September 28, 2010 At Work Rick Owens Is Tickled Pink By Claudine Ko Fashion designer Rick Owens creates drapey, esoteric clothing, often asymmetrical and mostly in black. His clothes are not cheap and are favored by the likes of Courtney Love and Michelle Obama. On a recent summer day, I ended up in his unmarked Soho boutique, and, somewhere between his coveted skinny leather jackets and covered wedge ankle boots, I discovered that the man loves books. His personally curated selection of rarefied titles sits on an open display, each volume available for purchase at regular bookstore prices. A sampling: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies by James Whistler Serious Pleasures by Philip Hoare La-Bas by J. K. Huysmans Whistler and Montesquiou by Edgar Marshall The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck Man Enough to Be a Woman by Jayne County Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell Bunker Archaeology by Paul Virilio Read More
September 23, 2010 At Work Pressing Flesh with Sam Lipsyte By Giancarlo DiTrapano Sam Lipsyte. Photograph by Ceridwen Morris. From his first collection of stories, Venus Drive, to his most recent novel, The Ask, Sam Lipsyte has consistently penned the best comedic literature of the past decade. In the fall issue, he has returned to the short form and chiseled us out what might be his best story to date. It’s your classic tale about a good man with a bad plan. A lot like life, it’s a tale of things almost working out. Last year I interviewed Lipsyte about The Ask. This month he let me do it again, this time about “The Worm in Philly.” The hero of your new story wants to write a book about Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Why Hagler? As the narrator says, why not Hagler? Truth is I’ve always been a Hagler fan. There were things I left out of the story, like his subsequent career as an action-movie star in Italy, or the rumor that he wouldn’t shake hands with white fighters because he refused to touch “white flesh.” I used to follow a fighter named Mustafa Hamsho, who lost to Hagler a few times. I like both of those names a lot. Hagler and Hamsho. Hagler’s baldness was maybe an homage to Jack Johnson, but it was ominous in a fiercely contemporary way. He was kind of a throwback, but there was also the possibility he was from the future. I love the “white flesh” thing. I do that too. I want to talk about drugs though. Without answering the first part of this question, why do I love reading about drugs and why do you love writing about drugs? Why are drugs so hard to resist, whether they’re on the page or in the pocket? I’m glad you do that, Gian. That’s good. I’m not sure why you love reading about drugs. Maybe at a certain point the reading high is better than actually doing them? That could be preposterous though. I guess I’ve written about drugs a good deal because for a time, in my younger days, certain hard substances were the major elements in my life. My movements and decisions revolved around them. I like to pretend it was all some meaningless blur, but it was a very intense and focused time. I had a daily purpose (to get more drugs) that heightened the experience of being alive (a heightening then nullified by the drugs). I felt very alert during the mission phase of the day. Make no mistake, it was a horrible time, but I’ve always been fascinated by that robotic intensity. Also, it’s a way to give your character something to do, and we all know you have to keep those fuckers in motion, or readers might find out they are just constructions in a fiction! I try to make sure the drug-users in my stories aren’t acting high. Most of them tend to do drugs to get straight anyway. They are in that awful place. So their interactions might seem slightly off, but mostly these could easily be people not doing dangerous drugs. It’s just that occasionally they die from their addictions or else make really bad decisions that lead to more misery. That’s where the comedy kicks in. Drugs are hard to resist for some people because they work really well. And then don’t. But you find that out later. Read More
September 21, 2010 At Work April Ayers Lawson on “Virgin” By Lorin Stein April Ayers Lawson’s short story “Virgin” appears in our new issue. It is Lawson’s first appearance in a magazine with national circulation. Last week she was kind enough to answer a few questions from her home in Greenville, South Carolina. In “Virgin” you describe sexual frustration and desire very convincingly—and very specifically—from a man’s point of view. How did you do it? Close observation. Male frustration seems to me more focused, more linear, than female frustration. This interests me a lot. Also, I enjoy asking men about what they think it means to be a man. I like to hear about the women in their lives—how they view their mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives. I like to try to understand what it means to be “manly,” what it means for a man to think he’s failed to be manly. The more I understand men, the more I understand women. Also, when a story is about women—I consider the story to be mostly about the women—it makes more sense to me to feel them from the perspective of a man. Did you ever feel out of your depth? The perspective came naturally. If it didn’t I’d have aborted. When I write I’m doing it as an act of discovery. Also to get high. What I’m writing should feel at least as real to me as what’s physically around me. It should rise out of and also sustain a heightened sense of emotional reality. Otherwise, no point, no pleasure. The stories of yours that I have read are all set in the South among Evangelical Christians. Do you write with a Southern Christian reader in mind? Read More
August 30, 2010 At Work In Search of Proust’s Overcoat By Stephanie LaCava Proust’s Overcoat tells the story of Jacques Guérin, a Parisian perfume magnate, who was obsessed with the works of Marcel Proust. In 1929, through a chance connection, he met Proust’s family, only to discover that they intended to destroy the author’s notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Guérin ingratiated himself with Proust’s heirs, and through bribery and kindness, amassed a collection of Proust’s belongings and manuscripts, saving it from destruction. I recently exchanged e-mails with Lorenza Foschini, an Italian journalist, about her book. Why was Proust’s overcoat so special? Proust’s contemporaries, like Jean Cocteau, described his style as embodying an old, refined elegance. He was a real dandy, always dressed in large silk shirtfronts by Charvet, a double-breasted waistcoat, very light colored gloves with black points, a flat-brimmed top hat, a rose or an orchid in a buttonhole of his frock coat, and a walking cane. But even on the hottest days, Marcel didn’t remove his heavy fur-lined coat. This became legendary among those who knew him. How did you discover this story? Those who love Proust know that such passion often becomes a mania. This was so in my case. When interviewing the well-known Visconti costume designer, Piero Tosi, I could not resist the temptation to ask him if he knew the reason why the great filmmaker (Luchino Visconti) stopped production on his beloved project, bringing In Search of Lost Time to the big screen. In the early seventies, the American studios allocated a lot of money for this project and there was talk of casting actors like Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, even Greta Garbo. Tosi was invited to Paris to go over production plans. It was there that he met a very special person. My book comes from the extraordinary story that Tosi told me about this man, Jacques Guérin. I can understand the need to collect the letters, diaries, and notes of a writer. But can you explain our obsessions with a writer’s personal objects? Why a bed? A rug? A coat? It’s because of Guérin that a draft of Swann’s Way became available to us. The same goes for several versions of the last volume of In Search of Lost Time. My book is a story about the incredible efforts of a great bibliophile. Guérin was able to save important papers that offended the bourgeois respectability of Proust’s prude sister in law. After Proust’s death, his family began to deliberately destroy and sell his notebooks, letter, manuscripts, furniture, and personal effects. Proust’s homosexuality surrounded him like an invisible and insurmountable wall. His family’s unwillingness to understand this led to a history of silence that mutated into rancor. This transformed into acts of vandalism as his papers were destroyed and his furniture abandoned. Finding the coat is only the conclusion of a series of adventures and coup de théâtre that Guérin had to face. I do not want to reveal them now; you have to read the book. Of all of Proust’s objects collected by Guérin, which is your favorite? Read More
August 19, 2010 At Work Vendela Vida By Patrick Loughran Vendela Vida’s new novel, The Lovers, follows a middle-aged Vermont woman, recently widowed, as she vacations in the unfamiliar territory of Turkey in an attempt to re-examine her life. Among these new surroundings, her initial numbness about her bereavement gives way to doubt over whether her marriage was even happy, and she has to face up to a pain she never anticipated. Vendela Vida recently answered my questions over lunch during her book tour’s stop-over in New York City. What drew you to set this novel in Turkey? It was completely an accident. I went there for a month in June of 2005 when I was trying to finish my second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and wanted to be far away from the Arctic Circle in winter—the setting of that novel—and free from the day-to-day distractions of my life in San Francisco. I found a rental house by typing “Turkey,” “rental,” “cheap,” and “beach” into a search engine. I had no intention of setting a novel there, but a year later, this house and this town I stayed in kept appearing in my mind. I couldn’t get rid of the idea of writing about Turkey, so I did. Did the house you stayed in have any of the unusual contents of the vacation house in the book? Yes. I usually don’t like to take details from life, but, in this case, I couldn’t resist. The owners left out things that people typically wouldn’t leave out—sex swings, pornographic photos of the wife, books on sexual positions. My husband and I would leave the house to swim, or eat, or explore, and when we returned we would want to be in a neutral, uncomplicated place to relax and absorb everything new we’d seen and experienced beyond the walls of the house, but we were continually affronted by some new and intimate discovery about the owners’ lives. I wanted to put Yvonne, the protagonist of The Lovers, in a discomfiting situation like that. Lionel Shriver has said she writes partly as catharsis-in-advance. So she wrote about death to experience bereavement. Was this a motive for you in exploring the character of Yvonne? I write a lot from a place of fear. My friend, the writer Amanda Davis, who was killed in a plane crash in 2003, said that every day you should write about something that scares you. I was finishing this book just after the birth of my second child and the notion that this newborn could one day be estranged and the source of pain for me was also something I feared—and so I made Yvonne’s relationship with her daughter an especially fraught and challenging one. Even the vague idea of my husband dying is something that devastates me. So I was tapping into that fear when creating Yvonne, who’s fifty-three and a widow, and trying to imagine what it would be like to lose someone after spending half your life with them. Read More
August 16, 2010 At Work Tom Grimes on Mentor By Christopher Cox In his new book Mentor, Tom Grimes explores his friendship with Frank Conroy, who was the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for almost twenty years, offering the reader an unvarnished account of the vagaries of MFA programs, the fickleness of publishers, and the anguish and second-guessing that even the best writers suffer. He recently answered our questions about the book via e-mail. You write of Frank Conroy’s memoir, “What electrifies Stop-Time is its demonic anger.” There’s definitely some anger in Mentor, and a strong brew of other emotions. How did you marshal those into a finished book? Type angry and revise calmly? Actually, I never expected to write the book. Its existence is due to pure chance—an off-the-cuff comment by a Tin House editor who suggested that I write about Frank Conroy’s work. Instead, without giving it much thought, I began to write about Frank and me. Since the memoir’s inception was accidental I didn’t know what emotions I’d encounter. I simply knew that I had the beginning of the story—when I met Frank Conroy—and the events that happened during the sixteen years we were friends. Other than that, I handled what came at me, through my recollections, on a daily basis. Usually, I had no idea what would come next until I was just about to write it. Certain parts of the memoir clearly needed to appear: writing my second novel, describing its fate, continuing to write, and my relationship with Frank. But the memoir opens up into a larger meditation on friendship. I never really considered Frank my “mentor.” I considered him a friend and I was more interested and invested in that relationship than I was in our relationship through writing, once we’d moved past the experience of my second novel’s fate. Also, I revised sentences relentlessly and that marshaled my emotions as I wrote. And the quickness with which events moved saved me from the sandpit of self-absorption, which any memoirist absolutely has to avoid. Has Conroy’s initial snubbing of you at a reading in Key West influenced the way you act at your own readings? Yes and no. I’m polite to everyone who approaches me, but I understand that Frank had to be wary of strangers who approached him with questions about applying to or getting into the Iowa Writers Workshop. In retrospect, I understand his guardedness. More importantly, his initial snubbing of me sparked the anger that informed our relationship later on. I believe that if I’d never encountered him I may have been just another student who studied at Iowa but lacked a strong emotional reaction to and, ultimately, a strong emotional bond with him. Several years after the incident when we knew one another quite well and were very close friends, we were at a bar, somewhat drunk. I looked at him and said, “You know, the first time we met you walked right past me after I asked you a question.” Momentarily, Frank stared into space, puzzled. Then he said, “But I didn’t know it was you.” You are unsparingly self-critical in the book, especially about your second novel, Season’s End: “I’m a failure as a writer because I’ve overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent.” How are you judging failure here? My sales were lousy and my novels—no matter how good some people (or reviewers) told me they were, or how good I thought they were—hadn’t won any prizes, so I was left in a vacuum. The literary world didn’t provide me with a sense of my worth as a writer, or give me a reason to continue writing. Nevertheless, I did. That was personal, and that had to do with my ambition. I wanted to be a great writer. I wanted my books to occupy the same shelves that Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, and Pynchon’s books occupied. I wanted to write books that would change the way people saw the world. To me, that was success, and according to those standards I overreached. Had I set my sights lower, at age nineteen, which is when my ambition was first formed—before I’d written a word of fiction!—I may have been less tormented for the past twenty years. Read More