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What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
Here is an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Tillman upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Like other unique thinkers, Tillman sees the world differently—she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social and political questions change the reader's mind, startling it with new angles. Which is why so many of us who know her work often what would Lynne Tillman do? A long-time resident of New York, Tillman's sharp humor is like her city's, tough and hilarious. There are distinct streams of concern coursing through the seeming eclecticism of topics—Hillary Clinton, Jane Bowles, O.J. Simpson, art and artists, Harry Mathews, the state of fiction, film, the state of her mind, the State of the Nation. There is a great variety, but what remains consistent is how differently she writes about them, how well she understands, how passionate and bold her writing is.
What does Lynne Tillman do? Everything. Anything. You name it. She has a conversation with you, and you're a better, smarter person for it.
What does Lynne Tillman do? Everything. Anything. You name it. She has a conversation with you, and you're a better, smarter person for it.
381 pages, Paperback
First published November 12, 2013
About the author
Lynne Tillman
113 books320 followersHere’s an Author’s Bio. It could be written differently. I’ve written many for myself and read lots of other people’s. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction – selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me.
My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years.
Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.
I’ve lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He’s also a wonderful man.
As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I’m inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.
When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don’t know, have or haven’t experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that’s been written.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 13, 2014
When a writer hits the spot, and its a collection of essays, then that's the payday or desert in one's life. The magnificent Lynne Tillman writes about the visual and literary arts, as well as anything that captures her fancy. Any one book that has pieces on Paul & Jane Bowles, Charles Henri Ford, Chet Baker, John Waters, Marinetti & the Futurists, Nan Goldin, and Warhol's novel (of sorts) "A: A Novel" is perfectly OK with me. Also a great interview with Harry Mathews and a writer i have heard of, but haven't read yet, but now will read - Paula Fox. I think anyone who has, or even, a slight interest in culture will need to read this book.
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February 7, 2015Great collection of essays that bridge the gap between alt-lit and the fine arts. In addition to being insightful and thoughtful, Tillman is also a great interviewer. This definitely made me excited to check out some of the people she talks to.
Not every single essay knocks it out of the park, but on the whole, this is pretty brilliant stuff. The long form pieces (about Paul and Jane Bowles, about Edith Wharton) are particularly insightful. Tillman has a non-judgmental curiosity about her subjects, which doesn't render her "neutral" or opinion-less.
Oh, and it's nice to hear from someone who liked "Role Models" as much as I did, for the same reasons!
Not every single essay knocks it out of the park, but on the whole, this is pretty brilliant stuff. The long form pieces (about Paul and Jane Bowles, about Edith Wharton) are particularly insightful. Tillman has a non-judgmental curiosity about her subjects, which doesn't render her "neutral" or opinion-less.
Oh, and it's nice to hear from someone who liked "Role Models" as much as I did, for the same reasons!
March 24, 2015
An expansive and thoughtful, artful collection of nonfiction, including interviews, reviews and essays. I'd never read her work before, or the work of some of the writers she interviews and writes about, but I will definitely seek out their work, and more of hers.
I liked so much of this book, I highlighted many passages. Here are a few of them:
Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs.
--
With bigger brains, people have concocted notions about self-reflection and self-awareness, which allowed for “I think; therefore, I am.” Not “I think what; therefore, I am what?” One would have thought that might matter.
--
At parties I observe people acting much like dogs, except for sniffing rear ends, which is generally done in private.
--
“Acting like a human” is a matter of opinion, too. “Did I do the right thing?” can translate into “did I act right?” Some people act better than others; even when being honest, some people aren’t convincing. Yet con artists are great at appearing sincere.
--
Gosling embodies an unusually sensitive human to a degree I find unnerving.
--
In Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling enacts a “real human being” better than most human beings do. I might one day meet such a person. Probably not Mr. Gosling, who would, most likely, not live up to my expectations.
--
Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I’d been taught or unconsciously believed. Any writer knows that what’s left out is as essential, if not more so, than what’s there. Unlearning works that way.
--
I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world.
--
In some ways I think he was forever amused by something invisible buzzing around him, and that something kept him going. Maybe he was amused just to be alive.
--
Poetry, genius, love, fame, friendship, beauty, family, character, sex, psychology, youth, and Pavlik, always, are variously appetizers, entrees, or desserts on Ford’s menu du jour et de la nuit. His diary is riveting. As it moves from theme to theme, the reader senses a life formed consciously in the present, one lived spontaneously, interrupted and interfered with by memory and the pressure of unconscious thoughts. The reader feels the moment’s vitality and presence, and the sorrow at its loss, but not because Ford insists on it. Emotion—disappointment and sadness—is there in the way he writes the day, flying from an idea, sex act, or fantasy, to a line in a poem, a report on dinner talk, a death, an argument, to a question about aesthetics, a worry about Pavlik—then it’s all gone, except the memory of it, what he’s written down.
--
Maybe the only thing in life that doesn’t change, apart from the certainty of death—though these days that seems to be changing—is desire. Only its articulations and the environment in which it is felt shift.
--
The literary diary is a strange form. Was it written to be read? Maybe. Probably. Is it self-conscious? Necessarily. Ford’s diary was written to examine himself and others, and in a way, its self-consciousness is its raison d’étre.
--
He invented himself much like a novelist might a fictional character. But instead of writing his character, he lived it.
--
Hughes likes biographies especially. From them, perhaps, he can get a person’s measure, learn how others’ beginnings and ends may have been radically different, hear how they failed or thrived, and lose himself in details of lives he might have written—collected—for himself.
--
A fictive fellow knows how fragile identity is, how difficult to maintain
--
In this and her novels, Fox chooses words so splendidly a reader must contend with how language can and cannot allow events and emotions to be rendered.
--
the infinite is in a machine on your desk.
--
We are all unreliable narrators, after all. Inevitably and maybe not unreasonably, the present will make its own terms with the past.
--
In the beginning, there seems just one way to write, the way it comes out, and then that way becomes a debate, contested, most essentially, in and by its writer.
--
If the reader accepts, as I do, that no object has inherent value, that it is re-made by passing generations of readers and viewers—the erratic history of the worth and reputation of authors’ work attests to this—no form can be privileged, no judgment eternal. Consciousness, in all its manifestations, will come to be represented variously by each generation for their different days and nights; since what is around people, what we see, hear, watch, exist in, affects our being and becoming, our reactions and what we make, as our psychologies shift within parameters of basic needs, new hungers and expanded wants.
--
A great story is necessarily greater than its plot.
--
I’m for generative types of contemporary writing, not for proscriptions about writing. I don’t have a secure or immovable position, my various notions on writing might include contradictions, I’m sure they do. I don’t want to take A Position. Not taking a position is a position that acknowledges the inability to know with absolute surety, that says: Writing is like life, there are many ways of doing it, survival depends on flexibility. Anything can be on the page. What isn’t there now?
I liked so much of this book, I highlighted many passages. Here are a few of them:
Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs.
--
With bigger brains, people have concocted notions about self-reflection and self-awareness, which allowed for “I think; therefore, I am.” Not “I think what; therefore, I am what?” One would have thought that might matter.
--
At parties I observe people acting much like dogs, except for sniffing rear ends, which is generally done in private.
--
“Acting like a human” is a matter of opinion, too. “Did I do the right thing?” can translate into “did I act right?” Some people act better than others; even when being honest, some people aren’t convincing. Yet con artists are great at appearing sincere.
--
Gosling embodies an unusually sensitive human to a degree I find unnerving.
--
In Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling enacts a “real human being” better than most human beings do. I might one day meet such a person. Probably not Mr. Gosling, who would, most likely, not live up to my expectations.
--
Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I’d been taught or unconsciously believed. Any writer knows that what’s left out is as essential, if not more so, than what’s there. Unlearning works that way.
--
I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world.
--
In some ways I think he was forever amused by something invisible buzzing around him, and that something kept him going. Maybe he was amused just to be alive.
--
Poetry, genius, love, fame, friendship, beauty, family, character, sex, psychology, youth, and Pavlik, always, are variously appetizers, entrees, or desserts on Ford’s menu du jour et de la nuit. His diary is riveting. As it moves from theme to theme, the reader senses a life formed consciously in the present, one lived spontaneously, interrupted and interfered with by memory and the pressure of unconscious thoughts. The reader feels the moment’s vitality and presence, and the sorrow at its loss, but not because Ford insists on it. Emotion—disappointment and sadness—is there in the way he writes the day, flying from an idea, sex act, or fantasy, to a line in a poem, a report on dinner talk, a death, an argument, to a question about aesthetics, a worry about Pavlik—then it’s all gone, except the memory of it, what he’s written down.
--
Maybe the only thing in life that doesn’t change, apart from the certainty of death—though these days that seems to be changing—is desire. Only its articulations and the environment in which it is felt shift.
--
The literary diary is a strange form. Was it written to be read? Maybe. Probably. Is it self-conscious? Necessarily. Ford’s diary was written to examine himself and others, and in a way, its self-consciousness is its raison d’étre.
--
He invented himself much like a novelist might a fictional character. But instead of writing his character, he lived it.
--
Hughes likes biographies especially. From them, perhaps, he can get a person’s measure, learn how others’ beginnings and ends may have been radically different, hear how they failed or thrived, and lose himself in details of lives he might have written—collected—for himself.
--
A fictive fellow knows how fragile identity is, how difficult to maintain
--
In this and her novels, Fox chooses words so splendidly a reader must contend with how language can and cannot allow events and emotions to be rendered.
--
the infinite is in a machine on your desk.
--
We are all unreliable narrators, after all. Inevitably and maybe not unreasonably, the present will make its own terms with the past.
--
In the beginning, there seems just one way to write, the way it comes out, and then that way becomes a debate, contested, most essentially, in and by its writer.
--
If the reader accepts, as I do, that no object has inherent value, that it is re-made by passing generations of readers and viewers—the erratic history of the worth and reputation of authors’ work attests to this—no form can be privileged, no judgment eternal. Consciousness, in all its manifestations, will come to be represented variously by each generation for their different days and nights; since what is around people, what we see, hear, watch, exist in, affects our being and becoming, our reactions and what we make, as our psychologies shift within parameters of basic needs, new hungers and expanded wants.
--
A great story is necessarily greater than its plot.
--
I’m for generative types of contemporary writing, not for proscriptions about writing. I don’t have a secure or immovable position, my various notions on writing might include contradictions, I’m sure they do. I don’t want to take A Position. Not taking a position is a position that acknowledges the inability to know with absolute surety, that says: Writing is like life, there are many ways of doing it, survival depends on flexibility. Anything can be on the page. What isn’t there now?
January 5, 2018
i quite liked this.
Read
June 9, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/10/r...
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? – Lynne Tillman
by M.C. Mah
[Red Lemonade; 2014]
Fiction writers’ opinions on current events have a basic, ironic appeal: Credentials, qualifications — they have none. Have they ever been “on the ground”? Oh, here and there, perhaps. Granted special access to a subject? Are you talking about the self? No? Then no.
This is not to diminish the worldliness of Lynne Tillman. It is to say that she has in common with all good writers a singular mastery of rhetoric. The times are drunk on expertise: the newsperson, the academic, the IT guy. The first thing I should like a talking head to do is fumble with a mic and ask, Can anyone hear me? On which follows the idea of the writer as pro skeptic: should anyone hear me? In an interview with Paula Fox, in lieu of a question, Tillman assures her that she’s a great writer. Tillman is aghast that anyone, especially Fox herself, didn’t know that. The same thing is obvious with Tillman, and it doesn’t take more than a few sentences in order to tell. Her quality as a writer is some function of what is and what is not obvious to Lynne Tillman. “I don’t trust experience, even if it has shaped me.” Which is one of the most trustworthy things I’ve read in a while.
The essays in Lynne Tillman’s What Would Lynne Tillman Do? come in sections alphabetically ordered, inscrutably, by subject or tone (“M is for Mordant”). In the end, WWLTD? seems serendipitously structured as a quest to find fans of Two Serious Ladies, the would-be classic by Jane Bowles. Tillman professes her love for it, pushes it on people, notes parallels. In the essay “Nothing is Lost or Found,” Tillman sets out to include Paul Bowles in an anthology of American ex-pats. She’ll tell you a secret: an interested editor, after talking a little shop, shows her his tasteful nudes. What follows concerns copyright law, a deathbed swindle, and the FBI reading the mail. The essay is palpably excellent. It demonstrates a good ear and a knack for skipping to the good part of the story (sex, poison). It’s a work of literary criticism that emphasizes enthusiasm, though she’s hardly incapable of playing straight: “Though the whole has never existed and the Real is not available, these illusions nourish fiction.” And it’s written with quickness, intelligence, and presence; after reading her observe the shy, handsome laugh of Paul Bowles, I had the feeling, perhaps strange and dumb, that I knew with a critical certainty that a person was writing.
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/10/r...
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? – Lynne Tillman
by M.C. Mah
[Red Lemonade; 2014]
Fiction writers’ opinions on current events have a basic, ironic appeal: Credentials, qualifications — they have none. Have they ever been “on the ground”? Oh, here and there, perhaps. Granted special access to a subject? Are you talking about the self? No? Then no.
This is not to diminish the worldliness of Lynne Tillman. It is to say that she has in common with all good writers a singular mastery of rhetoric. The times are drunk on expertise: the newsperson, the academic, the IT guy. The first thing I should like a talking head to do is fumble with a mic and ask, Can anyone hear me? On which follows the idea of the writer as pro skeptic: should anyone hear me? In an interview with Paula Fox, in lieu of a question, Tillman assures her that she’s a great writer. Tillman is aghast that anyone, especially Fox herself, didn’t know that. The same thing is obvious with Tillman, and it doesn’t take more than a few sentences in order to tell. Her quality as a writer is some function of what is and what is not obvious to Lynne Tillman. “I don’t trust experience, even if it has shaped me.” Which is one of the most trustworthy things I’ve read in a while.
The essays in Lynne Tillman’s What Would Lynne Tillman Do? come in sections alphabetically ordered, inscrutably, by subject or tone (“M is for Mordant”). In the end, WWLTD? seems serendipitously structured as a quest to find fans of Two Serious Ladies, the would-be classic by Jane Bowles. Tillman professes her love for it, pushes it on people, notes parallels. In the essay “Nothing is Lost or Found,” Tillman sets out to include Paul Bowles in an anthology of American ex-pats. She’ll tell you a secret: an interested editor, after talking a little shop, shows her his tasteful nudes. What follows concerns copyright law, a deathbed swindle, and the FBI reading the mail. The essay is palpably excellent. It demonstrates a good ear and a knack for skipping to the good part of the story (sex, poison). It’s a work of literary criticism that emphasizes enthusiasm, though she’s hardly incapable of playing straight: “Though the whole has never existed and the Real is not available, these illusions nourish fiction.” And it’s written with quickness, intelligence, and presence; after reading her observe the shy, handsome laugh of Paul Bowles, I had the feeling, perhaps strange and dumb, that I knew with a critical certainty that a person was writing.
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/10/r...
July 30, 2014
I think of myself as a pretty huge Lynne Tillman fan, and I had some pretty high expectations for this book that ultimately weren't quite justified. It still feels like what it is, a collection of odds and ends that, it turns out, span maybe twenty years of Tillman's writing life. There isn't a clear theme here, or anything like that, and most of these are extended book reviews, or something like it, along with a couple interviews of varying interest. The writing, while good, doesn't quite sparkle-- we're never really invited to contemplate Tillman here, but rather the subjects she is writing about. I suppose that's a really class form of modesty, but it also creates a kind of odd reading experience.
I learned some stuff, there are sections I might reprint for students some day, to give them context for Stein, for example, but this is mostly inessential stuff.
I learned some stuff, there are sections I might reprint for students some day, to give them context for Stein, for example, but this is mostly inessential stuff.
April 24, 2014
In these essays – arranged according to the letters of the alphabet – Lynne Tillman takes us on a personal tour of her life as a reader, writer, and lover of art, film, and New York City. She reminisces about the writers and artists that she's known and who have influenced her, or caused her to question herself, her work, or the world in some interesting way. Her interests range wide: from Edith Wharton and Jane Bowles to Spike Jonze and John Waters. She's funny and sassy, sharp and observant, thoughtful and warm. And she is always, always curious. I love Tillman's work because it rises off the page and gets in my head. Her inquisitive attitude is infectious! And that's certainly the case in this collection.
February 28, 2015
As I slogged my way through this anthology, I kept asking myself, "what's missing?" Obviously Lynne Tillman is brilliant, knows many famous artists, and has criticisms and accolades for a variety of cultural media. But every article is missing a huge ingredient - heartfelt, authentic emotion. Every review and article and critique is erudite, but lacks passion and emotion. We don't know WHO Lynne Tillman is. She stays solidly in the academic, removed, reserved place of watcher, witnesser and judger, as if this is a passive act. But it's not. We all bring our own baggage to any trip we take, as well as any piece of art we look at or piece of music we listen to. Lynne Tillman never acknowledges this and that makes this anthology empty for me.
Shelved as 'awareness'
July 30, 2015Marc wrote: Ellie, making the complex fun is no easy task! Care to give an example of a book or author that you think exemplifies the kind of complexity you mentioned? Don't feel obligated to do so.
When I read your post, writers like Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Lynne Tillman came to mind.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
7/30/15
When I read your post, writers like Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Lynne Tillman came to mind.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
7/30/15
September 24, 2014
(The pages listed here are incorrect: It's more like 392, not 192)
Really enjoyed this. Not every essay was for me, but highlights definitely include the Edith Wharton essay and her permeating love for Paul and Jane Bowles.
Really enjoyed this. Not every essay was for me, but highlights definitely include the Edith Wharton essay and her permeating love for Paul and Jane Bowles.
April 16, 2014
Pretty fantastic all around, with the Jane & Paul Bowles, Harry Mathews, and Edith Wharton sections standing out as particular highlights.
May 29, 2014
well, that made me smarter.
September 16, 2015
When she is good, she is very, very good...actually, never horrible. Just a little overstated, self-conscious even, at times. Just a little.
Currently reading
May 24, 2014had to take it back to the library >_<
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews