5 Questions with Daniel Levin Becker, co-editor of All That Is Evident Is Suspect
Daniel Levin Becker is reviews editor for The Believer and has been a member of the Oulipo since 2009. He is the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature published by Harvard University Press. He is celebrating the release of the book he co-edited with Ian Monk, All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963-2018 (McSweeney’s) with an event at City Lights on Thursday, November 15th, 2018. Daniel will be in conversation with Hiya Swanhuyser.
City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?
Daniel Levin Becker: I’ve been to City Lights too many times to count. I remember being caught off guard, on my first visit, by how clean and bright and airy it was: this was ground zero for the Beats? Later I went down to the basement, which I found reassuringly musty.
CL: What’s the first book you read & what are you reading right now?
DLB: No idea what the first book I read was! Currently reading Gayl Jones’s Mosquito, Ian S. Port’s The Birth of Loud, and Frédéric Pajak’s The Wind of Things.
CL: What are 3 books you would you never part with?
DLB: Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi, and Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey.
CL: What writers/artists/people do you find the most influential to the writing of this book and/or your writing in general?
DLB: This book was the brainchild of my co-editor, co-translator, and co-Oulipian Ian Monk, so primary influence credits go squarely to him. Our aim was to include at least one piece by each member of the Oulipo, something which hadn’t been done previously in any language; since about half of the members are what we call “definitively excused” from group activities on account of being deceased, selecting texts involved a lot of going back to the archives, figuratively and literally. The book’s title comes from a lecture given in 1963 by Jacques Duchateau, probably the first time anyone spoke publicly about the Oulipo, and in retrospect I think that text sets the tone for the rest of the volume: Duchateau, who was the last living founding member until he died last year, was one of the most taciturn and retiring Oulipians, and it’s satisfying to think that his voice, along with those of the other lesser-known members, occupies so much of a book coming out in 2018.
CL: If you opened a bookstore tomorrow, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
DLB: I’ve had the phrase “Literature as Soap and Whitewash” bobbing around my head for the last few days—turns out it's a Javier Marías reference—from which I deduce that tomorrow’s bookstore will be called Soap and Whitewash, located speakeasy-style behind or beneath a laundromat in Barcelona, and that its bestseller will be El Secuestro, the Spanish translation of Perec’s E-less La Disparition that omits the letter A instead of the letter E.
Daniel Levin Becker wrote a great piece on Georges Perec, Edouard Levé, and the "not good" Henri Lefebvre for Music and Literature.
Here are some choice lines:
"Whereas Levé was fascinated by people from a remove, Perec wrote in enormous part to remind himself that he was one of them."
"It is nigh on the last of Perec’s works that will appear in English before his incipient Bolañofication sets in, beginning this winter with his never-published detective novel Portrait of a Man."
"What vertigo to play the character of reader in a Levé book: to peek behind a patterned curtain and see the author staring impassively back, snapping candid after meticulously arranged candid. To turn around and find his ambivalent gaze, his cool alien curiosity, trained on you."
