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LAPHAM: Maybe I'd try to tell the wonderful story of Robert Benchley, who was given an examination at Harvard when he was in law school. He hadn't been to a single class in his entire year and was asked to discuss the fishing rights off the Grand Bank from the point of view of the French, the British and the Americans. It was a three-hour exam. Benchley's opening sentence was to the effect that he never knew what the French position was, he never wanted to know what the British position was and he didn't care what the American position was. He would, however, like to discuss the question from the point of view of the fish. Then follows a long conversation between a cod and a flounder as to whether it's better to be fried by the French or boiled by the British.
Once, when he lost himself in the details of Wes’s passing—the helicopter airlifting Wes’s body from the bend in the road where the RV had struck him and where a hole in his head had opened and bled and refused to close-Harper had spilled an entire tray of huevos rancheros for a table of very disappointed midwesterners (Boilermakers, it appeared from their sweats), who shook their big sad heads at him. Harper was tempted to think that head-shaking, when placed within the context of death, should seem pathetically trivial, and that knocking these same heads together would produce a highly satisfying sound, but then, from somewhere deep in his head, he heard Wes’s voice saying, “What if you were a very hungry person with a big fat sad head, wouldn’t you be a little pissed off after being crammed into a tour bus all day, breathing the stink of your fellow man, only to have your waiter dump your food on the floor?” So Harper forgave the head-shaking, shut his eyes, took a deep breath, counted to seven [...]
lol
INTERVIEWER
What traditions are behind your writing?
MOODY
The modernist notion that anything is possible, the postmodernist notion that everything is exhausted, the post-postmodernist notion that since everything is exhausted, everything is permitted.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a daily schedule you try to stick to when you’re working?
MOODY
No. I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect. Otherwise, don’t bother. Break your deadlines, default on your due dates, wander in the streets, go to the movies, eat lavishly, fornicate, blaspheme, bless a street urchin, browbeat a civil servant, and when you’re done with these things, if you feel excited by what you’ve seen and heard, then go write.
When I was on tour people would say, I’m so sorry about your mother, as if the work was transparently autobiographical. But my mother is in the pink, and grateful for many things, except for the fact that she has a writer for a son. You’re correct that writing about sons and mothers is deeply demanding and complex, and in my experience it does make you feel kind of uncomfortable. But if you find you need to write about subjects like this, you have no choice but to commit entirely. You can’t get part way in and then try to be dainty, you know?
What else could I be? I guess to be an American writer means, uh, that I have dined multiply at drive-through windows and that I have no choice but to occasionally darken the inside of a shopping mall, and that I come from a country of former slave-owners, and that I feel the Manhattan Project as a blot on my conscience that I will never expiate, and that there is something in baseball that I think is close to my heart (it was once a Native American game), and it means that I daily have contact with guys who think that our government exists only in order to hinder the magnanimous philanthropic work of large corporations, and it means that there’s constant vacillation in my head between the ethical messages of Judeo-Christianity and a desire to cast off these messages entirely, and it means, hmm, that I like artificial cheese food products, and it means that I conceive of nature as an expanse of space, and it means that I believe that spirituality is best experienced in landscapes emptied of human beings, and it means that I like to spin the dial on a television set, just can’t stop myself from spinning that dial, and it means that I only speak one language well, and it means that I don’t mind listening to people on the street talking incessantly about stock prices, and it means that I look to Europe for a definition of the high arts, and it means that I sometimes can’t tell the difference between high and low arts, and it means that the sentimental reiteration of family as the origin of all good is never far from my mind, even though I resist this idea entirely, and it means I know a lot about cars, and it means that I can talk for half an hour about the best kind of computer, and it means that I have a lot of opinions about the best operating system for a computer, and it means that I prefer music with guitars to music with electronic keyboards, and it means that I think ketchup is a vegetable, and it means that I am to some degree or other worried about my weight, and it means I believe strongly in ministorage and the ministorage way of life, and it means I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with all these American things. Guess it means a lot of things, huh?
In the scene he cannot help but re-imagine each day, one of the saleswomen darts after him into the street, calling out, “Hey! Hey!” and he stops, and the young woman points at his abdomen and says to him, “Hey! You didn't pay for that soap!” and Edwin looks at her, his eyes welling up with tears, and he smiles slightly, and the girl apologizes for her gruffness, laughs and then invites him to an upcoming party where the staff plans to share mud baths and homemade beer.
oh man this story was excruciating
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM: My third novel, Flesh and Blood, received a withering, truly venomous review from Michiko Kakucani in the daily New York Times. It was, in a sense, my worst fear come true: a devastating review that was read by millions of people. I'm not prone to vomiting, as Hellman was, though I had a hard time with that review, not because I worried that it might be true, but because I felt so publicly humiliated. Most of the writers I respect live continually on the edge of various convictions that they are not very good at what they do, that they have simply fooled enough of the people enough of the time, and that sooner or later they will be exposed as hacks or frauds. It is, to me at least, an inconvenient but necessary attitude-too much confidence, too much conviction about one's own virtuosity, seems dangerous (though of course too little is dangerous too). I survived that review, I kept writing, and in so doing seem to have crossed a line I'll never have to cross again. There's a perverse son of relief in seeing your own worse fears realized, at least if it doesn't do you in. You understand, after that, that they can hurt you bur they can't kill you. You're not as timid ever again. You go on.
michael cunningham
KlM EDWARDS: I did my graduate work in Iowa City. When l finished, my husband and I left for teaching jobs on the rural east coast of Malaysia, worlds away. Against the dazzling backdrop of the South China Sea, life seemed very quiet-no talk of writing, no other writers, no visible ways in which books mattered. Still, I kept writing stories and sending them out hopefully over oceans, one last, tenuous connection with my old life, with what I still believed was my writing life. The mails were slow, erratic. One day I came home to find not one, but two, rejection letters waiting. They were simple form letters, neither kind nor unkind. Still, in that silence I allowed them enormous weight. For days I was depressed, glum. At last my husband got fed up. “If you love to write then do it,” he finally said, exasperated. “Do it for that reason and that alone. But if you only want to get published, give it up.”
RICHARD FORD : I don't usually like stories about other people's early failures and rejections. They all sound so much the dreary same, and of course they weren’t successful failures or we wouldn't be hearing much about them. Bur I do love my own. I like to think back from a point of present calm to moments of consuming rage, bitter, gnawing betrayal, glimpses of disaster, hopelessness and defeat. Why I like to think about these is not to gloat. Certainly not. They' II all come around again with conspicuously different outcomes. It's just that I like the lingering notion that I've enjoyed a vigorous, exciting and robust life up to now-vigorous, robust enough to have been consumed by rage, et cetera about something. And second, I like it that no matter how I once felt-scalded, damaged, done in-I didn't go on feeling that way very long. That bad day got over. Another day started. I found other, better things to do. It can seem (almost) funny-all that fuming and raging and the creaking open of the abyss. It's good to remember this cycle of feelings in anticipation of the next round of assaults, due any day. Hard to choose the right rejection-they seem so plentiful and various. Once, Jay McInerney was quoted in a Canadian newspaper as saying that instead of his early meteoric success as a writer he now thought it might've been better for him to have been like Richard Ford, and to have labored for years in obscurity. Those years of obscurity, of course. were the years when I persisted in spite of one or another sort of rejection, slight, betrayal, rage, demeanment, demoralization. Odd to think these should seem salubrious to another. However, I'd be only too happy for Jay to have gotten his wish. I would simply want a trade: my obscurity for his early meteoric success. I believe we'd each be better for it now.
lol