Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.
Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.
One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.
Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.
Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.
Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.
Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.
There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.
I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to see my work that way, as reclaiming a preserve. I write in a way that is aimed at all levels - conscious and unconscious - at pleasing the kind of reader I am. Some of the authors I read are male, some are female, and some are even in between. And speaking of in between, maybe now is as good a moment as any to point out that there might be no "feminine" or "masculine" literary sensibility, or sensibility generally.
I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.
I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.
The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.
There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are never quite felt, existing only as the residue of hard work, or more as satisfaction than thrill.
It's unfortunately true that if you mess up a single detail of the art world the whole thing seems false, and most writers are not in a position to get the details right, because they don't hang around with artists. It's not something you can get the vague gist of. It's too specific.
At a certain age just being around particular people is an event.
I was a child but weirdly uninhibited. I talked to people and inserted myself in all kinds of absurd situations. I think some of those life experiences influenced me in terms of the main character of The Flamethrowers. But for the parts where the community of artists are speaking above her level of participation, that probably came more out of my experience of being in New York in the '90s as an adult.
It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.
As to the "traditional filler of twenty-first century realist fiction," maybe that is something I avoid. I don't relate to standard psychologizing in novels. I don't really believe that the backstory is the story you need. And I don't believe it's more like life to get it - the buildup of "character" through psychological and family history, the whole idea of "knowing what the character wants." People in real life so often do not know what they want. People trick themselves, lie to themselves, fool themselves. It's called survival, and self-mythology.
I do study Marcel Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain films can help for that, too, in terms of understanding how multiple conversations at a table, or in a room, can take place and remain separate, and dissonant, and also gather themselves, accidentally, into a collective rhythm and an affect.
I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.
I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the realm of politics, on some level.
While it might be true that our reality would suggest that more writers would address these elemental issues of modern life - work, the marketplace, brutality, race - I'm not sure I have enough of a sense in aggregate of what the dominant novelists are doing to comment on why less do, or if less do. Maybe that's partly because I don't feel woven into any kind of fabric of contemporaries; I just read what I read, and do what I do.
I like to think each writer is doing his or her part. Feeding the lake, as Jean Rhys said. And maybe there are different lakes.
