diSONARE interviews Mexico City Lit co-founder, writer, and journalist Tim MacGabhann
Tim MacGabhann writes across different genres. Spanning from classical poet to novelist and journalist, he is interested in the complex, multiform writing forms arrived at when combining the genres he works in. He edits the literary magazine and press Mexico City Lit. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry has appeared in Entropy, gorse, 3am, and The Stinging Fly. diSONARE’s editor Diego Gerard sat down with MacGabhann in Mexico City to discuss the ever-changing concept of originality in writing.
DG: Can you offer a progressive definition for originality in writing?
TM: Creativity is fundamentally a critical act. You’re taking materials around you, materials that came before you, so your arrival at new combinations through originality has actually more in common with remixing or criticism rather than creativity out of nothing. One of my big concerns is the combination of genres because I work across three at the moment: poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and the latter is how I make a living, so in my own work —the artistic, non-professional stuff— I try to push myself into new territories by combining the best of what I know about those three genres. So, I suppose that originality is nothing more than rearranging and remixing to make something feel new. This is where my love for musicians like Moodymann and Monocle and J. Dilla comes in, where there is literally nothing new happening —in terms of progressions, if you want to be all Theodor Adorno about it, but also in terms of the fact that most of what’s happening is a sample— but the way it comes out gives you this delicious shiver.
DG: So you would say that originality lies in a genre hybrid per se?
TM: Yes, that’s definitely what’s influencing my riff on originality. Belatedness is a fashionable feeling, but it truly does feel like every genre at this point has had its golden moment and is falling into decadence. On my own bookshelf, I have all my best-ofs, you know: narrative nonfiction from the 60’s and 70’s, like Michael Herr and Joan Didion and Renata Adler; and then I’ve got my New York School people and the Movement people and the Rosemary Tonks types, who’ve got that shredded post-Eliot feeling; and then these massive, overambitious modern and postmodern novels whose entire point appears to be to fall into decadence — Dos Passos or Elias Canetti or Virginia Woolf, sometimes, when she does things like Orlando. So, like, what I have there is stuff salvaged from the big shipwreck of it all —and I project my own disastrous fucking time leaving Ireland onto that, to be honest— and I’m just there polishing the fragments of insight I pull out of them, or whatever. I don’t know, I’m obsessed with shipwrecks. I’m also obsessed with the time read David Shields’ Reality Hunger two years ago, even though about 70% of that memory gets my back up. He’s there talking about mixing a literary work together, as if they were all these stacked audio tracks, and then he talks about how that’s all consciousness is, and I like that even though it freaks me out something rotten. But the final point is that all you do is produce something cool, formally, because content-wise there is nothing you have lived that is unique or interesting, really, in the grand scheme of things, and there is not much you can do about that.
TM: Less so plot, yes. Demanding a plot satisfaction is unfair. It’s like going to hang out with your mate and being like ‘What am I getting out of this interaction?’ — when really it’s enough just to be there, in a particular place, with a voice coming at you that’s beguiling to be around. The one thing I’ve learnt as a journalist is that anything is newsworthy if you know how to tell it properly. I’m not being a sophist here: I have covered stories whose relevance I’ve had to argue for, because I believe they deserve to be heard. It’s like the opposite of a sophist, to be honest: the fact that you start from a position where nobody gives a fuck what you’re going to write about, so you have to argue them into believing that it does by the way you formally shape the thing. So if you think of literature as the news that never makes the news then anything can be literary as well if you treat it correctly. You don’t necessarily need the most gripping story in the world or the most gripping hook for anything, it’s about how you treat it, and how you mix up your knowledge of the content, other genres and writing forms and your own experience. It’s like mastering in a studio, or whatever.
DG: Is word economy a trait that every author should follow? I ask because word economy typically forces a writer to use words in a better way, even as different parts of speech, or ways that can contradict proper grammar.
TM: I don’t know where I read this, but every sentence is a potential to waste someone’s time. I love that line. That is something that I’ve picked up writing professionally, especially in journalism, where I have wasted a lot of my bosses’ time. But in seriousness, sometimes you have a certain amount of words to express 15 months of reporting, research and investigation, so you have to find a way to compress everything down. Just today I was asked by one editor to give a bridging section more narrative flow “in no more than 9 words”. It almost felt like an instruction from a creative writing class, “make this good and flowing in 9 words.” When you’re pushed by material constraints, or the form of a poem, or how a short story is supposed to move, everything requires your sentences to work harder, so they all earn their place in the text, and so they don’t waste your reader’s time. At a content level, the pleasure of a text is a cognitive one, and compression makes that feel even nicer. You also don’t want to waste your reader’s time, it’s an abuse of the contract between writer and reader.
The flipside of that sense of economy is that you need to think of your resources as being scarce. You have to do so much with so little that the grammatical sense can get wrenched if you’re not careful. I think that accounts for all of the worst excesses in my writing. The surface texture gets clotted and opaque. I mean, it’s a nice trick to make verbs out of nouns, but after a while you end up sounding like an alien, or Craig Raine. This happens to me a lot. He has better trainers than me, and still I let this happen. We’re working on it, though. One of my most trusted readers —he sees everything before anyone else does, and sometimes he’s the only one to see a text, if it’s bad— is threatening to put together a spreadsheet of Tim-isms and we're slowly cutting it down. I'm allowed one of each mannerisms per text. For Christmas, he's getting a story that has none of those shite tics in them. This means he’s probably put together that spreadsheet already. You should see it. It’s dreadful. Nouns verbing everywhere. Entire sentences where you have to play hunt-the-preposition. It’s basically what happens when I’m trying to be Christine Schutt or Lindsay Hunter or Diane Williams, but am in fact shaming myself.
DG: I know that you’re very much into pop culture, and that you feed from its nonsensical modes of behavior and uses of language. Does pop culture have a valuable language of its own?
TM: I feel totally disconnected from the way people speak English these days. Think of it: I live in Mexico, and about 90 percent of my life in Spanish, and my contact with English is generally news, or literature, and rarely speech.
TM: Exactly, they are registers divorced from immediate language. So, whenever I come across something I actually get that’s, like, not the news, and not a novel, and not a poem, I’m like a kid finding a fucking jellyfish on a beach and just get really into looking at it and poking at it. That’s a strange image, but it does capture something of the strangeness of what I’m talking about here. I am a bit obsessed with Paris Hilton and Nicky Minaj. They’re two ends of a spectrum that I adore. I love them on Twitter, and I love them as linguistic entities, floating around on cyberspace. The absolute vapidity Paris expresses —I think probably knowingly at this point, to be honest, sort of like a more physically delicate version of Zlatan Ibrahimovich — sounds like this desert speech, like end times speech, and the fact that she stopped being relevant somewhere around 2003 is even better for me. Nothing is more uncanny than something that is recently dated. It gives you such a bleary sense of freaked-out exhaustion. I mean you can go to Beckett, and you can go to Don DeLillo, and all those other overreacting white men, and they’re absolutely miserable about the death of speech. And I feel as though you can learn so much more about your own exhaustion and emptiness reading Paris Hilton tweets as you can form a grim meditation on Cartesian uncertainties, or whatever. I just think it’s a much more fun way of arriving at a very useful form of self-devastation. So then there’s that end of the spectrum, and at the other you have Nicki Minaj throwing out six-dollar words and short frazzles of nothing in particular, and those happen in the same breath. I think she’s everything. I’m slipping into something I hate in other writers here, where it’s as if they’re deigning to enjoy pop culture, or whatever, like kids from la Roma buying their trainers in Tepito, or whatever, all going for some very cheaply-got credit that doesn’t exist outside their heads, but that’s not happening here. Nicki is the best.
DG: Do you think there’s anything in those modes of expression that can aid high art?
TM: Last year I saw the Jeff Koons retrospective in the Whitney, and, as you walk in, you realize that this baroque overburdening of the rim of a conceptual void is the exact same thing that happens in cathedrals here. You are twisting lumps of matter into Babylonian columns, or things that look like other things, or whatever, and piling up all these layers of money —whether you’re Jeff Koons or an architect in seventeenth-century Puebla— brings you face to face with how culture operates: a celebration of the division of labor. Like, all of these beautiful materials, all of these man-hours put into making a thing or a place gorgeous, none of which you’ve had to do yourself, and all of which you can now consume by flicking your eyes around the room — all you’re doing is celebrating your position in the class system. “It’s great I’m not a worker,” is your appreciation in paraphrase. That’s the jarring effect I think Koons is going for, albeit with a kind of glee that I really wish I could muster myself. You see a giant Michael Jackson posed like the Dying Gaul, and you realize that you’re being conned, same as you are when you see a giant golden altarpiece in Puebla cathedral (I have real problems with Puebla). All you’re doing is looking at another social class’ decoration of spaces that belong to them. You’ve been let in for a quick look at some rich person’s living space, and then it’s back out the door to your position in the edifice.
DG: Language can sometimes be confined and morphed by geography, social class, technology, historical time periods, the clash of cultures. Is technology really morphing language, showing that it can be flexible, or is technology butchering language and diminishing its power?
TM: OK wow, that’s a cool question. I don’t know if it’s butchering and diminishing it, you know. Writing in English puts you in a very anarchic, very open territory. When I was in the university we read a lot of postcolonial theory, and I did linguistics, too, and there was this section on discourse analysis which focused on moving from a prescriptive to a descriptive linguistic model of describing language variants. The takeaway is that there many “englishes”, and there always have them, and, at a personal level, living far away from the word-hub has gives me a sense of the differences between Received Pronunciation and Irish English. When I’m talking with other kinds of English-speakers, or people whose second language is English, or whatever, the sense that no one variant is above the other seems to make the words you’re using sound like a second language by default, because you’re planing away all the usual touches and textures you use when you’re on your home territory. So adding to this there is the technological leap,where people all over the world online are living in a second language; so I think what happens is that our relationship towards word shifts becomes abstract, language becomes something that is happening at a distance from us, which means that the flexibility of language does happen, and opens up to real, ludic possibilities. I personally kill so much fucking time on Twitter, just amusing myself with all the ways I can talk, saying things I don’t mean, putting on a dreadful turgid voice and stuff like that. I have fake accounts as well as my own personal one, for example, where I am just churning out endless crap. Playing with language in this way can in a sense be butchering it, because you’re just playing with it and saying nothing, which is the point you arrive at if you read Derrida for ten weeks during your university years. It would be better to just give everyone a Twitter account for a month, get them to talk bollocks, and then tell them not to bother with On Grammatology or whatever. But putting it into practice is quite a surreal and disturbing thing to do, and it has the converse effect of bringing you back into your real practice as a writer or journalist to the absolute value words can have. So by going to this meaningless playfulness I arrive at the bottom of what words mean for me. The more I abuse this meaningless use of language the useful side of language becomes obvious to me.
DG: So going further, we would say that this is an example of the misuse of language?
TM: A deliberate one, yes…
DG: So, do you think that the poor use of language can be used and conceived as high art? A good example is one of the texts we have discussed in the past, Junot Diaz’ “This is How You Loose Her.” It’s a very intentional misuse of English.
TM: It’s almost Spanglish, right?
DG: Sure, so, how did we get to the point where this is legitimate as high art?
TM: It always has been in my mind, coming from Ireland… language is really weird in Ireland. I come from a rural town, and the regional misuses have become encoded in how I speak, I have very long o’s… so when I go to Dublin to this prestigious university or whatever—“prestigious” in massive quotation marks, because while I loved a great many people in that place, I also hated the place and the institution itself. All I felt, all the time, was these class signifiers flying at me. In real terms, you just look at yourself like this lad with bits of dirt falling off my boots because of the way I speak. I did not look like a Dubliner. I dressed too badly for that. And I had the kind of stupid fucking hairstyle which that happens when someone from the country learns about how “city folk” looked from an Argos catalogue. So to like keep centered or whatever I used to go up the stairs into the library and I’d pass this shelf of dictionaries, and one of the dictionaries was the Terry Dolan Hiberno-English dictionary, which digs out a lot of old words material — it’s amazing— and I’d just flick through to find all these weird monosyllabic shards of English as its spoken by William Carleton, or characters in George Moore, or things like these, words that are more like percussive sound effects, or come at you like particular aromas, or senses of other times and places that break over your palate. They open up imaginary spaces in your head where you can just vanish and hide and feel safe. And when you go back to the Carletons and the George Moores and stuff, you notice that these words do have a literary pedigree of a very particular kind, and when you see them in the wild they’re coming at you beside very baroque, over-the-top, six-dollar kind of words. So it was great seeing these very flowing, elegant sentences, studded with little nubs of weird Irish sound. It captured a lot of the disjuncture I felt in myself, where I was able to perform at an extremely high level academically even while being basically a basket case. And I would compare that linguistic experience to what in Mexico you guys call Español Dominguero. The same class pressures are in operation. Sometimes it pushes out diamonds. Mostly you just end up pulverized, though, which is what happened to the way I write. There are a lot of cunts in Dublin. I left pretty crushed. Toughened, too, though, in a way.
DG: Would you say that the existence of this dictionary separates this sort of speak from slang?
TM: Not sure, but I think seeing it in the library was very consoling for me. Like, here are my words, the words I’m used to, and it’s here in this sterile academic environment full of rich kids. And the point is, I think, that it is a document making a case for Hiberno-English as a legitimate usage of English, even if it is a sub-language within it. And that can go one of two ways, towards this stupid, autochthonous fallacy about a pure, national language — the sort of discourse that gets people killed— or the totally other way, where everybody has a right to the mic, and puts their own twist on speech, and makes something really strange and distorted and great out of it. I don’t know, the thing I’m most excited about in Irish literature is when the Irish versions of Adichie or Hemon start to write, kids who end up drawing on other dictions in their writing. It’s going to sound amazing. Jonny Greenwood kind of shit, you know? All crunchy and strange and great.
DG: A lot of the time when authors employ these sorts of techniques, like the use of slang, or phonetic dialogue, they use the first person. I’m thinking about Thomas Wolfe’s short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” in which the first person narrator is confined to his Brooklyn vernacular. Junot Diaz also narrates in first person when doing this. The first person in this case becomes an alibi for legitimacy. Would it be justified to employ this in third person? When we assume that the author is knowledgeable about the correct use of language.
TM: The best example I’m familiar with is John Dos Pasos. He was year zero for me. He blasted away everything I’d ever read before. I mean, looking back, his various different accents and worker voices risk sounding like a Harvard student’s idea of ‘how the worker man talk’ —which to a degree it is— but where his characters’ speech comes across as shattered or shredded or diminished, that is kind of the point of his project. You have this vicious machine flailing at his characters’ consciousnesses all the time —I mean industrial capitalism— and leaving them flayed. He could have caught the note better, I think, but the idea behind the endeavor is sound. This is how you talk when your life is a nightmare. This is how you talk when you are alienated from your labor. This is how you talk when you will spend your last $5 on a massive session. Like, it would have been better to use the first person —in the sense that he hand the mic over to someone who’s actually lived this shit, rather than be the kind of class tourist that I am certainly in danger of becoming myself— but as a template, as a manual, his is a great body of work.
DG: Can we only be descriptive of an age by using the language of that age?
TM: I don’t think so. The most garish and gorgeous moments in Shakespeare’s diction can still tell us a lot about how capital operates. He borrows images and items from things he’d heard from colonial voyages, like some kind of extremely materially obvious version of Pinterest. The words are glittering with all the wealth his characters wish they had. It’s the language of want. You catch Derek Walcott parodying of this a lot, using words straight out of Raleigh and Philip Sidney, and using them to talk about the pillages realized on his island and region, leaving it as flat and diminished as the shine off of a credit card.
DG: But do you think that when this is done, using the language of the past, be it intentional or not, are we only alluding to the past and acknowledging it, ore are we really trying to bring it forward and give a place today?
TM: The fact that you’re trying to use it at all indicates that it still has a value. A good metaphor is walking down Alvaro Obregón and looking at the replica Renaissance sculptures. I get such a jarring collision seeing them there. I feel it again like it was 1905, feel that nouveau riche, end-of-days, wish-I-was-in-Paris anxiety. And so what you do then, to bolster your sense of stability in a really charged moment for your class system, is you try to import a sense of the classical, as if you can conjure history down its old patterns, stave off the social collapse. And this is the case now, too, where la Roma wishes it was Williamsburg — Guillermosburgo, I call it. Because we’re in much the same powder-keg instant, I think, where it could all blow if it hasn’t already. We’re just like the Porfiriato people. We want the same things: wealth, stability, comfort. The props are all that change. And their surface differences are pure, historical accident.
DG: Is this not just a touch of nostalgia?
TM: No, not at all, because all these classical meanings and resonances and words still exist now, they just have a slightly more interesting texture because they’ve been beaten to bits. It doesn’t mean the same thing to use words from higher rhetorical registries now as it did before, because you’re not bolstering a class position anymore. You’re referring to something that has already fallen apart. So this produces a very ironic jarring feeling. We can talk about ourselves all we want, but the echoes of the past are always going to drown it out.
DG: Could it be part of a collective unconscious that has existed through the years and hasn’t faded away? I mean, perhaps these things keep resurging because they are part of our ancestry as a society, so bits of it irremediably wash up.
TM: Yes, I think the “wash up” image is great. Rich and strange trash from the past.
DG: Speaking about current times, would you care to guess where is language going? Is it someplace vulgar? Towards extreme abbreviation?
TM: This idea of remixing and combining registries is absolutely nothing new. The same manual is necessary now as it was in the wake of the French Revolution. The words change, but the shape of language and its landscape doesn’t. Think of Chaucer, speaking in the fourteenth century, in Troilus and Cresseida, where he compares language to a geological phenomenon, collapsing, sliding, but somehow constant — even if only as an index of constant change.
DG: How much are we losing of language?
TM: If there is a crisis in speech, it’s just a reprise of some older crisis. The French spoken and read today is the register of a crisis around standards of discourse, ways of speaking, all of which was associated with the emergence of a particular class with a particular, corresponding way of speaking. When you read people after Montaigne, like Corneille or Racine, they have this incredible attenuated diction, because when the Académie Française was founded, they cut all the dirty, peasant, vulgar words, leading French to have infinitely fewer words than it did in the 16th century when Montaigne was writing, or further back, when Villon was around. The hierarchy of registers mirrored the hierarchy of the classes. The dirty, workaday types who supported the glittering edifice were smushed discreetly out of sight.
DG: Is language the only tool of the writer?
TM: Words aren’t just a tool. They’re a narcotic, a weapon, an array of building materials — and tools, of course, to make all those effects happen. I don’t know, I don’t get wasted anymore, but I do get deep into the lulling, vaguely narcotic words have. You sort of lull yourself into an oceanic feeling, a kind of homeostatic contentment. You could go full psychoanalysis and talk about how all you’re doing is looking for an escapism so total that it’s like being back in the womb. But, truly, the combination of form and content means that you can make language into a portable safe space — a house you carry in you everywhere. You don’t you write unless you’re looking for a peace and contentment you can find somewhere else, because why would you go to the bother otherwise? I do feel displaced, and out my comfort zone all the time, and so writing is about the only things that makes me feel centered and safe. Words are all I have that can’t also be taken from me. The rest of my life and environment is an accessory.
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