>> So do you think I have time to read? >> Oh yeah. >> Okay. So, I thought I'd read a couple pretty, brief passages showing how I was trying to have that sort of research be as invisible as I can get it. So, it's just filtered through the mind of, of characters. Now, I haven't actually named all the kinds of research, as I'll show in these passages, but, oh, you have books. Good. So. Let's see, so the first one is about Julia. It's near the end of the book, page 211. Julia, being the granddaughter of Augustus, who is sort of the person behind a lot of what has been going on with Ovid. An unhappy woman, being made to be pregnant, in order to bear a child for the empire. And she was awfully fun to write, because when anyone is really angry, it's a lot more fun than when they're happy. >> [LAUGH] >> And she was kind of right up my alley [LAUGH]. Okay, so I'm going to skip around a bit. But, let me read a little bit about her. So, this is near the end and she's... Many things have gone on. So, at this point, everything else that's come, before in the novel, a reader already knows, so, there's more shorthand available, but you've read it, so, you'll be able to kind of see that. "After Ovid had gone, Julia sat still for a while. The world about her, motionless. She traced a gold sandaled toe over a spray of seaweed and heard the light, tinsley scrape. She laid both ringed hands upon the globe at her belly, and briefly imagined. The imagining, itself, flitting in through the window, full of light and warmth. That what she touched, was what she pretended, small and alive. For an instant, she felt the whole swath of it, of love and tearing loss. She opened her eyes again, and let them roam over the walls. All illusory garden with fanning peacocks, striped snakes, diving swallows, rabbits, with their grey ears up. All rosemary and sun, as if she were outside and free. Which, she had never been. She had been born beneath eyes that, the second they bitterly discerned her sex, had already enslaved that soft apricot cleft to the requirements of Rome. Sometimes, it quivered through her so violently, that she shuddered and felt she could open her mouth, or poke fingers into her hated lower lips and pull it out, that hot snake of hatred. Standing abruptly, she untied her sash and shook loose the hidden cushion. Ridiculous, that anyone believed it. Yet they did. The court had been tender. Her grandfather, beholding her, had slit his lashless eyes, and his skeleton hand had trembled, as it touched her shoulder. But, where he touched her, she imagined a print of cold. That fragment of her flesh, detached and swirling in the air of history, backward. Becoming the piece of flesh bitten from Pelops' shoulder. Pelops, who'd been served by his father for dinner. Thereby, launching a curse, that would kill kings in their bathtubs, felled Troy. Julia touched her shoulder. Kingdoms did fall. Troy, tragic Athens. She tried to imagine it, with her hands out at her silken sides. She tried to see this city of hers, this entire empire razed into the Earth." And then, skip over to the next page. "Yet, as Julia stood fiercely imagining in the middle of her painted room, she found that she saw nothing. She heard the words of ruin, she felt the terrible hunger for ruin, but she could see none of it. A blackness, a sparkle, that was all. Her fingernails were driving into her soft palms, and she held her hands out before her, saw the faint red crescents she'd made. Suddenly, she felt enormously tired. All she could do was make a few smarting incisions. She could barely lift her own legs or arms. Barely move from the center of the strangling, jeweled room." Okay, so, one little passage about Julia. But, what I was hoping in this, was that, you know, having done the research to know, like, what kind of, you know, floor she had, and what kind of paintings there were on the walls of, of, the house, she probably lived in, and the kinds of things that would be the content of her mind. So, the bit about Pelops. So, a piece of ancient Greek myth, about a child served up to his, to the other Gods for dinner. I was hoping all of that, would sort of be... just, seamlessly, part of the way she thought, and what she experienced around her. Whether it works, I don't know, I hope so, but that was the idea, as well as the history. I mean, just the fact that, this is how she would experience the fact, that she was being bred to rear children. So, just from one woman's, like, hopefully, real, real perspective, these different aspects of the kind of mythological and literary content of her mind, and the historical world around her, and the physical world around her. Now, skipping to the next page, a bit about Ovid. "When Ovid left Julia, he walked blindly to the baths. His boots struck the paving stones, with an underwater clang, a slow reverberation. The cypruses shuddered slowly by, and the pines, and the shining leathered faces of men in the square. He went into the changing room, dropped his satchel, and only when its weight struck his foot, did he look down at it and acknowledge. He shook his head. He couldn't think. He walked naked into the great room, fell into the water, and sank into the silent, greenish world that was so warm and forgetful. He turned, enveloped, sinking, and let his body bump to the bottom. There he lingered, fingers scraping the floor, penis swaying, eyes lifeless and open. He imagined himself drifting there forever. But, slowly he rose. He couldn't help it. His body turned, lifted, and broke through the surface, into the loud air of the hall, the steam echoing the men's voices. He felt the warm water lapping at his ears and knew that it was blood. The feathers are gone, he thought. They've slid free from the melted wax, and you have fallen into the sea. Imagine, being so foolish, as to trust yourself in empty air and to wax. For a moment floating, he saw Horace's feathered man. A poet, transmogrified, to eternal bird, sprouting plumage and wrinkled, horny claws, fluttering up into the sky. So long. Thanks, I won't be needing a tomb. Ah Horace. Horace could make jokes. With that wizened head, those dolphin eyes. One look at him, and you knew, this man would live forever. When Horace had read his sacred poems for Augustus, on that sacred day, Ovid had wanted so hard to think, he is an emperor's mouthpiece. But Horace's words themselves settled upon that thought and dissolved it. He would live forever. He was as genuine as Earth. It could not be described, the value of his words. Like a secret kind of water, that's heavier and colder than the usual kind. Words had more value in his lines than they otherwise had. They were coin. Fuck, finer than coin. Ovid, that day, invisible among the crowd, and disdained by the emperors he'd deserved, had stood listening with a garish grin. He moved his jaw in the water and felt it creaking on its hinge. Let the cow, his Daedalus, made for Pasiphae, to hide in and receive them, the bull. He was grotesque, a contraption. There had never been wings, just stuck together stage wings, all contrivance, not art. The plucked, bloodied feathers lay about him on the water, and he floated among them, sea worms inching into his ears." Okay, so it's always funny, reading stuff you wrote. But, so, in this passage, I was trying to pull together a bunch of things And, and, you know, we know that Ovid heard Horace read, okay? And so, I'm, I'm thinking well, maybe he heard Horace read this. Horace has these various poems, and one is about imagining himself turning into a bird and becoming immortal, and not needing a tomb. And, I wanted Ovid to just absorb that. You know, the way you, you know, the way you absorb things that you read, and that you hear. And then his own work, you know, the, the, some of the figures he has in the "Metamorphoses." Like Daedalus and Icarus, so the boy, with the wings that are made of wax, that fall... and how he's relating that to his own image of Horace, as a bird man, actually becoming immortal. and, hopefully, I'm putting together the wax, with the wax of his tablets, that he's always writing in, and then, that's what's copied onto the, you know, the later rolls. But also, the idea of him sinking to the bottom of the, of the, pool, sort of like a boy that Xenia has seen, in her strange way that she can see things, sinking to the bottom of the Black Sea, where flesh doesn't dissolve. It's got a strange anoxic property, metal dissolves, but not flesh. So, you know, so, that's another way of like, expressing oblivion, just disappearing, and yet, you know, not being preserved in a sickening way. So, so, these are two cases, where all kinds of research I did, I just wanted to kind of be, just kind of seamlessly, in the, in the characters' minds, you know, how they perceive the world around them. and then, also, the kind of content that has, that has filled their thinking and made their consciousness. And I think I will, I will, wonder now whether you have any things you want to talk about, tell me about, ask me about, in the, in the writing of this. I don't know if you, any of you are, actively writing fiction, yourselves, or what. >> Well, I actually had a question about, more of the craft of writing, by itself. And [COUGH] one of my favorite parts about this book was the, the suspense that you maintained throughout it. And the sense of momentum and... just the building, that you could tell, you know, the reader knows that something probably bad is about to happen. And their love affair is very destructive, in ways. And so, I've taken a few creative writing classes, and I'm always interested in how you use wording, and how you... use different devices in order to maintain that. I think that's a very hard feeling to display, through literature. To a reader. Like, to give them chills, and to make them actually, nervous, and excited, so. >> And, there are so many chills in this book. >> Yeah, there's so, there's so many moments where I, I get a little scared, or I was wondering, you know, what's going to happen, and I think that's one of the hardest things that you can convey in a story. So, I was just wondering how you went about that. >> How? God knows. [LAUGH] I think that you, one of the main things that you learn about. And, this can be really, technically, learned is, is pacing. And so you know, that if you if you slow down, and kind of focus attention on a moment, and everything are sort of slow, there gets to be this, kind of strange, still quivering property. And, and, and people are then, kind of set up, for something much faster to happen afterwards. So on, on the one hand, you're kind of controlling different speeds, and how fast things happen, to make people's, you know, you're almost trying to control peoples' heart rates, frankly. You know, you, if everything was always at the same pace, that would be monotonous, right? And so, instead, you're kind of deliberately skidding to something, stopping, waiting, looking around, suspending action even a little longer, and then, you keep going. and also you're controlling information. There's just enough that is known, not enough that is known, that you can imagine and speculate and fear, but you don't know yet, and so, you have to keep going forward. So, I think it's a, a manipulation of, of speeds, and also, what can be known or suspected. >> Mary. >> So, you just read a passage on page 215, and you read a profound sentence in there that says, "all contrivance, not art." And I just wanted to, maybe, begin a discussion on what the nature of, of art is. And your novel is called "The Love-Artist," which would beg the question. I'm wondering, in this novel, do you, or how do you perceive art? For Ovid, I think it's, this is a difficult question for him, because he is trying to resolve whether it is an artist who creates art, or is it an artist who observes art and then, interprets it how they will. And I'm just wondering how you perceived art, and what your interpretation of art was. >> That's a nice big question. I think. Well, starting with the idea of the con, of the contraption. I mean, I think that, all the artists I know, whether they're writers, or or, or visual artists, or other kinds of artists, I think the real ones, sorry, I'm begging another question, are the ones that are always afraid that what they do is junk, that what they are is complete contrivance, that they don't have anything real or true. People who are confident, you know, always confident, kind of consistently confident, the odds are good that they're not You need doubt, you need doubt, you need to think that you're always false. So, I think, I think for Ovid, you know, setting himself up against Horace, he just can only imagine that he is false. Now, how Horace felt, I don't know. He might not have, have been as self conscious as to even begin to allow the question to be spoken. But [SIGH]... >> You, in this novel, you really, I mean, Ovid becomes this quivering gel of doubt, self-doubt, so often, and it's, it's great. It's his, his huge narcissism is wedded to this great insecurity. >> Which, I think is what it is. I mean, there has to be, that you have to, at some times, feel that you are... you are brilliant. You are seeing things, no one has seen. You are inventing things, no one has invented. And in, in the next, other half of the breath, be pretty sure you're a fool. Because, it's like you need that self critical, in order to try to push yourself to do something else. But with Ovid, yeah. Because, he's full of doubt that what he's doing is just watching and taking, but he isn't actually inventing anything. But, I mean that's not true. I mean, alright, here's a kind of analogy. This is going now, to another form, which is memoir. Someone has famously said, you're not paid for living a life. You're paid for how have interpreted it, and filtered it, and transformed it, into something else, that has value beyond you. And it's, it's the same thing here. I mean, he could just transcribe what Xenia does all he wants, but obviously he's bringing something else into it. That, he's not, in this, in this novel, in this character, able to, always see or admit. But it's, it is this, this sort of alchemical transforming that you do of what is real. And that is, that makes art, that will speak to other people, that will be much, much bigger, and that will last. I guess I do believe that. Ephemeral art aside, I guess I think that, I believe, because I was trained in classics, I believe in things lasting, and still having a truth, and a resonance. So, if I can read things that the real Ovid did write... I've just finished a translation of, of a lot of Ovid's stories from the "Metamorphoses" and the "Amores." And, when he tells a story about, when he, the way he describes a young girl like Myrrha, falling in love with her father, trying not to, knowing it's wrong, and unable to stop herself, and doing the awful thing that she does, which is trick him, and sleep with him. And then being so full of self hatred, that she begs to be changed and made not alive or dead, and is made into a tree. I, I find that absolutely powerful, 2000 years ago, 1000 years ago, 20 years ago, now. So, that's a case of taking something that could be a tawdry storyline, and turning it into something that's real, and powerful, and lasts. And that is art. Whether the artist can admit that he's doing something that powerful or not, or over admits it. >> Yes? >> Yeah, that sort of leads into something that I've been thinking a lot about, since reading your book. And, on page 153, toward the middle bottom of the page, there's this lone sentence. And it says, "It made him giddy, the way the whole thing proceeded, the way she spun herself into form before his eyes." And, for me, that has made me think a lot about, kind of relating back to your earlier comment of, for Ovid, he can't merely transcribe what Xenia's actions are, there has to be a certain level of interpretation there. And so, in a story called, "The Love-Artist," I kept thinking about, well, who is the love artist in the story? Is it Ovid, who sort of creates this other version of Xenia as he's writing? Or is it Xenia, who's enacting her magic upon him, and sort of has him completely entranced by her, sort of mystical ways. And to what extent, how does that affect the nature of love in the story, are these characters... To what extent, are they truly, truly in love with each other, or, if there's sort of like, another level of distance, where they're in love with their ideas of each other? Are they creating each other in their own image, and does that sort of create a level of of distance? So, it seems to be like, a loss there, along with art. The more that you sort of construct a new reality, you sort of lose a little bit of the humanity there, as well. But, is that not, also, one of the most human things, [LAUGH] You know, [LAUGH] for, for an artist to, also, experience. So, that's really, you know, kind of troubled me, but I've loved struggling with it for the past few days of, of thinking about this. >> Well, I think you said a lot of things there, interesting things. And I think that, well, let's see how to take them apart. I think that, the first thing you said, well, who is really the love artist? Who is working? Who is doing the creating here? And that's where a word like carmen was really important to me in reading Ovid and then in writing this. So, carmen being this word that is, that means both the poem or a song, and an enchantment, a spell. So, it does have this this, this, this property of of, of, of magic, this idea of magic. But in both cases, it's words that are said, that make something real. So imagine that. So, if you have a poem, or you have a story, a song, a carmen, in that way. You, you know, you see it and it's conjuring something before your eyes that seems real. And a magical incantation is doing something else, something, words are said that will make something happen. So they are both, and they talk about that in a scene, earlier on, when they're still on, on the Black Sea. They are, they are wedded in this way by way of that, that, that word does unite them. And in terms of love, I guess I'm not, maybe my own background, but I don't, I've never, I don't have any, I don't know that I believe in, or, I certainly don't have first hand knowledge in, in the kind of love that is this truly... good [LAUGH] thing, that is really just sort of seeing another and feeling love for that person. In my life, there's always a part of, of sort of consumption or, or, or destructiveness to it, or need, or I mean it's, it's already such a complicated thing. And in that way, they are both, definitely, the love artists, you know? They are needing something badly, that is inhabited, that is possessed by the other person. And so love, need, very similar things, in this kind of love. In romantic, sexual, passionate love, as opposed to, what you might feel for a pet. [LAUGH] Where it's totally different. You can really love that little animal. But that passage too when he, he's, it made him giddy, giddy, the way the whole thing proceeded, the way she spun herself into form before his eyes. I mean, he's being, well, he slash me, [LAUGH] whoever, is being a little bit facetious there, because, she's spinning herself into form before his eyes, but that's only because he is capable of seeing the form. Right? He's capable of seeing, you know, the figure in the, in the carpet, the way Henry James put it. And when you write something, those of you who've written know, and you will know, when you keep writing. That, there often is this sort of unbelievable magic moment when, I mean, you've been writing and writing and writing maybe you have got a whole draft of a novel or story maybe... A second or a third draft. But, there's a moment when... All of a sudden, it's as if there is a logic, that you swear you did not invent, that you are simply finding in what you're writing. And it's like everything starts to connect and add up and it's it's like this image goes with that image and they're both connected by way of this third image. And you think, my God, this is, there's something real here that I'm doing. and, and, so, when he sees her and says she's spinning herself into a form before his eyes, that's kind of what's happening. It's gotten to the point where, what he is making and seeing in her, she is also helping to make for him. And, that's a real dynamic, that, I think, an artist or a writer has with a work. There's another Latin word that kind of helps consolidate that, that, idea and that is inventio. Which means both invent and find. So, it's like you're both inventing something, making it, but you're also finding it, which is complicated. That is really what, what it feels like often when you're writing. So, it's like the, where, how are there these truths? I think of, I think of dream logic as being similar. Like, you know you can have a dream. You didn't consciously make that dream, and nobody else did. I mean, it's in your head. No one else did. And, you'll be pondering it, you know, in a particularly complicated dream, and you'll be pondering it, and then you'll start to see, oh, this connects with that, connects with that, and it all is actually telling me something. It's the same kind of, it's the same sort of system. I'm not into, you know, too much of, of consciousness and unconsciousness and so on. But, I do think that there are logics that you have to, have to be able to find, and you only do it because you have a certain eye, that's able to find it, and look for it, aka make it. Going in circles. >> One of the canons of rhetoric in, in the ancient world, was the canon of invention. The idea that you have to, you're discovering your matter, before you write it down. So, it's a very Roman idea. >> Yeah, yeah.
