When I was younger I thought that was cool and tough and now that I’m older I just think it’s indulgent and show-offy. I think Schwartz writes with absolutely no thought of the reader. I think the epigones are vastly overrated and the original vastly underrated. Extravaganza is one of my favorite books ever, as is Mourner at the Door. And the thing of it is is that I think Lish is the best writer of them all, even better than Carver and Hannah. Every time I read an interview with one of them it sounds like Lish is talking. I’m talking about the new, 2nd Gen Lishies. The day would pass in that fashion, and then I would go home and write about postage stamps and Judas Iscariot. Wilson has been trampled in the stairwell. O’Riley’s room has been set afire in the meantime, or Mrs. And perhaps all this explains why, in the old country, contortionists were always thought the best schoolteachers. I never managed that to successful effect. If you’re lucky, the fracas is close by, and you might arrange things accordingly-one hand here and one hand there, finding yourself in various complicated postures. Stop the fight or protect the blackboard? This seemed to me, at the time, the central educational dilemma. The teacher now fears the press of bodies, and the tendency of bodies to smudge, or even erase, words. ![]() So what to do when the fistfight breaks out? You know how people gather around. And once this had been accomplished, once the blackboard had been covered with words, first thing in the morning, it was upon the teacher to guard the blackboard all day. This was transcription, the transcription of many items, all these chapters from the absent books. ![]() So it was upon the teacher to scratch out lessons on the blackboard. Lots of mischief, and no textbooks, as these had all been lost or destroyed or thrown out into a courtyard, where-I may be revising the memory slightly-there was a great pile of books, a pile nearly one story high. This comes to mind: long ago, in New York, I taught middle school for a year. The final answer of the interview though is my favorite moment-it reads like a wonderful and bizarre microfiction. In the interview, Jason Lucarelli talks with Schwartz about John the Posthumous, his experiences with Gordon Lish, and teaching writing. Schwartz’s latest, John the Posthumous, is my favorite book of 2013. 3:am Magazine has published an interview with novelist Jason Schwartz.
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