Author: Biblioklept

This afternoon I was reading, or really, I now know, rereading Gordon Lish’s 1996 interview with Rob Trucks, and while reading (rereading) this interview, I experienced terrible déjà vu, the kind of déjà vu that upsets one like a bad itch tucked away and wriggling in an unscratchable little alcove in the back of one’s mind. Only of course now I know that I wasn’t necessarily experiencing what can rightfully be called déjà vu; rather, I was simply failing to fully remember having read something several years prior—in this case, Gordon Lish’s 1996 interview with Rob Trucks.

Early bits of the interview set me tingling. Stuff about Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. Stuff about DeLillo. Lots of Lish’s anxiety about Blood Meridian.  But my (non)déjà vu exploded when Lish shared the following story while discussing his (anxiety of) influences:

I read Wallace Stevens a lot, since you asked about influence. I read Stevens’s letters a lot. I’m eager to find all sorts of connections between Stevens’s life and my own, right down to, and I’ll put this to you, my extraordinary discovery not long ago that the face on the coin, on the half dollar coin, and on the dime that I gazed at so often as a child in honor o my idea of an American woman, since I come from an immigrant family, what a great American woman looked like, the one that you would have to bed in lieu of all other women you could not bed, turns out to have been modeled for a sculptor who was a landlord in Chelsea. he was, in fact, Stevens’s landlord when he and Elsie Kachel, his wife, were living in Chelsea, and the design on the coin was modeled by Stevens’s wife, so that it’s fair to make the claim that I was infatuated with Steven’s wife, or at least her profile, from the time I was five or six or seven years old. You looked at the dime, you looked at the half dollar, and you saw Stevens’s wife, amazingly.

When I read this amazingly amazing anecdote the déjà vu had passed pulsating—it was humming, whirring in the background, trying to attach to something, eventually coming up with, “David Markson? Is this something you read in a David Markson novel?” Instead of trying to search through Markson’s work (where I’m sure, or now not really sure, but rather somewhat sure, I read the anecdote of Wallace Stevens getting into a fistfight with a much younger Ernest Hemingway off the coast of Key West) for this Elsie Kachel Stevens reference, I simply did a basic internet search to get some more background on Lish’s claim that the poet Wallace Stevens’s wife served as the profile model on at least two coins of U.S. currency. The story more or less checks out (with a lot of passive voice).

Here is a photograph of the dime in question, which was designed by Adolph Weinman and minted in 1916:

 

And here is a photograph of Elsie Kachel Stevens:

And here is a photograph of the bust that Adolph Weinman made of Elsie Kachel Stevens:

Anyway. I went back to the interview, still tingling a little, but also a bit preoccupied—I needed to prepare our dinner of tacos, kids needed to get to piano lessons, the dog need walking, etc. And as I hurtled through the interview, I got to a moment when Lish tells his interlocutor, “I use my dick, mainly, to write the first time, and I’m using my brains to do the revisions. I mean, not my brain. I’m using rather practiced sequences of motions that have to do chiefly with mind or chiefly with know-how. I’m trying to stick it into the page the first time out.” And then, a few paragraphs later, this nugget:

Q: So Self-Imitation is still a dick book?

A: It’s a dick book. All my books are dick books.

And then I laughed out loud and then I remembered that I had not only read this interview, but I had even written about it years ago on this idiot blog of mine. And so my itch was scratched.

I read—by which I mean reread—Gordon Lish’s 1996 interview with Rob Trucks in Conversations with Gordon Lish (edited by David Winters and Jason Lucarelli), a collection chocked full of tingly bits and fat juicy morsels and etc.