What books are on your night stand?
What tends to accumulate is a mix of active pleasure reading, books I hope to pleasure-read very soon and anything I might want a sip of before sleep. It rotates seasonally; it’s a mess. A selection:
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Poetry: James Longenbach, “Seafarer”; Lynn Xu, “Debts & Lessons”; Shakespeare’s sonnets.
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Fiction: Maya Binyam, “Hangman”; Kevin Lambert, “May Our Joy Endure” (translated by Donald Winkler); Mark Haber, “Lesser Ruins.”
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Nonfiction: François Truffaut, “The Films in My Life” (translated by Leonard Mayhew); Ryan Coyne, “Heidegger’s Confessions.”
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which books and authors stick with you most?
The first book I loved was “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” which still seems perfect to me. As a young kid, I read a lot of fantasy: Mercedes Lackey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Guy Gavriel Kay. As an adolescent, I read all the books I could from the tiny, shadowy, wonderful gay and lesbian section at Hawley-Cooke Booksellers in Louisville: Baldwin, Barnes, Genet, Mishima, Kenan, Winterson, Woolf.
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
It’s not a novel, but a couple of friends and I are reading Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” which I’ve always been intimidated by. Being intimidated by books is an old, deep-seated impulse; it’s always a waste of time.
Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?
It’s amazing how angry some people get when they hear you’re reading Heidegger.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
For years my answer has been Pedro Lemebel’s “My Tender Matador”; I can now add the new Penguin selection of his crónicas, “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles.” He is one of the world’s great writers; everyone should read him.
What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
Miranda July, “All Fours.”
You’ve described yourself as a fan of “annoyingly obsessive granular” close reading. Where do you think that came from?
Painters used to learn by copying the great masters, composers by writing out the scores of Bach. Neurotic close reading is a way for writers to do something similar: an attempt not just mechanically to transcribe, but to enter into a process of making the choices, conscious and unconscious, that went into a great work. That’s where aesthetic education happens. It’s also a training in attentiveness, the artist’s most important resource.
“Sometimes I think all art is repeating again & again the same message: I’m dying, love me,” you’ve written. Tell me more.
What more is there to say? If anything is true in general of the human animal, it’s that we know that we will die, and that our fulfillment comes in loving and in being loved. Those two facts light up our existence with meaning, and they seem to me to be at the heart of art making.
That said, art is always bigger than anything we can say about it. The “sometimes” in the sentence you quote is important.
Are there responses to your much discussed Yale Review essay, “A Moral Education,” that you’re still thinking about?
I expected the essay to spark many more negative responses than it received. Maybe they’re still coming.
Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?
James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” is a founding text of modern queer literature. It’s also profoundly homophobic: not just because everyone ends up dead or devastated, but because it treats durable love between men as a logical absurdity. (This is not true of Baldwin’s later novels.) If we could understand how the book has nevertheless been lifesaving for generations of queer people (including for me), we might be able to have more productive, less facile conversations about “affirming” literature and “positive representation.”
Doesn’t writing a Substack take away from the energy it takes to write a novel?
I don’t worry about it taking energy away from fiction, the impulse toward which is pretty peremptory. I do worry sometimes that it might get in the way of more serious essay writing. But then often enough the line between seriousness and the newsletter gets blurred. I like having a place to put my enthusiasms; I like being able to write about whatever strikes my fancy — paintings, books, operas, movies; and I like having a kind of atelier where I can think and write in a looser, more improvisatory way.
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
My response to art doesn’t hinge on subject matter, and my only wish is that authors write the books they feel they have to write. That kind of urgency makes any subject revelatory. But the revelation comes in form, in the material stuff out of which art is made, which for writers means language. I wish more writers would pursue their formal obsessions: experiments with time, with perspective, with the diction and sentence shapes that excite them.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
St. Augustine, Iris Murdoch, Manuel Puig.
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