Listics

Quickie… Interview with Robert Arnold

The Sandhill Trek interview is known far and wide for the probity, the wit, the in depth comprehensive coverage of important matters — personal and political.  After a while all the foreplay that goes into crafting one of those babies starts to tire a fellow out and you’re looking for a quick roll in the hay, uncomplicated, straight-forward, none of your Donald Barthelme and Roland Barthes bullshit if you know what I mean.  So here’s my one-pager with Robert Arnold of warbaby.com  Was it good for me too?  You bet! This is a two message email exchange on a new list and I had no idea this brilliant cat existed before he filled in the blanks.

Aww fuck it… I might as well rip a little Barthelme off Robert’s website just for an intro or something.  Pretty short interview otherwise:

“Less is more,” said Walter Gropius, or Alberto Giacometti, or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, or Henri Guadier-Brzeska, or Constantin Brancusi, or Le Corbusier or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the remark (first made in fact by Robert Browning) has been severally attributed to all of those more or less celebrated more or less minimalists. Like the Bauhaus motto, “Form follows function,” it is itself a memorable specimen of the minimalist esthetic, of which a cardinal principle is that artistic effect may be enhanced by a radical economy of artistic means, even where such parsimony compromises other values: completeness, for example, or richness or precision of statement.  –John Barth

Okay, so it’s not Barthelme.  It’s Barth.  Barth is like four keystrokes less than Barthelme.  Less is more, right?  And the Barthelme quote over there was a graphic and I wasn’t about to key it in when there’s acres of cut and pastage a mere Google away.

Let’s get on with the show!

Quick survey… are you a “writer?”

Yep - used to make a living at it until the dotcom collapse.

What do you like about being a writer? Dislike?

I’m very good at it and I find the finished product very satisfying but I hate doing it. It’s like some writer once said upon being asked how to write, “You stare at the blank paper until beads of blood form on your forehead.”

Now, if you are a writer, are you also a “blogger?”

No. Don’t have anything to say that anyone would care about or that wouldn’t get me arrested.

How do you think these things differ, writing and blogging?

Beats the shit out of me. Looks like the same thing. Writing is writing no matter where you do it.

How is blogging like heroin?

Cheaper.

Is writing as good as that? As bad?

I’d rather have the heroin.

What would it take to make the leap of faith and quit your day job?

I haven’t had a day job since 1979. 

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Thanks for letting me share this Robert!