#gordon lish

“I find myself really willing to declare I never finished a single book by Borges, but I’m much enamored of the idea of such an affiliation. I really can’t claim to having ever read a word of Ulysses, nor would I want to, and yet I feel myself in certain ways the result of my ideaof Joyce. I think Harold Bloom would claim that strong writers only read themselves, and that it is your misreading of your precursors that counts. So it is my misapprehension of Joyce, of Beckett. I can’t deny that for three or four years of my life I virtually saw my walk as consonant with the walk I imagined James Joyce had. But I was probably more taught by Joyce’s letters than I was by his prose fiction.”
-Gordon Lish, from Conversations with Gordon Lish[eds. David WintersandJason Lucarelli]

I’m extremely beholden to Garielle who took the time to respond to my silly, garbled, childish, intrusive questions. You can purchase her latest book Worsted here and here, among many other sites. 
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Q.  You’ve attributed the resuscitation of your literary career in quite considerable measure to your teacher and editor Gordon Lish. It seems like you guys are particularly close, even as you seem to have largely confined yourself to Pittsburgh(mostly driven by your erstwhile teaching career but also by your liking the city over time). How does it feel to hear someone like Gordon speak so highly of you, “I think there’s more truth in one sentence of my student [Lutz] than in all of [Philip] Roth. Lutz gives [herself] away. “The speaking subject gives herself away,” says Julia Kristeva. I thoroughly believe that. What you see in Lutz, [her] lavish gift, is [her] refusal to relax [her] determination to uncover and uncover. It is, by my lights, quite wonderful, quite terrific.[…]Lutz is entirely the real thing?” Does one feel vindicated? How do you navigate the waters of self-effacement and self-indulgence as a writer and as a person?

A.  I haven’t had a literary career before or after studying with Gordon Lish.  I don’t think one finds one’s way to him in hopes of launching a career.  Anyone with vulgar ambition along those lines would have been shown the door pretty quick.  I would never presume to be close to Gordon or to feel that I am part of his life other than in my role as a student. He dwells in another realm entirely. I attended his classes and tried to grasp, to the best of my abilities, the things he was saying about how to get from one word to the next.  He also talked about how to free a word from the constricting range of its permissible behaviors, how to drain it of every sepsis of received meaning, until there is nothing left of the word but the skeleton of its former self, just the lank, gawky letters sticking out this way and that, and then how to fill the thing up again, to the point of overspilling, but this time with something that would never have been allowed to belong in there before, and then see whether the word, now close to bursting, can hold up and maybe have a new kind of say.  I’m always surprised and relieved whenever Gordon says anything approving about anything I write.  I think that for a lot of his students, his opinion is the only one that counts.  

Q.  You’ve said, “A typical day goes like this: noon, afternoon, evening, night, additional night, even more night, furtherest night, then bedtime, though I don’t have a bed or furniture of any kind.” Have you always been a lychnobite, sensing the overwhelming superabundance of life after the sunset or is it a relatively recent development facilitated by your retirement from teaching? Do you consider yourself in any way to be a minimalist? Does your room bear any resemblance with a sparsely lit opium den where all exchanges happen at the floor level?

A.  I think the pandemic has had a lot to do with it.  Lately I’ve been up until five, sometimes six.  But I’ve always found mornings the harshest and ugliest part of the day (maybe it’s just because of the place where I live, but I never open the blinds anyway).  There can be something awfully scolding about a sunrise the older you get  Evening seems to extend every form of leniency, and in the dead of night, expectations go way down, which is where they maybe ought to stay.  I do spend all of my time on the floor, but my apartment doesn’t bear any resemblance to an opium den.  It’s more like a crawlspace or the back of a  dollar-store stockroom.    

Q. Even with your reputation of being a page-hugger than a typical page-turner, how do you decide which books to read apart from your line of work? Do you try to keep it largely in the familiar territory, like exploring the oeuvre of a time-tested writer? How does one unshackle oneself from this constant niggling that one ought to read so many books?

Here’s Ben Marcus: “When I was in graduate school, there was this sort of cautionary adage going around by the poet Francis Ponge that we can only write what we’ve already read and one way to hear that is you’re just sort of doomed to kind of regurgitate everything you’ve read and so if you’re just reading all the popular books, the books everyone else is reading, in some sense you’re maybe unwittingly confining yourself to a particular literary practice that’s gonna look pretty familiar. I remember at the time thinking, okay well if that’s true, if I’m just fated to that, then I’m gonna read things that no one else is reading. I loved to just go to the library and pretty randomly grab books, because I think for a little while, and I’m kinda glad this passed, but I really just had this feeling that a writer just consumes language and just sort of spits it out. So it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t have to be a great novel for it to be worth-reading. And I still read very little fiction in the end compared to non-fiction, essays, works of philosophy, science. And the other sort of dirty secret is: I don’t finish a lot of books. I just don’t care enough. I only finish a book if I have to or if I really want to. And, often, I’ll stop reading a book three pages from the end. I think that as writers, we probably feel a lot of pressure about what kind of a reader to be, what kind of a writer to be in, and we feel this shame, like “I haven’t read DH Lawrence, I’m such an asshole.” You begin to feel like you’ve these deficiencies and you gotta make them up and you never will and a lot of it is just kinda tyrannical. Of course, obviously, we must be naturally motivated to read and read and read and read but I guess I just started to notice that…I got a lot of my ideas by just reading…e.g. a gardening book…like the weird way a sentence was structured.”

Then there’s Moyra Davey: “Woolf famously said of reading: “The only advice … is to take no advice, … follow your instincts, … use your reason.” A similar thought was voiced by her elder contemporary Oscar Wilde, who did not believe in recommending books, only in de-recommending them. Later, Jorge Luis Borges echoed the same sentiment by discouraging “systematic bibliographies” in favor of “adulterous” reading. More recently, Gregg Bordowitz has promoted “promiscuous” reading in which you impulsively allow an “imposter” book to overrule any reading trajectory you might have set for yourself, simply because, for instance, a friend tells you in conversation that he is reading it and is excited by it. This evokes for me that most potent kind of reading — reading as flirtation with or eavesdropping on someone you love or desire, someone who figures in your fantasy life.”“What to read?” is a recurring dilemma in my life. The question always conjures up an image: a woman at home, half-dressed, moving restlessly from room to room, picking up a book, reading a page or two and no sooner feeling her mind drift, telling herself, “You should be reading something else, you should be doing something else.” The image also has a mise-en-scène: overstuffed, disorderly shelves of dusty and yellowing books, many of them unread; books in piles around the bed or faced down on a table; work prints of photographs, also with a faint covering of dust, taped to the walls of the studio; a pile of bills; a sink full of dishes. She is trying to concentrate on the page in front of her but a distracting blip in her head travels from one desultory scene to the next, each one competing for her attention. It is not just a question of which book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do that, but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her, redeem her. Often what is at stake, should she want to spell it out, is the idea that something is missing, as in: what is the crucial bit of urgently needed knowledge that will save her, at least for this day? She has the idea that if she can simply plug into the right book then all will be calm, still, and right with the world. […] Must reading be tied to productivity to be truly satisfying […] Or is it the opposite, that it can only really gratify if it is a total escape? What is it that gives us a sense of sustenance and completion? Are we on some level always striving to attain that blissful state of un-agendaed reading remembered from childhood? What does it mean to spend a good part of one’s life absorbed in books? Given that our time is limited, the problem of reading becomes one of exclusion. Why pick one book over the hundreds, perhaps thousands on our bookshelves, the further millions in libraries and stores? For in settling on any book we are implicitly saying no to countless others. This conflict is aptly conjured up by essayist Lynne Sharon Schwartz as she reflects on “the many books (the many acts) I cannot in all decency leave unread (undone) — or can I?””

What way out do you suggest? Do you deem it worthwhile to eschew any shred of obligation and be propelled in any direction naturally? Like you said you found grammar books and lexicons more engaging and enjoyable than the novels.

A.  I seem to remember that in some magazine or another, James Wolcott once said “Read at whim.”  That has always sounded like the best advice.  And I assume it means to feel free to ditch any book that disappoints.  Like Ben Marcus, I’ve had experiences of abandoning a book just a few pages from the end, but I often don’t make it that far in most things anymore.  I came from a long line of nonreaders, so I’ve never felt any guilt about passing up books or writers that so many people seem to talk about a lot, and I don’t expect other people to like what I like. Some books I’ll start about halfway in and then see whether I might want to work my way back to the beginning.  Others I’ll start at the very end and inch my way toward the front, one sentence at a time, and see how far I can go that way.  I seem to remember that in The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes recommends “cruising” a text, and maybe something like that is what I’m doing at least some of the time, if I understand what he means.  And every now and then I’ll read  a book straightforwardly for an hour and afterward wonder whether the time might have been better spent staring off into space. Too many books these days seem ungiving.  It’s the ungivingness that disappoints the most.  A lot of contemporary fiction has the gleam and sparkle of a trend feature in a glossy magazine, and I can appreciate the craft and the savvy that go into something like that, but I am drawn more toward stories and books that demand being read slowly and closely, pulse by pulse, the kind of fiction where everything–what little might be left of an entire blighted life–can pivot on the peal of a single syllable.

Q.  I’d like to ask you so many questions. But let this be the last one for matters of convenience. Also, in a capitalistic world, one’s enshrouded with guilt for taking one’s time without being remunerative in any way. Among the books and films that you recently encountered, which ones do you think deserve rereads/rewatches?

A.  I used to feel like the woman you’ve described so movingly above, someone who questions her choice of books almost to the brink of despair.  At my age, though, I no longer have a program for reading, a syllabus or a checklist, and I’m okay with knowing there’s a lot I’ll never get around to.  I’m happy being a rereader of a few inexhaustible books and chancing upon occasional fresh treasure.  The one book that has shaken me the most in the longest time is Anna DeForest’s  A History of Present Illness, which will be out next August.  It’s a blisteringly truthful novel written with moral grace and unsettling brilliance and an awing mastery of language.  A couple of recent books I have read in manuscript, books that totally knocked me out with their originality and uncanny command of the word, are Greg Gerke’s In the Suavity of the Rock (a novel) and David Nutt’s Summertime in the Emergency Room (a short-story collection).  I haven’t watched many movies in the past few months, and the ones I watched aren’t ones I’ll probably be rewatching anytime soon.