“I’m on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That’s where the writers are most likely to be… I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
Category: interviews
A brief interview with William Gibson. Not a lot of new material, but I love this: “IÄôm a very pro-art kind of guy, but IÄôm not that visually literate. My inner redneck looks at something and says, ‘Oh, thatÄôs so cool.'”
There’s an Amazon interview with Douglas Wolk about his new book, Reading Comics, and another recent interview with Newsarama.
TMN has a great photo gallery up: Still Life by Martin Klimas. They’re wonderful photos of statues in the midst of shattering. The martial arts figurines are particularly enjoyable.
Khoi Vinh posted a brief interview with Stephen Coles, one of the fellows who worked on the massive reference, FontBook.
The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (review: 4.5/5)
The Paris Review has been popular for years for its interviews with writers, focusing more on the authors’ methods and craft, rather than their products. The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I collects 16 of those interviews over the last half-century, a selection of novelists, poets, screenwriters, and even an editor. One of the unique aspects of the Review’s approach is that the interviewers review and refine and reconstruct the text in concert with the writers. There’s plenty of back-and-forth communication along the way from inception to print. I’ve never read a book full of interviews before, so one of the best parts was to be an observer of that proceess. I learned bit more about the difference between good interviewing (e.g. Borges & Christ) and bad interviewing (Hemingway vs. Plimpton). Of course, the more obvious privilege is learning from the writers themselves—reading about the ideas of really smart people who do really, really difficult work.
You’ll find a lot of great moments in this book. To pick just a few…
Robert Stone on the state of American fiction: “You have famous writers, but there’s no center. There are the best-seller writers, who are anonymous, almost industrial figures…” I love that! Nora Roberts is like GM, James Patterson is PepsiCo, Danielle Steele like Kraft; I can imagine them and their counterparts hulking along churning out self-similar merchandise.
Saul Bellow was interesting for his occupational humility:
There is such a thing as overcapitalizing the A in artist. Certain writers and musicians understand this. Stravinsky says the composer should practice his trade exactly as a shoemaker does. Mozart and Haydn accepted commissions–wrote to order. In the nineteenth century, the artist loftily waited for inspiration. Once you elevate yourself to the rank of a cultural institution, you’re in for a lot of trouble.
Kurt Vonnegut mirrors this attitude: “Trade. Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles.”
Jorge Luis Borges is brilliant and his interviewer, Ronald Christ, seemed to be right up there with him. I expect conducting an interview is a lot easier with such a responsive subject, but I love how he was able to ask, prompt, suggest, hint… and just let Borges carry on. The result is the longest and probably the most engaging transcript in the entire book.
On the other hand, George Plimpton’s interview with Ernest Hemingway was simply awful, but in an interesting way. Hemingway comes off as a real jerk. Intelligent, serious, dedicated, but a jerk. For the most part, Plimpton rolls belly-up, yielding ground and changing the subject. It seems like he never really pressed or pursued or challenged. Then again, I wonder how literally accurate the transcription is, after the back-and-forth editing between writer and interview. There has to be some background story there.
I find a certain perfectionist kinship with editor Robert Gottlieb. His perspective:
What is it that impels this act of editing? I know that in my case it’s not merely about words. Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good—whether it’s what you’re wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what’s going on on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop. I don’t want to interfere with it or control it, exactly—I want it to work, I want it to be happy, I want it to come out right.
There’s some other good folks in there: T.S. Eliot, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Billy Wilder, among others. This book probably has the highest educational-value to difficulty-of-reading ratio that I’ve come across in the past couple years. I would have blown through it in a couple of hours if I didn’t have to stop so often to bookmark a worthy exchange or ponder a claim. I hope the rest of the series holds up as well as this volume.
New York Magazine has a good profile of economist Tyler Cowen and his new book, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.
Lately there have been a couple good interviews with William Gibson in anticipation of his book, Spook Country. From his talk with the College Crier:
One of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a lot of old science fiction. 19th century science fiction obviously expresses all of the concerns and the neuroses of the 19th century and science fiction from the 1940’s is the 1940’s. George Orwell’s 1984 is really 1948, the year in which he wrote it. It can’t be about the future. It’s about where the person who wrote it thought their present was, because you can’t envision a future without having some sort of conviction, whether you express it or not in the text, about where your present is.
And recently on Amazon:
The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There’s some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you’ve never seen before. You’re still really inside some annotated version of your own head.
Janice Harayda pulled a very interesting quote from poet Philip Larkin—he isn’t a big fan of poetry readings. The quote comes from an old interview in the Paris Review. I just finished the anthology Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, by the way. Very, very good reading. [via bookslut]
Kind of a brain-stretching discussion about PhDs in Design and design research & scholarship. Lots of good feedback in the comments.
An interview with Chris Ware. “I think storytelling is one of comics’ aesthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist’s problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of “writing,” the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience.”
An interview with Joanna Newsom. On her time studying composition at Mills College:
My music generally retains an interest in melody and harmony and some sort of meter– it might be a polymeter, but some sort of meter that repeats for more than one bar. But a lot of these ideas that I was interested in seemed to be considered pass?©, like they were unworthy of discussion and unworthy of listening. I wouldn’t necessarily say that would be true of the professors at that school, but the climate was dictated by what the students were interested in, and most of them were writing incredibly dissonant music on their laptop computers and didn’t play instruments [or] know how to write notation.
Sad and hilarious.
A long, excellent interview with Steven Johnson. A smart, knowledgeable interviewer can make such a huge difference.
There’s a cool New Yorker article about Parkour, the cool urban running/ jumping/ climbing/ leaping thing. By no means am I as bold as the pros, but man it’s fun. [via kottke]
An interview with Scott McCloud.
One of the eternal tensions of comics might be this dual aspiration that we have, on the one hand, to ensure that words and pictures are integrated. That they feel as if they were drawn by the same hand, feel as if they belong togetherÄîthat theyÄôre flip sides to the same coin. And, on the other hand, to take advantage of the unique potential of words, and the unique potential of pictures, which often sends them in opposite directions.
In the course of the interview, he also mentions Dylan Horrock’s critical essay “Inventing Comics,” which is worth a read.
An interview with Jonathan Lethem. He talks about copyright and some of the ideas in his Harper’s article a couple months ago.
A brief interview with Alex Ross. He’s got a new book on the way this fall, which I predict that I will enjoy immensely.
What I want to do is to provide an intelligent introduction to this fabulous, labyrinthine world: not just the music itself, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky onward, but the entire cultural and social tumult around it: the Rite of Spring riot, the interaction of composers and jazz people in the twenties, the entanglement of composers in totalitarian regimes, the weird intersections of post-WWII avant-garde composers and Cold War politics, the origins of minimalism in the alternative philosophies of the West Coast. ItÄôs not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century told through music.
LifeClever compiled 17 interviews with David Allen.
There’s a fairly good profile of Edward Tufte in the current Stanford Magazine.
Mark Larson 