Stories of the Streets: Reimagining Founds Texts by David Lazar comprises a series of meditations – through prose poems, micro-essays and flash fictions – on what it means to encounter lost or discarded texts. Rather than simply deconstructing the lists, notes, receipts, or book pages he finds strewn in various cities, Lazar uses them to inspire possible narratives that are at most latent in the texts and objects themselves. To encounter them, them, is to encounter oneself and the mystery of cities, where detritus may double as a sign saying “consider this.” By photographing what he describes as “messages that had escaped their bottles,” Lazar becomes a flaneur of paper debris, puzzling over the evidence of urban life.
Genese Grill interviewed David Lazar in December, 2024.
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Genese Grill — Stories of the Streets evokes many memories and emotions in me, so many encounters in life, in books, in art, fragments of my and our shared past. I suddenly remembered that when I was 11 or 12, my best friend and I concocted a game called “Square S/Square P” — a spy ring of two, in which we analyzed bits of speech (S) and of paper (P) we came across, in order to investigate the goings on around us. I thought also of an art school assignment at The Cooper Union, when we were asked to make a sculpture out of found materials and I, half-seriously, half-provocatively, began to create a tiny gem from the miniscule sparkling bits of mica I prized from the concrete. I also recall the “secret drawer” in the now defunct Caffe Dell’ Artista on Greenwich Avenue in NYC — a drawer in one of the tables filled with confessions from people in many languages. and the question — who was it who cleaned out the drawer and had this person saved the notes? Here’s my first question …
The act of collecting, saving, and arranging of the objects and texts you have found while wandering the streets of the world seems to put a frame — however light or casual — upon ephemera, a sort of “moment, abide awhile” spell calling us to attention. What happens to the fleeting, the random, the seemingly insignificant when we preserve it in images, within the covers of a book, and respond to it with care?
David Lazar — You touch on two important aspects of the book — curating and collecting. The latter is a subject that I’d like to write more about, to respond in some way to Walter Benjamin’s great essay on collecting. Why do we value what we find, and what do we do with it? All found things — and there are many forms of finding — whether what we find is at our feet or at a thrift store, change the moment we notice them. They enter our spheres of interest and take on new contexts and meaning(s) that may be distant from their first lives. Or even quite opposite from their original codes and significance. But something hooked us, caused us to stop and consider. There was a connection, or a hook. And then it becomes ours, and our responsibilities. If it ends up in a book, we own it very clearly, and how we frame it, how we distill it or distort it, is up to us. This sounds very freighted, but working with ephemera felt much lighter than that to me — little challenges and stimuli.
GG — One of my art teachers, Nicholas Marsicano, once took a paper napkin, tore it into pieces, and threw it to the ground, saying, “Composition? That’s composition.” You found these objects and texts by chance, having survived for your discovery by wild chance. The themes of chance, prophecy, augury, omen, alternate endings, possibilities haunt the book. In “Hermeneutics,” you write, “Please understand, every arrangement has a sense, every mad sequence was sequenced for a reason.” How did you decide which pieces of your large collection to include in the book and how did you put them in order? Just as there are alternate trajectories for the things you found, are there also alternate arrangements for your book?
DL — There are always alternate arrangements, and I think of the final one in a book as one of many possibilities. I think the arrangements in Stories of the Street were more intuitive than my usual essay or prose poem arrangements. They were more about tone than anything else, small sequences of tonal play, unities or contrasts that seemed to make sense at the time. How this book begins or ends is what I think about most in arranging.
GG — In your introduction, you write that while you’ve seen these findings as “crumbs on the ground” you “might follow,” they’re “only partially readable” — both because they’re often literally smudged, ripped, or incomplete and because all signs out of context are somewhat obscure. The inability to ever fully understand language and image is sweetly illustrated by your commentary on one of the found texts — titled “Jane Burton” — a child’s unfinished essay about a sea horse. The commentary is written in the voice of the sea horse, who has found a photograph of a grown woman whom he mistakenly believes is the child Jane Burton. The child sea horse’s own little essay about this photograph seems to mock our adult attempts to explain the world. Does this implied inability to accurately read or translate what we see detract from or intensify the importance of trying our best to decipher what we find?
DL — I’d like to hear an answer to this question from a reader of the book! For me, I hope the ones I’ve chosen present opportunities through incompletion or fragmentation. And rarely am I trying to actually decipher except as a kind of trope wrapped around the act of extrapolation. The found objects are all signs saying, “This way,” towards a long hall of doors. The one I open leads me towards what feels inevitable, but never really is. Or — I want to permanently taint the reader’s relationship with the object.
GG — Cities are notoriously lonely places. In your piece, “It’s Late,” in response to a small scrap of paper reading, “4:30 AM,” you ask, “who then is passing out this stray invitation to the edge of night? Or who, I wonder mournfully, left a kind of breadcrumb to say they just couldn’t get out, glued as they are, subdued in the moment of dark, dark, dark.” Is not your work — listening to the voices, paying attention to the detritus of human lives, to what has been lost — a small but potent charm against loneliness?
DL — Hmm. Is anything? The fragments we shore against our ruin are consolations, at best. And there isn’t a cure for the dark night of the soul, though goodness knows I’ve been to all the specialists. You’re right that many of the pieces are witching hour responses.
GG – These small physical objects, these words on fragments of paper muddied by time and circumstance are all almost forgotten, almost lost in the rush of the clean, sterile, world of cyberspace and the general practice of communication through plastic devices. But you have saved them, shored them up against oblivion. At one point you praise a cracked sidewalk because it has “the character of time.” To what extent did you think of this project as an object lesson against virtuality?
DL — I like to think of it that way, but I can’t say that that is how I conceived it. But the materiality of the objects, their occasional quaintness, the natural warmth of detritus, of desiccation, is perhaps an alternative to the cold, virtual world.
GG — This may be too obscure, but I feel that the language you use, your syntax and style often hearken back to the 20s, 30s, or 40s, a sort of tin pan alley or early days of Hollywood gangster vernacular. There is also a related proliferation of puns and allusions to well-known phrases and proverbial expressions — both the lilt of those good-old-days and the atmosphere evoked by the nods to our shared American slang might be another form of picking up and preserving what would otherwise be lost. Was this intentional?
DL — That’s a wonderful reading, Genese. Words, absolutely, are also found — and lost — objects. Only found words can render lost and found objects. And I think all of my work, and certainly Stories of the Street, contains phrases, disfigured proverbs and aphorisms, that have lurked around the corner of mind having escaped from Vaudeville, from the movies, from the Yiddish conversations of my parents, from an earlier patois and patter. If not preserved, they’re at least wandering the halls.
GG — In “Forgotten in Death” you conjure an absurd cemetery with trees, lanes, a sculpture of a cigarette butt, a gondola, and a grand yellow squash and then — after all this imaginative play, you write, “Suddenly I am very small.” You go on to ask, “Is there anything more melancholy” than a page of “printed ephemera, language lying in the street … ” and imagine a “home for aged prose, where, before it is forgotten in death, it can sit outside in the world along the adjacent lanes and consider the life of the page that might have lived in another place and time, under other circumstances.” Are not all these fragments of text, lost or discarded objects — there is a crucial difference, you remind us between those two! — metaphors for our own ephemeral existences? Your book asks the question — what will remain of us? Who will care to pick up the traces, interpret the signs, answer our invitations across time and space. Isn’t your book about death?
DL — I think that’s a fascinating reading. I’m looking forward to reading the book myself and seeing if you’re right. Seriously, though, I wouldn’t begin to argue with the idea that anything I’ve written is death-haunted.
GG — Everyone who reads this book will be attracted to different aspects of it and have different questions. Is there something I didn’t ask that you would like to be asked about?
DL — Here are some questions you haven’t asked — Why did you feel the need to make a list before you saw your psychiatrist near the Dell’Artiste café? Did you ever try to locate any of the objects’ parents? No!! Do we have any response to handwritten texts that differs in kind to printed texts? Yes!
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