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TV AND WRITING
Q: Are you a tv-watcher? Do you
write with the tv or some other medium turned
on? I ask you this because I
have the impression that you were watching a sort
of X-Files-like tv movie while
composing your story "Kamikaze Motives..."
There's the same atmosphere in
it. More generally, where and when do you write
fiction?
A: What's interesting to me is that
my generation of fiction writers is pretty
much the first to have been raised
on television, and that fact has clearly had
a profound impact on the way many
of us structure our narratives, not to mention
the sorts of secondary texts we
appropriate for content.
You only need to think of someone
like Mark Leyner, for instance, and how fast
his narratives skirt across the
surface of the page, how comfortable he is with,
say, MTV-ized jump-cuts, the speed
of CNN, and the refusal of depth, to see what
I mean.
And, of course, we no longer appropriate
narratives from the Bible or Homer or
Dante like our literary antecedents
did. Rather, for us the most
unselfconscious appropriations are
from very different cultural loci-Daffy Duck,
Star Trek, Batman. Pop-cultural
ones, in other words. Televisual. Not, needless
to say, without a highly conflicted
relationship with those loci and with the
power of that medium.
In fact, when I write, I often feel
like my sentences are competing with
television, with the latest action
film, with last week's hot rock'n'roll album.
I want my sentences to somehow outperform
them in energy and density and number
of (in my case linguistic) explosions
per minute.
And, of course, that's not always a good thing.
David Foster Wallace, a generation
my junior, and yet also deeply affected by
the beams coming off the cathode-ray
tube, points out that the risk of this sort
of televisual sensibility in the
works of someone like Leyner is that, as he
says in his bright essay "E Unibus
Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,"
"velocity and vividness-the wow-replace
the literary hmm of actual development.
People flicker in and out; events
are garishly there and then gone and never
referred to." The consequence, he
says, is some of "the best image-fiction yet,"
"both amazing and forgettable, wonderful
and oddly hollow."
In any case, no, I wasn't watching
tv when I wrote "Kamikaze Motives..."-though
I adore the medium and am frightened
by it and watch it an hour or two every
day. I don't watch or listen
to anything when I write. It's just that a tv
never stops playing inside my head,
and this is probably what you were sensing.
In fact, what I do is to get up every
morning, have breakfast, then go into the
back room of our cabin (I live in
a cabin on a farm four miles from the nearest
town, population about 500) and
write for three and a half hours, no matter
what. The joke is that when my wife
and I first bought the place, I immediately
put claims on the room with the
best view as my writing room. Then I pulled the
blinds, unplugged the tv and radio,
and never looked out the windows again.
That was nine years ago.
MUSIC
"The ultimate rock'n'roll novel"
-Brian Stableford about Tonguing the Zeitgeist
Q: Avant-Pop writers are strongly
influenced by pop music, every kind of pop
music. I can find it everywhere:
- there's a general 70's punk
attitude in your works as well as in Amerika's
Sexual Blood,
- many hidden-or-not quotations
from song lyrics,
- Mark Leyner said he wrote Et
Tu Babe listening continuously to Chemical
Brothers' last album,
- Larry McCaffery's first anthology
borrows the title from a Sonic Youth double
LP,
- not to mention the relations
between Ricardo Cortez Cruz's style and rap
music.
Is it just another aspect of
your attitude about the media or something deeper?
A. Just as all those people you mention
were all raised on television, so they
were all raised on rock'n'roll.
It's in our blood, in our genes.
No doubt about it.
But my impression is that we all
use it for different aims. Leyner, for example,
celebrates it pretty unabashedly.
McCaffery appropriates an apt metaphor from it
but very little more. Cruz picks
up its very rhythms in his style.
What's caught my attention about
rock'n'roll is the space between, say, the
Beatles and the Monkeys-that is
to say the space between authentic artistic
experimentation (texts that teach
us to be more extreme) and inauthentic,
commodified pseudo-experimentation
(texts that corporations have appropriated,
ingested, and given back to us at
a price).
Think, for instance, of a band like
Nirvana. The moment they became successful,
a wealth of clone-grunge bands showed
up, manufactured as much in record-company
board rooms as in garages around
the northwest for the sole purpose of sales.
This is what ultimately fascinated
me, and what I ultimately wrote Tonguing the
Zeitgeist to explore: the commodification
of rock'n'roll (and, by implication,
all the arts) at the turn of the
millennium. Hence my protagonist, Ben Tendo, in
a retelling of the Faust myth, asks
himself what he would give up to be famous,
and his answer turns out to be everything...his
voice, his face, his gender,
even, finally, his body.
ABOUT BURNT
Q. In one of your novels, Burnt,
a teacher kills a student because of his bad
writing style. What are your
students like? And your colleagues at the
University of Idaho? Are
they interested in your work?
A. The novelistic murder bit is probably
simply emblematic, in a metaphorical
and ludic way, of my adoration of
language. If one doesn't read for and
cherish that, after all, why not
just skim a newspaper or take in a flick?
As a rule, my real-time students
are actually wonderful...good-spirited, fairly
open to new ideas, slightly suspicious
of theory and aesthetic innovation, but
usually willing to be exposed to
and then seriously contemplate such beasts. A
handful are mildly interested in
my work, while most are wholly interested in
their own, which is probably how
it should be. We frequently find ourselves in
the midst of some exciting creative
feedback loops, nourishing each other's
obsessions, which for me is the
best of what education can be.
On the whole my colleagues are, I
think, benignly amused by what I do. Most
quite clearly don't understand it-any
more, I hasten to add, than I probably
understand what they're up to. For
them, in any case, I represent the token
weird uncle every academic family
keeps in the figurative attic. Yet in all
honesty they are often impressively
supportive of my work and genuinely nice
people, though many are surreptitiously
contemptuous of postmodernity, let alone
such things as cyberpunk and the
Avant-Pop.
One comic note: for some reason they've
gotten it through their heads, since I
don't dawdle in hallways and am
openly uncomfortable in the face of petty
bureaucracy, that I'm some strange
hermit who never comes out during the
daytime.
My students, thank goodness, tend to know better.
All of which is to say, I imagine,
things here are pretty much like things in
most English departments in America.
Which is to say they are pretty much like
most corporate hierarchies, since
in the U.S., and, from what I understand, in
much of the rest of the world, traditional
paradigms of the university have
collapsed into business paradigms.
You know...cut the budgets and fill the
classrooms.
Universities, in other words, are
slowly becoming economically effective trade
schools, which, it almost goes without
saying, is a very sad fact. Before too
long, every one of them will be
a subsidiary of Microsoft, McDonald's, or
Coca-Cola.
CREATIVE WRITING
Q. Last year here in Italy there
was a debate about new creative writing
schools: some were said to produce
poor writers, all with the same writing-style
as their teachers. What's your
opinion, as a creative writing teacher? Are your
students all little Lance Olsens?
A. All creative writing programs
run the risk of devolving into aesthetic Ford
assembly lines.
You know: everyone pretty much turning
out the same safe, predictable, very
little social realist narratives,
often having to do with blue-collar lives in
trailer parks or middle-class ones
in suburbia, domestic strife, psychological
depth, the importance of what isn't
said over what is-all told in an understated
glassy prose befitting Raymond Carver's
ghost and the pages of last week's New
Yorker.
Why? Because those are the probably
the easiest stories to write in some ways,
and certainly they are the easiest
ones to read for the majority of people
because the majority of people love
to experience vicariously various versions
of themselves and their experiences
in forms that reinforce rather than
challenge consensus-reality and
the assumptions predicated upon it.
What's lacking from such generic
workshop fare is any resonant sense of vision
or understanding of complex technique-what
Nabokov meant when he said that all
good fiction is really experimental
writing. One is either born with a certain
degree of vision or one isn't, yet
that's not what writing programs teach. It's
not what they can teach. Instead,
their function is to generate a space where
people born with a certain degree
of vision can come together and
cross-fertilize each other's creativity,
support each other, argue with each
other, think out loud about important
aesthetic matters, learn what they believe
about fiction or poetry and why,
and practice the act of writing-all the while
trying out different forms, different
approaches, different voices.
So I'd pretty much want someone to
take me out into a field and shoot me if all
my students started writing like
me.
What I want my students to do is
to drop the preconceptions they brought with
them into this program about what
writing is and should be, rethink themselves
and their work from the bottom up,
and explore as many narrative possibilities
as they can-in the process discovering
what their fiction and/or poetry is
really all about.
Meantime, my role as teacher is to
provide a comfortable, friendly, honest
environment in which that can happen
while offering narratological pointers and
(I hope) helpful critiques-in the
same way, say, a piano teachers assumes a
certain amount of vision on the
part of his or her students while concentrating
on technique and exercise.
My students' role is to push their
fellow apprentice writers to go farther and
continually do better work-i.e.,
come to increasingly close approximations on
the page of what's going on in the
mind.
GIBSON AND CYBERPUNK
Q. You wrote an important critical
study of William Gibson and you use some
cyberpunk features in your writings.
Do you consider yourself a cyberpunk in
some way?
A. I find it difficult to consider
myself any particular sort of writer, and I
don't much like belonging to cliques
and clubs which rely on exclusionary rather
than inclusionary tactics for their
existences.
But if I think of myself as anything, it's as a kind of Avant-Bricoleur.
What I mean by that is this: I don't
think of myself so much as belonging to the
School of Cyberpunk or the School
of the Avant-Pop or whatever as I do to the
School of Appropriation-the school
that understands at a fundamental level what
Roland Barthes expressed so beautifully
more than a quarter of a century ago:
"that a text is not a line of words
releasing a single 'theological' meaning
(the 'message' of the Author-God)
but a multi-dimensional space in which a
variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash."
I was, for instance, captivated when
I came across Gibson's Neuromancer shortly
after its publication in 1984. Suddenly
I was reading a kind of science fiction
that was doing something that no
other sort of fiction at the time was doing.
For one thing, it was probing realms
of the technosphere-cyberspace, information
systems, the body-machine interface,
the role of multinational corporations in
shaping this arena, and so forth-in
a way that made it feel like you were
reading a realist novel from the
future rather than a science fiction novel from
the present. For another, it was
creating this impression through a flashy dark
prose one certainly didn't associate
with traditional SF, and perhaps not even
with the New Wave, a language deeply
influenced by alternative literature, but
also by (to return to what we were
just talking about) television and
rock'n'roll.
And so I consciously appropriated
many of those elements for some of my own
work-while simultaneously appropriating
other elements from many other works and
genres, among them Thomas Pynchon,
magical realism, Robert Coover, hypertext,
Scientific American, surrealism,
Kurt Vonnegut, metafiction, Don DeLillo,
theoretical discourse, Samuel Beckett,
critifiction, William Faulkner, A-films
and B-films, and so on. I thus feel
like a cultural garbage disposal. If I see
or read or hear something I like,
well, into the machine it goes.
But I'd hate to write only one sort
of thing, be type-cast as only one sort of
writer. As poststructuralism teaches
us over and over again, we're not the same
person we were five years ago or
five seconds ago. For better or worse, we all
live in a radically Ovidian state
of flux.
Why wouldn't the texts we produce
do much the same thing?
POLLUTION
Q. One of the themes in Neal
Stephenson's Zodiac is pollution, and in some ways
DeLillo's Underworld talks about
it too: maybe we can say pollution in all its
different aspects seems to be
a shared concern in much American fiction. Why are
you all so interested in trash?
Is eco-fiction becoming a literary genre?
A. I'm interested in trash in two senses.
The first is the sense of environmental
pollution. I'm deeply disturbed by how
American culture-most cultures-continually
foregrounds short-term gain at the
expense of long-term loss. And so
I write about that in many of my novels in
order to help in some small way,
I hope against hope, to draw some sort of
attention to it. In Burnt that obsession
manifests itself as a sort of low-grade
background noise, while in Tonguing
the Zeitgeist, Time Famine, and my
forthcoming novel, Freak Nest, it
manifests itself as an extended out-and-out
cautionary dystopia.
It's extraordinary to me how North
America feels it has some sort of God-given
right (a distant echo, perhaps,
of the notion of Manifest Destiny) to poison
itself through its pursuit of economic
excess while taking the moral high ground
in discussions of, say, the South
American rain forest or rampant pollution in
developing countries which often
can't afford the preventive or moderating
measures North America refuses to
use in the first place.
But I'm also interested in what Larry
McCaffery once called-referring to Donald
Barthelme's work-The Aesthetics
of Trash. This goes back to the notion of
bricolage. I love the idea
of metaphorically recycling genres, forms, and
various fictional moves so they
become reconstituted in apparently new and with
any luck engaging ways. It's like
what they've begun doing in the
U.S. recently, grinding up plastic
bottles and reprocessing them into a kind of
fiber out of which you can make
clothes. I want to do something analogous to
that in my fiction.
There's definitely a constellation
of American writers currently exploring trash
in the same two senses I am, from
Stephenson and DeLillo, as you point out, to
such apparently different writers
as Bruce Sterling in a novel like Heavy
Weather and David Foster Wallace
in Infinite Jest.
Probably what such diverse writers
have in common is a real terror of what's
going to happen to this planet in
the next ten or twenty years if we're not
careful.
And, so far, we haven't been.
I'm reminded of H.G. Wells' tombstone,
on which he wanted engraved the lines
which run something like this: "Goddamn
you all. I told you so."
BODIES AND THEIR WEARING
Q. You often describe your characters
by using many physical particulars, and
you pay extraordinary attention
to the way they dress. Do you consider it
important to give a precise description
of your characters?
A. Details involving physical particulars
and the way people dress are cultural
markers that suggest worlds both
about them and the universe they inhabit: what
socio-economic status they inhabit,
their tribal allegiances, their age and
interests, what they hold important,
what their culture holds important, what
they're rebelling against or supporting,
and so forth.
So, yes, I'm always fascinated by these things.
There's a tremendous amount of information
in a designer label on a shirt or a
pair of jeans, in other words, and
using that sort of fictive shorthand allows a
writer to get a wealth of data across
to a careful reader very quickly.
WHERE IS HAROLD?
Q. I know you are a fan of Harold
Jaffe and, after reading two short stories by
him, I am too. How can you explain
his relatively poor success in comparison to
Leyner, for example, who after
all is as radical as Jaffe but who sells a lot
more books?
A. I'm as puzzled by this as
you are, really, though wonder if it doesn't have
something to do with the nature
of the radicalness in each writer-the
seriousness of what Jaffe is doing
versus the ludic backbeat one senses in
Leyner's work.
That isn't to say that Leyner isn't
handling some pretty serious subjects-the
cult of personality in late-stage
capitalism at the very instant "personality"
has dissolved into a simulation
of subjectivity, for instance, in Et Tu, Babe.
But Leyner's linguistic pyrotechnics
and cartoon extravagance are so pronounced
that it's easy to miss the satirically
serious side to his work (which,
incidentally, is what I think David
Foster Wallace might have done in the
comment of his which I quoted a
little while ago).
Plus Jaffe is transgressive in a
way that Leyner simply isn't. Leyner's world is
a kind of goofily slapstick one
at the level of language and event. Jaffe's is
funny, yes, but funny only in the
very ominous, very bitter, very serious way
that morally outraged satirists
like Jonathan Swift are funny.
In his recent manifesto in Paradoxa
(volume 4, number 11, 1998-a terrific new
journal of cultural critique here
in the States, I should mention, that everyone
should check out) Jaffe calls for
a kind of aesthetically "beneficent
terrorism." Since "morality"
is currently defined and controlled by the
dominant culture, or cultures, he
argues, artists need to embrace something
closer to Bataille's appeal for
an "immoral subversion of the existing order."
Hence Jaffe's Axiom: "If the dissenting
American artist wants something of her
work to be felt, she must educate
herself about contemporary culture,
technology, ideology and media (all
of which are largely synonymous). Then, in
the spirit of a guerrilla, find
a seam, plant a mine, slip away. These seams are
the rents, or fault lines, in the
web of interlocking ideology which prevents us
from being ourselves."
This, of course, is exactly what
Jaffe has done in his fiction. Leyner basks in
and celebrates contemporary culture;
Jaffe's critique of it is more pronounced
and much angrier. Those characters
speaking and those spoken of in his work are
as psychically and socially cleft
as the texts they inhabit. They are little
more than disembodied talking heads
whose voices, genders, and selves elide into
one another, sometimes transposing
in the course of a few lines. They are at
essence registers of a moribund
culture of electronic, sexual, and violent
excess, always in search of a new
way to up the experiential ante for the
vestige of a vestige of an emotional
buzz as they scud through a surreally
depraved multiverse jammed with
full-face snout helmets and organic oat milk,
Disney videos and snuff flicks,
carcinomas and cellular phones, anal plugs and
health clubs, serotonin re-uptake
inhibitors and massive caffeine ingestion.
Given their single-minded fixation
on the flesh, it nearly goes without saying,
their talking-head status is acutely
ironic. They privilege discourse of action
over action itself, watching over
touching, recounting over doing, and each
voice is continually and irreparably
out of sync with the discourse of those
surrounding it.
Needless to say, this isn't a pretty
sight, and most people would just as soon
not read about it.
ITALIAN WAVE
Q. What about Italian fictioneers?
A brief list of Italian artists whom I
consider important understanding
today's and tomorrow's f(r)ictions: Italo
Calvino, Leone's first spaghetti-westerns,
Marinetti and the Futurists, Nanni
Balestrini, Umberto Eco (not
his novels, definitely), Marco Ferreri. Any other
Italian reading?
A. To be honest, I'm hopelessly ignorant
of Italian fiction and nearly
hopelessly ignorant of the other
arts in Italy, except for some of the largest
imports, and have the impression
that most American writers would admit pretty
much the same thing.
I didn't come across Calvino until
shortly after finishing graduate school.
When I did, it was love at first
sight. What interests me most about him is his
critifictional intelligence and
tremendous inventiveness. He continually
teaches us that fiction can and
should be new with every piece we write, and
that's obviously an important lesson
unless one wants to continue reinventing
the narratological wheel. And, of
course, a work like Cosmicomics-with its
appropriation of science, pop culture,
and innovative forms-is a one of the key
precursors to what has come to be
called the Avant-Pop.
I'm only distantly aware of Leone,
another clear proto-Popster, and even less so
of Balestrini and Ferreri.
Marinetti in particular and Futurism
in general, however, have attracted me for
quite a while. What's so strange
about reading the Futurist manifesto is the
eerie sense one has of reading an
early draft of some version of the cyberpunk
manifesto-yet the former was written
more than half a century before the latter.
What's missing from Marinetti's
notions, so far as I know and understand them,
though, is the certain refined ambivalence
toward-even the outright suspicion
of-technology that informs the edges
of Gibson's Matrix Trilogy, for instance,
or Lewis Shiner's and Richard Kadrey's
fictions. Such writers understand that
technology can be liberating or
dehumanizing, depending on how it's used, and
understand that often it can be
and is both things at once. Needless to say,
this brings cyberpunk into harmony
with a frame of mind that science fiction has
evinced since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Italian Futurism, as it comes down
to us through Marinetti, seems to
be all about the utopian revolutionary
swamping of the world with techno-junk
without really thinking too seriously
about what that might mean.
I adore the thoughtful craziness
of Umberto Eco's essays, and even now I
frequently refer with great fondness
to the one I stumbled across while a
graduate student at the University
of Virginia that draws parallels between our
own postmodern moment and the middle
ages. What a wonderful, bizarre brainy
maneuver.
SEMIOTICS AND HOW TO ANALYZE
A POMO TEXT
Q. You've said that "the more
one experiences a 'postmodern' text, the less
'postmodern' it becomes."
What do you mean exactly?
A. One of the impulses behind any
postmodern text is to destabilize conventional
modes of reading, and therefore
conventional modes of understanding reality,
ontology, and epistemology, by means
of fracturing Newtonian temporality and
logic, dispersing Freudian notions
of localized depth-subjectivity, disrupting
the way normative language functions,
and so on.
Think, for instance, of Kathy Acker's
Blood and Guts in High School, Burroughs'
Naked Lunch, and Carole Maso's Aureole.
While each of these texts sets about to
perform this destabilization in
different ways for different purposes, the fact
remains that all three evince a
similar aesthetic (or, perhaps closer to the
point, anti-aesthetic) thrust.
Okay. Now imagine that you don't
simply read each of those texts once, but four,
five, maybe even six times, then
read criticism written about them, then teach
them, then read them some more,
then think about them, then talk with other
academics about them, then read
lots of pomo theory, and then return to them yet
again.
Somewhere during that process those
texts begin-despite their authors' efforts
to the contrary-to stabilize themselves
in your mind.
That is to say you begin to untangle
the scrambled chronology, or at least
remember certain key events while
forgetting others. You realize that while
character may not be fully-rounded
or fixed, you can still sense certain
subjectivities with which you can
sympathize profoundly, or at least delight in.
You even begin to find, perhaps,
something analogous to the experience of
listening to music: in place of
linear discourse, you unearth certain leit
motifs, recurring images, beautiful
sounds, structures that are pleasant to
discover and which give you a sense
of shape, however unconventional it might
be.
In other words, you begin to find
other-than-traditional sorts of patterns and
the very presence of patterns will
tend to settle ta text down.
On your seventh or eighth reading,
that pomo text won't seem as innovative (in
the sense of aesthetically wild-eyed)
as it did when you first read it. It may
actually begin in certain ways to
feel more and more like what you have come to
think of as fairly predictable narrativity.
This is certainly what has happened
for many critics with respect to
a novel like Neuromancer, to cite a single
example: it simply doesn't seem
as shockingly new as it once did.
Which is to say that you will have
adopted a new set of reading strategies that
help you make sense of things.
Why?
Because, at least for many people
(and most critics), part of being human is the
urge to create order from jumble.
Kathryn Hume shows how this works in her very
nice study, Pynchon's Mythography:
An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow.
PUBLISHERS
Q. You've published with both
small independent presses and big New York ones.
What are the main differences?
Could the Internet be a solution to publishing
problems in the future?
A. New York publishing makes your
novel (and it's usually your novel, since New
York publishers are seldom interested
in short-story collections) feel like it's
the literary equivalent of a McDonald's
fast-food order.
The codes of New York, sometimes
spoken and sometimes not, continually remind
you that your work is one commodity
among myriad other commodities, and that the
goal for your particular commodity
(as it is with them all) is to sell itself.
Hence, while your book is in production,
you're the superstar of possibility who
can do no wrong. The camera always
remains on the potential money. But as soon
your novel doesn't surge forward
to new heights financial success, well, you're
last week's news.
The essential paradigm, then, as
we've already discussed with the contemporary
university system, is corporate.
Being part of an independent publishing
project, on the other hand, is like
being part of a quirky family. Many
times you're working with people who care
more about what they do than what
they earn. Often you have tremendous input on
the layout of your book, the cover
art, the sort of modest publicity that goes
into getting the word about your
book out there, etc.
So the analogy is one between some
huge record company and some small
alternative indie label. The
huge record company, like the New York publisher,
has greater visibility, better distribution,
and a greater commitment to finding
work that large numbers of people
will want to buy. Thus, hands down, it makes
oodles of bucks. The small alternative
indie label, conversely, has much less
visibility, struggles for distribution,
and is committed to the aesthetic
quality of the work rather than
to how the work might do financially. And so,
usually, it has a tiny but pretty
rabid fan base. Hands down, the indie label
makes much, much, much less money
than the huge company, and it barely hangs on
by a thread year after year until
it usually collapses and goes under-after,
that is, turning out some exciting
and important texts which until the
going-under have stayed in print
a long, long time.
Obviously, the Internet is providing
a third possibility: a paper-free (and
hence environmentally savvy) virtual
reality where interesting work takes out
the middlemen from editor to distributor
and is read by small tribes of
like-minded individuals.
But the problem is finding that work.
What, exactly, are you looking for? How
reliable are the search engines
for getting you where you want to go? Often you
need to know an author's name or
a book title in order to discover its
whereabouts, meaning that many writers
remain afloat in the cyber-abyss.
And, it almost goes without saying,
there's a tremendously large amount of bad
work out there in the digital beyond.
How can we locate the good, except
through word of mouth?
Plus, once something does find its
way onto the Internet, it's fairly clear it
won't be making any money at all.
And anyone else can simply download it,
change your name to theirs at the
top of the first page, and reload it as their
appropriated creation.
So the early hype of the Internet
being some sort of utopian zone for the
alternative has been overstated.
In fewer than ten years, as a matter of fact,
the wild electronic frontier has
by and large been tamed and colonized by
commercial interests, and its future
remains anything but clear. Its
revolutionary rhetoric has proved
to be fraught with problems. And, while
information may want to be free,
it turns out that it just plain isn't.
Moreover, I worry about the increasing
growth of a technocracy...a society
divided between the digital haves
and the digital have-nots.
So my inclination is to go easy on
the optimism for a while.
YOUR NEXT PROJECTS
Q. Speaking of the future, tell
us about your new work. Can you say something
about Sewing Shut My Eyes?
I've seen/read the images on Café Zeitgeist
(www.uidaho.edu/~lolsen) and
it looks great.
A. Thanks. Sewing Shut My Eyes
is a short story collection FC2 will be bringing
out in the spring of 2000.
Many of the fictions in it are image-text
collaborations with my wife, Andi, who
works with-among other media such
as assemblage and video-computer-generated
collages. For several of the pieces
in Sewing, she created visuals with no story
or order in mind, and passed them
along to me. I sat down with them, lived with
them for a while, and soon various
narrative possibilities presented themselves
to me which I then took advantage
of.
Often those images have been appropriated
from the media and manipulated, as
have some sections of the text.
Several of the narratives, on the
other hand, include no images whatsoever, but
explore various other innovative
formal possibilities-as is the case with the
one you're publishing in Kung!,
"Cybermorphic Beat-Up Get-Down Subterranean
Homesick Reality-Sandwich Blues,"
a kind of celebration and critique of the
Beats in general and Allen Ginsberg
in particular.
I think of Sewing Shut My Eyes as
an Avant-Pop concept album in prose-nine cuts,
nine satiric, deeply conflicted
takes on how our brains have become cathode-ray
tubes, our skins pixilated static,
our bodies vast switching stations for the
Society of the Spectacle.
I recently completed the third novel
in my anti-trilogy, which includes Tonguing
the Zeitgeist and Time Famine.
This new one, as I say, is called Freak Nest.
It's set in London in the first
quarter of the twenty-first century and
investigates the myth of the feral
child as well as some of the darker sides of
nanotechnology...especially the
implications of nano-drugs. Wordcraft of Oregon,
which brought out Burnt, will bring
out Freak Nest late in 2000 or early in
2001.
After that, my plan is to leave anything
that resembles science fiction for a
good long time.
POLITICS
Q. Can we say that Debord and
the theories of Situationists have influenced the
present generation of American
writers? As I remember you put The Society of the
Spectacle on your reading list
somewhere...
A. Right. On my homepage I
keep a running list of books that readers of the
alternative might find interesting,
and very close to the top of that list is
Debord's pivotal text.
It's extremely difficult to talk
about the present generation of American
writers in anything even approximating
homogeneous terms, since so many of them
are doing so many different things
simultaneously, and it's unclear in my mind
how many writers have actually read
Debord, as opposed to simply picking up his
ideas by talking to other writers
and theorists who did.
Surely, though, one can say that
someone like Hal Jaffe is consciously
influenced by his notions, as are
Larry McCaffery, Raymond Federman, and Curtis
White, while the fiction of such
authors as Stephen Wright, Robert Coover, and
Steve Erickson rhymes well with
Debord. I know I was simply blown away by The
Society of the Spectacle when I
came across it early in the nineties because it
seemed so prescient of the advent
of televisual culture even though it was
published almost thirty-five years
ago in 1967. It explained so much for me
about the rise of non-life in the
face of the media-generated image, the sense
of unreality most of us experience
as we move through the postmodern mediascape,
and the way some sort of eerie feedback
loop has constituted itself through the
spectacle that reinforces and extends
the conditions and aims of the existing
system.
Equally interesting to me is how
well Debord's notions accord with
Baudrillard's. The epigraph
to Sewing Shut My Eyes is in fact from "The
Precession of Simulacra"-that wonderful
passage about a replica of the Lascaux
caves having been built 500 meters
from the original. You can catch glimpses of
the original through a peephole,
but you exist in a simulation of it. "It is
possible that the very memory of
the original caves will fade in the mind of
future generations," Baudrillard
concludes his discussion, "but from now on
there is no longer any difference:
the duplication is sufficient to render both
artificial."
For me this forms a beautiful Avant-Pop
appropriation and re-articulation of
Plato's parable of the cave: the
world of becoming has been bought up by
Disneyland and the world of being
has become indistinguishable from it.
POP WARS
Q. What do you think of this
last war against Yugoslavia? (I'm writing this
just a few hours after its end.)
Will it become a subject for postmodern
writers just like the O.J. Simpson
trial and Lady Di's death, or is such a
nightmare too much for us all?
Should we use it as pop-cultural material?
A. The last decade of the twentieth
century began with the first Avant-Pop war,
the televisual one with Iraq where
mass death became a video game, and so it
makes perfect sense to me that it
should end with the second, the one with the
Serbs where mass death became a
Debordian spectacle.
There are no longer such things as nightmares left, in other words.
Rather, it's all come down to a cultural
sense of remoteness, the miracle of
media-generated (un)reality, and
the Americanization of global consciousness.
That you could frame your question
in such a way as to equate what happened in
Yugoslavia with O.J.'s brutal silliness
or Di's Ballardian crash proves my
point, I think.
It's all about watching now.
The only thing left to do is to start sewing shut our eyes.
