Party Boy
Sunday, November 29th, 2009The best things I’ve read lately were both recommended by Ed Park, The Notebook by Agota Kristof and Speedboat by Renata Adler.
Tao Lin was interviewed by Michael Silverblatt for KCRW’s Bookworm, and in his post Tao links to a bunch of other great writers’ interviews from the Bookworm archives, including an interview with Gordon Lish. Listening to it I went to Lish’s Wikipedia page (which has been markedly expanded since I last checked) and that’s where I read this:
T. Gertler’s novel, Elbowing the Seducer, has a character who is a book editor and womanizer who is apparently based on Lish. It is unknown who Gertler really is — this writer only published on story in Esquire and one novel.
In 1984 she told Don Swaim her name is Trudy Gertler and doesn’t at all seem to be assuming a fake identity. Maybe Wikipedia is wrong. There isn’t any citation for that detail. Anyway here’s an interesting bit from the interview:
T. Gertler: When I was a little girl and I’d read the Miami Herald, which is quite different now, but at the time I would read that so-and-so was a good woman writer, and then there would be Steinbeck or Faulkner and they were writers. And at the same time it would say so-and-so is a great dancer and so-and-so is a good black dancer. And I got this notion that there were categories and subcategories and I wanted to be in the main category and I despaired it and I just thought well there are always writers and there are women writers and being a writer is the thing to be, even if you’d be the least of all the writers, it’s still better than being the top of the women writers if that’s a subcategory. You know I just wanted to be a writer. So I thought maybe that wasn’t a reasonable thing to want to be….and I didn’t have an strong push in the opposite direction…I think part of my predicament was preposterous…my thinking that…
Don Swaim: Well not really because, particularly in the past, women have trapped themselves into writing about women’s themes to a great degree and not universal themes. And this still happens…to a degree, and I think that this is changing now.
T. Gertler: Well to a degree, there is one other point I could make about that, about universal themes, which is that men and women do have, to a degree at times, different preoccupations sometimes merging sometimes not and that often when a woman writes badly people saw oh this is female writing, this is bad. When a man writes badly we should say that he is also exaggerating the worst in himself and we’d say he’s writing male-ly. He’s overmacho or he’s emphasizing that part of himself, the male part…
Don Swaim: Or we say he’s writing junk.
T. Gertler: Yes and so women can write junk and men can write junk. But the preoccupation is when your human, and when they pertain to the truth or the need of the man or the woman is good writing, usually. Emily Dickinson is certainly a genius. Some of her poems are not very good and criticism has been that they are too female. Yeats is a brilliant, wonderful, wonderful poet and at times some of his poems are less than marvelous and that’s when he’s pursuing his male themes to the exclusion of his female self, he’s not in balance either, nor is she at times. So I take a minor exception to what you just said in that I don’t think it’s been the confinement to certain interests that’s been the problem for women, but the lack of perception, critically, that when men are failing they are failing in their work because they are doing parodies of being men and that when women fail in their work they are doing parodies of being women and neither is acceptable.
Also did you know…
Rozalia Jovanovic is writing surreal and wonderful “reviews” for The Rumpus
Alison Kelly reviewed NOON for the Times Literary Supplement