#David Naimon

[garadinervi]

Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, with David Naimon, Tin House, Portland, OR, 2018 [The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation]

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2023: CONVERSATIONS ON WRITING by Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon.

Currently dual wielding books, over here--I've never really been big on reading two different fiction books at once, but I can pair fiction with nonfiction just fine.

I haven't read as much nonfiction as I'd hoped to this year (overcorrecting from last year, apparently), so I'm excited to get back into some Writers Writing about Writing stuff while I cool off of my current project before I gear up for NaNo. This one starts with "In Memoriam," though, so I suspect it'll probably break my heart a little bit. This is Fine™.

[her-moth]

adania shibli interviewed by david naimon

[dutifullylazybread]

10 things for 10 people you'd like to know better!

Thank you so much for the tag @falcatas!! This was so much fun!

Last book: Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guinn and David Naimon

Last movie: Smile 2

Last TV show: It was either Arcane or Bob's Burgers.

Sweet/savoury/spicy: At the moment? Spicy.

Relationship status: Married

Last thing I googled: Act 3 Beyoncé

Current Obsession: Baldur's Gate 3 is an easy one for me, of course. But also Stardew Valley (I started a new playthrough to help manage my stress) and Mothman. I like Mothman.

Looking Forward to: Doing more Canva training, buying a tablet (so many people here have inspired me to pick up drawing again!), finishing the current book I'm reading (The Girl in the Tower), starting Lady MacBeth, writing more of Deeply and Immovably So - Chapter 13 (I wrote the argument scene over the weekend!), and working on some other miscellaneous fic ideas that have cropped up. I have a few original story ideas that I would really like to start outlining soon! :D

No Pressure Tags: @redroomroaving @underdark-dreams @little-paperboat @lemonsrosesandlavender @darkurgetrash @forget-me-maybe @kimberbohwrites @sorceresssundries @orangekittyenergy and anyone else who would like to join in!!

[northwindow]

hey julia !! hope ur doing well... am asking u [instead of messaging!] this bc i imagine u might say some rly cool stuff that other ppl would love to see also lol... but i just wondered if u had any basic tips or resources about like developing a (short-term) writing routine? the context is not fiction writing but like academic but i feel like my academic writing is a creative practice so yeah, hope that makes sense! hope its okay to ask ! have a lovely day <3

hi anna marie! you ask the very question i need answered for myself… i am in a very slow place creatively so i feel silly to be giving advice! but i’ve been thinking about how to get things flowing again. very basic but helpful to me:

getting feedback from other people at a regular interval - i am very shy and this can feel like pulling teeth but it’s so worth it, i am always amazed how much it pushes me to finish things i would have otherwise languished on forever

reading a lot (of course) - it helps me to read a bit directly before starting to write. but also being intentional about it and having a defined list of inspiring works… i recently listened to david naimon interview joanna hedva and he asked them which writers were “squatting over” their latest book which i thought was a good way of putting it! i would like to curate a "squatters shelf" to dip into for inspiration on whatever project i'm working on

distinguishing between writing vs. editing time - this is hard for me because i am a very "edit as you go" type person but sometimes it's stifling! in another interview with tommy pico i heard him talk about his writing routine as very everything-goes, yes-and, accumulation-focused style on monday-thursday and then friday is reserved for finding what was good and refining it. i have always wanted to try this!

incorporating a degree of controlled randomness into the routine - whether it be randomizing where you physically work, what part of the project you work on, or brainstorming new ideas, i really enjoy drawing an option "out of a hat" (i hope that makes sense) at some stage of the writing process. i know i am going to be surprised and challenged by a guiding force even in a small way and want to see what’s going to happen.

something that has helped me a lot with routine in general is “habit stacking” i.e. trying to bundle a new task into something you already do regularly - i have not thought about how to do this with writing, but i have successfully bundled reading into drinking my morning coffee every day and it has changed my life significantly

also: i really like that you specified a short-term routine! i think temporary routines keep things interesting, help mark time, and more fully immerse me in things, so academia might be onto something with semesters etc… i am curious about trying to have a self-imposed writing “season” followed by an “off season” where i chill and eat peaches and watch the sopranos every night or whatever without guilt. (one might say i am chilling right now lol… but it’s definitely guilty chilling!) i also love that you see your academic project as a creative pursuit, i hope you are having a really fruitful time so far! ❤️

[adamantine]

It's my birthday, so if you want to hear me talk for like TWO WHOLE HOURS (and why would you not want this, he says, making eye contact pointedly) I'm up at the iconic Between the Covers podcast with David Naimon! We talk about The Saint of Bright Doors, Rakesfall, Sri Lanka, Buddhism, post/colonialism, fascism, replacement theory, and pretty much everything else that anybody could possibly ever talk about

[journalofsolitude]

“It's the last word in landscaping. It requires explanation if you don't know what it is," and you write, "They show the stones. They hide the destruction. Death is absent. There is no ruin. What is heart-rending in a ruin, they removed, sterilized. These neat remains, labeled and caged, are a portrait of my inner ruins." It almost feels like the well-kept-ness of the ruin is an extension of what caused the ruin in the first place, a memorial to cleanliness and decorum”

— David Naimon in conversation with Helene Cixous regarding the book Well-Kept Ruins

[gregdotorg]

two great conversations with Dionne Brand about her new book, Salvage: Readings From The Wreck:

Audio: David Naimon on Between The Covers podcast from Tin House Book Print: Saidiya Hartman in Bomb Mag

[abouyusuf]

"That’s why I really believe that literature is one of the antidotes to all these fake interpretations of the past and the present that we have now because literature is a very slow media. We need slow media. For many years, we were obsessed with the fast media, with news and everything just to come faster. Now we need the slow medias."

"This famous sentence by Flaubert, “Madame Bovary is me.” That was the pretentious of classical literature. I must say in the opposite way, “Georgi Gospodinov, that’s not me.” I don’t know who I am, of course, like all modern people, that’s why I needed a Gaustine. I need someone that I want to be beyond the limitations of my body and my times. This is our dream, the dream of modern people, to be everywhere. This is our anxiety, that we are not everywhere. In this second, in this minute, I’m missing from New York, from Reims, from Napoli, from Reykjavik, from the moon. The whole world is full of my absence, that’s why Gaustine was invented. Gaustine is my dream, my dream to have unlimited bodies, flies, and time. But in the last book, he really changed, Gaustine, because he appeared in all of my books, but in the last books, he became a bit dangerous."

[cleekleequlee]

Aesthetics is itself the violence

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast “Between the Covers” between David Naimon (a co-author with Ursula Le Guin) and Dionne Brand on her new book *Salvage: Readings from the wreck.* It was a casual listen, so I didn’t pay much attention. At one point, David was asking a question to Dionne:

“The first involves a quote you share of the Kenyan literature professor and post-colonial scholar, Simon Giacondi, who says, the aesthetic can never be sutured against or cauterized from the “colonial event”. And you explicitly take this thought of his a step further. You propose that the colonial event *is* the aesthetic. What is pleasing, what is beautiful in the text isn't inseparably sutured to the violence, but *is itself* the violence.”

In the conversation they were talking about these aesthetics of good manner, civilisation, beautifully composed proses as the samething, the other side of slavery and the bodily nature of how things actually work.

I didn’t pay much attention at the time of listening - I was in the gym and running on a cross-trainer.

But today, when I was thinking all day about what to talk about in a mini lecture to interaction design students, I thought of the example Bow once used when talking about technology and feminism, how platform economy turned into gig economy, which puts the welfare of people like Uber drives and delivery men behind the scene. I suddenly made the conneciton to the “aesthetics is itself the violence” statement.

If the whole world, particularly the place where I have grown up, was lured by the dream of modernization, aesthetics, or illusion of clean, neat, organized, fast, convenient, hassel free definitely played a role. But when it actually arrive, there is always a dark side, that was hidden behind the original promise. These promises are exactly like the “Mr. Darcy”, or any decent English man, Mr. Rochester in my once favourite Jane Eyre! Decent, jobless, living on a big fortune passed down. When you were young this seems romantic and perfect, while only much later in time you can question. How is it so?

And technology…. isn’t it doing the same glossing over? Telling you “technology helps to make things faster, better, hassel free”, yet someone still have to cook the meal, somebody to deliver in a rainy or stormy night, Somebody has to take the burden of old electronic trashes, dig up forest or insert wield solar panels, or wind turbines (which Niall Williams is not complaining enough about). Glossing over to create the propoganda, and the future will never arrive.

The future does arrive, alienated. One end is clean and efficient, all logical and nice, the other end is dirty and messy, but it’s veiled behind, nobody sees it. Then is the cut in the middle. “Try to get to the nicer end”! Everybody shouts, move faster, read faster, type faster…Who wants to be trained into, tortured into becoming caring, when outsourcing is an option?

So here we are, the mind-body split ever so vast. All the nice things to the mind, so we could forget about the body. I wonder how I can show people that… by standing, unmoved by the craziness moving forward, FORWARD. Hey, thinking by doing, and doing thought actually feels great. Small is actually beautiful. Subsistence is not all about giving up.

Will anyone listen?

[anniekoh]

Listening to this fantastic interview with poet Monica Youn.

Transcript:

Monica Youn: Deracinated identity for me is an empty space. It’s an empty space that is contained in a shell and the shell is the interface with whiteness. The interface with whiteness, also the interface with other racial identities causes you to be defined as Asian without the guts of it, without the deep connection to homeland or belonging that I feel that other people have access to and that I never have. Growing up in the south, people in ways that are deeply binary and deeply racialized nonetheless have a connection to place, to homeland that I have never felt

...

David Naimon: I think of this in relation to the poem you just read where the tourists and the artists are allowed to pass for White, the tourists and artists are not contained, and in fact, they literally walk away and can walk away, but Asianness is a container in this poem, race is a container. I think of this when I think of something that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o says that our bodies are our first field of knowledge, that if you start from a place of finding that field to be wrong, you don’t have the foundation to build from. Also, when I talked to Claudia in 2014, her talking about her desire for White writers to stay within their bodies when they write, to write as White writers, to in a sense be contained, to accept containment and not perpetuate Whiteness as White space as universal perhaps is the ability to step in and step out. But I wanted to read a couple of things Dorothy said about your work in this interview as a lead into what I found to be a really fascinating response on your part that I’d love to explore. Her introduction notices, like I did, something different about From From when she says, “Youn’s first three collections are accomplished and impressively controlled, with a palpable sense of wariness about them. They can be hard to penetrate, not because of the numerous high-culture references to Greek and Nordic myths, Proust, Antonioni, and so on, but perhaps because of a restraint or constraint which felt, well, racialized. In Youn’s latest collection, From From (Graywolf Press, 2023), something has come undone—all to the good of her,” and in that same introduction, “Since graduating from Princeton, Youn has had the sort of career that could be seen as embodying a ‘model minority’ or aspirational-immigrant dream: Yale Law, jobs in top New York City firms, Stegner and Guggenheim fellowships, and critical acclaim for her three books.” Then she goes on to talk about performing a mastery of knowledge, something I want to return to because I do think you use this mastery of knowledge in a weaponized way now in this latest book that I really appreciate. But your response to her when she brings all this up is to say that there’s also a lot of credentialing on the identity side as well, not just on the assimilation side. You go on to talk about how the only model for you growing up in relation to Asian American-ness was an authenticity model which you couldn’t perform as you’ve already alluded to, not knowing Korean language, not having spent much time in Korea, and that part of the impetus for this book came from a panel of young Korean female poets at AWP in LA. You say, “I didn’t want to be led down the ‘authenticity’ path.

...

Monica Youn:

I don’t want in any way someone to come away from either of these two interviews thinking that I am in any way disclaiming the work of the Korean-American poets on that particular panel. I adore their work. I teach it all the time and I don’t think that they are performing authenticity. I think what I was responding to was their description of the funding mechanisms that enabled the production of their poetic works, which was they would often get some Fulbright or research funding to go back to their home country and research it in order to be able to conduct a sufficiently authentic performance that it would be acceptable to a White consumer or a capitalist consumer who only wants to consume authentic racialized experience in the same way that they only want to consume authentic racialized food. That was what I was trying to steer clear of. This is not my home cooking and I’m not going to cook it for you.

[azspot]

“Something entirely new grows up out of that rich darkness”: David Naimon on Ursula K. Le Guin’s mesmerizing poetry

[magnus-sm-writes]

I just finished Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon and I am blown away by how deeply Ursula thought about every single thing she spoke about. She was a truly wonderful author and a brilliant soul, and I need to read every single thing she has ever written asap

[sleepysera]

"Over the past decade, it is in-the-world Ursula, as public figure and public thinker that has risen to prominence. During that time, she publicly resigned from the Authors Guild to protest the settlement with Google that allowed them to digitize books in disregard of copyright. She also gave what is widely regarded as the most ferocious speech in National Book Foundation history, using her acceptance of the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to lambast the deepening corporatization and commodification of books and their authors by the likes of Amazon."

-David Naimon, Conversations on Writing with Ursula K. Le Guin (2018)

[figural]

Solmaz Sharif: [...] One can only show in a poem without telling what is shared with that audience for example. It’s already presuming a certain cultural common denominator that might not exist for all of us. For the rest of us, there’s an amount of telling that’s involved in order to just communicate the basic content of our lives for example. Obviously, that’s not the only part or limitation of “Show, don’t tell.” I think the more dangerous part is that a poet and a poem does not make an argument, a poet and a poem does not make a statement, the poet and a poem offers a space of negative capability that a reader can enter and contemplate for themselves this complicated moral quandary or whatever, when in reality, there are certain things that just need to be told and need to be said, and said simply and directly. Great poets have done it throughout time. Actually, I’m allergic to using the language of great writing, greatness, and all that, but find me the great poets that didn’t tell. We’re creating entire generations of poets that are working in a mode that is—and I don’t have anything against any of the component parts that I’m about to name. I just think they’re dangerous when they are presented as the best way forward for everyone—working in a mode that is common, like commonly image based, relies on empathy, that was the other thing, you couldn’t be scornful toward anyone or anything, there are no enemies in a poem, everybody is complicit. More and more, you have to reveal your own complicity in whatever you say, which is this self-absolving liberal tick that has appeared in writing in US literature in the last 15 years or so. There could be an epiphany but there shouldn’t necessarily be a neat and moral conclusion if that neat and moral conclusion is political. [laughter] David Naimon: Let’s stay with empathy for a minute too, because in the one of the Dear Aleph poems, you have the great line “Empathy means laying yourself down in someone else’s chalklines and snapping a photo,” and perhaps similarly elsewhere, you say, “Like, I’ve decided, is the cruelest word,” and you’ve talked about an allergy to similes and that they’re often for you moments of ethical failure. I would love just to spend another beat, not with the expectation that poems should be empathetic, but maybe questioning empathy in its own right, which seems to be what you’re suggesting with that line. SS: Yeah, I hate empathy. [laughter] I think empathy has its uses, and its uses are self-preservation. Yes, maybe in every interaction, we don’t appear in completely porous open ways. What it is is like, “I will experience you for a moment in a way that I can enter and exit and still go grocery shopping undisturbed.” It’s emotional and it’s used in workshops often. I found myself in 2014 using it in a workshop for somebody’s poem and I was like, “You know what, actually I’m going to stop, the word I need here is love. There needs to be love in this part and there isn’t love.” Why is it that empathy feels like the okay word to use here and not love? I was like, “Well, what does empathy allow?” It allows the absolute and unhindered continuance of what is. I’m very much against that. I’m very much for ending that. I think the only way to that is actually love. DN: I’m going to quote you back to yourself. SS: Uh-oh. I hate empathy? DN: [laughter] No, not that. You’ve said that empathy is the language of the grant application in the boardroom, that empathy, as you just said, you could step out of it into a life like a therapist can open and close the door, and that love is none of these things. Love can get you fired. Love is ungradable. Replacing the word empathy with love will reveal the lie[.]

(full transcript)