Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte is the author of three books, including Venus Drive. 

As a child, he read a novelization of Caligula.  These days he has a kid of his own.

Chief Magazine: So where you originally from and what were you like as a kid?

Sam Lipsyte: I grew up in New Jersey and, uh, goddamn, I was friendly but slightly pissed off.

Okay, alright. That’s fair. What kind of things were you into when you were developmental and all?

Developmental? I spent a lot of time by myself in a basement. I went into exile there.

You opted out into the basement.

Yeah. I opted for basement life fairly early. I guess I had some toys and, you know, things that could be made into toys as I got older I learned how to jam the cable box to get porn.

Nice.

I did all the things that one does in the basement.

Fantastic. So like, as far as when did you decide that you were actually going to pursue writing?

Well, I always wrote when I was a kid, like comic book things but I was a shitty artist. I rushed through the drawing part just to have a little text at the bottom. I was always much more interested in the text, and did lots of those and when I got a little older, I read, I was always reading. Actually one of the things about this basement, there were all these kinds of weird books that my parents were kind of ashamed of owning and didn’t want to have upstairs, where people can see, so it was a strange mix of old, dirty Victorian stuff and some weird ‘60s radical readers. One of my early influences was a novelization of Vidal’s screenplay for Caligula.

Wow, that’s random.

Very random.

Yeah.

That I bought at a used book store. But I remember my father said, “You could have anything you want,” and I picked that out and the sales lady didn’t want to sell it to me, so he gave a big free speech lecture, and bought it for me, then afterwards, he was angry that I had it. So I always read but I didn’t really think, until I guess when I was 16 or 17, I really thought it might be something I wanted to pursue seriously.  I did it some in college, but then at some point I stopped writing and got involved in music and was in a noise rock band. We were called Dung Beetle. There’s still a 7-inch out there.

No kidding?

For the completists out there.

That’s awesome. So you did that for a while then?

That kind of ended in all the usual fucked up ways that bands end and then I really got back into writing. I kind of figured out that I really did want to write, and I started to figure out how to do it.

What was your first kind of break into writing?

Well, I don’t know if it was a break. I was annoying this editor Gordon Lish, he worked at the magazine called The Quarterly from the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s. I constantly sent work in, and he was, I don’t know if you know about him but he was a famous editor in the ‘80s and he was an editor at Esquire. He edited, you know, everyone, people I really admire from Barry Hannan to Raymond Carver, all these people. So he's at this magazine and I sent him stuff and I get rejected, but in sort of a nice way. I mean, I think he did it for a lot of people, encouraged you to keep banging your head against the wall.

So it was all about perseverance?

Yeah, and then I ended up working with him a lot more and he really, really taught me a lot. After that, I was able to figure out what I was doing. A lot of it was just figuring out how, it’s figuring out how you write. It takes a long time, how you can do it differently, bring some unique sounds to it all. It’s difficult. Some people may be able to hit it right away. Some people may take a long time.

Do you think that your initial way that you were basically doing a comic book, was that merely a means to an end to just get your words down on paper or was it something like that you actually had interest in? Would you ever pursue it now?

The graphic thing?

Yeah.

If I met an artist who was doing something that was interesting to me, yeah, and felt there was a fit. I’m not huge into it. There are a lot of writers who are deeply into graphic novels and really come from that. I don’t really, I don’t come from that. That’s not really my background.

Are there any artists now that you know of that you’re kind of into their work?

Yeah, I mean there are painters and people like that.

Well, I just meant like comic books.

I know just the stuff that everybody knows, not deeper than that.

Oh, okay. Cool.

But maybe you should tell me.

I’m huge for 100 Bullets. Just visually it’s amazing and the writing is fantastic. So you live in the city?

Yeah, I was living in Astoria for the last seven years. I just moved to around  Columbia University because I’m teaching there.

What are you teaching?

I’m teaching an MFA program, Creative Writing.

Really? That’s great.

Fiction stuff. Pretty much all I’m qualified to do.

You know they lied to us at Pratt and said that they were going to hire you to teach, like back in the day, about seven years ago.

When I went there to visit?

Well, it was right before that you came to speak there. We were told straight out that if we picked authors that were New York based, that they would be approached to kind of come in and teach us, not just as writers in residency but as adjuncts.

They never approached me.

No, I know.

At that point I would’ve done it.

They could have just asked. I love that school but the bold face lies that told us to get us in the door. Oh man. Anyways... Every year or so, I hear word that the e-book is coming again and it’s like going to destroy all paper literature. So in your opinion is that just horse shit or is that something you see on the horizon?

When I look on Amazon and see how many e-books I sold and two, possible three, books sold. I get a statement from the publisher that lists hardcover, softcover, and e-book and the e-book is two or three copies or something.

So it’s not really an e-book explosion.

Well, that may be me. That’s not the e-book but I’m assuming the scale, the proportions are the same. I don’t know. I think the idea was to be able to, you download the book and then you’re supposed to print it out, originally, I mean.

Well, they’re saying that now the new developments in it is that they’ve got this device, it’s like a weird paper pad that you can pull out and it’s like a mini computer screen that you kind of unroll, it’s a scroll, so you pull it open and then you’ll have digital text on it. And that will be your book, so you just can keep pressing the little tab on it and that would flip the page for you.

Right, and you can keep a thousand books on you.

Just in case you need to have a thousand books on you at all times for any reason.

[laughs] Right. People like paper. I mean, eventually, they said there’ll be no paper.

They can recycle taxis now, we'll always have paper.

I remember when they were talking about it years ago, it was going to be about…you’d be able to print it out and bind it yourself. It’d be an e-book but you’d kind of be making your own pamphlet book version of it and maybe if someone figured out that part of it, people wouldn’t mind making their own books, but maybe if that could be done in an interesting way.

Well, then the book industry will be completely open to the piracy of like MP3’s. That would completely screw the pooch, if they just had their stuff as a Word file. I don’t know. Are you’re a purist either way? If you had a book on digi or whatever the hell they have it on, would you prefer to have a novel in front of you?

Well, can I read it in bed?

I believe so.

And if I fall asleep and roll on it, will I hurt it?

I think it’ll destroy it.

[Laughs] You see, I don’t treat my books very well. You know, they’re all defective, stained, and tattered, so as long as it’s a machine I could really beat the shit out of, then I’m fine.

It’s gotta really take a licking. Fair enough.

I’m not a purist in that way at all but I do like the durability of books.

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What are you looking forward to in the coming year, personally, professionally, pop culture wise, anything. What do you give a shit about next year?

Well, I guess Bush is still going to be president this coming year, so unless I wish for a coup or something like that, just gotta live, just gotta sit that out. I’ve been keeping things pretty simple this year. I have a two and a half year old son, so I’m just trying to, you know, spend some time with him.

Congrats on the kid. That’s awesome.

Oh, thanks. So I try to keep going, just make it to ’08, I think is the plan.

So you’re looking forward to the next New Year?

Next New Year, exactly.

That’s too funny

I’m just trying to get through this fucking year. I’m just going to take the ball and kneel. Pop culturally? The good thing, it sucked a little less.

Are you addicted to any of those terrible TV shows? ‘Cause every now and then you’ll come across that one that just kind of hooks you.

Yeah.

For a couple of years, Lost totally fucked me.

I never got into it. I mean, I just haven’t really given it a chance but I knew I would possibly like it. I watched that show Nip/Tuck with my wife for a while and it was pretty good. It went off the rails.

Oh, really? Like off the rails as in it went too screwed up or just lost it?

It just got too self-consciously campy.

I was good for that through the whole first season.

It’s good again, I think.

Is it? I knew it was something special when they had women with two breast implants filled with heroin per breast smuggling drugs across the border.

Yeah, that was great.

So what kind of music are you into lately?

I guess there’s some pretty good stuff out there. Some of that Hold Steady stuff is pretty good.

Oh, that’s great.

Another one is LCD Soundsystem, they’re great. Yeah, I mean, there’s always good stuff. There’s always good bands playing. They’re just buried under a pile of shit but they’re there. They’re always there.

It’s true. You can’t really deny that. You just have to dig for it. Or luck out with a random grab bag move. It hasn’t happened to me in at least five years, but when I pick up a book just for the cover and I’ll end up being really, really impressed with what I found there. The last time it happened was Houellebecq. His stuff in England, his covers abroad in general, are pretty great. They’re pretty damn good.

They were really good, horny covers in the UK. They don’t really do that here.

They’re blowing it, because if you put a tasteful, good shot of even just a chick in a bikini, it will sell. 90 percent of the time, the covers are completely irrelevant anyways.

The novel is the argument for the pointlessness of life but that one with the bikini on the cover, it really is a counterpoint.

It certainly helps you hone in.

Counter argument.

What do you think of him?

Houellebecq?

Yeah, you met him.

Well, I wrote that piece about him. I really, really admire a lot of his work and I guess I don’t really know him any better after spending a week with the guy, but I still admire his work.

What’s your favorite of his…?

Of his stuff?

Yeah.

I guess, in the end, The Elementary Particles is the best book, but I really, just, in depth, think the first novel of his, Whatever, is in some ways, definitely the dark horse in the Houellebecq sweepstakes. It has an economy to it that I really…His other books have that sort of sprawling, Sci-Fi stuff, but there’s something kind of great about the slimness of that first book. It gets its job done very quickly.

It really does. I mean, I was hooked from like in the first chapter with the dinner party, the holiday party.

And it was very simple. It’s just a little business trip.

No fucking around.

And, in a way, he said it all in that book and then the other books are just sort of variations on it.

Right, and then he takes a microscope to certain aspects of it. His work does at certain points, absolutely double as pornography, I mean that in the best way that I possibly could, in that it was actually functional pornography, that all in all… pretty amazing.

Read one-handed and with love, is that what you’re talking about?

There was an occasional moment. There were points in the book. I won’t lie about it.

[Laughs] So I guess that makes it a good desert island book.

It certainly does. If it can keep you alive, mentally and sexually, you’ve got a good desert island book. So what are you reading now?

A whole bunch of stuff. I just finished this book that’s coming out by Roberto Bolano called “The Savage Detectives.” It’s pretty amazing. It’s a shame the writer died a few years ago. This stuffs all starting to come out in English. That was good. I’ve read his other stuff that are being released too, are pretty major figures I think. I just read Heidi Julavits’ book, which is really good, called The Uses of Enchantment, and a lot of student fiction, some of which is amazing.

Do you find when you’re writing and producing work, are you able to read when you’re writing?

Yeah but it took a while. There were periods when I really couldn’t, but I’m a little better at compartmentalizing all of that but I definitely went through a period. I think everybody does, where you really write the way the write you are reading writes.

I think that’s natural. You just write your way through that, that kind of phase, until you get a better sense of who you are. I read other people and not just to get a style or if I’m writing, I’ll pull a book off the shelf and read for myself something I really like.

Are there any names at the top of your list?

Anybody who has a prose style that I admire. All I’m doing is, I’m not trying to cop a style. I’m just pulling it off the shelf and asking myself, you know, “Am I trying as hard as this guy?” Just as sort of self-flagellation.

Right, right. Holding you up to a really stern mirror.

Not that I could be as good, but am I at least giving it my all?

Are you writing anything now?

Yeah, I’ve been writing stories and working on a novel too. It’s all very slow doing, torturous, but something. Something will come of it, I hope.

Is the novel formed enough that you can say anything about it or is it still baby steps?

I really don’t know what something is about until I get through a draft and so, even if I had 300 pages, I wouldn’t really talk about it.

No, that’s totally understandable. Just to change gears for a moment,  what are your thoughts on the fact that now, in the last six months, everywhere you look, as far as like celebrities, you’re seeing like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, all these young starlets flashing their cougars to the paparazzi. I’ve seen all of their shaved vaginas, all them. what the hell is going on with that?

I keep hearing about these vaginas and I haven’t looked. Why don’t I get to see them?

I’ve seen all of them.

I mean, I hear jokes about them, hear them referenced.

It’s unbelievable.

I don’t know where to go to see them. Do they look different than maybe the ones I have seen?

They look like they’ve been sat on all day. They’re horrible looking. I can’t believe it. It’s not like it happens once and they learn lesson or anything like that. It’s literally like day by day they do the exact same. It’s all like getting out of the car shots and it is very…

Do you think the first one was an accident and the rest were planned?

I think so. I think they kind of maybe accepted that this is what we’re doing now and this is what people expect of us. Maybe they think of it as, “We started this trend, this is the future.” and it’s like, “We’re this comfortable and, like, outrageous with our sexuality.”

I remember a few years I would be begging guy for one of these girls to have a nipple slip or, like, some tit out, and I was like, “Wow, that’d be fantastic and beautiful woman that everyone seen in the film of the moment and now her tit is out.” And now they shot way past that.

You’ve got pretty low expectations for yourself if that’s what you’re praying for.

I have very specific prayers. I have a long list of very laser-focused, high-powered scope defined prayers. There’s a long list and I go through it nightly. But now, I never would have imagined or dreamed this. This is shot right passed sexy. This is pretty intense.

Well, I don’t find any of those women…

Well, no, they’re not really sexy... I don’t know. I just can’t get my fucking mind off it because it’s so obscene. It’s so, I don’t know. I mean, ‘cause I’m all for porn.

It’s different. Yeah, I mean I guess it’s about the loss of mystery, maybe. We’re just showing all our holes now.

Right, I think that could be it. It seems like…

If you don’t hide at least one of your holes, there’s some wonder lost.

That’s right.

I mean, I guess we’ll have to see their assholes at a certain point.

At a certain point. But they shot right past porn.

I mean, I’m not sure. It’s all just heading straight towards nothingness at a very fast clip. I’m not sure. You don’t get the sense of a great liberation at the end of this, for all those.

No, no. Do you feel that it kind of lends itself towards nihilism?

I don’t know. We have to just stop looking, I guess.

That’s not going to happen, but there’s just nothing really kind of, there’s no real life attached to any of this stuff.

I think that might be the real sin of it, you know, where it’s not like sexuality at this point.

It’s not that they’re idiots.

Perhaps they are, I have no idea. It’s just, just the way it’s framed, it’s just kind of this lifeless thing.

No, it’s all autopsy. I think with that, it’s de-sexualized in this really like, obscene way and, whenever I’m mentioning it as obscene, not at all sexually interesting, I think it’s really like a car wreck, like you’re seeing somebody’s insides and it’s not attractive.

It’s not dirty. It’s not joyous.

Right. There’s something weirdly clinical to it.

It’s kind of cold now and it’s a checklist, going through this shock checklist because they have nothing else to offer. I don’t know. The same goes for all of the men in the same category. But why?

Why bring it up?

No. Why do you people care?

Oh, why do people care is, like, I assume it’s the same reason they’ll print photos of these people falling down or anything else they do, them sunbathing on a beach. The mystique of celebrity.

Yea, I mean, Paris Hilton is sort of nice, sort of a pressure valve for capitalism too, I think. I mean, people can say, “Look at that rich, idiotic bitch, you know, doing something stupid again. Maybe I won’t be so angry about class divisions.”

I just have never seen the envelope pushed in this way.

Whatever works. We’re supposed to feel superior to them and in doing so, it will keep us from asking some other question. I think that’s how that works. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy behind it. I just think that’s how it ends up playing out.

Well, I think that joins most things in just continuing the public malaise, you know.

But we know that they’re young and beautiful and rich and we’re not, so, but yet we can feel superior to them and that brings a certain kind of stability to the system that otherwise might lend itself to a certain amount instability.

I don’t think an absence of them shinning their gyni-town is going to…

Bring down capitalism, no.

I would say even prompt riots.

I think there will always be something that does that and that’s what’s helping do it now.

Do you have any thoughts of what could be next after this? If this is what’s now publicly accepted? If these women aren’t being locked up?

I would like to see one of them splaying on top of a casket coming back from Iraq and actually you could do a whole calendar of them straddling dead soldiers.

Them straddling, just specifically month by month, shit we shouldn’t be paying attention to. Not a bad concept. So is there anything else you want to cover?

What did we already cover? Love, war...

Right, right. The big ones.  Is there anything you want to hype or push?

Is there anything I want to hype or push?

Like plug. Is there anything you’d want to plug?

A new sitcom.

Awesome. If there’s anything you want people to spend their money on, where you can get a little bit of that money?

I want them to download my new sitcom from iTunes.

Excellent, excellent. $1.99 a click.

Yep.

Do you have anything for sale anywhere? Besides the books. You want to tell people the books again?

The books? Yeah, sure. Oh yea. I thought you meant message for the people of America.

No, no. Fuck them. I don’t give a damn about any message just for them. It’s more like, do you want any of their money?

I’d like them to be able to link to Amazon or maybe Powells.

Is Open City still around? I haven’t heard anything from them in a while.

They’ve been doing great. They’ve just put out a really great book of stories by Rachel Sherman, you should interview her, called The First Hurt Book of Short Stories. It’s her first book. New writer. And they did another book. They’ve been publishing this British writer, Edward St. Aubyn, and they still do the journals.

Is there anybody you know of know that isn’t getting the kind of press they should be getting or anyone you want to make people aware of?

Whenever I get asked this, I always say Gary Lutz and I’m not sure, have you read him?

Uh-uh. I know the name, but never read him.

Well, yes, then Gary Lutz. Read Gary Lutz. No, there have been some other books. A guy named Christopher Sorrentino wrote a book called Trance last year that I thought was really good. An historical novel about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, but very funny. So, yeah, that’s good stuff. Anything Paris Hilton does we should pay attention to.

Sure, people should be obsessed with it and they should pay good money for anything that she’s involved in. So, now you moved into the city, is that what you said?

Yea, I just moved up to 112th and Broadway.

So as a proper member of Manhattan, do you have a specific vision on how the city's going to go out?

How it’s going to go out?

That’s my favorite kind of movie overall, the disaster flick. So, in like the disaster theater of your mind, how’s New York happen?

Well, maybe it’ll be like a combo deal… no one thinks about a combination in the same way people think you can’t have cancer and have a heart attack. Like, there’s no reason there can’t be a big small pox bomb and then a flood and so then everybody’s swimming around, dying of the small pox.

Good, multi-tasking. It’s always, always. We’re a busy city.

Like, you’re floating along on some garbage can with small pox.

With small pox and then with the fact that we have no vaccines for Polio anymore, so we can’t swim.

As our legs wither.

Oh, that’s great. That’s good. Multitasking to the end.

That’s the way I’m seeing it.

Alright, that’s fair. So, everybody’s got that one story where they thought they were gonna die, do you have any stories about when you thought you were going to be killed? Anything of the sort?

Yeah, um, well I guess there was this one time. I haven’t really told this story. I guess there was this one time years ago. God, must be 15 or 16 years ago, but I was in my very early twenties and I was not well. It was a druggie world. I went to this place to buy some drugs and this guy, this sort of lookout at the place to buy some drugs, said to me, “Let you get me some drugs. I have to stand out here,” and he handed me a ten dollar bill and I went into the place to get some drugs.

It was kind of dark hallway you walked down and these Styrofoam cups would descend from a high stairwell and when the money's in the cup, the cup will go up and the drugs would come down. So the cups came down and I put the money in the cup and the cup went up and as the cup was coming back down, someone shouted outside that the police had arrived. So the guys upstairs dropped the cups and the cup tipped and whatever was in the cup fell to the ground and at the same time someone hit all the lights, so it was pitch dark.

So, I went down on the floor to feel around for my drugs and I just felt something, took it in my hand and the call came that the cops actually had not come, so everything was fine and the lights went back on and I went outside and the guy said, “Do you have my drugs?” And I said, “Yeah, right here.” And I opened my hand and it was just a cigarette butt and that’s what I picked up in my panic from the floor and he took it the wrong way. He took it as…

As a “fuck you.”

As a “fuck you,” indeed. So he took out a very large gun.

Oh shit. “I got your drugs right here.”

No, he didn’t take out the gun yet. He just grabbed me and threw me against the wall, he had kind of thrown me down the hallway, threw me against the wall, and just started punching the hell out of me and for some reason I thought I should just let him punch me because of the fact, if I fight back, then things could really get bad, so if I sort of let him punch me…

Maybe he’ll get it out of his system.

He’ll get it out of his system. So I just let him punch me for a while and I sort of slumped against the wall and then he pulls out this gun and put it to my head and then his friend pulled him away, saying something to the effect of, “He’s not worth it,” and the guy went away and I’m internally grateful to the guy who realized I wasn’t worth it.

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Nice guy. Did you go back and get the drugs?

No.

I guess that’d be a good time to call it a night.

Yeah, the night was over.

That’s a good "almost getting killed" story.

Then, six months later I was somewhere else during a similar transaction and the guy walks in.

Same guy?

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Same guy and I think, “Shit,” and then I think, “No way he remembers me. I’m just some schmucky guy he fucked with one night.” Except that, as soon as he saw me, he said, “Hey, remember me?” And then he said, “Don’t worry, we’re buddies tonight.” So everything was okay and I felt like I touched his life in some way that he remembered me.

That’s right. You lingered.

Somehow I lingered in his memory in a manner that I find moving.

It’s always nice when you really have a connection.

And I tell this story around this time because it’s sort of a Christmas story.

Awesome, we’re nailing this holiday issue.

We touched each other’s lives in a small, but important, way.

One that lingered to this day.

It lingers still. And you know, I certainly, from then on, began to think about maybe I should live a different kind of life. It took me kind of a while to get there but that was my first real inkling that maybe I shouldn’t be in places like this and maybe, in some small way, I guided him to a better place too. Because when I was ten I never imagined I’d be here…

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With a gun to your head…

Or I was imagining it but it was a different scenario.

Right, right. Not over ten dollars.

Right, exactly.

At least your life got changed. I mean, I think that’s pretty good.

Yeah.

But to be honest, what really made this story were the cups.

Yeah.

Because I’ve been in a ton of situations when I’m buying drugs from dealers and I don’t meet anyone elaborate enough where they actually have a set up in a building. I don’t buy from enough squat houses, I guess.

Well, I don’t know if they exist in that way anymore.

Sam Lipsyte's latest novel, Home Land, won the first annual Believer Book Award.
He lives in Manhattan.

Photos

Rebecca Smeyne

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