Interview

In case you missed it, here's the transcript of the interview I did for Alamo TV on my recent trip to San Antonio.  Several times during my interview I referenced an interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard which appeared in The Independent recently.

What drives you to write?

Writing is a way of thinking.  If I didn’t write then, not only would I be an irritable bastard, I wouldn’t know what I thought.  Just ask my wife.  On the days when (for some reason, and these days are rare) I can’t write, I become extremely short tempered and confused.  Even though my condition hasn’t been officially diagnosed, I’m driven to write by some sort of psychosis.  The act of writing itself isn’t an expression of the mania, but an antidote.  If I didn’t write, I’d be an insufferable wreck and would probably have to take up smoking and drinking heavily.

You’ve never submitted any of your novels for publication.  But your contemporary, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, has become a literary rockstar.  How does that make you feel?

How do you think it makes me feel?  I’m already in therapy because I can barely deal with my feelings of overwhelming inadequacy.  Every morning when I wake up I don’t even turn on the lights because I can’t look myself in the mirror knowing what I mediocrity I am.  All those dreams I had in my youth of writing a truly great multivolume novel have come to nothing.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m happy for Karl Ove, but the fiction which consoles me is that there’s still hope that there’s a reading public out there who will be interested in the meandering drivel that I write.

What’s on your bedside table?

A book light and a package of condoms.

What’s your desert island book?

That show-off, Karl Ove, went with Finnegan’s Wake.  The bastard!  That was my answer.  But seriously, recently I was talking with my colleagues at Phaneron about the article by Stephen Marche in the Guardian about centireading, that is the act of reading the same book one hundred times.  Marche, by his own account has read Hamlet and PG Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves one hundred times.  There’s a pretty good discussion of Marche’s piece on Scott Esposito’s blog too if you are interested.

Anyway, I’m guessing that a desert island book has to be a book that would stand up to centireading.  While I don’t have any plans to read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow a hundred times, it might be a good candidate for a desert island book, and it’s in a similar vein as Finnegan’s Wake.  But on second thought, screw Pynchon and forget Joyce.  I’d pack the Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography (Volume 4) for reasons which I’ll leave you to work out for yourself.

What’s the most overrated book in the literary canon?

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.  You thought I was going to say My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, didn’t you?

Do you listen to music while writing?

No.  My ability to concentrate is so feeble that the slightest noise will derail my train of thought.

What song would you have played at your funeral?

“If You Were Here” by The Thompson Twins.

Your relationship with your father is central to your own unpublished multivolume fictional memoir.  You have a son.  How are you doing as a father?

I thought my father did a pretty good job at being a dad, but I still ended up in therapy and have had to experiment with prescription mood-altering medication for years to deal with the emotional trauma I didn’t even know I was suffering growing up.  Mostly, as a father, my motto is “do no harm.”

Are you optimistic about the world your son is growing up into?

No.

Can you elaborate?

I could, but if you’re really interested in my answer to this question then you should read The Golden Marshmallow Dream.  In that novel I think I do a pretty good job articulating my pessimism about the world’s present course.  Nothing short of global catastrophe is going to save us.

Is The Golden Marshmallow Dream one of your unpublished novels?

Yes.

What’s your most cherished memory?

The day when I won the school spelling bee in fifth grade.

The importance of reading

One of my colleagues alerted me to an article by Phil Davis in Scholarly Kitchen about a study of the reading habits of academics.  Evidently there's some concern over whether scholars are reading more or less of the academic literature.  While I was reading Davis' account of the study and its correction, I recalled Roberto Bolaño's dictum that reading is more important than writing.

I'm not the fastest reader.  In fact, I might be the slowest reader I know.  Even my ten year old son reads faster than I do.  Because I read so slowly, I tend to be choosey about what I read.  And if a book doesn't work for me, I'll give it up.  My personal library contains hundreds of half-read books (where "half-read" is defined as any value of pages greater than zero but less than the total).  A lot of these books, I do plan on finishing one day.  Just because I put down a book and don't finish it, doesn't mean the book is bad, just that there was something more pressing to read that bumped it off the stack.

Ten years ago, I started reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.  I was enjoying the book.  (I especially like the bit about the dodos.)  But something happened when I got to page 120.  I got distracted.  (Brain cramp?)  One day though, I'll get back to reading the remaining 640 pages.

So have I read Gravity's Rainbow?  I'd say that I haven't read it.  But I have read 15% of it.  Does that count for anything?

Another thought occurred to me as I read Davis' Scholarly Kitchen piece: what does your typical academic consider to be reading?  In order to read a paper, do you just need to read all the words in the article and examine the figures?  What if there are mathematical formulae?  Is it sufficient to glance at the formulae, or should you try to work from equation 1 to equation N along with the author?  Have you read an article if you've read the abstract, introduction, and conclusions only?  If we take a liberal view and say that an article has been read if one gathers as much as one needs from the text, then I've already read half-a-dozen articles today and will likely "read" a half-dozen more before my "academic work day" ends.  But if I need to have read all the words in these articles, then I've read precisely zero articles.

What is the quanta of reading?