← How I Write
Loading summary
Transcript156 lines
- [00:00]
A
Ocean Vuong is on the show, and he's a poet, he's a novelist, he's a professor at nyu. What he's really good at is just writing in this fresh and enchanted and imaginative way. He has this way of seeing and experiencing the world that's alive, that's filled with wonder. And if you want to write prose that's lush, words that are vivid, stories that pulse with life, well, then you're going to love this episode. You wouldn't believe it, but how I write costs a fortune to run, and it's thanks to Mercury, but I can even do it. They're the sponsor of this episode and a banking platform that I've been using for the past four years to run my own business. When I started Howerright, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare. I got team members in four different countries, I think, to think about, like, currency exchange and taxes and expenses, and I was just dreading it. But honestly, banking has maybe been the easiest part. I can't remember running into a single problem, and it's because I've been using Mercury. I switched over from other, more traditional banks because Mercury is so, so well designed. It's easy to get started, it's easy to use, while also feeling totally legit and secure. And Mercury gives me all the tools to run a global company, like virtual cards, unlimited users, and the ability to customize each user's access level to exactly what they should see. And you know what? If anything goes wrong, if I have any sort of challenge, I can always talk to their support team, which is super responsive and actually helpful, which is pretty rare these days.
- [01:28]
B
And.
- [01:28]
A
And all that is why I can't imagine banking any other way. Mercury is a fintech company, not an fdic. Insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Column NA members. Fdic. All right, back to the episode talking about awe, mystery, wonder. I feel like that's so infused, not just in the way that you write, but in the way that you see.
- [01:48]
B
Yeah.
- [01:49]
A
And that has to be like some sort of muscle or something that you're cultivating.
- [01:52]
B
Yeah. Well, I like to think metaphor is a great example of that, because many of my students say, how do you write a good metaph? And I said, it's really about observation. It's about looking at the world. And sometimes a metaphor, a strong metaphor, takes years to come to, and the rest is arrangement and syntax. You'll get that. You'll find a way. You'll draft your way through that metaphor. From the Greek. It's A carryover, right? So you have, usually you have your tenor and your vehicle. So let's take a line from Isaac Babel, one of my favorite short story writers. Babel, writing in the early 1920s during the Soviet Polish War, in Red Calvary. Now you can describe a sunset in a memetic way, which is often what the newspapers want, the newspaper style. A red evening sunset along the hills. Fine, it's a useful descriptive, but it's mimetic. It's only bringing. It's mimicking the world, right? This is from Aristotle's idea of mimesis and poiesis. But the metaphor is a disruption of that. It's asking the viewer to bring themselves into that scene. So Babel opens the Red Calvary with describing a sunset as the low red sun rolls across the hills as if beheaded. And when I read that, I was like, that's a sentence the species never had yet. So a red evening sunset. The species has that. He opened the door, walked into the room and sat down. The species has that. But we have not had a sunset described like a beheading. And you wouldn't need to know that Babel was a war correspondent at the time. That context is embedded in the image. And that image is so incredible because it does something no other art can do. Film can't replicate that sentiment. You can take a time lapse shot of a sunset, but it would not be indicative of the connotations of a beheading. And so the second clause, that simile also changes, alters the rate of the sunset, is the speed of. You can see the speed go, move. So now Babel has not just given us a memetic scene that the newspapers want, right? So you'll never see, you know, New York city, you know, February 26, 2026, Trump descends air Force One as the sun sets across Manhattan as a beheaded cnn. You never read that, right? Because it's silly. It's all about information, right? So it's about efficacy. You want an invisible style. So that was really important for the newspaper, but it's done incredible damage to a young writer's imagination because the sentence has now been so timid.
- [04:55]
A
So in your class, the way that you begin is not with criticism, but just allowing people to read and experience each other's work. And I was hearing you talk about it and you're like, what you get from that is that you get really, really, really specific feedback that is like, geared to the individual, geared to the person. And I want to hear about why you do that. And then what that means about sort of your relationship with the rules of writing, if you know what I mean?
- [05:22]
B
Well, I think the idea. There's recognition, building recognition in what's happening in the work. Because sometimes we think the workshop is a place where correction is progress. So unfortunately, we bring a lot of the culture into our creative practice. And the culture often says you feed something into a machine or process and it should be better. But of course, every writer who's done it for about a year will tell you that some workshops actually destroy the work. You get too much feedback, it's all over the place. And sometimes you can draft beyond the pinnacle of the work. And so why does that happen? Right? That's one question that I'm always interested in. Why is it that sometimes you get draft one and it's just completely there and you're like, oh, my goodness, poetry gods, writing gods, thank you. That happens once every blue moon, if you're even lucky. And then sometimes you think you're writing this poem or you're writing this story, this novel, and then you get to, you know, the 7th, 20th, 28th draft, and you're like, oh, my goodness, it's not this at all. It's this other thing. Why didn't I see this earlier? Why did I have to spend so much time? And I think that moment is actually a moment of recognition. It's like my goal is, how do we get that work to be present in the room rather than just constantly correcting lines, right? Because one of the greatest dangers of being of a culture that fetishizes productivity is that you might have too much work. We all had that friend who writes a poem a day for all year or write a novel a month. And I know those folks. And sometimes it's much harder to go back into a pile of rubble to salvage the work than starting completely anew. When you center recognition and you say, well, what is it? What are the tendencies here? Because when you have a sentence, what you really have is consciousness filtered through syntax. And for every single person, it's different, right? If I said, like, write a poem. Write an Obad, which is a traditional poem that you write after the. The morning after when you're leaving, or you hook up with somebody and then you. The Obad is like the glorious morning or the melancholic, depending how it went. But if I said, well, write an Obad, every single student would have a different poem. And so we're naming the tendencies. We're seeing the patterns. Oh, you're a poet that's interested in trees. You're a poet that's interested in. Your verbs are enjambed, right? You're enjambing on your verbs, or your prepositions are on the left margin. You seem to like to launch into the next line. So recognizing patterns means you recognizing yourself. But imagine sending a first draft and everyone pulls it apart with their dogmas. Because when you approaching the work anew, you often have dogmas that you picked up years ago. And so you hear things like, oh, a poem shouldn't be like this. A novel shouldn't be like that. But the problem with those rules is that anytime you ask them why, after two or three whys, the whole argument usually falls apart part. So I think suspending that and building out the recognition to yourself, like, who am I as a writer? Why did I write this? Because sometimes the consciousness, the subconscious brings out this work and we only half know it, right? Half know it. You only half know it. Sometimes the line comes out and it's thrilling, but you don't really intellectualize it yet, right? We've all had that moment, I'm sure you had as well, where I'm like, wow, what is that? Right? Early on in my career, I would censor myself a lot. When that happened, I said, gosh, if I don't know it, then I'm not in control. Then that means I'm not really a writer. I should be. So I would censor him. I said, ah, let me pull back. Let me not. Let me put that on the back burner until I understand what I just wrote. But as the more I did it, the more I realized I don't want to judge what comes through. You know, just. You're like, whoa, what? Where did that come from? What does that even mean? But there's something in me that says, this is new. So I'll keep digging. It reminds me of a Japanese botanist who was tasked to find medicinal plants in the rainforests. And he had the record in his university, in his community for finding the most medicinal plants. And naturally, people come to him and they say, well, why? What's your trick? What's the secret? How did you do this? You know, this landmark work, and it's in a book called the Method of Hope. And he says, well, I don't go into the rainforest looking for what looks like medicine. I simply look for anything that's new to me, and I hope that it's medicine. Sometimes. Often it's not. Sometimes it's poison, right? But as we know, in pharmaceuticals, some poisons could be Redesigned as medicine. But he says, I'm just looking for anything new. I'm not looking for what came before me. I'm not looking for what looks like the other medicine, the other plant, the other species. Anything that's new, I put in my bag. And I think that when we suspend critique, the students are more willing to just let the novelty of themselves come into the room. So we're just putting things in the center. Right. When we look at a poem or a short story, say, I notice this. I see this pattern. You switch from past tense to present tense in this fifth paragraph. That's interesting. Why is that? Let's just put it in. And then by the third or fourth week, when we know the tendencies of the writer, we can gear everything towards them. It happens so naturally and seamlessly, and it's like relationships, you know?
- [11:22]
A
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.
- [11:23]
B
Yeah. You would never walk up to a stranger and say, I have some fashion advice for you.
- [11:28]
A
Right.
- [11:29]
B
Do that in New York, and you might, you know, end up in Bellevue, you know, But. But I think so. Just being close to someone and gearing it to them and getting to know and building that recognition, not only good for the community in a workshop environment, but for yourself, you know, how do you get to that moment faster? You really need 30 drafts, right, to get to the moment where you realize, oh, it wasn't about this at all. It's about this other thing here.
- [11:56]
A
Okay, so we're talking about how do you get your writing done and if you're thinking about work and how you can be more productive there. Well, I recommend a tool called Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management tool, and it's different from the other ones, which are loud and noisy and cluttered. They're feature bloat.
- [12:12]
B
But Basecamp says, no, no, no, no, no.
- [12:14]
A
We're going to keep things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters, which is just getting the work done, you know? Now, for us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we're doing with how I write, when episodes are being recorded, where we're recording them, the publishing day, all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look at. And I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Freed, he came on the show, and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestation manifestos. He cares about great copy. He cares about telling a great story. And him and his co founder, they've written five books, and I can tell you that they bring the same care and Attention to detail, to their books as they do their software. So if you're thinking about work and you're asking, hey, how can I be more productive? How can I make my team more cohesive? Well, then I recommend Basecamp. All right, back to the episode. Yeah. The big word that comes to me as novelty, surprise, pursuing it. Like, in what ways do you feel like you are pursuing novelty, freshness? And in what ways do you feel like there's more kind of this, like, pursuit of quality that's, like, more structured and refined and, like, actually less open to stretching the boundaries?
- [13:26]
B
Gosh. I think it's really about. It's always about stretching the boundaries because the boundaries are arbitrary. If you look at what's historically good writing, it is historically variable, what we consider strong writing. Now, first of all, if you look at Chaucer, what is literature? We're getting into a really fundamental question. What is literature? Well, literature is a relatively new fabrication in our species. It came the literature department, the English department, came about the end of the 19th century. And so prior to that, if you ask Chaucer, what is literature? He would say, anything written. If you ask Shakespeare, what is literature? He probably couldn't give you an answer. Right. Literature is kind of a blueprint for life. The poem was something used, like a text message. It was part of courtship. Right. So we formulated literature when we formulated institutions. And so it came as an organizing principle, as a way to gather literary work and organize it and study it. And so right away, I think it's important to kind of go back, like, is the Iliad a poem or a story? If you look at the bantam classics from the 50s and 60s, they actually abandoned Homer's original line breaks. Right. To just read as a novel. It's an interesting publication decision. They had to make it cheap, Right. But then they made executive decisions like, we don't care for the poem part. We just want the story part. Right. So I think it's important to go back to our species foundation and realize that everything has been hybrid and we put these qualities on it. And even the novel was not considered a serious literary endeavor until the late 19th century. Before that, it was considered feminine.
- [15:23]
A
It was considered women's work, like Jane Austen.
- [15:26]
B
Yeah. It was for entertainment, for the domestic men or serious thinkers only read the classics, poetry and nonfiction. Right. And it wasn't until after the Civil War when a critic, De Forest, I believe his name was, in 1868, he first credited the term great American novel. And after the American Civil War, it was a serious Moment of moral crisis in the country. And DeForest wrote an op ed, basically saying, what book will bring us together will make a testament. So for the first time in American letters, the novel was seen as a serious moral endeavor. And then everything changed, right? It was no longer women's entertainment, fancy work. And it became a kind of vehicle of national reckoning. And it also coincided with the newspaper, the rise of the newspaper. The newspaper needed to be standardized after the Civil War because it was completely reckless newspaper reporting. I mean, you would have crack journalists who would talk about troop deployments. And meanwhile, the soldiers, particularly in Union camps, would read newspapers. And any schmuck can go out and say, I think Lee's over there across the hills. And all of a sudden it was a. Which is why it was a headache, you know, for those early Union generals, because there was no standardization. Exclamation marks were everywhere. It was kind of vibes, right? It was kind of like this. It was kind of beautiful, but for information delivery, it was crazy.
- [16:59]
A
It was fake news on steroids.
- [17:00]
B
It was fake news on steroids, right? And the style was really wild. It was. It was naturalistic, at times whimsical. Right? And after the Civil War, alongside DeForest's call for the great American novel, newspapers sobered up and said, we need to have a standard practice. But what happened then was that the English sentence started to become tamed, right? It became efficient. It went for clarity. It had to have enough brevity to keep room for advertising. And so you went from, like in the newspaper. In the newspaper. So you went from the Victorian sentence, Matthew Arnold, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, which is more like a root system. It was just feeling. Because it began with oratory. Oratory was a way to win arguments in the 19th century. You have Frederick Douglass, you had Thoreau, all these folks going about giving sermons and speeches, and you have an audience that was still relatively illiterate. And so the subordinate clause, the long winded clause delaying the independent clause, kept your audience hooked. What is he really saying? We gotta keep paying attention, right? So you had language that looks similar to legal speech, right? A lot of subordinate clauses. And it was momentous. It was perfect for oratory. And naturally, people wrote the same way they spoke.
- [18:36]
A
Obviously, this was later. But is this like Churchill, like, we shall fight on beaches, we shall fight in the fields, we shall never surrender at the end. And everything that leads up to it is like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Exactly. Anaphora. It's like saying the same thing over and over.
- [18:50]
B
Yes.
- [18:50]
A
And like you're saying you're sort of delaying the punchline at the end. We shall never surrender.
- [18:55]
B
Yep. And that comes from the Bible Whitman used, picked up the King James Bible, employed an afra. And it's perfect for politicians. Right. Because you can build momentum. We will heal the working class, we will heal the racial divide. It's perfect for politicians because you can build momentum with the base, have an emotional pull and it's performative, it's a spectacle of power, and yet never explain how you're going to do it. So it's all the dopamine without the explanation. And so the Victorian sentence worked this way, but it was very rich and metaphoric. And so when we turn to the turn of the 20th century, the rise of the great American novel, the national novel, because other countries started to think about, well, who? What's our novel? Right. It also coincided with standardization for a commercial, efficient sentence. Right.
- [19:50]
A
It's probably not a coincidence that Hemingway was a newspaper guy.
- [19:53]
B
So was Stephen Crane, Jack London. Right. Orwell. The hallmarks of the 20th century sentence, which we now considered good writing.
- [20:03]
A
Sure.
- [20:03]
B
Right. So that's my bone to pick with that is that there are wonderful ways to write, but the culture in the 20th century has settled on mostly one way. They've allowed one way to prevail.
- [20:17]
A
I'm guessing you don't write with Grammarly.
- [20:21]
B
Well, it's interesting because there's a lot of talk about AI. Right. And I said, look, you know, AI is predictable. Its onset is predictable because long before AI, we have always been homogenizing the sentence.
- [20:37]
A
Yeah. I have a friend who, he did an experiment. He said, I'm going to take this bit from Shakespeare and I'm going to put it in Microsoft Word. And what does it give you? It gives you red and green squiggly lines. And he goes, this software program is telling me not to write like Shakespeare. It is like saying, do not do that. It's giving me auto suggestions what is going on? And even in something like Microsoft Word, which is. It seems so innocuous. Right. But I don't know, maybe 600 million people write with it. Maybe more. Maybe more than a billion people have used Microsoft Word. And just with the spell check suggestions, it's like imposing a certain kind of form that is the very antithesis of the person who people say might be the greatest playwright in the English language.
- [21:27]
B
Yeah, 100%. So, you know, AI didn't have to be what it is today. We could have built it to have doubt, to be exploratory. To have spiritual questions. But instead we build it according to the corporate model. Scaling, efficacy, standardization, standardization, homogenization, total consumed consumption, colonization of ideas and material. And we think that's just naturally good. That's just what. So it's interesting that the corporate model is kind of like a de facto model of progress and we never built. But it's interesting that, like Claude. I think they hired philosophers now to like, advise Claude. It's interesting, you know, like the. The liberal arts are coming back with this kind of technological advance. And so to go back to the. The sentence. I think the Victorian sentence was incredibly beautiful in the newspaper world. It was a mess. And so unfortunately, unfortunately, poetry, I think writing was actually on its way to painting. You know, Rimbaud's Season in Hell, a hybrid text of prose poetry. And so there was a turn, there was a kind of a fork between poetry followed painting and prose followed the newspaper. And so we have a sentence that in. If you look at any literary review you open any book review, they often prioritize the newspaper sentence, which is the invisible presence of the author. We have to say we don't like this work because the author wouldn't get out of their own way. Or it's pretentious because there's too many metaphors or what have you. And so we're asking the sentence to behave more like a butler. And this comes from the newspaper model. There's plenty of works that are written beautifully from that. But I'm advocating for a more Victorian style to come back and have more freedom to strange the world.
- [23:32]
A
The word that came to mind for me was right angles. Like a lot of writing right now has right angles. It's sort of coarse and harsh and it's very sort of refined. It's almost like it's been written with the ruler. And it's funny because you see in. It'd be interesting to look at a study of paintings of how many right angles showed up in paintings. Like, if you look at Impressionism, there's no right angles in Impressionism. And then if you look at like Kandinsky, there's like some right angles because it's more sort of abstract. But then you get to like, Post World War II, Penn, Mondrian is like all right angles. And it's sort of like the right angleization of culture and of writing.
- [24:08]
B
That's so. That's right. That's really great. And technology had to do with that industrialization. We now created more. We had around 1920, afterwards, after World War I. We now are a Species that can produce right angles almost perfectly. But then scientifically, we now know that straight lines don't exist in nature. Yeah. Even in that frame. Right.
- [24:33]
A
If you go.
- [24:33]
B
If you narrow it down to a molecular level.
- [24:35]
A
Sure, sure, sure.
- [24:37]
B
It's not real. It's an illusion. So I think the trouble for a young writer, a novice writer, to really innovate according to their terms, everything from draft one to the publication process will hinder that for the novice writer right now in the 21st century. And it begins with this illusion that. Well, first of all, if you're a young writer, you're often told something very, very familiar. Here are the models that you should look at. The innovative, daring masters. Wolff, Melville Baldwin, Juna Barnes, Ann Carson. And you're teaching them that in the syllabus. And then the naive, you know, hopeful novelist writer does that. They read the books, they create a matrix of their own. That's weird and interesting. The dichotomy is that the publishing world, and it begins with pedagogy too, is actually very cynical because when they did the homework they do, they make that interesting work based on these one of a kind, one of one writers, the Shakespeares. Right. And they deliver it to the professor, they said, oh, who do you think you are? You're not Melville. And you bring it to the publisher. It's like, oh, this doesn't look like anything we published. We need a comp. This doesn't look like it. But I'm like. Then you're like, wasn't that the whole point? So while we build up this fantasy of innovation, publishing because of commercial fear, is actually very conservative.
- [26:25]
A
Oh, 100%. I'm trying to make something in Hollywood right now. And it's a documentary style thing.
- [26:31]
B
Hollywood's even worse.
- [26:32]
A
Hollywood's even worse. I mean, like, when you think of how have movies changed, the one word that comes to mind is the sequel. Right? We just have sequel after sequel after sequel. And basically what you have is you have. The stated preference is we're innovative, we're trying to push the boundaries. And Hollywood used to be the leader of culture, but now it lags culture. So it used to be that Hollywood would actually take risks, invest in things, and then what they would make was the head of the snake. And now Hollywood is sort of the final. The final checkpoint that you go through to basically say you've made it. It's like you have to make it on Instagram, you have to make it on Twitter, you have to make it in your books, whatever. And then you get Hollywood at the end. And basically what they said to me was, you're doing a documentaries. There's only three kinds of what they call unscripted series that work. True crime, music and sports. Anything outside of that, we're just not interested. And I understand it from a business perspective, like, if you're trying to basically get your ROI and whatnot, there's certain risks that if you're trying to basically have a structured risk profile you're not willing to take. But when it comes to a creative culture and pushing the boundaries and taking risks and stretching the imagination, it just. It doesn't happen.
- [27:53]
B
Isn't it galling? Right? It's so stunning, you know, and I think that's my. I feel like my job is to preserve that sense of awe for the student so that they can keep that original matrix.
- [28:06]
A
Does the word enchantment come to mind? Like, it feels like we live in a bit of a disenchanted world. Is that.
- [28:12]
B
Yeah. And estrangement.
- [28:14]
A
So estrangement.
- [28:15]
B
Babel was writing at the same time as Victor Shlovsky, the Russian formalist. And his central idea by. He says something really important. One of my most. One of my heroes. So much of my thinking comes from Slavky's foundation. And he says there's no such thing as cliche. And the biggest taboo in any writing workshop was. Or any writer editor comments. This is cliche. And the problem with cliche is that we often see something like someone would say, don't write about the rose. It's a cliche flower. Don't write about grandmothers. God forbid you write about a grandmother in a kitchen, right? And so a student would say, okay, I won't write. I won't touch it. I won't touch it. But then if you keep doing that, you're not going to touch anything. So you'll end up with a narrow scope of this neutral, fearful, timid thematic work that actually denies yourself the subject of the world. Because he's like, well, grandmas do exist in kitchens, though. Are they just now exiled from all literary work out of this sphere? But that does happen in the classroom. Shlovke says it's not the grandmother, it's the idea of the grandmother in the kitchen. So now you have to estrange it. It's up to you to rescue the grandmother in the kitchen into a different mode of thinking by estranging that mode. Similar to how Babel rescued the sunset by making it strange through displacement.
- [29:46]
A
Is that like making it feel fresh again by displacement?
- [29:50]
B
So, like, for example, Take a flower. So you have. Say you have a rose, you put it in a bridesmaid's hair. That's familiar, cliche. It's there. You take the same rose, put it in Mike Tyson's ear, now you're somewhere else. So it's not the rose's fault, right? So instead of saying, I will not write about a rose, it's about, you need to reconsider the rose. Right? Take a look at Slavky says it best here.
- [30:17]
A
You read my mind. I was literally a second away from saying, pick up one of your books. I feel like this is a perfect time.
- [30:23]
B
Okay, look at this. He comes up with this idea of estrangement. And he quotes Tolstoy in one of Tolstoy's diaries.
- [30:32]
A
Okay?
- [30:33]
B
And Tolstoy says, I was dusting in the room, having come full circle. I approached the sofa and could not remember if I had dusted it off or not. I couldn't because these movements are routine and not conscious. And I felt I never could remember it. So if I had cleaned the sofa but forgotten it, that is as if I was really unconscious. It is as if it never happened at all. If the whole of life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been then. Slavski comments. Eats up things. Clothes, furniture, your wife and the fear of war. Incredible line. And so Shlofi continues. What we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing and not merely recognizing things. The device of art is the ostrania estrangement of things. It and the complication of the form which increases the duration and complexity of perception. As the process of perception is its own end in art and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the making of a thing. Babel Reads sees this cause they're contemporaries. They're working in St. Petersburg at the same time. And he's like, oh, I can't just name it, I have to re. See it.
- [32:07]
A
Yeah, there's at the Met, there's this room. So there's George Washington crossing the Delaware, sort of the famous painting in this room. But to the left there's this Albert Bierstadt painting of the Matterhorn. It's this beautiful sunset painting with these like pink orange hues. And I always think of that painting when I see a mountain. It's like whenever I'm in nature, I want to see, like Bierstadt Saw it, which is that seeing versus recognizing. So often I'm like, oh, it's a mountain. But no, Bierstadt was really looking at it. It's the same thing with Monet and the water lilies, Van Gogh with the way that he would paint flowers and stuff like that. Like, you look at Van Gogh and you're like, he was seeing not just the object itself, but the energy inside of those objects. And it allows us to see the world fresh again.
- [32:55]
B
100%. And even like someone like Hemingway, you know, that laconic style, if you do it now, because I'm not even arguing for maximalist sentences. I'm arguing for idiosyncrasy and strangeness. And even early Hemingway was very strange. You don't see that style anymore. And if you did early Hemingway, now three or four word sentences. An editor would say, this is too conspicuous. You know, it's too felt. Right? So even that is now cut off. So you have this newspaper sentence that is invisible, it is inoffensive, it is mimetic. Right. He walked into the room and sat down. The sunset glows through the evening. Fine, but that's a memetic sentence. Poiesis, for Aristotle, is the moment of process. It's a moment in between what's known. It's a moment. So you have a rose, then you have the bud. Those are two mimetic moments because they have names, they're nominal. The rose is a thing. The bud is a thing. However, there are infinite moments between the bud and the rose. When the rose tears open on its way to the final rose, when the bud bursts, all of that is still part of life. That's Poiesis. And Heidegger goes on to call this the threshold moment. What is the moment when the rose becomes a rose? Where is the threshold? And that, to me, is where so much poetry and wonder, enchantment and estrangement comes in. But we're taught to ignore that because it has no definition.
- [34:37]
A
Yeah. You know what I'm thinking of? Have you done any, like, video editing in, like, Adobe Premiere or anything like that?
- [34:43]
B
No.
- [34:44]
A
Basically what happens is you look at a timeline and you're sort of zoomed out. And then what happens is you zoom in. You zoom in, and then Premiere will show you the individual frames. Almost like, you know, that famous horse painting that showed, like, the galloping and how. There was a big debate. Does the horse do all four legs get off of the ground, or is one always on the ground? This was a debate for years. And then what we did was through photography, we were able to basically slow down time and. And freeze frames. And what I'm hearing from you is basically a lot of the way that you can basically enhance your perception is to somehow look and look and look and observe and sort of see how deliberate change can be, like in the blossoming of a rose or something like that.
- [35:30]
B
It's about perception. It's about slowing down. I think, like, 80% of writing is looking and thinking. The last part is syntax.
- [35:40]
A
What is looking and thinking? How does that actually manifest itself?
- [35:44]
B
Taking a walk. I mean, I imagine for me, like, for example, there's another metaphor by Richard Siken. He's describing stars, and he says, the stars out there tonight, comma, little boats rode out too far. And what's stunning about that is that the tenor is stars, the vehicle are boats, and the correspondence is what metaphors speak. How close is the correspondence is so thrilling because he's taken something that is a monolithic example of storytelling and culture. Stars. We look to stars to navigate. They are the foundation of our storytelling dreams. Orion's Belt, right universes. And he's reduced it to something completely, almost like a munch painting, something you see in a monk composition. Loneliness, loss, being too late. The modifier rode out too far. Stunning there, too. And you don't need to know that this is in the book Crush, which is about queer loss and desire in the 90s, in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. And you don't need to know that, but it's embedded into that position, that subject position of a historical person named Richard Siken, who is, you know, a social worker while he's writing these books, looking out and feeling that sense of loss and sadness, upending this monolithic symbol that stars are supposed to be and giving us an alternative something. Again, that sentence. I checked. Our species never had that yet. So, my teacher, Ben Lerner, I hope he doesn't mind me saying this. I was an undergrad, in his office hours. One day, I gave him a poem. He's like, this is fine, but I'll show you. I'm going to do something. I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you what we're after here. And he turns around, he types on his laptop, on his computer, he's typing into Google, and he says, you see that line you wrote? It's a decent line. Come on. Come here. 300,000 people beat you to it.
- [37:58]
A
Oof. That's a punch in the face.
- [38:02]
B
Sorry, Ben, I mean this with all love, but that was such an Incredible moment of education. Right? I don't think that's, you know, to me, he raised the bar right there. He said, oh, we're out here to write sentences the species has never encountered. Not only that we're out here to do that, but that it's possible in this lifetime. Because one's education is also filled with awe in the wrong way. Where the canonical is often given to us with too much awe, we are asked to. To be too awestruck by the canonical.
- [38:40]
A
Yes. Like, everything in a museum is gonna be great. Everything in a library is the best thing ever written.
- [38:46]
B
So you feel like that achievement is beyond your lifetime. So, again, it's incongruent. We worship the past, but when a student starts to do that, we condemn them. And we work with cynicism and fear. And what Ben did was the opposite. As a teacher. Up until that point, a lot of teachers said to me, no, no, who do you think you are? This is pretentious. You're just a kid. What are you doing? I'm like, well, I did what you told me to do. I read the greats, and I'm trying to do what they did. But Ben was like, go higher. You have something in you. You're able to say for the first time. And when I realized that, because some. But sometimes you do need sentences like, he walked into the room and sat down. You need that scaffolding to get you to the great poesis moments. The question there is, are you satisfied with what the dictionary has given you? That's the central question of a ride. Are you satisfied calling it a red sunset, or you call it a low red. You know, the low red sun rolling over the hills as if beheaded. Is it stars or is it boats rowed out too far? And moments like this is where the human being steps in and creates something closer to the thumbprint. You and I each have one thumbprint. No one else has it. What I'm interested in, in writing is not so much how to hook somebody, how to hook a reader, but how to stay with a reader. Because all our workshops, all of our writing seminars are built about capturing and possession, keeping a reader eyeballs, keeping things. But I'm interested. I'm actually more interested in being haunted. You know, there are, like. There's a poem by Robert Browning, meeting at night. I can't for the life of me remember it. I read it 20 years ago as a high school student. To this day, I still think about that poem. Every other day, I think about it. It's about a lover Meeting a lover at night. It's describing the boats moving through the eddies, crossing little farms, knocking on a window, hearing the match exhaust itself and then light up, and then the gasps of the lover recognizing each other through the window pane. And it has no pronouns. So as a little gay boy in Hartford, Connecticut, I thought it was about two boys meeting each other secretly. Who knows what Robert Browning meant, right? But the power of that is that that poem is downloaded into me. So I think syntax, although I said 80% of writing is perception, looking that 20% is everything. Because that is like the spike protein. It is like the downloading mechanism. And how we resonate with work or how work stains us is dependent on the syntactic clause as it's built.
- [41:32]
A
One of the things that keeps coming back. We were talking about cliche earlier. And then these things that you read or you watch, you listen to that really stick with you, that really live with you, you know, I think of Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon's this, like, punk kid, you know, he's all about reading books, reading books. I know everything. And then there's that great park bench scene where Robin Williams sits him down, just starts talking to him. And you could say, hey, you know what? What you read in a book is just an abstraction of reality. You actually need to experience the real thing. Like, that's a good sentence, but. And there's a good point there, but, you know, halfway through it, he says, if I ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable, Known someone who could level you with their eyes, who could rescue you from the depths of hell, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That just added power to this thing. Where 10 seconds ago it was like that, just sort of recognition. And now I'm really seeing it.
- [42:37]
B
Yeah, yeah. And it takes daring to write that, what you just said. It takes a kind of daringness to go. To break out of that kind of mimetic mode. And I think, say the sentences. Look at the examples. We had the second line, the Babel line, you know, Barrett's poem, that scene. If a student usually writes that, and someone would come along and say, this is pretentious. This is self absorbed. You know, this is too. But I thought, why not? Would you want Corma McCarthy to be any less self absorbed in Satry? Right. Do you want Toni Morrison to be less self absorbed, less, you know, indulgent in their maneuvers I mean, that's what we come. I came. The first artistic practice that I encountered was skate culture, DIY punk shows, and what's called and one mixtapes, which is street ball was like the early 2000s.
- [43:34]
A
And one like the basketball brand.
- [43:35]
B
Yeah. And one mixtape. Yeah, they had mixtapes. So what's interesting about and one was that it was never about winning the game. It was about the beauty of deception, crossing people, doing tricks. It was performance. It was like Harlem Globetrotters.
- [43:51]
A
Yeah, that's right. It was kind of a street ball type thing. It wasn't NBA.
- [43:54]
B
Yeah. And you would go and they would play games, but no one kept score. And if they did, it wasn't about that. It was about a communal celebration of the beauty of the body with deception. And I think writing is very similar because we're working with a linear art. And anytime you're working with a linear art in film, the sentence is a linear technology. It starts and it ends and it picks up again. Some cultures go up and down, left and right, what have you. So when you're working with a linear art, at the most fundamental mode, you're either satisfying or denying a reader's expectations through pattern. That's it. There's many ways. There's thousands of ways to go about it.
- [44:34]
A
Reminds me of music.
- [44:35]
B
Yes, absolutely. That's exactly it. And you talk to any dj, you know, when do you drop the beat? When they want to or when you deny it? Right. That sort of. Sort of what I call like literary edging is like part of. But that's what it is. Right? It's that, do you satisfy expectation or deny? Similar in a film. Oh, he's gonna do it. He's gonna do that. And then everything leads up to that moment, and then it doesn't happen. And then delight happens. Surprise, estrangement. Now you're not just looking at the scene, you're looking at what's behind you say, wait, this director has thought ahead of me. Now I need to pay more close attention.
- [45:15]
A
They know what I want better than I do.
- [45:17]
B
Yeah. There's an exhilaration embedded into that linearity. And so. And one, mixtapes were very similar. The part in a skate video. Because I would take videos of my friends doing skate parts to send to the local skate shop for them to get sponsored. And sponsorship means just free boards and T shirts. You know, it was very humble endeavor, but to me, like, that performance and self indulgence was so powerful and so celebrated, so. So I was really surprised when I went into the literary world. Which has this sort of like upper middle class decorum where you're not supposed to do that, you're supposed to perform this kind of self erasure of that crystalline newspaper sentence. So a student who wants to write with estrangement. And again, I want to say, you don't have to. Incredible work has been done without it. Gertrude Stein, I mean, Stein's interesting because she inspired Hemingway's sentence. He went to Paris, saw what she was doing. She was not inspired by the newspaper, but medical writing. She was a medical student. So the medical community was also at the same time trying to standardize their practice, right? So no nonsense, short, memetic, informative sentences. So Stein used that to write three Lives. And also like Didion Capote, you know, that kind of nonfiction fiction, it blended everything. It was also viable. So it's not the fault of these writers. They need to get paid. They need to get paid by Vogue, by Marie Claire, by Time magazine. So that style started to infect prose writing. So that's what I mean. Before AI, we've been already homogenizing the sentence.
- [46:59]
A
I mean, look at architecture, right? You used to have all of these styles, all these regional styles, right? You go to Sudan, you go to China, you go to Japan, you go to England, you go to France, like all these different styles, different kinds of stone, different shapes of roofs, different kind of brickwork, whatever it is, right? And now you look at downtowns, no matter where you are, and you just close your eyes and you imagine a new skyscraper that was built 10 years ago in Tokyo, in Seoul, in London, in Santiago, Chile, in New York City. What do you think of? You think of glass, right angles, skyscraper, the same everywhere. And the same thing is happening in architecture, it's happening in writing, where you get this global standardization homogenization and it's this copy and paste thing. And there's an entire systemized apparatus that is working to basically create a kind of claustrophobia in terms of what we make.
- [47:57]
B
The factory's upon us. Yeah, even when we say, I'm not on Wall Street, I'm not in corporate America. But you know, our country is so embedded with commercialization that it happens even sometimes without us knowing. Even the word workshop. It's a metaphor of production. It's a workshop. Let me clean up this sentence, let me tighten this line. Let me polish. So we have this fantasy that we are producing something, an efficacy as related to progress and goodness. Quality. Quality. If it's efficient, it's quality. And that's the fantasy of the assembly line. And the editor also would know that, oh, it's easier to edit if I get everybody to sound like each other. Even news magazines have house styles. You know, the New Yorker has one. The New York Times all have one. And it's important for them because they're newspapers. You don't want a really stylistic presence when you're reading about a flood in Chile. Right. You know what I mean? Like, you don't want the authorial presence there. You don't want an impressionistic take on, like a mass shooting, you know?
- [49:06]
A
And even with the New Yorker, insofar as there is a literary style, you pick up the New Yorker for that literary style. But then all the writers who write for the New Yorker do have to conform to that.
- [49:17]
B
Yes.
- [49:17]
A
That's the trade off.
- [49:18]
B
Speak from experience. Right. I work, and they're lovely. I mean, the New Yorker gave me, you know, like, one thing about. I'll say it's important to say is that they published me out of the slush, and I never. Because I sent into the slush, and I thought, there's no way they're reading the slush, you know, but to their credit, they're really out there looking at the culture, you know, like, from. From. And that's a long legacy from, you know, prior to that, from William Maxwell, you know, all the way back to the founders. But it's interesting. I wrote a piece for them, and I come. I was like, wow, I didn't know. I don't. Doesn't feel like me, but. But it's still, like, my ideas. But it was really informative to see how they were cutting for efficacy, because this was early on in, like, 2018. I was writing for them, and I learned a lot working with the editor. It's like, oh, this is what. This is what clarity can look like. So it was important to learn, but it did feel like, oh, that is a house style, but that's also a brand. They have, you know, readers who expect that. You don't want a kind of diverse cast of voices because it feels like you're not reading the product. So it's hard to keep that too. There's an army of copy editors and style editors that keep that intact.
- [50:31]
A
Do you feel like poetry is a kind of experimental testing ground for you? Right. Like, we're talking about pushing the boundaries. And then you have a poem, like Notebook Fragments, which is a unique form, a unique style. It's like, okay, I'm gonna go experiment in poetry, and then I can bring that into the novel later on.
- [50:49]
B
100%. And I think it's not a coincidence that particularly in the 19th century, there was no ontological, vocational distinction between poet and novelist. You know, Melville wrote both, Whitman did. Dickinson wrote incredible letters. She saw that as similar to some of her styles in her letters, particularly the master letters, has the same prosody as some of her poems as well. You think of Thomas Hardy, right, who saw himself primarily as a poet, even though canonically we receive him as a novelist. James Baldwin wrote poems quite seriously. And I think why poetry is a wonderful laboratory for the sentence, great word.
- [51:32]
A
Yeah, man, that's so good.
- [51:34]
B
You don't have to tend to anything else but language itself. You don't have to do plot. You don't have to have a character. And when that is out, that obligation is foregone. You then get to focus on transforming the sentence into a kind of elsewhere, estrangement. Right? And similarly, you know, interesting like that. One of the most daring moments, because my thinking is that in fiction and nonfiction, the sentence in the 20th and 21st century is quite timid because of everything we said, right? And oftentimes it's not even the author's fault that the editor would then kind of force them to it. If you want to get published, go through this process. And so it's a homogenization process. But there's two places where that doesn't happen, and it's poetry and nature writing. So in nature writing, mimesis would collapse everything because we already know. We already see it. So if you're just describing meadow, you just say, oh, there's a sunny meadow. Well, we've seen photos of that. We can see it ourselves. Why am I reading someone else telling me what I've already seen? So the power of nature writing and why it is closest to poetry and poiesis and estrangement, is that at the foundation, it's really bringing the subjective view of the writer onto nature, into a kind of synthesis, right? So when we're reading really strong nature writing, we're reading Robert McFarlane, seeing it through the filter of Robert McFarlane, through that sentence. And that's the delight. Oh, I never saw a meadow that way. And one of my favorites, J. A Baker, does the same thing, right? Just look at this sentence where he's describing mud all day the low clouds lay above the marshes, and thin rain drifted in from the sea. That's a memetic sentence, right? You can see that anywhere. Clear then mud was deep in the lanes and along the sea wall, thick ochre mud like paint, oozing gluttonous. Mud that seemed to sprout on the marsh like fungus, octopus. Mud that clutched and clung and squelched and sucked. Slippery mud, smooth, treacherous as oil mud, stagnant mud, evil. Mud in the clothes, in the hair, in the eyes. Mud to the bone. On the east coast in winter, above or below the tideline, man walks in water or in mud. There is no dry land. Mud is another element. One comes to love it, to be like a wading bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meets, where there is no shade and nowhere for fear to hide. We're not talking about mud anymore. We're not talking about trees. So Baker's interiority has leached because he's allowed it. The dam has broken, the dam of mimesis has broken, and he's allowed that interiority to come out. And I will never look at mud the same.
- [54:53]
A
Right?
- [54:53]
B
Mud, evil. Right. Where no fear can hide. Like, what are we talking? And of course, we don't need to know that Baker was chronically ill while writing this book. Right? And so a moment like that, if he just said. If he just kept on the mimetic mode and just said, thick ochre mud, oozing gluttonous mud, octopus mud.
- [55:22]
A
So many different kinds of mud. It's like when you look at a crayon, it has all the different colors of blue.
- [55:27]
B
Doesn't it make you want to laugh? The delight.
- [55:30]
A
Delight, yeah.
- [55:31]
B
Of watching an artist discover, you know,
- [55:33]
A
what word we haven't had here. That I think is a really important kind of energy to inject into this. It's just fun. Like, it's like the crayons. Like, Crayola has all the different colors of blue. There's, like, sky blue. There's, like, marine blue. There's all these different blues. And what do they do beyond just make you smile? And it's the smile, yet childlike. And it just opens you up to the majesty, the wonder, the subtlety, the grandeur of this world and fun. It's like you have it inside of you, but once you get away from the fun, you stop seeing it.
- [56:06]
B
Right? Right. And sometimes the novel and the nonfiction article has an assignment. Right. The plot is an assignment. The investigative work is an assignment. So it takes over these sort of tangential explorations. So when nature writing doesn't have that plotted assignment, so you can do something very close to poetry, when you take the assignment out, you get language. But I'm convinced that you can bring this into anything with an assignment. I Think you should write, I wouldn't be so mad if CNN wrote the President ascended Air Force One as the sun set, as if beheaded. That might be truer to the ethos of where we're at. Look at. It's funny you said crayons. Look at what Shlosky says later on. In one description, for instance, Tolstoy does not say birch, but quote, a big curly headed tree with a luminously white trunk and branches. He writes again later. Tolstoy writes in his diary, Anderson's fairy tale about the clothes. The goal of literature is to make people understand things so that they believe the child. Crazy, right? But there's so much there because he's basically saying somewhere along the way we have lost. We have lost faith in children in the childlike way, because of language. Definition is the enemy of imagination. The paradox is that we work with material that is defined.
- [57:46]
A
Yeah. Well, it's funny because whenever I use a dictionary, I use a specific one, which is Webster's 1913 dictionary. It rocks.
- [57:57]
B
Yeah.
- [57:57]
A
And one of the things you realize is a really good definition can expand your sense of what a word can be. And they have beautiful etymologies and these lush, vivid descriptions. Like, take a word like solitude.
- [58:12]
B
Yeah.
- [58:13]
A
Now if you look up solitude on Google, it'll be like a kind of loneliness. It's not what solitude is. Solitude is the sense of melancholy, this sort of internal reflection, maybe a little bit of like a hint of sadness or whatever it is. Right. And yeah, I think so much of modern definition does restrict, but sometimes it can really expand. And I think that's what's going on with that mud. It's the muddy of the mud of this, the mud of that, the mud of this, the mud of that. And all of a sudden by describing mud, you've just like exploded the sense of possibility in mud.
- [58:49]
B
Yeah. And that's why the OED is so important for every writer.
- [58:51]
A
What's oed?
- [58:52]
B
The Oxford English Dictionary. It's English of etymologies. So you have one definition, then say, oh, it comes from the French, which means X, Y, Z, which was taken from the Latin, which meant that. So you're like, oh, wow, we are. It's a. It's almost like a family tree of definition from the.
- [59:09]
A
One of my favorite ones is the word passion. Yeah, you hear passion. Ah, so passionate, so energy, fire, intensity. It's kind of this like radiant, which sort of excite excitement. But the word passion comes from suffering. Like the passion of the Christ.
- [59:23]
B
Of the Christ.
- [59:24]
A
And like to almost be crucified by the thing that you're giving yourself to. And when you think of passionate, like, what are you passionate about? It doesn't need to be. What are you excited about? It's like, what are you willing to suffer for? Same word, completely different meanings once you follow the etymology.
- [59:44]
B
Yeah. And you can't unsee it. Right? And so I think, like, we're talking about poetry as a laboratory. I think anything could be a laboratory if you trust that you can return to the assignment. So the question then is, how do you take that laboratory of poetry, of nature writing into a novel? It's like you give yourself permission to have a experimental moment, knowing that you can return. And, you know, McCarthy does this really well, right? He allows this sort of wild tangents in metaphor.
- [60:16]
A
Cormac.
- [60:17]
B
Yeah, Cormac. And he comes back, he says, well, I know I'm going to keep telling the story, but it's really hard, you know, for a young writer to write that way now, because I think editors will kind of call that. And I was really lucky because I started as a poet and I was really fortunate. You know, my editor just passed this week. Anne got off. And I was fortunate because I was trying to sell the novel and I met 11 publishers, editors. And, you know, it's interesting. They all. I was lucky. They all wanted it, but they all had, like, caveats. They all had that. They're all like, okay, but this, this is a very, you know, a baroque style. Our readers and even some. I keep thinking about this, which annoys me to no end. But there was a moment where one of the editors said, what about the reader in the Midwest? And I said, how elitist, you know, like, what about them? They have a nervous system. They have read everything probably you and I have read, right? What do you mean? We have to dumb it down for people in a large part of this. What are we talking about here? Right? But I'm like, it was such a wonderful education because I saw how cynical it is, right? You have that kid who's like playing with the crayons, does the equivalence with the crayons in writing when they become a writer. And then you get to that moment, the final boss, right? And the final boss is saying, what about people in the Midwest? I'm like, have you been there? What about them? Like, why are we talking about them as if they're remedial, right? And I was lucky enough to go with someone who just saw what I was coming after. But of course, she's edited Pynchon, she's edited Mary Oliver, you know, Ann Gadoff. So I was really lucky, too, right? So, like, there's a historical background of how I was able to write on my terms. And. And this is where we get into a phenomenon that the theorist Yuri Lottman called. He said that all literary works are read on the matrix of two temporal lines, a synchronic reading and a dichronic reading.
- [62:31]
A
Synchronic and diachronic and diachronic.
- [62:34]
B
And it brings us to this phenomenon.
- [62:36]
A
What do those words mean?
- [62:38]
B
Synchronic reading is reading in time, in a contemporary space. A diachronic reading is reading a work through time. So, for example, let's use Shakespeare. We do not have access to a synchronic reading of Shakespeare anymore because Shakespeare's plays were written for the stage. So a synchronic experience of Shakespeare would have to be going to the Globe Theater, buying a ticket, and then experiencing it that way. That's watching it unfold entirely. Yes, right. Not as literature as we know it. Again, literature as we know it didn't exist in Shakespeare's time. So Lottmann says, when we read Shakespeare, we're reading it diachronically because we're reading not only just the text, but we're reading everything written about Shakespeare. The reification, the cultural shift, all the essays, all the thinking, the canonization, which is why we tolerate the archaic language, the thy's and the thou. If you and I wrote earnestly thy and thou in our next books, you're
- [63:31]
A
like, what do you do?
- [63:31]
B
Like, what the fuck? What are you doing? This is obnoxious, right? And because when a reader picks up Shakespeare, there's a diachronic kind of suspension, right? That happens like, oh, I'm reading Chaucer, I'm reading. I understand that there's a diachronic layering, whereas you and I would read each other synchronically. But this is really interesting when you think about publishing industry. So a very common thing with, you know, mimetic writing, like that kind of clean, you know, style that we're talking about, is that a very common experience that I've talked to with readers, and I've had it myself, is that you read a book, say a big magazine, tells you at the end of the year, these are the most important books to read. If you're like an intellectual being on top of your game, right, this is what you should do if you want to be on the end and you read the book and then you think, I mean, this is a lovely book, but I feel Like, I read this before. Like, didn't I read this last year? Didn't the same magazine tell me to read a book similar to this? Then you're like, didn't I read this book written in this style when I was in high school five years ago? And why am I reading the same book?
- [64:43]
A
So it's a different book, but it's the same book.
- [64:44]
B
It's the same book. And so it's no wonder that readers have this fatigue and mistrust and readership is going down because they're like, I'm being pumped into the system of false valuation when I know better what's happening there. What's happened is that publishing works synchronically. It's in seasons. A book is published in a spring season, a fall season, and then it's collected within the year. That's a synchronic existence. At the end of the year, you have a similar amount of books. All these writer. The young writers coming through, and they're edited out. All of their idiosyncrasies, all of their estrangement, all their wonder, enchantment edited out. And they all have the same thing. And they feel good. They feel I'm making progress. Right. My editor loves it, My agent loves it. And they even get it published. And even the reviewers love it. Right. Because. Or there's like, there's an obligatory praise when if it's not offensive, then we just kind of say, great, cool. Now there's 30 or 40 of them that look like that at the end of the year. Because of the rule of scarcity, only a few of those 30 get picked to be the one. They all sound similarly because they went through that homogenization process. Not always. Sometimes something brilliant comes through. They come through, and then one or two gets picked as the chosen one. And then everyone else is like, what happened? I was praised all the way up until this point, until the reader comes in. Because the reader does not have a synchronic relationship with time. They have a diachronic relationship. The reader was reading Melville last week. They were reading Shakespeare. They were reading Baldwin. They were reading Annie Dillard. And then they picked up this book at the bookstore. They don't have that synchronic. That's a hallucination. Life doesn't exist on this sort of catalog. Right. We read books all over the place.
- [66:40]
A
This reminds me of Rotten Tomatoes. Sometimes you'll see major divergence between the. The audience score and the critic score.
- [66:49]
B
Right, right.
- [66:50]
A
You know, the. The critics will rate it like 96.
- [66:53]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [66:54]
A
And the audience will be like, no, it's a 31.
- [66:56]
B
Right.
- [66:56]
A
Or you'll see the audience rate it as, like, 94. And the critics is, like, 27.
- [67:01]
B
Yeah.
- [67:02]
A
And it's always, I love looking at those. Like, I love watching those movies. Why was there such divergence between the system and the machine and their eyes and how they see versus just the people?
- [67:13]
B
Yeah. Cause the critic was at Sundance.
- [67:15]
A
Exactly.
- [67:16]
B
They were swayed by that.
- [67:17]
A
They're trained. They grew up going to the bright film school. You know, they go to the Hollywood parties or whatever.
- [67:22]
B
And it also doesn't mean that they have better taste. It just means that their taste is manufactured in the synchronic system. Because sometimes a critic is a person. They have an editor, they have a brand. Some of them might not believe they do, but they have a brand they're trying to uphold. So they also have a pattern. They say, oh, I praised too many films in March, so I gotta be a little tougher now. I mean, they'll say they don't do that, but we all have that kind of subconscious work. But it's trapped in a synchronic cycle. And Lotman brilliantly brings up this idea that actually, literature exists mostly in a diachronic. The synchronic cycle is only a year. Once the book is published, then the publishing industry moves, like most commercial industries, to the next year. The next crop goes in, you're forgotten. So there's a kind of moment of dismay for that writer who was pushed into the box so young. They wrote in the box. They stayed in the box. They published in the box. The critic was like, all right, it's in the box. It's recognizable. It's fine. Obligatory clap. Now it's out. The moment of truth is when it lands into the reader. And the reader's like, I read this last year. I swear to God, I read this. I paid $32. That's my family's meal. That's, you know, that's. That's, you know, fees for my child, for daycare. Like, what am I doing? And that's when the moment of truth happens. And often it's too late. And a young writer who was forced to conform through the decades don't realize that moment of reckoning until the book is published and the reader says no to it. Can you.
- [69:03]
A
The sort of theme throughout all this is perception, reenchanting the world and breaking from the chains, these sort of invisible chains that are imposed around us. And one of the most interesting ideas there is that it's through Benevolence it's through benevolence. And so if I come to you and I say, ocean, ocean, I'm one of your students, and I'm trying to. I want to write, and I want to live my life differently. In order to achieve that, what do you tell me?
- [69:35]
B
You have to be. There's a. I mean, what we often talk about in writing school is writing techniques, metaphors, that's all fine. But one thing that I found is,
- [69:46]
A
like, words on the page.
- [69:47]
B
Yeah. And it makes sense. It's a studio. You go into the studio, you do work. But one thing that's rarely talked about, that's so essential, is two things. Daringness and disobedience.
- [70:01]
A
What's the difference?
- [70:03]
B
Well, daringness is the willingness to risk it, make a wager and see what happens. Right. And. Or you correct yourself and you say it's better to step back in line and be praised accordingly and move on. Even if I sound like everybody else. Right. So conformity and innovation are two very discongruent, incongruent relationships with so much of art making beyond writing. Right. Any artist, I think, could tell you better than I, because I only work in two mediums. But I think that. So then, are you. Do you have enough courage? Do you not have enough fortitude to risk it? And I think maybe I had that because I was a skater. Like, I was a skate kid, and the idea of skateboarding was that you threw yourself off an ace there, never expecting to land it. Like, landing the trick is like a miraculous moment of, like, cosmological agreement with gravity, physics, and time. Right. You almost feel chosen when you land a trick like that. And so the idea that failure is actually not just even a prerequisite to success, but part of experiencing life. And sometimes all you do is throw yourself off an eight stair, and all you have is bruises and a broken ankle, and that's it. There's not even a payoff. And yet there is a delight in doing it with your friends and seeing your body move through space. And so I think for me, the. The expectations were so low in that sense, where I'm just like, I get to write books. My family came from factories and nail salons. Like, I get to try. That's my vocation. My job is to try things and then go like this and throw it over my shoulder. Why wouldn't I try everything? Why wouldn't I relentlessly throw myself off an eight stair?
- [72:05]
A
Like, what I'm hearing from you is basically, when you're writing, you're just Trying all tricks. And then a book, a poem, is a collection of the tricks where somehow, through cosmological agreement, it actually worked.
- [72:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. And being open to the curiosity, one of my favorite poets, Eduardo Caral, compared moss growing to applause.
- [72:23]
A
To applause. Like clapping.
- [72:24]
B
Yeah. He says, this is a very sophisticated simile. Moss grows along the tree, like applause. What he's after there is that the image is not congruent. There's not correspondence between applause, a crowd applauding and moss. But he's not after that correspondence. He's after the nature of applause, which is nebulous. Growing quick to moss. So by using applause, he actually increases the rate that the moss grows. You see it, right? You see that it's.
- [73:01]
A
It rules.
- [73:01]
B
Moss grows. You can't even see it grow. Right. But what he did there, similar to the Babel line, was that by using applause, he retroactively changes how the applause, how moss behaves. So he's comparing the behavior of the two correspondence rather than the image. So that's a tricky one, because you would think, and if you gave me that assignment, I would forego it. I was like, ocean, compare moss to a plot. I'm like, no, thanks. I want to leave that one. But Eduardo Corral, you know, he won the Yale Younger for that book, right? For good reason. He's hunkered down. And I asked him, I said, how long did it take you to write that book? It's 45 pages of poetry. Nine years. You can tell. This is a man who's looked at moss for a long time.
- [73:50]
A
Long time.
- [73:51]
B
Like, he's looking at beyond what it is, his definition. He's looking at it beyond applause. He saw the nature essence of applause, and he harnessed it and asked it to modify this thing that is stagnant. And you don't need to know that this is in a poem called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, that the exuberance of life after such mass death and loss, the thrillingness of the renewal, the lucency of that growth, you don't need to know that to feel that. That rejuvenation in that simile.
- [74:27]
A
Last question. Can you talk about the way that language and your deepening relationship with it is this tool that gives you might and power and expands your reality, but also the way that language sort of is limited and contracts what we're able to see? Because you are like, you're a citizen of Vietnamese and English, and there's things that you can see through Vietnamese that you can't see in English and vice versa. And, like, you have this master command of language, but also this deep sense of the futility of it.
- [75:04]
B
Yeah. Oh, that's a great. Thank you for that question. Well, I think being bilingual taught me that all words are stained by things beyond the definition. Right. And, like, even the word. And it's how they're used, not the definition. Right. So, like, the definition of the word sadness in Vietnamese would be a feeling of sadness, but how it's used. So Wittgenstein, one of my favorite philosophers, says the meaning of a word is its use. It's not the definition, it's its use. Use changes definition. The dictionary has to catch up to us, and that's really important for students to learn because they often feel intimidated by the dictionary and standardization. I need to learn the rules to be a real writer. It's like. No, it's. You use it. How you use it is how the dictionary will. We introduce new words all the time. Right. Netflix and Chill throwing Shade.
- [75:59]
A
Literary edging.
- [76:00]
B
Yeah, we'll call Webster, see what happens.
- [76:04]
A
But word of the year 2026.
- [76:06]
B
But I think edging. Edging. Right. Edging itself. That's a new word. And so I think how we use it. And so that's why it's important to remember that what happens on the margins of society and power is actually where things are most mobile, most dynamic. And it's often what's in the margins that changes the culture. The culture then captures what's on the margin. Commercialize it, brings it into the center, shoots out a product. Right. Lotman talks about this too. He says that there's a concentric circle to how culture works. It engulfs innovation, brings it into the center, and then spits out homogenization. And it keeps doing that until things are constantly destroyed. And so that goes to the futility of it. Right. What's the point of all this? And I think it's important for me to say that, you know, language has made my life. I am. I'm here because of it. I've been able to materially support my family because of this thing that has no weight, you know? And in terms of speech, we can't even see it.
- [77:15]
A
How about that?
- [77:16]
B
Yeah. And so. And on the other hand, it's important to say that literature and writing doesn't really save us the way we always wanted to, because it's still the tool of tyranny. You know, authoritarian regimes, the first thing they do is capture newspapers and radio
- [77:36]
A
stations, change the stories.
- [77:37]
B
Right, Right. So it's always a ground that we're tussling with. And you know, look at, like, there's a man named Thomas Thistlewood. He was a slaver in Jamaica in the 17th century. And we only know about him because he left detailed diaries of all of his crimes. Right. He sexually assaulted and raped his slaves and monstrous acts. We also know because of his diaries that he had one of the largest libraries that mirrored the Enlightenment ideals. He read Chaucer, Milton. He read astronomy. He read nautical explorations. He wrote poems you can imagine. And so you say. And then you think of, like, you know, the SS officers who ran the gas chambers going home and reading Roke and listening to Beethoven. What's all that art for if you can still do something so monstrous, if you can be so inhumane using humanity's greatest treasures.
- [78:40]
A
Wow.
- [78:41]
B
So for me, I think it's. There's a skepticism ceiling that I am working within this material. But I don't have this romantic notion that what I do will do anything beyond what happens. The magic we see on the page. I don't have that. If it does, great. Sometimes literature does do that. You know, Harry Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin created the Civil War according to Lincoln, which freed millions of people. So it happens. But I don't wake up counting on that because there are examples on both sides historically.
- [79:19]
A
Ocean, thank you. You're invited on the show at any time, literally. I could talk to you for the next 27 million hours and we still wouldn't run out of things to talk about.
- [79:30]
B
Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for tolerating my rambling.