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SELFIE INTERVIEW | Tim Eberle

Tim Eberle is a New York based writer and comedian, like everybody else who lives in Brooklyn. His writing and performances have appeared in McSweeney’s, Splitsider, DNAinfo, the Santa Fe Literary Review, Jewish Life Television, Jewlicious.com, Heeb Magazine, and The Madcap Review, among others. Most recently, he was seen performing at the Peoples Improv Theater in “I Am Not A Man: A One Sort-of-Man Show” (a sad show, which he wrote alone), and in the sketch review “Sad Men And The People Who Love Them” at Theater 99 in Charleston, South Carolina. Read more at timeberlecomedy.com

Eckleburg: What drives, inspires, and feeds your artistic work?

Tim Eberle: I think that my work is largely defined through my taking the inconsequential seriously. Because the true stuff of life is found in the mundanity of it all. After all, things are only “mundane” because those things are repressively relatable. And – at the risk of alienating anyone reading this with the pretension dripping from the following rhetorical – what better subject is there than the “repressively relatable”? I like to work from the inside out – starting with the first-person-confessional and eventually moving on to an exploration of the larger context.

Eckleburg: If you had to arm wrestle a famous writer, poet or artist, either living or dead, who would it be? Why? What would you say to distract your opponent and go for the win?

Tim Eberle: Like anyone who has ever pushed through the entirety of Gravity’s Rainbow, I’d love to settle into an arm wrestling match with the great Thomas Pynchon. My motivation there is partly due to the incredible respect that I have for the man (and the pursuant desire to express that respect through a wordless contest of physical strength), and partly due to the fact that I truly believe that anyone who has written something as incomprehensible as Gravity’s Rainbow probably deserves to get his arm twisted at least a little bit. Plus, I think it would be an easy win. There’s so much physics involved in arm wrestling that I assume he would be immediately distracted and forfeit the match so that he could go off and immerse himself in thoughts of parabolas. (Besides, the whole “recluse” thing basically ensures that, even if I were to lose, chances are decent-to-good that no one would ever find out about it anyway.)

Eckleburg: What would you like the world to remember about you and your work?

Tim Eberle: I’d like the world to remember that I once arm-wrestled Thomas Pynchon and won. I’d also like the world to remember that there was once a time when words mattered, when nuance was celebrated, when brevity was not synonymous with quality, when articles were more important than headlines, when questions were common and answers were fluid. (But mostly that I was stronger than Thomas Pynchon.)

Eckleburg thanks Tim Eberle for sharing his Selfie Interview with us. Read more about Tim Eberle. 

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George Saunders on reading, writing, and teaching – The New Yorker

About George Saunders

I was born in Amarillo, Texas, grew up in Chicago, and (barely) graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a degree in exploration geophysics.  There was an oil-boom on, which meant that even someone like me could get work in the oil-fields.  So after college I went to work in Sumatra, as a field geophysicist.  We worked four weeks on and two weeks off, in a jungle camp that was a forty-minute helicopter ride to the nearest town – so this is when my reading life really started.  The game became filling up an entire suitcase with books sufficient to get me through the next two weeks of camp life.  About a year and a half at this job, I got sick after going swimming in a river that was polluted with monkey shit (I remember looking up at about 200 of them, sitting on our oil pipeline crapping away, and thinking: “I wonder if swimming here is okay?”) and came home to try and be Kerouac II.  I worked as a doorman, a roofer, a convenience store clerk, and a slaughterhouse worker (a “knuckle-puller,” to be exact), and all of this contributed to my understanding of capitalism as a benign-looking thing that, as Terry Eagleton says, “plunders the sensuality of the body.”

I’d always been interested in reading, ever since a nun I was secretly in love with turned me on to “Johnny Tremaine” in third grade.  But I’d never met a writer and so it took me awhile to realize that a person could actually write for a living. 

In 1986, at a wild party in Amarillo, Texas, I found a copy of People Magazine in which Jay McInernry and Raymond Carver were profiled.  Before this, I’d never heard of an MFA program.  I applied to Syracuse, got in, and had the great good fortune of studying there with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger.  I also met my future wife, Paula Redick there, and we got engaged in three weeks, which I believe is still a program record.  Paula got pregnant on the honeymoon, went into early labor at four months, and had to go on total bedrest.  Our first daughter, Caitlin, was born in 1988.  Our second daughter, Alena, was born in 1990, by the same method: five months of bedrest.  So we had two daughters before we’d known each other three years, and it was off to the races.

We had no money and so I worked as a tech writer, first for a pharmaceutical company and then for an environmental engineering company.  During this period (1989-1995), I wrote three abortive first books and then an actual one, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.”  One of the stories from this book, “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” ran in The New Yorker in 1992 – the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with that magazine.

Since 1996 I’ve taught in the Syracuse MFA program, where I’ve had the privilege of teaching some of the most remarkable young American writers of the last 15 years.  I write short stories for The New Yorker and travel pieces for GQ.  The latter have been part of an attempt to avoid the mental rictus that comes with old age.  I’ve traveled to Africa with Bill Clinton, reported on Nepal’s “Buddha Boy,” gone on patrol with the “Minute Men” on the Mexican border, spent a week in the theme hotels of Dubai, and lived incognito in a homeless tent city in Fresno, California.

In addition to my new book, “Tenth of December,” I’ve written three other short story collections “Pastoralia,” “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (both New York Times Notable Books) and, most recently, “In Persuasion Nation.”  “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” was a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.  “In Persuasion Nation” was one of three finalists for the 2006 STORY Prize for best short story collection of the year.  I’ve also written a novella-length illustrated fable, “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil” the New York Times bestselling children’s book, “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” illustrated by Lane Smith, (which has won major children’s literature prizes in Italy and the Netherlands), and, most recently, a book of essays, “The Braindead Megaphone.”

I’ve also written two screenplays (one of which is in development with Ben Stiller’s company, Red Hour Films) and have collaborated with the playwright Seth Bockley on stage adaptations of two of my stories, “Jon,” and “CommComm.”  The director Yehuda Duenyas staged “Pastoralia,” at PS 122, and a musical version of “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” was produced and performed in Austin and Los Angeles.

 My work has appeared in the O’Henry, “Best American Short Story,” “Best Non-Required Reading,” “Best American Travel Writing,” and “Best Science Fiction” anthologies.  In support of my books, I’ve appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Colbert Report. 

I’ve read at hundreds of bookstores and universities, including the main reading at AWP in 2011, to a crowd of 2000, and events in support of the work of PEN/ACLU at the Sundance Film Festival and Cooper Union.  I’ve also read and taught in Russia, Belize, England, Amsterdam, Italy, and this summer will be a Writer in Residence at DISQUIET, in Portugal.

In 2001, I was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100 top most creative people in entertainment, and by The New Yorker in 2002 as one of the best writers 40 and under.  In 2006, I was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.  In 2009 I received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  I still teach at Syracuse, and live in the Catskills. Read More

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Writing Différance & the Art of Writing What Must Be Written | Margins of Philosophy by Jacques Derrida

The Eckleburg Workshops

 

 
“For the same reason there is nowhere to begin to trace the sheaf or the graphics of différance .* For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, a principal responsibility. The problematic of writing is opened by putting into question the value of the arkhe [arche]. What I will propose here will not be elaborated simply as a philosophical discourse, operating according to principles, postulates, axioms, or definitions, and proceeding along the discursive lines of a linear order of reasons. In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. Adventurous because this strategy is a not simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics, or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of différance , it no more follows the lines of philosophical-logical discourse than that of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.” (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy)
 
Derrida’s “différance” is a deliberate departure from the word difference and an important critical foundation of postmodernism. Différance alludes to the French différer, which means simultaneously to defer and to differ. For Derrida, the concept of “meaning,” as conventionally regarded, has no true beginning or end. We are always in search of meaning, a word, phrase, concept, ideal, logos, even axiom…. We can never truly attain this meaning because meaning depends upon context and the perception by which context is being given and so meaning for one particular entity, be it a word or logos (the concept of good/bad, for instance), if it is to be fully understood, must be empirically tested against other contexts and perceptions and there is no absolute. Meaning shifts from one person to another, one person’s situation to another. It’s all in the context. There is always a deferral of meaning, a constant search. To ever find this ultimate meaning or “truth” would be antithetical to the craft and artistry of the writer because we are not, I repeat, we are not the truthsayers. We are the explorers, the devil’s advocates prodding our readers to ask the questions, embark on collective and individual searches for meaning. And one must be a passionate explorer, a master in the art of not knowing the absolute in order to lead this search. Writers who have embraced différance  are our greatest explorers.
 
Derrida gives us the foundation for pushing past boundaries while recognizing boundaries. As writers, we study the lines and rules that govern language and story so that we can better know how and when to break these rules. We are always aware of the rules, character, plot, grammar, etc., and as we write and develop our voices and aesthetics, we search always for the moment of différance, the act of “departure and deference.”