This

We writers, aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands, (interoffice memos, supermarket receiptes, etc.) it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream.
None of this disqualifies my passionate urgency at the task of making the giant octopus in my mind's eye visible to yours. It doesn't make the attempt any less fundamentally human, delicate, or crucial. It makes it more so. That's because another name for the giant octopus I have in mind is negotiating selfhood in a world of other selves--the permanent trouble of being alive. Our language has no choice but to be self-conscious if it is to be conscious in the first place.

Jonathan Lethem



I'm still looking for the crazy wherever I can find it. It's hard enough to kick against the plastic Victorianism of our culture, the social sarcophagus of daily life. Even attempting it can make you crazy, let alone succeeding as well as Dick (Philip) did. I like helpless braggarts, obsessive fools, angry people. My ears prick up at the word pretentious--that's usually the movie I want to see, the book I want to read, the scene I want to make. Nearly anyone I've found worth knowing was difficult enough, vivid enough, to qualify at some point in my life as my crazy friend.

Lethem


The mental room tone of the Radisson is Genius Asperger's (which is not to presume a diagnosis of any of its actual occupants): cognitively astonishing accounts of living in a world to which one does not fully belong, the terms of which one cannot fully discern or trust...surprisingly challenging to enact the unspoken protocols for getting in and out of a crowded elevator (a difficulty that's rampant at the Radisson) but it can see both fascinating and urgent to consider such protocols exist in the fist place, and then to attempt to describe them, to consider how they formed and were taken unassumingly into our bodies.

Lethem


The American novelist is buffeted by two increasingly contradictory imperatives. The first comes as the directive to depict. The Way We Live Now....Cliche though it may be, but the notion that no one is better suited to explain teh dilemmas of contemporary life than the novelist persists...[The] other designated special province of the literary novelist: museum-quality depth. The further literature is driven to the outskirts of the culture, the more it is cherished as a sanctuary from everything coarse, shallow and meretricious in that culture. If these two missions seem incompatible, that's because they are. To encompass both...you must persuade readers that you have given them what they want by presenting them with what they were trying to get away from when they came to you in the first place.

Laura Miller


True art is a gift rather than a transaction

Me

It may be latent in human psychology to model the world on a fall from innocence, since we each go through one. I can't know because I speak an an American, and I do know that as a culture we're disastrously addicted to easy fantasies of a halcyon past, one always just fading from view, a land where things were more orderly or simple. (The model is doubly useful, open equally to our patronizing dismissals of the past and to our maudlin comparisons to a corrupted present.)

Lethem

This, to put it bluntly, is what I want....films that install themselves this way in my sexual imagination, by making me feel that sex is a part of life, a real and prosaic and reproducible fact in the lives of the characters, as it is in my own life, and at the same time makes me that sex is an intoxicant, a passage to elsewhere, a jolt of the extraordinary which stands entirely outside the majority of the experiences of the characters, as it stands in relation to my own experience. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I want the paradox. I want it all.

Lethem

Dude, what if bird-watching was not about watching lots of different birds, but watching just one. Pick a bird--not a species, but a sole, actual bird--and follow it anywhere, watch it forever. Like, vertical instead of horizontal bird watching.

William Burroughs

No frame equaled no art.

Lethem

All television shows should have an arc and be capped at five seasons.

Me

If I've bet my life's work on a suspicion that we live at least as much in our wishes and dreams, our constructions and projections, as we do in any real waking life the existence of which we can demonstrate by rapping it with our knuckles.

Lethem

Proximity People

Lethem

People who talk on their cell phone at the counter. People at the counter who make you wait while they take a phone call. People who work and talk on their cell phones, treating their job secondarily. People who drive slowly when you're trying to get to work. People who honk at you when you're just trying to have a nice quiet drive. People.

Me

I've given enough interviews that any striking notion I've ever managed aloud I've also paraphrased awkwardly a few dozen times, and contradicted outright another five or ten, a combination of my eagerness to tell in-person listeners what they want to hear and my discomfort at repeating myself, at least repeating myself exactly.

Lethem

Existence itself seems a contradiction, or at least, a mystery of the sort that would eventually necessitate contradiction.

Me.

Let's face it, you're either serious about what you're doing or you're not serious about what you're doing. And you can't mix the two. And life is short.

Bob Dylan

Bolano has been taken as a kind of reset button on our deplorably sporadic appetite for international writing, standing in relation to the generation of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes as, say, David Foster Wallace does to Mailer, Updike, and Roth.

Lethem

Instead, he [Thomas Berger]explores the fallibility of the human effort to feel justified or consoled in the gaze of any other being, and the absurdity and heartbreak of the disparity between intention and act. The results are never dreamlike. Berger located the part of our waking life which unfolds in the manner of Zeno's paradox, where it is possible only to fall agonizingly short in any effort to be understood or do to good.

Lethem

Literary competition is not a zero-sum game with a single winner, or even a ranked listed of winners--that all-too-naive image of the canon in which, say, Shakespeare has first place and the gold cup, followed by Chaucer with the silver, in second place, Milton with the bronze, in third...The concept of literary quality is an outgrowth of conflictual process, not a consensual one. In the enlarged democratic field, the nature of conflicts simply becomes more complex. Even among the most serious pursuers of the aesthetic; there is no more than one goal; there is more than one winner. Multiple qualities and multiple achievements are valued--and have been valued throughout the history of the conflicting practices of writing making up the larger field called the literary.

Samuel R. Delany.

There's something embarrassing about knowing what you know, after a while. On certain days it can all seem to plunge into either the category of that which never needed explaining in the first place or that which you're astounded to realize you've never even begun making clear.

Lethem