Music, Influence, and “Deeply Unnecessary” Art

Jonathan Lethem and Ben Arthur in Conversation

Jonathan Lethem is prolific. He has a book published for every year the last twenty and he moves easily between forms, recently releasing bestselling novels, collections of short stories and critical commentary, lyrics to an album, and a graphic novel. He is as good naturedly self-deprecating as he is unfailingly generous to fellow artists.

I met Jonathan for the first time in 2013, when we wrote and recorded a song with Walter Salas-Humara in the course of an afternoon (a music video of the song, using footage shot that day, is premiered below).  Since then we’ve collaborated on another song, written in response to his story “Pending Vegan,” which will be released on my upcoming album, Call and Response.

Jonathan is the Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, in Claremont, California. We met in his airy and comfortable office in Crookshank Hall on a January morning. I started by admitting that I had just read his dense and brilliant critical collection The Ecstacy of Influence, and was feeling wholly inadequate to the conversation.

—Ben Arthur

I.  A HUNDRED FINGERPRINTS

BEN ARTHUR: You mentioned that this conversation was good, in order to get your head into this space—why?

JONATHAN LETHEM: I’m co-teaching a course, with my friend Kevin Dettmar, the guy who just wrote one of these 33 and 1/3 books on the Gang of Four. A course we’ve just invented, called Inauthenticity. It’s a giant umbrella. The subtitle is something like Plagiarism, Appropriation, Sampling, Copying, Pastiche, Collage, Influence, and Forgery. I can’t remember which terms we mention, actually. But they all apply.

BA: That sounds like so much fun. Did you read that piece about the guy who was trying to use fingerprints of artists, left accidentally in the paint or on the side of the canvas, in order to authenticate paintings?

JL: I didn’t. But that’s a marvelous…

BA: He was, of course, forging everything.

JL: Our romantic image of the artist has to do as much with the Renaissance masters as anything. And they were all workshop artists who had a specialist come in to do the clouds. They were above doing the trees in the background; they’d call in their twenty year-old apprentice. You’d find a hundred fingerprints on the paintings. There’s not a sole author there. In the class we’ll do Led Zeppelin and Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan and T.S. Eliot, all of it. High, low, sampling, appropriation, copying. Fakery scandals, authorship controversies, and YouTube culture, fan appropriations of popular media.

BA: I kind of...