Quick Questions with Justin Taylor

By Josh Spilker »

Justin Taylor's new book Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial, 2010) is like a tow truck ride with four people in the front seat--it's awkward and unusual, but memorable. The punk rock, the Tetris, the religious discussions, the gentrification--those arrangements click and create good stories to boot.

All of that babble means I liked Justin's book. And he was kind of enough to answer a few questions about his book, plus provide the five best things that he's read recently.

There was a lot of stuff about the South in here, or more about Florida, but that doesn't count as the south. But this isn't southern literature, or northern literature or western literature. It seems to be more "transplant" literature...people caught in the in-between of moving. Is that something you're interested in? Do the places you do mention, like Northern Florida, or Sacramento or Tennessee, hold significance to you or to the story? Or are they just random selections?

Florida is not in the South, but the South is absolutely in Florida. It starts at or just north of Orlando, and covers the whole rest of the state. I for one would not go telling those people what they do or do not count as. But I kind of like this idea of "transplant" literature that you mention-- I grew up in one area of South Florida near Miami, spent most of my life in the same house, and so when I moved out to start college the change was very drastic and jarring, which is not to say wholly unwelcome--like all change, there were strong currents of both loss and opportunity. I moved from the non-South South to the real-South South (Gainesville, a college town, granted, but if you doubt its cred go there and see for yourself).

I found I liked it very much. I spent four years there, then over the course of the next three years (2004-2007) moved around a lot: New York City; Portland, Oregon; Franklin, Tennessee; then back to New York again for what seems like keeps. In New York I lived the first time on west 48th street and then in Battery Park City, (both of these were extended stays in the living rooms of benevolent cousins). In New York the second time I lived in Morningside Heights, then Bushwick, Brooklyn, then the Upper East Side, then back to Bushwick again--where I have been since and hope to stay. If you've spent time in New York then you know that changing neighborhoods is basically equivalent to moving to a new city anywhere else, and changing boroughs roughly to changing states. So, yeah, the bulk of these stories were first conceived, drafted, and revised for publication during a time when I was rootless--either sleeping in people's living rooms or else in some temporary-by-design sublet arrangement, owning no furniture and few other things, etc. I can see how that might have helped foster the transplant sensibility you describe. I guess in telling this story I've already answered your last question--the selections are not random. They're places I've been that left impressions. Well, except for Sacramento. That one's random.

There's also a lot about faith--mostly Christian and Jewish. I rarely see young-ish writers or really any fiction writers tackling religious topics much anymore except to explain it away. What does using these faiths in your stories reveal about the characters or stories?

I find religion, and expressions of faith in general, to be deeply fascinating. Something draws me to them, and to exploring them--especially Christianity. I don't have a good reason for why this interests me, but I'm interested in pursuing the interest than in questioning where it comes from. I've been working on a novel for the past couple years that has required a massive amount of research into (among other topics) Christian theology and mysticism, and I honestly can't tell you if I did the research to do the book or the book to do the research. Either way, I loved every minute of it.

Jewish faith is articulated most often in my short stories as a kind of inheritance, one which the inheritor is typically somewhat ambivalent about having received. Christianity on the other hand, is explored in a deeper and in some senses more sympathetic way. I don't know if that's because I'm developing a strange full-blown bias (I myself am Jewish, born and raised) or if, what's perhaps more likely, because the Christian system is less personal to me, I have an easier time delving into it in a clear-headed way, and then creating some version of its expression or exigencies from the imaginative inside out.

In any case, I agree with you that religion and faith tend not to be explored except where and when they are being explained away--or apologized for, or mocked. I think that's a major failing of our culture. The entire terrain of faith has been ceded to the wingnuts of the Palin right, who want it for such narrow, misguided reasons of political and social repression that it would be laughable to use something so powerful and valuable to obtain a goal so small-minded and pointless--would be, that is, if they weren't making headway, and if they weren't destroying the very notion of what it means to have faith or religion in the process. The far-right in this country would love nothing more than to foment the same kind of affiliation between their politics and their faith as, say, the Taliban has. Because those are two groups that see eye to eye. They are inversions of each other, and bring each other, in DeLillo's words, to "deep completion."

I've read elsewhere that you're a Harold Bloom fan for lack of a better word...what's your "favorite" by him? Do you get nervous reading Anxiety of Influence? I do.

The Bloom of my preference is not the Bloom of the theory of influence and literary agon, though of course that's part of the package. I mean, I agree with him, generally speaking, about the process as he describes it, and I can't say it makes me nervous. I think it's fascinating to observe the process, in oneself no less than in anyone else. But Bloom interests me most as an exegete--his readings of Dickens, Austen, etc. in The Western Canon, and anything he says about Shakespeare or Emerson or the Bible. It makes you smarter to read him, and expands your horizons in another, deeper sense, a soul-sense, I think, because really his later work is all devoted to this idea of collapsing the literary categories of sacred and secular into one continuum, which is an idea I find deeply compelling. My favorite book of his might be the one I finished most recently- The American Religion. I think he's one of the finest writers-on-religion that we have, and I would say that my religious sensibility (which is hardly static, or in any sense complete) owes as much to him as to anybody else. Him and Marilynne Robinson. 

Lastly, there's punk rock talk in these books and I've also heard your next book is about Floridian anarchists. How if at all does punk influence your writing, or is all this a vain attempt to get your book sold in Hot Topic?

Does Hot Topic sell books? I know Urban Outfitters does. In any case, either company (or are they the same one?) is welcome to vend the book, if they would like to. But that was a serious answer to a basically joking question--which either means I don't know how to take a joke, or maybe it means I riposted, and now the joke's on you.

But what can I tell you about punk? It's a subculture that interests me, and whose music and prevailing ideologies in some but by no means all respects overlap with my own. Plus I think they look cool, usually. Anarchism is much older than punk, of course--it's as old as religion, really, and in fact is itself a kind of ageless faith: this idea that we can be our best selves without coercion, without the threat of state intervention, that the state, by serving a function redolent of (if not quite analogous to) the role played by the Gnostic demiurge, might in fact be the thing which keeps us from this bestness.

This is a very beautiful idea to me; it's a faith worth having, if it can be had, and the anarchists in my novel have made a few of these connections. Their anarchism has led them to question some of the tenets of anarchism itself, namely the classic catchphrase "no gods, no masters." What if a God existed Who had no interest in exerting sovereignty over you, and Who in fact was directly invested in aiding your liberation from those who would? So really, it's a book about religion. I don't know how that kind of thing goes over at UO or HT, but they're free to call the distributor and place an order just like anybody else.

5) The Five Best Things Justin Taylor Has Read Recently:

5. The March '10 issue of Harper's, in particular the article "Mammon from Heaven: The Prosperity Gospel in Recession" by Benjamin Anastas. The Prosperity Gospel is one of the most fascinating and disturbing perversions of the New Testament that I can think of, which given the storied and boundless history of perversions of Christ's message, is saying something. I saw Anastas speak at the PEN World Voices festival last year, on a "Faith and Fiction" panel with Nadeem Aslan, Brian Evenson, and Jan Kjaerstad. You can listen to that talk here (I believe a transcript was also published in a recent issue of PEN America) but the point is that I was very impressed by that panel, and therefore excited to see Anastas's name on the cover of Harper's. Also, the main preacher that Anastas covers is a guy whose name is actually Creflo Dollar. What else could you want?

4. Sleepingfish 8. Is this the best issue of Sleepingfish yet? Contributors include: Blake Butler, Alec Niedenthal, Christine Schutt, Diane Williams, Sasha Fletcher, Dennis Cooper, Ryan Call, Tim Jones-Yelvington... That's maybe 1/3 of what's in there. Niedenthal, I hasten to add, is also going to be in...

3. ...the Agriculture Reader #4, the arts annual I co-edit. Our designer just sent a PDF proof to me and the founding editor, Jeremy Schmall, so we could see the artwork for the first time and do a final comb before the book goes off to the printer (by the time you read this it will be there). The whole issue is illustrated by the amazing Scott Teplin, and when it comes out (in April, in time for AWP) it will feature new work by Amy McDaniel, Peter Jay Shippy, Gary Lutz, Jordan Davis and many other fine people, established and otherwise. There are translations by Zachary Schomburg. Joshua Cohen presents a selection of adages by Benjamin de Casseres. We are re-printing the title poem from Douglas Crase's 1982 collection, The Revisionist. We have a story by Eva Talmadge, the longest piece of fiction we've published to date, and the first historical fiction we've ever published--a double-first for us. Check back on the site in late March / early April for ordering info.

2. This Facebook event invitation came to me from David Swider, of the legendary Square Books of Oxford, Mississippi (also of Kitty Snacks magazine). I joined it immediately:

Get Barry Hannah's books back in print!

Type: Causes - Protest
Start Time: Friday, February 19, 2010 at 8:20pm
End Time: Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 11:20pm
Location: This is not an actual event, but a petition.

Description: Dear big (Grove Atlantic, Random House, etc.) and small publishers,

Barry Hannah is one of our favorite writers and it's a shame that some of his books are not in print. Anyone who has read these books that have gone out of print will agree that it's insane.

These books by Hannah are no longer in print:
The Nightwatchmen, Captain Maximus, Hey Jack, Boomerang, Never Die

SOMEONE PRINT THESE!!!! Or donate the money to Kitty Snacks and we'll do it.

Thanks for keeping these in print:
Airships, Ray, Geronimo Rex, The Tennis Handsome, Bats Out of Hell, High Lonesome, Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Of the out-of-print Hannah books, my favorite is Boomerang, which is a really weird and beautiful and subdued autobiography. Interestingly, the edition of Boomerang I have is a two-in-one edition where it's paired with Never Die, which is a weird and dark novel I don't know what to think about--though I'm totally down with it being back in print. I've never even SEEN an actual copy of Nightwatchmen. I think that since all these O-O-P titles are on the slender side, it would make the most sense to reissue them in pairs or even in triads-- like the Houghton-Mifflin omnibus editions of Richard Brautigan.

(Ed. Note: Justin submitted this item before Mr. Hannah's passing).

1. This passage from Denis Donoghue's Warrenpoint is written out longhand on a large torn strip of ruled yellow legal stationary and taped over my desk, at eye-level but to the left of the space where I work:

"As a boy, Hopkins asked himself: 'What must it be to be someone else?' I have rarely posed this question. It seems trivial to ask: What would it be to be a beautiful, wild girl? Or even: What would it be to be a beautiful, wild man? It is a more dreadful question to ask: What must it be to be myself and to remember that I was once a boy who helped to smash a railway carriage? What have I done with that violence, unless I still retain it and it takes other forms?"

Further to the left, on a fully in-tact sheet taken from the same pad, is this line from Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, written in a larger hand than the Donoghue and entirely in capital letters:

"WHAT EXCEEDS THE SYSTEM IS THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ITS FAILURE AND LIKEWISE THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ITS SUCCESS."

Posted on March 16, 2010. More on: books, justin taylor, codex, literature