YouSaid · the spoken record

Lydia Davis

lines on the record: 49
first: 2022-03-23
most recent: 2022-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, I actually have a pile of stories that have been sitting here and accumulating, and they're in a folder called New Book, and it's very fat. There are a lot of them, but I keep having to put it aside because of all the other things I'm doing that get in the way. But that should be the next book because it's all there. I just need to organize it, maybe complete one or two of the longer ones. And there it'll be another book of stories.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I actually don't want to translate anymore, what I decided at a certain point was this just partly because I have a lot of other things I want to do urgently, but at a certain point I thought I do want to go on translating, but they will all have to be very, very short stories. So at that point switched over to translating, there's a Swiss writer I like a lot called Peter Bichsel. Some of his early books were translated here, but these are sort of newspaper columns, autobiographical that I really like a lot. So I translated a few of those, and they're only a page and a half long. So that's, if I wanted to answer your question properly, I'd say that's my dream translation job is texts like that that are autobiographical and short.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, staying much closer to the French. I mean that was something I tried to do with Proust and Flaubert was really really A good book or a good book to read that, you know, scholar would not necessarily approve of the approach.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was true of Stiegmuller's translation of Flaubert, I think, is also a good book to read, but it goes quite far away from Flaubert.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Haneys was farther from the original because I also tried to, you know, I read it alongside the original because it's not impossible. His departed much more from the original than whichever one it was that I was comparing it to. But that was very interesting. We all enjoyed that too.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was several. I read the Haney, but also referred to was it Nabakov or Nabakov? What am I thinking of that was much more literal than he attempt a very literal one or am I mixing him up with someone else?”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I asked someone once, you know, which one do you think is the best? He was someone who was in a position to know. He did have to think a bit, but he decided that all in all that was the best one. So we read like the first four books or whatever books, meaning not books, but long sections about a hundred pages. And I was very glad, and so was everyone else. We also read Beowulf because that was another one I had never read and thought that I should read.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually I belong to a kind of pretty high-minded book club, a Zoom, a remote book club, and I say high minded because they have another one that's much more casual than we read detective novels. We're not ambitious, very ambitious. But this one, we're willing to tackle difficult things. So I thought, well, my choices will all be books that I've been meaning to read, and I'll make them read them with me in that way. I'll actually read them. So we did read 100 pages of Don Quixote. We all agreed we couldn't try to read the whole thing.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the kind of thing I love, and I can't really tell you why, except that I'm sure if you go back to the Indo-European or the Gothic or go way back, you'll find it there. The answer is there somewhere that, I mean, I sometimes think the sounds are related to the meaning in the sense of no, mam, mama, mama, mama. The m is good for mamma. But W-R, I'm not sure, you know, is it something to do with that? That's a bit of a mystery. I don't think I ever tried to answer that. But I like having these discoveries. I liked, I should say in the past tense, having these discoveries with the students and having that freshness. Like I didn't plan it. I haven't done that with the students every year from Time Memorial.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again we get back to the lack of being systematic. For one thing, I didn't like to give out a curriculum at the beginning. This is what we're going to do every week till the end of the term because I never knew. I like to see what they needed or see what I was reading or see what occurred to me and give the next assignment based on that rather than something I had already decided. So that was one difference. And that led to some very fun things like I myself was trying to think of all the words that began with WR. This was just something I was happened to be doing walking around the house, realizing there weren't very many of them. So I thought, okay, I'll give that as an assignment next week. The students will have to think of all the words they can that begin with WR. They're allowed to ask other people, but obviously they're not allowed to look online or in the dictionary to find them. And that was a lot of fun because we also realized that all”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in my experience I have not had to or really wanted to interview students in person before accepting them into a class. So it's been either that they were already signed up and enrolled and I did what I could, or with some of the classes at the Writers Institute in SUNY Albany. Those are for continuing education in general public and graduate students. And you're handed, you know, a pile of samples, thirty samples, anonymous. So I really think that's the best way if you're selecting students for a class. I always wanted to balance the genders, and that was a bit of a game with me to say, well, this seems like a guy. This seems like a woman. You know, nowadays, who cares? But I thought it was good to have the balance. But I was often wrong, and that was fine too.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that it didn't try my best, but there has to be a minimum recognition of how language is used. I don't know. There's so many things you look for in teaching, writing that gets very complicated.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, just a certain spark, a certain way of being able to look with his or her own eyes at the world and see it the way he or she sees it. I mean, what discourages me completely, of course, is the cliched observations, you know, one after another. A student just picking and using what everyone else picks up and uses. But I've had some students who were exciting. I mean, it's partly the use of language, but the use of language implies that they are really thinking about language and paying attention to what language can do. So it'll be use of language and then use of their own honest vision. Usually if the grammar and syntax are just too bad, you know, I mean, you can have sort of a spark, but if it's too bad, I've learned from experience it's really hard to change that at that point. You know, the students in college or after. So, you know, I mean.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I suppose. I mean, one friend, writer friend, when I forget which book it was, almost no memory, maybe, or one earlier one she said, because of the sort of subject matter of those stories, she said, oh, now Lydia discovers marriage or something like that. So it's true that my story is, I don't think they were really about love in the beginning. They're not only about love, because I think in the first collection there was a story called What an Old Woman Will Way.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm already doing that actually in magazines, and I will do it in book form. I have lots and lots of notebooks and journals, depending how you count 90 to 100 to more. Some of them don't have much in them, so I wouldn't even count them, but some are very full. So I've been going through them and picking out the parts, the entries that are of general interest. They're not the autobiographical ones as much as just observations again or interesting things from my reading. And putting them together and publishing them, some have been in the magazine noon that Diane Williams edits and founded. So because she asks for something each year, I give her something. And if I don't have stories, I give her journal excerpts. So sooner or later I'll publish an excerpt, a volume of excerpts of journals. And then much, much later when I don't have to know about it.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That seemed lovely, and I thought, well, someday that'll have to be my last project. Maybe I'll have to write a book like that modeled on all the projects I didn't finish. So my ambition, if you call it that, is really just in terms of what I'm interested in doing and doing that next and so on.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not ambitious in the worldly sense. You know, I've never been someone who was driven by, you know, the public's gonna forget me, so got to get another book out within the next two years, which I know does motivate some writers, or at least if they'd prefer not to think that way, they sometimes have an agent or a publisher who says, you know, you've got to give us another book in two years, but that's never been the case for me. And that's why some books are seven years later, I'm doing other things. Often I'm working on, say, another project that won't bear fruit. I think George Steiner has a book, which I have not read. I haven't even opened it, but a book detailing all the books he didn't write.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So productive or successful, it does work very well with shorter things that you can actually finish. So the way I work on stories is to get busy immediately and write down what occurs to me and write it until I've sort of exhausted that vein for the moment. And then I usually have enough to come back to later. So I'll have 10, 15, 20, 30 unfinished stories. And every now and then I'll pick one up again. Sometimes I don't even remember what it is. I'll see a title and think, I don't know what that story was. I'll pick it up again and try to discern what it was that moved me and what it was that made me want to write it and get back into that and see if I could finish it. So that's a sort of chaotic method that works pretty well.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's hard to say because I imagine that a lot of writers share some of the things I do, or a lot of them, so unusual. But I know that I have a more chaotic approach than some writers would want to have. And that's always been true. It's in a way very wasteful. I mean, like the reading, the books, I don't finish reading. They're also a number of very interesting projects or very interesting to me that have done a lot of work on and, you know, then gone on to another project. So I have at least three or four or five big projects. These are not small stories. These are biographical projects or grammar projects or history projects, crossing genres that I've done a lot of work on and then gotten distracted from.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and really liked the writing and wanted to go on. But I think the other problem is that there's always a new book coming into the house, another and another and another. And the temptation just to open a brand new book and start reading it is just too difficult for me to resist. But sometimes I think, well, I'm going to go back to this bookcase and I'm going to finish every single book that I started. But so far I haven't done it.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me it's both I'm always annoyed by it, so I won't say that I pride myself on it or it's a wonderful thing. I'm always annoyed by it and now I'm trying to develop the ability to skim. I know how to skim, but it doesn't usually occur to me to skim a book that I should take seriously. But now I'm thinking, well, I either skim it or I don't read it at all or don't finish it. I think the reason over the years usually was that I kind of got what the writer was doing in the first 30 pages or whatever I read carefully. And I seldom felt that I really had to read every word to get it. And I did feel that way, say, as I mentioned with Ulysses, I felt. I really wanted to read every word. But for example, we mentioned Conrad. I started the Heart of Darkness. I had read it years ago, and I started it, you know.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was very, very much into classical music and, you know, from a pretty early age. I tried to branch out into moments of pop music, folk music, rock and roll, and I always managed to like some of it for a little while, but I always went back to classical music. I guess it was Bach and Schubert's songs were very important to me maybe because there was a little narrative element in them. But I keep coming back to Bach and in high school there was a very good program in which I played in the orchestra and sang in the choral groups and so on, studied music theory. And that was very, very heavily oriented towards Bach. But, you know, again, it's like with writers, I mean, how could I do without 4ay and how could I do without VRD's Requiem, so on and so forth?”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well no, I like Joseph Cornell and I like what he was doing and why, but I don't do collages and I never have, and I don't know if I ever would, but you never know, but my pieces are always composed sort of very much in a very unified way from beginning to end. I mean in the first place. Then I go back to them and work on them. So the collage idea doesn't appeal to me, although just once a neighbor and friend here in New York State, he was writing haikus, and he said, would you like to collaborate on a poem? And I usually don't want to. But I said, well, okay, if we can do it this way, I'll give you a poem and then you can intersperse what inspires you by what you read, you can compose something and intersperse it with mine. And that worked out quite well. But that wasn't me responding to him. Which is not quite fair.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm interested in the landscapes. I like to just look at what was going on in their landscapes at that time. So part of my interest was sort of documentary. They were there and they were painting what they saw. So they're not trying to imagine what life was like back then.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's hard to put aside his work since we live with it and I think about it the most. But oh dear, that's very hard not because there aren't painters that I love. It was Velosque that I paid a lot of attention to for a while and that was partly because I was in Europe on many different trips and would often go to a museum and I found museums overwhelming. I just thought I can't do this. I feel sort of ill after an hour. So what I'm going to do is just look at two areas of painting. One is Velasquez. I almost made a game of it. How many Velasquez paintings can I find in the different museums, you know, make it sort of running list? And then the other area was early Flemish paintings. Very, very different. But I love them and I partly interested in them sometimes. I mean, a lot of them are interiors.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I actually have I never translated that long book which I learned Norwegian by reading, but I did translate some short stories by Gunhild Oyhaug. It's hard to say her last name. They were actually in the other Norwegian language Norsk. Norwegian has two languages Bokmal and Nunorsk. So it was in that language. I found her short story so delightful that I did translate at least one of them and also some other works by a friend, by my Norwegian translator actually. But these were all very short.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't actually think there's much language in my dreams, actually. Come to think of it. But I think it would be mostly English. But sometimes in waking life, another word in another language will just pop up into my head spontaneously. And I don't ever quite know why”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think I experienced the fiction itself or the content in a more enjoyable way. I'm sort of experiencing both at the same time, but content probably less well, and then the language is a pleasure in itself. And that doesn't mean I would enjoy reading a washing machine how-to manual in French or German and get the same enjoyment. I read two different Peter Hahnke books in German just because I wanted to. One was The Left-handed Woman, and that he wrote in such a straightforward style and the material repeated so much that I was able to read it without a problem. So then I tried reading whatever it is that day in the afternoon of a writer, I think it's called, afternoon of a writer. And that was terribly complicated with difficult constructions and huge vocabulary. I had terrible trouble with it. I already knew it in the...”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really just love foreign languages which may sound a little dumb because it's such a blanket statement, but even here at home I find myself wanting to just break into German or French just for a second. I don't know what it is. I obviously not tired of English really because that's my language. I write in it. I love it. But I love the sound of other languages and also that soon as you speak another language or read it, you enter a completely different culture and a completely different history and I really loved that. So, you know, I do think sometimes that my first experience of another language made me want to translate the rest of my life and that was being in that Austrian classroom and not understanding anything anyone said. And yet feeling that the surroundings were hospitable and friendly, so it wasn't an alienating experience. And then learning gradually what they were.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I usually don't see any that are really bad, but I think I've learned something from some of them. You know, when I was stuck on a vocabulary word or something, actually might have learned something. But I'd hesitate there to blame the translator because I think usually it is a time constraint. Or I used to discover that I could not earn much of a living if I translated very, very carefully. And that was simply, you know, I could not take so much time. I did take time when it mattered, and got paid very poorly like a dollar an hour on some books. So time and money and film industry, I bet it doesn't work too well.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's kind of fun. I mean, are they pressed for time? I'd have to guess because often people press translators to get things done overnight and more and more so. I think, I mean, the constraints are obviously, you can't translate faithfully what you're hearing. You have to translate it in such a way briefly, more briefly, so that someone can read it quickly. So it's very hard to retain all of the flavor of the flavor of the flav”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would be very cautious about accusing another language of having deficiencies, but I do think English has a wonderful advantage in having the doubled vocabulary, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, and the Latin vocabulary. Examples being underground would be the Anglo-Saxon version and subterranean would be the Latin of the same idea. And not all languages are most don't have that advantage. So we can play with the different vocabularies and, you know, speak more plainly or speak more abstractly and intellectually. We have that great facility because of our vocabulary.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In his case, I think it may be a combination of actually trying to retrieve memories that he had trouble retrieving and allowing the book to work that way and be that way.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it can succeed. In fact, not to bring it back to myself necessarily, but obviously I'm so well acquainted with my own work pretty well acquainted anyway. But I think of the novel I wrote, the one novel, the end of the story, was meant to give the impression of fragmentation because the narrator is trying to remember incidents. And so the memories come back in fragments. But I was thinking even first of a book that influenced me a lot in my writing of that, and that was Elizabeth Hardwick's sleepless nights, which I haven't revisited in a while, but that too gave the impression of being fragmented but was written that way deliberately. And I think also a sorrow beyond dreams by which I'm about to revisit, by Peter Hank, also gives that impression of fragmentation.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think he is. I think he is. I think some of these writers are burdened by their reputations. That would be true of Kafka and Proust, you know, that we hear so much more about how important they are, that we sort of tune out the moments that are really funny. Kafka, I'm thinking of his diaries have very funny entries, not because he was trying to be funny, but just he described people walking in the street as, I think, trying to unstick their feet from where they are to stick them down in another place. You know, he's just, he's observing. And what he observes ends up seeming funny to us and probably to him.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aha, that's interesting. Has anyone done speaking of studies? Has anyone done a study of the difference in the humorous passages between the German and the English? That would be fun to read.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's written about it? You know, there are people like Roger Shaddock who've written a great deal about Proust. And there's Beckett's essay on Proust, which I think I probably did read that. It's short, by the way. But in that case, I would be curious what another favorite writer of mine thought about Proust, although he was quite young at the time. So that would be sort of my answer. Sort of, I guess, the easiest answer really or the most sensible is to dip in and out of the different writings on Proust and see which writer you feel comfortable with, some you'll hate and some you'll love. Oh yes, I want to hear what he has to say.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the fact is that I did not, as a matter of principle, did not read any secondary material before I started translating Prust, and even now would not want to read a great deal of it. I like the one on one confrontation with the text, and I really think that swear reader should begin and maybe end. I don't like the idea, I mean, I'll modify this in a minute, but I don't initially like the idea of some so-called expert coming in between me and my perception of the book. And that was particularly true translating it. I didn't want someone else to tell me what was important or what I should look out for. And then I suppose, you know, if you've read all of the Proust's novel and read it again or whatever, and then you just want to read more about it and share the experience in a way with another person.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm reading it in English. I can actually read Catalan if I put my mind to it, but I see no reason to in this case.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Approached the ongoing story in a very different way, I found that possible too. But it's tricky. There's a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that's called the Grey Note Book, I think the Grey Notebooks or the Grey Notebook. And that's very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it. But I'm not reading it all at once. I'm going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project he took an early, very brief diary of his, he was 21, I think, and it was only cover the year and a half. And he kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material. And I love that idea. So maybe that's why I can read it.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, maybe it helps that he conceived of the individual books or the parts that make up the whole book he conceived of them one at a time or published them one at a time, wrestled with them one at a time. He didn't set out to write as much, you know, as he ended up writing in that one novel, which I can really understand if there are a lot of projects if you realized how long they were going to be and how long they were going to take you might not start them. So he thought it was going to be a matter of, say, three small volumes or even two in the beginning, two small volumes, or reasonable volumes. And it grew and grew, which I can also sympathize with. So I didn't have a problem with that. I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, since I hesitated to even open the books, I can't answer you because I guess I do find not all long books, but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them I try over and over, and if I sense that it's really a load of verbiage, you know, I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late pinching, but I haven't.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but it would be very different. I mean, we do tend toward shorter sentences now, anyway. You know, every writer's very different. But in general, we have less tolerance for long, elaborately constructed sentences. But I think with very short sentences, you can also be very sparkling, lyrical, magical.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes Absolutely. Well, I don't know. Did Conrad have a great sense of humor? I mean, it depends who you think is great in the first place. So maybe we are leaving Conrad for certain other reasons, but he was one I was reading recently. And I don't detect much of a sense of humor there. But I do in Beckett and Proust, people usually don't think of Proust as very funny, but he's quite funny.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it only blurs in that sense I think of a poem as more lyrical and I think that's a test that I can depend on to some extent there are poems that aren't very lyrical but they're clearly poems for other reasons so yeah I go back to the idea of song with poems and I don't see my very short stories as songs. I see them sort of pedestrian. In other words thump thump thump. You know, they're not rhythmical or imagistically beautiful most of the time. And I'm talking about the very, very short ones. There are longer short ones that are a paragraph or a page and some of those are lyrical.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you really want to know, I usually don't brush them away because that might harm their little tiny body. So I blow them away and then remove the reason for their interest. So if they're interested, it's always food. I blow them away and clean up the food very thoroughly. And I do usually persuade them not to come back.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. Well, they have interactions with AU and TS, I guess, in the past. But yes, I mean, the little insects that come to the cat bulls, if we're not careful. So the incongruous would be probably perceiving myself as a person who actually respects ants and tries to deal with them in a respectful way. In other words, not squashing them, but persuading them to leave. So that would be the incongruity, perhaps.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose, I mean, it's always easier for me to work from examples because I forget that there's so many of these stories by now, many volumes and so hundreds. But I tend to remember the stories about ants just because I still have dealings with ants and interactions with ants.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose it's limited by something that is short in duration necessarily either an action that's very short in duration or a perception that's very brief and glancing. It might be a perception that could lead to a great many more perceptions or could be developed. But for the moment it's very brief. That is the constraint. The stories are born very spontaneously from these immediate perceptions or immediate actions that are there and over in a blink of an eye.”
2022-03-23 · Conversations with Tyler · Lydia Davis on Language and Literature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source