{"id":790,"date":"2009-05-26T01:14:13","date_gmt":"2009-05-26T06:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/?p=790"},"modified":"2012-02-25T16:13:48","modified_gmt":"2012-02-25T21:13:48","slug":"arthur-phillips-bss-288","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/arthur-phillips-bss-288\/","title":{"rendered":"Arthur Phillips (BSS #288)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Arthur Phillips is most recently the author of <i>The Song is You<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/arthurphillips.jpg\" alt=\"arthurphillips\" title=\"arthurphillips\" align=\"center\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"powerpress_player\" id=\"powerpress_player_4555\"><!--[if lt IE 9]><script>document.createElement('audio');<\/script><![endif]-->\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-790-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\">http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div><p class=\"powerpress_links powerpress_links_mp3\">Listen: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\" class=\"powerpress_link_pinw\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Play in new window\" onclick=\"return powerpress_pinw('http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/?powerpress_pinw=790-podcast');\" rel=\"nofollow\">Play in new window<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\" class=\"powerpress_link_d\" title=\"Download\" rel=\"nofollow\" download=\"segundo288.mp3\">Download<\/a> (Running Time: 49:46 &#8212; 45.6MB)<\/p>\n<p><b>Condition of Mr. Segundo:<\/b> Reconsidering the playlists and those who play him.<\/p>\n<p><b>Author:<\/b> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arthurphillips.info\/\">Arthur Phillips<\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Subjects Discussed:<\/b> Characters who are enslaved to culture, partisan positions in relation to hoarding facts, being in denial about larger arguments within novels, Nabokov&#8217;s <i>Lectures on Literature<\/i>, aesthetic concerns, muses and playing against reader expectations, the myth of an author&#8217;s personal connection, listening to headphones, ghosts and <i>Jeopardy<\/i> experiences gone awry, personal experience and lies within fiction, speculating on the specific conditions in which a man can be a muse, being a male model and a musician, the myth of writing what you know, getting excited about emotion, the distance required to contend with a fictive location, the wall between the personal and the artistic, the magic souffle, predicting 2009 weather in New York, reading time, the danger of boredom, William Gaddis&#8217;s <i>The Recognitions<\/i>, outlines and improvisation, reinventing the wheel, the little changes within a manuscript vs. changing as a writer, the value of urgency, being a metaphorical roofer and upholsterer, Re-Flex&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=eabefjsJsAQ\">&#8220;The Politics of Dancing,&#8221;<\/a> and the crazy amounts of money one must pay to republish lyrics.<\/p>\n<p><b>EXCERPT FROM SHOW:<\/b><\/p>\n<p><b>Correspondent:<\/b> If we&#8217;re talking about time, there&#8217;s also the notion of reader&#8217;s time.  And as a stylist, you have some control over how frequently or how long or how short the reader&#8217;s going to turn the page.  When I read your book, I found numerous passages when I would slow down.  And then when dialogue would bump up, particularly with the scenes with the cop, it then sped up.<\/p>\n<p><b>Phillips:<\/b> Right.<\/p>\n<p><b>Correspondent:<\/b> And so I&#8217;m curious.  If time on a structural level was important, I&#8217;m curious if there was any importance you placed in terms of thinking of the reader and thinking of this notion of how fast the reader&#8217;s going to turn the page?<\/p>\n<p><b>Phillips:<\/b> That&#8217;s such a great question.  And on one hand, I want to say, &#8220;Jeez, I wish I had more conscious &#8212; and I will vow in the future to have more conscious &#8212; understanding of those technical matters.&#8221;  On the other hand, it seems a little impossible to control.  Well, not just a little.  It&#8217;s entirely impossible.  I think any time you start getting into what does <i>the<\/i> reader or what does <i>a<\/i> reader expect, react to, experience, you&#8217;re doomed.  I mean, you&#8217;re just &#8212; it can&#8217;t be.  If you have one or ten or a hundred or ten thousand or a hundred million readers, they&#8217;re just different.  And this is just so obvious that it&#8217;s just not saying anything.  But it says everything.  Because if everybody&#8217;s going to have a slightly different reaction, even taking a smaller subset of the people who &#8220;like&#8221; it, they&#8217;re going to all have a different reaction.  You can&#8217;t plan for them.  So the only reader that you can really have much planning for is yourself.  At which point, I don&#8217;t really have to think very consciously about &#8220;I need to speed it up here, I need to slow it down here.&#8221;  All I have is the feeling of &#8220;I&#8217;m bored.&#8221;  And so when I&#8217;m writing and I go back and I read the draft, I say, &#8220;Oh this is just &#8212; I&#8217;m just bored.&#8221;  Something has to happen here that is different from what&#8217;s happening.  Because I don&#8217;t like it.  And then at the end of it, when I&#8217;ve gone and I&#8217;ve done that twenty-five times, and I say, &#8220;I like the whole thing,&#8221; then it&#8217;s done.<\/p>\n<p><b>Correspondent:<\/b> Well, to deflate my own interlocutory souffle&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><b>Phillips:<\/b> (<i>laughs<\/i>)<\/p>\n<p><b>Correspondent:<\/b> I should point out that this may very well be the difference between having lots of dialogue and having lots of imagery.  I guess the question here is how intuitive is it really.  I mean, when you&#8217;re getting lost in a long sentence, whether as a writer or even as a reader, you&#8217;re going to be aware of the slowness.  Or maybe you&#8217;re lost in such a fugue state that there really is no sense of time.<\/p>\n<p><b>Phillips:<\/b> Right. I&#8217;m reading <i>The Recognitions<\/i> right now and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><b>Correspondent:<\/b> First time?<\/p>\n<p><b>Phillips:<\/b> First time.<\/p>\n<p><b>Correspondent:<\/b> Oh wow.<\/p>\n<p><b>Phillips:<\/b> And I&#8217;m having all kinds of temporal feelings about that book as I work with it.  There are times when I am lost in a fugue state, although not often enough for my taste.  And often I&#8217;m feeling, &#8220;I think Gaddis was lost in a fugue state. And I just can&#8217;t join him for some reason.&#8221;  I don&#8217;t know that it&#8217;s just images and dialogue.  I think that you can have some very impenetrable, hard-to-wrestle-with dialogue.  And actually that&#8217;s what brings <i>The Recognitions<\/i> to mind.  Because there are passages.  Long passages.<\/p>\n<p><b>Correspondent:<\/b> The party scenes, I know.<\/p>\n<p><b>Phillips:<\/b> You know, there&#8217;s a forty page party scene with almost nothing but dialogue.  And you have to go, &#8220;Oh wait a minute.  Is this the same person who four pages earlier was talking?  And where is that in relation to the little girl asking for sleeping pills?&#8221;  And all the rest of it.  So it goes on and on.  So you can have some very slow-moving dialogue.  And actually I was thinking about Gaddis writing that in &#8217;55, and Nabokov in some period around the same time doing one of his customary unappealing little digs at novels that are all dialogue, and thinking, &#8220;I wonder if he read this, looked at it, had any feeling about this, would have included or excluded it from that grouping.&#8221;  Generally speaking, light dialogue goes faster than description or internal thought.  But not necessarily, I guess is the short answer.  I could have said &#8220;Not necessarily&#8221; about fifteen minutes ago.  <\/p>\n<p><b>Correspondent:<\/b> (<i>laughs<\/i>) That&#8217;s all right.<\/p>\n<p><b>Phillips:<\/b> There you go.  Just cut it down to the dialogue.<\/p>\n<div class=\"powerpress_player\" id=\"powerpress_player_4556\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-790-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3?_=2\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\">http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div><p class=\"powerpress_links powerpress_links_mp3\">Listen: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\" class=\"powerpress_link_pinw\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Play in new window\" onclick=\"return powerpress_pinw('http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/?powerpress_pinw=790-podcast');\" rel=\"nofollow\">Play in new window<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\" class=\"powerpress_link_d\" title=\"Download\" rel=\"nofollow\" download=\"segundo288.mp3\">Download<\/a> (Running Time: 49:46 &#8212; 45.6MB)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Arthur Phillips is most recently the author of The Song is You. Condition of Mr. Segundo: Reconsidering the playlists and those who play him. Author: Arthur Phillips Subjects Discussed: Characters who are enslaved to culture, partisan positions in relation to hoarding facts, being in denial about larger arguments within novels, Nabokov&#8217;s Lectures on Literature, aesthetic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<div class=\"powerpress_player\" id=\"powerpress_player_4557\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-790-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3?_=3\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\">http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div><p class=\"powerpress_links powerpress_links_mp3\">Listen: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\" class=\"powerpress_link_pinw\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Play in new window\" onclick=\"return powerpress_pinw('http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/?powerpress_pinw=790-podcast');\" rel=\"nofollow\">Play in new window<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/_mp3\/segundo288.mp3\" class=\"powerpress_link_d\" title=\"Download\" rel=\"nofollow\" download=\"segundo288.mp3\">Download<\/a> (Running Time: 49:46 &#8212; 45.6MB)<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1084],"tags":[748,16,9,750,375,143,749],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2199,"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions\/2199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.edrants.com\/segundo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}