I had a rapid-fire chat on Monday with Alexander Laurence about my experience as a student of Gilbert Sorrentino, photography, music, the Oulipo, writing, visiting David Markson, and art and writing in the 90s.
Alexander has been interviewing writers, artists, and musicians for decades and it was great to be asked to be a part of his current series – and to reconnect after so many years. Cups magazine, edited by Alexander in NYC in the 90s, was one of the few places to feed an interest in non-mainstream art. “We basically did whatever we wanted to do,” Alexander has recollected, “and it was very fun pissing off people. We got to interview many people like Martin Amis and Mary Gaitskill. Many of the interviews that I did, and have included on The Portable Infinite, first appeared in CUPS. Regular contributors were William T. Vollmann, Dave Eggers, and D. Strauss. We started it in San Francisco and then moved to NYC in 1995.”
After our meeting in 1996, Markson and I corresponded with each other for a couple of years. One comment he wrote after that visit applies to my conversation with Alexander: Noting that our afternoon was filled with his “own compulsive nonstop bullshit,” he called this “One more penalty of the writer’s aloneness, by the way; we don’t know how to shut up when we do start talking.” Nothing he said that day was bullshit. Hopefully I kept mine to a minimum.
Be sure to find Alexander’s recently published Collected Poems.
Today's musical diary is another live performance on the Frankentele.
