Amazing perspective.

Love this, from a series of interviews with the rock critic in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

One of the things that made me a music writer, and that’s always thrilled me, is when you listen to a piece of music and it just seems miraculous. It’s hard to believe that anybody could produce anything so wonderful, so perfect, just as a matter of knowledge and will. Then you think, “How must the person who is making this music have felt at that moment?” I was listening to Dave Mason’s one great solo album [Alone Together, 1970], and there’s a track, “Look at You Look at Me,” which has a very long guitar solo at the end: an unspeakably marvelous and elegant piece of music. Everyone at the time thought it was Eric Clapton playing it … supposedly it’s Mason, but if it’s really Mason it’s the greatest Clapton solo that Clapton never played. Listening to something like that and wondering what must it have felt like, in that moment, to be making that music … I always imagined that the person felt free and fulfilled and utterly taken out of himself. For some people, reacting that way, they would then decide, “I want to feel like that person so therefore I’m going to learn guitar and ultimately get to that point.” For me, the way of inhabiting that moment was to write. And it wasn’t until I read Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies that I had the same feeling about writing: “I want to feel as free as she must have felt when she wrote that.”

Jennifer Egan writes both. I love her take on the difference:

There is nothing the same about them. For nonfiction, the writing part is almost an afterthought. With nonfiction, it is basically the job of synthesizing a gigantic amount of information and experience into something crystalline and relatively short, although my pieces are relatively long. The Lorie Berenson piece took a really long time to write, I really struggled with the writing. But some of the ones before that I wrote in four or five days.

In fiction I am doing something entirely different— I am letting it rip in an almost unconscious state to see what I come up with, and then I decide what to do with it.

With nonfiction, I am dealing with the world. There is a kind of great feeling that happens with nonfiction, this sense of clarity about a subject and an excitement about sharing that in all of its nuances. Once I reach that point, the writing is easy. In fiction it is precisely the opposite because it is the act of writing that generates the material and then it is a process of years before I have really processed that and turned it into something interesting.

Apparently some copy editors have taken issue with Pico Iyer’s use of long sentences. In today’s Los Angeles Times, he makes an eloquent case for them (while employing them often), explaining that he uses them “as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment.”

We live in a world of sound bites and bumper stickers, he writes.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).

P.S. Yes, in excerpting this I am in some small way perpetuating the same sound-bite world that Iyer is protesting against. McLuhan was right. The medium is the message. But nothing is stopping you from reading the piece in its entirety, right?

The fog rolled in this afternoon and I went for a walk. The sky was drained of color, the world reduced to black and greys. I looked up and saw this.

The world lost a great writer recently, and I lost a good friend. Joel Deutsch — poet, essayist, novelist — died in Los Angeles. Joel devoted his life to learning and writing. Thanks to a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, he edited and published a highly regarded journal, Meatball. Later, he wrote intensely personal essays about going blind that appeared in the Los Angeles Times. His piece about introducing Russian immigrant friends to American culture, Exits and Entrances, was featured on World Hum.

A number of his friends gathered last night to remember him. We read his poetry and shared memories. This sketch of Joel was made by an old friend of his, writer Charles Bukowski. It makes me smile.

Love the spare sound of this.

Rivers of Gold by Idée Fixe Records

This week I interviewed Henry Rollins — punk rock icon, spoken-word performer, writer, actor, DJ — about his new book, Occupants, which features his photographs and observations from war-torn and troubled places around the world. It’s a powerful book. I loved what Henry had to say about travel and the kindness of strangers and how his journeys have humbled him over the years.

Here’s a taste:

Humbling to the point where you have major regrets about some of the stupid things you said, some of the things you thought were right. You keep going to these countries, and it’s like, you forgot the lesson from the last time. Because the first person you encounter kind of bitch-slaps you upside the head in the most wonderful, innocent way and you realize, God, I’m still an asshole. And this guy, by doing nothing except being broke and so incredibly polite—it takes you aback, you realize, I’m still not there yet. I still have like eight miles to go before I can even get into the parking lot of humility. I have to keep going back. It’s like going back to a chiropractor to get a readjustment.

Read more here.

Ernest Hemingway bought his beloved boat, Pilar, in a shipyard in Brooklyn in 1934. Could the ensuing time he spent on the boat have altered his writing style? At least one writer thinks so. Paul Hendrickson is the author of the new book, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. (Given all the ink that has been spent on Hemingway’s life to date, I love the notion of framing a new biography around his boat.) NPR’s Rachel Martin interviewed Hendrickson. She asked, “What did he [Hemingway] want from the boat?”

Hendrickson had an intriguing reply:

I think he wanted escape. I think he wanted to get away from shore. In fact, I make the case in this book that Pilar helped broaden out, so to speak, his prose line. When you say Ernest Hemingway, what do you think? You think of these simple declarative sentences, these magical and yet very short sentences, free of the subordinate clause. What happens, Rachel, from the mid-’30s onward, the Ernest Hemingway sentence gets longer and longer and longer. Why is this? I like to make a case that aboard Pilar, getting away from shore, getting away from the sniping critics, getting away from all the petty little literary games, he can get out there in the Gulf Stream and he can free himself in some way.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Really enjoying David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. It’s mostly a transcript of conversations between Lipsky and DFW over five days in March 1996, while Wallace was on a book tour for “Infinite Jest.” As you might expect, DFW comes across as brilliant but very human.

He made it clear during the trip that he wasn’t altogether happy with his first novel, “The Broom of the System.” He regretted arguing with his editor, Gerry Howard, about proposed changes, and apparently getting his way. At one point before “Broom” was published, DFW sent Howard a 17-page letter explaining his objections. Having edited more than a few writers myself, doing that editor-writer dance that’s different every time around, I couldn’t help but feel for Howard.

Lipsky asked Wallace if he’d re-read the letter since the book came out. To which DFW replied:

Oh, sure. It talks about how the entire book is a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and presence versus absence. I mean, Gerry [Gerry Howard, Broom's editor] didn’t want the book to end there. We have a cast of characters who are afraid their names don’t denote, word and referent are united in absence, which means Derrida… you know what? It’s a brilliant little theoretical document, unfortunately it resulted in a shitty and dissatisfying ending, right?

And in fact it was a very cynical argument, because there was a part of me–this was a year and a half after I wrote it, and I know that the ending, there was good stuff about it, but it was way too clever. It was all about the head, you know? and Gerry kept saying to me, “Kid, you’ve got no idea.” Like, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if you hadn’t created this woman named Lenore who seems halfway appealing and alive.” And I couldn’t hear. I just couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear it. I was in… Dave Land.

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was. And so, as a result, for the rest of my life, I will walk around… You know, I will see that book occasionally at signings. And I will realize I was arrogant, and missed a chance to make that book better. And hopefully I won’t do it again.