three quotes, as follow:
Marilynne Robinson, speaking about her propensity for a “puritanical hedonism”:
…I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence than I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. …I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.
Haruki Murakami speaking of what his works tell his readers about “how strange the world is”:
xxxI don’t want to persuade the reader that it’s a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I’m telling those readers that it’s just a story—it’s fake. But when you experience the fake as real it can be real. It’s not easy to explain.
xxxIn the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I write about.
Jack Kerouac speaking of his role (and technique) as a writer:
I really hate to write. I get no fun out of it because I can’t get up and say I’m working, close my door, have coffee brought to me, and sit there camping like a “man of letters” doing his eight hour day of work and thereby incidentally filling the printing world with a lot of dreary self-imposed cant and bombast, bombast being Scottish for pillow stuffing. Haven’t you heard a politician use fifteen hundred words to say something he could have said in exactly three words? So I get out of the way so as not to bore myself either.
I am a closet solitary, living in an unreal world, wishing that it would make more of an effort to cater to my jones for java and recognition of my genius. Nailed again. What can I say?
X
The other day, Big Brown delivered a package to me containing a priceless gift from my good friend, Jim, in Arizona. There was no occasion; that’s just the kind of guy Jim is. The gift was a boxed set of the four-volume The Paris Review Interviews. It includes interviews with 99.9% of the twentieth century literati with whom I wish I’d had a chance to have a beer and a conversation.
Given the magnificence of this gift, I was inspired to launch a new feature here at Rodak Riffs: Readings: the Paris Review Interviews. The premise is this: as I read these interviews over time, I will make an attempt to isolate and share here a quotation from each one. These quotations will not necessarily be ones most likely to show up on a googled list of author so-and-so’s quotes. It will, rather, be something they said which struck a responsive chord in me—a belief, attitude, predisposition, taste, opinion, or (perhaps) defect, that I find myself sharing with that writer.
This idea did not come to me until I was half-way through the reading of the interview with a less-than-cooperative, drunk, and surly Jack Kerouac. I had begun with Marilynne Robinson’s interview, followed by that of Haruki Murakami, and then Kerouac. So this first installment will contain three quotes, as follow:
Marilynne Robinson, speaking about her propensity for a “puritanical hedonism”:
…I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence than I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. …I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.
Haruki Murakami speaking of what his works tell his readers about “how strange the world is”:
xxxI don’t want to persuade the reader that it’s a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I’m telling those readers that it’s just a story—it’s fake. But when you experience the fake as real it can be real. It’s not easy to explain.
xxxIn the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I write about.
Jack Kerouac speaking of his role (and technique) as a writer:
I really hate to write. I get no fun out of it because I can’t get up and say I’m working, close my door, have coffee brought to me, and sit there camping like a “man of letters” doing his eight hour day of work and thereby incidentally filling the printing world with a lot of dreary self-imposed cant and bombast, bombast being Scottish for pillow stuffing. Haven’t you heard a politician use fifteen hundred words to say something he could have said in exactly three words? So I get out of the way so as not to bore myself either.
I am a closet solitary, living in an unreal world, wishing that it would make more of an effort to cater to my jones for java and recognition of my genius. Nailed again. What can I say?
X
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
