Nancy

I’ve been involved in music all my adult life. I didn’t plan it that way, and it wasn’t even a serious ambition at first, but that’s the way it turned out. A very happy accident, if you ask me. It’s a little strange, though, to realize that a large part of my identity is tied to something that is completely ephemeral. You can’t touch music—it exists only at the moment it is being apprehended—and yet it can profoundly alter how we view the world and our place in it. Music can get us through difficult patches in our lives by changing not only how we feel about ourselves, but also how we feel about everything outside ourselves. It’s powerful stuff. 

-from How Music Works, by David Byrne

I interviewed Adam Ross for The Rumpus. I’m a big fan of his writing, and he had some really fascinating things to say. Here’s a piece of it:

Rumpus: Were there any particular writers or books that inspired you along the way? Who inspires you now?

Ross: Sure, I mean, like I said, I was bedazzled by everyone from Frank Herbert to Frank Miller. I loved Hemingway as a teen, was all puddled at the end of The Old Man and the Sea. Raymond Carver had taken over the world when I was at Vassar and for a while he took over mine. My Shakespeare class my sophomore year shook me to the core. I remember being rocked by the end of Richard II: “I’ve wasted time and now doth time waste me.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Heidegger’s Poetry Language Thought and Basic Writings. The hits just keep on coming. And who can forget…? After graduating, when I moved back to New York, I remember reading all of Walker Percy, each of his novels, twice. (His books on semiotics are great, by the way.) There was a long bout with Joseph Conrad. I began a ten-year streak of re-reading Homer’s Odyssey annually. And then I found Bellow and Roth and all the Jewish modernists, and then Calvino and Barthelme. And DeLillo—every newly published novel of his was an event. I remember exactly where I was when I read Pafko at the Wall.

Everything I read inspired me and that hasn’t changed. What’s floored me recently? James Salter’s Light Years, Burning the Days, and A Sport and a Pastime. He is a giant. I just read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It’s tremendous. Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was wonderful.

I can’t imagine turning into one of those codgers who no longer reads fiction. I’m regularly stirred by it and suffer no anxiety of influence. Influence me! That was my credo then, as I was developing and learning, and remains so now, as I’m developing and learning.

ANYWAY IT’S SNOWING. But then there is the absolute bullshit of it! The amazing gall of some people! Who does he even think he is? Odile Neff, art-school dropout, age twenty-three, rides her green bicycle along the snowy streets of the city that evening at five p.m., arguing with herself. She is wearing one gray sock and one black sock and her faint-pink underwear, hidden beneath her long gray skirt, is dirty. It is January 1999, one year before the world as everyone knows it is about to end. Communism, like God, is already dead.

-from Office Girl, by Joe Meno

I used to work in a neuroscience lab. We were trying to figure out how the mind remembers, how a collection of cells can encapsulate our past. I was just a lab technician, and most of my day was spent performing the strange verbs of bench science: amplifying, vortexing, pipetting, sequencing, digesting, and so on. It was simple manual labor, but the work felt profound. Mysteries were distilled into minor questions, and if my experiments didn’t fail, I ended up with an answer. The truth seemed to slowly accumulate, like dust.

At the same time, I began reading Proust. I would often bring my copy of Swann’s Way into the lab and read a few pages while waiting for an experiment to finish. All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences. For me, his story about one man’s memory was simply that: a story. It was a work of fiction, the opposite of scientific fact.

But once I got past the jarring contrast of forms—my science spoke in acronyms, while Proust preferred meandering prose—I began to see a surprising convergence. The novelist had predicted my experiments. Proust and neuroscience shared a vision of how our memory works. If you listened closely, they were actually saying the same thing.

-from Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer

I interviewed Colson Whitehead last week:

Rumpus: You write a lot about technology in both novels and essays. How do you think technology will affect literature?

Whitehead: I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it’s sort of crappy now. It’s always just you and the page. That doesn’t change. In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there’s still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn’t change. It’s just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn’t affect what I write.

Read the whole interview here.

I reviewed Radio Silence at The Rumpus this month. Absolutely loved this magazine! Check out the review: here. And while you’re at it, take a stroll around the new website! I’ve spent the past few months working on the redesign and it’s looking pretty swanky. We’re still tweaking a few things, but it’s pretty close!

I love listening to the Lovin’ Spoonful. Their music is sort of laid-back and never pretentious. Listening to this soothing music brings back a lot of memories of the 1960s. Nothing really special, though. If they were to make a movie about my life (just the thought of which scares me), these would be the scenes they’d leave on the cutting-room floor. “We can leave this episode out,” the editor would explain. “it’s not bad, but it’s sort of ordinary and doesn’t amount to much.” Those kind of memories—unpretentious, commonplace. But for me, they’re all meaningful and valuable. As each of these memories flits across my mind, I’m sure I unconsciously smile, or give a slight frown. Commonplace they might be, but the accumulation of these memories has led to one result: me. Me here and now, on the north shore of Kauai. Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on the shore.

-from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami

The baby boy wriggled in his arms, a warm, wet mass, softer than a goat and harrier than a rabbit kid. He held a blade over a candle flame for some time, then cut the cord and rubbed the baby with a wetted shirt. When this was done he laid the child in a basket near the fire and then stood at the head of the bed and looked down at this wife’s face a long moment. Abruptly, he bent low and placed his head near her mouth, staying all the while stone silent, waiting for some whisper from her lips. At last he stood straight once more, seeming to disappear into the still blackness of the low rafters as if he had just become another of the cabin’s shadows. The child began to cry, and he turned to look at it lying there, by the glow of the dying fire.

-From Bright’s Passage, by Josh Ritter

Looking forward to reading this:

The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata & Jim Fingal
Release Date: February 27, 2012

Publisher’s Description:

How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction? In 2003, an essay by John D’Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata s critically acclaimed About a Mountain was accepted by another magazine, The Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.

This book reproduces D’Agata’s essay, along with D’Agata and Fingal’s extensive correspondence. What emerges is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between truth and accuracy and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other.

——

Here’s D’Agata on PRI:

I don’t consider myself a journalist. I never received training as a journalist … I know that I do an overwhelming amount of research and I’m often interviewing people but what I then do with the information is dramatically different.

I like playing with the idea of journalism and our expectation of journalism. So I like making something feel journalistic and then slowly reveal that that approach isn’t really going to give us as readers what we want from the text, that we need to try a different sort of essaying, and then the essays become a lot more associative and the perhaps become a bit more imaginative and start taking the problematic liberties.

I think it is art’s job to trick us. I think it is art’s job to lure us into terrain that is going to confuse us perhaps make us feel uncomfortable and perhaps open up to us possibilities in the world that we hadn’t earlier considered.

I think that we have to be fooled before we are really able to wonder. So philosophically my issue is that we’re not allowing an entire genre – nonfiction – to have that kind of a relationship with the reader.  And that’s for me, as an artist, that’s problematic.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going directly the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

-from A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

The summer I turned ten I smelled jasmine everywhere I went. At first I thought the smell was part of the normal world, because we were having a hot spell that July, and every night it rained and the flowers were in full bloom. So I didn’t pay much attention, except, after a while, I noticed I smelled jasmine in the bath, and my dreams were full of it, and when, one day, I cut my palm on a piece of glass, my blood itself was scented, and I started to feel scared and also good.

That was one world, and I called it the jasmine world. I didn’t know, then, that epilepsy often begins with strange smells, some of which are pleasant, some of which are not. I was lucky to have a good smell. Other people’s epilepsy begins with bad smells, such as tuna fish rotting in the sun, dead shark, gin and piss; these are just some of the stories I’ve heard. 

My world, though, was the jasmine world, and I told no one about it. As the summer went on, the jasmine world grew; other odors enetered, sometimes a smell of burning, as though the whole house were coming down.

Which, in a way, it was. There were my mother and my father, both of whom I loved—that much is true—but my father was too small, my mother too big, and occasionally, when the jasmine came on, I would also feel a light-headedness that made my mother seem even bigger, my father even smaller, so he was the size of a freckle, she higher than a house, all her hair flying.

from Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by Lauren Slater