13 Questions for George Salis
George Salis is the author of the novels Sea Above, Sun Below and Morphological Echoes. He’s the editor of The Collidescope, an online publication that celebrates innovative and neglected literature, and he hosts The Collidescope Podcast. His fiction has been translated into Russian and Brazilian Portuguese. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing.
Read an excerpt from Morphological Echoes here.
George, self-portrait
What are you reading now?
I recently finished reading Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt. It was something of a parting gift from my friend Chris Via. I read it on my flight to Athens, Greece, and finished reading it while hunting for apartments here. The book exclusively features conversations with authors who have passed away, from Octavia Butler to David Foster Wallace, and each exchange is an example of something that is also passing away: the ability to communicate at a high level, to express abstract ideas, complex emotions, beautiful metaphors, and more. I found the book engaging and inspiring throughout, and it gave me the urge to read more, write more, and interview more authors on my podcast. Considering how burnt out I’ve been feeling lately, this is saying a lot. Some of my favorite conversations were those with Carlos Fuentes and William H. Gass.
To pander to the general reader is also to condescend to them. To expect a book to fit one’s narrow perspective on what a book is capable of is to straitjacket that art form.
What book(s) most altered your taste in literature?
Ulysses by James Joyce and Women and Men by Joseph McElroy proved to me how fruitful months-long deep reading experiences can be. To pander to the general reader is also to condescend to them. To expect a book to fit one’s narrow perspective on what a book is capable of is to straitjacket that art form. From Moby-Dick to Gass’ The Tunnel, the possibilities of structure, both on the level of the sentence and the book as a whole, are endless.
Describe the last time a work of literature affected you physically?
I’ve been reading a great deal of Garielle Lutz lately, including her Backwardness, a nearly 1,000-page notebook of “miserabilia” spanning decades. Between that and her latest short story collection, Worsted, Lutz’s work elicits a sense of bodily horror, existential dread, and loneliness one tear short if not for the necessary numbness. Her exquisitely worded and constructed sentences arouse me in a way other than what you’re asking, as a writer who deeply admires a master of the craft.
Please share a passage from the book nearest at hand.
As I’ve alluded to, I’ve since moved to Athens in an act of artistic and political self-exile. I’m not the first, and certainly won’t be the last (I know writers who are in the process of a move or wish they could undertake one). This is all to say that my extensive collection of books has been put in storage, except for those that I’ve stuffed in my luggage. What books should one bring on a permanent move such as this? Those that are bigger on the inside than the outside, as well as the rare ones, those that can’t be read on my e-reader, something I have to use out of pure necessity rather than preference.
The first book I fished out of my suitcase is Gilbert Sorrentino’s Gold Fools, a book written entirely in the interrogative. Here’s a random excerpt:
Was the desert that they now entered smooth and level, with plenty and to spare ergs, chalfonts and brills? Or was it a depressing, rock-strewn nightmare, or horror, of scattered stones and shardlike pebbles? Were there numerous washes and gullies? What is a wash? Is a wash a gully? Is a gully a crick? Is a crick a fata morgana? Or is it a creek? How many countless aeons ago had the washes been created? The gullies? The cricks, if cricks they be, or were? What is man, before such a lavish display of Nature's handiwork, not to mention God's? And what was man in the dawn of the past, countless aeons ago? And woman? What was she? Were the washes, water-wise, as dead as so many dried-out doornails? And what did that suggest regarding the fate of man who is born of woman, and then smells like a cut flower, even for a little space, before he withers and croaks? And what of woman who is born of woman? And animals of animals? What of jist ever'thin'? Did Hank say that digging in the washes would sometimes produce water and sometimes—gold?
I’m somewhat surprised by the Latin American aura with which this passage glows, coming as it does from a U.S. author, a wrongly neglected one at that. If the book moves me to do so, I hope to write about it after I read it.
How do you treat the books you read?
Forget the toenails and foreskins of saints, forget the crucifix. Books are the most sacred objects, and so death to those who dog-ear. I have a sizeable pile of bookmarks, often rescued from abandonment in the books themselves or sent with a purchase as a bonus. I still have the bookmark I found on the ground during my first year of middle school, a red laminated thing whose head is in the shape of a chicken, the long wattle perforated from the bookmark proper so that it can straddle a page if one chose to use it that way (I did not, have not). However, some years later, a decade or so, maybe longer, I suddenly realized that this silhouette was not the head of a chicken but the whole of a dinosaur, a brontosaurus perhaps, the wattle in truth a tail. Come to think of it, this change reflects a reverse evolution. Anyway, no, I’ve always, even as a kid, barely cracked open my paperbacks lest I wrinkle the spine, and I used to take notes on sticky notes but I’ve since transitioned to snapping photos of the pages and/or taking notes on my iPhone app, all of which I delete after I’ve finished writing a review or completing an interview.
To inhibit the imagination is a form of self-censorship. If you censor yourself, then you shouldn’t be writing in the first place.
What quality do you most appreciate in a novel?
Purpureal prose, of course, but also a willingness to depict the most grotesque grotesqueries of the imagination. To inhibit the imagination is a form of self-censorship. If you censor yourself, then you shouldn’t be writing in the first place. True writers must develop a pachydermatous skin because illiterate readers (an oxymoron that’s unfortunately alive and well) are bound to charge you with this or that thought crime.
Who is an author you feel should be more widely read?
I’ve spent many years promoting the work of wrongly neglected writers on The Collidescope and through the site’s companion podcast, so I would direct readers there if they want to discover rabbit holes within rabbit holes delving into largely unknown literature.
Going back to your question: being more widely read is perhaps a curse more than anything else, because most readers are really not worthy of the books they’re attempting and often failing to engage with, but if we assume that most readers were suddenly able to become literate, then I’d suggest, let’s say, Alan Singer, whose sentences sing serpentinely. He and I have both been unable to find a publisher for our latest books. His longtime publisher, Fiction Collective Two, turned him down despite praising the book. Similarly, the editor at McSweeney’s called my second novel, Morphological Echoes, “outrageously beautiful and ambitious” before hitting me with rejectionese. And so Alan was kind enough to allow me to publish an excerpt from his book, titled The Seahorse. Given the resources, I would publish it myself in a zeptosecond, along with a hardcover omnibus of his incredible violence triad.
What book are you avoiding reading?
I’ve long orbited Thomas Pynchon’s monsterpieces, having read everything else except Vineland, and now Shadow Ticket, and it’s long overdue that I read the biggest ones, namely Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. I’ve been telling myself that I’m saving them for a rainy day, yet I’ve weathered, and continue to weather, plenty of rainy days. So, instead of using them as umbrellas, perhaps I should think of them as outright eject buttons, atom bombs even. I will say that Alexander Theroux’s review of Against the Day for the Wall Street Journal made the book sound like a kindred spirit to my own Morphological Echoes.
Books that are not only miraculously written but are miracles by dint of existing at all […]
What novel would you add to our current season (on Family) and why?
The first that comes to mind is Don DeLillo’s White Noise because I think its themes of familial dysfunction in the midst of physical and audiovisual pollution are relevant today, although I must admit it’s been a very long time since I’ve read it. Much more recently, I finally read Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, which features an excellently wrought family dynamic, relatable and relevant for different reasons. I then made a pilgrimage to his hometown in Asheville, North Carolina. I saw everything from the birth-bed in his home to the headstone of his grave.
What book would you like to be the last one you read before you shuffle off this mortal coil?
Am I reading on my deathbed? Am I on a nosediving plane? The circumstances might affect my choice. I’ll assume something more peaceful, slow-going. And so I’d need an eternal book, osmotic: Finnegans Wake, a book whose language will crackle and sparkle as my neurons fizzle and flounder. And maybe in that glorious glossolalia are the answers to riddles I’ll need when passing through the multitudinous gates of the Duat.
If you were to design a literature course around a singular word, what word would that be, and what books might appear on the reading list?
Miracle.
Books that are not only miraculously written but are miracles by dint of existing at all, because the way society works, particularly in the United States, there’s no room for true artistic endeavors, no time to dream and tinker, to wrestle with one’s imagination and pin it down like a Nabokovian lepidoptera. If one has managed to write a grand and girthy book that doesn’t compromise on any level, a task often taking a decade or longer, then one has joined the pantheon of Borges’ fools against the odds, against every grain of the Sahara and then some. My Morphological Echoes is the latest in a long yet fast-fading tradition. Others include: The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman, Underworld by Don DeLillo, The Tunnel by William H. Gass, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux, Women and Men by Joseph McElroy, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, Invidicum by Michael Brodsky, Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes, and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, et al. Only those who have completed such an impossible project can fully understand each other.
In what character in literature do you most recognize yourself?
I don’t really read literature to find myself or isolate my characteristics. Quite the opposite, I read to discover other ways of being and thinking, so no characters come to mind. Having said that, I did find myself relating quite a bit to Mathew McConaughey’s character’s nihilism in True Detective, which is likely for the worse rather than the better.
Why read literature?
I’m going to have to quote Cosmo Kramer here: “Well, why go to a fine restaurant, when you can just stick something in the microwave? Why go to the park and fly a kite, when you can just pop a pill?” In all seriousness, literature is one of the highest forms of art, one of the greatest ways of communicating in the moment or across dizzying generations. With technology making people dumber and lazier by the day, I think our only salvation will be to engage with art and ways of expression that are both familiar and strange. People are using ChatGPT to write, or more accurately regurgitate, their wedding vows, or using it as their surrogate wives, period. Soon, even basic communication may be beyond the grasp of the masses, let alone expressing complicated feelings and abstract ideas. Instead of Instagram, read a work of classic literature. Instead of candy-crushing your soul into oblivion, read a book from a country you’re not familiar with. Instead of flirting with your operating system, start a book club. Instead of TikTok, learn a new language. Instead of Netflix, watch a film by Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr. The range of human experience is far vaster than people realize. They don’t even know what they’re missing because they can’t even conceive of it, and they certainly don’t have the words for it. Nota bene: wordlessness is another pandemic in and of itself.
I’ll bring this exchange full circle by saying: we need more Silverblatts.
To learn more about George Salis, visit his website. Read his novel Sea Above, Sun Below. Check out interviews and reviews with great authors at The Collidescope, which George edits.