Wayne Koestenbaum's Phone Call With Paul Holdengraber

Writer, scholar, and artist Wayne Koestenbaum took a phone call from interviewer-extraordinaire Paul Holdengraber (aka "A Phone Call From Paul"), and both the exchange itself and its transcription are now up at Literary Hub. "[T]he two discuss working in libraries, reading Proust for the first time, and what Holdengraber calls their shared 'quote-o-mania.'" A morsel:

PH: ...[I]n your book My 1980s, the first sentence of your essay on Susan Sontag is “Susan Sontag, my prose’s prime mover, ate the world.” Ate the world.

WK: Her restlessness and her avidity for all kinds of experience, particularly aesthetic experience and experiences of pain—I think the way she sought out extreme literatures and extreme films, but also extreme historical situations. I’m no Sontag here as a world traveler, or even as a cinephile, but those of us who look to arts to cauterize remain sensitive, I think, to the pain and the pleasure at the same time. It’s kind of on that threshold.

PH: Can you say something more by what you mean when you say “cauterize.”

WK: I think when there is a wound, you cauterize it by—I imagine you take a hot iron to something to seal the wound to prevent it from bleeding, and to provide anesthesia. I’m thinking again of that moment of Anna Moffo singing Mozart: cauterizes the wound of existence, let’s just say, with one pitch. The perfection with which that pitch is upheld, but with the lightest quivering vibrato changes. I would say that the accuracy of the pitch is what heals the wound, and it’s the vibration through the warm vibrato that prevents that moment of healing from being it’s own kind of death sentence or incarceration. You seal the wound, but then you remain open to flux and to vibration. It’s getting a little abstract.

PH: No, no, no, no, no. I think you’re developing what one might call an aesthetic or a philosophy of what literature, in the broadest possible sense, can possibly do for us. It provides solace, and is an irritant. It is so many different things at the same time. And in My 1980s you have this line where you say, “my mission in the 80s was to develop my aestheticism. My mission in the 90s was to justify my aestheticism.” What is your mission in the 2020s?

WK: My mission in the 2020s is to persevere in my aestheticism...

Read, listen, persevere, at Lit Hub.