todd hasak-lowy (interview)

everything blocked in the center is what todd, the author of The Task of This Translator, a collection of short stories that i liked said, everything else is what i said; this happened through e-mail and i added the links later

1. Most of the characters in The Task of This Translator are depressed. Why exactly (take your answer from the other interview and say 'why?' to that) do you write about people who are depressed?

2. Who is the most depressed character in The Task of This Translator?

3. What's the best way to stop being depressed?

4. When you are depressed, what kind of book will you read?

Preliminary answer: Before addressing the specifics of any of these questions, maybe some general thoughts about the word “depressed.” It seems to me this word has somehow become the term of choice in our culture for describing a not good mood. For whatever reason, “depressed” has pushed “sad,” “down,” “unhappy,” and a bunch of other words out of the way. This is remarkable in and of itself. But the matter of this word grows even more complicated when you consider that “depressed” is a clinical term describing a spectrum of conditions, most of which don’t exactly describe how the average person really feels when he or she says, “I’m so depressed today.” There are a lot of conclusions to be drawn from this, but I’ll limit myself to one for now. This is a really central word in our culture (and in your blog), but it’s at once overused (in your blog in a knowing, maybe playful way) and its meaning is pretty slippery. I start with this since I feel like one of the things I’m trying to do when I write is get behind things, or get past the way words, as we tend to use them, don’t really do the job.

Now I feel like I can answer these four questions.

1. Writing about misery, failure, unhappiness, loss, and even depression is more interesting to me than writing about their opposites. At least for now my project involves investigating people who find themselves in a bad way. Maybe this has something to do with the way the solitude and safety of writing lends itself to exploring feelings and experiences that are just too unpleasant or unruly to deal with at most other times.

2. I guess Larry, in the sense that his life has really fallen apart, and what he’s losing (wife and possibly access to child) is painfully large. But depression or feeling really rotten is the stuff of incommensurability. I think that’s one of the points of the structure of “The End of Larry’s Wallet.” Compared to what is about to happen—a massive nuclear exchange between two countries that will kill millions of people—Larry’s own problems, much of which are of his own doing, appear pretty trivial. But they’re real, at least to him. Real and overwhelming. In that sense, characters in almost every story are facing just about all they can handle.

3. No real suggestions here. I think, and this is a guess, depression (in both the idiomatic and clinical sense) is one of those things (I think shame is another) that builds on itself. In both cases you feel bad about feeling bad. So I guess the general strategy would be to interrupt the circular current.

4. If I’m feeling really crappy, I can’t concentrate enough to make reading worthwhile, in part because there’s usually some anxiety involved. Thankfully, that’s not too often.

When I read your stories, I feel like you've set very high standards for yourself, that you've worked very hard to have it be funny, insightful, original--anything but boring. And so I can sort of stop analyzing my own reading (am I wasting my time?), and, trusting that everything in the book will be good, read it sort of lucidly, with actual, unselfconscious enjoyment. Who is like that to you?

I definitely had that experience when I read Yaakov Shabtai’s Hebrew novel Zikhron Devarim (literally, “Memory of Things,” but the English translation is called Past Continuous). He wrote these massive, complex sentences that sometimes run five pages, masterfully describing the layered subtleties of his characters’ inner worlds and moving from one layer (and one character) to another in unconventional ways. Reading that book changed, or maybe just brought into focus, how I was trying to look at and think about the world. That book, you also may be interested to know, is about as bleak as bleak gets. In fact, if I have any criticisms of it, it’s that it’s too uniformly tragic. But yes, as I got more into that book I stopped wondering if it was “good” or if I was wasting my time. For me it was much bigger than that.

In your story, "The End of Larry's Wallet," you do this thing where you narrate an entire people's happenings by saying "...people did this, people did that..." I've seen this before in Lorrie Moore, in her stories Like Life and Joy, and also in Joy Williams a little, in her collection Taking Care. Who else does this sort of thing, that you know of?

I think that type of gesture is fairly common in wide-canvas realist fiction (though my story is definitely not an instance of that). But if you look at the openings of a lot of 19th century novels, they’ll start with this type of wide shot before narrowing in on particular characters. Orly Castel-Bloom, an important contemporary Hebrew writer, opens her last novel with a complete chapter about Israel and Israeli society, narrating the weather, the political situation, and other things that are causing the people to suffer.

You and Matthew Rohrer are friends or something (I read in an interview). Do you read and enjoy his poetry? He is one of the more ironic poets I've read, and funny in a intelligent, condensed way. What's your favorite poem of his, if you read him. And what other poetry do you read, and like?

I know Matt from college. He was instrumental in encouraging me to pursue my own writing, since I’ve always looked up to him as a writer, from way before I ever even considered writing. I do read and enjoy his poetry. I like pretty much all of his poems, but “The Painted Couple” from his first book (A Hummock in the Malookas) and “MK Ultra” from his most recent book (A Green Light) are maybe my favorites. Incidentally, he’s an amazing reader—in the out loud sense.

I don’t read a lot of poetry, which I mention with a certain amount of shame. It just requires a degree of patience that I normally can’t locate. Also, I’m ultimately most interested in narrative, which pushes me away from most poetry and toward fiction (and all sorts of non-fiction). A read a fair amount of Hebrew poetry (and some Arabic poetry) in graduate school. The Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai is absolutely brilliant, and there are lots of very good translations of his work out there.

In "The End of Larry's Wallet," you say you went to see Independence Day for ironic value, but ended up not being able to enjoy it ironically because of the scope of the thing, that they used a bomb and sacrificed millions of lives yet did not destroy the alien spaceship in that one scene. Have you ever had this same experience with a book?

Not really. What made “Independence Day” so oppressive was its unrelenting and unapologetic use of truly visceral images and sounds that circumvented the thinking, reflective, conscious part of me and went straight to something involuntary. I didn’t think anything as much as I immediately felt, almost physically, really bad. Books, by having to use words, can’t cheat quite that effectively.

The narrator of the stories is ironic, but also always sincere. Ironic people can be sincere, but unironic people cannot be ironic. What does that mean? Why? Is this analogous to philosophical writers being able to write about relationships while unphilosophical writers are not able to write about the nature of being and existence? What do you think?

I’m going to try to answer this in the most unironic way I can. Irony is a complicated thing, and pretty misunderstood. Being ironic only necessarily means saying one thing but meaning something else. That’s all (as far as I know). It doesn’t also require sarcasm or being cutesy or not thinking anything is serious. If you say exactly what you don’t mean, then you’re being ironic, but quite possibly very sincere, albeit in a roundabout way. Somehow irony has come to be seen as this mode of communication that involves some sort of knowing wink between whoever is being ironic and whoever (whomever?) is supposed to be detecting the irony. Some third person is left the odd man out, and the stakes are really low for the other two. I’m not particularly interested in that brand of irony. In fact, that type of irony gives irony a bad name and allows cultural conservatives and the like to claim that irony is the sign of some larger cultural sickness. I write from a conviction that language has been pretty nearly ruined by misuse—and I don’t mean grammatical misuse—but by its abuse at the hands of politicians and news anchors and other people who speak with disingenuous authority. I try to sound authoritative, but ridiculously so, and I think that’s where my irony originates. I’m not sure I’m really accomplishing anything through this, in terms of reclaiming language or anything along those lines, but that’s where my irony comes from.

For me, it doesn't really matter what an author writes about--subject matter isn't what determines if I like a book or not, but rather if the author and I have similar personalities and worldviews. What about you? Why will you enjoy one book and not another?

I’m first and foremost interested in an author’s voice. It’s never just a matter of voice, since voice is inseparable from tone and theme, etc. But I read to hear how other people are using language. I typically don’t read a book because of what it’s about, in some narrow sense. When I do, I’m typically disappointed.

Do you think, do you have the impression, that more literary awards are given to books that deal with, on their deepest level, (1) the nature of being and existence, (2) real events in history encompassing more than one generation of people and more than one political group, (3) people suffering due to there being different nations in the world with a lot of or not a lot of power and influence (4) people suffering due to prejudice, racism, sexism, intolerance (5) people suffering due to unsatisfying relationships; and why do you think that is so (why is your answer what it is), and if you were giving awards, what kind of book would you give awards to, in terms of how the book affects you? (and have I missed any 'genre' here?)

I’ve been way too serious throughout this interview, so I’ll just go ahead and say that I’m not really sure what you’re talking about. The givers of big awards probably like big, epic novels, but I don’t follow the awards too much. I do tend to watch the Academy Awards, in spite of myself, and that typically and truly depresses me.