“So let’s talk, you and I, now that we’ve both failed as writers.”

“I think twenty-seven is a bit young for failure. And how old are you? I’ve never known. We’re awful friends, aren’t we? We don’t even know each other’s birthday.”

“We’re old men in this city.”

“Then we should have some wisdom, if you believe in such things.”

“Oh, god no. God, no. Time, I believe in time, and also in relinquishing the notion of control over our lives.”

“So what are we talking about then?”

“Writing, of course. Two men who are prematurely old by sheer, dumb fuck bad luck. Drop my sperm down in New York City and we’ve got the world by the balls, you know, but instead we‘re here, in this hellhole, two old men who are still dumb as children. Let’s talk writing.”

“I’m not as well read as you think I am.”

“Nor am I.”

“I never bothered with the Russians. I’ve got Dostoevsky sitting on top of my bookshelf in my apartment. It’s sat there for so long, and I’ve fingered the cover so many times, it looks read.”

“Karamazov?”

“Of course, yes. And Tolstoy is on my shelf. I told myself I’d get to him after Dostoevsky. I have a whole shitload of unread Tolstoy. And you guys come into my place, and I’ve got Dostoevsky sitting there. The book’s all worn, and you guys probably think I’ve read it. And I bring girls back and they see Tolstoy on the bookshelf. They see those huge goddamned books…”

“You could kill a man with those Russian novels.”

“Easily, easily…those girls see those murderously large novels, and they think I’ve read them. I let them think that.”

“So why haven’t you read them?”

“I tried. They bored me. I tried more times than I could count. I practically tortured myself to read them.”

“I’ve only read Turgenev. But only his short books, only the ones under two hundred and fifty, three hundred pages. He’s good, you know, a bit flowery, but I like that. I never bothered with the other guys, I didn’t even pretend to. I knew they’d make me suicidal, I just fucking knew it.”

“I’ve barely read any Vargas Llosa.”

“Fuck, I haven’t touched Borges.”

“Garcia Marquez?”

“’One Hundred Years,’ that’s all.”

“’Love in the Time of Cholera.’ And ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold.’”

“Ok, yes, I read ‘Chronicle,’ too. That was a fine read, right? His journalistic instincts really come out there, just brutally fucking efficient reporting.”

“I liked ‘Cholera.’ Well, I hated it, then I loved it. So liked seems an appropriate middle ground. It’s brutally slow. He swamps you in details. He’s so meticulous it almost drowns you. It really feels like drowning. It’s that painful. And then at like page one thirty, this switch flips. It was like I’d waded through enough shit to finally understand. All those details came together. The world suddenly bursts around you, totally whole.”

“I could see that, you know, again it’s that whole eye of the reporter, keen observer thing he’s got working in ‘Chronicle.’”

“…”

“Should we discuss poetry?”

“Oh, fuck no.”

“You were a poet.”

“I was a bad poet. My whole idea was: poetry is artifice. It’s adherence to the old forms just for the sake of continuity. I thought: why? I wanted to capture the essence of my consciousness.”

“How original.”

“I was earnest about that. I wanted to. I’d still like to. I didn’t care about form or device. Again, it all seemed so arbitrary to me. It seems slightly less arbitrary now, although still mostly inessential. It still seems to be a nod and a wink to the dead.”

“We differed about that, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I differed with a lot of people about that. I wanted purity. I wanted the purity of experience directly translated into words. I wanted to explicate the feeling of the exact moment. What it felt like to be me. I thought reading too many poets would, at least subconsciously, cause me to emulate them. I thought it would contaminate the purity of my thought.”

“Form has its uses, its purposes, right? That’s what I believe. Because without it, you’re just babbling gibberish, you know, out there in the wilderness raving. Any illiterate asshole can rave about the sun. The point of poetry, right, is the synthesis of your own consciousness with the longstanding traditions and rigors of the discipline. It’d be like if a piano player never learned the chords and just went out there banging around on random notes, all in the name of purity, of breaking the rigid bonds of the system.”

“I know you disagree with me. Most people do.”

“I think poetry without at least an honest effort towards form is just hackneyed.”

“And yet you don’t believe in wisdom. You don’t believe in control.”

“No, but that’s what makes literature so important, it’s ability to transcend that lack of control, right? It’s the one arena in which we do have control, you know, and why would we willingly relinquish that responsibility? The world is shapeless and without any rational order, and that’s why it’s important we impose some order on our writing, to transcend the randomness of our mortality and our circumstantial existence. It’s the essential part of the whole fucking thing, and you’re just throwing it away on some naïve idea of principle.”

“It’s too artificial for me. That, that kind of intentional structure is too artificial for my tastes. I don’t want my writing to be artifice. I want my writing to be mimetic. I want my writing to reflect the conditions of the world. And that means randomness. That means random terror and death, but also random beauty and grace. And not all of those moments have to be interconnected. Not all of those moments have to serve some larger order. Sometimes they just happen. There isn’t any rationale behind them.”

“See, but the problem is, the problem with your rationale is, the minute you’re applying language to an image or a moment, it’s artifice, you know? Any narrative that begins and ends, whether those two things are symmetrical or not, is immediately fucking artificial because it’s allowing us to enter a narrative, impose our biases and hopes and predilections onto it, and then exit that narrative and, from the objective position of distant subjectivity, evaluate and impose meaning onto it. Randomness in a novel or a poem is it’s own kind of structure, because the randomness is fucking intentional, right, is meant to stand apart from any traditional forms. It’s intended to frustrate or confound, right? Besides, whether you’re intending symmetry and order in a story or not, someone reading your story, or poem, or whatever the fuck you write, is going to impose their own limitations on it, they’re going to project their own wishes for structure and coherence into a story where you intended there to be none.”

“Only because they’ve been indoctrinated to do so.”

“What the fuck ever. They still do it, right?”

“You miss the point of randomness. It can’t be calculated. If it’s true, pure randomness, then it’s not artifice. Or, it’s as un-artificial as possible. As genuine as possible. And that’s tough to achieve in a novel or a story. It’s tough because you’re creating it over such a long period of time. You return to the piece time and again. Inevitably, you do impose your own ideas of structure. We’ve been so indoctrinated into the narrative form we can’t help imposing structure, even if we don’t believe it. We’re powerless.”

“But in one of your poems, right…”

“Right. Yes. In a stand alone, throwaway poem, you can achieve a reasonable facsimile of inartificial experience. If that poem is constructed in one fell swoop and with no thought given to structure or tradition, it can come damn close to genuine consciousness.”

“Maybe, maybe. I’m still thinking here, you know, that it’s just such a stretch, if only because of the indoctrination you’re talking about, if only because basic language carries so many of its own structures, that the minute you’re putting something into words, you’ve lost any hope or pretense of mimetic re-creation. At the inception of language, you embrace the basic artificiality of your form, you know?”

“…”

“Yeah…”

“I’ll be honest, I’ve always hated Paz. What little I’ve read of him.”

“Oh fuck yes. Neruda, too. Neruda is a monster of mediocrity.”

“I like Neruda. I like the blatant sentimentality of his love poems. It always struck me as eschewing convention for the sake of honesty.”

“His political stuff is miserably turgid.”

“I hate Paz for presuming to speak for all of Mexico. I hate him for embracing this Mexican identity. Who gave him the right?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“…”

“Have you tackled any of the French?”

“Which ones?”

“I don’t know. The romantics, the naturalists, the Dadaists, the symbolists, whatever Goddamned French there are.”

“Not a one. Octavia loved them. Especially the guy who inspired Debussy with that poem about the moon. He was a symbolist. I can’t remember his name.”

“I read a bit of Rimbaud, but he just oozed faggotry.”

“From what little I know, I admired his spirit.”

“I’ll admit I’ve tackled Bolano, at least. Some of his poems. And most of his novels.”

“Yes, me, too.”

“He’s fine, he’s really something. I envy him.”

“He disappointed me.”

“Really? I thought you loved him.”

“I do. I do. But ‘2666,’ the ending broke me.”

“Why?”

“Well the whole book is this wonderful critique of the novel as institution. Or at least, I thought it was. It flaunted being discursive. It flaunted randomness. It flaunted introducing characters for a page or two and then banishing them from the narrative forever. It was like people you talk to in a bar.”

“Like a woman you fuck one night and then never see again.”

“Yes, sure. Like that. But that’s the whole book. Sure, he’s setting up these different memes and structures of traditional novels. But he’s setting them up simply to demolish them. He’s setting them up to discredit their validity as urgent, necessary forms. And then with the last, symmetrical line of the novel, he reneges on everything he’s spent nine hundred pages arguing. He spends all this time destroying the traditional conceit of the novel, only to reaffirm it at the very last. And the worst part of it? I felt good about it. I was satisfied to have my closure and my neatness.”