The Style It Takes #1

On Teju Cole, Lou Reed, John Cale, Dubravka Ugrešić, Garth Greenwell, etc.

A percentage of teaching—as with art-making, test-taking, politics, and love—is based in theft.

To wit: before every workshop I lead, I do the same thing. The class gathers. There is the sort of loose hush that signifies that the energy in the room is about to shift. The student whose work we will be discussing looks ill, or defiant, or proud. And I ask the group to share what art they have experienced since the last time we gathered.

Now, I don’t necessarily expect my students to go to a museum, read poetry, or watch a Criterion Channel film every week (although of course they should be doing these things!). Instead I think of it as, well, I don’t call it this for obvious reasons, as something like an adult version of show-and-tell. I hear in their moments of art the way a student perceives the world. It helps me understand their writing; it helps them to write. Some of my favorite examples from last year: a student wears a particularly nice outfit then runs into an ex on a Rutgers bus; the crescendo of “Court of the Crimson King” hitting just as an NJT train rounds a corner and Manhattan comes into view; a small badly-painted dog at the edge of an otherwise perfectly executed 18th century painting; the moment in Brokeback Mountain when Annie Proulx writes “Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain”; a student brings in a beautiful sock puppet that they had knit explicitly for the moment of art.

We then discuss the style of the art —because all of these instances, from anecdote to elevated, have a style about them, and style is that ineffable thing that pulls art out of the outline and makes it unique. By identifying what lurks behind a moment of art, we can also sometimes find the kind of art we want to make.

Though this is my signature maneuver, I now must confess: I stole the gimmick. I took it whole-cloth. I didn’t change a thing. During the pandemic, I took a Shipman Agency writing workshop with Garth Greenwell, who I consider perhaps the foremost stylist working in the English language. There were 3 amazing outcomes from this class: Garth became a friend, we workshopped the first 5 pages of my novel, AMERICAN RAPTURE (almost done, if my agent is reading this!), and I stole the moment of art.

In my defense, I stole it, because I had needed it. It was tough, in Summer 2020, to find the art in things, and I remember stressing out before Garth’s class, because I knew I would have to share something, and that stress made me read Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, made me watch Truffaut’s Day for Night, made me drive to the ocean to put my feet in the surf. I found, or re-discovered, myself in these strivings. I was teaching my writing classes on Zoom too, and forging connections between my students had been a horrible challenge. Sharing our moments opened up the class right away - laughter, sadness, epiphany.

I always bring in my own moment of style for my students—most weeks, it still becomes a minor stress point for me, and so I find myself reading more, watching more, seeing more—and I thought this would be a nice thing to bring to you too. Art, every week or so, and the style that lies behind it.

The name of this Substack comes from a Lou Reed/John Cale song off Songs for Drella, their Andy Warhol tribute album. I have always liked the phrase - it implies a certain verve, but also a loss, a combination I associate with art making:
"You've got the style it takes (kiss)
You've got the style it takes (eat)
I've got the style it takes (couch)
We've got the style it takes (kiss)"

All well and good. But then, a couple of weeks ago, I was reading what is certainly going to be one one of my favorite books of the year, Teju Cole’s TREMOR, which is out in a couple of weeks (run don’t walk. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the great OPEN CITY, but takes some stylistic leaps (though it does not have the rape plot that always reveals who has not actually read OPEN CITY)). I was reading along happily, and then, 35 pages in:

“He begins the workshop by asking the students what has been preoccupying them lately. He wants them to enjoy each other’s range and to examine their own experiences in the light of their classmates’ reactions. Anything may be discussed during this opening segment of class, with the sole exception of Brexit.”

The fictional character’s students go on to discuss Ad Astra, Lana Del Rey, the flooding in Spain, Samuel Little (a seed that will bloom throughout TREMOR), and a student’s experience in an acting class. There was an uncanniness for me, as I read, because the thing I had stolen from Garth seemed to be somehow have been stolen from both of us by Teju Cole and placed in his marvelous new novel (though of course Garth could have stolen it from someone—from Teju Cole!—and as I write this, I just remembered that there is a very similar scene at the end of FOX, the late, great Dubravka Ugrešič’s under-read 2017 novel about thievery and art making. Who was the originator of this concept?!) In all these echoes, my möbius strip of art and theft, I see the contour of something stylish. And I feel absolved too, because my original sin was shared. Or, better than absolved: fired up.

____

A couple of programming notes:

• I plan to post around once a week, unless a week has been completely devoid of art. And I hope that you will share your own moments in the comments.

• If you are NYC based - or I guess if you’re not but are an ambitious traveler - Substack is throwing a reception for writers at the Invisible Dog Art Center on Bergen Street, where I have a little studio space, on October 11th from 6-10 PM. Join us!