Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz’s work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.
In memory of John Frederick Cone (1927-2009)
David Hoenigman: What projects are you currently working on?
Richard Kostelanetz: In various states of incompletion are 1.) Skeptical Essays in the 21st Century for Autonomedia; 2) Person of Letters in the Contemporary World, previously uncollected literary essays, probably for Amazon Kindle (Internet); 3.) Autobiographies @ 70, probably for Archae Editions (print); 4.) Categories of my Work, initially for a new artbook publisher whose editors decided against doing it now but might change their minds. 5.) chapbooks of poetry and fiction for several publishers around the world.
Most of most of my days I spend at my computer moving these projects forward, refining them to various degrees, in addition to responding to other more urgent problems that arrive every day in my email.
Since the telephone is far away from my computer, it doesn’t ring much anymore, thankfully. I never much liked to answer it. I’ll never forget sitting in the living room of the historian Richard Hofstadter around 1967, when answering machines were still scarce. As the telephone rang and rang, he didn’t move. When my head nodded toward his telephone, he replied, “It isn’t anyone who wants to do me a favor.”
DH: When and why did you begin writing?
RK: Consciously at 14, when I first read Sinclair Lewis, thanks to a great ninth-grade teacher with whom I’ve kept in touch, John Frederick Cone, who also authored books about the opera. Reflecting Lewis’s influence, my best high school writings were satires.
DH: When did you first consider yourself a writer?
RK: It’s more crucial to consider when strangers did, because they published me. This began in 1963, a year after I graduated from college, and has continued ever since.
Persuading strangers is crucial to me, as I’m reluctant to meet editors until they publish me, in part to discourage ass-kissing and other peculiar distractions. I was never a pretty girl.
DH: What inspired you to write your first book?
RK: A contract from a commercial publisher that commissioned the anthology On Contemporary Literature (Avon, 1964). Fortunately, it was published. Some later manuscripts, often book-length, haven’t been.
DH: Who or what has influenced your writing?
RK: Sinclair Lewis initially, as I said; then many others. The principal general influence on my writing has been reading; and perhaps because I’ve read so much and so variously, I’ve published much and variously.
I’ve always sensed that anyone claiming to be “a writer” who does not read intensively will soon discover he’s a fake. So will others.
A girl friend once told me that the only things I like to do more than reading are swimming and sex.
One secret reason why I rewrite so much, though perhaps not enough, is that I like to read my own writing.
Music is also important to me. The principal influences upon my art, not just in my sound and speech compositions but perhaps in my visual art and writing as well, have been the composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Charles Ives -the first for his austere elegance, the latter for his fertile inventiveness.
DH: How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?
RK: Nothing in this respect is more important than living in downtown Manhattan for most of my life. This fact has informed, often subtly, almost everything I’ve done in writing and art.
As I grew up in a house that didn’t have a lamp next to any chair, because my mother’s literacy was limited, I didn’t start to read intensively until I got to college. Need I add that not just my reading but my writing improved so quickly that I began to publish in national magazines soon after graduating.
DH: Do you have a specific writing style?
RK: Don’t I have several styles, all I hope fairly distinctive. Those in my poetry and my fiction differ from each other and these differ in turn from styles predominant in my essays? How much do my extended essays resemble the aphorisms, which I’ve written so often recently?
Curiously, in making a selection from my writings, “A Book of Kostis” as I call it, I chose only from my expository prose.
DH: What genre are you most comfortable writing?
RK: I resist any measures of one or another of my activities as more important or “more comfortable” than the others. When asked how I divide my time among various genres, I reply that everything is “100 per cent.”
On the other hand, having gone to a Manhattan “progressive” school, where education was taught as fun, I don’t court discomfort.
DH: Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?
RK: Messages are many, though the principal theme of my career as a whole, which others tell me is valuable to them, has been possibilities for a writer in the 21st century.
DH: What books are you reading now?
RK: Too many books, variously way through.
One reason why I don’t buy many books nowadays is that I tend to read everything that people send to me, out of respect due their offering. When I say “read,” I’m acknowledging a range of degrees of speed and comprehension. Most every book passing under my eyes at different degrees has some penciled notations in its pages and a slip of paper with my handwritten notes. Since I’ve read a book a day for most of my life, owning most of them, that accounts for why my library perhaps numbers 15,000 volumes. Perhaps because of my peculiar education, my patience with obscurity or unnecessary difficulty is limited.
DH: Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
RK: As many of my enthusiasms are under-recognized, they are forever “new” to others.
Some four decades ago, I repeatedly noted that critics older than forty-five didn’t appreciate very young writers. Now a quarter-century past that turning point, I can confirm that this earlier perception has become true for me. The last young writers to impress me were William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace, both of whom were born in the early 1960s.
The young New York performance critic Claudia LoRocco recently told me of her current enthusiasms. As none of her names were familiar to me, who loves and recommends Elizabeth Streb (b. 1950) and Sara East Johnson (b. 1966), I should have remembered my own intelligence from decades ago and thus been less surprised.
DH: What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?
RK: The common principles behind the variety and then the connections among and between the categories.
DH: Any memories of particular works: the writing of, feedback, the thought behind…etc.
RK: Not really. I don’t keep much of a personal journal or diary, because I don’t have many secrets.
Once a book appears, I tend to forget what went into it. There’s already too much useless information swimming around my mind.
At this point in our interview Richard Kostelanetz welcomed questions from his colleagues. The questions below are credited to their contributors. –DH
II
Constance Lane: How does the use, misuse, or disuse of syntax and grammatically correct sentence structure affect your ability to communicate with language?
Richard Kostelanetz: Conventional syntax and sentence structures facilitate effective communication, as I’m attempting here.
Disrupting expectations, it seems to me, is a prerequisite for artful writing, not just in poetry but also of prose. Only after you’ve read a lot of standard sentences can you appreciative unconventional uses of language.
CL: There are a lot of people who are alienated by experimental syntax and sentence structure, because they are unable to make any kind of complete thought out of it, and end up feeling frustrated and/or duped. others find the breakdown exciting. Myself, I find it exciting, but for years have tried to understand why?
RK: Simply, perhaps too simply, aren’t those people failing to understand the difference between prose and poetry, which likewise often resists comprehension as a “complete thought,” or between exposition and literary art. If some helpful advice about overcoming their problem doesn’t open their minds, my fear is that nothing ever will. Nothing.
Simply again, doesn’t appreciation of experimental writing reflect literary sophistication, which we might learn at universities, as you probably have, or don’t some of us develop it on our own?
III
Clayton Patterson: Do you write as you think?
Richard Kostelanetz: I assume so, though someone else might judge otherwise. I don’t hide and I don’t lie. I’ve never worked in public relations.
To paraphrase Yogi Berra, I don’t think and write at the same time, which is to say that I no longer think about writing as I write. I just write. After all, I’m a pro, as was Yogi Berra.
CP: Do you first work out all your ideas in bits and pieces, in lists, on scrap paper, then place them in a preconceived order, then just follow your plan and build your articles?
RK: Years ago I composed essays with paragraph outlines, because I was very concerned about organizing my disparate thoughts effectively. I feared any signs of disorganization, which I used to deprecate in others. I also discovered that, once a clear outline is established (and a writer knows his subject), paragraphs almost write themselves.
More recently, I find my thoughts falling into the optimal order without any outline. After all, I’ve become a pro, finally.
CP: Do you ever just blast into what you have to say and build as you go?
RK: Sometimes, though I like to return sometime later to any text hastily written, usually to embellish, sometimes to remove duplications or extraneous asides, rarely to reorganize anymore. I don’t publish first drafts.
I’m a compulsive rewriter, even after a text of mine has appeared in print. Should something be reprinted, either by someone else or myself, I like to have ready in my computer a revised version that is I hope more definitive.
CP: Are you sure of everything you want to say before you write.
RK: Not quite everything, but most things. Once I proceed, I don’t suffer many doubts, which perhaps account for the “strength” that others find in my writing. By contrast, I tend to be less assured, if not more modest, in my speaking.
I don’t believe in “writer’s block,” which I think reflects a lack of preparation. “Publisher’s block,” by contrast, defines the absence of cultural will.
CP: Do you clarify you ideas by thinking about them–by making notes, by doing research– or by talking to others.
RK: One reason why I turn down many invitations, especially if I can identity someone else who can do a certain job better, is that I don’t like to initiate research-to “work up a subject,” as journalists used to say. I’d rather write about subjects I’ve already researched and, better, have thought about for some time. I don’t often interview sources, which is what I’m told is taught in journalism school, though I like to offer drafts to colleagues for criticism and correction.
CP: Does writing bring out ideas?
RK: Sometimes, to my surprise, but only if I begin with some strong, perhaps generative ideas. Some new ideas have emerged now in my responses to your questions.
CP: Do you know exactly what you want to say before you write, and that is the way it is, or do you get ideas and it changes as you write.
RK: I think the former, as I don’t like to begin anything unless I can see the end.
CP: What is your preference-typewriter, long hand on paper, computer?
RK: For prose, the computer; for poems and fictions, nearly always by hand on paper. One problem peculiar to me is that my handwriting has become so sloppy that it’s indecipherable, at least by me, who was meant to be its initial reader.
CP: Has the computer changed how you write?
RK: Sure, though it’s less a writing machine than a rewriting technology, because to produce an acceptable text I need not retype, which I now recall as such a nuisance I wonder how I ever did it for so many years. Also, whereas typing in the evening once made me unable to sleep, I find that the best time for rewriting on a computer is late at night. As I noted already, the computer also makes earlier texts more immediately accessible than cabinets of files with manila folders.
CP: Do you trust Wikipedia?
RK: It’s not as trustworthy or concise as Britannica, say, as anyone can discern in comparing their entries about me.
On the other hand, Wikipedia often contains valuable information unavailable elsewhere, even if it’s unreliable or a later reader removes it. In principle, I respect the self-correcting, essentially anarchist processes informing Wikipedia and remain impressed that anything so anti-authoritarian should be so successful.
CP: If you research something, do you use the web or books?
RK: Books, if I can, which is one reason why I must own some twenty thousand of them; but once they were packed away, anticipating a move still in progress, I’ve relied more on web sources.
I couldn’t imagine doing expository writing totally away from my library or the Internet.
I recently met an artist who graduated from my Ivy League college nearly four decades after me. Though our school wasn’t particularly good, we agreed, at teaching us how to make significant art, we did learn how to process critically much larger amounts of cultural information, particularly in books, than people learn elsewhere. Indeed, the Ivy-educated artist leaves his or her mark in work reflecting greater literacy. You can see it in Frank Stella (Princeton), Peter Halley (Yale), and Paul Laffoley and John Simon, Jr. (both Brown), among others.
CP: Because of all the new technology–texting, twitter, emails, and so on–do you think people have shorter attention spans?
RK: Publishers certainly think people do. In the mail recently came an anthology of the self-consciously up-to-date magazine Vibe whose hundreds of pages contain no article more than three pages long in a typeface so tiny it’s evidently for younger eyes. Even when I was young, a half-century ago, older publishers thought the literacy of young people more limited, which we now know wasn’t true. What persists are publishers’ cynical calculations.
CP: What are your thoughts on all of these digital books and archives?
RK: All technologies that facilitate the dissemination of information are beneficial culturally, even if unedited, such as Wikipedia and other archives that exist only on the Internet. It’s better culturally that someone’s manuscript be available on the Internet than buried in his or her desk drawer. I once speculated that, before the Internet, there was a social cost, perhaps incalculable, when valuable information, especially radical criticism, wasn’t easily available. Editorial censorship is no less objectionable than government censorship.
CP: Do you save a hard copy made of everything you write?
RK: Yes, no doubt for nostalgic reasons. I also have enough space in which to put folded boxes 9″ x 12″, two inches high, next to books of mine that have already appeared in print.
CP: Are you comfortable with Kindle?
RK: Sure. Though I’ve yet to purchase one, I’ve put into its store some unpublished books that previously existed only on my personal website. Again, any invention that facilitates communication, even self-publishing, is laudable.
CP: Since hardcopy has been around since the beginning of time, and digital is so new, are you comfortable with so much of our history, literature, writing, art, ideas, and close to everything connected to our life moving from hardcopy to digital?
RK: No reason to be uncomfortable, though we know from the recent history of audio technology that new storage/playback media quickly becomes obsolete. Remember long-playing records? I gather than CDs are going, though I still play them. I haven’t yet gotten MP3s.
If the government tried to censor Internet channels, or if they censored themselves, may I suggest that new competitors would spring up, promising the total freedom available in the new communications technology.
CP: Since your father was a lawyer, did that influence your writing.
RK: I doubt it. As he went to both college and law school at night, while working every day, he didn’t read much beyond newspapers and his law stuff. Since our house lacked lights next to reading chairs, he would put the Sunday newspaper on the carpeted floor.
I once offered to rewrite some of his stuff for hire. When I eliminated his boilerplate for simple prose, he retired me, I guess because I didn’t know that boilerplate, much like other jargon, was meant to intimidate to a degree that common language can’t.
CP: As a child going to school were the rules of grammar drilled into your head?
RK: Less grammar than sentence structure. In ninth grade John Frederick Cone, whom I mentioned before, taught us how to diagram sentences, which was in effect building a visual structure to ensure that every word is a sentence had a proper relation to all the others. When he died just recently (2009), several of my high school classmates remembered how he taught us to use semi-colons before conjunctions in sentences with complex clauses and then how we continue to do so, even though young copyeditors repeatedly change my semi-colons to commas.
CP: Do you have someone else edit your work?
RK: Sometimes interns have improved my texts, and I’ve occasionally hired Douglas Puchowski, a professional editor, who began his editorial career as an intern with me.
I once joked that the ideal spouse for a writer is a copyeditor and, though I haven’t remarried, those I’ve known well I remember more fondly.
