A New Canadian Myth for New Canadian Times by Sheila Heti
“We live in a place where the official rewards aren’t so grand, but that means something else happens: Artists slide between mediums, they work on each others’ projects, and new forms emerge.”
The Believer Logger: Gun Guys
Dan Baum is the author of Gun Guys which documents how he – a Jewish liberal Democrat – strapped on a Colt Detective Special .38 revolver, left his comfortable home and family in Boulder, Colorado, and undertook a walkabout to meet his fellow gun lovers. His goal: to confront his inner…
Absolutely
Our very own Sheila Heti, half of the Believer interviews editorial team, is included in TIME’s poll to help decide the 2013 TIME 100. As an artist, an editor, an acquaintance, and a human, we think Sheila is tops, and we couldn’t be more proud to see her included here for How Should a Person Be?, “among the most-talked-about books of 2012,” or happy to click the little button next to her face that says “Absolutely.”
(You can vote for Sheila here, and see the whole list here.)
The American paperback comes out in June! I really love this gentle new cover.
And a question for you: Should I be on the Times 100 list? Vote here.
Tomorrow (Saturday 9th) is the first U.S. screening of painter and filmmaker Margaux Wiliamson’s film Teenager Hamlet. This “constructed reality” movie is about the tension between the Hamlets of the world (who worry about what’s a worthy action to take in life) and the Ophelias (who have faith in the redemptive power of beauty).
It is the companion piece to Believer editor Sheila Heti’s book, How Should a Person Be? Both the book and the movie were created between 2006 and 2012 and feature many of the same people.
Please come! $9 suggested donation. 7:30 PM at UnionDocs (322 Union Ave., Williamsburg, Brooklyn).
THE AGE OF CELEBRITY SEX TAPES AND EXECUTION TAPES: AN INTERVIEW
In If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? (Penny-Ante Editions) Jarrett Kobek uses transcriptions of celebrity sex tapes to trace a narrative through decadent, post-internet celebrity in America. Beginning with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s 1998 honeymoon tape, fragments of amusingly vapid dialogue are juxtaposed with the celebrity’s criminal history (on inlaid black strips of paper) to sketch an era in which entertainment overrides justice, and a life without consequence is the norm for a privileged few. This is Kobek’s third book. We spoke over Skype. – Matthew O’Shannessy
THE BELIEVER: To start off with, why did you get interested in celebrity sex tapes?
JARETT KOBEK: There’s probably a twofold answer to that. The first is that I think in the last ten years, everyone has unfortunately had to develop an interest. It may not be as profound as my own, but everyone is at least aware of these things. The genesis of this project was whenever the first Paris Hilton sex tape came out, which was almost ten years ago at this point. And you know, the sex on these things is always really bland because probably the most uninteresting thing in the world is watching narcissists fuck each other. But what was really interesting even then, was the dialogue that was occurring during the sex or between the sex, or just watching Paris Hilton and her big dumb boyfriend try to talk to each other like human beings and their complete failure to do that.
I think in that tape there’s this really amazing moment where at some point she’s having sex and actually her cell phone goes off, so she just gets on her cell phone. So then you have three layers of dialogue going on. In the background they’ve left the television on because if you’re Paris Hilton you’re going to leave the television on while you have sex, and there’s the dialogue between her and the guy that she’s having sex with, and then she’s on the phone. It’s just an amazing biopsy of a certain kind of profoundly consumer American life. You know, taken to its furthest extreme.
BLVR: Obviously these tapes are much longer, and you’ve picked out certain elements and then arranged them, put them with the criminal records. In a way it’s more than a transcription. You’re going for a certain effect.
JK: If you put Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian on a camera for five hours, you would be amazed how little usable material there really is! So there’s some editing, but it’s not huge. And I really didn’t want to transcribe people moaning or whatever it would be. The sex part is by far the least interesting. The criminal records¾I think I was transcribing one of Vince Neil’s sex tapes from Mötley Crüeand I realised that he had actually killed a guy. Then I remembered that the actress Rebecca Gayheart also had a sex tape and she had also killed someone, and I started to think about how we had gotten to this point as a society where there’s an actual distribution mechanism. There’s an actual product in which we watch felons fuck.
And I thought, that’s really interesting, that’s a way to elevate it beyond just being this sort of gag book where it’s like, O yeah let’s laugh at Vince Neil, or Let’s laugh at Tommy Lee. When you start to realise that – maybe not the majority, but a significant minority of the people in this material actually have criminal histories, they have committed really crazy or serious crimes, and that none of them did time¾ that’s the key. You start thinking about the way that fame in particular, but also money, perverts criminal justice.
If I had run over a nine-year-old kid, I probably would have gone to jail, but Rebecca Gayheart didn’t. I think she got 1200 hours of community service. So inserting the criminal records became a way to put some gravity into the work.
BLVR: The sex tapes are part of an era – the last decade or so – where it’s not about suppressing the tape anymore, it’s about turning it into a marketing tool. It’s a way to kick-start your career. What interests you about this era?
JK: That’s a good question. There’s a narrative in the book, I don’t know how evident it is to anyone else, where you can see the point where the tapes begin. At first, it really is just people’s home videos. Then in the middle of the book it shifts into people doing these videos with the intention of turning it into a marketing tool. Then by the time you get to the end of the book, it’s become an actual genre. I don’t know if I have that much to say about it other than it happened, that it’s a definite narrative progression.
That last decade was such a deeply fucked-up time that it just seems endlessly rich in terms of material to mine, in a way that I’m not sure the 1990s necessarily were rich. I mean, everyone in the 90s thought they were rich, but then if you look at them in comparison to the 2000s, the 2000s have a lot more of real consequence going on. At least from the American perspective, it’s a much richer time in terms of society just going really haywire and getting truly bizarre and truly baroque.
For me, I was a teenager for more or less the whole 90s, and I hated it, I really hated that decade. I hated the 2000s, too, but I hated them in a much different way. Where I felt like the 90s never made any sense to me, the 2000s made sense to me in this aspect where everything was just breaking in America. The 90s in my memory were just so incredibly superficial. Not that the 2000s didn’t have superficiality, but there’s something much darker about popular entertainment when Amy Fisher actually shoots someone through the head and now you can watch her have sex for money, on tape. I mean, that’s really deeply disturbing!
I don’t have any hard conclusions to draw about it, because it’s not completely clear to me what’s going on. Usually when I do these things, I do them to try and figure out how I feel about them, and I usually have a much better sense by the time the project is done. This one, I don’t. It’s still really murky to me. It’s like, maybe that stuff is beyond critique. Maybe the critique can only be indirect ¾ because how do you critique Amy Fisher’s artist statement? It’s just so bizarre.
BLVR: In your other books, there’s an interest in the overlap between fact and fiction. But what you’re talking about here with the tapes is that they’re contrived or they’re a marketing tool.
JK: Yeah. I really feel like having read as much Philip K. Dick as I could in the 90s was like some bizarre training ground for the eventuality of the 2000s, in terms of this sense he had that everything eventually was going to become entertainment and everything eventually was going to be about how you can make money by transforming everything into entertainment. He strikes me as profoundly ahead of his time.
BLVR: So you’re interested in the sort of entertainment complex that produces these things?
JK: Yeah. It might’ve been about 10 years ago at this point¾but there was a moment when the Russian Mir space station was crashing into the earth, and Taco Bell actually put a giant target out in the ocean. The idea was, if the satellite hit the target, then everyone in America would get a free taco for a year or something like that. That was the moment when I started to realise that Philip K. Dick may have been much more prophetic than I had given him credit for. Reality TV, these sex tapes, strike me as very Dickian. They strike me as science fiction¾in the most mundane as possible way: there’s not a lot of science but there’s certainly a lot of weird fiction in there.
BLVR: There’s a lot of negative writing about this sort of stuff – “being famous for being famous,” all that. Are you critical of people who don’t earn their fame, or are you just observing?
JK: I feel like there are much better things to worry about. It doesn’t really matter why people end up famous. In an ideal world, everyone would win fame and glory for actual achievements, but I don’t think that’s the world we live in, and I don’t think that’s ever been the world we’ve lived in.
At the same time, it is dispiriting when you find out how much money Kim Kardashian has made in the last three months. When you live in a society where the people from Jersey Shore are making millions and millions of dollars for apparently nothing, it does become incredibly dispiriting.
I think there’s something useful in looking at these people and seeing the extent to which luck and base motivations can get you to the same place that you’ve been raised your whole life to believe that if you just work hard enough, America will reward you. Most of the time it won’t. Often it seems like success comes not so much from their hard work as from profound psychopathic tendencies.
BLVR: We haven’t talked about the sections with Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Why did you put them in?
JK: Well, Saddam has been like a lodestone over my literary career. My short story about him was the first thing that I ever had professionally published. I’d seen Saddam’s execution tape, and I don’t know how it happened, but he’s a genocidal dictator who used chemical weapons against his own people, and yet somehow in the tape he ends up coming out looking like the best person in the room. You know, he’s funny in it, and he’s calm in a way that no one else is.
I was thinking about these tapes and how it was interesting that the mechanism for the delivery of Saddam and Gaddafi being executed was pretty much the same mechanism of delivery for these sex tapes. They were all shot on really shitty equipment. I think Saddam’s was shot on somebody’s cell phone—probably Gaddafi’s was too—and then distributed on the internet.
It’s really interesting that it’s the same medium, and that it sort of works in the same way, in that the object of fascination in the tape is based primarily on these people being flashing images that have come before you. What’s an interesting contrast is that these are people who actually do end up suffering some kind of punishment. Whether or not it’s a just punishment, it’s punishment for actions they’ve done in their society, that then come to a definite termination point. I mean, I’m not trying to liken Saddam and Gaddafi to Paris Hilton in that obviously these guys were genuinely horrible individuals responsible for some really atrocious things, but it sort of seems like it’s a related if dissimilar genre.
The precursor to those execution tapes, much like the precursor to the sex tapes was Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s, is the execution of Ceaușescu in 1989. So there’s a real parallel. I thought, How much celebrity can you have without consequence? and, Okay here’s consequence: here’s celebrity, here’s consequence.
BLVR: People have talked about literature being, in a sense, behind other art forms – not having caught up to things like contemporary art or music. Would you agree with that?
JK: Completely. It’s weird that literature is always going to be bound to a human need for stories that have a beginning, middle, and an end. My big inspiration over the last ten years is the Scottish comic book writer Grant Morrison. He’s really really fascinating because he’s been writing these really shitty superhero comics, which are the best things ever because he’s figured out that, okay, you have to have story beats here, here, and here, but you can use the moments between these beats to talk about whatever it is you want to talk about. It’s crazy when one of the major works of experimental fiction for the last six years has been a guy writing Batman, but it’s a really astonishing work.
BLVR: Your book is more like an artist’s book, in the sense that the design and physical aspect of it is so carefully crafted.
JK: Yeah. My interests and sensibilities may be better aligned with the people in the art world than the people in the literary world, and thus far my literary career seems to have had a pretty huge intersection with the art world. The literary world is¾I mean, there’s a lot of criticisms you can hurl at the art world, but all of them can be hurled at the literary world in a much more severe degree. It’s kind of dismal. My one success was with Semiotext(e), who I don’t know if anyone in the world would look at them as entrenched within the literary establishment. I think there’s a certain flexibility in the art world that isn’t in the literary world right now.
I know the intention with Penny-Ante was to have the book be more like a limited edition or an artist’s book than, okay, we’re going to publish this thing that will infinitely be in print. It’s more like, We’ll do 1000 of these books or we’ll do 300 of them, and that’ll be the end of it.
Matthew O’Shannessy is a writer and member of the art collective Tape Projects. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
"A fair and generous woman is (at best) respected, but seldom loved."
the realest of talk from Redstockings co-conspirator Shulamith Firestone. (via theothernwa)
(via ellenwillis)
I Will Speak Daggers
Roxane Gay is Spelled With One "N": What I Read, 2012 + A Top 11 + A Frustration
Love this list, all her lists!
Sometimes, I’m conflicted. I do not want to be overly prescriptive. I don’t want to traffic in censure. We read what we read. We love what we love. At the end of each year, though, I am forced to consider the state of literary culture. These end of the year lists are very, very telling. I am watching them, quietly. I’m always interested in what other people are reading so I can expand my own reading horizons and find unexpected literary treasures. I use the word treasure without irony.
In list after list, though, I see much of the same thing—white writers, often white men dominate. They dominate these lists because they dominate publishing, because they are the majority. I understand the world we live in. Blah blah blah. I’m bored with talking about this. You’re bored listening to talk about this. I do not necessarily exclude myself from narrow reading. I’ve read 136 or so books so far in 2012. There are plenty more I started but couldn’t finish. I’m currently reading six books or so. I don’t know that my reading list is diverse enough. I do know I’m trying. Each year, I do a little better.
To be clear, I am not talking about myself or having a woe is me moment. I’m fine. I have three book projects I believe in fiercely. I have an agent who believes in them fiercely. I am confident they are going to end up where they belong. I don’t want to be an exception to the rule, though. I want lots of writers of color to be able to say they shattered the glass ceiling hanging above us all.
I hate that whenever I talk about the lack of diversity in literary culture, I feel this uncomfortable compulsion to explain, “I know I’m doing relatively well,” as if a modicum of success precludes me from saying this culture could do better, as if I don’t want to be perceived as a whiner. I want this to be something we no longer need to discuss.
I don’t even know, anymore, if talking about these issues does anything. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop thinking and writing about literary culture. I’m just saying it feels futile. We read what we read and maybe nothing is going to change that.
Regardless, I had a great reading year, the best I can recall. I learned so much about writing and what we can do with both fiction and nonfiction. I truly felt like I grew as both a reader and writer, from the books I read in 2012.
I do have a Top 10, which is arbitrary. I read a lot of wonderful books this year. It’s actually a Top 11 because it was just too difficult to pick 10. Even picking 11 was an ordeal. I am a libertine in my reading. I love a lot. I am very comfortable with this.
Best 11 books of 2012:
How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayanna Mathis
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
I Am a Magical Teenage Princess by Luke Geddes
NW by Zadie Smith
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung
How to Get Into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak
Dare Me by Meagan Abbott
Represent, ladies. Yes, my list is dominated by women. I don’t care. I loved these books. These are the books I’ve read more than once save for The Round House which I just read. These are the books I cannot stop thinking about. These are the books I cannot stop talking about, that should be required reading. I loved them, without reservation. I vouch for all of these. TREAT YO’ SELF by getting these book.
The most underappreciated books of 2012:
The Sovereignties of Invention by Matthew Battles
The Necessity of Certain Behaviors by Shannon Cain
Hold Til It Hurts by T. Geronimo Johnson
Let Me Clear My Throat by Elena Passarello
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianju
Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky
Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman
Kind One by Laird Hunt
Pure by Julianna Baggott
There were lots of other great books I read (some were books I’ve read before and wanted to revisit, some were not released in 2012). You can ask me about them and I will talk your ear off.
Fobbit by David Abrams (hilarious, timely)
Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine (intelligent, funny, strange, compelling)
From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry (interesting commentary on the state of civil liberties in this country)
Last Seen by Jacqueline Jones LaMon (smart poetry)
Wild by Cheryl Strayed (moving, honest)
Stiltsville by Susanna Daniels (perfect evocation of place, long portrait of a marriage)
Pretty Tilt by Carrie Murphy (poetry about girlhood that so accurately captures a moment in a woman’s life)
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg (moving, warm, honest)
Baby Geisha by Trinie Dalton (strange, nice use of language)
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (great sense of people and place)
Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures by Emma Straub (brings Old Hollywood out in lovely ways)
The World Without You by Joshua Henkin (lots of staying power, sprawling, true)
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (gritty, engaging)
The Last Repatriate by Matthew Salesses (really interesting novella)
Thursday by Chad Redden (poetry chapbook with an overall theme and energy I liked)
Last Night by James Salter (Salter, okay?)
Wake Up, We’re Here by Dallas Hudgens (gritty, strong authorial voice)
Night Swim by Jessica Keener (at first I was ambivalent but it’s grown on me)
Don’t Trade the Baby for a Horse: And Other Ways to Make Your Life a Little More Laura Ingalls Wilder by Wendy McClure (LIW4LYF)
We Only Know So Much by Elizabeth Crane (portrait of a quirky family, pleasant read)
Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey (so strange, the gloves! lots to admire)
Mind Blowing Sex by Diana Cage (obvi)
Mother/Daughter Sex Advice by Susie Bright and Aretha Bright (charming)
Bay of Foxes by Sheila Kohler (great echo of Talented Mr. Ripley)
Dora by Lidia Yuknavitch (this book will cut you)
State of Wonder by Anne Patchett (this book is so gorgeous, just stunning)
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (dark, depressing, so of course I was into it)
Dispatch From the Future by Leigh Stein (smart poetry, smart uses of pop culture and language)
Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi (the search for home and one’s place in it, very well done)
Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Bergen (this book will cut you too)
Heroines by Kate Zambreno (a compelling call to action)
Privacy by Garet Keizer (thoughtful meditations on privacy in the modern age)
Promising Young Women by Suzanne Scanlon (short novel about women and mental illness that reads like prose poetry, very well done)
Love, In Theory by EJ Levy (like the titles, the stories in this collection take up love, in theory)
Shampoo Horns by Aaron Teel (wonderful chapbook about boyhood in a Texas trailer park)
A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins (layered novel about a divorced man reconnecting with people and himself)
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith (fierce poetry, smart poetry, loved this)
This is What They Say by M. Bartley Seigel (prose poems about a time and place we don’t see enough of)
My Heart is an Idiot by Davy Rothbart (these essays are as charming as they are offputting)
Every Story is a Ghost Story by DT Max (well considered recounting of Foster’s life. true care was taken in this project)
There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights by Laura van den Berg (it’s Laura van den Berg; of course it’s great.)
Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (my review will be in the NYTBR this Sunday)
The End of Men by Hanna Rosin (thought provoking, for sure, but narrow in proving the overall premise)
May We Be Forgiven AM Homes (ambitious, wholly engaging)
Three Cubic Feet by Lania Knight (interesting look at a young man grappling with his sexuality and how he fits in with his family)
Safe as Houses Marie-Helen Bertino (precise, intimate stories)
Magnificence by Lydia Millet (stunning, just stunning. kind of obsessed)
Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar (slow to start but a really fantastic look at race and class in SoCal)
The Lover by Marguerite Duras (Duras. deal with it)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (slow journalism, moving, complicated)
The Glimmering Room by Cynthia Cruz (this book will cut you)
The Ideal Bookshelf by Jane Mount (art) and Thessaly La Force (ed) (mostly, you get to see what others are reading and that’s cool)
Book I wanted to hate but couldn’t because game recognize game:
This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Brilliant books that haunted me with their stark portrayals and language and painful beauty:
Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi
Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson
Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
With the Animals by Noelle Revaz
Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes
Book I felt in my soul in ways you wouldn’t necessarily understand:
The Story of O by Pauline Reage
Books not normally in my wheelhouse that I still appreciated:
One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper (heartwarming)
Motherland by Amy Sohn (kind of infuriating but I’ve thought about it time and again)
You Take it From Here by Pamela Ribon (a lot to like but one of the main characters just baffled me to no end. I’m still mad at her even though she is not alive.)
Book I was moderately ashamed of reading:
The Sweet Life Episodes 1-6 by Francine Pascal. I read these books, was thrilled by their terribleness, and talked about them more than is reasonable. I can own it.
Most unexpectedly delightful book I read this year:
On the Island by Tracy Garvis Graves. There’s nothing redeeming about this book. It’s a romance novel, full of absurd wish fulfillment but credit where credit is due. I’ve read this book more than once. It is competently written. The plot is SO bananas that I just surrendered to it. A lady in her thirties! Is stranded on a deserted island with a 17 year old! And they fall in love! Of course they do. The runner up in this category would be Redshirts by John Scalzi. I choose to ignore the extra codas at the end because they made me mad but this book was so witty, so much fun, and it truly understand it’s overall project. I highly recommend it.
Essay collection I aspire to writing, only using my own voice and style:
Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Books I wish I had read much sooner because they were outstanding:
The Wife by Meg Wolitzer
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
Heartburn by Nora Ephron
Edinburgh by Alexander Chee
Savages by Don Winslow
Disquiet by Julia Leigh
Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
On Being Blue by William Gass
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
Books I was ambivalent, torn, or slightly hostile about:
Bunheads by Sophie Flack
Some Assembly Required by Anne Lammott with Sam Lammott
Suri’s Burn Book by Allie Hagan
You Are Free by Danzy Senna
All Woman and Springtime by Brandon W. Jones
Fuckscapes by Sean Kilpatrick
The Next Best Thing by Jennifer Weiner
Black Cool edited by Rebecca Walker
The Darlings by Cristina Alger
When It Happens to You by Molly Ringwald
Big Ray by Michael Kimball
How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
My Mother Was an Upright Piano by Tania Hershman
I Knew You’d Be Lovely by Alethea Black
Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt
We Sinners by Hanna Pylväinen
Walking With the Comrades by Arundhati Roy
Book I grudgingly admit was a good, albeit infuriating read:
In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe
Books I threw across the room and had vocal, furious conversations with:
Vagina by Naomi Wolf
The Morning After by Katie Roiphe (SERIOUSLY???)
Books I would burn but that I also read more than once and wrote about a lot and FINE there were a couple sexy moments:
50 Shades of Grey E.L. James
50 Shades Darker by E.L. James
50 Shades Freed by E.L. James
Books I taught in my novel writing class and graduate workshop:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Room by Emma Donoghue
Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis
Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction by Catherine Brady
Books coming out next year:
Louisiana Maps: A Diagram of the Territory of New Orleans by Delaney Nolan
The Dragon Lies Down by Alicia Erian
My Foreign Cities by Elizabeth Scarboro
Love is Power or Something Like That by A Igoni Barrett
Middle Men by Jim Gavin
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp
Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine Scheidt
Willingly Would I Burn by Laura LeHew
Amen.
(via chadasaurusrex)
Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire: Herman Wouk
(Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar was one of the first “adult” books I read - I was 12 or so - and it blew my mind. I am happy to see that he is such a mensch. I love the Proust Questionnaires and this one, in particular. Usually one or two of the answers breaks your heart, but with this one the love just grows.)
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Monogamy, with the right lady. (Sheer luck.)
What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Betty Sarah Wouk, no contest.
When and where were you happiest?
Anywhere with her, while she lived.
What is your greatest fear?
At age 97 and counting, guess.
Which historical figure do you most identify with?
On bad days, the captain of the Titanic.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Taking myself seriously, even in a Vanity Fair quiz.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Complacent stupidity.
What is your greatest extravagance?
The way I live now.
What is your favorite journey?
These days, from office to bed at bedtime.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Wounding cleverness.
What do you dislike most about your appearance?
The shrinkage.
Which living person do you most despise?
The Jewish writer who traduces his Jewishness.
Which talent would you most like to have?
“Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope … ”—Sonnet 29.
What is your current state of mind?
Optimistic. Can’t say why.
If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
Where shall I start?
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I guess The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.
What is your most treasured possession?
Probably my journal—100-plus volumes, 1937 to the present.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Helplessness.
Where would you like to live?
Ideally, Jerusalem. Realistically, Palm Springs.
What is your favorite occupation?
Plain truth? Writing at a new book.
What is your most marked characteristic?
Pursuit of privacy.
What is the quality you most like in a man?
Being a mensch.
What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Silent, steadfast love.
What do you most value in your friends?
Intellect and humor.
Who are your favorite writers?
Bible and Shakespeare aside, the usual grand suspects: Twain, Dickens, Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy, etc., etc. Also Jane.
Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Don Quixote.
Who are your heroes in real life?
Those who serve over in Afghanistan, or six months underwater in nuclear subs.
What is it that you most dislike?
Priggishness.
How would you like to die?
Not much.
"
“I always think that females are insiders, and that female rebellion starts someplace where you’re really trapped…” - Eileen Myles
Sheila: Can you explain what you meant when you wrote that females are insiders?
Eileen: It started with that idea of males being outsiders, which I had been fed for a long time – the idea that the male artist is howling outside of the culture. He is transcendent, omnipotent, or you know, just a rebel; the institutions can’t hold him. And my own female existence was often about trying to imitate a male existence, because all the images of artists I had were of men, so how could I be like that? How could I be Kerouac? But then persistently seeing that in On The Road the girls were jumping off the roof, the girls were fading into the background. And if I really thought about my female existence, it was very much about what it felt like to be in the Myles family, what it felt like to me at my job – feeling oppressed by who had a crush on me, or who didn’t. Institutions seemed to be places where women were sort of held and prodded, and I would have to figure out my freedom from in there. So often it was a hollow pain; the pain of being inside, not the yop of freedom of being outside. Whether I was in a mental hospital or in a job as a camp counsellor, I was institutionalized. So it began to seem like to get wild and crazy would be to say what that really looked like. To really camp out in being female and say how it is.
"from my recent interview with Eileen Myles
"How Should a Person Be? is chosen as one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2012!"
Love
An oddly Gerhard Richter-like rendering of my little cousin. Photograph by my brother, David Heti.
