Tyler C. Gore

Tyler C. Gore is the author of My Life of Crime: Essays and Other Entertainments, which the Washington Independent Review of Books called “immensely readable…full of the people and peculiarities of New York and told with an almost wide-eyed wonder of someone in love with the place — even the worst of it.”

My Life of Crime was also a First Horizon Award Finalist, shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize, and appeared in the Independent Book Review’s list of “Impressive Indie Books of 2022.”

Tyler has been cited five times as a Notable Essayist by The Best American Essays, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Exacting Clam and StatORec.

He lives, as he dreams, in Brooklyn.

Facebook: @tyler.c.gore
Instagram: @tylermustwashhands
Twitter / X: @TylerCGore
YouTube: @TylerCGore

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

The music that shaped my taste in young adulthood is what used to be called “college radio alternative.” Left-of-the-dial stuff: punk, post-punk, new wave and all the good stuff that followed in the 80s and 90s. The Clash, The Replacements, R.E.M, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Jam, The Psychedelic Furs, etc. I still listen to all of that but also to a lot of new music, the modern successors of…well, whatever we’re calling that genre.

Music is discussed quite a bit in “Appendix,” the five-part, novella-length memoir that is the cornerstone of My Life of Crime. David Bowie, Tom Petty, Kate Bush, Neil Young and Robyn Hitchcock are all mentioned in passing, and there’s a long melancholy passage concerning Death Cab for Cutie’s song “What Sarah Said.”

But Regina Spektor — “the Russian-Jewish chanteuse of my depressive evenings,” as I describe her —plays an especially important role in that essay, and I wrote about several of her songs (“Laughing With” and “Us,” particularly) in detail.

But I can’t listen to any of those songs while I’m actually writing! Lyrics interfere with the words in my head, and the emotional coloring of any particular song is frequently misaligned with the tone of whatever I’m currently working on.

So I used to never listen to any music at all while writing.

That changed while I was working on “Appendix,” which presented a lot of difficulties and required a sustained effort.

Before the start of every writing session, I would sit at my desk with a fresh cup of coffee and play Maxence Cyrin’s gorgeous piano interpretation of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” I’d just sit there, staring out the window, and listen to the entire song. Sometimes twice. That daily ritual would somehow center me, put me in the exact frame of mind I needed to work.

And then, ready to write, I’d turn the volume down a bit and queue up a playlist of Max Richter’s moody, evocative soundtrack to all three seasons of “The Leftovers,” which is probably my favorite television series of all time. While working on “Appendix,” I listened to that soundtrack over and over again, day after day, month after month.

Spotify does a kind of “your favorite tracks of the year” thing every December, and at the end of 2022, I received a pop-up notice congratulating me as one of Max Richter’s top 3% listeners. I laughed when I saw that.

What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?

I’m a huge fan of Neil Gaiman’s 1990s graphic novel opus, the Sandman series. I’ve read them many times, and in “Appendix”, I mention the series in a slightly deranged section that riffs on Freud, sex, and dreams.

I can’t think of anything quite like Sandman. The loopy, convoluted tale that unfolds across nine volumes is deeply mythological yet modern, and imbued throughout with a pitch-perfect punk/Goth underground aesthetic.

Sandman can be very disturbing — one of the most unsettling volumes revolves around a serial killer convention — and yet it can be beautiful and moving as well. Dream and Death — brother and sister — rank among the greatest inventions I’ve encountered in literature, and seem sprung full-grown from some loamy mythological soil.

Dream — ethereal and forbidding, and looking very much as if he’s about to attend a Cure concert — is the central character of the series, and governs the realm of dreams, of course, but he is also the father of all myths and stories. Dream is vain and capricious, and sometimes petty, but surprisingly capable of compassion and regret.

But like so many fans, I am particularly enamored by Gaiman’s appealing vision of what happens after you die.

Death — a waifish, black-clad, mascaraed Goth chick with a silver ankh hanging around her neck—gently delivers the bad news: you’re dead. And then — and this is the best part —Death invites you to tell her the story of your life. She listens attentively, with the sympathy and patience of an old friend, and once you’ve said all you have to say, she bids you farewell and sends you off into the Unknown, whatever that may be.

Of course, many of her clients — in one scene, a week-old baby — are deeply unhappy to find their time on earth cut short earlier than they’d expected. Death has a famous response to their misgivings.

“You lived what anyone gets,” she tells them. “You got a lifetime.”

Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?

I’ve always adored “The Sleeping Gypsy” by Henri Rousseau. I first encountered it somewhere as a child — possibly a print hanging in my grammar school — and was instantly mesmerized by its mysterious beauty.

I wrote about it in “October’s Rain,” one of the essays in My Life of Crime: “I have always thought the painting captured the floating, surreal mood of a moment of suspension, that sudden instance of peace and wonder which comes to us odd and unsummoned in the midst of our tumultuous lives, that feeling moment when we see ourselves as if from outside, as if in a dream.”

Another favorite painting of mine is “The Lovers” by Rene Magritte, which depicts a passionate kiss in which both lover’s faces are entirely veiled from one another. What a profound and piercing statement about the human condition, about love! It reminds me of Conrad’s famous line in Heart of Darkness: “We live, as we dream — alone.”

Here’s the ridiculous thing. Both paintings are part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, and yet I have never seen either one in person. I’ve lived in NYC for decades! I even had a MoMA membership for a year!

I feel ashamed. I am definitely making a pilgrimage this year, because what the hell.

Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?

Oh, city for sure.

Don’t get me wrong. If someone is willing to drive me, I’m always delighted to travel with friends to lovely places like upstate New York or Cape Cod. As a New Yorker, you really treasure these escapes into natural settings. And it’s a profound pleasure to go biking or running in the countryside without constantly worrying that some distracted rush hour driver or delivery bike will smash my skull into the pavement.

But I am really and truly a city mouse, and I’ll always choose cities when I’m traveling to some new destination, especially when traveling abroad. I’m very partial to cafes, bars, and public transportation.

I can be blasphemously indifferent to the famous sights I am supposed to see, and completely happy to just aimlessly wander around random neighborhoods for hours on end, photographing graffiti, getting into conversations with strangers.

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?

I definitely don’t dance, unless inescapable social obligations force me to, and then only after several drinks.

But I have something of a graphic design background, and I love making digital collages in Photoshop. Collecting source material, painstakingly separating out the backgrounds, moving stuff around the screen for hours on end. I’ve been doing that for years. I was thrilled when one of my collages was featured as the cover art for the Winter 2023 issue of Exacting Clam.

I think collage is the artform best-suited to our era — post-industrial, late capitalism, whatever term you want to use — when we have such astonishing access to all of the visual creations of human history across time and space, but barely appreciate it because we are drowning in a never-ending deluge of mass-produced ephemera and pop culture. We live in the Age of Image, and there’s way too much of it. Max Ernst recognized that, early on, and was a terrific practitioner of the form. So was Joseph Cornell, whose gorgeous assemblages are a three-dimensional form of collage.

My wife Natasha also makes wonderful collages in her spare time, and she does it the old-school way, with magazines, scissors and glue. She sometimes gives them to close friends on their birthdays. I have a lovely collection of them, and I hate to admit it, but she’s probably much better at it than I am.