Gideon

When did we meet again?

Geoff

2013, when I was teaching at Columbia for a semester. It was one of the happiest phases of my life. We were playing ping-pong regularly, along with some of the other guys at Pips.

Gideon

As I recall, although you would regularly beat our friend Eli, who would regularly beat me, I tended to beat you. It was a beautiful circle of competitive life.

Geoff

Well, I would slightly disagree with your assessment. But if I was obliged to agree with it, I would say there's a comparison between, let's say, a team like France, which is trying to win matches, and these other teams, which are just trying to get to extra time at nil-nil and hoping to sneak by on penalties. So, yes, you had a very good attritional style with that wood bat of yours that sort of nullified everything. If you are comfortable being one of those teams, that’s great.

Gideon

I remember thinking, Geoff loves ping-pong for the singular feeling of a great forehand winner.

Geoff

That was the glory shot. It was also, as you know, my Achilles heel, because it was such an all-or-nothing shot.

Gideon

I would say this is indicative of your personality, that you derive so much pleasure from a particular sensual or aesthetic element. When you like something, you really like it. Probably anyone who knows you or reads you is aware of this. Sometimes it’s a very specific donut from some very specific shop. Sometimes it's a very challenging avant-garde jazz trio, like The Necks. As long as I’ve known you, you have these things you love and they orient your days. Kind of like, say, an entire 25-shot ping-pong rally might be oriented around the pleasure of hitting a forehand winner. I’ve had the thought before: is Geoff a sensualist? A hedonist? An epicurean? Or…something?

Geoff

Well, I was always going to end up quoting Nietzsche in this interview, but I didn't realize I'd be doing it so soon. He says something like, the great lovers of things are also the great despisers of things. There's so much that I love and there's so much I utterly despise. I was never comfortable in LA, where it's bad form to say anything is bad. For me, that feeling of being impassioned about things is part of being a discerning person. I guess the problem is, in the contemporary world, everything is jumbled together and there's little mechanism for ranking what's worth looking at, reading, or listening to. But I don't think it is an obsessive thing. If I like something, of course I like it. And that means I want more of it.

Gideon

I was always amazed by your appetite for ping-pong. Sometimes we’d play multiple times a week. Sometimes three-hour sessions, and you were most likely to be saying, “One more game. One more game.”

Geoff

In the realm of food, for example, this can be a problem. My wife and I were back in Rome recently and, of course, I wanted to go to this pizzeria I love known locally as L’Obitorio. On our third night, she said, “Can we go somewhere else?” And I said, “Why would we?” I don't have a great capacity for reverence, but I do have a great capacity for loving things. And if you love something, you always want to ask yourself, “Why this? Why have I fallen for her? Why does this film or band intrigue me so much?” And that begins a process of investigation. The remarkable thing is sometimes, even after doing that, the magic of the thing remains intact, mysterious. It's one of the ways in which I would differ from D.H. Lawrence, who's always claiming that explanations and science eat away at our capacity for wonder.

Gideon

It is true that, as much as you love a cafe you love, if you're in a cafe that, say, is playing terrible music, you hate it with equal conviction.

Geoff

And, of course, a cafe that one has once loved can begin playing terrible music. Which is a genuinely tragic situation.

Gideon

Would you say you're a fan? Fandom can be so strange. I don’t think I’m capable of being a fan of anything. It’s not how I’m wired. Would you say you're a “fan” of The Necks?

Geoff

Well, to be very specific about The Necks: I know there are people who go to every gig of a given tour by a given band, which always strikes me as pointless because the shows are essentially the same. Whereas The Necks uniquely reward this because, as you saw that time we went together, they're not playing songs. Every show is a complete one-off. I've seen them quite a lot since we were at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, and the extraordinary thing for me is the consistent quality of performance when it’s such a high-wire act. Anyway, I do grow out of things. I love Bob Dylan so much, but I really can't see why people are bothering to go to the current shows. They've drunk some Kool-Aid which makes them think he's in great form when it's so obviously musically impoverished.

Gideon

I assume that kind of devotion almost always has nothing to do with what is in front of the audience. But that doesn’t necessarily devalue the power or legitimacy of the experience. Maybe you would know that better than most. When you fall in love with, say, a pastry, and are building your day around getting it that afternoon, I assume your anticipation, effort, and planning are inextricable parts of the pleasure. I think if I were to try one of your beloved pastries, I'd be like, “Pretty good.”

Geoff

That would depend on the pastry, of course.

Gideon

It might depend on the pastry.

Geoff

Even if we're using pastry as a metaphor here, it still has to do with the pastry. Of course, other things go into an experience but quality is important. So, what am I trying to do? Fill my life with things that make me happy.

Gideon

You also have a discerning eye for and love of a good party. It’s a mentality I really like, but that somehow strikes me as old-fashioned, not common in my generation and below.

Geoff

One of the nice things about the writing life is you get to meet a lot of interesting people. And by interesting, I don't mean famous. I know there's this traditional stereotype of the writer as some sort of a tormented loner, but actually I think the majority of writers love going out. The ones that I can't bear are the ones who come to literature festivals and say they were obliged to. The publishers forced them to. Most writers are actually keen to get out of the house.

Gideon

Maybe three years ago, I was in LA and I invited you to a party, and you came, looked around and were like, “Well, good night, Gideon.” It was not a good party.

Geoff

I was gone in 10 minutes, even though I was looking forward to seeing you. And you hated that party, too. The first rule of military strategy is to never reinforce failure. So, when you go to a shit party, you can reinforce the shitness by staying there, or you can call it what they called Apollo 13: a “successful failure” and leave instantly.

Gideon

I like the idea of leaving a bad party as a civic duty. Like, in leaving, you’re correctly signaling to your fellow man, “You shouldn't be here.”

Geoff

I'm not such a fascist like that.

Gideon

I fear I am. Recently, I was driving through Manhattan with my friend Eric on a Saturday night, and we both had this unbelievably curmudgeonly instinct to yell at the people waiting in long lines: “Go home! Its not worth it!”

Geoff

I lived in some very shitty houses when I was younger, so I was always very reluctant to go home. Also, because I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, I’ve always liked being in a group.

Gideon

I’ve been hearing there’s a bit of a literary moment happening in London these days?

Geoff

There’s this thing that’s been written about in magazines, a surge in literary events. I’m aware that’s going on. If we want to talk about tendencies in writing itself, there is a kind of fiction where instead of scenes you get these little sketched scenes. A given bit lasts a paragraph or two, and then there's a lot of white space, and then we move on. I used to like that very much when, say, Michael Ondaatje did it. The trade-off was, instead of the Anthony Trollope-like exhaustive scene that goes on for 40 pages, you just get this intensity. That was great, that sort of fractured mosaic thing. But it seems to me with quite a few of these books that I’ve come across recently, it’s a way of writing which serves as a substitute for the harder work of substantiating a scene, building character, and immersing the reader in a world.

Gideon

Sometimes I look at a page of a recent novel and I think, “Wow, there really aren’t a lot of words on here.” I assume this is due to the fact that people want to read but the internet has made sustained reading harder. Sustained writing harder, too.

Geoff

I think that mode is easier because, as anyone who's tried to write fiction discovers, the simplest things are quite difficult, such as moving characters around a room. But then it turns out that many of the reasons you enjoyed a novel, certain novels, is that you wanted that full immersion in a scene.

Gideon

But I think full immersion in lo-fi technologies like books is no longer possible for a lot of people.

Geoff

I feel our capacity for experiencing it as readers has not necessarily diminished. There’s so many variables. I’m always banging on about Lonesome Dove. Now there's a properly substantiated book. And thinking of a writer like Rachel Cusk, one of the ways her books succeed is because she does have all those traditional novelistic skills. She couldn’t do the innovative things she does without all those time-honored basics of craft.

Gideon

Have you seen any of these stories about college professors finding their students can’t finish a book? The students aren’t illiterate, of course. They just don’t have the attentional capacity. They want to read books but can’t.

Geoff

I encountered that when I was teaching. Maybe I didn’t understand the educational system I was working within, but students were often complaining about the burdensome amount of reading I assigned, and it surprised me because it wasn’t like I was asking them to read law textbooks. I was assigning enjoyable novels that people read on the tube on their way to work in London. My capacity for giving myself to books has similarly taken a hit due to all the stuff that we know about. But I don’t want to just lament a fallen world.

Gideon

I noticed you recently made an Instagram for the first time.

Geoff

It's actually been a great source of happiness for me. I never post anything interesting, but I watch a lot of great stuff.

Gideon

Do you?

Geoff

It’s fantastic. I love it.

Gideon

Wow.

Geoff

I’m aware of it being a time suck but, for example, remember parkour when it started, people running along a rooftop in Paris or wherever? And now I get to see these 18-year-old kids doing the most unbelievable stunts.

Gideon

Is your feed parkour, parkour, and more parkour?

Geoff

It varies. Because I’m a person of a certain age, it’s mainly stuff on how to stop back pain, how to stay fit when you're over 60. But I’m not feeling the need to cut down my Instagram use.

Gideon

I think you may be uniquely suited to not be ruined by social media, partially because of some of the qualities we’ve talked about. I don’t expect your capacity to be immersed in slower and more subtle mediums to be degraded in the usual way.

Geoff

People say that Tarkovsky films are boring because they’re slow, but there’s nothing more boring than, say, the most recent Mission Impossible. It unfolds at such a ridiculous clip. The pace is absurd and profoundly tedious.

Gideon

You talked about Dylan being washed up at this point. Maybe a similar mechanism is at play when a bad film or book is getting rave reviews, the sort of response that can make me wonder if I’m the crazy one. I’m sure it’s always been true, but it feels like, now more than ever, attention is better suited for the world around art than art itself. That is, the quality of an experience of art depends on the quality of our sideways glances—at the ambient context, responses of others, etc.—rather than the quality of a direct gaze at the art itself. I don’t just mean this literally. People do still watch movies and read books, of course. But I do wonder if art can compete with the internet-ted environment it arrives in. If not, then an artwork mostly functions as a cultural idea.

Geoff

I’d turn that around a bit. One of the things that keeps me an obsessive Dylan fan is thinking, “Wouldn't it be just amazing to go back and hear Idiot Wind for the first time.” It’s such a strange, unprecedented song. Or Tangled Up in Blue. Because now when I’m hearing these songs, I’m sort of not hearing them. I don’t even need to listen to them in order to hear them. Can you imagine what it must have been like to be at the first performance of Beethoven’s Fifth? Well, actually there are accounts of that. Apparently it wasn't such a big deal because it was part of a massively distended program of music and by the time it premiered, people were already feeling stuffed to the gills.

Gideon

Well, assuming artistic genius and our ability to receive it hasn’t totally faded, you should be able to hear Idiot Wind or Beethoven’s fifth for the first time, right? The Bob and Ludwig of our era are, theoretically, strolling and scrolling amongst us.