ARCHIVE
Face to Face with SAM LIPSYTE
AA: When do you write?
SL: I write when I can. I have a full-time job and a kid, so my writing life is really about maximizing the time. It used to be about squandering the time. Actually it probably still is, but then it just takes me a lot longer to come up with new pages. My main mission when I sit down to write is not to think at all, at least in the beginning. I just need something to set things in motion: a scrap of language, an odd phrase, or even just a simple sentence with something a little off about it. That’s what I like to start with. Then I just follow along from sentence to sentence, looking to bend and twist as I go, looking to scare myself a little with how sharply I can swerve, and eventually I begin to figure out what the thing might be. Later, of course, comes the relentless revision, which I prefer to the first draft. The thing about knowing if something works is that it’s often a hunch, and often a wrong one. But if it’s exciting you, and you can recite parts of it, and you’re just giddy about it, and you’re not high or drunk or about to be hospitalized for exhaustion, then there is a tiny chance it might become something powerful — although odds are it sucks and you should trash it and try again.
AA: Stanley Crouch aside (and despite the fact that he’s older), our generation doesn’t seem to have a lot of punch-out artists. Is it that there’s simply less at stake?
SL: I did expect a few more shoving matches and broken coffee tables. But those older generations, they were kind of jerks, weren’t they? “Fools in old-style hats and coats,” right? I’m not sure I ever feel I’m working alongside anybody, but there are affinities, there are people whose work intrigues, excites, astonishes. Then it seems like there’s a whole bunch of other people doing “writing,” and you say, “Yep, sounds like writing.” And if those people are writers, then you’re not, and if you are, then how can they be? I think there are lots of niches of people feeling this way, resenting and looking to thwart the people in the other groups, and they’re always angry because the people in some other group seem to be getting the crumbs from the big, dumb culture table. It’s not so much that the stakes are small, because aside from the (mostly) tiny monetary stakes, the stakes are tremendous — the moral stakes — and it’s a terrible feeling when somebody from some other group, whose writing is drivel, gets raised up by the official and semi-official organs as an example of what art should be. Not that you want somebody you admire to get all the attention, either. But seriously, when you think about it, name me a younger writer everybody agrees on. It’s just not possible anymore. Maybe it never was, although we pretend it was. Nobody from an older generation walks around and says, “I always thought Faulkner was shit.” But people did at the time. I’ve read some pretty bitchy reviews.
AA: Are there any mantras you want to leave us with, while we wait for McJihad?
SL: No mantras. If I had to boil everything down to one notion, it would be to stop trying to boil everything down to one notion, and don’t trust anybody who does. See, that’s two.