{"id":36097,"date":"2007-03-01T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-01T20:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36097"},"modified":"2025-02-18T12:00:07","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T20:00:07","slug":"issue-62-a-conversation-with-david-shields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-62-a-conversation-with-david-shields\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 62: A Conversation with David Shields"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Issue<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Interview in Willow Springs <\/em>62<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works in Willow Springs 59<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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March 1, 2007<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Samuel Ligon and Adam O’Connor Rodriguez<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID SHIELDS<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"David<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: The Rumpus<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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David Shields is one of today\u2019s most controversial <\/strong>writers and also one of the most passionate. Jonathan Lethem says of Shields: \u201cWhile on the one hand I feel the urge to compare Shields to the very most incisive and smart contemporary essayists I know\u2014Phillip Lopate and Vivian Gornick and Geo\ufb00 Dyer\u2014 in another sense he\u2019s accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to his new book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You\u2019ll Be Dead<\/em>, Shields is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season<\/em>, a \ufb01nalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Re\ufb02ections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity<\/em>, winner of the PEN\/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel<\/em>, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine<\/em>, Harper\u2019s<\/em>, Yale Review<\/em>, Village Voice<\/em>, Salon<\/em>, Slate<\/em>, McSweeney\u2019s<\/em>, and Utne Reader<\/em>; he\u2019s written reviews for The New York Times Book Review<\/em>, Los Angeles Times Book Review<\/em>, Boston Globe<\/em>, and Philadelphia Inquirer.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shields has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he teaches at the University of Washington. Since 1996, he has also been a member of the faculty at Warren Wilson College\u2019s low-residency MFA program in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, and Farsi. He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards non\ufb01ction panel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We interviewed Mr. Shields on two occasions, and this printed version is a combination of those interviews. The \ufb01rst meeting was over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane, on May 19, 2006. We met again at Hsu\u2019s restaurant in downtown Atlanta, during AWP\u2019s annual conference, on March 1, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SAMUEL LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your two upcoming books, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You\u2019ll Be Dead <\/em>and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto<\/em>, have similar structures. Were you working on them simultaneously?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DAVID SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see the connection between those two books. So much of them is trying to argue my view for a kind of nakedness or a kind of rawness. In each case, I\u2019m trying to get either to the primitive body or to the primary text. I\u2019m trying to strip the body of defenses or the text of \ufb01ctional apparatus. I see them as corollary texts in this interest in what I would call nakedness, stripping the body of false spiritual consolations. They have similar opinions toward what I\u2019ve come to regard as the groaning contrivance of the \ufb01ctional apparatus. There\u2019s a drive for what I would call the raw or the naked in both books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You talk in these upcoming books about becoming conscious of taking risks. When you mention rawness and nakedness, you\u2019re talking about a kind of risk-taking. Can you address artistic risk-taking?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My \ufb01rst novel, Heroes<\/em>, is probably my least risk-taking book. The book is back in print and I\u2019m proud of it, but it\u2019s not my favorite, because the whole idea of embarrassment matters a lot to me, the idea of nervous discomfort, nervous-making. To me, the best way of doing that is some level of psychic risk on the writer\u2019s part. Obviously not literal risk; compared with actual physical risk, it\u2019s certainly di\ufb00erent. But I guess part of my drive from \ufb01ction to non\ufb01ction, if you want to call it that, is that the temperature of the room seems to go up in my non\ufb01ction. The nervousness goes up when there\u2019s a sense that things you\u2019re talking about aren\u2019t under the guise of \ufb01ctional apparatus, because you can\u2019t hide behind that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, in Black Planet<\/em>, the narrator\/author, who I call myself\u2014 but who to me is a \ufb01ctional projection or exaggeration of my real self\u2014says that while having sex with his wife, he basically imagines that he\u2019s Gary Payton, the basketball star. There\u2019s a review in The Washington Post by Jonathan Yardley that suggests my wife should divorce me. To me, that\u2019s just the highest praise. The book got under his skin that bad. It made him that nervous. So many books bore people to death. In reality, I never felt exactly what I wrote, but I said I did because I wanted the book to channel white guilt, white insanity. All these things. Have I ever felt that? I don\u2019t know. Maybe I thought it. I must have thought it on some level because I wrote it down.
All these ideas are so interconnected\u2014embarrassment, nervousness, risk-taking, rawness, primitiveness, nakedness. These are my watchwords as a writer and reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to get to what? You\u2019re talking about creating this emotional state in the reader and writer\u2014to get where?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To what it feels like to be alive. I can\u2019t know what it\u2019s like inside you and you can\u2019t know what it\u2019s like inside me. We\u2019re existentially alone. One of the great values of art, especially writing, is that it actually allows conversation. The loneliness that we feel as human beings is bridged through extremely serious literature. It de\ufb01nitely doesn\u2019t get bridged, in my view, through well-made stories. I watch you create narratives, like I\u2019m watching you build bridges, and I applaud that bridge-making. But I don\u2019t get to know you in a thrillingly intimate way. And when someone writes about how his father used to beat him and that\u2019s how he came to become a heroin addict at twenty-one, I\u2019m not interested, even if it\u2019s not done in some boring, bloodletting way. I\u2019m interested in knowing the deepest secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets really are the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all have demons within us that we project as fears of insanity. And that\u2019s what creates the moment when the narrator of Black Planet<\/em> projects a Gary Payton-esque sex doppelganger. Some guy from a magazine happened to interview me a couple days ago about that book, then he sent me links to his blog. During the interview, he seemed to like the book, but in his blog, he criticized it. All these other readers were typing in, saying, Yeah, you go man! or whatever. One guy wrote that he expected, at some point in Black Planet<\/em>, for me to ask Gary Payton to \u201cDo my wife.\u201d That was so interesting because it told me that my book made this guy so uncomfortable he had to \ufb01ght o\ufb00 the insight by projecting those insights onto me. In those moments, you\u2019re actually getting to something. So he thinks he\u2019s trying to \ufb01ght o\ufb00 my insights with a kind of, It\u2019s your problem man, not mine, whereas a more serious reader, a more adult reader, would wrestle with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s also an opposite example from that same book, another line people talk about a lot. In the book, I say sort of embarrassingly that I\u2019m not the type of person who, out of politeness, opens the door for people. But if the person behind me happens to be black, I tend to open the door, I tend to not want to be racist, and I also tend to open the door for women, playing like, you know, the polite usher. I de\ufb01nitely debated a thousand times whether to put the line in or take it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an indirect way, that line is more embarrassing than the other line, and so many people have come up to me, a lot of black people, saying, Thank you for writing that. And white people say they\u2019ve felt that all the time. I didn\u2019t think anyone else was as crazy as I am. Black people told me, You have no idea how many times I\u2019ve felt that. And in those moments, human beings are actually connecting in a really interesting way. Conversation gets deeper. Human beings get to know each other slightly better. The loneliness of the human condition, to put it grandly, is slightly dislodged. And writing is no longer some time-killing activity, it\u2019s actually connecting human beings. That\u2019s what I\u2019m about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see that in \ufb01ction, as well. I\u2019m thinking of \u201cA Small, Good Thing\u201d by Carver, where we see that connection occur. We also feel it in Carver\u2019s \u201cCathedral.\u201d The end of \u201cThe Dead.\u201d Chekhov\u2019s story, \u201cGusev,\u201d in which readers see and feel that connection. Are you saying non\ufb01ction creates more opportunity for connection than \ufb01ction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. But obviously it\u2019s subjective. It would be absurd to say that Black Planet matters, but \u201cThe Dead\u201d doesn\u2019t. I\u2019m not going to put myself in a totally ridiculous position. Who knows why, after writing three novels, but \ufb01ction has gone slightly \ufb02at for me. I \ufb01nd Carver hopelessly sentimental. \u201cA Small, Good Thing\u201d is terrible and \u201cCathedral\u201d is really bad. Those are just very sentimental works. He\u2019s a hack. He wants you to love him for loving humanity. Talk to Tess Gallagher about how Carver appropriated \u201cCathedral\u201d from her. You know that was her story, her visitor. I\u2019m interested in that story. Carver, this loving guy. He stole that story. But in the \ufb01ction, he presents himself as Mr. Enlightened\u2014Look at how I love humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although that protagonist does not come o\ufb00 as somebody who loves humanity. He comes o\ufb00 as a misanthrope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end, he does. And everyone talks about the Chekhov story, \u201cGusev.\u201d I almost always love \ufb01ction writers\u2019 non\ufb01ction more. For instance, Chekhov\u2019s diaries interest me far more than any Chekhov story. Cheever\u2019s journals are by far the best book Cheever wrote. Fitzgerald\u2019s The Crack Up<\/em> interests me more than any Fitzgerald novel. J.M. Coetzee\u2019s Elizabeth Costello is to me Coetzee\u2019s best book, an amazing mix of lecture and confession and quasi-novel. \u201cThe Custom House,\u201d the preface to The Scarlet Letter<\/em>, is better than The Scarlet Letter<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you more interested in those works because they provide insight or connection to artistic process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not saying I\u2019m right. I\u2019m just saying this is what interests me. For instance, the other day I was teaching Stephen Frears, the British director. He directed The Queen<\/em> and was doing promotional interviews hoping to get the Academy Award. The interviewer was talking to him about his previous movies, and High Fidelity<\/em> came up, which Frears directed, and they were talking about the Nick Hornby novel on which the \ufb01lm is based, the voiceover work in the \ufb01lm, and how Frears worked to try to translate the best moments from the book into the \ufb01lm. Frears found, to his surprise, that the best moments were the voiceovers, and especially the direct speeches of John Cusack to the camera, not just voiceover, but actual direct address. He said something very interesting, something like, \u201cWhat we realized was that the novel was this machine to sort of get to these twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and masculinity and art and music and list-making, and masculine distance, and masculine drive for art, masculine trouble with intimacy, blah, blah, blah.\u201d And I realized that is the way I experience almost all novels. You have to read seven hundred pages and then you get these insights that were the whole point the book was written for and the apparatus of the novel is there as this elaborate, huge, overbuilt sca\ufb00olding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ADAM O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think \ufb01ction should go away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, I mean obviously everyone should write and read what they write and read. If you want to be Bell and write these huge novels about Haiti, more power to you. You probably have far more readers than I have. I\u2019m just trying to stay alive as a writer and reader. Ninety-nine percent of stu\ufb00, I cannot get a toehold on\u2014so many books that people praise, endless books, books that win prizes. If you put a gun to my head, I could not read Jonathan Franzen\u2019s book The Corrections<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about his non\ufb01ction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not good either. I\u2019m just trying to read stu\ufb00 I actually love. Most readers are bored. I don\u2019t want to read out of duty, I want to read out of love. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. They form a tradition which D\u2019Agata calls the lyric essay. And I just want to go to the mat for those books because I really love them. They sustain me and nourish me, and some of them happen to be quasi-novels, like Tristram Shandy<\/em> or Proust. Or V.S. Naipaul\u2019s A Way in the World<\/em>, which is published as \ufb01ction in the U.K. and as non\ufb01ction here, which is interesting. Or Julian Barnes\u2019s Flaubert\u2019s Parrot<\/em>, the only bad parts of which are the novelistic moments; the parts which are pure, gorgeous meditation about Flaubert I really love. I\u2019m trying to stay alive and awake and not bored and not rote. I don\u2019t know if you know the new, young non\ufb01ction writer, Eula Biss. She\u2019s at Northwestern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Balloonists<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love that book; it\u2019s beautiful. I\u2019m meeting with her because she has friends publishing short, book-length works of poetic non\ufb01ction. It\u2019s a wonderful crowd. I think The Balloonists<\/em> is really strong work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To answer your question, Adam, about what I want to do with \ufb01ction: There are a lot of works of \ufb01ction which I love, primarily because they retard the narrative impulse. Their motor is not \u201cGuess what happens next.\u201d Their motor is \u201cWatch me think deeply about human existence, watch me take you as the reader deeper into the human predicament.\u201d And maybe they have a very slight novelistic frame, very slight, like Camus\u2019s The Fall<\/em>, say. I feel like, Why are we here on the planet\u2014to tell each other stories? For me, no. For many people, yes. I want to try to understand slightly better who we are as a species. The energy of storytelling is, \u201cGuess who is behind the closet?\u201d I don\u2019t care who\u2019s behind the closet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet there is a lot of narrative in your work. Not anecdotes, but narratives from your own life\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s subservient to a larger investigation. There\u2019s a wonderful line which I probably appropriated in Reality Hunger<\/em>. It\u2019s a line from Alain Robbe-Grillet. He says something like, \u201cThe anecdote is not dead. The innocence of the anecdote is dead, that we can no longer tell stories na\u00efvely.\u201d Stories are still told. And I de\ufb01nitely still tell stories, but I would say I tell stories not na\u00efvely, like I\u2019m aware of who is telling them. I try to undermine them. I try to ironize them. I try to put them in triplicate quotations marks. I try to marry them to the larger investigation. There\u2019s a story in A Handbook for Drowning<\/em> called \u201cA Brief Survey of Ideal Desire,\u201d which to me is sort of the crucial break in my work. And my sister books, Heroes and Dead Languages, are to varying degrees relatively traditional novels. A Handbook for Drowning<\/em> mixes the essay and story and brings a collage from the pieces some read as quasi-confessional, personal essay, some read as relatively traditional story. And the pieces that interest me the most kind of blur forms. \u201cBrief Survey\u201d is the \ufb01rst time I did that. There\u2019s a critical reading of Joyce\u2019s \u201cThe Dead.\u201d There\u2019s a third person account of obsessive basketball playing. There\u2019s a discussion of looking at pornography. There\u2019s a discussion of the protagonist visiting a massage parlor. It\u2019s like six or eight di\ufb00erent little things, and you\u2019re supposed to \ufb01gure out how they\u2019re all connected. I think it is a short story. There\u2019s a character named Walter in it. It felt like something popped open for me in that story, where the loyalty of the \ufb01ction is not \u201cGuess what happens to Walter next,\u201d but \u201cWatch me investigate how platonic desire works. Watch how fucked up you can be when you\u2019re always projecting desire out\u2014some absolute outside yourself\u2014rather than some desire you actually feel for real.\u201d In ten short pages, I\u2019m actually investigating something about desire\u2014and the stories are part of that investigation, as opposed to the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would the statements or ideas have weight without the narrative?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the objection most people raise, and I think it\u2019s legitimate. When you just want the insights\u2014where Nick Hornby stands, his essay on the male animal. And that\u2019s not probably what we want. I\u2019m not interested in psychobabble either. Or street philosophy. I\u2019ve talked about the war without and the war within. People have di\ufb00erent aesthetics. And for me, the way that a novel works, say, the war is generally without. Which is to say that characters do battle with each other. King Lear has an argument with Cordelia and they are sort of butting heads, then at the end, there is some resolution. The essay form, the lyric essay, the personal essay, is just as full of con\ufb02ict, and the con\ufb02ict goes inside\u2014the writer at war with himself. I \ufb01nd the intimacy of that discussion takes me to a deeper psychic place. I \ufb01nd the intimacy of that more naked- making, more strip-mining, more primitive, raw, embarrassing, et cetera. Someone else\u2014say you or Jess Walter or whoever\u2014would \ufb01nd the form I espouse solipsistic, narcissistic, navel-gazing, or whatever. And that\u2019s okay. But I prefer the war within. I \ufb01nd the level of discussion, potentially\u2014not by any means always\u2014but potentially thrillingly higher. When that\u2019s good, nothing\u2019s better. A lot of it is horrible, memoir or journalism, or woe is me stu\ufb00, but when it really is at the highest level, it is really important to me. Maybe the war within is my own self-enclosure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you want to consciously articulate these truths or realities in a way that a painting might not let you? We have a response to painting or music that might be emotional, that might be just as true but di\ufb03cult to articulate. Are you interested in clear, conscious articulation of truth?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a very good point. I think I am. There\u2019s this line by Yeats that I disagree with, which is, \u201cYou can\u2019t articulate the truth, you can only embody it.\u201d That\u2019s wrong. You can articulate the truth. I really believe in language above all else. It goes back, as so many of my tropes do, to stuttering. I grew up with a stutter, still stutter slightly sometimes. I wrote a novel about it. In a way, it\u2019s sort of the core of my being. So many of my theories unconsciously draw from it. I love articulation. I love saying\u2014telling, not showing, that workshop bromide. Bromide of bromides: Show don\u2019t tell. I so adore telling. Showing bores me to tears. It always has. When I think about my favorite moments from Huck Finn<\/em>, they aren\u2019t like, Oh look at this plot turn or this dialogue. It\u2019s just Huck saying something. Those are the moments that I live for. I am drawn toward articulation as revenge on stuttering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m guessing that you don\u2019t care for Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s stories\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did a brutal thing to Flannery O\u2019Connor once. I was trapped in some cabin for a long weekend and I read the collected O\u2019Connor front to back. That is one formulaic writer, I promise you. Every single story is exactly the same story. Obviously she was a master crafter of stories. I went through a phase where I very much admired O\u2019Connor. I think \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find\u201d an awfully well-made story. But she doesn\u2019t interest me. I couldn\u2019t imagine reading her. She is a religious writer. I think so much of my work is founded on a godless meaninglessness. There is no meaning. We are lost. We are existentially alone. How do we get through the next hundred years of our lives, or the next \ufb01fty? If, \ufb01nally, your vision is underwritten by religious salvation, we\u2019re on very di\ufb00erent sides of the path to hell. But who am I to criticize O\u2019Connor? She is a quintessential example of someone who is by all accounts a great writer who holds zero interest for me. Especially the third person. I\u2019m just allergic to the third person. To the degree I can read \ufb01ction, almost by de\ufb01nition it has to be \ufb01rst person, because at least we\u2019re pushing toward some authorial \u201cI.\u201d The moment that we\u2019re in the storytelling mode, I tend to be not interested. But who am I to end the world of \ufb01ction? Obviously a \ufb01ction writer and a poet and a non\ufb01ction writer are all trying to get to the same stu\ufb00.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see Reality Hunger<\/em> as an artist struggling to be vital, to be born, in e\ufb00ect. And this is an artist who is already alive, who has already been an artist for some time\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this artist is me? This is me struggling to be born?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How so?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see you creating systems of belief about art in the entire book and then examining them, arguing with these beliefs, building them up, tearing them down, looking to other artists for insight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s exactly right. This friend of mine read it and he said that it\u2019s the most personal book I\u2019ve ever written. But obviously my friend was being sort of coy. By most accounts it will not be thought of as my most personal book.
Is he\u2014I mean, am I\u2014born or am I dead?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conversation is ongoing, I think. When you talked before about Cheever\u2019s journals, it seems that you\u2019re interested in how that artist exists. For me, Reality Hunger shows an artist struggling with who he is, struggling to create meaning in his life and out of his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was listening to this show on public radio recently. It\u2019s basically three or four stories read aloud by actors on a Broadway stage called \u201cStories on Stage,\u201d something like that. Again, I\u2019m sort of making an easy case. Some guy was reading a Cheever story. It wasn\u2019t \u201cThe Housebreaker of Shady Hill,\u201d but it was very close. Basically a story about a guy who is somewhat estranged from his wife. He\u2019s living in Rome, and he writes a sort of fantasy version about how they\u2019ll actually connect. It was a beautiful story and fun to listen to when I was driving around. So beautiful that when I got home, I ran to my radio so I could hear the end. But it pales compared to the journals. I probably sound like I\u2019m kidding, but they are far and away Cheever\u2019s best book. They\u2019re basically journals he kept from 1940 until he died. They\u2019re very consciously written\u2014written for publication, it\u2019s obvious. They\u2019re so sculpted. There are scenes that come in and out and leitmotifs. It\u2019s an amazing work of art. But hearing the \ufb01ction story, as well done as it was, was the sketchiest investigation. You\u2019re comparing a twenty-page story to a 300,000-word journal, but still, the \ufb01ction felt like gossamer compared to the depth of the journal. The journal let him get away with absolutely nothing. He was relentless toward himself, and in so doing, connects himself with us. The \ufb01ction is full of grandiosity of logic, and he gets away with murder. I was constantly listening, going You lying sack of shit, I read the journals. I know what it\u2019s like at ground level for you. Don\u2019t give me these happy coincidences and sweet endings. Not that the \ufb01ction by any means has to have a sweet ending. The groaning contrivance of the story compared to the electrifying rawness of the journals, there was no comparison. To me it was a really instructive example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reality Hunger<\/em> contains dozens of unattributed quotes from various writers, \ufb01lmmakers, philosophers, and other people. Are you getting any noise from Knopf on the legal end?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They\u2019re publishing The Thing About Life<\/em> \ufb01rst, to my shock and dismay because to me, Reality Hunger<\/em> is a more timely book. I was pushing for a Vintage Paperback Original published maybe in September\u2014just go. Forget the galleys, forget everything. But for some reason, they insisted that The Thing About Life<\/em> come out \ufb01rst. And Reality Hunger<\/em> will follow in September of 2009. So in a way that book is, frankly, not really on their radar yet. They bought both books together, a two-book thing. So I\u2019m just developing all my legal arguments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if they ask you to include an acknowledgements page?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point in the book, I say, \u201cYou get a brownie point for every di\ufb00erent quote you identify.\u201d That pretty much tells it. They\u2019ll either deal with it later, or\u2014I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Lethem is a good friend and we have a sort of pact that when it comes time to make that argument, we\u2019re going to go in and just argue the case to the hilt. And I\u2019m probably going to lose the debate, to be honest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are quite a few quotes from John D\u2019Agata in there. And John said, \u201cPromise me you won\u2019t ruin the book by putting a bunch of sources in the back.\u201d Everyone has been amazingly generous in the spirit of the book. I have quite a few quotes from my friend Michael Logan. From a former student, James Nugent. Paul Bravermann. Friends are the main quotes. A lot of them, I\u2019ve remade. Some are my own. So much of the argument of the book depends on learning those boundaries. The moment you\u2019ve said page twenty-one is from Vivian Gornick and page twenty-nine is from Coleridge, the book is over. It\u2019s not over, but it\u2019s considering domestication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remote has an acknowledgments page\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paperback does, and it\u2019s kind of cool because all those footnotes are in the back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about a page that simply says, \u201cThe following works were considered or used as part of this collage.\u201d In e\ufb00ect, the acknowledgements page. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll probably be thrilled if I can get away with putting something like that in the back. I\u2019m talking brave now, but we\u2019ll see how far I get when it comes down to it. I would love it if there was something elegant about silence. You remember in the end of The Wasteland<\/em> when Eliot tells you where every quote was from? I hate that whole idea. If you recognize the quote, \ufb01ne. If you don\u2019t, \ufb01ne. But the idea of turning it into this kind of snarly apparatus\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why do you think Eliot did that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think he was trying to raise the mystery of the work. People went into Eliot\u2019s library. What was that book of his called, by that lady? Jessie Weston? From Ritual to Romance<\/em>? Something like that. They went into Eliot\u2019s library and it still had the cellophane wrapped around it, a book he was supposed to have been quoting from. The point being that so many contemporary poets will give you every line. Like, \u201cLine twelve is a translation of\u2026\u201d That\u2019s such a dead gesture of quasi-scholarship, of good citizenship. I feel strongly\u2014as do so many friends who are quoted in the book\u2014that citing everything would hurt the book\u2019s intent. I feel strongly about it. I\u2019m going to argue strong. Obviously I\u2019m not going to say, Well, forget it. I\u2019m not going to rip up the contract. I\u2019ll deal with it as I deal with it. Why do we need all these citations of sources that pretty much anyone can \ufb01nd on the web? The biology of acne or something like that? Why do we need that snarly apparatus?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When is it appropriate to attribute credit?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think John D\u2019Agata is really good about this issue. It\u2019s almost like an art form struggling to be reborn itself. John has this feeling that if we\u2019re going to look at non\ufb01ction as art, we\u2019ve got to stop sourcing it. And if you\u2019re writing a work that has no aspirations to be art, let\u2019s say a biography about Thomas Je\ufb00erson or something\u2014it\u2019s a work of history. I don\u2019t read that; I don\u2019t write it; I\u2019m not interested in it. You\u2019re going to source the fact that someone else found a document about Je\ufb00erson as a slave owner or something like that. And you\u2019re writing this history of Thomas Je\ufb00erson. In that kind of work, you have the whole snarly apparatus. But in the kind of work that I\u2019m trying to champion, that I\u2019m trying to write and read and love, you \ufb01nd a feeling that if a work has any chance of existing as a work of art, as a liberating thought experiment, we have to get away from the idea of sourcing things. It establishes a pedestrian or journalistic and\/or scholarly context. It takes away the whole aura of a work of art which is crucial to the planet. Look at painters, the way they approach art. Look at Rauschenberg and Warhol. Do they say, This comes from the Campbell Soup Company? They just go and do it. Until all the lawyers got involved. Look at how musicians and hip-hop artists come in and just slash and burn. And turntablists go in and remake stu\ufb00. The moment you get lawyers involved, the moment you get journalistic and scholarly good citizenship involved, you\u2019re dead. If anyone wants to take my work and remake it, they\u2019re more than welcome. If anyone wants to take Black Planet and make it into, whatever, an opera\u2014it\u2019d make a great opera; if they want to take Remote and turn it inside out\u2014they\u2019re welcome to it. If it\u2019s aspiring to be art, it\u2019s crucial we remove the rubric of non-art in my view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is Reality Hunger<\/em> structured the way it is, in 563 sections?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that we all teach, that I\u2019m not up on some Vermont mountaintop with twelve hours to write every day of the week, that I\u2019m checking the Web every \ufb01ve minutes for gossip of some kind. We live in an attention de\ufb01cit age. I\u2019m in\ufb02uenced by collage artists from the last hundred years. I think it\u2019s totally congruent with what I argue. It\u2019d be absurd for me to have a three-hundred-page essay that\u2019s smoothly lucid and coherent. It\u2019s the way I think. There are twenty-six categories from A\u2013Z. That\u2019s a sort of funny idea of the alphabet. There\u2019s a pretext of being thorough. We\u2019ve got the A\u2013Z, the explanation that explains nothing. The categories mean relatively little except you\u2019re supposed to realize how much turnstile jumping there is in the categories. Sometimes something\u2019s in the wrong category. The A\u2013Z stu\ufb00 feels fairly arbitrary at times. The quotation. You can\u2019t tell what the \u201cI\u201d espouses. You ask, Who is saying this? David Shields? Robert Lowell? George Orwell? Who is saying this? Categories are break-downable. I even argue for the virtue of brevity in the book. Drawn to collage, aphorism, sound bite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of your books are broken into similar short sections\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A friend of mine called it \u201cAphorism sent through radiation.\u201d I just love that idea. Remote is not quite as fragmented, but it\u2019s pretty montage- like. Enough About You<\/em> is somewhat. Body Politic<\/em> is somewhat. But this pushes it further. Collage\u2014to piss o\ufb00 some more people\u2014collage is the evolution beyond narrative. It\u2019s the next step. I\u2019ve written ten books and there\u2019s almost a direct movement from very grounded, well-made, linear, realistic novels. The \ufb01rst is a four-hundred-page book and each chapter\u2019s forty pages, and boy is it grounded in the real, in narrative. Now I\u2019m onto a book like Reality Hunger<\/em>, where there\u2019s no section longer than a page. I don\u2019t know what to say other than that\u2019s how my mind thinks. The books I seem to love the most are often what I would call speedy and they cut to the chase. There\u2019s very little furniture moving. There\u2019s very little table setting, just bursts of language and of insight. A \ufb01ction writer might ask, \u201cOkay, we\u2019ve got a bunch of insight, but where\u2019s the context?\u201d There is a context. The book is nothing but 563 insights, but they keep building upon one another. The context needn\u2019t be narrative. The context could be contemplative. That\u2019s what I\u2019m drawn toward now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Should people still read your \ufb01ction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a great question. I\u2019m doing this sort of easy thing where I\u2019m like nah-nah-ing at \ufb01ction as a way to boost the assignment of non\ufb01ction, but I\u2019ve got three books of \ufb01ction out there that on some sort of trivial level, I want people to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it a trivial level?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m just saying trivial level of, Let\u2019s go out and buy those books or something, as if those book sales will change my life in some substantial way. I still love those books. Those books still matter to me, especially Dead Languages<\/em> and Handbook for Drowning<\/em>. Heroes to me, less so because it\u2019s so traditional and so conventional. There\u2019s very little of my aesthetic driving it. It was in\ufb02uenced by a University of Iowa aesthetic. I was trying to write in a realistic way, a traditional way, a conventional way that probably doesn\u2019t play to my strengths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Dead Languages<\/em> is so clearly the forerunner of what I\u2019m doing now. The reason it is ten times a better book than Heroes<\/em> is that I\u2019m making all the gestures I\u2019m making now, but further still. Dead Languages<\/em> talks about stuttering. It talks about masochism to a certain degree, it talks about self-destruction, my love-hate a\ufb00air with language. It\u2019s phrased in \ufb01ctional context, but it\u2019s the evolution of my artistic aesthetic. I think that book holds up really well. And I really like Handbook for Drowning<\/em> quite a lot, too. The pieces I love the most are the most collage like\u2014\u201cThe War on Poverty,\u201d \u201cBrief Survey of Ideal Desire.\u201d Those books are not very far from my current work. I\u2019m encouraged by the idea that you\u2019re supposed to change as an artist. Part of me is stupidly nostalgic for my early \ufb01ctional writer self. Somehow calling yourself a novelist still has a slight glamour to it. I mean, it doesn\u2019t really have any glamour in the culture, but in literary culture it somehow still seems slightly more respectable. Whereas the stu\ufb00 I do doesn\u2019t even have a goddamned name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you have a name for it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like John D\u2019Agata\u2019s term, \u201clyric essay.\u201d It\u2019s sort of a mouthful, but I despise this \u201ccreative non\ufb01ction\u201d term. It\u2019s absolutely meaningless. I don\u2019t mind \u201cpersonal essay.\u201d But a book-length essay, what do you call it? What do you think of it as?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You call Reality Hunger<\/em> a manifesto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manifesto is a very speci\ufb01c-book word. The Thing About Life<\/em>\u2014what would you call that? A collage?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s less a collage than even Enough About You<\/em>. It seems like a struggle between the personal story and scienti\ufb01c research, those two things playing against each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then there are the quotations from all the sources. I hope there\u2019s a relatively complex play. Tolstoy weighing in, quotes from Lucretius to Coetzee, me and my dad. Somehow those play o\ufb00 each other in what I hope is an interesting way. Do you have a term for those kind of works? I think lyric essay seems to be catching on. Someone will be crowned a genius if they can come up with a term for this. I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s such a shame, though, to be working in a form. Literary non\ufb01ction sounds sort of self-congratulatory and self-marginalizing, as if somehow you\u2019re writing an essay on Shakespeare or something. And creative non\ufb01ction? Creative as opposed to what? Destructive? Destructive non\ufb01ction? Maybe that\u2019s what I write. Destructive non\ufb01ction. That would be good. I swear that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you have one book coming out that\u2019s a meditation on death and one that\u2019s a manifesto, what could you possibly do after that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m starting a book about sex. Part of me feels like that\u2019s sort of the goal. I\u2019m deeply middle-aged, so I want to make sure to cover a lot of big topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODRIGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sex, death, and life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIELDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exactly. Sometimes I\u2019ll get an idea for some book, like from the guy who runs the mailing place around the corner, who\u2019s from Iraq, and we always talk about the war. Part of me wants to do a book with him about Iraq or something. I have all these ideas, dozens of ideas for books. You want to make sure that they are essential topics. You kind of want to get down what life feels like to you. It\u2019s a good question. I feel like writing The Thing About Life<\/em> changed my outlook. It made me both very morbid and completely free from morbidity. On the one hand, I feel like, My God, we\u2019re just animals and there\u2019s no point to anything. Okay, if there\u2019s no point to anything, you might as well try to enjoy life on some level. Dark \ufb02uid entered my body through that book in some really serious way. Though I think the book is not heavy. It feels sort of light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are just nerve endings. And that book does feel like some end game on some level. The manifesto\u2019s saying, Here\u2019s what I believe about art. So I agree, I\u2019m at a weird impasse. After I \ufb01nished those two books, I couldn\u2019t do anything for a couple months. I just sort of reorganized my \ufb01les. I threw a bunch of stu\ufb00 out. It was like some weird death thing. I threw out all these old clothes. I cleaned up my computer \ufb01les. This weird cleansing. I had really gone through these two crucial discourses which I\u2019d been dying to write for my whole life, death and art. Destructive non\ufb01ction.<\/p>\n\n

<\/svg><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Shields is one of today\u2019s most controversial writers and also one of the most passionate. Jonathan Lethem says of Shields: \u201cWhile on the one hand I feel the urge to compare Shields to the very most incisive and smart contemporary essayists I know\u2014Phillip Lopate and Vivian Gornick and Geo\ufb00 Dyer\u2014 in another sense he\u2019s accomplished … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36732,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36097\/revisions\/36732"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}