This piece first appeared in Tally Ho Sulky, a lovingly written and produced fanzine by Adalena Kavanagh. If you would like a copy of Tally Ho Sulky in its entirety, please email 5redpandas AT gmail.com. Adalena also blogs at tallyhosulky.blogspot.com

If you have not done so, you should first read the introduction to this interview.

David Berman Interview — NYC October 1997

(a= Adalena Kavanagh, d= David Berman)

<David:> You could read too much into it already. You want to interview somebody so let’s say you’re going to interview this musician, let’s say his name is David. But, from the start, number 1) I don’t feel like a musician unless there is a guitar in my hand or I happen to be writing now, or even like walking through the grocery store humming something. So if I’m here like this weekend what I feel like is a guy on vacation seeing some old friends blah, blah, blah. So unless it's a documentary about high school reunions then I’m already in a weird position. So basically what I feel like I have to do to do an interview today I would have to go back to who I was in November which is the last time I did a series of interviews. So let’s say in November I did 100 interviews in one month, and then in December I did 10, January 5 the next month 2. So for the next six months not do one and in those six months I was able shave my beard off which I grew to do interviews. You know when they say, don’t trust a man with a beard, he has something to hide, well you know I never know if that was true or not

<a:> is it true?

<d:> yeah, it gives you a foot of personal space, even though it’s actually a centimeter coming off your face but in your mind it feels like people are back an extra foot. I grew that because an album was coming out and I would be in the unnatural position of having to talk about myself. Let’s say x calls me up and says let’s go out tonight some friends of mine are in town. I go out and am introduced and I feel the obligation when we sit down to immediately make a person like me so I take care to learn their name, smile, shake their hand firmly, maybe do a few things someone can call me on, maybe be more ingratiating than someone who considers himself more honest. Like Dan (Koretsky) for instance or Will (Oldham) definitely would not make some of the efforts, emotional or certain kinds of deportment. But for whatever reason I feel this need to say, make within five minutes, this person like me and then I can relax. So there are certain things you learn from your father or whoever you choose to learn from. You do those things whatever it takes and then you start asking them questions, that’s the easiest way. So why do you do that and why did you make that and instead of absorbing answers you also have to show that you were really hearing by saying "yeah I can see why you did that..." but basically you’re trying to express the fact that you are learning from them and in an interview situation you can try and turn the tables whatever be cutesy and ask the other person questions. "I’m not into a star trip, blah blah blah.v But in reality it’s not until after the tape recorder goes off that you get to be just yourself. In that case being myself with another person is being a listener and an understanderer or something. So I can’t do that interview. So is that a long answer to your question "what do you want to talk about".

<a:> no that’s fine.

<d:> no, it’s all this iced tea.

<a:> does it get you excited?

<d:> yeah it really does. I have a really low resistance to caffeine. If I drank a cup of coffee at ten in the morning at 2 at night I’d be up still and wired walking around. If I sit down to write in the morning I take a can of coke and I put it in one of those koosh containers to keep it cold because it lasts six hours. If I can make it six hours at the desk I’ll only get to the ¾ mark and I put it in the refrigerator and that night when I need a little extra kick to get me through Conan O’Brien I’ll drink that last ¼ of the can and that will take me to bedtime.

<a:> Is there anything you need to do to get you started writing?>

<d:> Yeah, there’s a couple techniques. First of course the Coca-Cola in the morning, I get up and do two or three things but not do so many things that you’ve already gotten in utilitarian anthropolominalogical(?) mode like making a phone call or doing too many tasks. Just do enough to shake the cobwebs out but keep enough in that there’s some stratus, (that’s the word lattice, lattice work still on your point of view) and then sit down and say I don’t have a thought in my mind I don’t know what I want to write about. But, evidently, the French writer, Raymond Quinos said if you can write twenty lines a day of prose fiction, whatever, that’s good, that’s very good. So at the very minimum my rule for myself is I have to fill up two pages of legal pad a day and I allow myself to let it be bad. You have to because if you just sit there and you’re playing critic and writer at the same time it’s too slow. So you allow yourself to write bad things even if you want to scratch them out. Open a dictionary to a page, take a word, put words around it. Open up books, hold it two or three feet away from my face and race my eyes across the page and wait for me to read something wrong. I’ll read a sentence put an extra R into a word, change the meaning of a sentence, do that four or five times until something good comes. Write that down, write five sentences around it. These are just things for when there’s nothing coming. Get a book of poetry, pick up the book, read the poem, figure out what’s wrong with it, what you don’t like about it. Read it again, take the first line, improve it, take the second line, improve it, and improve it three times over until it’s enough away from it so you’re not stealing or borrowing and just make it yours. Just kickstart stuff and you’ve got a half a page of stuff to work with. That stuff is for you, someone else might look at it but it’s going to be like droppings or something so then you think of an audience or you think of a friend or someone who likes what you do and you think, "I’m going to make them laugh", or "I’m going to make them cry" or something and then you just start writing.

<a:> Do you have something specific you want the reader to get from your writing?

<d:> The word in the question that makes me say no is ‘specific’. It’s an accident, the writing’s not an accident, but what the person gets is an accident. I have what I want from it. Here’s a perfect example: sometimes I read people talking about their writing. Especially sometimes you see a lot of this with musicians and someone will say "oh what does this lyric mean" and the person says "Oh I don’t interpret my lyrics because I want people to think what they want to think." I grant people the right to think what they want to think but I have something yes, of course, oh I want them to think this and I can tell you this is what I meant and this is what I was thinking of and this is what it means to me. I could never say to someone, if someone came up and said " what did you mean by that?" I would never say "I leave it up to the reader". That’s just touchy feely and it’s also like a cop out because a lot of people don’t know what they meant and they don’t even bother to go back and think about what they meant. <a:> Or what it might mean to someone else.

<d:> Right, and so they throw some words together and they’re like, " I leave it up to the reader..." and they’re hoping the reader can find something. Anyone can find anything. You can take meaning from anything. I used to play this game when I six or seven years old when I couldn’t sleep and I was first getting into words and I first realized that words had their own life and I would lie in bed and challenge myself and take two words or two nouns and try to find two you couldn’t connect in a sentence and the fun part of the game was that I couldn’t.

<someone threw out the words peach and nuclear and David came up with this sentence: We went down to the peach bowl in Atlanta to see Arkansas play Clemson and we had a hotel room with a view of a nuclear reactor">

<d:> You can’t do it and that’s the beauty of it. The language has that built into it and it’s all interconnected and that’s what’s so fun because you just have to find it. That’s why I’m also so into nouns since nouns all share the same space or the same world or same universe they’re all necessarily able to beinterconnected through verbs and all the qualifiers. Any two in the world so everything is completely interrelated through language. An ocean on Neptune is completely related to this bed. They have a spatial relationship, they have a color relationship, etc. but you have to make it with the language, an animal can’t make it. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I like to do in the morning when I wake up. Use words and make everything together and remind yourself that everything isn’t flying apart and things aren’t cold. Do you remember we were in the record store today and we were talking about how there is this low level angry vibe in a cool record store and that makes you feel like you’re being told you need to get out? The work that someone is doing on the records, if they’re doing a good job, in that record store is an opposite and equal force. That’s the weirdest part about it. Maybe there is some universal psychic balance happening. The same thing happens in an art museum, here you are and people can go look at a Mark Rothko and my gf can actually get emotional over a Mark Rothko (I can’t, but I can appreciate it) and actually be brought to tears by an abstract painting and nothing else in the art museum is encouraging you at all to feel. The employees, the architecture, the light, nothing is. Bookstores, places where you go for art, where you go to buy and experience human feelings or works of humans and art, they are all mean and alienating places.

<a:> You said you don’t feel like a musician unless you have a guitar in your hand. What’s the difference between why you do one thing over the other? It seems you have more exposure being a musician than as a writer. Is there one that you hold dearer or are they both on the same level?

<d:> Well we were talking about this the other day and the dream is—and it’s not the post-modern one of bric-a-brac and combining different art forms and multi media stuff. In the 1800’s and 1700’s you could be a renaissance man and you could know everything and I think it was Thomas Jefferson or someone earlier who had read every book in the world. That was a possible thing to do in the 1700’s. Thomas Jefferson was able to do so many things in so many fields and be a little bit better than just a jack of all trades. Nowadays everything encourages you to specialize. People are drawn to smaller and smaller corners. I go to a party and I meet a guy who studies the heads of pins and I meet another guy who works for a remote control factory and then I meet a lady who is a painter but she paints exclusively in the color blue. So you’re at this party and you’re meeting all these people and someone comes up to you and asks you what you do so you have this choice (you in this case is me) "oh I’m a writer, oh I’m a musician" well there’s all that baggage. Here I am talking to the guy who studies heads of pins for a living and I’m interested in what he does but for me to tell him that I’m a writer and musician, number 1, even if I was pretending to be specialized that’s so fucking vague. And you don’t trust anyone who says that. Never trust anyone who says that. Never eat anywhere called "Mom’s" and don’t trust me.

<DV DeVincentis:> Also you can’t trust what image people have in their minds when you say writer. When you say writer you’re releasing responsibility of description in their minds of what you are and that can be so many things to them.

<d:> Yeah and I’m not wearing a seatbelt. (laughter)

<a:> I described a teacher I had who only talked about writing in the context of drinking or drugging and we got a bit on the myth of writers> That whole disorientation of the senses thing that Rimbaud started or at least he announced it since people were disorienting their senses but he’s the first person to claim that it was a necessity or something at least for him has already been proven many times over to be true for certain individuals and it also has been proven to be true that people like that burn out and coast on really bad work well into their old age like Wordsworth and Bob Dylan and what really bothers me is people who allow that to happen. People like your teacher or people who would give someone like Neil Young way more credit than he deserves for bad music because of what he did before. And to walk around in Windermere thinking every word that comes out of your mouth is mountain dew. Like when R.E.M. comes out with a new album, for every new album, they always say "yeah I really think this is the best album we’ve done since...". I’m always amazed at the distance of what their perception of what they’re doing is and me the average fan perceives them to be doing. What I find scary is someone who wants to keep making things. Right now I’m lined up with what I’m doing, I’m very aware of what’s strong and what’s flawed with what I do. I’m afraid one day I will lose that because we were talking when you’re writing and you’re imagining your audience and you’re playing to a friend that you’re playing to or writing to and it keeps you true. Those guys have lost touch with that first person they were thinking of when they wrote the song, their gf or something, and they’ve lost touch with their audience not in the way you usually say lost touch with their audience but they’ve lost touch in the sense that they can’t hear their music like the audience can hear it, anymore and then it’s bad. That’s when they start to suck.

<a:> You had a line like "Now that I’m older I just want to say something true." It’s such a simple line but for some reason that’s the line that sticks out in my mind. We were talking about irony and the different kinds of irony and I was wondering if you really believe that line.>

<d:> Well I probably always want to have it both ways. What I hear most commonly about the silver jews songs is "you know it’s strange, the songs are funny and they’re sad." Sometimes they’re sad and funny at the same time sometimes a section is funny or sad but you never tip the scale too much to one side or the other. I guess that comes from the only way I know how to try to be as smart as I can be but also be benign. In a sense I think growing up in the 80’s a lot of humor was ironic and speech just became ironic, American speech was ironic and it was sharp edged and there was submerged anger in it and I liked it when I was growing up but it became tiring and it wasn’t practically useful for situations I found myself in when I needed to speak.

<d:> This might sound funny but I found watching Conan O’brien, when he first started, (and I still watch him), to have been in a lot of ways a watershed in the culture in that he took whatever David Letterman started in the ‘80s, who I really blame for that kind of nihilistic irony of the ‘80s spreading through the culture, I don’t want to say blame, but I locate it in him and his powerful sense of humor. Conan bridged a gap between intelligence and kindness that I hadn’t really seen before. I started to watch it and I found it to be inspiring and comforting, funny and touching. All the things I would like songs to be like, obviously not weighed so much towards joking and humor like Conan O’Brien but the intentions were clear. So when I say something like, "I just want to say something true", I mean that. I mean that. It’s like I told you before, sometimes I have to lie to say something true, sometimes I have to deflect emotion through humor to say something true and sometimes you have to be balls-out-sentimental to say something true.

<a:> It’s harder to say what you really mean. Do you feel sometimes you have to create a new persona? You talked about interviews and now you say you grew a beard and everything... You said you can’t trust someone who has a beard, but most people who grow a beard they just grow a beard. It seems like you just grew a beard so you could have an excuse.

<d:> Yes. But most people just grow a beard because they grow a beard. Some people grow a beard for entirely practical reasons-like it makes my face look fuller or some guy got a knife cut-but I think a truism like that, I stand by that. You can go down on the street and everybody has something to hide. I think of a lot of academics with beards. You see a lot of rock musicians with beards. People who are in front of people on a daily basis, performing for people, receiving the attention of all those eyes, whether it’s 20 kids in a classroom or a thousand people in a honky tonk. I stick by that. You’re not going to change my mind. ?

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