v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Interview with Alejandro Zambra

From The Millions, back in 2011;

The Millions: Now that you’ve received a fair amount of attention for your books, do you worry more during the act of writing about how it will be received?  Or does the recognition validate you, give you a sense of freedom?

Alejandro Zambra: At the moment of writing, I feel completely free.  I really don’t think you can write anything genuine when you are under any kind of pressure. What’s more, publishing a book isn’t like giving birth to it; when you publish a book you feel what a father must feel when his son leaves home: you wish him well, you delight in or suffer with his successes and failures, but you can’t do anything more for him.  And your daily work is more interesting: the next book, the child you are starting to rear.

TM: Recognizing that any list like Granta’s will be subjective, is there anyone you feel strongly should have been included, but wasn’t?

AZ: Such lists are always arbitrary, and I suppose there are a lot of authors who were worth including in Granta’s, and in the end were not.  The truth is it’s an uncomfortable subject for me, because I really don’t believe in lists or rankings.  In any case I’d like to highlight the work that younger people have been doing, such as the Chilean Diego Zúñiga or the Mexican Valeria Luiselli (the author of Papeles falsos, one of the best books I’ve read recently).

TM: Not many authors have their books published more or less simultaneously in Spanish and in English, but both La vida privada and Bonsai were.  I’m curious about how the experience is different in Chile and the U.S. How does your status as a native or foreigner affect how people read you, do you think?  Do you feel more pressure to be “representative” in some way when you are outside of Chile?

AZ: I think both novels are very Chilean, so I’m sometimes surprised that they can be read in other languages.  To me, it’s a beautiful thing that readers so distant and different can connect with a book of mine.  It’s like sending out thousands of letters, and little by little receiving replies you never expected.  I guess some readers in the U.S. or in France want to confirm some prior idea they had about Chile or about Latin America.  But books aren’t made to confirm ideas; they’re made to refute them, to question them, to put other images out there where we thought everything had already been said.

TM: Tell us a little about Formas de volver a casa—is it much of a departure from your first two books?

AZ: It’s a book about memory, about parents, about Chile.  It’s about the 80s, about the years when we children were secondary characters in the literature of our parents.  It’s about the dictatorship, as well, I guess.  And about literature, intimacy, the construction of intimacy.  I don’t know if it’s very different from my previous books; the truth is I feel like it’s close to The Private Lives of Trees.  In fact it starts from there, from some of the intuitions or images of the past that were in that book.  Maybe the main difference is that it’s in large part narrated in the first person.  It also includes a writer’s diary, a kind of center or heart in which the fiction breaks, and the only thing left is the writer’s voice searching for its origins.  It’s my most personal book, without a doubt, although the others were that as well.

More

Brautigan's Brew

From TLS, a new biography of Richard Brautigan:

Trout Fishing in America was met with “rushing laudatory torrents”, but widespread acclaim would always elude Brautigan. One evident aim of Hjortsberg’s book is to counter Brautigan’s detractors and install his subject as a major American author in the pantheon of Brautigan’s heroes: “Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson”. Brautigan certainly believed himself deserving of such laurels: “I’ve been thinking recently”, he told a friend in the early 1970s, “I’ve got a good shot at the Nobel Prize”. But the sceptics were many. It would remain difficult for Brautigan to escape Robert Duncan’s verdict, that he was nothing more than “a talented stand-up entertainer”. In the later phase of his career, Brautigan would get on stage to read a poem titled “Fuck Me Like Fried Potatoes”.

Hjortsberg’s effort to reverse the verdict sometimes causes him to overcompensate by including statements that inflate Brautigan’s significance. The writer’s ex-wife, for example, says, “He really created a new form . . . . Which was a prose poem”, a statement Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud would have something to say about, and Hjortsberg should, too. Whenever Brautigan receives a negative review, Hjortsberg has the critics “sniff[ing]”, “carp[ing]”, or “sneer[ing]”, with the TLS “howl[ing] at the head of the pack”. But while there are surely many hatchet artists amid “the honking gaggle of newspaper hacks”, Hjortsberg overreaches himself when he lists Julian Barnes among “the usual array of naysayers”. The reader is compelled to scepticism, as one suspects such amplification would be unnecessary, were Brautigan’s eminence self-evident.

Brautigan always carried the seed of alcoholism, but success enabled it to flourish Brautigan always carried the seed of alcoholism, but success enabled it to flourish. Jubilee Hitchhiker becomes a story of decline when Brautigan builds a house outside Livingston, Montana – “twenty-four bars and an equal number of churches” – to live among a macho milieu of hard drinkers, gunslingers and philanderers including Thomas McGuane, Peter Fonda, Jimmy Buffett and William “Gatz” Hjortsberg himself, whose property was adjacent to Brautigan’s. “For narrative purposes”, Hjortsberg here inserts himself into his book in the third person, a technique that goes from strange to stranger. At first, the reader is only slightly bothered, as Hjortsberg writes of Richard’s “admiration for Gatz”, how he “praised Hjortsberg’s writing”; but when Hjortsberg and his wife Marian begin having “marital problems”, and we learn that “It wasn’t long before he [Brautigan] and Marian became lovers”, the material has certainly become the first-person’s domain.

David Ferry

In Eden

You lie in our bed as if an orchard were over us.

You are what’s fallen from those fatal boughs.

Where will we go when they send us away from here?

David Ferry

Derrida/Ornette Interview 1997

Interview of Ornette Coleman by Jacques Derrida in 1997:

Jacques Derrida: This year in New York you are presenting a program entitled Civilization — what relationship does it have with music?

Ornette Coleman: I’m trying to express a concept according to which you can translate one thing into another. I think that sound has a much more democratic relationship to information, because you don’t need the alphabet to understand music. This year, in New York, I’m setting up a project with the New York Philharmonic and my first quartet—without Don Cherry—plus other groups. I’m trying to find the concept according to which sound is renewed every time it’s expressed.

JD: But are you acting as a composer or as a musician?

OC: As a composer, people often say to me, “Are you going to play the pieces that you’ve already played, or new pieces?”

JD: You never answer those questions, do you?

OC: If you’re playing music that you’ve already recorded, most musicians think that you’re hiring them to keep that music alive. And most musicians don’t have as much enthusiasm when they have to play the same things every time. So I prefer to write music that they’ve never played before.

JD: You want to surprise them.

OC: Yes, I want to stimulate them instead of asking them simply to accompany me in front of the public. But I find that it’s very difficult to do, because the jazz musician is probably the only person for whom the composer is not a very interesting individual, in the sense that he prefers to destroy what the composer writes or says.

JD: When you say that sound is more “democratic,” what do you make of that as a composer? You write music in a coded form all the same.

OC: In 1972 I wrote a symphony called Skies of America and that was a tragic event for me, because I didn’t have such a good relationship with the music scene [milieu de la musique]: like when I was doing free jazz, most people thought that I just picked up my saxophone and played whatever was going through my head, without following any rule, but that wasn’t true.

JD: You constantly protest against that accusation.

OC: Yes. People on the outside think that it’s a form of extraordinary freedom, but I think that it’s a limitation. So it’s taken twenty years, but today I’m going to have a piece played by New York’s symphony orchestra and its conductor. The other day, as I was meeting with certain members of the Philharmonic, they told me, “You know, the person in charge of scores needs to see that.” I was upset—it’s like you wrote me a letter and someone had to read it to confirm that there was nothing in it that could irritate me. It was to be sure that the Philharmonic wouldn’t be disturbed. Then they said, “The only thing we want to know is if there is a dot in that place, a word in another”; it had nothing to do with music or sound, just with symbols. In fact, the music that I’ve been writing for thirty years and that I call harmolodic is like we’re manufacturing [fabriquions] our own words, with a precise idea of what we want these words to mean to people.

More

David Ferry

Soul

What am I doing inside this old man's body?
I feel like I'm the insides of a lobster,
All thought, and all digestion, and pornographic
Inquiry, and getting about, and bewilderment,
And fear, avoidance of trouble, belief in what,
God knows, vague memories of friends, and what
They said last night, and seeing, outside of myself,
From here inside myself, my waving claws
Inconsequential, wavering, and my feelers
Preternatural, trembling, with their amazing
Troubling sensitivity to threat;
And I'm aware of and embarrassed by my ways
Of getting around, and my protective shell.
Where is it that she I loved has gone to, as
This cold sea water's washing over my back?

David Ferry

Watch Poet David Ferry Reads From His Collection 'Bewilderment' on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Interview with Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti, Ryan Kamstra, Sholem Krishtalka, Margaux Williamson. Photograph by Lee Towndrow.

From The Paris Review, an interview with Heti on her new novel, How Should a Person Be?:

Let’s talk about your process. How did you take your conversations from your life and weave it into fiction?

I don’t know. I did lots of different things. But the conversations were not meant for a book. I was just taping friends. I didn’t have a plan for where I was going.

Did you think you were writing your play?

I wasn’t sure. I’d spent the previous five years working on Ticknor, and I wanted to sort of shake that off me. So all the transcribing I was doing was kind of like drinking a glass of water—it was refreshing, like a palate cleanser—a way of getting out of my imagination. Taping and transcribing was part of looking around to see what things were really like in my environment. I’d been completely in my room, in my head, not looking at anything.

That reminds me of something Tilda Swinton once said about filmmaking—it’s a social way of making art. What do you think happens when you’re working like this?

Well, the writing becomes more like life in that you don’t know where you’re going to end up, and you don’t know what’s going to end up being important. It’s like how in life you can meet somebody and not think much of them, then a few years later you’re married and in love, but the person you were really drawn to and thought, This is it!—you forget about them six months later. When I began transcribing, I was certain that I wanted to write a book with no people in it, about the workings of a supermarket.

That sounds so different than the book you ended up writing!

I know! It just seemed really relaxing to write a book that was not about feelings and not about people. Of course, what ended up happening was completely the opposite. My friend, the writer Lee Henderson, actually e-mailed me a dream he had after I told him that my new book was not going to have any people in it. He was like, “I had a dream that you wrote your new book and there were people in it.”

Is the question “How should a person be?” a question that really preoccupies you?

It did. But I only realized that when I figured out the title. Then it became even more of a preoccupation. I think I wouldn’t necessarily have put it in those words before that; it was a general feeling, of not trusting myself and anxiety and wondering, and also a feeling that there were these Platonic truths out there, that if only I could have access to …

I see.

I think it was Margaux who said it should be the book’s title when she saw it on the wall in big block letters when she came to visit me one summer at Yaddo. I can’t remember if I was thinking about it as a title or just thinking about it.

Margaux sounds like a terrific friend. Though, of course, I know her mostly through this fictional lens of your novel.

She is. We’re both incredibly bossy, but not with each other.

I loved how stark you were about ambition. But why does the Sheila character desire fame over, say, wealth or power?

I was thinking a lot about Paris Hilton and all those girls like Lindsay Lohan who were in the tabloids. I was wondering what I might have in common with them, to find the seeds of them in me, then think about those aspects, and emphasize those. I don’t see their drive as being riches so much as fame.

Do you think this is a modern obsession of ours?

Renown is something people have always wanted, but maybe what’s modern is that it’s considered a virtue, this desire, rather than a vice. I might be wrong about this.

I think you could be right; that makes a lot of sense. I know that Lena Dunham recently recommended your book in Entertainment Weekly. Have you been watching Girls?

I love it so much. I was on the train down to New York yesterday and I watched episode 6, then watched my favorite scenes from the first five episodes. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before—rewatched scenes from something I’ve liked. It felt like rereading the scenes you love in a book.

Totally! Which scenes?

I love her expression in the sixth episode where she’s watching the dance performance at the benefit; that’s a very subtle expression, looking around at her hometown and evaluating it. I like when Adam admires her pencilled eyebrows in another episode and says, “You look like a Mexican teenager,” and she’s like, “I’m NOT here to talk about that.”

More

Interview with Detainee

From The Guardian:

Ahmed Errachidi, 47, is a Moroccan chef. Having spent much of his adult life living in London, he was arrested in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, in January 2002. Handed over to the American authorities, he was held in military bases in Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay, where he spent five-and-a-half years, most of them in solitary confinement. He was released in 2007. He has never been charged with any crime.

You grew up in Tangier. What brought you to London?
I first went there in 1985, aged 19. I was young and wanted to discover the world, to meet people. I married a British woman. [The marriage later broke down.]

And you got into cooking...
I started as a kitchen porter. But I had a passion for food and I began to cook the odd thing, and my bosses saw I could do it well and gave me more responsibility. I loved bringing ingredients together, creating dishes that made people happy.

On 11 September 2001, you were in a cafe in north London... Can you describe your feelings that day?
Shock and horror. No one I was with understood what was going on. We thought it was a plane crash. Then it became clear it was a terrorist attack. I felt a terrible sense of loss.

Just a few weeks after 9/11, you travelled to Pakistan. Why?
Work was quiet and I realised I couldn't keep travelling back and forth between Morocco and London. I'd married again, and my wife and sons lived in Tangier. So I started thinking about starting a business and decided to import silver from Pakistan. In August 2001, I learned that my youngest son, Imran, had a heart problem and might need an operation. We needed money. So I went to Pakistan to get things started.

But then, while there, you decided to travel into Afghanistan...
The American bombing of Afghanistan had just begun, and I would watch the images of suffering on the news in my hotel room. It was all happening less than 100 miles away. I just had an urge to try and help. I was in pain myself because of my son and as soon as the idea crossed my mind to help those people, I started to feel better. As a Muslim, if you want God to help you in something, you need to help others. So I crossed the border.

You were arrested just inside Pakistan, on your return from Afghanistan. Did you have any inkling at this stage that you might be sent to Guantánamo?
No. When the Pakistanis arrested me, they lied. They said they just wanted to make sure I wasn't on any wanted list, then they'd let me go. I remember thinking, each week when Friday came round: "Oh no, that means I'm not going to be released till Monday." That's how optimistic I was then. It seems almost funny now.

You were held at military bases in Bagram and Kandahar before being transferred to Guantánamo. While there, you were interviewed by British interrogators. Didn't they help?
They said there was nothing they could do. Their hands were tied. Although one MI5 agent told me that, if I was telling the truth, he'd get me released. I remember asking him how long it would take to check my story. His exact words were: "It may take weeks."

What happened when you arrived in Guantánamo?
Exactly the same thing as happened to every new prisoner. After a 26-hour journey, shackled and blindfolded, I was taken to an interrogation room and the first thing they said was: "Do you know Osama bin Laden? Did you know about 9/11 before it happened?" And then a female interrogator told me that all my rights had been taken away, that if I didn't co-operate I was going to spend the rest of my life there. But since I'd done nothing wrong, I didn't know how to co-operate.

During your time there you were subjected to constant, often astonishing cruelty by the US soldiers – beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nudity. Do you feel contempt for them now?
The ordinary soldiers were executing orders. They were very cruel, but they were being used as well. They were told that we were terrorists who had been trained not to feel pain. If I was to meet them today, I would tell them that what they did was wrong, but I would forgive them. But the politicians, the generals in charge – I will never forgive those people. I believe they need to stand trial.

You were one of the few detainees who spoke English. What difference did that make?
It meant I was always in contact with the soldiers. Each time there was a problem, they called me to translate. So I was always in their face. I couldn't hide. And that made me a target. They assumed I was a troublemaker, a leader. That's why they gave me the nickname "the General".

You write of the sense of solidarity you felt with other prisoners.
We were like a family. What brings people together is having something in common, whether a religion or material interest. We shared one thing in common, and that was pain.

How did you get out?
My lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, dug around and discovered that the accusations against me couldn't be true, that I had been working in London like I'd always said. It wasn't hard to check these things. If the Americans had wanted to, they could have done this.

More

David Shapiro

Vallejo Nocturno 2013

After Poetry

‘I want my son to grow powerful and rich through science.’ — Rimbaud

Now that I have given up poetry,
The guest of poetry,
Governed poetry,
Or rather that poetry has given up me,
Has queened my pawn, how green my pawn,
Or rather that poetry died in my lap,
Any lap, like a lousy lover
In another language, and I
A Luddite with a laptop in his lap

And now that my son is subtle
And malicious as a god any god.
And bestrides the dogmatic world
As if it were a tennis court

The clouds pass by, almost inhuman
Like passers-by, the mountains like
Churches and the churches like mountains
Beautiful and untranslatable a woman
Walks past the park like a street
Or a scream or a double and triple
Loss of meaning, and I thank whatever
Nothing we actually worship, to change
Nothing and the important thing: to leave
The world alone, largely uninterpreted
For the wet pavement
On which he may scratch his poems

Objective Reality

Vallejo Nocturno 2013

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line.

But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

Thomas Pynchon, V

Interview with Sebald

Toby Green interviews Sebald:

Beginning with Vertigo, what was it that made you actually start the writing when you did?

I was in my mid-forties when I produced my first scribblings which were non-academic. I went down to London. Completely randomly, I had picked out a book by an Austrian writer, Konrad Baier, which I had not looked at for some time. The book had a footnote about a botanist who had been on Bering's Alaskan expedition. When I got to London, I went to the British Museum on a complete whim and read about it. I could not see how I could possibly write an essay or a monograph on this, but it so fascinated me that I just wrote it down in a longhand prose poem. I had no intentions to publish it. It was very liberating at the time, because it was so intensely private.

At the beginning of Vertigo, you follow the young Stendhal in Napoleon's army and introduce the central theme of the book: the unknowability of the past and memory's unreliability. As a writer you must draw on memory--do you feel that all the stories we tell are fictions, or do some stories have more truth than others?

Seen from the outside, some stories have more truth than others, but the truth value of the story does not depend on its actual truth content. The truth value depends on how it is framed and phrased. If a story is aesthetically right, then it is probably also morally right. You cannot really translate one to one from reality. If you try to do that, in order to get at a truth value through writing, you have to falsify and lie. And that is one of the moral quandaries of the whole business.

That's a theme that is evident in your books, what you term in The Emigrants "the questionable business of writing"--why do people write?

One doesn't know why one does it. You have no idea. If someone asks, you have to own up and say that you have no idea what your motives are. It could be a compulsive habit with neurotic dimensions. Or it could be vanity.

Do you think that exhibitionism comes into it?

Oh yes--that is the less savoury side, along with the mercenary considerations.

So how do you find that you are viewed, as a writer?

Usually with a mixture of admiration and contempt! But there are of course some noble motives--trying to say something that is true, and being analytical about oneself. That's all very laudable, but even these are mixed up with less savoury motives, and the commodification of literature has just made the whole thing worse.