by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #232. Manguso is most recently the author of The Two Kinds of Decay.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating fifty-five additional states of decay.

Author: Sarah Manguso

Subjects Discussed: David Markson, sentences that originate in other formats, fan mail, whether a paragraph is truly a paragraph, problems with typesetting nomenclature, remembering personal moments at 1,000 words a day, word arrangement units (”WAUs”), themes vs. timeline, organic vs. inorganic writing, unrecognized planning mechanisms, thinking of the reader, Adam Thirlwell’s The Delighted States, syntactic barriers and foreshadowing meaning, mosaic tiles, the goofy perils of being called a poet, incidental metaphors, the engine of intelligence getting in the way, the uncertainty of employment, the solipsistic degrees of writing, stumbling upon a cohesive idea of what the universe entails, other memoirs of illness, categorization and after-the-fact marketing, reading fiction while writing, John Cheever’s Falconer, surveillance and paranoia, the alphabetical pursuit of hobbies, and the identity of the famous writer baffled by the idea of a hobby other than writing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Manguso: I thought of the pieces as an arrangement in two phases. The first phase was completely chaotic and the second phase was orderly. And during the chaotic first draft phase, the project that I set myself was really just to try to remember everything I could remember about this nine-year period in my life. Just everything. Every individual memory that I could bring up. And after my latest revision had lasted seven years, after that time, it really did seem that the memories had become particulate. Like there really was just one memory that espoused the insertion of the first central line in my chest. And it really did seem to have hardened in my memory into this item, this thing, this chunk of this chapter. And so while I was first writing the book, I didn’t think about chronology. Mainly because I had no idea how to write a book about one thing. I’d never done it before. And I didn’t know anything about narrative or what should come first. I really just wrote the pages all as individual files. And once I couldn’t remember anything else, I printed them all out and tried to notate based on memory and based on asking people what months and what year each thing had happened. And then I just put them in chronological order.

Correspondent: Well, there’s specific phrasing for some of these “thingies.” Pardon my…

Manguso: Let’s call them chapters now. I think that sounds more professional.

Correspondent: These particular word arrangement units. WAUs. Wows?

Manguso: Wows.

Correspondent: We’ll call them wows. Or waz.

Manguso: I’m going to call them chapters. But I like wow.

Correspondent: You often have text within text. With this italicization. But you have a particular timeline. Because you often use “the day before the decision I wrote” or “I wrote this three months after the diagnosis.” And so it seems that not only arranging these wows into themes, but also into a timeline. I’m wondering how you place prioritization upon a theme over a timeline. Were there certain circumstances? Was this entirely an organic process? Or was there just a lot of tinkering around with order and with rhythm? The way we were talking about this, it almost seems like this quarto of some sort.

Manguso: Well, I wish I knew. I’m not really sure how to differentiate an organic process from an inorganic process.

Correspondent: Okay. Let’s just say blindly intuitive vs. carefully planned and calculated.

Manguso: Well, at the risk of sounding difficult, I’m really trying my best to remember what it was like to write this book. But I made the thing. And the thing is a result of my guiding intelligence engaged with my memory. And I don’t know if I can really distinguish between the decisions that were more intellectual than intuitive. Or more intuitive than intellectual. I wish I knew. It is true that, after the book was done or after the final draft was done, it does seem that there were themes that had been inserted or injected into the book by some planning mechanism that I didn’t really recognize. But I think that’s kind of a familiar recognition to have after you make a thing. It makes sense in ways that you weren’t exactly planning. I’d rather not say that the whole thing is mysterious to me. But I think enough of it is that I’m hesitant to say, “Well, I meant to this, this, and this.” I don’t know what I really meant.

Correspondent: Well, I mean, how much should we be really dwelling upon dichotomies?

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by Edward Champion

Responding to Orwell: August 28

George: It pleases me immensely that you were fond of using the shorthand term, “ditto.” The word has intriguing etymology and yet you didn’t sprout (as I did) during the 1970s and 1980s, when “ditto” was more commonly used in reference to a mimeographed paper or a copy that was circulated amongst schoolkids and businessmen (who often behaved like schoolkids). But before good ol’ Xerox, it was used in a more common “see previous” capacity. You knew this of course. But let me confess my youthful ignorance. For years, George, I actually believed that the practice of saying “ditto” in this “see previous” capacity originated from the photocopy! I believed this as late as the early days of Limbaugh, circa 1993, when he referred to his listeners as “dittoheads.” (I am pretty confident, George, you wouldn’t have liked Limbaugh so much. For many years (1990-1993, to be precise), I exerted needless energies expressing my hostilities towards the man who gave us “feminazis” — an affront to the English language you likely would have observed.

And, in fact, while on the subject of Limbaugh and photocopied dittos, I remember one summer job (1993) I had in Sacramento. I was nineteen. I worked in a printing house and collated brochures. There was no air conditioning. It was tedious work, but I didn’t complain. And the owner, who was an unassuming but friendly conservative, played all three hours of Limbaugh every day. This drove me bananas. And I was patient. Up to a point. Until I finally confronted the owner and asked him whether he actually believed Limbaugh, why he listened to him, what he got out of him. Seriously, this guy is spouting a lot of bullshit. And what’s a guy like you, a man running a fairly successful small business, okay no air conditioning but even so, what’s a guy like you doing swallowing this codswallop? He speaks for me, said the owner in a very quiet voice. Limbaugh speaks for him. And I realized there and then that it was largely meek and mild-mannered men who were Limbaugh’s listeners. Not the callers, mind you. The callers were the most vocal of this bunch. And I realized that they were afraid of expressing what was on their mind. And I realized that they would flock to damn near any remotely entertaining demagogue because this was the only way that they could be part of the political process.

The Left here in America has failed to understand this. They are only just starting to get remotely angry, but they remain subdued for the most part, even after two terms of Dubya! Air America doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t represent that vicarious thrill that the print shop owner had. The idea, presumably, is to appear “civilized” in comparison to the “brutishness” of the Right. But nobody other than a pugilist finds use in a punching bag. So the Left is as much to blame as the Right for the past eight years of horrors. At the end of the day, we are all dittoheads. Small wonder then why it remains so hot & overcast. Yesterday, ditto.

by Edward Champion

Let the Games Begin

If this interview represents how McCain responds to questions — real questions, not the Leno softball variety, not the questions that result in the old coot offering his trademark “I served as a POW” answer without a followup — I simply cannot wait for the presidential debates to begin. Pass the popcorn and pop open the beer. These debates will feature material more hilarious than Bush’s “Internets” gaffe or his entreaties for us to remember Poland. The man will be flayed alive — should be, if Obama truly wants to win — with almost little to no effort.

But with the presidential race now neck-to-neck, and Obama’s people offering an aesthetic disaster in response to the elitist charges, will the American people continue to believe in this man? The cynic inside me says yes. The optimist insides me says no. And the pragmatist remembering that dark November morning four years ago is somewhere on the fence, likely to trot over his legs upon enunciating the trusted mantra, “The Democrats will fuck this up.”