Diana Hamilton's Wit Burns Through New Interview

Bryan Woods interviews Diana Hamilton about her new book, God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), for Triangle House Review. Great intro: "Diana’s wit is so sharp—I felt so burned by one of her answers in this interview that it took me two months to work up the courage to send a new question—and her reflections on blurred identity, friendship, love, sex, and animals are so rigorous, they made me want to work harder at everything to which I apply my brain." From their conversation:

BW: ...I know this is all a cliche. Everyone knows academic writing is political, or unreadable, or navel gazing, or whatever, but while I was reading God Was Right I kept wondering Why? Why aren't the people who devote themselves the most to something always the best at it? Why does this book feel so different?

And to go back to something you just said (and which struck me as profound): "so much of reading for pleasure is about agreement." I think that's absolutely true, and I'm surprised that I have almost no mental framework to draw from in terms of framing an argument (that word!) or articulating a thought in a way that feels like it's worth sharing, if it's an agreement. I've tried to sit down a number of times to write about music or books I love, and always wind up giving up, because "omg lol it's soooo good" feels like enough. How did you approach this when writing the book?

DH: You are saying so many nice and mean things at once! You accuse me of academic rigor, you read me for the unnecessary Barthes references, and you wink at the fact that God Was Right is full of such shortcuts.

I’ll bite, though. I didn’t think I had to approach the problem—how hard it is to express agreement or admiration critically—because I took the shortcut of “these are poems, calm down.” I wanted to say, for example, “friendship is incredible.” There are many scholars who have said just that! But along the way, they have to “contribute to the discourse,” establish authority, hand-wring over method, period, and scope, decide whether the object of analysis is literature or art or ethics or health, attempt to obtain tenure, etc. It’s very difficult to meet these constraints and still give the impression you’re in love. You could write some Guardian-style popular science piece instead, but the scientists would admit they don’t know why or how friendship is curative; they’ve just designed some studies to find evidence that eating alone too much correlates with depression, and that “face-to-face” interactions are important for most people. 

Instead, you can just tell some stories about an exceptional friend...

Read on here.