Conversations

With Lawrence Weschler ("Convergences")

Lawrence Weschler defies categorization, and that’s his point. A staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, he left in 2002 to direct the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, to continue teaching at such places as Sarah Lawrence, and to author more books with titles that reflect his ability to conjoin seemingly disjointed topics, most recently Vermeer in Bosnia (2004). His new offering, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney’s, 237 pages, $29), evidences a lifetime of closely examining the worlds of art and politics and finding what Magritte called "the secret affinities" between such disparate things as the ruins of the World Trade Center and a Jasper Johns painting. It is lavishly published by McSweeney’s, where he is a contributing editor and the writer they publish more than any other.


DAR: You’re 54. What’s a fossil like you doing in the company of McSweeney’s?

LW: All those incredibly intense wonderful 25-year-olds! I think they see me as a link between them and Joseph Mitchell in some sense. You know, for all of its razzle-dazzle, the new journalism of Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and so forth, didn’t have that many heirs.

Just a few years ago everyone was despairing that 25 year olds don’t read, and now there are all these young McSweeney’s-inspired literary zines writing at length.

LW: McSweeney’s is important for the reason you mention, and second, in the crisis of this endlessly ironizing generation, they took the route of ironizing themsleves deeper and deeper until they broke out of the irony and into something true.

Care to characterize the place they broke into?

LW: It’s kind of a zone of wonder. Admittedly a knowing wonder, not a na?ve wonder, but a wonder nonetheless.

Good thing, because it might have been difficult to publish a book like yours that defies easy categorization.

LW: In fact I offered it to seven or eight places – The New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic – and everybody said, "is this political or is it art?" They couldn’t figure out what slot it would fit into. And the minute McSweeney’s saw it they said, "great, let’s do it." Their boast about this book is that it’s the most Weschlerian in book history.

So you’re an adjective now?

LW: I think what they mean by that is a kind of loose, open, unexpected, not bound, serious in an unserious way, serious play. A kind of daydreaming.

Daydreaming is fine for artists who leap across arbitrary borders, but should politicians daydream more, too?

LW: Everybody should. This sort of category confusion is something that everybody does at the outset. When you're a kid, your first two or three years, you converge all the time. School is about training that out of you, especially universities. Art historians are not allowed to say that Che Guevara and an anatomy lesson have something in common. "What’s your proof for that, what is your evidence?" And similarly politicians are not supposed to be quoting arts things. There’s that kind of separation of disciplines, what’s foot-notable and what’s not. The real geniuses – Einstein, Newton and so forth – are simply people in whom it wasn’t dulled out.

But the trick is to note these convergences with a light touch, as you do in your book.

LW: Yes, you don’t make more claims for it than you can. Where I notice, for example, that Mark Rothko’s painting [of a lunar-like landscape] was done in 1969 and I think about what was on TV in 1969, the moon landing, I’m not saying that Rothko got the idea from watching TV, I’m just asking how would that landing have seemed to him. You push at it and then you let it go.

So what happens when you catch a kid daydreaming in one of your classes?

LW: I have to be careful not to join him.

In your everyday life, do you point out to the cashier the convergences that strike you in the check-out line? Are non-artists receptive to this kind of thing?

LW: What I get a lot of is, "ha, that’s interesting."

In one place you transcribe it as H-U-N-H. The "n" signifies the element of wonder, I suppose ...

LW: I think people are doing this all the time and repressing themselves. You don’t get as much of it in writing these days as you used to. [But] when you say it to people: "Oh, yeah, that’s true," that moment of hunh.

Can there be a downside to too much connectivity? Too many loose synapses? Has it ever ill-served you?

LW: You can get gummed up, ensnarled in your webs. Again, the key is letting go.

I remember my college essay for the SAT’s – "The problem with being open-minded is that your brain might fall out."

LW: The problem of draftiness. Too well ventilated. I think one of the things that prevents that from happening is precisely the density of the cross-reference. The openness is a structured openness.

One last question. On page 90 you write, "A few weeks later during the trip to Chicago, I wondering into another gallery" – "wondering" instead of "wandering." Was that a typo, or another kind of convergence between wandering and wondering?

LW: Hunh! Let’s say it was both.