A Conversation with Garth Greenwell
BY NICHOLAS Z. LIU
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for many other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His second book, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the Prix Sade, among others. A New York Times Notable Book, it was named a Best Book of 2020 by over thirty publications. His new novel, Small Rain, was published in September. His cultural criticism has appeared widely, and he writes regularly about books, music, and film for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
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I first met Garth Greenwell at the NYS Summer Writers Institute, where I was a student and he a Writer-in-Residence. On a panel, I had the pleasure of discussing with him his acclaimed works of fiction, Cleanness and What Belongs to you. He spoke with the same eloquence, fluidity, and insight that one finds in his writing. And he is generous and encouraging; after the Institute, we met up for coffee—it turned out we lived in the same neighborhood—a year later, it was at the same coffee shop that we conducted this interview on Small Rain.
Nicholas Z. Liu: You once said in an interview, “The kind of sentence I’m drawn to, which constantly falls back on itself in correction or hesitation or defeat but is also drawn forward by the demands of rhythm and cadence, feels mimetic of desire.” We are familiar with this circuitous kind of sentence, from What Belongs to You and Cleanness, which tries to portray experiences faithfully, and maneuver inadequate language into something less inadequate. It seems to me that Small Rain at points admits the inadequacy of language outright: the narrator says, “They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description.” This is echoed in other sections of the book, for example the descriptions of certain artworks’ effects on the narrator. I’m interested in this shift. Could you share your thoughts on the capacity of language and how that might have informed this book?
Garth Greenwell: This book is a departure from the first two books in some important ways. It’s set in America, and in many ways it’s about America. Both What Belongs to You and Cleanness were about being a foreigner, they were about being an American abroad; this book is set in America, in a small, midwestern town. Also, though I wouldn’t want to reduce them to this, it’s true that the first two books were about a kind of erotic or sexual adventure, and in this book there’s almost no sex. And yet I do think Small Rain is about adventure. It’s obviously a sort of adventure about what happens to the narrator, his experience of being imperiled, of an utterly unprecedented experience of pain, but it’s also about the experience of seeing a stable, enduring love as an adventure.
Also it does feel to me that this book is part of the same project as the first two books. I’ve always been interested in experiences of the body in extremity, which this book begins with, and I’m also interested—and I guess I would say this is the underlying current of everything I write—in the process of how human beings make meaning. I think we do that in sex, we do that in love, we do that in art, and also we do that through ideas of God. All of those things—the experience of sex, the experience of profound love, the question of God, the question of art—are things for which language is inadequate, in the way that language is inadequate for the kind of pain that the narrator is struck by in the beginning of Small Rain.
I hope that the formal techniques that have animated all the books are attempts to make language adequate to things for which it is not adequate. And in that, as I’ve talked about before, the kind of sentence I write has a long history in the work of writers who have attempted to do that. But really I think all serious artists tend to do that; it is simply a problem of art that we are taking impulses, feelings, ideas that are not material, that are beyond the material, and we are trying to force some material reality to be adequate to them. When you look at Cézanne, you see Cézanne struggling to make his work adequate to apples, not just to the physical object but to the act of perceiving them, and the materials he has to do that with are inadequate. And so he has to do weird things to those materials to try to make them more adequate. I think that’s what all serious writers do.
NZL: To me the narrator’s endeavor to describe the ineffable seems to mirror the process of writing about these topics. What was that like?
GG: I think that’s true—and I also think that it’s something everyone experiences. I like to talk about how important a certain kind of mystical writing has been to me, the attempt to find a language that could be plausibly adequate for talking about God, who is beyond all things, and certainly beyond all language. But apophasis is something that all of us experience all the time. The question with which the book begins—a doctor says, “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain”—that is such an absurd question, and I think everyone, confronted with that question, would just be like: What do you mean? The scale of one to ten is utterly incommensurate with what I’m experiencing. We feel that all the time. When you experience love, when you experience a great work of art, when at the end of an opera you’re reduced to tears, and someone says, What are you feeling?, your immediate response—and I think this is true whether you’re a writer or not—is just that this medium is utterly inadequate for what you want to say. That’s why we have aesthetic writing; language has to take on something in surplus of denotative meaning, it has to take on affective resources of rhythm, of image, of certain patterns of syntax that are not reducible to denotative meaning. That’s when language becomes art, when we try to face up to this problem of the utter inadequacy of language, an inadequacy that all of us have experienced.
NZL: That reminds me of the novel’s references to… well, is it a novel?
GG: Yes, yes, it is a novel. Does it say that?
NZL: Yeah, it does. I wanted to confirm because some people called Cleanness a novel or a short story collection, but really it was a song cycle, as you had called it.
GG: Yeah, it’s interesting to think about this book as the first book that I’ve written consciously as a novel. The second book I don’t think of as a novel. The first book I do think of as a novel, but I didn’t write it thinking it was a novel. Both of those books were written in pieces, and I never had to think I was writing a book, I could just think, I’m working on this very manageable, small thing. This is the first time I began a project thinking of it as a novel, and that’s another way of looking at this book formally, and maybe that’s a more profound departure from the first two books. It has what Aristotle talks about as Unity of Action, maybe, if the action is illness and the narrator’s response to illness, then there is a single arc of energy that goes from the very first sentence to the very last sentence. That’s different from any of the other books.
NZL: You once mentioned that novels operate like operas, in the way that there are moments of intense energy, or arias, and then there are recitatives.
GG: The way that I write novels—I don’t think all novels are like that. But that was the narrative model I had.
NZL: I do see that in this novel. The novel references Frank Bidart’s poem “Injunction”: to nail something “outside // time.” I feel a lot of great poems do that; poetic forms allow poets to separate words and phrases from their relationship to time. Prose on the other hand, I feel, usually has a different relationship. In fiction workshops we are told to move from cause to effect and to advance the plot. Small Rain feels very lyrical, and it seems to operate more like a poem at points than a novel.
GG: I think that’s true. I mean, I am interested in cause and consequence, and this is a novel of cause and consequence. There is a given, and you have the question of fate, or luck—something just happens to the narrator that is utterly removed from his agency. Everything else is a consequence of that. But in some sense his agency is irrelevant throughout the novel: one of the novel’s central questions is, Is he going to survive? which he has no control over. But his agency is involved in the question of what he’s going to do with this event, what meaning he’s going to make of it. In that sense it is an inner adventure rather than an outer adventure, and so it has a different relationship to cause and consequence.
It’s true that this book is constructed in a fairly aria-recitative form, which is something the novel pokes fun at itself for: the way the narrator can just spin up verbal, philosophical, affective charge out of anything. There’s an aria about a potato chip, which I hope is quite funny. I think that’s just my way of writing, in part because of my background in opera and lyric poetry, to seek out emotional heat as opposed to a narrative built on a strict logic of cause and consequence. I think that has been constant throughout all the books, and even when there is, as I hope there is, a kind of urgent narrative energy, that always feels secondary to me to the real adventure, which is this kind of interior adventure, the question not of what is narratively going to happen, but what meaning the narrator is going to make of it.
NZL: Your discussion of interior and exterior adventures reminds me of what Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay “On Being Ill.” She says, “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and nonexistent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes.” I find this quote very relevant to Small Rain. Your prose of consciousness seems very embodied. Was this essay ever an influence to you? And could you share your thoughts on writing embodied consciousness?
GG: The idea of writing embodied consciousness is really essential to me. I do know that essay, and it’s funny that I was not consciously thinking of it when I was working on this book. But the whole question of what I think of as embodiedness, embodied experience, embodied consciousness, is a preoccupation of all the books. What Virginia Woolf describes in that quote as “literature” I would just say is one tradition of literature. I think there is a countercurrent that is really alive to bodies: Tristram Shandy is alive to the body, and to the way that the body affects consciousness; also the mystical writers that I’ve been talking about. Which is interesting because even though they’re so concerned with the transcendence of their bodies, they’re absolutely invested in the body and bodily experiences. So I don’t think that’s a true statement about literature in general, but I do think it’s a true statement about a certain tradition, maybe especially a western tradition of novel-writing. But of course Woolf is absolutely right, the whole Cartesian Cogito is just a radical error, there is no separating consciousness from embodied experiences. I love Plato and the tradition that arises out of Plato, but the whole endeavor of Platonic abstraction, this whole attempt to make thinking immune to embodied experience and to separate an idea of reality from material existence, I think that’s just radically wrong. This whole book is about how pain affects thinking, how being on Oxycontin affects the way you think, and not just necessarily in negative ways. I think this is also true in Cleanness—the kind of thinking that happens when one is having a certain kind of sexual encounter, that’s also about how the experiences of the body affect the experiences of the mind.
NZL: I’m really interested in one experience of the mind—the chip aria. In the novel you write about “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by Keats, specifically how the word “silken” places the readers in that scene, next to the sacrificial cow, because touch is more intimate than sight or sound. But the novel takes it further—taste is even more intimate. The narrator eats a chip, one that is “entirely engineered,” and the almost-orgasm that he feels is a “deformation of our natural response designed for addiction.” In a way the novel is an ode to humans, our ingenuity, our power over ourselves and over nature.
GG: That’s so interesting. I mean you’re quite right, but I hadn’t connected the meditations on the senses and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to the potato aria. But yeah, absolutely. In one sense, the book is an ode to human ingenuity, not just in the potato chip aria but also the fact that the narrator survives thanks to this medical technology that surrounds him. But also the novel is about the utter inadequacy of that, the fact that our technology can only control so much, can only protect us from so much. That’s true in the medical crisis, but also in the incident with the storm that knocks a tree onto a house that had just been renovated: that too is about how nature is so far beyond human control. I don’t know how emphatic this is in the book, but it is also a meditation on climate change, which is something that reminds us how paltry human agency is. And the stuff about American politics, too—there is this irrationality that we seem entirely unequipped to meet and manage, that defeats our ingenuity and our agency. So I think you’re right that it’s a meditation on how extraordinary human ingenuity is, but also how paltry and inadequate it is in the face of reality. You know, it’s funny, this is only the third conversation I’ve had about the book, so I don’t know anything about it yet; it’s a harder book to talk about than the previous two.
NZL: At the Institute, you did say that great art is more intelligent than the artist.
GG: Not even great art, I think just anytime form is functioning, the art becomes smarter than the artist. I guess this is another question of ingenuity and agency: there are forces beyond individual agency, individual ingenuity, at work in the text, that I think create an intelligence that’s not one’s own.
NZL: In this book I found many points of tension or contradiction at work. There is a discussion about beauty and destruction being two sides of the same coin, and there are these moments where the police repress protests from whom they are supposed to protect, officers stand at attention near a shackled prisoner. I also recall an instance where the narrator talks about wanting to gaze into others yet he doesn’t want to be gazed into. Could you speak more about these?
GG: When you look at something carefully enough, contradictions emerge. I don’t know if the narrator in that scene experiences the prisoner as a threat, maybe he does. The prisoner is certainly presented as a threat: he’s in chains, he’s wearing a prison jumpsuit, he has these two armed guards near him. But I think the narrator is more fascinated by him. The narrator does want to look at everyone, it’s true, but then he also feels this inhibition; it’s not just that he himself doesn’t want to be looked at, but also that he recognizes that there’s always an issue in gazing on the lives of others. He compares it to looking into lit windows at night, which is obviously a morally questionable activity. So there’s this question of, Is the very act of looking an infringement on the agency of others, or on their right to privacy? And yet he’s drawn to the lives of others because he’s curious about them, so I do think that’s a contradiction, or at least a tension.
I think that’s a very minor instance of something that he thinks of pretty often. At one point he quotes Walter Benjamin, who says every document of civilization is a document of barbarism; and the narrator is aware that all of these things he loves and finds value in, like the institutions of liberal democracy, like opera, like literature, like his life and his house in Iowa City with his partner, all of these are predicated on a kind of underlying violence. I think the narrator entertains the possibility that this underlying violence is just what humanness is—and maybe not just humanness, maybe the phenomenon of having a body entails that one’s existence is predicated on the exploitation of others. He entertains the possibility that that substratum of violence is just the state of the world. He’s not a utopian, he doesn’t think there’s some organization of human life that could be pure of that, and for that reason, these structures that may be predicated upon violence but also serve to restrain violence feel precious to him.
So this idea that maybe art itself is always predicated upon violence, even if that violence is merely the violence of perceiving another person; maybe there’s no way to engage with others that’s pure, maybe the simple act of looking at someone, and therefore unavoidably, because this is how humans are wired, thinking about them—maybe even that barest form of representation, mental representation, forget about putting them in a novel or a painting or a film—maybe that infringement upon the agency of others is morally questionable. And yet he feels that art is infinitely valuable, that human life, human culture, can be predicated on violence and still be valuable, and then be a bulwark against further violence—that’s a kind of contradiction or paradox or tension that the narrator is interested in. And also this idea that the institutions of liberal democracy can be predicated on and sullied by violence and still be immeasurably precious. Because in any possible version of reality, if we let these institutions, which are the product of centuries of very slow triumphs of human agency and ingenuity—we had to invent the idea of human rights, we had to invent the idea of a kingdom of ends, we had to invent the idea that lives have value—if we give these things up, what replaces them is going to be worse. That’s a tension the narrator is interested in: can we find a way both to recognize the violence that lies at the founding of these institutions, can we recognize their inadequacies, and still, can we recognize how precious they are and fight for them? That’s the question of America at this moment. The right does not value these institutions, and the left has become so thoroughly critical of them that it has become difficult to defend them. I think that’s a huge problem for the left, because I think these institutions are precious, and hard won. Never before in the history of the world has there been a political system that has its own correction built into it, a political system that can self-correct and still be continuous. That has never existed before, and we are at the point of letting it pass away. It will be an unspeakable tragedy if that happens.
NZL: I find it interesting that in the novel, you use the subjective, a first-person, maybe even unreliable, narrator to discuss social issues. You aim to point out something about the collective through the individual.
GG: The idea that we can do that is for me baked pretty deep into the whole endeavor of art and the endeavor of thinking. The idea that individual experience can make available broadly applicable revelation is just a gamble of art. That’s also an idea that had to be invented, and I think it lies at the heart of the kind of literary endeavor I’m engaged in: the idea that the particular can lead to the universal. To me, that’s the deep mystery of art. If you look at one of Cézanne’s apples, say, what is this force that allows this utter devotion to the particular—Cézanne trying to get exactly right what happens when this light at this moment strikes this edge of a plate—how can that then reveal something universal? I’m not even sure what it reveals—it reveals a feeling, it reveals something about perception, and also it creates an emotional response that feels universal. So how’s that possible? For the narrator that’s the deep mystery, and also the big question of this book, or one of the big questions. The narrator’s whole sense of the value of his life depends upon this gamble, this weird alchemical power art has, which I have no way to account for, somehow to produce out of devotion to the particular an opening to the universal.
NZL: An example I’m thinking of in the book is the discussion of the sparrow poem. As the narrator mentions, by particularizing the individual sparrow and connecting it to a child, by connecting the individual to something else, the individual is made to feel more individualistic, specific and fully fleshed out. This I think is mirrored when the narrator is in the PET scan machine and feels claustrophobic. By reciting that poem, he’s connecting himself to a whole lineage of poetry, and in that way he is more of a subject.
GG: I think that’s true. The narrator has a profound experience of isolation, and he comes to realize the extent to which his human individuality depends upon relations to others, especially to his partner L. He realizes that the data that the doctors gather from him, even though it is specific to his body, actually makes him less of an individual, it abstracts him from his individuality, and that it’s only in the two hours a day that he gets to be with L. that his individuality is restored to him.
About the PET scan scene—so that chapter begins what I think is formally the weirdest thing in the book, which is this fifteen page essay on the George Oppen poem. I hope that essay serves as a vindication of the value of poetry, the value of the humanities in general, and the value of art. But then he’s put in this chamber for the scan, he goes through this harrowing experience of being in a tube for an hour, and the question is: Is all that stuff that he’s just been celebrating, vindicating, is that any use to him? And he finds out, or seems to find out, that no, none of those resources of culture, none of that is helpful to him in this really quite extreme experience. He spent his life memorizing poems and none of them are there to comfort him. And then at the very end of the chapter these two words, just two words of the poem and nothing more, arrive; and in some sense they do serve as a kind of salvation. In my reading of that scene, to the question of What can art do for us in these moments of existential crisis, the answer is almost nothing, and all of salvation resides in that “almost.”
NZL: It’s curious that the narrator has spent his whole life with art and yet there’s almost nothing it can do for him. He says art “humanized [him].” And when describing the Mahler piece sung by Kathleen Ferrier, he says it “unmade me and remade me somehow around it.”
GG: It almost doesn’t come, it’s almost useless, and that almost is infinitely precious. I talk about this experience as a kind of limit experience for the narrator, but obviously it is not a limit experience in the context of all human experience: he’s not being tortured, he’s not really imprisoned. Human beings are devastatingly good at finding ways to strip humanity from each other, and yet I do think it is true that our relationship to art is utterly inalienable. I remember one year at Skidmore, when I was a student there, Robert Pinsky read a poem in which he talks about a poet who was imprisoned at Guantanamo, who wrote poems with his finger nail on styrofoam cups. In Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s great film about the Holocaust, there’s only one time that we hear the articulate voices, or an articulate voice, of the victims of the Holocaust. We hear their screams and their cries throughout the film, but the only time we hear an articulate voice is when we hear a song, an actual, nonfictional historical document, a song that was composed by one of the prisoners at Auschwitz. Even in Auschwitz, human beings made art. It does seem to be the case that we have not found anything to do to each other that finally alienates us from art. This is something that can only be an article of faith, because who knows, maybe we are inventing right now the technique or the technology that will finally alienate us from art; it is an article of faith to say that human beings cannot be alienated from art.
NZL: You mentioned in a previous interview that your fiction tries to inhabit a sort of lyric or queer time. Small Rain seems to inhabit a kind of sick time as well. I’m curious about how you imagine these nonlinear modes of time would come together in your novel.
GG: The book is obviously really interested in time, and all of my work has been interested in lyricality understood as a certain kind of relationship with time. Sickness does create a space where the usual movement of time is disrupted. The question is, What does that leave possible for the novel? You know, if you set a kind of timer ticking in the beginning of a novel, it allows you to do anything you want with time. The great example of that is Virginia Woolf, in Mrs. Dalloway: the fact that Big Ben is ringing the hours means that she can go anywhere in time she wants to go, because there’s always this anchor of Big Ben orienting us in the book. In a similar way, in Small Rain we have this time of the hospital, the rituals of the hospital: the fact that every eight hours he gets a Heparin shot, the fact that every morning they take an X-ray. Time is constantly going in the world of the novel, and it moves in a single direction—we begin at the beginning of his stay, and we end at the end. That linearity frees the narrator, or it frees the novel to go anywhere in the narrator’s experience or thinking. I do think that’s a modernist structure, a modernist way of organizing time in the novel, and it’s one that feels lyrical. Again I probably think this because of poetry, but I think the project of all my books till this point has been taking charged moments and wanting to stop time to try to unpack those moments, to try to in some sense take experience as the object of consciousness, to ask what is experience, what does it mean to be an embodied consciousness in this place at this time. The lyric approach to time allows one to unpack that. I guess it’s a legacy of phenomenology, which is another crucial step in this tradition that I try to work in, which began with Augustine and moves forward to the novel of consciousness.
NZL: If in your previous books the narrator is constantly trying to faithfully capture his experiences through this self-modulating prose of consciousness, in this book the circuitry of language seems to occur at the level of paragraphs and chapters. The narrator seems to be trying to recover a life that he’s lost. And you also kind of equate life with art. When L. sees a good work of art, he says, “Pura vida,” and in the very last sentence of the book, after the narrator’s life is given back to him, he says, “Pure life.”
GG: That’s a beautiful observation, thank you. I do think this is a book about life. My narrator has not always been fully committed to life, to his own life, to life in general. I think What Belongs to You and Cleanness are really death-haunted books, certainly the second chapter of Cleanness is. The narrator’s ability to send up these dust-funnels of meaning, his ability to find meaning anywhere, even in a potato chip, is counterbalanced by a really severe nihilism. He senses that he is always only ever a couple of inches away from seeing existence as utterly void of value. He’s standing on a precipice: a step in one direction, existence is pregnant with value; a step in the other direction, existence is entirely void of value. This is a book in which value wins. This experience of literally being on the precipice of death, of having the world stripped away from him, in some sense delivers the world back to him. There is a way that he comes to find that he is on the side of life. I hope in the novel that that’s true, but I know it’s not the full truth of this character, and maybe at some point I have to write a book in which the other side of his sensibility wins. But this is a book about finding oneself committed to one’s life. At the heart of that for me is L., this relationship. In a way that I think is maybe almost inevitable, the narrator has allowed himself to be dulled to that relationship, dulled just by the experience of everydayness, and he has the value of that relationship returned to him. He becomes alive again to how much he loves L., how important it is for him to be loved by L. For me, it is a book about love more than anything else. In some ways it is a love letter, the narrator’s love letter to L. in that L. is really at the heart of everything that has been valuable about his life.
NZL: That’s beautiful—I was wondering if you were familiar with Lacan and his work at all?
GG: I read Lacan in undergrad and have forgotten pretty much everything, so you’ll have to explain to me.
NZL: What you had said about love returning to the narrator reminded me of the Lacanian notion of desire. There’s a circular motion where we chase after an object of desire, miss it almost by necessity—it’s unattainable, due to the lack in the Symbolic Order, and we chase after it again. We can see it in your prose—it’s a kind of prose of desire where sentences constantly fall back onto themselves. But we can also interestingly see it in the last scene: the dog overshoots the ball and has to return to retrieve it. I was curious if Lacan was any influence to you at all.
GG: That particular moment in Lacan? I don’t think so. But the psychoanalytic idea that desire is always lack is certainly something that I encountered in my education. And it’s not just psychoanalysis. You know psychoanalysis in general I’ve always found less compelling than other systems that try to organize our thinking around the human. Theology is more compelling, phenomenology is more compelling. There’s nothing objective in this preference, it’s just what one responds to. Poetry is more compelling to me. You know, this is all in Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is all about not just that the object of desire is unattainable, but that we want the object of desire to be unattainable, because the moment we attain it, happiness flees. It’s also this old, apparently false, poetic etymology of desire, which is that it comes from “de-sideris,” which means away from, separated from the stars. So the idea is that desire is what we feel when we look at the stars, which are utterly unattainable. It’s such a beautiful idea even if it’s not historically or etymologically true, and I guess I’ve always wondered about it. If having the object of desire has dulled the narrator to the experience of desire, then the recognition that we are always, all of us, pressed up against the reality of death, restores that value.
Yeah, the dog may overshoot the ball, but she gets it in the end! And not only does she get it, she brings it back to repeat the joy of chasing after it. The narrator experiences his relationship with L. again as a kind of fullness—and not just his relationship with L., also everything about the texture of the dailiness of his experience, living in this house in this college town in this red state; all of it is filled up with wonder for him, and that is reality too. Our orientation toward existence should be one of absolute wonder at every moment. Of course we can’t live like that, but that’s what I mean when I say being stripped of the world returns the world to him: he has that wonder restored to him, and that wonder centers around L. So in this instance maybe it isn’t true that one cannot have the object of one’s desire, because the narrator has that object restored to him, and at least for a moment, lives in the fullness of attainment, by which I mean a full awareness of the wonder of that object.
NZL: I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind answering some quick, fun questions.
GG: Of course! Happy to.
NZL: How do you feel about dating apps like Hinge?
GG: I’ve never used Hinge. When I left the United States to go to Bulgaria in 2009, I don’t think any of those apps existed. Certainly Grindr didn’t exist. In Bulgaria, I started hearing about these things, and when I came back to America for the first time, which I think was in 2011 or 2012, I downloaded Grindr just to see what it was. I have complicated feelings about them. My most fundamental feeling is that this is not a great way for human beings to engage with each other, and that swiping left is always a degrading response to another human being. Dating has not really been an important experience in my life, but cruising, analog cruising, feels to me humanly richer as an experience, as a possibility of human sociality, than Grindr does.
NZL: And what’s a piece of art that’s startled you recently?
GG: That’s a great question. There is currently an incredible Peter Hujar exhibition down at the Ukrainian Museum on E 6th, I think, up until September 1st. I really recommend it. There’s a big room, and within that big room there’s a smaller room in which they have all these photos he did at Palermo, which I’d never seen even though some of them were famous. They were these very Diane Arbus-y photos of disabled children in a hospital. Then there are all these photos that he did of the Palermo crypts of these dead bodies, that were in his first book and are extraordinary. Utterly startling, amazing. The very first photo you see when you walk into the exhibit is a portrait of a beautiful young woman holding some flowers. It looks like a beautiful spring day. And then among the crypt photos there is this desiccated corpse laid down along with dead flowers—that was very startling to me, really, really great. I’m going to go again before I head back to Iowa.