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.

lorrie moore (again)

why i like lorrie moore so much, i think, is because she is, in a way that most writers i've read are not, open-minded emotionally, intellectually, and, most appealing to me, tonally

she can be melodramatic, but when she is it feels real instead of just embarrassing

because on the same page, there will also be sarcasm, irony, detachment, earnestness, and jokes

and also on the same page will be layered a sort of counter-tone, a 'making-fun' of the melodrama, the sarcasm, detachment, etc.--she'll subvert her own rhetoric, offer a different point of view oftentimes in the same sentence or else question her own rhetoric, condescend toward it or doubt it openly or make it into a joke

so that it is like she is egoless, a sort of computer, just trying things out, detached, from a distance, nervously, with uncertainty, and jokes

and this is very appealing to me

when i read her, i feel the opposite of escape, i feel maybe more alive than i normally do in my normal life (which is not saying much) but in a way that makes me want to make my normal life as alive as when i read lorrie moore because the way in which her writing makes me feel alive is not the same as watching a hollywood movie or reading one of the authors that i'm going to list about five paragraphs down makes me feel alive (which is in a concentrated, distorted, dehydrating sort of way) and this sentence just made me nauseous

in contrast to lorrie moore, in terms of openness, escape, and how sort of dehydrated i feel after reading them (to me), are writers like Donald Barthelme, Kafka, Palahniuk, Philip Roth, etc. (any writer, maybe, that gives certain subjects more weight, as if saying that this is deeper, more important, than that, as if that is their message, and all of which is a preconception, the thing about one thing having more importance than another)

after reading those authors, and many others, i feel off, i feel strange, i feel like the book has taken something of me and moved it away from me, out of the real world and into some dream world, in the same way that playing chess or watching TV will do to me

i feel lied to a little

a little bit commercialized, whatever that means

and why i feel this way, i think, is because i feel that those writers (listed above, and many others) change themselves when they write, they block out certain things and get into a different, more closed-off frame-of-mind in order to write

while lorrie moore, i feel, blocks nothing out when writing, but just sort of merges from real life into fiction, and stays open to the actual experience of life

that is

lorrie moore incorporates donald barthelme and kafka and palahniuk, etc. into her works, and does so in a fleeting, anecdotal way (like it is in real life, my real life, when sometimes things feel kafka-esque or barthelme-esque or palahniuk-esque; this last one mostly in middle school)

she'll have it in a line of dialogue or in a simile or she'll just mash it in there somehow (a poem or something that the character thinks or remembers non-sequitur-ishly)

like the guy in Like Life who drew paintings of snarling dogs jumping over sofas (barthelme-esque a little) and, in the same story (Like Life), the part about how it was illegal not to own a TV (barthelme-esque again), or in that same story again where it says Mamie has recurring dreams that involved finding a place to die, where (paraphrase) everyone goes around asking, "Is it okay to die now? Can I die here? Is it okay to die yet?" (kafka-esque) or in Willing where the character "...hated, hated her life..." (palahniuk-esque... maybe)

lorrie moore, then, to me, acknowledges philosophical problems, like the nature of being, identity, religion, creation, death, time (that simile in Terrific Mother, "something something... like the history of all things..."), etc., but writes stories that are true to life in that these are the things that a person would actually feel in their life, and does so in a tone that is comprehensive, and does all this not through any contrivance or short-cut but, i feel, by just working really hard

i just get the feeling that she works a lot harder than any other writer i've read

you can't really copy her style, i don't think, because i don't think she has a style

but just works very hard (except her last two new yorker stories)

i think i exaggerated a little today

actually, no i didn't

the task of this translator

i really like this book

it's a very comprehensive book

it pretty much gets at everything there is in life

it has everything

it has

the holocaust, a depressed man working in a cafe in a holocaust museum who is a little ashamed of being depressed, death of millions by nuclear disaster, death of one by unfair heart attack, a story where the author interjects to analyze his insecurities about what he has done in the story, a depressed old man who soundproofs his basement and rides and is happy on an exercise bike while listening to and singing aloud to music at 3 a.m. while his wife sleeps upstairs, a young man so depressed that when he loses his wallet he no longer knows what to do with his existence, and a man who because he is lonely invites someone who he is afraid of over to his house to watch football though he does not know how football works

it is ironic, sincere, funny, sad, and comtemplative

it acknowledges politics, that things happen on a global scale, but also acknowledges that a person can get depressed for almost any reason

and it explores, or rather, deals with, both

without preconception, cliche, or inanity

the sentences were so relentlessly consistent in their intelligence, voice, insight, and humor that at one point i put the book down and i myself did not know what to do with my existence

i swear that happened

sometimes when a book reaches a certain level of being good, then its flaws (or what i feel might be viewed as flaws by other people) become, to me, idiosyncracies, its obscurities become i'm-too-stupid-or-young-to-know-what-this-mean-ies, and its irresolutions become moments of humbleness, humility, and sincerity on the part of the author

the book becomes un-criqitueable

which feels really good

because critiquing a book of fiction is very strange

it's like going up to a person who is just sitting there some place, not harming anyone, not doing anything, and then attacking them for being who they are

i especially hate it when a reviewer starts making 'should' statements

a good book should, a novel should, a short story should, etc.

which happens all the time and everywhere

because for some reason people turn into god when they write reviews

so i googled the book for reviews on it and found this review

which depressed me

The title, a playful allusion to Walter Benjamin's 1923 essay "The Task of the Translator," underscores this theme, with Hasak-Lowy comparing his role to that of a translator striving to translate a moment of personal resonance into a universal one.

when did Hasak-Lowy say that he was translating personal moments into universal ones?

and does that even make sense?

i mean

how do you translate a moment in time experienced by one person into a, um, thing that is experienced universally?

i think the word the author of this review wanted here was make

but probably that wouldn't have fit his angle

which was to use the word translate a lot

his angle that doesn't, oops, actually mean anything

The collection opens with two stories in which Hasak-Lowy asks his reader to view altercations between Israeli and American individuals as miniaturized metaphors for the relationship between the United States and Israel.

again, when did Hasak-Lowy ask this?

why would an intelligent man ask the reader of something so banal, uncomplicated, and seventh-grade-english-paper-ish?

Things come to a head when the Israeli cashier knocks the American to the floor - the pastry an emblem of "stale" American-Israeli political relations.

again, the pastry being an emblem is the reviewer's own idea

and it's the same kind of thing that in seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, freshman year, sohpomore, junior, senior year in college made me want to throw a chair at that person's face to stop them from making literature into something that causes me to want to throw a chair at their face

and i think people should know this

should know that

that in the actual story, by Hasak-Lowy, there's no symbolizing of pastries

In a rush to make sure the reader gets the (correct) message, Hasak-Lowy often overbakes his point. For instance, in trying to suggest that Yad Vashem has become just another tourist must-see, its unbearable poignance numbed by tour-guide burnout, he calls Yad Vashem "the complex commemorating the Nazis' treatment of the Jews" a staggering 22 times in 20 pages.

i thought it was funny

i didn't feel there was a correct message to the story

rather, it was written in a complex, natural sort of way

much like if it happened in real life

in real life

if something happened

you probably wouldn't think, what is the correct message to what just happened in my real life?

you would probably just take it as a thing that you experienced, that happened

... a staggering 22 times in 20 pages

who overbaked the message?

THE OMNIPRESENT theme of little people living beneath looming dark clouds...

this sentence made me think that the author of the review was making fun of himself

but i don't think he was

because he has little or no sense of irony

which is bad, scary, and depressing

because the book he reviewed has a lot of irony

After 27 pages of juxtaposing the wallet hunt with the India-Pakistan crisis, the story runs adrift and loses direction, a feeling clearly shared by Hasak-Lowy, who suddenly posits himself, as author, into the story, to berate the story for drying up.

i didn't feel that the story ran adrift

actually, i felt very excited when the author interjected

something new and great was happening, i felt

and Hasak-Lowy didn't enter the story to berate the story for drying (the story is a kind of water?) up

he just literally didn't do that

sorry

The problem here is that while postmodern masters like John Barth take these kinds of risks with imagination, subtlety and purpose, the effect here is forced, disruptive and ultimately a distraction from what was unfolding as an otherwise captivating story.

the reviewer said that the story was running adrift, but is now saying, later, that the story was actually captivating

feels sort of forced

In "Raider Nation," Hasak-Lowy rails against the hold TV has on our lives, his point channelled through the story of a "loyal student of Marxist literary theory" whose father buys him a state-of-the-art 43" TV, a beast of a thing that takes over his life.

the cliched, seventh-grade, it's-cool-and-wise-and-a-little-badass-to-think-that-TV-is-bad interpretation is that Hasak-Lowy is railing against the hold TV has on our lives, and the interpretation that the reviewer took was that Hasak-Lowy is railing against the hold TV has on our lives

which sort of simplifies the story and insults and simplifies Todd Hasak-Lowy and makes everyone in the world and the world itself seem lazy, asinine, and cliched

when actually only one person involved here is lazy, asinine, and cliched

"How Keith's Dad Died" is a more straight-faced and touching story in which a father's emotions prove difficult to translate.

again, i feel like the reviewer is making fun of himself, getting this translation theme-thing into every paragraph almost so that he'll have an angle

and so that his internalized seventh-grade english teacher will give him an A!

On the whole, this is an uneven collection, consumed with big ideas communicated in small ways, to mixed effect. Although Hasak-Lowy consistently reaches for ambitious heights, achieving crisply funny and original moments along the way, too often his intentions are, somewhat ironically, lost in translation.

i don't know what to say

i had a feeling of laughing out loud after reading that, but i also had another feeling that stopped me from laughing out loud

and i think why primarily i didn't like this review was because it did not work hard enough, but instead automatically assumed that Todd Hasak-Lowy was an unintelligent, cliched man who was going to write about TV being bad, who was going to symbolize pastry, who was going to have a correct message for each of his stories, just like in seventh-grade

in other words

the reviewer's brain works, i think, in cliches and preconceptions (many of which are cliches), in a seventh-grade english way, and also in a journalistic way, which is to say that the first thing, and the main thing probably, he thought before writing this review was how to make it so this review would have an angle, something a reader could read and then understand the correct message of

but the book he reviewed is almost the exact opposite

and the reviewer would have had to work very hard to change his worldview, and to somehow get a sense of irony, in order to view the book in the same way as it was written, to make his review as complex as the book it was reviewing

but he didn't

and now probably a lot of people, anyone who read that review, think that Todd Hasak-Lowy is a cliched, asinine, unintelligent, unironic, unfunny man

and this goes the same for almost every review out there

which is very depressing

housekeeping

there is something strange and existential about christian writers of literature, i think

for example, this book, housekeeping

by marilynne robinson

winner of the pulitzer prize

i don't know what to think while reading it

because i keep thinking that it should be trying to convert me to christianity

because if it isn't trying to convert me, then i don't know why else it is here, in my hands

because

if you believe in god, marilynne, then your goal in life, as i understand it, is clear

you know what's going on and you know what you should be doing with your life on earth

you should, as i understand it, be trying to spread god's word or whatever, make people into christians, and so your book should be trying to convert me to christianity so that i don't go to hell

actually

your entire life should maybe be spent trying to convert people to christianity so that they don't go to hell

anything less would be sort of, well, evil

a little selfish

or else lazy

for example, if i was in a room with ten people, and i knew for certain that they would all suffer infinite pain in hell unless i convinced them that the universe was created by say, a fish, then wouldn't i be a bad person if i just sat there doing other stuff, not talking about the fish but, say, writing a book about sisters growing up?

wouldn't someone looking in on my situation expect me to be trying to save these people from the pain of hell and wouldn't they think i was sort of a jerk if i instead wrote a book about something not related to the fish or else wrote a book so subtlely about the fish that no one would know it was about the fish?

in conclusion

housekeeping confused and bored me

the book contains within itself a confusion that makes me feel sad

and also

the language did not make me happy, did not make me say that's good, that's creative, did not make me laugh or smile

and it wasn't really a page turner

i've been reading it for over two years and am on page one hundred and twenty or something

yes, i haven't finished it yet

but i will

but it's hard, because of the christian writer of literature thing i just explained above

and because i keep seeing marilynne's face in my head and damnit i just want to

i don't know

but i do know

that christians, if they are thinking deeply, which marilynne, i suppose, might have tried to do while writing this literary book, should probably conclude that they should be trying to convert me to christianity twenty-four hours a day

and the christians that aren't doing that, the twenty-four hour thing, i think, are either sort of not thinking too deeply or comprehensively or else are sort of selfish and bad people

not more selfish or bad or un-deep-thinking than any average person, but just regular selfish and regular bad, i guess, like any normal person, like most people

so i'm not saying that marilynne is a bad person

i just feel that

marilynne robinson, the christian writer, is, in my mind, saying to me and other people

i'm going to heaven and i don't really care about anyone else, they can and will all go to hell, they can and will read my book because it won the pulitzer prize and they will learn about the childhood of two sisters and then later on they can take their knowledge of two sisters growing up and they can take that knowledge and they can and will go to hell with that knowledge for eternal pain and suffering while i go to heaven

because if i am going to suffer pain in hell for over a billion years, then i think everyone in the world can agree that it is okay to infringe on my privacy or whatever, that it is okay to be a little totalitarian with me, that it is okay to convert me, at all costs, to christianity

which is strange and depressing

because most people view christians who don't bother other people as the good kinds of christians

but really

aren't the ones who bother you all the time the really good ones?

the ones that care about you, about whether or not you are going to hell or not?

is your book autobiographical?

what someone really wants to know, or wants to know a little, when they ask this question, i think, is

did you have any other motive during the writing of your book other than to express yourself, to create art, to say what you really and sincerely think and feel?

if so

then how much of the book was written with other motives in mind, such as money, fame, will the reader enjoy this, will my writing workshop enjoy this, will my mom enjoy this, will i embarrass myself with this, will people think i am weird if i write this

in other words

the question, i think, is

would you write this same book if you were the last person alive and locked in a room and you knew that you were the last person alive and there'd be no other people ever and that you'd never get out of that room?

and some authors would have to answer that question with

no, i wouldn't have edited this one paragraph to make this story end in a more satisfying way

or

no, i wouldn't have written any book if no one was going to read it anyway

or whatever

no

actually

the question, i think, is

am i being spiritually lied to?

if so

what percentage of your soul is telling lies to me?

and by lies, i mean anything that after your brain thought it was affected and changed by anything not your own brain

which is kind of hard to ask

and not too polite

and so which explains why everyone always wants to know if something's autobiographical

maybe