I love watching things about WSB and finding out more about Brion Gysin is always fascinating. The kinds of intellect that this attracts gives me a lot of things dig in on and expand my thinking with.
You spend a lot of time as a writer both trying to arrive at a place where you have mastered your art, and conversely at a place where you are continually deconstructing it. It makes it a kind of battle between the conscious and unconscious processes that contribute to an arrival at something which is art.
I think there are some writers who are too in control of their process and they only turn out hamburger. I have a notion of where I want to go but you have let the jazz sensibility enter in and fuck with it. Is it a mix of signal to noise that I am allowing to flow through me? Sounds as pretentious as fuck, right?
Well, here’s the thing — the work that you do in private to make the creations that you create often sounds over-intellectualised and pompous when you put it down on paper. It is an act of condensation — trying to find a sentence to boil down the truth of the Rube Goldberg Machine that you are.
I listen to music. I watch films. I read. And the writing is affected. The writing is changed in the act of writing. How? Because there is that moment you have the idea and then the fingers start to type and a change occurs. People often talk about not getting down exactly what they were thinking. There’s a distance of time and space between the thought and the writing that is not as instant and true as the prologue thought. Do you get an approximation though?