Absolute Gentleman

Here’s an entry from the Juniper Writers Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. Alma Mater to many legendary scholars and thinkers, the greatest of whom being Doctor Marcus Camby. That boy can play, has played, ball. He a baller. He a Rhodes Baller.

I’m here and I feel out of place, which is not surprising: I feel out of place in most places. At this point, I’m like Crash Davis, without the minor league homerun record.

People are good. I don’t like people, but recognize that people are good and useful. When I decided to speak to people here, I found them genuinely good. Here’s the thing about conferences at this point: People here are either 90 or they’re 24. Or there’s a youth writing conference here, in which case the participants are teenagers.

Lydia Davis is one of these good people, and she visited campus to give a reading and an informal talk about writing, etc. Her ‘interviewer’ was Chris Bachelder. He wasn’t really an interviewer, though, and I appreciated that. He got the hell out of the way and let Lydia meander through her genius unfettered, as opposed to me, who is very much the hell in the way of this entry. I am fettering the progression of this entry.

Lydia knows me from her generosity. She and Amy Hempel came to Pittsfield, Massachusetts (50 miles from where I am now) and did a benefit reading for my educational nonprofit, Word Street. There was dinner afterward with Lydia and Amy, and I have chosen not to write about it because I loved the moment and want it to be mine for as long as possible.

I’m not ready to write about it yet.

Before what was to be an interview before a live audience, I watched Lydia talk some with Chris, most likely doing some last minute preparation for what was to come. Lydia saw me and waved quite vigorously. I know the reason for this was that she knows how oddly uncomfortable I am in most situations and especially in light of the debacle at the Brix Wine Bar.

My wife and I had our annual date night a few months ago, and we decided to pretend to be refined palates and sniff some wine corks at Brix. It was three or four days, maybe a week, before the big reading I organized, featuring Davis and Hempel, and the maitre d’ seated us just about on top of Lydia Davis and her husband, the artist Alan Cote. I knew Lydia from a master class in fiction I took with her at UAlbany, but that was a long time ago, at least a year, so when I sat down next to her, I didn’t think it was appropriate to say hello, thought I’d be imposing on a meal I shouldn’t have been a part of in the first place. Yes, I have issues. I’m in the process of getting help.

So I never said hello to her, and to make matters worse, since I thought she may have noticed me and wondered why I didn’t say hello, I emailed her to tell her what I did, that I was sorry. She emailed back and recounted the entire evening, from the things we ordered to the awkward conversation with the waiter. She thought the whole thing was humorous and put me at ease once and for all.

So when she waved vigorously to me two days ago, I think she knew what she was doing.

Like I said, she’s one of the good people.

Without further delay, here are my disjointed notes on Lydia Davis’ interview with Chris Bachelder:

Lydia read the dictionary in 1971, it was a collegiate dictionary, maybe a Merriam Webster. She still references a worn copy of the dictionary constantly – not for shedding light on a general meaning of a word, but to find the precise meaning of a word. She also regards etymology as essential.

The best writing instruction she ever absorbed was not from writing teachers, but from one or two writerly friends who would read her work microscopically close.

It takes a long time to become individual as a writer. I’m assuming she’s talking about voice and style.

Constraints in writing are often more useful than freedom.

Interesting exercises: using the thesaurus to change words — consequently rhythm; diction, obviously. There are no synonyms, after all, because words aren’t the same, each is more or less precise.

Ideology doesn’t drive her work. Davis is receptive to external elements and, usually, her ideology appears beneath or within (these are partly my paraphrasings, by the way) another intention.

If Davis is stuck on a particular day (which is a rarity), she assigns herself small writing tasks: each day this week, I will write a two-paragraph story. In forcing yourself to stay in the chair no matter what, the result is a brutal truth.

Look to models in published writing for solutions to writing problems.

Lydia Davis writes in order for the words to disappear. The precision of her diction and simplicity of the language directs the reader, ideally, away from the writing.

My own thought toward the end of the interview: If a woman is sitting in front of me and her cascading blonde hair falls all over my bare knees, isn’t she in my space? Should I allow this?