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Whenever I avow to being influenced, I’m never sure I’m telling the truth. But here goes. I think I learned a lot about punctuation and speed from Donald Barthelme, about adjectives and sentence rhythms from Elizabeth Hardwick. I don’t know if I learned from Nabokov and Thomas Bernhard, but their incomparable books help me keep my standards for myself as severe as they ought to be. And Godard—Godard has been a major nourishment to my sensibility and therefore, inevitably, to my writing. And I’ve certainly learned something as a writer from the way Schnabel plays Beethoven, Glenn Gould plays Bach, and Mitsuko Uchida plays Mozart.
Don’t dare. Don’t want to. But, anyway, I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
whether she thinks about her audience
De Iuventute
When I was a young man
chasing girls I was so
hot to get into them I
never had time to learn
to savor the pleasures
of it. Fuss and rush
was all it was. And on
to the next.
Now that I'm old and
girls will have none
of me I must try to
imagine what it would
have been like with
each of them if I
had taken some pains
to learn to please them.
Prince understands. He is the only one who understands me.
Then one day I come in from the porch. It’s starting to get dark so early, now that it’s winter. I come into the living room and it’s all in shadow. I can’t see anyone’s face clearly, all I see are their teeth shining.
It is so quiet. Then I hear their breathing, each one of them separately like singers not in harmony. They are all waiting for something.
“I wish I had a steak,” says Eliott, his voice strained and high.
A pause.
“In Africa they eat grubs and things. Maybe there are worms in the backyard,” says Pat.
“You can eat dandelion greens. I’ve heard of a dandelion salad,” says Eliott.
Pat says, “I heard in Korea people eat dogs.”
No one says anything. I can see the room get darker.
Then my dad stands up.
“What are you doing?” my mother says. He doesn’t answer.
“Where are you going? Howard—don’t —don’t—”
My dad is reaching for his gun. My brothers stand up.
“What are you doing? How can you even think of—”
They are walking slowly to the door.
“He’s a man, Howard! A man! You can’t—” my mother screams.
“He’s a dog,” says my dad. “He’s an animal.”
And then I see the door swing open, see Prince lift his head expectantly. I see my dad lift the gun and aim. I’m trying to get over there, I can’t get there fast enough, the air is too thick.
Sometimes I am so lonely the phone
will do.
Sometimes I am so lonely and you are not
dead, you
live in Brooklyn Heights yet I cannot
touch you.
I have spent 30 years trying not to write
this poem.
Sometimes I am so lonely the phone
will do.
excerpt from the poem Phone Sex
I was reading a biography of Pugin. Architecture
was how Pugin avoided God.
This much is evident. When he slipped out at night
to drift down to the water he was a smoke.
He did not look up at the moon. We can be sure
that any bargain he made was intentional
especially those he bound in straps made of snow.
Yes. I think it was a response to my environment—to being misunderstood and feeling that the environment of my family was promulgating a version of life that I was at odds with and that I didn’t agree with. I think my earliest question was, Is my version the right one? Or am I wrong? Very early on I came to see writing as a place where truth could be gotten at, but also where the truth could be defended. The fact that it could be written down—said—where it could not be said, at least not by me, in the reality of my home, created a very powerful sense of duality in me.
I suppose if there is a reckoning in middle age, it’s a tragic sense that you have been formed by things, and sent hither and thither by those things, and put in a frenzy and made to run around the place, and up and down the house in the service of those things, and they were not real. They were the product of your upbringing or conditioning or gender or social class. And I think there’s a certain point where suddenly the grip of all of that on you loosens. It’s like a stage set beginning to sort of crumble, and you start to see it wobbling, and I think you can get some really startling and frightening perspectives on identity once you start looking at it from there. The thought that you’ve wasted your entire life in the service of things that didn’t really exist—that you were in a prison where the door, in fact, was open, and you’ve sat there all this time . . . A lot of what I was writing in these books was concerned with that.
In 1975 I was a baby; what happened was not my conscious experience. My memories, instead, are of growing up in Michigan, with a strong grandmother and a strong stepmother. The summers were short and the winters went on and on. Icicles lengthened from the eaves and fell like daggers into the snow. My sister and I knew the vague story about our mother in Viet Nam, but ours was a family that preferred silence over questions, especially when there were no simple answers. We lived in a mostly white community that wasn’t happy about a sudden influx of Vietnamese refugees, and our mode of safety was silence. No one talked about the war. It was better to look forward, not back. It was better not to ask and not to know.
Thursday, 17 December.
The cat is sitting by the door. Evidently it wants to go out. I sit by the door also, watching it. It is as if our hostilities (the hostilities of cat and mouse) have already begun. This is a feline that I purchased at a fair. A charismatic man was giving kittens away. You didn’t dare look at him because . . . oh but you looked at him and now he’s calling you over, he’s smiling, he’s touching your arm a bit. He remembers you from somewhere. He’s telling you about kittens and then you’re in the car on the way home and everyone is cooing stupidly and passing the thing around.
When my wife comes home I am still sitting there. The cat is still sitting there. Nothing has changed. At least two hours have passed. I think in some ways I have gained the cat’s respect, although of course the gain in that regard is counterbalanced by my wife’s dismay. What are you doing on the floor? I begin to tell her but think better of it.
the same vibe that i get in kafka, dostoevsky, baudrillard's diaries