The Cut & Paste: Nathan Tyree

Just in time for Halloween, I was able to sit down with Nathan Tyree for a Cut & Paste. Let’s hit it hard and fast; I’m tipping Woodford leftover from my bachelor party a few weeks ago. I saw you’re a whiskey wonder over at HTML Giant. What’s in your tumbler?

The liquor store was out of Maker’s Mark, so I bought Wild Turkey. I haven’t had WT since I was fifteen, and I’m not the same person now that I was then, so I decided to try it. Flavor wise it isn’t bad, but there is a residual burn that could leave scars.

Yeah. Never could manage the Turkey, but Maker’s is for lovers. Speaking of lovers and scars, your writing tends to mangle absurd and brutal. Can you speak on that?

When I was seventeen I stumbled across a copy of Waiting for Godot at my favorite bookstore. I had heard of the play, but didn’t know much about it. The cover featured laudatory words from Norman Mailer (I had just read several of Mailer’s books, and was very impressed) so I bought it. That night, instead of writing the paper that was due in a few days, I sat cross legged on my bed and read Godot straight through. I got to the end, after the repeated bit about hanging themselves, unless Godot comes (and the echoes there of the thief saved by Christ from earlier in the play) to those final lines:

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes. Let’s go.
They do not move.

I sat the book down and started to wonder why I was weeping. I picked the book up and opened it and read it through again. I spent that entire night trying to decipher what the play could mean, and why it effected me so strongly. This was before I discovered Existentialism and Sartre and Camus (and Kierkegaard for that matter) and before I read any Ionesco. It would be years before I found Celine and even longer before the films of Luis Bunel infected my brain.

On some base level I got that the play was saying that life is absurd, and boring, and weird, and terrible. But those things seemed to be just too obvious. I wanted to hold the book up in front of my face and scream “Don’t you think I know that!” but Beckett had slipped something else in there. He had hit me over the head with an insight that my depressive, teenage mind hadn’t been ready for:

Sure: life is boring, and absurd and meaningless and terrible. But it is also beautiful and wondrous. It is a puzzle to be solved and the joy is in the work of trying to solve it. That was why I wept. Beckett taught me a lesson that has served me both in my writing and in my living. I love that play.

Is it a thought in contrast? That through the mental physics of coil and recoil you are highlighting all the beauty and wonder in the world by highlighting all the absurdity and terror in it?

Every time I drink a beer I flip the cap into the ocean. It is my ambition to someday fill the ocean with beer caps so that it floods the planet and kills every living thing.

I hear you can do that faster by just driving your car more and leaving your lights on.

The snow came and went.

You’re damn right it did.

Someone keeps stealing my blood. I have less and less each day. That’s not what I want to write about, though. The thing I want to write about is writing (how fucking dull is that, huh?). This is my system:

I turn on my laptop and look through some old porn. Eventually, I open up word and stare at the ocean of white for several minutes. Then I turn on the TV and flip through the stations. Nothing is on, so I stare at the blank white for a while longer. I get up to pour a drink, get to the kitchen and realize that I’ve forgotten what I went to the kitchen for, turn around get all the way back to the living room and remember that I am sober. Back to the kitchen, fix a drink, walk back to my spot, see the white and wonder why the fuck I bother.

Three or four drinks later I start to type. At first without really knowing what the hell I’m writing about. Eventually something starts to take shape. Then, I get a rhythm and the words flow- for a while.

Then I get too drunk to type, try to remember to save what I was working on, and turn off the computer.

I wonder if Bukowski did it this way.

Buk was something of a pugilist, wasn’t he? I feel like I heard or read that somewhere. There’s that story about the boxer who couldn’t wipe his ass correctly. Not that Buk was meant to be the boxer, nor that he could or couldn’t wipe his ass correctly. Evidently, he always used his notebooks and then sent them off to be published, but even still, he managed to at least capture a few beautiful shit streaks. I guess that’s as correct a way as any to wipe your ass.

Over at the blog I use to detail the process of the new novel, I have posted the first (long) paragraph of Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski Fistfight in Hell (follow that link to read it along with a bit of pointless introduction). Tell me if it sucks. Tell me if it causes sexual excitement. Tell me if you vomit.

All I ask of anyone is: fight me or fuck me. I have no use for anything else.

I’ll fight you, simply because you seem desperate at times, and I think you’d fight real horrorshow, like there’s nothing left.

Hell yes. Lets go. I have my fists in oldschool boxing position right now.

Well? Shall we go?

Yes. Let’s go.

They do not move.

*  *  *

Nathan Tyree lives where dreams go to die. His work has appeared everywhere, if everywhere means in 100+ journals, anthologies, e-zines, and all that rot. He is also Solicitor General for Thirst for Fire–a journal prone to face-melting. Nathan blogs at http://nathantyree.wordpress.com.