Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Folks, please feel free to chime in with your own questions and
comments.
  

    
Hi Scott, Runshin, and Mary -- great to know you're in the mix here,
and I'll look forward to more questions. 

Gun, With Occasional Music was conceived as an attempt to crossbreed
Philip K. Dick style dystopian fiction with the classical hardboiled
detective voice -- I modeled it more than anything on Raymond
Chandler and Ross MacDonald, but James Crumley's voice was in the
mix as well. And elements of my future world were strongly derived
from a Brothers Strugatsky novel called The Ugly Swans, and (more
atmospherically) from Bernard Wolfe's Limbo. I saw the detective
story as a kind of rigorous structure I could follow, since at that
point I didn't know how to organize a book. It served me well as a
way to learn how to plot (although later I'd learn that I wasn't
always terribly interested in plotting!)
  

    
By the time of Motherless Brooklyn I was a published writer and had
moved back to Brooklyn, which explains why that book is so much a
valentine to that place. I'd learned about Tourette's from reading
Oliver Sacks -- two essays, "Witty Ticcy Ray" and "A Surgeon's Life"
-- and also by seeing a very good documentary film called Twitch and
Shout. I felt an instant and even somewhat overwhelming sense of
identification with some parts of the experience of the Tourettic
patients -- although, obviously, not with the outward situation of
having manifestations that others would identify, with all the
difficulties that ensue. Yet in many ways I do feel that I wrote
that book "from the inside". Certainly the more I learned about it,
the more I felt I was learning things about the nature and operation
of my own brain, especially in its particular ways of relating to
language.
  

    
The film was entirely Edward Norton's, from the very beginning! He
optioned it even before it was published, from the galley. We met up
less than a year later -- this would be in 2000 -- and he had
already completely conceived the fundamental changes that were
reflected in the finished film 20 years later: the shifting of the
story out of the '90's, into the very early 1960's, and combination
of my material with the biographical phantasia about the developer
Robert Moses. I gave him my blessing back then, and when he finally
was able to make it that was the film that I saw -- the one he'd
intended when we first spoke. I never saw a screenplay, though once
it was shooting I was invited to visit the set, and did. I had a
particularly good time talking with Bobby Cannavale and Ethan
Suplee.
  

    
> He optioned it even before it was published, from the galley

How does that work, if you can say? Did your agent shop the ms
around? Was Norton already a fan? Had your earlier novels attracted
Hollywood without having been made yet? ("Gun, with Occasional
Music" could be great. Maybe someday.)
  

    
20 years to finished film!

Of course, I had to watch it as I pursued the story, becoming
increasingly more interested, and I wondered what you thought about
how Lionel’s affliction was increasingly smoothed out into a single
tic: “If!”
  

    
The option before publication was new to me, and hasn't happened
again (though I doubt it's unprecedented generally). That book had a
bit of pre-publication buzz -- I think the hook of "a detective with
Tourette's" was quite easy to understand and pass around, and would
tend to be exactly the kind of thing that a virtuoso actor might be
looking for. And he and had a two-degrees-of-separation which made
it easy for him to hear about, and then to request a copy of the
galley. So he just got hold of it early and was able to influence
New Line Cinema to preempt all others with an option. 
  

    
Ha, like the pitches at the start of The Player, "It's Out of Africa
meets Pretty Woman." 

I remember thinking of movie-like possibilities while reading The
Fortress of Solitude, especially the more magical moments. Wikipedia
tells me it was adapted for the theater but did it ever attract
attention for a film adaptation?
  

    
Linda, after having 'let go' of the material so long before, by the
time I saw Edward Norton's film, I didn't really relate his Lionel
to mine so much... it seemed to me the two had really parted ways a
long time ago, and so I just took in this new creature with
curiosity, but I wasn't checking him against the original.
  

    
Scott, your question could lead to a lot of tales! Fortress has been
continuously under option since it was published, and has moved
through four different proposed projects. Gun, With Occasional Music
has also had four different unsuccessful developments, although it
is currently out of option. The same is true for As She Climbed
Across the Table -- four deals, no movies. My work is catnip for
filmmakers, but I think it turns out to be hard to adapt once they
get in. The first of my books *not* to be picked up for option and
development at some level of the film industry was my eighth novel,
Chronic City. Along with Dissident Gardens and A Gambler's Anatomy,
it is one of only three of the thirteen novels never to get a
nibble. The history of my developed-but-unfilmed books could take us
all day to get through, but a couple of highlights of what didn't
happen are the Leos Carax version of Girl in Landscape, the David
Lynch version of Amnesia Moon, and the David Cronenberg version of
As She Climbed Across the Table (that one especially tantalizing
because it was actually ready to go and even "greenlit" before a
studio executive squashed it.
  

    
oops, failed to close that parenthesis.)
  

    
Maybe an AI could make them.
  

    
Jonathan, as a fan of your nonfiction I know you are deeply immersed
in movies. Did you everyone consider adapting one of your stories
yourself or writing a new screenplay? 
  

    
When I was reading Motherless Brooklyn and now Brooklyn Crime Novel,
it struck me how neighborhood-specific, street-specific,
building-specific each is.  As a native Angeleno, I'm sure that
there was a great deal of subtext I missed.  Although I did notice
Ziad's mentioned in both books, so I felt like an insider for a
brief moment; it brought to mind the fabulous sandwiches at the late
Genova Deli in Temescal, which just made me sad and hungry. 

Like, I can say Temescal to you, and trust that you know I'm
referring to the Temescal part of Oakland.  That kind of subtext
that would be lost on a Brooklynite who had never been to the East
Bay, which is another bit of subtext.  One paragraph, at least two
bits of subtext.

I can only imagine that the same is true of these books, full of
these kind of references that just passed me right by  Not that they
weren't richly textured enough as it was, I just felt there was
surely a lot I missed. 
  

    
Scott, I've lived long enough that despite my general prohibition on
getting distracted from writing my novels -- and a more specific
prohibition on adapting my own work to screenplay, on the principle
that that rarely works out well for the author, who tends to get
fired and rewritten -- I've gone down a lot of paths I never
intended. I have the curiosity of a cat, though it hasn't killed me
yet.

Among the many things I've written that aren't my novels are a
scattering of tries at original screenplays, in various contexts.
And twice I've been talked into adapting my own writing. No films
resulted from any of these things! Nor did a fabulous treatment and
pilot script I wrote for HBO turn into a television show.

I did once do a "dialogue polish" for a not-terrible science fiction
movie, but I'm contractually bound not to tell you which one! The
check didn't bounce. 
  

    
Linda, no question, there's a ton of local reference in those books.
I had to get past a reluctance to do so -- when I started out, it
seemed to me that I should have in mind a reader's need to recognize
everything. At some point, I got over it. I think it was reading
Dickens, actually. The world of his books is loaded with cultural
and urban detail that can only be grasped by a modern reader by
inference (unless they're some kind of scholar of London history).
Yet I realized I was absorbing everything I needed to understand his
books, even if many of the literal and topical references were lost
on me...
  

    
When did you start writing about art?

Do you want to choose one of your what, essays?  commentaries? 
reviews? and put a link to it here?
  

    
I'm a fan of your essays, which often? sometimes? contain an element of
memoir. I'm especially thinking of "Defending The Searchers," in which
you talk about the John Ford western as you encountered it at different
parts of your life. It reminds us of what it was like to form an opinion
on a movie that, in the years before always-on entertainment, you might
not get to see until some theater decided to show it, and, as I remember,
the difficulty of approaching a work freshly when you have already been
immersed in conventional and reactionary opinions on it.

But -- just teeing up a couple for you to riff on here -- I was
absolutely floored by the essay "The Ecstasy of Influence," which you
(or Harper's?) subtitled "A Plagiarism." Wonderful and necessary use
of endnotes, and I hate to explain anything about it to first-time
readers because I want them get the same reveal I had. But fans of Kirby
Ferguson's "Everything Is a Remix" videos will certainly enjoy it.
  

    
Linda, I stumbled into writing directly about art and artists when I
was asked to add something to publications about my artist friends
-- beginning with Perry Hoberman and Fred Tomaselli. I was also
motivated at a certain point to write about my father's paintings to
accompany a career retrospective show he had at a small museum in
New Hampshire.

I began it with reluctance because -- compared to my enthusiasm for
film and music criticism -- there wasn't much art writing I read
with joy, or identified with. But I figured out my own way to
practice it, and started down a path of doing it with regularity, to
the point where I had a book's worth of stuff to collect.

Thanks for the suggestion that I post a few things -- here are a
couple of new ones, not actually in the book, but typical of how I
go about it:

https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/1067

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/jonathan-lethem-charles-child-untitled-cormora
nt-barn-sale/

and here's the very new collection:

https://www.zebooks.com/books/cellophane-bricks

and an excerpt from it:

https://www.zebooks.com/news/when-art-talks-back-jonathan-lethem-on-graffiti-a
s-visual-and-written-expression

(Scott, I'll circle back and talk about the essays soon -- first I
have to go off and teach a class on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A
Screenplay, in my "Kubrick and Texts" course... and you'll remember
that Nabokov and Lolita play an important part in "The Ecstasy of
Influence"...)
  

    
I was surprised by your reference to James Crumley. I crossed paths
with him many years ago, when he was teaching in El Paso. I know he
has a kind of cult following, but how did you come upon his work,
and what draws you to it?  
  

    
Scott, you've certainly singled out two very pivotal essays for me
-- perhaps the two most pivotal (another couple might be "Speak,
Hoyt Schermerhorn", also from Harper's, and the very recent "The
Invention of a Neighborhood" in the New Yorker...)

(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/boerum-hill-brooklyn-gentrificat
ion-jonathan-lethem)

The Searchers essay was, simply, the very first time I tried
seriously to do something with the literary essay. Up to that point
I might have published a small scattering of book reviews or movie
reviews, but I hadn't treated the essay as a form to invest in, nor
had I offered up anything like such personal material within it... I
had to work terribly hard to get it on its feet, there were dozens
of drafts behind the version that was finally published -- it is
undoubtedly one of my "most worked" pieces of prose, in any form.
The result has been endlessly gratifying -- I still hear of people
teaching it in courses on film and the western and in classes on the
personal essay. And it kicked off a cycle of similar writings that
culminated in "The Beards" and which were collected in my first
non-fiction book, The Disappointment Artist.

"The Ecstasy of Influence" was a much more cognitive thing, a really
deliberate piece of rhetoric or agitprop that came out of several
years' involvement with the Copyleft movement, and reading and
thinking I was doing around problems of intellectual property... the
assembling of that piece was an effort of more than six months of
steady intensive labor and required so much reading and notation
that I've sometimes joked that it was the doctoral dissertation I
thought I'd avoiding having to write when I dropped out of
college...
  

    
Peter, I was such a fiend for variations on the hardboiled voice,
and looking for successors (after Ross MacDonald) that I read very
widely in search of worthy material... by the nature of my
upbringing and cultural biases I was especially interested in anyone
trying to take that voice not only in a more "literary" direction
but doing so from a hippie or leftist or countercultural position,
like Roger L. Simon or Richard Brautigan or Don Carpenter... (other
followers, like Robert B. Parker or early Ellroy often seemed good
but somewhat regressive or even reactionary to me... not pushing the
voice or its implications in the direction I was interested to see
it go...)

Crumley wrote three hard-boiled detective novels (I think). He was,
I think, a heavy drinker, and much of what I've read is promising
but somewhat under-realized. But he hit it completely out of the
park once, with The Last Good Kiss. I believe it's one of the
greatest examples of the form. A book I cherish.
  

    
Thanks for these detailed answers, and for the pointers to the new writing
above. I love Katie Marz's work, which is new to me. The celluloid piece
in your home is wonderful, as if Raw ventured into stained glass.

Rereading "The Ecstasy of Influence" this morning, I thought a sentence
must have come from Lewis Hyde's "The Gift," and, checking, and I was
smugly happy to read, "Above any other book I've here plagiarized,
I commend The Gift to your attention." Hyde has a few fans here on the
Well, though perhaps not in this conversation.
  

    
I'm here and I'm a fan of both.

I can only say that I'm delighted to have Jonathan Letham, a writer
I've always read and admired, do an inkwell.vue - but I find I have
few questions, only the occasional expression of appreciation.
  

    
Hyde is a great writer, and a lovely guy. One of my finest
plagiarism-forged friendships.

Renshin, no pressure for questions. I will say they don't all have
to be deep -- and I promise not to answer everything quite so
ponderously! We can do a speed round or two. Favorite David
Cronenberg movies, etc.

Something about the Well makes me want to drop a lot of Bay Area
street cred. Mention bands I saw at Berkeley Square, and so forth.