Talk:Gordon Lish

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[edit] Genesis West

I started the literary magazine Chrysalis in the late 1950s at San Francisco State Univ. and made Gordon Lish co-editor from the second issue on. He later took over the magazine and renamed it Genesis West. Chrysalis was his first venture into the literary world and I believe his first short fiction publication. We have remained friends since then but we both have lost contact with one another over the years and several times. I also co-wrote a thriller novel with Lish that we never tried to market. He also was instrumental in helping me get my first agent in International Creative Managament. He was always extremely helpful to me and to any writer who came to him who Gordon thought of as deserving of his help. Contrary to the public persona -- that of being difficult and unpleasant, Gordon Lish was one of the kindest writer/editors I have met in a very long time in this business. His only criteria was that of excellence. All writing should be fresh, new, dangerous, risky -- that was what he stood for and that is what will go down in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century in the U.S.

John Herrmann


Ah, so you were behind Genesis West! As I was commenting on the Jack Gilbert page, someone really needs to write a wiki article about Gordon. He played a behind the scenes role for many, many writers who otherwise might never have been known. He published a few of my poems in TQ, and I felt very lucky.

His manner could be very eccentric and vitriolic, he was not diplomatic, and he was unabashedly biased toward whatever he happened to like. And more than any editor I have ever known, he truly cared about nurturing good writing, and was passionate about the writers whose work he liked. Once he decided he liked your work, there was almost literally nothing he would not do to encourage you further. He was also, not incidentally, an extraordinary editor-- his expert cuts helped to forghe Raymond Carver's distinctive voice. They don't make 'em like Gordon anymore.

If you would like to collaborate on an article about him, please let's take a crack at this.

Here's a story about my experience with Gordon Lish in 1963 and 1964. It's from Chapter 8 of the book GINNY GOOD (ISBN: 0972635750), published in 2004. You can read the whole book for free here (I just got all the rights back from the publisher.):

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggsyn1.html

And I'm sending out free cds of the whole fifteen-hour audio book...here's a sample chapter:

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch35m.mp3

But here's the part about Lish:

...The class was taught by Gordon Lish. He's sort of famous now, too—or he was there for a while, anyway. He was fiction editor at Esquire in the seventies. Then he was an editor at Knopf, ran prestigious writing seminars and made some kind of a stir in the publishing industry in the eighties by suing Harper's Magazine. The books he edited were critically acclaimed stylistic bare bones masterpieces but never seemed to make much money—things by guys like Don DeLillo and Barry Hannah and Rick Bass and Raymond Carver and Harold Brodkey and Cynthia Ozick and Amy Hempel—and the five or six books he wrote himself enjoyed some critical success themselves but made even less money, which made it hard to show any actual damages when he sued Harper's for publishing an unauthorized handout from one of his seminars. I'm not sure how it all came about.

Somewhere along the line, Gordon Lish had taken to calling himself "Captain Fiction" and charging all kinds of money to go to his seminars, and I guess it ticked him off that Harper's went around giving away what he had to say for the price of a magazine. Nor am I altogether sure what he got out of the lawsuit, either, but I think he won. All I know for a fact is that in the spring of 1963 you could get him for free if you were under twenty-one and for seven bucks a semester if you weren't. I got him for free myself--well, for the first semester anyway (and he was worth every nickel of it, too). The next semester I had to pay the seven bucks.

The College of San Mateo was still over at Coyote Point back then. If you've never heard of it and don't feel like looking it up on a map, Coyote Point is this rocky bunch of red clay cliffs and eucalyptus trees jutting out into San Francisco Bay, just south of the airport. The classrooms were old army barracks left over from World War II. Gordon Lish stormed into one of the dilapidated Quonset huts with a leather satchel under one arm. He had his own literary magazine called Genesis West and hung out with guys like Ken Kesey and Gregory Corso. His hair was short and blond and thick; he was sort of short and blond and thick in general.

The satchel under his arm had loose papers and books sticking out around the edges, as if it couldn't begin to contain all the wisdom he was eager to impart. His face was flushed. He was out of breath. His gray wool sport coat was rumpled. His tie was loose at the neck of a faded blue work shirt. He seemed pretty image conscious. He wrote his name on the blackboard. Big initials. Chalk chips flying here and there. I'm not an expert graphologist, by any means, but the way he screeched the "G" and the "L" across the slate made it clear that he wanted people to know he thought a lot of himself—and the way he scrawled the rest of his name showed that underneath all that initial bravado, he was as least as interested in making a buck as any self-respecting orthodontist might be. I thought that was a nice touch. If you want people to think you think a lot of yourself, you damn sure better have something to gain by it.

He thought the stuff I wrote had "merit." He liked finding people he thought might write serious fiction someday. He was interested in...


(Whoops. I have to leave stuff out here. I got in touch with Gordon Lish through his publisher to see if I could get his permission to quote a line or two from my copy of the forty-year-old mimeographed, coffee stained syllabus he passed out to the class. He said no. I couldn't use his quote. He declined to give me permission. Oh, well. It wasn't that great of a quote anyway.)


...No wonder none of his books ever made any money. Not making money was his criterion for writing serious fiction. I wish Danielle Steele had been teaching the class. Gordon Lish's dilemma was that on the one hand, he wanted to make big bucks, and on the other hand, making big bucks was anathema to the making of serious fiction. He seems to have solved it by charging all kinds of money to go to his seminars about how serious fiction shouldn't make any money.

I was the one who got him started in the seminar business, as a matter of fact. When the second semester was over, the College of San Mateo didn't renew his contract, so I called Lish up and talked him into continuing the class as a seminar. I had to be pretty persuasive, but he finally agreed, and for a hundred bucks each—in the form of a check made payable to the Chrysalis West Foundation—three other of his former CSM students and I all went over to his house in Burlingame and read our serious, dreary, puerile fiction out loud to each other. That was his first fiction seminar. He's parlayed it into a moneymaking bonanza over the years.

Back before I made Gordon Lish who he is today, the way we used to work it was that he would sit in my chair and I'd go up to his podium and read stuff about my idyllic childhood from the so-called journal I'd been sending to Ginny Good. He'd look up and beam sunbeams out his eyes at me and get all red in the face and tap the eraser end of a pencil on the desk whenever I got to something he wished he could have written himself.

It was when Gordon Lish didn't tap his eraser that I got skeptical. What the hell did he know, the fucking asshole? Here he was, pushing thirty, and still nothing but a two-bit part time teacher at the College of San Mateo. I think the College of San Mateo felt sort of sorry for him. That was probably how he got the job. He had a family to feed. He'd come there fresh from having been kicked out of Mills High School for telling kids they didn't have to hide under their desks during atom bomb attacks. The local papers took up his cause—he was Mario Savio before Mario Savio was Mario Savio—and the College of San Mateo took a stand for free speech and freedom of expression and gave him a part time job.

Personally, I think the real reason Gordon Lish got kicked out of Mills High School was for something as prosaic as not turning in lesson plans, but that wouldn't have gone very far toward calling yourself "Captain Fiction" and charging all kinds of money to hear what you have to say—so the story that got to the newspapers was that he got fired for telling his students that they didn't have to hide under their desks.

Despite his ambition (and no doubt in large part because of his ambition), however, he was a great teacher—not a good teacher, a great teacher. If he'd been a good teacher I probably would have written a book or two by now—but what Gordon Lish taught us was far more important than how to write a mere book or two here and there: the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian, for example. Now, that's a great thing to have learned. Think of all the people who don't know the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian! I've long since forgotten the difference myself, but think of all the people who never knew the difference in the first place!

I think it had something to do with Nietzsche. The other thing I know about Nietzsche is that he was the guy who said what didn't kill him made him strong. Ha! He was also the guy who was incurably insane the last twenty years of his life. What didn't kill the son of a bitch drove him nuts. Which would you rather be? Dead or nuts? Now that's a question with equally compelling answers, and ferreting out questions with equally compelling answers was what made Gordon Lish a great teacher. He even offered himself up as a sacrificial case in point. Nobody could tell for sure whether he was just a total fucking asshole or whether he was so strong and selfless he didn't mind people thinking he was a total fucking asshole if he thought somebody might get some serious fiction out of it someday.

But the real best thing about Gordon Lish was that, when I got to know Ginny better, I could tell her that I was taking a class from a guy who had his own literary magazine and hung out with Ken Kesey, and maybe she would think that was slick, and maybe she would like me. That was the quintessential best thing. That was the only thing. All I wanted was for Ginny to like me. I would have done anything...

Gerard Jones http://everyonewhosanyone.com

 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.142.21.198 (talk) 16:14, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Please clean up the prose

Take a look at how many times sentences begin with "He" (about halfway down you will notice), or "Gordon." A great American writer deserves better than that. It reads like an idiot wrote the paragraphs. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Vernorstanton (talk • contribs) 11:16, 9 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Yeah.

I'm taking a break for a bit; if anyone happens to come by looking for something to do, this page is riddled with adventure!

  • As Vernorstanton noted above, the small grammatical nuances need some maintenance.
  • The "External links" and "Bibliography" sections are gargantuan and need to be pruned big time.
  • There is an excessive amount of name-dropping. What to do about that...?
  • Many of the links on this page lead to this page. Funny how that works. I recommend either unlinking them, or making articles (rather than circles) about the links.
  • Eat a bundt cake.
  • I'm serious, they're not expensive! Go out and get yourself a bundt cake!

Okay, I'mma get my break on. V-Man737 06:08, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Comments

So, there are far, far too many external links and bibliographic entries. Wikipedia is expressly not a repository for lists of these things. I would advocate paring the bibliography down to 10 things at most and eliminating all but a couple of the most representative links.

Furthermore, I think it's obvious that the prose needs some work, the article is simply too long and it delves into trivial and unnecessary detail in almost every one of its (too many) subsections. I can tweak the prose here and there but I don't want to edit the appendices until a couple other people offer opinions on them.--Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 07:35, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

In fact, most of those external links should really be used as footnotes, as they are the sources for the articles.--Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 08:25, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
I did a lot of pruning, removing the very long lists and directory-like information, as well as a lot of the redundancies. Still could use work.--Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 08:25, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Recent edits

I went section by section and attempted to improve the prose as well as eliminate circular links, redundant and excessive lists (particularly of names), and reorganize slightly to improve flow. I do not have a particular connection to this article or its subject and my only desire is to give a major writer/editor his due with a good, wikified article. I believe the previous incarnation was a very good set of raw materials, and it's terrific that sometime took the time to type in all those lists, but they did not add much to the article but length, and as it stood, it was unlikely to be taken particularly seriously (or even read all the way through) by other readers. I think that it would be best to add stuff back (perhaps using the edit history, which is pretty transparent) rather than revert to the old version, which just invites other editors to come in and spend more time doing what I think I've already done here.--Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 16:19, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyedit

I have given this article a good trim - the language was over familiar and rather poor; I have also removed a lot of quite unnecessary links which added nothing and made the page overbearing Brookie :) - a will o' the wisp ! (Whisper...) 08:32, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I was hesitant to remove all those links because I thought it might turn into a conflict with the user who obviously spent a LONG time typing them all out.--Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 00:32, 21 January 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Mysterium

Mysterium was never published. It was abandoned. --Mewlhouse 20:23, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

I have removed it from the listing Brookie :) - a will o' the wisp ! (Whisper...) 09:15, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] tao lin fraud

A flag went up for me when I saw the name of Lish's son changed to tao lin. This is wrong, a lie, and this fellow needs to be controlled. This tao lin fellow has written stories using Lish's name and he is what many would call a nutcase. He has a blog and wants to be somebody other than who he is. Watch him.

It is true that Atticus has garnered some celebrity as a cagefighter, so that part may be true about the martial arts.

I have found so many tao lin remarks on the Gordon Lish page that I removed them. In doing so, I may have removed something of importance. My apologies if I did so. But this tao lin character must be stopped.Mewlhouse 17:58, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Mewlhouse,


Yes, Atticus is Gordon's youngest son.

Gordon has four kids; Jennifer, Becca, Ethan and Atticus.

Jennifer is a psychologist

Becca is an actor / voice over artist

Ethan is a software developer

Although Atticus (Gordon’s youngest son) was a kick-boxer for a few years, he never gained much celebrity. He is better known for his work as a Chinese translator and a artist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by TheHystorian (talk • contribs) 20:55, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

I know the above comments to be true. One interesting note is just tonight I watched a dvd called "Demolition: Vols. 1 and 2" with Atticus Lish as one of the headline fighters in a kickboxing match. He did fine, even though he lost by unanimous decision. I have never seen this type of fighting before, but it was fascinating to see the beloved son of somebody who means so much to so many of us.Mewlhouse 01:43, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Mewlhouse, this is Tao Lin, I didn't edit anything on Gordon Lish's page. I don't know why you just assumed that I did that. I didn't. I heard Gordon Lish was angry at me because someone told him about this. I'm sad about that, because I have not changed anything on Gordon Lish's page.

Just look back at the page history and you will clearly see your name everywhere in place of the one that should be. I removed "Tao Lin" the perpetrator. If you are the " real" Tao Lin there is really nothing I can say to you. The facts speak for themselves. And yes, I told Gordon about what happened here. Find your bad guy. It is not me. Mewlhouse (talk) 21:22, 6 December 2007 (UTC)


Mewlhouse, this is Tao Lin. Anyone can edit wikipedia pages. I'm saying I did not edit Gordon Lish's page. I did not tell anyone to edit Gordon Lish's page. I do not know who edited Gordon Lish's page. You implied that I was the person who edited Gordon Lish's page, and you called me a nutcase. I'm just letting people know that I did not edit Gordon Lish's page, it was probably someone who dislikes me so wanted Gordon Lish to dislike me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.122.89.243 (talk) 22:53, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Real Carver: Expansive or Minimal?

The NY Times says tht Raymond Carver’s widow is spearheading an effort to publish a volume of his stories pre-Lish. ( See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/books/17carver.html?ex=1193198400&en=ef2288f85b950c2d&ei=5070&emc=eta1 )

And Carol Sklenicka of San Francisco, says she is the author of a biography of an unauthorized biography of Raymond Carver forthcoming from Scribner and plans to "tell the true story". ( See http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2681557.ece )

Was Carver just a front man for Lish ?

- TheHystorian


I think there should be some mention of the Gordon Lish/Raymond Carver controversy in this article. I don't have the time or the inclination to do so, but there is information available via articles on the New Yorker's website.

-craisingoldfish

[edit] Just the facts

Over the holidays, I spent a lot of time with the family. I was able to review this article and correct a lot of inaccuracies. Some of these facts have been restored from previous versions, so please don’t arbitrarily make changes, as these are the facts. -=*=- CaptianFiction -=*=- —Preceding unsigned comment added by CaptainFiction (talk • contribs) 17:53, 30 December 2007 (UTC)