PicoBlog

In June, I wrote this essay/review of Sam Lipsyte’s recent novel No One Left to Come Looking For You, a screwball noir set in New York City’s (post)punk scene of the early ‘90s. Since discovering the satirist/lyric-wizard around 2009, Lipsyte has become one of my favourite writers – in short stories, novels and non-fiction. He writes “characters [who] exist in a fog of neoliberal precarity and despair, hustling for affection, for drugs, for a paycheck, for a new story to tell, ranting and bantering their way from one dead end to the next” and is never not funny.  

Born in New Jersey in 1968 to two writers, the journalist and novelist Marjorie Lipsyte and the sportswriter Robert, Lipsyte moved to NYC in the early ‘90s, started the anarchic band Dungbeetle, and hung out with James Murphy who would later form LCD Soundsystem. After a few years of hard-living, Lipsyte returned home to help nurse his dying mother – a period he wrote about recently for the New Yorker.   

Today, he’s a married father of two, a professor of writing at New York City’s Columbia University, and someone whose writing has joyously, skilfully absorbed the lessons and rhythms of Garielle Lutz. “A page-turner wants you to get to the next page as soon as possible,” Lutz once said. “A page-hogger is so enamoured of and bewitched by the phrasing on the page, that the reader wants to savour it almost indefinitely and feels as if the treasures of the sentence or paragraph are almost inexhaustible.”

I often feel that way about Sam Lipsyte.

Tell me about Dungbeetle. The capes, the catharsis – and having James Murphy as your sound engineer. I’ve read an interview of yours in which you say that, at some point, you realised you weren’t a musician…

I was the lead singer/screamer/deadpan tummler. Do you know the word tummler? It’s Yiddish. It’s the guy who stirs things up, makes a party out of it. I think it literally means the guy who makes a racket. My approach was serio-comic. Definitely some menace involved. I wanted people to be excited but uncomfortable, tonally confused. I was never much of a musician, it’s true. I learned some chords and wrote a few of our songs. Basic stuff. But the rest of the band, they got good. We started as a kind of inspired chaos outfit but by the end we could deliver a pretty tight, punishing set. Competency may have been our downfall, who knows? Murphy was hanging around. He liked what we were doing, at least conceptually speaking. It was a time when people thought that because they wore flannel shirts they were somehow authentic. We thought that was bullshit. Other bands were moving away from the overtly theatrical, but we did rock operas. Sure, they were steeped in nearly paralyzing irony, but that was the point. We did one about the space chimp, Ham. One about Evel Knievel. We did one called “Prophets of Rock” based on a pastime we had where we’d sit around drinking and somebody would name a band and you would argue whether they were Old Testament or New Testament. It’s not as easy to decide as you might think.

Murphy was in a band called Pony. He was the drummer but also the bandleader. He’d made a solo Goth record when he was sixteen or so. He was always advanced, always focused. Not in a careerist way. But he knew his path led to more music. The rest of us were kind of doing this now, as a fucked-up art project, and some of us (me) were also actually pretty lost, so Dungbeetle was home, a kind of anchor, but even then you had to squint to see it really evolving into anything beyond what it already was. Maybe if they’d ditched me they would have had a shot. I think we introduced James to Juan McLean from Six Finger Satellite. The two of them produced a Dungbeetle recording together. (I remember I did a vocal take naked because I thought it would make the performance more intense and vulnerable, but I think it had the opposite effect. I recall walking into the studio suddenly naked and defiant and getting silent, uncomfortable looks from everybody.) Murphy and McLean, by the way, hated each other. They each took us aside and asked us to fire the other one. Then of course they went on to collaborate for years on Juan’s DFA records.

What relationship do you have with music these days? Have your tastes fossilised, or are you still seeking out new stuff? Does it retain its capacity to enchant, to captivate? Do you listen to music as you work? And what albums did you listen to while working on No One Left to Come Looking for You – either for research or pleasure?

I wish I were more adventurous. I tend to listen to older stuff. My son has introduced me to interesting local rap. Some students have taught me about newer punk and hardcore. My daughter is getting good at guitar and is more in the pop mainstream. I don’t usually write to music, but when I do, I tend to lean more towards ambient or experimental stuff from decades ago. I can write to Howard Budd. But I can’t write to, say, Chrome or The Jesus Lizard (we did get to open for them once) or the Birthday Party anymore. I listened to a bunch of bands from the period while writing this book. It wasn’t really research. It was more a way to unlock memories. The Come record which has the song the title of the book derives from was very important to me in the years right after the time the book takes place. It helped me remember my earliest days of remembering, got me closer to recapturing certain textures of feeling.

I watched the documentary adaptation of the oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom last year, and earlier this year spoke with its author, Lizzy Goodman. And I’m still thinking about how strong and seductive music tribalism was in the ‘90s and early noughties, and how there seemed to exist in the heads of music nuts this concept of a grand dialectic – a struggle between authentic artists and their corporate parasites. And it all seems kind of amusing and silly to me now, though not without its charms and personal influence – and I also think about how these notions would appear utterly alien or anachronistic to kids today. How do I fashion a question from my rambling here? Let me try: Did you have to unlearn any ‘90s credos about art and suffering?

I wish people would learn them again. And I see it emerging again in my son’s cohort. They are more about underground rap and graffiti writing and street fashion but they eschew the purely mercenary ethos that seems to have held sway for a long time now. It’s true that in my book I got a lot of comic energy from the obsessive way the characters called every other band in their milieu sell-outs and saw any kind of success as a sign of being co-opted by the corporate machine. The single-minded drive for failure is inherently hilarious, but I do think the book is about, among other things, a pivot point in the lives of aspiring artists. You realize that there’s difference between being successful with what you are doing because the world flocks to your vision and creating work you don’t believe in to make a quick buck. The third category, of course, consists of those who couldn’t make a quick buck if they tried. After a certain point, you realize which category you belong in. In the world of music, James Murphy was in the first group, and I was in the third.

I don’t believe an artist must suffer, but it’s still true that many good ones can’t pay the rent, and a lot of shitty ones can. But this is more about the current economics of creative work than nostalgia for some 20th century notion of the starving artist. Maybe the answer is this: if you are truly talented and original, don’t quit your day job.

You are a very, very funny writer. And so could Martin Amis be, or at least during his GOAT spell (which I roughly define as occurring between 1980-2000). Amis once held great public contempt for JM Coetzee, who he despised for his apparent humourlessness. He once said of him: “You will get these people who are felt to be educational, even though, as Clive James said, a sense of humour is common sense dancing. Those who haven’t got it, a sense of humour, shouldn’t be trusted with anything. You’re amazed they can get across the road. But proclaimed humourlessness has a constituency, I don’t know why.”

You seem a more forgiving and less dogmatic man than the late Amis, but do you have any sympathy for his distrust?

Generally, I share his mistrust. All of my favorite writers, with very few exceptions, have been very funny, at least part of the time. Amis (and his father – have you ever read Ending Up?), Thomas McGuane, Stanley Elkin, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, Geoff Dyer, Garielle Lutz, Paul Beatty. Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, Bernhard. Leonard Michaels. Charles Portis. I consider them all comic geniuses. Don DeLillo can be hilarious. Even Cormac McCarthy seemed to relish some comedy at points. What’s Houellebecq if not a stand-up? To me the comic frame or view contains all of the others, including the tragic. Whereas the tragic view pushes everything else out. It’s seems very artificial and anti-life that way. And whatever else we are, we are laughing apes. Laughing and crying apes. Of course, if you read Coetzee in the right spirit, even he can be funny. Relentless humourlessness becomes its own comic performance. That said, Coetzee is one of those exceptions for me. He is still somebody you have to read. I really like his criticism, actually. (Amis was also a great critic.) Speaking of comic performance, though, Geoff Dyer once gave the funniest prank response to being introduced by Coetzee at the Adelaide festival. I’m sure you’ve seen it, but if you haven’t, it’s worth finding on Youtube.

Recurringly, you offer this very sound advice to the aspiring writer: read, read, read and write, write, write. And that’s about all I can say too, on the rare occasion I’m asked. But you are also a professor of writing at Columbia University, and I assume the school expects your advice to students to be a little... broader. So how do you teach writing? And what benefits are there – to both you and the students?  

I think Vonnegut once described himself as more of a coach than a teacher, and I relate to that. You can’t teach people to feel most alive when they are reading and writing. That’s just a certain kind of person. But once you are that kind of person, getting direction or tips from others, including some who have been doing it longer, can really accelerate one’s maturation. I’m trying to teach people to listen to their prose, to stay aware of and manage every piece of sound and meaning they make. The more you can hear it the more you can shape it. Also, it’s not abstract. Usually, there’s a manuscript, a story, a novel. I’m helping them learn to write this story, or that novel. Strategies and tactics are particular to the work. But the lessons, I hope, carry forward to future projects as well. I also like to remind them that nobody gives a damn whether they become writers or not. Even your families, your friends, I tell them, they just want you to be reasonably happy and have health insurance. This has to be for you, not for anybody else. Because if you do it right, you will probably be risking the ire of those close to you. Maybe because of what you write, but more likely because of the way you have to turn away from others to get anything done.

A related question. You once told a story of a student limited by their love of Samuel Beckett – they kept producing poor imitations. But one time they wrote something that broke away from Beckett-aping – and it was good. And yet, the student couldn’t, perhaps, see the lesson there. They had an idea of the value of Beckett, couldn’t see themselves not writing like him. Did you ever have to break free from the spell of your own literary influences?

I spent time imitating others. I think most of us do. You see people in museums sketching what’s on the wall. It’s the same sort of thing. You’re trying to understand the techniques of those who made work that stirred you. How are certain effects achieved? And it makes sense that we do this, for what is originality but a fresh, and often counterintuitive, combination of influences? That’s where you hope to eventually arrive. But the story you re-tell above is about getting stuck in a rigid notion of what literature has been and is supposed to be, rather than honoring, by which I mean letting loose, the new swirl inside of you. Otherwise you’ll get crushed. Beckett himself certainly didn’t want to get squashed by the 800-pound Joycean gorilla. Not to get too Harold Bloom about it. But we all know that shit’s real.

Finally, a nakedly self-interested question: How did your writing – and your routines – change after you became a father? And how comfortably did you settle into middle-age?

Right before our first child was born somebody asked me if I thought fatherhood would change my writing. I replied: “Wouldn’t it be really sad if it didn’t?” But the question of how it has changed it remains interesting, and it’s hard to answer because I can’t really imagine myself, now nearly 20 years later, not being a father. The love and the sense of responsibility and the choice to reject formerly attractive ideas like hopeless nihilism seep so deeply into you it’s difficult to picture existing differently. I’d like to think being a father gave my writing new dimensions, a thematic and perspectival expansiveness, but who knows? Certainly it changed my routines. Before kids I would waste untold hours “getting ready” to write, pacing, drinking coffee, napping, listening to music. I’ve streamlined the process a bit. I try to hit the ground running, wherever I am. I don’t have an office. We share space at the university where I teach and there is not enough room for a room of one’s own in our apartment. I often write in libraries, in cafes. I’m not complaining. This is how many people have to write. But that’s been a change since I first started and lived alone or with an adult partner. I like to think it all keeps me sharp. Maybe that’s just another story I tell myself. As far as settling comfortably into middle age, there’s not much that is comfortable about it! But given the only possible alternative, I am very grateful to be here.

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