Before the morning comes, the story's told

JESSE PEARSON: I've heard a lot of writers say that sometimes novels take on a life of their own, and I've heard other writers say that that's just bullshit and that doesn't happen and you're always in control.

PETE DEXTER: It's not bullshit. I don't ever feel like I'm in control.

JP: I love that thought, but I'm trying to understand how it works.

PD: It's like you're writing and you get to a place or an event and you sit back and think about who the guy is and how he reacts to it. You don't know what that reaction is going to be until you actually think about the guy, put yourself in the guy, and then think about the circumstance. And then you see, and the choice he makes there leads to all his other choices. In that way, it's kind of like life. Now, the opposite of this is these guys who plot their books in the beginning. I couldn't write a book like that. It would bore me to death. This is a problem in screenwriting too.

JP: That's been made into this weird algebraic thing, where it's like, "Three minutes in, this has to happen. Twenty-seven minutes in, this has to happen."

PD: You get 12 guys around a table, eight of whom are afraid that they're losing their jobs, and they're looking at a script and they start doing what you're talking about. "There's got to be more x, y, or z here." They want to plug all these things in even though they don't fit, and that's why you see so many movies that look like other movies.

JP: Right.

PD: Because eight guys are worried about losing their jobs. But I've got no idea how you'd maintain any kind of spontaneity, even within the personalities of the characters, if you had the whole thing plotted out ahead of time. If it's any kind of a story at all, it grows as you write it. The characters grow in ways that I can't possibly anticipate at the beginning of things. As well as I know the story of my stepdad and me, if you'd asked me four years ago, before this book really got going, what it would be about and I had to guess, I promise you that three-fourths of the stuff I guessed would be wrong.

JP: So you have to let the narrative guide you as you write it.

PD: If you can anticipate to the end in any way beyond, you know, the feeling, then I think you're kind of cheating yourself as a writer. Things happen that ought to be allowed to happen.

JP: It also seems more courageous and maybe pure to write like that.

PD: To me, it's more economical. When you follow the story, as opposed to leading it, you're less likely to make huge mistakes. You used a good word when you said "pure" because, if you follow the story, the things that you write will be purely of the story and of the characters. Even if today you look at yesterday's work and can't use it, there are still going to be things in there—if you followed the rules—that are useful to you.

-- Pete Dexter interviewed by Jesse Pearson for Vice, 2009

Play

(Eyes Wide Shut, Amanda Warner AKA MNDR, The Cage / Nona Hendryx)

I wrote you a letter and I told you you were dead

"I've always felt more comfortable with the bad reviews than the good ones. Well, until I decided to stop reading them. I'm the kind of person that if I'm in a room with twenty people all saying, 'That's good' and there's one person saying, 'You know what, that sucks', I'll be going, 'He's right! I'm sure it does suck…' After any approval you'd get a little frisson that lasted twenty minutes from somebody saying something nice, then… That unleashes a lot of self-doubt that turns into self-loathing. I've found that a lot over the years. With those emotions comes the rapid retreat from wanting to do it at all. And that's what happened back in the 90s.

"I went kind of nuts ... I ended up in hospital. I was not a well man. That was the decision made for me. So I retreated back to Usk in Wales. I'd always liked the place when I was a kid. I knew it was quiet and I knew it had some nice pubs. I just wanted to get away from everybody. So I did. I split up with my girlfriend, split from my management, split up with the musicians in the band, left the record labels and left my flat in Islington empty. I left everything there for years."

-- Green Gartside of Scritti Politti interviewed by Robin Turner, 2011

Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave

What's your writing regimen?

I think I'm going to just start writing and keep writing until they throw me in jail. Other than that, I set aside all day every day for writing and break it up with going home to see my family or having lunch or getting a haircut...

Do you see a career plan?

I don't know. I just make them up as I go along. Whatever anybody says, you're always making it up as you go along. It's like when you have babies; nobody gives you a how to book; nobody gives you a manual. It's like any of the important things in life. Whether it's your career, whether it's marriage, whether it's child rearing, you're making it up as you go along. And you try to have certain precepts, and sometimes they even change.

-- The Dramatist Poet: A David Mamet Interview by Fred Topel

Going dark

Bad style

"... Style, when it works, takes the reader to a deeper place than can be arrived at thematically. It takes you to an inner understanding of the writer's mind that isn't about words. In art, style is not superficial. Or rather it is, but it's also a way into the deeper body of the thing in a way that's hard to talk about, or write about, but which readers feel. The book had a sensibility that disturbed some people, but I don't think it was truly about "hardness." If anything, they may've been disturbed by the very softness I refer to, because it may've made them feel something."

-- Mary Gaitskill talks to The Slant about Bad Behavior

Take the blue mask down from my face

Before somebody blows your goddam brains out

Waking the Witch

"... the hardest thing is sort of being psyched up in the right way to do the vocal with the right emotional feeling. And the hardest thing for me is to be able to feel relaxed enough to be uninhibited. So sometimes I do get just a little drunk, and at other times I like to do them with Del, because I feel much more relaxed than if there's an outside engineer there. I mean, I do become quite sensitive when I start singing."

So can I assume you're pissed out of your head on The Big Sky?

"Yes, I might be getting drunk on that one -- the ad libs on the end, that was where I had to get drunk. And definitely on Waking the Witch. I was very drunk doing that."

-- Kate Bush interviewed by Peter Swales, 1985

Wild wing

"What is it that I really like? Following that is a long process of self-excavation from being buried by what you've been told you should like."

-- Jon Hassell interviewed by Daniel Patrick Quinn, 2014

"When you hear the word 'jazz,' immediately you've got a certain connotation. If you're not on the inside and know that it's a much broader category, you're just kind of like, 'Oh yeah, I've been there, done that.' If a piece were played on a classical station, saying 'This is the new Phillip Glass,' or the new this-or-that, of somebody from that world, I think it would be accepted, number one; and it would be a whole [different] group of listeners who could be enticed to buy the record, number two.

"I look at it this way. First of all, I grew up in America. I grew up where jazz comes from. It's in the air and in the bloodstream. But if I were looking at the world's music from a more objective viewpoint—outer space or something—I'd say: 'Well, jazz is this music over here. And so to leave it out, if I'm really listening to all the flavors, let's say, from all the places, then to leave that out would be crazy. First of all, it's in my bloodstream. And jazz, itself, is a hybrid, a musical hybrid. It is the collision of African and American—actually African and European, as translated through an American sensibility. So that's why the references are there, and the general feeling of latter-day jazz manifestations à la Gil Evans and Miles.

"At the same time, it was a strange learning process for me—I think I've used the phrase before about parachuting into the jazz world and not having hacked my way through the jungle to whatever center there might be. When I studied, I'm in Memphis, I hear things, I'm blown away as a kid by hearing Stan Kenton and the big improvising orchestra coming—a string section, five trumpets, five trombones, five saxophones, with Maynard Ferguson screaming on top. That was the most thrilling thing I'd ever heard in my life. Not that I didn't know—my parents would let me drive the car if I would go to church on Sunday. But what I'd do is just park and listen to the radio. And I remember Kenton coming on, and I thought, 'Wow! This is amazing. I've never heard this before.'

"So I have a much longer treatise to write about, in some sense, what it is that presets an ear—our sensibility to listen to big, thick chords; to the lush harmonies that came via [Maurice] Ravel, [Claude] Debussy and Impressionism, coming through people like Gil [Evans] and the tradition of using it and translating it in urban terms, the harmonic language of Impressionism. So I've come up through that, I go to school, I'm in Eastman School of Music, I'm studying orchestral trumpet playing, orchestral excerpts and trying to learn "Petrushka" solos and things like that, and [Igor] Stravinsky, at least 'Histoire du soldat.' And I'm kind of slated towards orchestral playing. But then I'm a composer, I'm not really there for trumpet; I'm there in composition basically. Actually, at that point, it was probably for both.

"So I'm in the kind of wild wing of composition..."

-- Jon Hassell interviewed by John Helman, 2009

Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne (A Da Capo, 1987)

Poetics

Suzuki

I couldn't spend another hour of daylight

"What if you were driving in your car on the way to the desert and suddenly your engine stopped? What if you got out to flag down a car and you just disappeared?"

-- Darren McGavin on Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Trance state

"Once I'm writing a novel, it's like laying a few bricks every day to build a house until the house is done. I write early in the morning. I work from seven or eight until one o'clock in the afternoon. I just add to it. In general, I don't know where I'm going with it. I like to have a process of discovery, so it's kind of a mystery to me where it goes, but I know the characters well ... When I'm involved in a novel, it's really like being in a trance for the several months that it takes. I'm preoccupied. But the great thing, Todd, is that there are no rules. That's something I always liked about being a writer. However you get it done, you get it done."

 -- Barry Gifford interviewed by Todd Summar, 2015

Easy movement

"Mennonites ... believe that if you look at the history of tractors with rubber tires, you see failure within a generation. Rubber tires enable easy movement, and easy movement means that, inevitably, the farm will grow, which means more profit. More profit, in turn, leads to the acquisition of even more land, which usually means less crop diversity, more large machinery, and so on. Pretty soon the farmer becomes less intimate with his farm. It's that lack of intimacy that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss."

-- The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber (The Penguin Press, 2014)

Girls in Danger

Who is the murderer?

With which word did he give himself away?

(See page 116 for the solution.)

-- Puzzlers for Young Detectives (Krimischule für junge Privatdetektive) by K. Franken
(Verlag J.Pfieffer, 1968 / Piccolo, 1972)