Eileen Myles, "Pathetic Literature" (Grove Press, 2022)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

New Books Network: Interview with Eileen Myles on “Pathetic Literature” (Grove Press, 2022)

Date: December 1, 2025
Host: Hal Coase
Guest: Eileen Myles

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Overview

This episode features poet, novelist, and celebrated literary figure Eileen Myles in conversation with host Hal Coase about their anthology Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022). The discussion delves into the concept of the “pathetic” in literature, how Myles curated the anthology, their influences, the shifting meaning of "pathetic," and the ambiguous, open-ended nature of both the book and the community it represents. The episode explores ideas of form, queerness, time, and devotion in literature, blending personal storytelling with literary theory.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Eileen Myles’ Literary Journey and Community

• Origins as a Poet and Writer – Myles recounts their move to NYC in the 1970s with the intention of becoming a poet and the vibrant, permissive literary community they found (02:29).
• Influential Communities – They describe a "tribe" of writers drawn to experimentation, queerness (broadly defined), and fringe culture, referencing figures like John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Samuel Delaney, and New Narrative writers (03:15–06:00).
• Pathetic as Distinction – The term “pathetic” became a badge of experimental, boundary-breaking, often marginalized literature and writers (06:41).

Quote:
"I think always, I mean, I'm very much a writer who was born in a community and a community of others. …It always felt like kind of a permissive tribe of weirdos. And that was a way to define my taste." – Eileen Myles [04:42]

2. The Genesis and Meaning of “Pathetic Literature”

• Evolving the Concept – Myles traces the lineage of the term "pathetic," noting its shifting connotations from meaning to insult, and cites a 1990s art show “Pathetic Masculinity" as an important touchstone (06:41–08:45).
• From Seminar to Anthology – The notion was born in Myles' graduate seminar at UCSD; assembling Valerie Solanis, Delaney, Walser, and others. The class “was received very enthusiastically” and became a “pathetic conference” memorable for its chaos and humor (08:55–10:05).
• Pandemic Assembly – The COVID-19 pandemic provided time and focus for assembling the anthology, with Myles “picking a writer every day” and embracing the project as “discipline” and “counting thing” (09:20).

Quote:
“It was a perfect thing. I was in Marfa…and I started to edit the pathetic book in that time. It was a very counting thing, who will I pick a writer every day, you know, and throw them into the book.” – Eileen Myles [09:33]

3. Criteria: What Makes Writing “Pathetic”?

• Pleasurable Perversity of Selection – Selections are highly personal, sometimes surprising both editor and readers (10:44). Myles realized, for example, that Kathy Acker’s work had “big pots of pathetic” despite not being an obvious choice, and Borges was included after rediscovering him during the pandemic (10:44–12:30).
• Organizing Reality – Myles links pathetic literature to “ramshackle piles of things” shaped by the internet and chance, matching the protean, boundary-crossing drive they see at the core of the pathetic (11:40–12:40).
• "Pathetic" as Uncontainable – Any piece of literature could be considered pathetic by finding the “turn that struck you”; it’s about boundary-crossing, mess, and deeply felt outsiderness (12:30–13:30).

Quote:
"It is a very personal anthology…because of the Internet and the way we organize reality now, I think we're all these weird, ramshackle piles of things, you know. And I think pathetic really meets that kind of…organizing reality." – Eileen Myles [11:41]

4. Qualities and Ambiguities of the Pathetic

• Big and Small, Facing the “Hovering Monolith” – The pathetic is liminal: pressing against but not quite breaching boundaries, “facing up to something that can't be faced up to” (13:50).
• Queerness and “Normal” – Pathetic work resists binaries; it’s not “normal or abnormal” but “whatever normal can't get a hold of” [16:02–16:11].
• Troubled, Motivated Texts – Many works are “troubled by something they can't quite get into” but this tension propels their creation, making the pathetic a “queer feeling” (16:11–16:33).

5. The Thread of Time

• Disrespecting and Killing Time – Myles and Coase discuss how many anthology pieces play with the flow of time. Literature as “wasting” time, asserting a unique “time code,” and finding richness in erratic textual pacing (16:35–19:30).
• Geographical Time Codes – Myles compares Marfa and New York’s “time codes,” explaining how open, “always unraveling” time in Marfa fostered the anthology’s creation (18:36–19:30).

Quote:
“So much personality and literature is…a time code. That's what one recognizes in work and often decides whether to consume it or not based on your ability to endure that time code.” – Eileen Myles [17:17]

6. Devotion & Anthology as Practice

• Devotional Reading – The book can be dipped into over time: “I would also dare such a word as devotional because…the book and the concept is devoted to that kind of composition” (20:03).

7. Form: Diary, Letter, and Genre-Bending

• Preference for Unique Forms – The anthology favors work whose “formal quality was unique, not easily defined as this or that” (22:50).
• Editorial Lightness – Myles resists the canonizing, policing role of most anthologies, encouraging readers to imagine their own additions or omissions (24:40).

Quote:
“I really like the idea that it makes the reader feel like they are…they could be the editor…that they have text that they would slip in or imagine as part of its continuity.” – Eileen Myles [24:40]

8. Performance, Reception, and Pathetic Happenings

• Live Events as Extension – Myles describes organizing performance events (the “pathetic happening”) as central to the book’s life, staging marathon readings at St. Mark’s and elsewhere, fostering collective and performative experiences (25:56–27:45).
• Critical and Commercial Understatement – Despite lively events, the book was largely ignored by major US/UK literary outlets, a fate Myles finds fittingly “pathetic”—in the best sense (28:48).

Quote:
“It was a party. This is…a collective experience. Everybody will come out for this…I knew that it was inherently a performance's book.” – Eileen Myles [26:15]
“That seems pretty fittingly pathetic or…end for…[the book].” – Hal Coase [28:48]

9. What’s Next for Eileen Myles

• Big Novel in Progress – Myles is working on a novel begun in 2013, planning to make “a thousand page book” and confront the challenge of scale and stillness by living in Marfa for a year (29:34–30:26).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It just… It just… It’s vague and it’s either… Sometimes it feels parental, the way childhood was just this incredibly tingly space that was always being marshaled by these adult figures… And yet that tingly thing, I think, is something that drives so much…” – Eileen Myles [14:17]
• “And that’s also for me really, where the weather, like queerness comes on. Not kind of... normal or abnormal; it’s just kind of whatever normal can’t get a hold of.” – Hal Coase [16:02]
• “I think it really like the idea that it makes the reader feel like they are... they could be the editor, you know... they would imagine as part of its continuity.” – Eileen Myles [24:40]
• “I have... my own experience as a writer is that when a book comes out, nothing happens.” – Eileen Myles [27:00]
• “Thank you so much.” – Hal Coase [30:26]

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Important Timestamps

• [02:29] — Eileen Myles on their start as a poet and entrance into NYC literary scene
• [06:41] — Discussion of the word “pathetic” and “Pathetic Masculinity”
• [09:20] — Pandemic as the moment to assemble the anthology
• [10:44] — On surprising inclusions in the anthology (Acker, Borges, etc.)
• [13:50] — “Big vs. small”: definitions and contradictions of pathetic
• [16:02] — Queerness and “normal”; texts as troubled, driven by the unspeakable
• [17:17] — Literature, personality, and time codes
• [20:03] — The anthology as “devotional” text
• [22:50] — Forms in the anthology and genre resistance
• [24:40] — Reader as potential editor; openness of the anthology
• [25:56–27:45] — Live “pathetic happening” readings and performance as practice
• [28:48] — Book’s low mainstream reception as “fittingly pathetic”
• [29:34] — Next project: a monumental novel
• [30:26] — Closing thanks and reflections

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Final Thoughts

This interview uncovers Pathetic Literature as a rebellious, unruly celebration of outsider writing and feeling—work that cherishes vulnerability, mess, and the power of failed or porous boundaries. Myles shares both the practicalities and deep philosophies behind the anthology, emphasizing its open-ended, personal nature and its grounding in performance, community, and ongoing conversation. The podcast itself reflects the spirit of the anthology: lively, accessible, and quietly radical.

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Transcript

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[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Hal Coase]

Hello and welcome to New Books in Poetry. My name is Hal Coase and today I'm really, really excited to be talking to Eileen Miles about their new anthology, Pathetic Literature, out last year from Grove Press. The anthology contains over 100 pathetic contributions to literature from the last 1,000 years. And they're from all over the world and they're all over the place. It's a self described sex club of thought with jokes. Eileen, who edited this anthology, is a poet and writer whose books include Chelsea Girls For Now, I Must Be Living Twice New and Selected Poems and Afterglow A Dog Memoir. They ran for President of the United States in 1992. Hi Eileen, thanks for being here. How are you doing?

[Eileen Miles]

I'm good Hal. This is fun. I'm glad we got here.

[Hal Coase]

Could you start by telling us a little bit about you, what you do and how you came to land on pathetic as a badge of distinction.

[Eileen Miles]

Okay, interesting. So I mean I'm a self defined poet and I've been such a person for I guess about 50 years. You know, I came to New York in the 70s with the very intention of becoming a poet and quickly got Into a world of writers that made it very possible. And I thrived in it. And my writing life became more complicated in good ways. Doing various. Everything from performance art to journalism to theater to Myrtle libretti, and started writing novels. Once I stopped drinking and drugging so much that it was only a thought and an aspiration. It became. I'd be able to. Became able to realize longer projects. But I think. I think always, I mean, I'm very much a writer who was born in a community and a community of others. And, you know, the way American poetry was when I arrived in it, you know, like, say I went to St Mark's Church, which as an institution, we defined ourselves in the 70s as the sort of the church of kind of the avant garde or America of American alternative poetry. But experience, you know, and it included people like John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg. And, you know, it was kind of queer in a way, but not queer necessarily around homosexuality or queerness, but just there was just another tradition, you know, that had a lot of connections to art and culture. So we saw ourselves as very central. But I think as culture has shifted and gotten more mainstream, I started to be defined more as experimental and. But there was just basically, it always felt like kind of a permissive tribe of weirdos. And that was a way to define my taste. And even before I knew anybody, I found people like Newt Hampson, who was about, you know, a writer, a Scandinavian writer who was about starving him. So only. Only, you know, only eating if he made his money from writing. And, you know, people who were devoted to odd experiments that were performative in a certain way and in living in particular. Maybe, I don't know, to me, I mean, like interesting and purposeful lives, but others might call them fringe. And so that, you know, so I think that wittingly or unwittingly, I found myself in a community of such writers. Like my peers in San Francisco were poets who wanted to write about sex. And so they kind of joined under a band called New Narrative. And that includes, very loosely, everybody from Kathy Acker to Robert Gluck to Dodi Bellamy to Kevin Killian, somebody, you know, a writer like Samuel Delaney, who was a sci fi writer and a queer writer, was always part of our tribe. The Boston poet John Wieners and. And, you know, and in the art world. Well, was it in the art world? No, actually, through a book dealer, I discovered a really important writer for me, Robert Walser, the Swiss writer, who, you know, took these walks and constructed narratives in very stray and gathered ways. So. So I Was always excited by writers who did unusual methods of composition. And I love. I came up in the era of Andy Warhol, who was about recording and divulging and fandom and excessive feelings and being very devoted to American pop culture in a certain way and. And also avant garde duration. So I think. So there was a. There was a well of taste, you know, that led me to pathetic. And I think, you know, and I think, you know, the book tells us, but I think I discovered. I mean, I was always aware of the word and it just got meaner as time passed in my lifetime And. But come the 90s, it had a. It had a short association through the critic Ralph Rugoff, who curated a show called Pathetic Masculinity in Los Angeles. And it included people like Mike Kelly and Tony Osler, but guys who were doing weird things with gender and kind of personal work in a way, you know, but theorized personal work. And I think it became a joke with some friends, mostly female feminist friends, that they were actually reinventing feminism for men, you know, and because. And these guys had been taught by feminists and Cal Arts and you know, I mean, like some of the history is loose, but I think it's pretty true. So I adopted the term and start, I think by the. By the arts. I was briefly a professor at UCSD and I. One of my powers was to teach a literary seminar, you know, to graduate students. And I had never taken. Taught a literary. I've neither gone to graduate school nor taught a seminar. But I thought, okay, this is the time to invent pathetic literature. And so I had a class and I made the first gathering of Valerie Solanis and Delaney and. And Walser and John Wieners and made, you know. And it was received very enthusiastically. And we just had so much fun with the word and the language. And we had a pathetic conference and it was so scarcely attended and everything fucked up and it was really funny and great and so it just lurked in it. And it migrated into a book of mine, Afterglow, which was about my dog at that same time who was dying in San Diego. And. And I think at some point I. I connected how. I mean, I, you know, I tend to. When I write books, when I construct books, I often drop in other texts that I'm obsessed with and decide the book will make a home for this. And, and that's what the book often grows around the text that is, you know, migrated into it. So an aspect of pathetic literature came into the dog book. And my then wonderful young writer editor Zach Pace at Grove said you should do an anthology of pathetic literature. And my agent was trying to. I mean, the whole thing. It's so funny how things happen in books. My agent was trying to. I'm the kind of writer that I have a reputation, but I never get money for my books. I mean, I get little, little tiny bits of money and I, you know, I make a living. I survive, But. So he was trying to construct a book deal that was like four books so that I could get something from the press. And so pathetic, you know, weaseled its way into my contract. And it was a book that I thought I would do someday. But the Pandemic became that day because it was a perfect thing. I was in Marfa, where I am right now, and I had been working on a novel. And it was very hard to keep focused during the Pandemic, at least at first. And so I found that the time that I was in that was really so glorious and excessive was really good for writing poetry. And I started to edit the pathetic book in that time because it just. It was. It was a little discipline. It was a very counting thing. Who will I. I would pick a writer every day, you know, and throw them into the book. And I had lots of time. I read. I read Borges for the first time.

[Hal Coase]

That was my next question. Was it because there's this sense of it being a tribe, so kind of people who you've always and had already carried with you, but were there discoveries for you when you were putting it together? Or did anyone that you then included surprise you in terms of, ah, no, this is actually pathetic or not pathetic? I know in the introduction you say, no, Gertrude Stein, she isn't pathetic. Right. But there's Juno Barnes. I was kind of surprised by Borges. And Simone Vale. Like, it sounds like it was really fun to put together. And did that involve you also surprising yourself when you were compiling it?

[Eileen Miles]

Well, there was. There was just a lot of pleasurable perversity in the choices. And in some cases, you know, like, I didn't think of Kathy Acker as pathetic, but then it became more of a. You know, and I knew Kathy and she was really a difficult person. And so I probably had read. I'd had read her somewhat, but not so much, you know, and so re. Delving into her. I was like, of course, there's big pots of pathetic in this writing, you know, but. But again, you know, like Borges, it was just like, psychologically, the Pandemic was so wonderful to be in those long corridors of Thinking and reading, Waiting that Borges. And then it was fun to find which was the pathetic piece of. I mean, like, it is. I mean, undoubtedly anybody could be in this book, and you would just have to find the turn that struck you. And it's very personal, you know, I mean, I think it was a very. It's a very personal anthology. And I think that's part of the fun of it, you know, like, I felt that, you know, like, I have an earlier book called the Importance of Being Iceland, which was a gathering of art writing and interviews. And, you know, and when I was putting that book together, I remember thinking, who is this book for? This is such a weird list of things. And so many people came up to me proudly and said, I can't believe you put in all my favorite things. And I think. I think we. You know, because of the Internet and the way we organize reality now, I think we're all these weird, ramshackle piles of things, you know, And I think pathetic really meets that kind of. That way of organizing reality. I think, too. I mean. I think. I mean, Robert Walser is very much the painter and saint of it because I think his composition is. Is so much that, you know, the way he describes himself as a, you know, cobbler of. Of, you know, just tapping things together and, you know, and. And I've been very inspired by that. My own writing.

[Hal Coase]

I've never read any. This introduced me to him, and I now need to go and read Robert Walter, obviously.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah, yeah. The Walk. Look for a book, a long essay called the Walk. Yeah.

[Hal Coase]

Cool. Maybe I just want to ask you about some kind of qualities of the pathetic. I mean, I know because in the afterward, and you mentioned this, it's kind of. In a way, the anthology also works as a dictionary, right. So these aren't really key words or anything, but I'm just interested in the language, like, kind of what surrounds the idea of pathetic. So in the introduction, you say it's work that acknowledges a boundary, then passes it. It being the hovering monolith, that bigger thing that confirms. And a lot of these pieces, they have this kind of like they're pressing against some exteriority, you know, like something. They're, like, up against something. Some of them are really, like, large and messy and kind of grandiose, and some of them are kind of curled up and much smaller. There's the amazing Sparrows piece on reading Moby Dick, kind of piece by piece. Can you talk about this kind of. Because I just found it throughout the bits of the anthology that I read this kind of big versus small. So pathetic is facing up to something that can't be face up to, really. And that facing up is kind of exhausting, but it's vital. And.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess it. I mean, I'm sure there's more complicated theoretical ways of talking about this, but. But I just do feel like in my own lifetime, I've so experienced myself personally and culturally and within cultures as always feeling this threat of erasure. Always experiencing something which is the world or my life or the day or my comfort zone, and then finding something that not only fails to acknowledge it, but is ready to knock it right down in the way of something which is either progress or cleanliness or fixing something, you know, so that it's just like. It just. It just. It's. It's vague and it's either. Sometimes it feels parental the way childhood was just this incredibly tingly space that was always being marshaled by these adult figures, you know. And yet that tingly thing, I think is. Is something that drives so much, you know, and is such a source of encounter of spirits and spirituality, you know. And so I think. I think that. I think that. I think the book, in so many ways, I've just made pathetic be the term that wants to protect that thing by saying that it changes shapes utterly. But it's something. It's. It's that je ne sais quad thing, you know, that. You know what I'm talking about? Kind of thing that inhabits every gesture and every thing that. That. That. That it feels like an invitation of a sort, you know, and even in one. One's own invitation to be alive, you know, fucked up idly, you know, and, you know, it's like. What is it. What is adorable, you know, and it could be. Can be ghastly, you know.

[Hal Coase]

Yeah. And that's also for me really, where the weather, like queerness comes on. It's not kind of. Not normal or abnormal or something. It's just kind of whatever normal can't get a hold of.

[Eileen Miles]

No.

[Hal Coase]

And a lot of the texts are kind of troubled, basically. Troubled by something that they can't quite get into what they're saying, but it's. It's there as a kind of motivating force behind the composition of the piece or why it's been written or.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah.

[Hal Coase]

And it's a queer feeling, I think.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah.

[Hal Coase]

I wanted to ask you about time as well. So there's. There's quite a. There's quite a few. There's a. I've Got a quote here from Nicole Wallace. No, I disrespect time because it disrespected me. And there's this.

[Eileen Miles]

There's a.

[Hal Coase]

There's also like a motif across some of them about kind of disrespecting time or killing time. Reading and literature is kind of a waste of time. I don't mean that this anthology is a waste of time, but the feeling of, like, time wasting. No, like. And it's interesting that you said you kind of put it together in the. In the pandemic days as well. So. Yeah, I don't know if you felt. Time sort of is a thread that holds the book together as well.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think the uniqueness of time and that so much personality and literature is in so many ways a time code. You know, that's what one recognizes in work and often and decides whether to consume it or not based on your. Be able. Your ability to endure that time code, you know, And I think the practice of writing is asserting a time code, whether it's regular or irregular, you know, and again, it's sort of like one can. One opens up a book and you start to read something and you're like, ah. You know, And. And, well, I mean, interestingly, Walter, who I love so much, I find his time code so disturbing because it's. It's so erratic, you know, And I think that's something I've adopted or something that exists in my own writing that I find. I. You either go for it or you don't, because it's not. It's not normative, you know, And I think. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, sociologists write about time. You know, I remember reading and Paul Goodman and it would be regarded as fucked up and racist now, but he would talk about ghetto time and being in whole neighborhoods where you just. Time really stops and you feel like anything could happen here and there's an empty. You know, and I. And I sought those places all my life, you know, like, literally and, you know, figuratively within work, you know, work that seems to suggest an opening into another space of another time experience, you know, and. And truly even, you know, the town. You know, I live in New York and I love New York, but they're really. New York and Mark are really two different time codes, you know, and. And this one is very conducive to writing because it doesn't ask. That part is part of it. It doesn't ask anything of me. So I can dwell in this kind of very passive, always unraveling space and make something in it. I mean, that's the thing that's interesting about open, you know, like open time codes is that it's. It's either devastating or fertile and perhaps depending on who you are or how you are.

[Hal Coase]

Yeah. Where you're at. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, I mean, even. I'm thinking now that even like the. That the anthology is a book is. Because I was saying to you before, no, I haven't read it all yet. I mean, I haven't read it cover to cover. You wouldn't know. It's kind of. It's this time in which you can. You can kind of pick, go in and out, you know. Yeah. It feels. Feels, you know, like something you can just kind of be with for a long, long time.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah, probably. I would also dare such a word as devotional because I think in a way, the book and the concept is, is devoted to that, you know, whatever that kind of composition is, you know, and it would mean, again, it would mean something very different to every one of these writers. But I feel like that's an aspect of it, you know, people are really saying what they're devoted to, you know, both in its absence and it's in its presence and then the practice of it.

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[Eileen Miles]

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[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Together on December 25th.

[Eileen Miles]

We have a plan. Plan.

[Hal Coase]

It's a bit insane.

[Eileen Miles]

Everyone in. He knows where we are. Watch out.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Get ready for one last adventure.

[Eileen Miles]

We stay true to ourselves, stay true to our friends. No matter the cost. Found you.

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[Hal Coase]

And I just wanted to ask you also kind of on that, I guess, about, like, form. Like, we have a lot of diary entries and journals and letters and poetry and at some forms, more pathetic than others. Or is that a kind of. You know, you're putting an anthology together. You need to find, like you said, the turn of the pathetic in even longer text. No. Was there stuff you had to leave out because it was just too long? Yeah. What's the. What do you think the relationship is between pathetic and how things are put?

[Eileen Miles]

Well, I mean, I think that I certainly experience a preference for work that's formal quality was unique, you know, was not easily defined as this or that. You know, I mean, Valerie Solanis play, you know, it's almost like a piece of work that didn't exist for a long time, you know, even though it was such a provocation and even part of how. How and why she Shot Warhol, you know, so it's sort of like, is that a. Is that a manifesto? Is that a play? Is that Exhibit A? You know, I mean, it's. It's something. And I think a lot of. A lot of the pieces have that quality of morphing, even as you look at them. You know, there's not much that's really conventional formally. But were you thinking about the book as a whole or. Or as piece by piece? I guess.

[Hal Coase]

But also, I mean, also hearing about the way you put it together, I mean, it could just go on, couldn't it? We get another one. It's not an anthology because, you know, anthologies can be quite. It's weird because actually, when I think about how maybe people think about anthologies as sort of. It's a canon. It's something that police. Is something. Something that has. That puts people in and out. But this doesn't really do that at all, I don't think. And that might be because it's so idiosyncratic that it's. It's kind of, you know, it's actually quite light. It's not actually, if I can say it like this, it's not. It's not really serious about. About kind of the limits of this stuff.

[Eileen Miles]

No.

[Hal Coase]

So that means that it kind of.

[Eileen Miles]

It could.

[Hal Coase]

I feel like I could almost sort of forget what was in here and misplace myself something else in here that I would like to see in there, you know, and then come back to and be like, oh, that wasn't in there. Well, I thought it was pathetic, but what does that mean?

[Eileen Miles]

You know what I mean? So then I think I really like the idea that it makes the reader feel like they are. They could be the editor, you know, that they have text that they would slip in or they would imagine as part of its continuity. You know, I mean, it was very funny dealing with the publisher. I mean, they were great in so many ways. They let it be as big as it is, which was amazing. And we just, you know, I picked the COVID and they were, like, great. And we, you know, so that was. They were great to work with, but they had so little ambition for the book as a. You know, I mean, I have. I'm very energetic as. I mean, my own experience as a writer is that when a book comes out, nothing happens. Everybody, you know, you work on this thing for so long, and then nothing happens. So you really have to invent things. You actually have to be the instigator of. Of the book having a life, otherwise it will not have a life, you know. And so I've been very, you know, on my own in terms of organizing tours and events and things like that, because it's just like. I just regard that as part of the labor, you know, and. And they were just not down with it. It was really funny. They just. They just thought it's an nobody comes out for an anthology. You know, I was thinking, no, this is not. This is like a party. This is. This is a collective experience. Everybody will come out for this. And it's really funny. And it did have. I mean, it was just like. The tour was amazing because there were just nights both. I mean, Los Angeles and New York were ridiculous. There were just New York nights where it was like a mob scene. It was like a. An opening, you know, and people. The people who read were just so on their hind legs in terms of being funny and performance. And it just, you know, it really was a introducer of people to other cultures and stuff. And I felt very proud of that. And. But the best thing we did was the pathetic happening, which was in New York, where we read the whole thing and we did it. You know, it would have taken 22 hours and so St. Mark's Church gave us the whole building and we just staged it in four or five locations simultaneously so that it just went on from like say 3 to 11. And it was a beautiful spring day and people were inside and outside and smoking and you know, just dipping in in the same way, you know. Yeah. So it really, you know, and I, and I knew that, I knew that it was inherently a performance's book. So whether the publisher agreed or not, we, I had, you know, we had that experience, you know, and a friend who was, who's in the book, Tom Cole, who is a playwright and also a theater producer, kind of teamed up with me and you know, we organized these things and we, we invited, it was like making a film, you know, we invited eight other sub curators, you know, and really made it wide and you know, and we've. It's funny, we, we largely videotaped the whole thing and then I think my dream was to make a really ridiculously short trailer, you know, like eight minutes or something. But I think it'll be longer than that. But, but Al Steiner and I are going to make a film or a video of it, you know. But it wasn't. Weirdly it was like uk. The Grove in the UK didn't. I mean, I guess it's available in, in the uk but they didn't take it on as usually my books are published by both. They didn't take it. And I just, it's really. And it got, you know, it got written slowly. It got written about. But I thought, man, this will be, you know, like pathetic literature. This will really get attention. Nah, not, I mean not in the. People like yourself, you know, like who found it. Found it. But not in that mainstream way. They just. Then the New Yorker wouldn't touch it. The New York Times wouldn't touch it. You know, we just like.

[Hal Coase]

I mean that seems pretty fittingly pathetic or pathetic end for. I don't know, it seems like there's something about the, the pieces in there that are kind of awkward and they don't really, I don't know, you know, it would be weird if it, if it kind of kick started some huge thing because actually they're so kind of. A lot of them are so like sort of, I don't want to say modest, but they're kind of still and quiet and, and curious and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it will have a life, you know.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah, no, I think it, I think it does. It seems like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The conversation continue. Thank you. Thank you so much.

[Hal Coase]

And so, final question. What are you working on at the moment?

[Eileen Miles]

I'm heading towards a novel that I've been off and on with since 2013. I just added a little scrap of it and then all these other books and projects came out. So my plan is to try and. I don't know how it's going to be, but to try and reenact the experience of the pandemic by basically, I'm trying to sublet my place in New York and, and just live in Marfa for a year and finish this book, you know, So I want to just sort of stay still next year and just be in it because the idea, my plan is to make really like a thousand page book, like make one of these really big books. And what does that mean? And what would that mean for me, this writer, you know, so. So it's a real challenge, which I'm frightened by in many ways, but excited about, you know. Great.

[Hal Coase]

Thank you so much for joining us.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah, yeah, no, no, it's great. I want to ask you a question. How old are you? Me? Yeah.

[Hal Coase]

I'm 30.

[Eileen Miles]

Okay. Because I just, I was intrigued by the color of your hair. Is it natural or are you.

[Hal Coase]

Yeah, no, no. We should say to listeners that this gray hair is not natural. And I. Yeah, yeah.

[Eileen Miles]

I was like, are you the. I mean, I once dated somebody who was 29 and she had pure white hair. And it was very funny because I would often walk into rooms looking for her and every woman who turned was old, you know, And I thought, oh, I'm dating, you know, And I thought, are you a young person with white hair?

[Hal Coase]

That's it. That's it. And what happens in Italy is that you get given the formal address more often because at a glance people think you're some old.

[Eileen Miles]

That's great.

[Hal Coase]

Who's coming for a coffee?

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah. Interesting. Let me ask you, so why did you choose to do it?

[Hal Coase]

The hair? Yeah, it was, it was just after the. It was like the end of the pandemic, like clubs were opening and stuff. And I'd never done it before and I thought that it would be fun, you know, and it needed that. At that time, whenever it was like the beginning of 2022, I can't remember.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Oh, cool. Yeah, Good choice.

[Hal Coase]

And also, I don't know, I don't know, probably in New York, I mean, in. I live in Rome.

[Eileen Miles]

Right.

[Hal Coase]

And it's not like a thing that you do.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah.

[Hal Coase]

People kind of look at you a bit weird, but that's okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of stand out, and sometimes that's a good thing.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah.

[Hal Coase]

Thank you again.

[Eileen Miles]

Yeah. Yeah. You're welcome. Thank you.

[Hal Coase]

Thanks to you guys listening. And come back soon.

[Eileen Miles]

And what's the last thing you said?

[Hal Coase]

I said, come back soon.