Ocean Vuong: NYU Professor Teaches the Art of Writing | How I Write

And I was just dreading it. But honestly, banking has maybe been the easiest part. I can't remember running into a single problem, and it's because I've been using her.

What they should see. And you know what? If anything goes wrong, if I have any sort of challenge, I can always talk to their support team, which is super responsive and actually helpful, which is pretty rare these days. And all that is why I can't imagine banking and

So you have usually you have your tenor and your vehicle. So let's take a line from Isaac Babel, one of my favorite short story writers. Babel writing in the early 1920s, um, during the Soviet-Polish War in Red County. Now, you can describe a sunset in a meme mimetic way, which is often what the newspapers want, right? The newspaper style. A red evening sunset along the hill.

Fine, it's a useful, descriptive, but it's mimetic. It's only bringing it's it's mimicking the world, right? This is from Aristotle's idea of mimesis and poesia. But the metaphor is a disruption of that. It's asking the viewer to bring themselves into that scene. So Babel opens the Red Calvary with describing a sunset as The low red sun rolls across the hills as if beheaded. And when I read that I thought That's a sentence the species never had yet. So a red evening sunset the the species has

He opened the door, walked into the room, and sat down. The species has that, but we have not had a sunset described like a And you wouldn't need to know that Babel was a war correspondent at the time. That context is embedded in the image. And that image is so incredible because it does something no other art can do. Right. Film can't replicate. You can take a time lapse. a shot of a sunset, but it would not be indicative of the connotations of a behead.

And so the second clause, that simile, also changes, alters the rate of the sunset. It's the speed of you can see the speed go move. So now y Babel has not just given us a mimetic scene that the newspapers want, right? So you'll never see, you know, New York City, you know, February twenty-sixth, two thousand twenty si um twenty-six. Trump descends, you know, Air Force One as the sun sets across Manhattan as if beheaded. CNN. You never agreed that, right?

Uh because it's silly. Well y it's all about information, right? So it's about efficacy. You you you want an invisible style. So that was really important for the newspaper. But it's done incredible damage to a young writer's imagination because the sentence has now been so timid.

Every writer who's done it for about a year will tell you that some workshops actually destroy the work, right? You get too much feedback, it's all over the place. And sometimes you can draft beyond the pinnacle of the work. And so why does that happen, right? That's one I'm one question that I'm always interested in. Why is it that sometimes you get to you get draft one and it's just completely there and you're like, oh my

Poetry gods, writing gods, thank you. That happens once every blue moon if you're even lucky. And then sometimes you think you're writing this poem or you're writing this story or this novel and then you get to, you know, the the seventh

Being of a culture that fetizes productivity is that you might have too much work. We all had that friend who writes a a poem a day or all year or write a novel a month. And I know those folks and sometimes it's much harder to go back into a pile of rubble to salvage the work than starting completely anew.

Right. So when you rec when you center recognition and you say, Well, what is it? What are the tendencies here? Because when you have a sentence, what you really have is consciousness filtered through And for every single person it's different, right? If I said like

Write a poem ab um write an Obad, which is a a traditional poem that you write after the the morning after when you're leaving, or you hook up with somebody. Oh and then you the Obad is like the mor the glorious morning or the melancholic, depending how it went. Um But if I said write a no bot, every single student would have a different And so we're naming the tendencies, we're seeing the patterns. Oh, you're a poet that's interested in trees. You're a poet that's interested in your verb.

um are enjammed, right? You're you're enjamming on your verbs or your prepositions are on the the left margin. You seem to like to launch into the next line. So recognizing patterns means you recognizing yourself. But imagine, you know, uh sending a a first draft and everyone pulls it apart with their dogmas, right? Because when you approach the work anew, you often have dogmas that you picked up years ago.

And so you hear things like, um, oh a poem shouldn't be like this, a novel shouldn't be like that. But the problem with those that rules is that anytime you ask them why, you after two or three whys, the whole argument you I think suspending that and building out the recognition to yourself, right? Who am I as a writer? Why did I write this? Because sometimes could the consciousness the subconscious brings out this word. And we only half know it, right?

But as the more I did it, the more I realized

I don't wanna judge what comes through. You know, just you're like

What's your trick? What's your d what's the secret? How did you do this? You know, this landmark work. Um it is it's in a book called Um The Method of Hope. And he says, Well, I don't go into the rainforest looking for what looks like metal. I simply look for anything that's new. And I hope that it's medicine. Sometimes often it's not. Sometimes it's poison, right? But as we know in pharmaceuticals some poisons could be, you know, redesigned as methods.

But he said I'm just looking for anything new. I'm not looking for what came before me. I'm not looking for what looks like the other medicine, the other plant, the other species. I'm anything that's new I put it in my back. And I think that when we suspend critique, the students are more willing to just let the novelty of themselves come into the room. So we're just putting things in the center.

Right, when we look at a poem or a short story, it's like I noticed this, I see this pattern, uh you switch from past tense to present tense in this fifth paragraph. That's interesting. Why is that? Let's just put it in. And then by the third or fourth week, when we know the tendency We can gear everything towards them. It happens so naturally and seems And it's like relationships, you know.

Faster. You really need thirty drafts, right? To get to the moment where you realize, oh, it wasn't about this. Spot this other thing here.

And I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Fried. He came on the show and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos, he cares about great copy, he cares about telling a great story and him and his co-founder they've written five books and i can tell you that they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software

So if you're thinking about work and you're asking, hey, how can I be more productive? How can I make my team more cohesive? Well then I recommend Basecamp. Back to the episode.

Yeah, the big word that comes to me is novelty, surprise, pursuing it. Like in what ways do you feel like you are pursuing novelty, freshness, and in what ways do you feel like there's a More kind of this like pursuit of quality that's like more structured and refined and like actually less open to stretching the boundaries.

Like what is literature? We're getting into like a really fundamental question. What is literature? Well, literature is a relatively new fabrication in our species. It came, the literature department, the English department came about the end of the 19th century. Um and so prior to that, if you asked Chaucer what is literature, he would say anything written.

If you ask Shakespeare what is literature, he would probably couldn't give you an answer, right? He's I'm I'm literature is kind of a blueprint. For life. The poem was something used like a text message. It was part of courtship, right? So we formulated literature. you know, when we formulated institutions. And so it came as an organizing principle

as a way to gather literary work and organize it and study it. And so right away I think it's important to kind of go back, like is the Iliad a poem or a story? If you look at the the Bantam classics from the 50s and 60s, they actually abandoned um Homer's original line breaks, right, to just read us and all.

It's an interesting publication decision. They had to make it cheap, right? But then they they made a executive decision say we don't care for the poem part. We just want the story part, right? Um so I think it's important to go back to

our species foundation and realize that everything has been hybrid and we put these qualities on. And even the novel was not considered a serious literary endeavor until the late nineteenth century. Before that, it was considered feminine. It was considered women's work.

And after the American Civil War it was a serious moment of moral crisis in the country. And DeForest wrote an op ed basically saying, What book will bring us together? Will make a testament? So for the first time In American letters, the novel was seen as a serious moral endeavor, and then everything changed, right? It was no longer women's entertainment. fancy work and it became a kind of vehicle of national reckoning. And and it also coincided with the newspaper, the rise of the newspaper.

You know, the newspaper needed to be standardized after the Civil War. Um because it was completely reckless. Newspaper reporting. I mean you would have crack journalists who would talk about troop deployments and meanwhile the soldiers, particularly in union camps, would read newspapers

And any schmuck can go out and say, I think Lee's over there across the hills and all of a sudden it was a m which is why it was a headache, you know, um for those early union generals, because there was no standardization, exclamation marks were everywhere, it was kind of vibes, right? It was kind of like this it was kind of beautiful but for for information delivery it was crazy.

It went for clarity. It uh had to be um have enough brevity to made keep room for advertising. So you went from uh the Victorian sentence, Matthew Arnold, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, which is more like a root system. Feeling, because it began with oratory, right? Oratory was a way to win arguments in the 19th century. You have Frederick Douglass, you had Thoreau, all these folks going about giving sermons and speeches.

And you have an an audience that was still relatively illiterate. And so the subordinate clause, the long winded clause, delaying the independent clause, kept your audience hooked. What is he really saying? Well we gotta keep paying attention, right? So you had language that looks similar to um legal speech, right? A lot of subordinate claws. And it was momentous, it was perfect for oratory, and uh naturally people wrote the same way they spoke.

And so the the the Victorian sentence worked this way, but it was very rich and metaphoric. And so when we turn to the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of the Great American novel, the national mo novel,'cause other countries start to think about well who what's our novel, right? It also coincided with standardization for a commercial efficient sentence.

You know, it seems so innocuous, right? But like, I don't know, maybe six hundred million people write with it, maybe more. Maybe more than a billion people have used Microsoft Word. And just with The spell check suggestions, it's like imposing a certain kind of form that is the very antithesis of. the person who people say might be the greatest playwright in the English language.

to like advise Claude. It's interesting, you know, like the the liberal arts are coming back with this kind of technological advance. And so to go back to the the sentence, I think the Victorian sentence was Incredibly beautiful. In the newspaper world it was a mess. And so unfortunately unfortunately poetry. I think writing was actually on its way to painting.

Rambeau's um Season in Hell, a hybrid text of prose poetry. And so there was a turn, there was a kind of a fork between poetry followed painting and prose followed a new. And so we have A sentence that in you know, if you look at any literary review, you open any book review, they're often prioritized.

The newspaper sentence, which is the invisible presence of the author, right? We have to say, we don't like this work because them the author wouldn't get out of their own way. Or it's pretentious because there's too many medical. What have you. And so we're asking the sentence to behave more like a butler, right? And this comes from the newspaper model. There's plenty of of um works that are written beautifully from that.

I'm advocating for a more Victorian style to come back Um more freedom.

If you look at Impressionism, there's no right angles in Impressionism. And then if you look at like Kandinsky, there's like some right angles,'cause it's more sort of abstract, but then you get to like post-World War II, P. Mondrian is like all right angles. And it's sort of like the right angleization of culture and of writing.

And it begins with this illusion that well first of all, if you're a young writer, you're often told Something very um very familiar. Here are the models. The innovative, daring masters, Wolf, Melville, Baldwin, Juna Barnes, Ann Carson, and you're teaching them that in And then and then the naive, you know, hopeful novelist, writer, does that. They read the books, they create a making

Of their own, that's weird and interesting. The dichotomy is that the publishing world, and it begins with pedagogy too, is actually very cynical. Because when they did the homework, they do they make that that interesting work based on these one of a kind, one of one writers, the Shakespeare. And they deliver it to the professor. And he said, Oh, who do you think you are? And you bring it to the publisher, it's like, oh this doesn't look like anything we publ we need a comp.

This doesn't look like it, but I'm like, then you're like, isn't that wasn't that the whole point? So while we build up this fantasy of innovation, Publishing because of commercial fear is actually very conservative.

Take risks, invest in things, and then what they would make was the head of the snake. And now Hollywood is sort of the final. The final checkpoint that you go through to basically say you've made it. It's like you have to make it on Instagram, you have to make it on Twitter, you have to make it in your books, whatever. And then you get Hollywood at the end. And basically what they said to me was

You're doing a documentaries, there's only three kinds of what they call unscripted series that work. True crime, music, and sports. Anything outside of that, we're just not interested. And I understand it from a business perspective. Like if you're trying to basically get your ROI and whatnot, there's certain risks that if you're trying to basically have

a structured risk profile you're not willing to take. But when it comes to a creative culture and pushing the boundaries and taking risks and stretching the imagination, It just it doesn't happen.

Don't write about the rose. It's a cliche flower. Don't write about grandmothers. God forbid you write about a grandmother in a kitten. And so a student would say, Okay, I don't I won't write I won't touch it, I won't touch it But then if you keep doing that you're not gonna touch anything. So you'll end up with a narrow scope of this neutral fearful, timid, thematic work that actually denies yourself the

Because he's like, well, grandmas do exist in kitchens though. Are they just now exiled from all literary work out of the sphere? And so but that does happen in the classroom. Shlovki says it's not the grandma. It's the idea of the grandmother in the kitchen. So now you have to estrange it. It's up to you to rescue the grandmother in the kitchen into a different mode of thinking by estranging that mode. Similar to how Babel rescued the sons. by making it strange to displacement.

It is as if it never happened at all. If the whole of life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been. Then Slavki comments Automization eats up things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war. Incredible. And so, Shafi continues, what we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life. in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing and not merely recognizing things.

The device of art is the Austrania, estrangement of things, and the complication of the form. which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is its own end in art and must be prolonged.

Art is the means to live through the making of a thing. Babel reads sees this,'cause they're contemporaries. They're they're working in Saint Petersburg at the same time, and he's like I can't just name it, I have to re-see it.

So often I'm like, Oh, it's a mountain. But no, Biersstadt was really looking at it. It's the same thing with Monet and the water lilies. Van Gogh with the way that he would paint flowers and stuff like that. Like you look at Van Gogh and you're like, he was seeing not just the object itself, but the energy. inside of those objects and it allows us to see the world fresh again.

newspaper sentence that is invisible, it is uh inoffensive, it is mimetic, right? He walked into the room and sat down. The sunset, you know, glows. Fine, but that's a mimetic sentence. Poesis, for Aristotle, is the moment of prospect. It's a moment in between what's known. It's a moment so you have a rose, then you have the bud. Those are two mimetic moments because they have names.

They're nominal. The rose is a thing. The bud is a thing. However, there are infinite moments between the bud and the rose. when the rose tears open, on its way to the final rose, when the bud bursts. All of that is still part of life. That's Poesis, and Heidegger goes on to call this the threshold moment. What is the moment be when the rose becomes a rose? Where is the threshold? And that to me It's worth so much.

poetry and wonder, enchantment and estrangement comes in, but we're taught to ignore that because it has no definition.

And then what we did was through photography we're able to basically slow down time and freeze frames. Right. And what I'm hearing from you is basically a lot of the way that you can basically enhance your perception is to somehow look And look and look and observe and sort of see that how deliberate change can be, like in the blossoming of a rose or something.

Something that is a monolithic example of storytelling and culture, stars. We look to the stars to navigate. They are the foundation of our storytelling.

And you don't need to know that, but it's embedded into that position, that subject position of a a historical person named Richard Seikin, who is a s you know, a a social worker while he's writing these looking out and feeling that sense of loss and sadness, upending this monolithic um symbol that stars are supposed to be and giving us an alternative. Something again, that sentence I checked. Our species never had that.

So w my my teacher Ben Lerner, I hope he doesn't mind me saying this. I was an undergrad in his in his uh office hours one day. I gave him a poem. He's like this is this is fun. Um, but I'll show you I'm gonna do something. I'm gonna show you I'm gonna show you what we're after here. And he turns around. He types on his lapto on his computer. He's typing into Google. And he says, You see that line you wrote? It's a decent line. Come on, come here. Three hundred thousand people beat you to it.

where the cana the canonical is often given to us with too much awe. We are f asked To be too awestruck by the canonical.

But Ben was like, G go higher. You have something in you to you you're able to say for the first time. And

When I realized that I because some but sometimes you do need sentences like he walked into the room and sat down. You need that scaffolding to get you to the great poesis moments. The question there is, are you satisfied with what the dictionary has given you? That's the central question of a right. Are you satisfied calling it a red sunset? Or you call it a low red you know, the l low red sun rolling over the hills as if beheaded? Is it stars or is it Boats rowed out too far.

moments like this is where the human being steps in and creates something closer to the thumbprint. You and I each have one thumbprint. No one else has it. What I'm interested in in writing is not so much how to hook somebody, how to hook a reader, but how to stay with

Because all our workshops, all of our writing seminars are built about capturing and possession, keeping a reader eyeballs, keeping things. But I'm interested I'm actually more interested in being haunted. You know, there are there are w like There's a poem by Robert Browning, Meeting at Night. I can't for the life of me remember it. I read it twenty years ago as a high school student.

To this day I still think about that poem. Every other day I think about it. It's about a lover meeting a lover at night. It's describing the boats moving through the eddies, crossing little farms, knocking on a window, hearing the match. exhaust itself and then light up and then the the gas of the lover recognizing each other through the window pane. And it has no pronouns. So as a little gay boy in Hartford, Connecticut, I thought it was about two boys, you know, meeting each other

Who knows what Robert Browning meant, right? Um But the power of that is that that poem is downloaded into me. So I think syntax, although I said eighty percent of writing is perception looking, that twenty percent is everything because that is like the spike protein. It is like the downloading mechanism. And how we resonate with work or how work stains us is dependent on the syntactic clause as it's built.

Where Robin Williams sits him down, just starts talking to him, and you could say, Hey, you know what? What you read in a book is just an abstraction of reality. You actually need to experience the real thing. Like that's a good sentence, but and there's a good point there. But you know, halfway through it, he says, if I ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.

Known someone who could level you with their eyes, who could rescue you from the depths of hell, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Yeah. And you're like, whoa.

Would you want Cora McCarthy to be any less self-absorbed in Sutri, right? Do you want Tony Morrison to be less self-absorbed?

uh you know, uh um, indulgent in their manoeuvres. I mean that's what we come I I came the first artistic practice that I encountered was skate culture. Uh DIY punk shows and um what's called Anne One Mixtapes, which is street ball. It was like these the early two thousands.

So when you're working with a linear art, at the most fundamental mode, you're either satisfying or denying a reader's expectation. Through pattern. That's it. There's many ways there's thousands of ways to go about it.

Surprise, estrangement. Now you're not just looking at the scene, you're looking at what's behind. You say, wait, this director has thought ahead of me. Now I need to pay more cl close attention.

and and so celebrated. So I was really surprised when I went into the literary world, which has this sort of like upper middle class decorum, where you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to perform a kind of this kind of self-erasure of that crystalline um newspaper sentence.

So a student who wants to write with a strangement. And again, I want I want to say you don't have to. Incredible work has been done without it. Gertrude Stein. I mean Stein's interesting because she inspired Hemingway's sentence. He went to Paris, saw what she was doing. She was not inspired by the newspaper, but medical rights. She was a medical student. So the medical community was also at the same time trying to standardize their practice.

Right, so no nonsense, short, mimetic, informative sentences. So Stein used that to write three lines. It you know, and also like Dideon, Capote, you know, that kind of nonfiction fiction, it blended everything. It was also viable. So it's not the fault of these writers. They need to get paid. They need to get paid by Vogue, by Mary Clare, by Time Magazine. So that style started to infect prose writing. So that's where I mean what before AI, we've been already homogenizing the sa the sentence.

You look at downtowns, no matter where you are, and you just close your eyes and you imagine a new skyscraper that was built ten years ago in Tokyo, in Seoul, in London, in Santiago Chile, in New York City. What do you think of? You think of glass? Yeah. Right angles, skyscraper, the same everywhere. Yep. And the same thing is happening in architecture, it's happening in writing, where you get this global

Standardization, homogenization, and it's this copy and paste thing. Yep. And there's an entire systemized apparatus that is working to basically create a kind of claustrophobia in terms of what we make.

Effica if it's efficient, it's quality. And that's the fantasy of of the f of the assembly line. And the editor also would know that, oh, it's easier to edit if I get everybody to sound like each other. Even news you know magazines have house styles. You know, the New Yorker has one, the New York Times all have one. And it's g it's important for them'cause they're newspapers. They don't you don't want

a st a r a really stylistic presence when you're reading about a flood in Chile, right? You know what I mean? Like you don't want the authorial yeah presence there. You don't want an impressionistic take on like a m a mass shooting. You know?

You know, like from from and that's a long legacy from from you know, bef prior to that from William Maxwell from you know, all the way back to the founders. Um, but it's interesting, I I wrote a piece for them and I come out like, Wow, I didn't know I don't doesn't feel like me, but but it's still like my ideas. But it was really edu informative to see how they were cutting for efficacy.'Cause this was early on in like two thousand eighteen, I was writing for them.

And I learned a lot working with the editor. It's like, oh, this is what This is how what clarity can look like. So it was important to learn. But it did feel like, oh, that is a house style. But that's also a brand. They have, you know, uh readers who expect that. You don't want a kind of uh diverse cast of voices because it feels like you're not reading the product. So it's hard to keep that too. There's an army of copy editors and style editors that keep that intact.

Um you think of Thomas Hardy, right, who saw himself primarily as a poet, even though canonically we receive him as a novelist. Um James Baldwin wrote poems quite seriously. And and I think why poetry is a wonderful laboratory for the sentence.

go through this process. And so it's a homogenization process. But there's two places where that doesn't happen. And it's poetry and nature, right? Huh. So in nature writing, mimesis would collapse everything because we already know, we already see it. So if you're just describing A meadow, you just say oh there's a there's a there's a sunny meadow.

Well we've seen photos of that. We can see it ourselves. Why am I reading someone else telling me what I've already seen? Yeah. So the power of nature writing and why it is closest to poetry and uh pro you know poesis and and x estrangement is that At the foundation of it's really bringing the subjective view of the writer onto nature into a kind of synthesis.

Right. So when we're reading really strong nature writing, we're reading Robert McFarlane, seeing it through the filter of Robert McFarlane through that sentence. And that's the delight. Oh, I never saw a meadow that's And one of my favorites, J.A. Baker, does the same thing, right? So just look at this sentence where he's describing mud. All day the low clouds lay above the marshes, and thin rain drifted in from the sea, as a memetic center.

You can see that anywhere. Clear. Then Mud was deep in the lanes and along the sea wall, thick ochre mud like paint, oozing gluttonous mud that seemed to sprout on the marsh like fungus. Octopus mud that clutched and clung and squelched and sucked slippery mud, smooth, treacherous as oil, mud stagnant, mud evil, Mud in the clothes, in the hair, in the eyes, mud to the bone On the east coast in winter, above or below the tide line, man walks in water or in mud. There is no drop.

Mud is another element. One comes to love it, to be like a waiting bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet, where there is no shade and nowhere for fear to hide. we're not talking about mud anymore We're not talking about trees. So Baker's interiority has leaped Because he's allowed it. The dam has broken. The dam of mimesis has broken and he's allowed that intuity to come out. And I will never look at mud the same. Right. Mud evil? Right.

Where no fear can hide? Like what are we tal and of course we don't need to know that Baker was chronically ill while writing this book, right? Yeah. So a moment like that, if he just said if he just kept on the mimetic mode and just said

And fun. It's like you have it inside of you. Yeah. But once you get away from the fun, you stop seeing it.

into anything with an assignment. I think you should write. I wouldn't be so mad if CNN wrote, you know, the president ascended Air Force One as the sun set as the beheaded. Um that might be true or to the ethos of where we're at. Look at you know it's funny friend, you said crayons, because look at what Shlovsky says later on. In one description, for instance, Tolstoy does not say birth.

but quote, a big curly headed tree with a luminously white trunk and branches. He writes again later, Tolstoy writes in his diary, Anderson's fairy tale about the clothes. The goal of literature is to make people understand things so that they believe the child. Crazy, right? Th but th there's so much there because he's basically saying somewhere along the way we have lost we have lost faith in children in the in the childlike way because of language. Definition.

is the enemy of imagination. The paradox is that we work with material that is defined. Yeah.

to have a l experimental moment knowing that you can return. And you know, uh McCarthy does this really well, right? He allows this sort of wild tangents in metaphor.

It's really hard, you know For a young writer to write that way now, because I think editors will kind of call that. And I was really lucky because I I hard started as a poet. And I was really fortunate. You know, my editor just passed this week and got off. Yeah. And I was fortunate because I I I was trying to sell the novel and I got I met eleven publishers, editors and

You know, they it's interesting, they all I was lucky they all wanted it, but they all had like caveat. They all had that. They're all like, We o okay, you but this is a very um you know, a Baroque style. Our readers and even some I I keep thinking about this which annoys me to no end. But there was a moment where one of the others said, What about the reader in the Midwest? And I said, How Alita?

You know, like what what about them? They have a nervous system? They have read everything probably you and I have read? Right? What what do you mean? What do you we have to dumb it down for people in a large part of this co wh what are we talking about here? Right? But I'm like It was such a wonderful education because I saw how cynical

It is, right? You you you you have that kid who's like praying w playing with the crayons, does this the the the equivalence with the crayons in writing when they become a writer and then you get to that moment, the final boss right? And the final boss is saying, what about people in the mid west? I'm like, have you been there? What about them? Like why are we talking about them as if they're remedial? Right?

And I was lucky enough to go with someone who just saw what I was coming after. But of course she's added pin. She's edited Mary Oliver, you know, Ann Goddow. So I was really lucky too, right? So like there's a historical background of how I was able to write on my terms. And this is where we get into a phenomenon that the theorists

Yuri Lottman calls he said that all literary works are read on the matrix of two temporal lines. A synchronic reading and a diachronic reading.

the reification, the cultural shift, all the essays, all the thinking, the canonization, which is why we tolerate the archaic language, the dies and the taos. If you and I wrote earnestly Die and Tao in our next books,

you know, um monetic writing, like that that that kind of clean, you know, style that we're talking about. Is that A very common experience that I've talked to with readers and I've had it myself is that you read a book Say a big magazine tells you at the end of the year these are the most important books to read if you're like a intellectual being on top of your game, right? This is what you should do if you wanna be you know on the inn.

And you read the book and then you think, I mean, this is a lovely book, but I feel like I read this. Like didn't I read this last year? Didn't the same magazine tell me to read a book similar to this? Then you're like, didn't I read this book written in this style when I was in high school? Five years ago and why am I reading the same book?

you have a a a similar amount of books. Say oh say all these writers, the young writers coming through and they're edited out. All of their idiosyncrasies, all of their estrangement, all of their wonder, enchantment, edit it out, and they all have the same thing. And they feel good. They feel I'm making progress.

Right. I my editor loves it, I my agent loves it. And they even get it published and even the reviewers love it, right? Because or there's like there's an obligatory praise. When if if it's not offensive, Then we just kinda say, great, cool. Now there's thirty or forty of them that look like At the end of the year, because of the the the the rule of scarcity, only a few of those thirty get picked to be the one.

They all similar they all sound similarly because they went through that homogenization process. Not always. Some w sometimes something brilliant comes through. They come through and then one or two gets picked as the chosen one and then everyone else is like what happened? I was praised all the way up until this point. Until the reader complaints. Because the reader does not have a synchronic relationship with time. Right.

The reader was reading Melville last week. Mhm. They were reading Shakespeare, they were reading Baldwin, they were reading Annie Dillard, and then they picked up this book at the bookstore. They don't have that synchronic that that's that's a hallucination, right? Life doesn't exist on this sort of catalogue, right? We read books all over the place.

the audience rate it as like ninety-four and the critics as like twenty seven. Yeah. And it's always I I love looking at those like I love watching those movies. Why was there such divergence between the system and the machine and their eyes and how they see? versus just the people. Yeah.

So I gotta be a little tougher now. Right, right. I mean, they'll say they don't do that, but we all have that kind of subconscious work. But it's trap. In a synchronic cycle. And Lotman brilliantly brings up this idea that actually literature exists mostly in a diachronic. The synchronic cycle is only a year. Once the book is published, then the publishing industry moves, like most

commercial industries to the next year. The next crop goes in, you're forgotten. So there's a kind of moment of dismay for that writer who was pushed into the box so young. They wrote in the box, they stayed in the box, they published in the box. Their critic was like, all right, it's in the box, it's recognizable, it's fine, obligatory clap, now it's out. The moment of truth.

Is when it lands into the reader. And the reader's like, I read this last year. I swear to god, I read this. What am I? What am I? I paid$32. you know, fees for my child for daycare. Like, what am I doing? And that's when the moment of truth happens. And often it's too late. And a young writer who was forced to conform through the decades don't realize that moment of reckoning until the book is published and the reader says no to.

discongruent, uh incongruent relationships with so much of art making beyond writing, right? Any artist I think could tell you better than I, because I only work in two mediums. But I think that so then are you are you do you have enough courage? Do you not have enough fortitude to risk it? And I think maybe I had that because I was a skater. Like I was a skate And the idea of be of skateboarding was that you threw yourself off an ace there, never expecting to land.

Like landing the trick is like a miraculous moment of like cosmological agreement with gravity, physics, and time, right? You almost feel chosen. When you land a trick like that. And so the idea that failure is actually not just even a prerequisite to success, but part of experiencing life. And sometimes all you do

is throw your b yourself off an eighth stair and all you have is bruises and a broken ankle. And that's it. There's not even a payoff. And yet there is a delight in doing it with your friends and seeing your body move through space. And so I think for me, The expectations were so low in that sense, where I'm just like I've I get to write books. My my family came from factories and nail salons. Like I get to try.

That's my vocation. My job is to try things and then go like this and throw it over my shoulder. Why wouldn't I try it? Why wouldn't I relentlessly throw myself off an eight stair?

That the moss grows. You see it, right? You see that it's it moves the moss grows, you can't even see it grow, right? But why what did what he did there similar to the Babel line was that by using applause, he retroactively changes how the applause, about how Moss behave. So he's comparing the behavior of two of the two correspondents rather than the image. So that's a tricky one because you would think and if you gave me that assignment I would forgo it. I was like

ocean compare moss to a plot. I'm like, no thanks. I'm gonna leave that one. But Eduardo Carral, you know, he won he won he won the Yale Younger for that book, right? For for good reason. He's hunkered down. And and I asked him, I said, how long did it take you to write that book? It's forty-five pages of poetry. Nine years. You can tell this is a man who's looked at moss for a Long time.

Like he's looking at beyond what it is, his definition. He's looking at it belong beyond applause. He saw the nate, the essence of applause, and he harnessed it and say, and asked it to modify this thing that is stagnant. And you don't need to note that this is in a poem called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. That the exuberance of life the after such mass death and loss.

Like you're a citizen of Vietnamese and English and there's things that you can see through Vietnamese that you can't see in English and vice versa. And like you have this master command of language, but also this deep sense of the futility of it.

Um but how it's use. So Wittgenstein, one of my favorite philosophers, says the meaning of a word it's its use. It's not the definition. It's its use. Use changes definition. Right. The dictionary has to catch up to us. And that's really important for students to learn because they often feel intimidated by the dictionary and standardization. I need to learn the rules to be a real writer. It's like no, it's you use it.

How you use it is how the dictionary will can we introduce new words all the time. Uh Netflix and Chill, throwing shade, right?

Right. Lottman talks about this too. He says that there's a concentric circle to how culture works. It engulfs innovation brings it into the center and then spits out homogenization and it keeps doing that until things are constantly destroyed. Thank you.

So that goes to the futility of it, right? What's the point of all this? And I think it's important for me to say that, you know, language has made my life. I am a I'm here because of it. I've been able to materially support my family because of this thing that has no weight. You know, and w in terms of speech we can't even see it. How about that? Yeah. And so And on the other hand, it's important to say that literature and writing doesn't really save us the way we always wanted to.

Because it's still the tool of tyranny. You know, authoritarian regimes the first thing they do is capture newspapers and radio stations.

He read Chaucer, Milton, he read astronomy, he read nautical explorations, he wrote poems, you can imagine. And so you say and then you think of like, you know, the SS officers who ran the gas chambers going home and reading Rilke and listening to Beethoven. What's all that art for? If you can still do something so monstrous, if you can be so quote unquote inhumane using humanity's greatest treasures? So for me I think it's a little bit more than a little bit.

I'm there's a skepticism ceiling that I am working within this material, but I don't have this romantic notion that um what I do will do anything beyond uh what happens, the magic we see on the page. I don't have that. If it does, great. Sometimes literature does do that. You know, Harry Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin created the Civil War, according to Lincoln, uh which freed millions of people. Um so i it happens, but I don't wake up um

counting on that because there are examples uh on both sides, um, historically. Yeah.