It’s hard for me to write a literary autobiography as so many books, comics, movies, shows, songs, sites, games, blogs, forums, posts, commercials and personal experiences have influenced me where would I properly begin? The advice from Henry James to writers, “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost,” seems quaint and misguided today. Who remembers every Tweet?
So, instead of absorbing the world, I’ve tried to curate it. I try to find and remember the works that speak to me—those that challenge my perceptions and expand my mind as a writer. Inevitably, I fail and find myself going down Wikipedia rabbit holes and watching comfort-food TV, but I try nonetheless.
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first book that spoke to me as a child. I loved it so much I stole it from the school library and still have the grey shopworn hardback in my bookcase with the stag leaping on its cover. Back then, I believed Narnia was real and one night when my parents were fighting, went to bed fully clothed—including socks and shoes—expecting Aslan and Mr. Tumnus to climb through my window to take me there forever.
When Huck and Jim fled “sivilization,” on the Mississippi, I was also with them on their raft. And when Marlow was piloting his steamboat up the Congo to the Heart of Darkness, I was with him, too. The theme of civilization being ultimately uncivilized, or, at least, inhumane, is important to me, as is the idea of fleeing it, or, as I’ve matured, realizing no matter how much one desires to escape, it can’t be fled because the monsters are inside us. If Heart of Darkness says this in lit, Blue Velvet does so in film—another influence.
Yet I can also say some works spoke to me too well. I remember reading Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From in my early twenties and becoming obsessed. So, when I studied Carver’s essay on writing, I believed him when he said, like Evan Connell he “knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.”
I foolishly put immense pressure on myself to write “perfect sentences” and only much later discovered that Carver wasn’t actually being truthful, that his editor Gordon Lish tweaked and trimmed, and in some cases completely rewrote Carver’s work, so that the published story was significantly different from what Carver originally wrote.
Much great art I now believe comes from if not such outright collaboration, then from borrowing bits and pieces from other previous writers and artists—pastiche, bricolage—an internal and intertextual dialogue with the dead. This cult of the individual genius who perfects each sentence without any help, or, at least, influence, was thus toxic for me. And if you read the acknowledgements page of any published author who’s honest, you realize how many other people pitched in to help her/him. This collaborative tradition raises important class issues as poorer writers rarely have such connections. They lack social and cultural capital.
I still secretly wish I’d had a mentor when I was young, and now, would love collaborators. So, I might as well put the word out there. Anyone interested in working on a story, novel, play, screenplay or poem together as equals, feel free to reach out to me.
I don’t want to say that Carver’s version of realism is dead to me, but I find the realistic genre’s dictates —those relentlessly-crafted “unique” physical details—to be oppressive, and, surprisingly, given its leftwing roots, bourgeois in 2021. The idea of a flaneur realistic observer as presented by someone like James Wood is generally if not a wealthy person, then someone who has the time to go out and observe so deeply as to see more of people’s lives than they have time to see themselves. The New Yorker-style paragraph—that polished compendium of who, what, when and where—is not composable by those with day jobs. Freedom for me then lies in expressing my dreams and, more often, nightmares.
I crave fiction that challenges the real now. Not genre necessarily, but subversive, surreal. As an atheistic Jew—I’m aware of the paradox—I’ve developed a taste for Kafka, Calvino, Philip Roth, Clarice Lispector, and George Saunders. Judaism itself is full of subversive intertextual paradox. Long before Borges, scholars were making footnotes in the Talmud, and footnotes debating those footnotes, and footnotes to the footnotes of the footnotes about ahistorical myths that never really occurred.
Moreover, I grew up in an age so suffused with secondary sources, with virtual realities, that my memory of TV shows is often better than my memory of my own life. Perhaps this is just a cop-out. I don’t think I could write well realistically even if I tried because reality doesn’t seem real to me anymore. I spend more time staring at a screen than I do the world. I can’t even prove today happened let alone capture in textual form the tidy plot arc of my actual life.
Baudrillard’s simulacra and hyperrealism interest me. Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” and Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” do, too. Like Jameson, I wonder if political, pedagogical lit can work today. Is there such a thing as great surrealistic agitprop?
I have a book on my dresser by Jose Saramago called Blindness waiting to be read.
