March 24th, 2008
News:
- I started reading for Open City and on my walk to the office last week I saw Paul Dano filming something.
- My first friend from college, Scott Waddell, added some great new paintings to his website. He famous.
- I have two cavities - one is underneath a filling that I’ve had since I was really little and my new insurance doesn’t pay for fillings.
Lydia Davis interviewed by Sarah Manguso:
BLVR: Ben Marcus also said of your stories: “There’s a nearly autistic failure to acknowledge the emotional heart of the matter, and a curious lack of interest in narrative scenes between characters.”
LD: I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters. Maybe I’m shying away from a certain artificiality that I perceive to be present in many such scenes as written. Although, as soon as I say that, I think of other possible reactions to that perception of artificiality: how a writer like Jane Bowles, for instance, lets a certain acknowledged artificiality be an effective part of those narrative scenes between characters.
BLVR: What’s artificial about those scenes? How are they more artificial than the rest of a story?
LD: We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.
(I will spare you the next question)