What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read Free Page B

Miller. a sometimes falls into unintelligibility, into illegibility. When Warhol held a tape recorder up to life, the result was streams of consciousness, many narratives intruding upon and interrupting one another, phrases and anecdotes, wordplay (there’s none in Miller), incoherence, coherence, poetry, puns, witticisms (I love Ondine’s remark that “charity begins alone”), documentary, bits of all of these. It’s not an easy read. None of his work is.
    10. a challenges reading. How do you read it? Sometimes I heard it, sometimes I thought it was radio, not TV or movies, I didn’t see it.Though I checked Victor Bockris’ geographical notes at the back of the book, I couldn’t find “place.” I tried to stay with Ondine, but when he became very high, what happened to me, the reader? It was a relentlessly strange reading event. a felt cerebral and became claustrophobic, airless. It’s a book with no space and in which space is a context, an area of contest, in which space is psychological territory that’s fought over. The space at the Factory, for instance, was fraught: there were territorial skirmishes, fights for primacy—over who Ondine wants in or out, what the Factory rules were and should be—and all of this is discussed in a . In one part, there were so many voices in one taxi at one time and so many interruptions, I began to think about the book as music, as a score. When I did that, I relaxed some, and reading it became less stressful.
    11. a: A Novel challenges writers because Warhol’s idea of what should be on the page allows for the chaos that writers are meant to control, to turn into art. a underlines how unlifelike most written dialogue and conversation is. Its most peculiar challenge is to the writerly conceit that writing just pours out of us, from our guts or our heads, without an enormous number of de facto decisions made even before what we’re writing came to consciousness or to desire. In other words, we receive language for the page, because other pages have been written. a: A Novel wasn’t written or conceived for the page in that sense.
    The novel follows its protagonist, and in its way, and within Ondine’s limits, remains faithful to its structural idea: time. Time’s a constitutive element of narrative; it’s material. Novelists use time the way filmmakers use cuts, or long shots, close-ups,etc. In a the reader is in real time, whatever that is, and every moment is precious or boring. Time and art in a sense are collapsed: Moments are precious or boring both to the reader and the story. Ondine could ask himself: What am I looking for tonight (and he does), what do I want, where do I want to go? (all narratives are journeys). The reader could ask: What am I reading for? What do I want to find?
    Boredom tells us something about life’s relentless movement toward entropy and death. (Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once commented that he knew when to take someone into therapy—when they bored him.)
    12. Warhol wanted Ondine to say everything, to keep talking, to say whatever came into his mind. It’s a psychoanalytic idea, and if that’s the case, Warhol’s the analyst, Ondine the analysand. Robert Polito suggested to me it’s also about confessing and confession. Confession mixes with the psychoanalytic, and one reads a expecting revelation, which is common to both forms of talking. I read expecting or hoping for discoveries—and found some. Warhol reveals a few secrets, Ondine many, and all kinds of vulnerabilities and fears are displayed—eventually. It’s the material that writers would have headed toward more quickly; writers would have edited away most of the other material. But it’s not cut out in a , it is a —the unedited relates powerfully to confession, to psychoanalysis, to not leaving anything out, accepting everything. To me, Warhol’s lust for the unedited is the most resonant and mysterious aspect of his work.
    13. In another way of looking at a , along