On keeping work and play separate

Are you a writer with a routine? Do you write a certain amount every day?

When I’m trying to write a novel, yes, to an extent. My friend, Joe, told me that you shouldn’t write more than 1,000 words a day because you can’t sustain high mental activity for longer than that, however long that takes. I did observe that when I was writing [Dead Souls]. I would decide in the morning if I was going to go to the library and work on it, and then I would go for about four hours and try and write 1,000 words. Sometimes I’d only write 500 words. But he was right — I found if I wrote over 1,000 words and I was like, “It’s going really well, I’m just going to continue,” whatever came afterwards I had to rewrite the next day because it was bad. There seemed to be some truth in it for whatever reason. Going back to it every day you do a little bit more and you build up. Digging a tunnel was the way I thought about it. I thought it was nice, that you just go and do a little bit every day. There’s something satisfying about seeing the days stack up and it’s leading to something.

It’s different for poetry?

You have to be in the mood. I don’t think you can sit down and decide to write a poem. I don’t know what the quantifiable factors are, and I don’t think anyone does really, but I think poetry’s always been connected to idleness. The Romans had this word otium, which is idleness and inspiration. Poets have always lazed around a lot. There’s some sort of connection between not working and poetry or loafing around and poetry, and that to go at poetry with a work ethic is counterintuitive on some level. That’s why all the poetry sucks now, because everyone’s a careerist.

I finally read Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry. I’m reminded because he talks about poetry and work, and can poetry be work?

All of these things start to fall apart when you take that seriously. I don’t think artistic work is work. There’s a Duchamp thing where he says it’s not what you’re physically doing, it’s the spirit of the activity. If you’re doing something that’s artistic or on some level you’re doing something you enjoy doing, it’s not work, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels rejuvenating and you’re finding shit out and it’s fun. Whereas to me, work is like work. It’s drudgery. I feel like there’s some relationship between value and work that is exactly what artistic work isn’t. It’s speculative and you’re playing. It’s play, isn’t it? The spirit in which you do that activity is not the spirit in which you work a job or in which you do any kind of real work, really. Maybe that’s an old-fashioned idea, but it’s one I still quite like.

While I was finishing Dead Souls, which is a lot to do with what we’re talking about, I was thinking that I haven’t really written much of anything all year.

I think there’s a hangover from doing a big postgraduate study where you don’t feel like doing that kind of thing for a while afterwards, or at least I don’t. It takes quite a lot out of you, you know? It’s healthy to not do it sometimes. I don’t like this language of productivity around writing generally, it’s very American to me. The goal isn’t to produce as much as possible. You’re not an arms factory. Sometimes it’s important to sit around and have a snooze. I don’t think that having a productive day is a good measure of where you’re at. Obviously, it’s nice to feel that you’re doing things, but there’s a lot of emphasis put on this if you’re doing any form of creative work, if that’s not too gross to say, that you constantly have to be churning it out. It’s good to have a pause. I didn’t mean to target you as an American. I essentially think we’re on the same side.

Has teaching always been your day job?

I worked in kitchens in my twenties. When I was doing my PhD I started teaching and hated it. But it increasingly became obvious that if I could get a job doing that, I’d have enough time to do what I want to do. As far as getting money for my time, it’s the most effective way. I’ve learned to enjoy it, and I now quite like teaching. I’ve always liked the students themselves generally, but I don’t really like universities that much or administration and all of that stuff. It’s hard to think of a better solution, I suppose, for organizing time and having enough freedom to do what you want to do and without feeling like you don’t have the time to do the things you want to do.

Do you teach literature or writing?

Both, but mainly writing. I have to teach Mrs. Dalloway next week. I lecture, but I only do a couple of lectures a year. This year, I’ve been given the Modern Period, so I have to do T.S. Elliot and Virginia Woolf, and I was going to have to do Joyce, but I got out of it. I got Woolf instead, and Mina Loy. I hadn’t read Mrs. Dalloway before two weeks ago. But it’s great, obviously, and fun to think about. Orlando is the best one by a million. It’s like watching a cartoon. It’s completely demented. I think she wrote it just for a laugh. It’s very charming and whimsical, and it’s like technicolor, it’s wild.

So you read Mrs. Dalloway for this class — now what?

I run tutorials, which are groups of ten students, and I have three groups of ten. It’s basically exam preparation for them, so if they get a Mrs. Dalloway question they have something to write about it. This has been quite difficult because there’s so much about it. At the beginning, it’s a bit Bolaño-esque. There’s a plane that’s writing in the sky and no one can tell what it says. Different people see it and they all think it says something different. The idea is the aerial view. Aerial photography was quite new because they only just had planes. The whole book is like this social mapping. It moves through various stratas of society and everyone’s linked to everyone else. The idea I’m going to present to them is that the authorial view is an aerial view, and you move very rapidly across social lines and geographical lines. There’s a speed to it which seems connected to that viewpoint. The idea, the neat little gimmick, is the writing in the sky is where the author is. That’s where I’ll nudge them.

That’s extremely up your alley.

You can find things. One year I had to do Introduction to Poetry, poetry from the 14th century, which I have absolutely no idea about, so that was really hard. This is definitely more connected to my interests. It’s still difficult to package it in a way, but this isn’t a bad part of the job. I did John Berryman last year. I really love John Berryman. He’s such a maniac. So many good last lines as well. “They took away his crotch.” I like that one. “If I had to do the whole thing over again, I wouldn’t.”

Again that reminds me of Dead Souls, although I did just read it so now everything is going to remind me. Something I’ve been interested in since I reread Bartleby The Scrivener and then Bartleby & Co, the Vila-Matas, is this idea of the not-writing. You were just saying taking a snooze as…

Praxis. This is to do with work as well, right? Refusing to do the thing that you should be doing. Or what we were just talking about with valuing money work and writing. It’s like the culture wants them to be the same thing somehow. “Oh, it’s just another job.” That would make a lot of sense for the administrative world. But that has to be pointed out as not true on some level as well.

A lot of the anecdotes I put into the novel are to do with that confusion. Basically by slightly exaggerating everything, [you get] a culture where you treat creativity as just another form of work. I don’t even really like “creativity” exactly, but you know what I mean: artistic stuff is just another avenue of money-valued work. Its final value is its fiscal value. Where would you go if you followed that logic? That’s in Bartleby definitely. The opting-out becomes untenable. Or if you’re opting out in name only — he’s there, he’s physically in the space, but he refuses to perform his job. You have to make like you’re doing the thing. That’s the imperative with work, isn’t it? You have to be seen to be working hard. At universities as well. They’re always was going on about, “This has been such an incredibly hard term, hasn’t it?” I’m like, “Has it? Has it really been that hard?” “As colleagues will know, the marking this term has been brutal.” Like, “Has it been brutal? Isn’t it the same as it always is?” There’s definitely this idea that working hard is… Unfortunately, that’s just what we have to do, isn’t it?

Are you working on anything now?

I’m trying to write another novel. It’s taking much longer. I’ve already been working on it for over a year. But I didn’t have the period of years of casual notetaking for this one. It’s quite different — or is it? Part of me thinks it’s exactly the same. I’m not sure. It’s not first person, so there’s more logistics, which has actually been very difficult for me to work out. It’s been very hard work. I don’t know when I’ll finish it, maybe next year sometime.

When you say the logistics, is it you’re mapping things out?

I’ve got a diagram. I had one for Dead Souls as well because there were certain points where I was getting confused about who was where or who was on what level of the story. For this one, it’s time. Things need to happen in certain orders so that things happen at the same time to different characters, that kind of thing. Several things have to happen at the moment before something else can happen. You have to position things a little bit. Some of that is new because I never really had to do that from an overview perspective before, it could always just be that person just happened to say that now, there was no reason that I had to take responsibility for that. But now, because I’m masterminding the whole thing, not a character, I have to be like: Why would I reveal this at this point? Doesn’t that seem a little bit tricksy? Why would I put things in that order when there’s no real reason I have to? I could put them in any order, because there’s multiple viewpoints of the same time period. You have to consider without wanting it to seem too artifice, like, “If I’d known that at the beginning, then I never would’ve thought…” I don’t want to have that kind of thing going on, big reveals. Maybe I do. But I don’t want to seem too stagey.

So how do you go about that? I’ve never written a novel.

You’ve written a big essay. It’s the same principle. At the moment, I have an idea of where things are going, but I don’t know how I’m going to get from the situation I’m in now to the bit I want to get to. I know everything’s there, all the pieces are in play, but that character needs to somehow end up here. That’s just a sense, it’s not affixed, but there’s some sort of flow to it, like an argument. If you’re making an argument in an essay, you have some target. It might not be static, but you’ve got a sense of where you’re going, and then as it clarifies, you’re like, “It’s actually a bit more like that.” You don’t go quite where you thought, but you still end up in that direction that you’re guided by some idea of where you’re going. It’s still a rhetorical gambit. It’s just you’re using made up people instead of arguments.

Are you a diagrammer or do you find that it’s necessary?

I am a bit of a diagram guy. When I went to art school — I did fine art — I used to make charts and do experiments and graph the results and all of that kind of shit. Perhaps I just like that kind of thing. Because Dead Souls is the Russian Doll structure, I would have certain timelines. There’s that couple, Amalia and Christian, they had their own little one because I needed to know what their story was going to be in a self-contained way. Then, theirs fits into a bigger one. Because some of them connect up earlier in the story, I needed to make sure that what was happening, say roughly a decade before that point, coheres with what they tell the character they’ve been doing — if they’re not lying. Stuff has to line up in a chronological sense. I found that I would be like, “I’m going to describe the weather, the scene needs a little bit of detail.” Then when I was reading through I’d be like, “Hang on, if it’s winter now, how could it have been spring a month ago?” I had to then skeleton a year structure over some of it, so that I could be like,””If that happened six months ago and it was summer, then now it must be winter,” which never would’ve occurred to me normally. With poetry you’re just like, whatever season you want it to be, it doesn’t matter. You can just say. There’s no fidelity needed.

[Speaking about time, I suddenly remember the book I told Sam I’d show him, Thomas Bernhard’s 3 Days.] What is it about Bernhard for you?

The earworm quality. I read Concrete a few years ago, and then read almost all of them. I was reading him while I was writing as well. The idea became essentially to ventriloquize it or to whatever extent I could to occupy the style. The license for that is that the book’s about plagiarism and unoriginality and therefore it’d be appropriate if it was told in that voice, but it also became the easiest way of doing it. I had very scattered ideas for little scenes and no real wave. I didn’t have a story, but I was like, “If it’s just one person talking, there doesn’t really need to be a story does there?” Or if there is, the story emerges from them talking. The person can jump around. If they start talking about something completely different, they can. I really like the freedom of that. Gombrowicz has that as well, where he suddenly talks about something else. It doesn’t matter, he’s telling the story, he can do what he wants. It was a liberating, enabling thing.

Tell me about your press, If a Leaf Falls. When did you start it and why?

I moved to Edinburgh and had a job at the university there, I ran writing workshops. I wanted to do a thing for my students, a little pamphlet of their writing, so I took it to the university printers, did about 20 copies, and it was like £7 to print 20. So I was like, “Huh, I could kind of print whatever I wanted here at that price.” I’d wanted to do some kind of small press before but hadn’t really worked out a form for it. I thought maybe it’d be pdfs, but then I thought no one reads them, you just have a million of them in a folder somewhere and it’s like a graveyard, you never look in it. A graveyard you never look in.

I worked out having the physical thing, and I knew I wanted to something with appropriated or found or sort of miscellaneous processes writing, which I felt certainly in the UK had no outlet really. I emailed maybe 30 or 40 people I thought might want to send me something and listed some things I might publish. Anything that might not make it into a book but was some weird thing you’ve written and might like some people to read it.

Quite a lot of people sent me stuff. When they were printed, something would happen to the content. Some extra dimension would appear in it, by being presented [in that way]. Amy Key sent me a whole list of her Uber history, which was, you know, “Mohammed is outside in a Toyota Prius.” Hundreds of lines like that. I put them into six-line blocks. Somehow having them in this little thing changed the content and made it seem a little allegorical, a little documentarian, a little bit uncomfortable. There are various readings of it. There was something unresolved about it. That felt quite interesting. I quite liked bringing that about—it seeming inexplicable, and a little tricky. So I kept going. People I have no idea who they are who send me stuff. This guy called Grant Maierhofer sent me this manuscript. I’d never heard of him, but I really liked the piece. It’s a list of neologisms; supposedly a memoir. It reads as a sort of generational story. Again there’s a slightly incomplete element to the text, like reading just the index of a book. It has some virtual or potential thing there that’s fun to speculate about.

When I stopped working at Edinburgh I had by that point a quite good relationship with the printer there. It has relaxed a bit as I’ve done more. But they tend to have some slightly artificially produced element, or unacknowledged copying or appropriation, or they’re about that somehow in subject. Now there’s enough people who buy it regularly for me to continue. It pays for itself. And I enjoy the process. It started 2015 so it’s been a while now. There’s over 100 titles now. They sell out, so I’ve got the last ten in stock maybe. I’m happy to send you some, I can’t remember if I have.

That’s how I know you! [I show Sam the eight If a Leaf Falls books I have.] When you sent me Dead Souls you also sent me this Duncan Wiese book, Tityrus: A Pastoral. Tell me about this project.

That was kind of a job-job thing in a way. I got approached by this publisher Lolli, she’s a friend, Denise [Rose Hansen]. They publish mainly Danish or Scandinavian stuff in English. They already had a translator, this guy Max [Minden Ribeiro]. They call it bridge translation. You get someone who speaks Danish — I don’t speak Danish — who translates in a completely literal way, and then me and him went through it and worked on it. There were certain word choices he’d made which to me sounded a bit strange. Some of the work was dialing it down a bit, other times finding solutions for problems, like things that didn’t really make sense when translated literally. I had to find some other way of saying it that was more elegant or easier to read. Danish has a small vocabulary so certain words are repeated a lot, like “bright” — “glow,” “shine,” any word like that is the same. But in English if you repeat the word “bright” all the time it sounds a bit weird. It’s not like in Danish he’s writing with a limited vocabulary, he’s not. It doesn’t read like that in Danish. You want to replicate that feeling without doing something that makes you really aware that he’s using the same word all the time. It’s a fun problem. So I went to Copenhagen, by coincidence around the same time, and we spent a day the three of us working on it together which was really nice.

Had you done translation work before?

No. My third book was somewhat google-assisted translations from Latin. So I had some experience of thinking in that way, thinking of equivalence. Finding something where you’re like, well I want to say that but I have to find… that was a useful preparation for it. I know I’m saying something, and I’m saying it somewhat differently from how he says it, but I want it to get at the same kind of thing. Or if it’s an image, to conjure up the same sort of image. You have to make adjustments, or lose something so you can gain something else. It’s fun. If I could do stuff like that regularly — it doesn’t pay badly. From the life/living perspective, translating for a living is probably pretty fulfilling. That’s probably a good way to live alongside writing.

I’ve been thinking about translation theory a lot for the past couple years. The Walter Benjamin essay, “The Task of the Translator.” And there’s a flip on that, the Don Mee Choi pamphlet, Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode. The Göransson-McSweeney as well, Deformation Zone — translation as a wound, “the wound of translation.”

There’s this argument between domestication versus foreignization. That there should be some trace of the translation process in the translation, right. If you present this completely untroubled surface — it’s like the book should remember what it is, and then you would have some indication that it had traveled from another language.

There’s this text called The Translator’s Invisibility, by Lawrence Venuti. That [translation] should be regarded as an intervention or a rewriting in itself rather than just making it available in another language. You’re bound to misrepresent it or damage the text somehow. Or omit or add or…