GD: At any given time I’ve got a load of abandoned ideas on my computer. I had a file called Blowjob Dot Doc and Esquire sent me this semi-pre-prepared meal and all I had to do was warm it up for them. Quite often there’s stuff simmering away in that machine. Out of Sheer Rage was written many computers ago, on the one where my Brilliant Time-Saving Autocorrect File began.  You can type in t-h-r-u and it immediately writes ‘through.’ N-i-e-t becomes ‘Nietzsche.’ It is a massive achievement and I kept my crappy old computer for so long because I thought I couldn’t transfer that autocorrect file. Then a tech guy transferred it.  It’s great. I sit here and bang shit out. In the morning when I write, the sun shines in so quite often I put the blind down.  What you called a “sweet street view” is more often a sweet blind view. Today, to be honest, I woke up slightly hung-over. Incredibly, the four minutes cycle ride home at two o’clock in the morning has completely vanished from my memory. Are we ok? Does your recorder pick up my voice? I’ve done a lot of these interview things and because they’re like four times as tiring as normal social things, they always seem to run out of steam after an hour and a half or so.

MC: One of my former teachers, John D’Agata, held two and a half hour seminars that ticked to four hours because in that last hour and a half, with everyone tired and groggy and hallucinating, he felt, ‘organic’ things happened.

GD: Three hours seems the limit of human endurance.

MC: He was a great teacher, but I haven’t forgiven him.

GD: His Lifespan of the Fact is an interesting idea, but I really hate reading stuff like that in such a small font. I opened it and immediately got a migraine. I do feel he’s a kind of kindred spirit, but the only books I’ve read of his are those anthologies filled with irritating essays.  

MC: I don’t get migraines, but at first, Out of Sheer Rage, your book about failing to write a critical study about D. H. Lawrence, made me both claustrophobic and spiteful. I found the whining, lazy, tangential narrator asinine.