Joshua Clover's Fondest Memory, & More, at SF Weekly

It must be Interview Friday. Put on your suit! Not. At SF Weekly, for one of our favorite columns, The Write Stuff, we have "Joshua Clover on Wearing Intense Knowledge Lightly and Changing Quickly." Clover gets to the point with Evan Karp's ever-hard-hitting questions, including "Do you consider yourself successful? Why?" and "What is art? Is it necessary? Why?" To wit:

What’s wrong with society today?

People think that cops need to be reformed. They need to be killed.

What is your fondest memory?

It changes? Prince at Madison Square Garden in 1986. The time I wrote a perfect 400 word review and I knew that for the first time ever the editor would send it forward without any changes and she did. A reading Juliana [Spahr] gave at Berkeley a few years ago. The first time I took acid, reading the same Joyce page over and over. That time I felt like I really understood the first chapter of Capital. March on the port, November 2, 2011, Rihanna soundtrack. Hearing “Graveyard Shift” for the first time. Not that it’s my favorite song, I just remember hearing part of it as I was out running one day in Iowa and freaking out, running directly home to find out what song it was. I called the radio station and everything. But really, all the people who were waiting for me outside the jail when I got out after a few days in 2012 — thinking I had a lot of good friends.

What would you like to see happen in your lifetime?

Do you remember that Facebook meme from 2009 or so, when you were supposed to post “25 Things People Might Not Know About You” or something like that? And a friend of mine posted her list, it was sort of uninteresting which is the meme’s fault not hers, and then the last one was, “thinking there might be a revolution in my lifetime is the only reason I am not afraid of dying.” I am probaby misquoting but that was the idea. I don’t know if I have ever had such an intense moment of self-recognition, that sense of, oh, that is the entire structure of my psychic life and I never quite knew it. That was the basis for the poem “Transistor” in my book.

What is art? Is it necessary? Why?

Art is giving form to the antagonism between the concept and immediate struggle. Or: lol again.

Read it all at SF Weekly.