Claro's novel has captured in language what Houdini must have experienced, the panic and thrill of both confinement and escape: carnival mist

Claro, Electric Flesh, Trans. by Brian Evenson (Soft Skull Press, 2006)

"Howard Hordinary is convinced that he’s the bastard grandchild of Harry Houdini. An unemployed executioner with a fetish for electric chairs, Howard is tormented by multiple perversities and obsessed with schemes to restore his status as executioner and as Houdini’s legitimate heir. Cycling back and forth between Hordinary's paranoid present and Houdini’s fantastical past — teeming with freaks, carnies, scientists, con men, lunatics, and Houdini’s own obsessions — Electric Flesh is a sizzling blend of fact and fiction, penned by an exciting new voice in American fiction."

"Claro is a verbal power station who'll light up your brain the way he lights up the page. It was for tour de force performances such as Electric Flesh that God created language and the Devil created style." —Tom Robbins

"Claro's Electric Flesh is frighteningly smart. Claro's novel has captured in language what Houdini must have experienced, the panic and thrill of both confinement and escape. I was trapped by this work from the onset and I'm not free yet. Many thanks to Mr. Evenson for this translation." —Percival Everett

"This is an astonishing piece of delirious, supercharged prose. It makes one think of Pynchon, of Joyce, of various kinds of Fear and Loathing. It's a short, intense burst of high linguistic voltage, and the translation is simply outstanding. There's nothing much like the zing and heat of Electric Flesh in these cautious, undercooked times." —Salman Rushdie

"Excessive, extreme, obscene, Claro's vision of an immoral application of electricity is beautifully strange and unsettling." — Ben Marcus

"From the beginning, in 1881, when an unemployed laborer, on a bet, attempts to copulate with an electricty generator, to the end, when an unemployed executioner who specialized in electric chairs fantasizes about electrically-enhanced sex with a prostitute, Electric Flesh runs an alternating current of language through the body of America.
The central protagonist of Electric Flesh, however, is Harry Houdini, both as the historical figure himself, and as an idea�specifically Howard Hordinary's conviction that he is the bastard grandchild of a rumored liaison between Houdini and Charmain London (Jack London's wife). Howard, tormented by multiple perversities�particularly sex and electricity�his unemployment and powerlessness, schemes to restore his status (as executionar, as Houdini grandchild). Cycling back and forth between Hordinary's present, and the fantastical Houdini past, populated by freaks, carnies, scientists, con men, lunatics. Momentarily confined by cages and straitjackets, Houdini ranges all over the world and, much has Hordinary is obsessed with Houdini, Houdini in turn is obsessed with *SZUSZU*, the enigmatic "Electric Girl," with whom he shared billing early in his career.
Combining the compressed violence of a Dennis Cooper novel, with the paranoid historical sweep of Pynchon and Vollman, and the linguistic experiments of Ben Marcus, Brian Evenson, and Matthew Derby, Claro is very much an American writer who will finally be discovered by his true audience."

"Electric Flesh is wired, cover to cover. The sparks fly from the beginning, and Claro does an impressive (if taxing) job of keeping the voltage up.
There are several storylines and obsessions in the novel. Much is centred around the early days of electricity, with Edison and others still figuring out all the potential of this newly harnessed discovery. Central to the book: the efforts to perfect the electric chair -- though the theme of current running through characters more generally runs throughout the book. Electric Flesh is also a Houdini-novel, as the great magician toys with electricity too (among much else) -- and has his own obsession, an 'Electric Girl' billed as *SZUSZU*. Then, in the (near) present-day, there's Howard Hordinary, convinced that either "his ghostly granny is none other than Charmian London, Jack London's wife with whom Houdini fooled around" -- or that he's *SZUSZU*'s grandchild by Houdini.
Howard is also electric-chair obsessed (and is a professional executioner -- though down on his luck since Pennsylvania has just switched to lethal injection). But it's the obsession of all the characters, a variation on the theme that Claro does well but can also be wearing (despite the jolts it offers).
Electric Flesh is full of charged episodes and writing -- amazingly lively and clever stuff at times (ably rendered into English by Brian Evenson). A good if not always comfortable read, in which much of the pleasure comes from the creative writing." - The Complete Review

"Three story lines fuse and ignite in this brief novel by the French metafiction master who publishes under a single name (which means "clear," "bright" or "fine" in Spanish). As a child, the real-life Harry Houdini develops a crush on Szuszu, a magician's assistant, whom he eventually pursues-along with the craft that pushes his body to its limits-through a sideshow of carnival freaks. Simultaneously, Thomas Edison directs an army of assistants while attempting to invent the electric chair, conducting gruesome experiments with animals, criminals and high voltage frying. In a modern story set in 1996, an unemployed executioner, Howard Hordinary, masturbates and dreams about Houdini's feats, eventually hoping to prove that he, like Gary Gilmore, is the unacknowledged grandson of the great escape artist, the fruit perhaps of Houdini's liaison with Szuszu. Accomplished U.S. novelist Evenson turns syntax inside out attempting to translate Claro's French whirls and dips into an inventive English, but Hordinary's need to connect with Houdini seems little more than a device to bring the history of electricity closer to a century of terror and torture." - Publishers Weekly

"Sometimes life truly is stranger than fiction. As I sat down to draft a review of French author Claro’s eccentric, over-the-top prose poem-like novella Electric Flesh—a fiction that cleverly incorporates the histories of Thomas Alva Edison (otherwise referred to as “Godhison” in the text), inventor of—and none-too-reluctant champion of—the electric chair, and that of escape artist Harry Houdini—I came across an article entitled “Will Houdini Be There? Remains To Be Seen” in The Guardian Online. A sense of Freudian unheimlich gripping my excitable guts as I read that the remains of the magician-cum-escape artist are to be exhumed, with the approval of his great nephew George Hardeen (also a magician) and family, in order to be autopsied for any traces of poisoning, which, if found, would effectively debunk the accepted version of Houdini’s death contending that he died of a burst appendix after being punched backstage by two over-zealous “fans.” In fact, if he was poisoned, the article implicitly suggests, it would strongly indicate a conspiracy planned by a group referred to as “the spiritualists,” of which Arthur Conan Doyle, known primarily for his Conan The Barbarian series, was a member, and who, further, had made some incriminating remarks two years prior to Houdini’s untimely death, not-so-subtly suggesting that Houdini would not be very long for this world. In any case, while Claro’s clever conceit does not delve into Houdini’s involvement with the spiritualists, or with the “spirit world,” it does, in one heated scene, reenact Harry Houdini’s final moments as seen/told through the warped lens of its protagonist Harry Hordinary’s electrif[r]ied mind.
Claro’s peculiar protagonist Harry Hordinary (“HH”) is an out-of-work executioner who prefers electrocuting criminals until crisp to seeing them hang or be granted a healthy dose of lethal injection, for his home state of Pennsylvania has—unfortunately for him—ruled the latter to be more humane than electrocution. “Harry” has borrowed his name, and quite literally his sense of identity/identification, from the great Houdini, who himself changed his given name (and his place of birth) from Erich Weisz/Weiss many times over the course of his young life to various variants thereof, until finally hitting upon his [in]famous moniker: “Harry Houdini.” Hordinary has crazily convinced himself that he is the illegitimate grandchild of the contortionist-magician Houdini and Jack London’s wife, with whom the former had apparently “fooled around,” and he (Hordinary) decidedly views the world through the eyes of this chosen idol, combined with those of a pleasure-seeking sadomasochist worthy of a William Burroughs character addicted to alternating electrical current (AC) instead of “junk.” Add to HH’s vastly-distorted inner dialogue Houdini’s supposed search for the enigmatic *SZUSZU*, the “electric girl,” with whom Houdini supposedly worked at some early point in his career (as “evidenced” by an obviously spurious autographed photo featuring the rigged up dame and a baboon-masked figure in the background that Hordinary believes to be Houdini), and you have a very strange story indeed.
The slim book, which can be read in a single, concentrated sitting (though you’ll probably want to read it twice for the deliciously dense details), opens with a terrifying, and literally shocking, scene in 1881—nine years before ax-murderer William Kemmler will be the first to fry on Edison’s nascent electric chair, which decidedly incorporates his rival Westinghouse’s “Alternating Current” technology—wherein a man named George Smith “couples” with an electric generator and is incinerated, igniting a series of reports and recommendations to a committee spearheaded by the sadistic dentist Alfred Porter Southwick and including Elbridge T. Gerry (ironically one of the founding members of the “American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Children”) to employ electrical current for human executions in lieu of hanging. These recommendations lead to the eventual development by Edison of the “Godhison” electric chair, which is first vigorously tested on various animals (“dogs, cats, horses, elephants…”) to positively sickening results. (The interested reader may wish to consult Jill Jonnes’s fascinating study Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (published by Random House), Chapters 7 and 8, for a more thorough and objective, yet equally gruesome, account.) Man and monkey are given equal status by the author/narrator of this smoldering yarn—equal lowly status, that is—for, is it not true that either will sizzle the same way when roasted on the chair? and is it not also true that, when it comes right down to it, the former has evolved (if we subscribe to Darwin’s theories) from the latter? But, the question sine qua non that is implied here is: How far has man really evolved? What separates us from other animals? The book’s grim conclusion would appear to be nada, aside from our perverse propensity to create horrid technological beasts such as the electric chair for our own ends; i.e. as instruments of control (political, economic, and so on) and torture.
Besides the artful blending of fact/fiction, the quirky dark humor, the visceral imagery, and the entertaining—albeit intentionally-skewed—storyline, one of the most striking and enjoyable aspects for some imbibers will be the verbal and visual-layout pyrotechnics, courtesy of translator Brian Evenson’s stunning translation/interpretation of the French. Salman Rushdie has compared Claro’s prosaic universe to that of Pynchon and Joyce, and it is not difficult to see why. Words leap off the page in delightful swooning, rushing, flowing blocks of eloquently-electrified text, sentences run to the point of almost-bursting before coming to a full stop, reveling in their clause-cluttered-complexity, never afraid to shout Hey, are you listening? from time to time, or to incorporate innovative visual techniques (read it and see what I mean) in order to call attention to themselves and/or their subject matter. While some initiates to Claro’s warped world will find this playful wordsmithing eminently satisfying (not to mention downright fun), others will inevitably find it to be somewhat cumbersome, teeth-grittingly opaque, if not totally impenetrable (though this text is a cakewalk next to Finnegans Wake!). Regardless of the challenge posed to some, I contend that once one enters the dizzying stream of Claro and Evenson’s words, hooks up and in to the sizzling-hot current upon which the text propels itself and its found audience to horrific heights of ectoplasmic ecstasy, as with the great Houdini himself (“three seconds, two seconds…”) there’s simply no turning back." - Marc Lowe

Yuriy Tarnawsky – A nightmare dissolves in time like blood in water: Rilke is murdered by a rose bush, but after donating his left arm to a fetus stew

Yuriy Tarnawsky, Like Blood in Water (Fiction Collective 2, 2007)

«A surrealist account of the creative and descriptive arts.
In these five surrealist collages, waking life continually gives way before the onslaught of dreams. Yuriy Tarnawsky has condensed the vastness of scope typical of novels into shorter fragments—mininovels—that require the reader’s active participation. The tone is a balance of dead-pan comedy and solemn gothic, sometimes a near-parody of wide-eyed candor, sometimes recounting utterly mad or barely conceivable states of affairs.
A candidate for major surgery struggles unsuccessfully to avoid it. Two strangers meet, and eventually marry, after participating in scream therapy. A pianist stops playing because he believes his hand is not there when he sits at the keyboard. A character sees the giant blue and white flowers he has craved his whole life only at the instance of his electrocution. Tyler Pavarotti, a tailor, voluntarily takes a role in a production in which he will be killed.
Tarnawsky’s language is elegant and careful, and his studied concentration of rhythm allows his work to transcend prose, nestling somewhere within the realm of musical composition. Both tragic and beautiful, in these stories life dissolves in time like blood in water.»

"When I get rich I'll get a pied-a-terre on Yuriy Tarnawsky's planet. It’s very wild on the surface and cool and calm in the interior. The palm fronds don’t decay."— Andrei Codrescu

"Tarnawsky’s are the second opinions we seek, almost recognize, then do, for they are made of the sounds, power sources, bizarre jobs, people coming our way, fitted together both by us and a culture by turns demanding and uncaring if we sleepwalkers notice or not: alarming, intelligent, caught again and again in the grasp of the author's surprise and yearning."— Joseph McElroy

«In this, his first work of fiction since 1993’s fantastically peculiar Three Blondes and Death, Yuriy Tarnawsky presents five “mini-novels” which he describes as prose works of short story length that engender the scope and complexity of novels. Each piece indeed achieves an expansive effect, largely due to extreme ellipses that fragment the stories. Tarnawsky leaves the reader with the task of filling in the missing episodes, imagining exposition and causalities as well as the significance of numerous bizarre scenes. The reader is firmly guided by Tarnawsky’s startling prose and exhilarating sense of play. As in Sorrentino or Barthelme, the text brims with the excitement that anything can happen.
The unifying thread is that of nightmare. Rilke is murdered by a rose bush, but not before donating his left arm to a fetus stew. A tailor named Pavarotti is hired to play Agamemnon in an Italian film, then ends up awaiting a presumably real death onstage, in the role of Marat. A doctor chases his patient across a skating rink, mowing down rows of giant flowers before plunging his ice skate’s blade into the man’s chest. Another man’s electrocution causes massive flowers to erupt out of the earth.
Tarnawsky’s stories recall the monumental terror of childhood, beautiful nightmares that resonate poetically and honestly. The fragments of these mini-novels swirl, daring meanings and tantalizing the reader with dreamlike connections—like blood in water, indeed, but like nothing so much as life itself.» - A. D. Jameson

“Nelson Fitipaldo stands at the window of his kitchen-apartment and looks outside. An unhealthy reddish color tinges the world like blood dissolved in water. - From “Former Pianist Fitipaldo”
Yuriy Tarnawsky, who, according to the back cover of Like Blood in Water, has authored “19 collections of poetry, seven plays, nine books of fiction, a biography, and numerous articles and translations,” came as a revelation to this writer, who had never heard of his work before. Tarnawsky’s collection of “five mininovels,” which he dedicates to his parents and terms “memories of my childhood,” is an oneiric, fragmentary journey through one man’s subconscious, and makes him a good candidate for inclusion as a modern-day surrealist; in fact, according to the biography at his website, he is a founding member of the New York Group, “a Ukrainian émigré avant-garde group of literary writers.” His background in electrical engineering, theoretical linguistics (his Ph.D. dissertation dealt with Noam Chomsky’s Extended Standard Theory/semantics), Artificial Intelligence, and Ukrainian literature seems to have left its indelible imprint on his work, as has the fact that he is a poet and playwright whose original language is not English. A rude awakening awaits the reader who comes to this collection with the expectation that s/he is going to encounter linear “stories” with all of the elements of conventional fiction intact (plot, arc, characterization, etc.). Those who are a bit more daring in their literary tastes, however, are likely to find the challenge of deconstructing Tarnawsky’s enigmatic work a welcome one.
From the get-go, one senses that this is not to be a regular collection of tales (as if the cover art, depicting a glass of blood-laden water against a gray and white background, wasn’t already a strong enough indicator.…). The first “mininovel,” which is also the shortest, entitled “Screaming,” is divided into six parts. This peculiar fiction focuses on a character named Rilke Roark (named for the poet, while the surname recalls the protagonist of The Fountainhead), and a one-armed woman, Alba (named for “the duchess of Alba that Goya painted”). The two meet at a sort of cult gathering, replete with yoga mats, where participants scream their brains out in ritualized fashion. Their uncanny dialogue in the second section, as with all of the uncanny dialogues in all of the uncanny fictions, is told in a format suggestive of reading the script of a play; indeed, it appears as though many of these pieces are meant to be read as quasi-plays, as sub-headings such as “the final scene,” “prologue” / “epilogue,” and “a dress rehearsal” (the latter consisting of a bizarre conversation between two parents concerning the colors of their daughter’s costume) would seem to indicate. In the third section of “Screaming,” Roark and Alba’s bizarre dreams are limned, while in the fourth we are presented a matter-of-fact description of their apartment (they have, in the space between sections, gotten married). For example:
'It is one very large room in a former factory building with windows along the entire outside wall. In the middle of it stands a toilet bowl without a seat. An old black quilt lies in a heap next to it. You can cover yourself with it when you use the toilet if you so desire. A large, old-fashioned sink with two basins is attached in the center of the wall opposite to the one with the windows. It is used for washing up as well as for doing dishes'.
The nouveau roman-like description continues in this fashion, to include details of a lithograph of Munch’s “The Scream,” a large, rusty-edged cube inside of which screaming sessions are held, and seven glass jars with fetuses inside of them. In the fifth section, one such screaming session is described in absurdist fashion—Munch’s lithograph literally screams along with the couple, turning back the hands of the grandfather clock in the room and making the fetuses dance and twirl like Olympic athletes—and appears to correspond with section nine of the fourth mininovel, “Pavarotti-Agamemnon,” in which the protagonist sings so loudly and forcefully that he breaks the window, the mirror, and his wife’s collection of glasswear. (Many themes are echoed and reechoed throughout the five mininovels, such as the “primal scream,” the appearance of clocks, rust/decay, the death of loved ones, etc.) Finally, in section six, images of a rushing river containing various large objects (e.g. houses, furniture, vehicles, etc.) coalesce with the final, resonant über-image of a person putting “quarters of light” into the rift between the horizon and the earth, as though it were a “slot in a pinball machine.”
As this all-too-brief overview of the shortest of the five fictions will perhaps indicate, despite the volume’s modest length there is a lot of “stuff” packed into each mininovel to merit, as well as reward, multiple readings. A few of the many highlights from the remainder of the collection include when, in the second mininovel, the protagonist Nelson Fitipaldo, who has enjoyed a humble career as a pianist for some years, loses the cooperation of his right hand during a live performance, as if in a classic Freudian anxiety dream, and gives up the instrument—and his career—with somewhat less regret than one might normally expect. In the fourth mininovel, “Pavarotti-Agamemnon,” mentioned above, a most hilarious dialogue about regional, home-cooked foods between the tailor/actor Pavarotti—who is to play a hirsute Agamemnon—and the producer/director of the film ensues at the former’s apartment; the bizarre conversation reflects a communication breakdown whilst the men try, apparently, to translate between Italian and English. (This sequence literally had me laughing out loud on the light rail—you’ll just have to read it for yourself to confirm its bone-tickling efficacy; see pp. 103-7.) In the third mininovel, “The Joys and Sorrows of R. York,” there is a wonderful scene wherein the dream R. York narrates to his psychiatrist appears to describe the painting to which the segment is apparently an homage. And in the fifth, and perhaps most accomplished, mininovel, “Surgery,” the paraplegic Dr. Kax’s dream of mowing down plants with his skates is one which is sure to remain in memory long after closing the book.
If the reader chooses to give these five mininovels, which should be read and considered as a whole, a fair chance to ferment in the subconscious, focusing on the imagery and language first and leaving logic and forced interpretation behind (are the mininovels autobiographical, as the author suggests in the dedication? are they derived from his own dreams? or are they simply nonsensical pieces, penned to frustrate the Cartesians among us?), there is much to be savored—and indeed learned from—this wonderfully opaque, yet at times surprisingly lucid and tender, collection of lapidary absurdities from Planet Tarnawsky.» - Marc Lowe

«Though Like Blood in Water, Yuriy Tarnawsky’s collection of five “mini novels,” is a somewhat slim 192 pages, the stories themselves often seem as though they are folded, accordion-style, so that they expand and contract with the act of reading. It is this kind of shifting nature that leads me to believe that I could read the collection 10 times and it would mean something different each time. Some elements that seemed of the utmost importance upon my first reading might not even receive a second glance later. And so, after closing Like Blood in Water for the first time, I was struck by the idea that the book in my hands, the actual printed words, was much less important than my experience reading it.
Like Blood in Water is an incredibly complex, beautiful, and frustrating work. It is less about story than craft, a fact that I found alternately exciting and confounding. While Tarnawsky chooses to call his stories mini novels, I think a better term might be collages, or jazz improvisations, or splatter paintings.
The collection starts off relatively easy with the work “Screaming,” the most straightforward of Tarnawsky’s tales. Straightforward is a relative term, though. Like each of the mini novels, “Screaming” is broken into a series of interrelated sections, sometimes using poetry or even scripted dialogue. Piecing the sections together, choosing what to show and what to keep hidden, is what Tarnawsky does so well; by writing only the minimum, we as readers are forced to help him create the story, weaving it together and filling in the blanks.
“Screaming” concerns itself with a man named Rilke Roark and a one-armed woman he meets named Alba, whom we are told get married and, really, are exceptional only in that they scream for transcendental purposes. One need only read a small section of “Screaming,” though, to recognize Tarnawsky’s enormous talent as a writer, and to understand that no basic plot synopsis could do his writing justice: “The sky above is also brown, tinged by the light reflecting from below. It is very low -- so low Roark has to stand with his head bent down. It stretches flat all the way to the horizon where there is only a thin opening left between it and the earth like the slot in a pinball machine. Someone on the other side is feeding shiny new quarters of light into it one by one, over and over again.”
With each successive mini novel, the collection becomes more complex, more enigmatic. Certain themes are constantly popping up: dreaming, identity, loss, doppelgangers, the apocalypse. There are moments of brilliance and moments of frustration and opaque meaning. Towards the end of reading Like Blood in Water, as I thumbed forward through the last story and realized my journey would be over in a few pages, I felt a little like I was finally seeing the end of a long, bloody battle. This was not because the book was not enjoyable, but because it is rare that I have to do so much intellectual work while reading a collection of stories just to get to the end of it.
I feel as though I’ve yet to form any solid opinion on Like Blood in Water. Even after a few close readings, it seems I have barely scratched the surface, barely identified all of the complexities and ambiguities and interconnections that Tarnawsky worked into his collection. And so perhaps all there really is to say about Like Blood in Water is that, if you choose to pick it up, prepare for it to seem heavier than it looks - there is nothing diminutive about these mini novels.» - Andrea Chmielewski

Yuriy Tarnawsky, Three Blondes and Death (Fiction Collective 2, 1993)

«Based on a complex mathematical scheme that the author, a computer scientist and linguist, developed as a substitute for the traditional architecture of a novel, and written in a deliberately sparse and structured syntax that ruthlessly compartmentalizes reality, Three Blondes and Death is an hermetic and hypnotic treatment of the classic themes of love and death. Its strange protagonist, with the literally unspeakable name Hwbrgdtse, searches for meaning in life through the three women with whom he successively falls in love. He finds, however, only life's absurdity, ending in death—a death to which his quest eventually reconciles him.
Three Blondes and Death takes place in an ambiguous time and geography that turn out to be present-day America. The relations between the protagonist and the objects of his love are totally perverse and destructive; the texture of their lives is deceptively simple but implies a dark and undecipherable complexity; and the angst of mortality hangs over every gesture. A lunatic simplicity governs the behavior of Hwbrgdtse, which enables him to face issues of love and death more directly than is usually the case with romantic heroes.
Tarnawsky's third work of fiction is unusually readable, even magnetic, once we are drawn in by its hypnotic repetitions. The logical clarity of its style contrasts with the irrational, often dreamlike content. The action is stark and at the same time mysterious. Whether the strange sensibility that suffuses this story can be traced to the mathematically rigorous mind of its author, or to his Ukrainian roots, or to his multilingual background, Three Blondes and Death is an intriguing and unique work.»
Yuriy Tarnawsky, Meningitis (Fiction Collective 2, 1993)

"The most unusual--and, often, infuriating--novel of this trio, has to be Yuriy Tarnawsky's Meningitis [....] It's [...] almost as if Hemingway had been a methamphetamine addict instead of a boozer. Oddly, though, the prose style is what holds [Meningitis] together and allows it to work as well as it does." - Stephen Phelps

I get Yuriy Tarnawsky's classic Meningitis off the shelf and marvel over it. It's like mathrock on eight-track tape. I love how it says "All of the characters in this book are fictitious" on the copyright page and then the first sentence in the first story says,
Jim Morrison woke up.
Every time the protagonist in the story is cited as subject, it's always Jim Morrison--not Jim, not Morrison, but Jim Morrison. Every time.
And no paragraphs. No quotation marks. It was Raymond Federman, I believe, who said get rid of the fucking quotations marks around the dialogue - they interfere with the reading - they are useless - and besides characters in a novel don't speak quotations - and even if they speak quotations they don't admit that they plagiarized them.
The descriptions of actual doors are also kind of eerie. They read as if they may have been unintentional. The book was printed in 1978 (in English at least) and Morrison passed away in 1971.
Is Yuriy, or was he, a Doors fan? I wonder.
[I have a bootleg of the Seattle '70 show where Jim is playing with feedback for 20 minutes.
I'm an archivalist. That's what it's called.
That's what I call it. Archivalism.]
The Jim Morrison character comes up again in the middle of Meningitis, in "Sister of Snakes." The story "The End" also features Jim Morrison. The Jim Morrison character. It is neatly placed near the end of the book. The protagonist in the other stories is named George.
What inspired Yuriy to make Meningitis? I wonder...

Mike,
How gratifying to read about how someone perceives your work and gets something out of it. Thanks.
I did like the Doors, but above all wanted to tap into the image of Jim Morrison that had permeated the society and to play it off against my imagination. It was the contrast I created that was to be the effect on the reader. I do similar things in the mininovels in Like Blood in Water (Rilke, Pavarotti).
In Meningitis I tried to contrast again my personal experiences resulting from the divorce I had just gone through against purely fictitious, imagined events (present tense vs. past tense; one story in the future tense anticipates what actually happened - my cat).
Developing the syntactic style took years. It was really hard to learn to write (=see the world) like that. It taught me a lot about how not to be verbose and repetitive. With short sentences this stands out like a sore thumb. I created essentially an artificial language with a simple grammar and the reader will pick up the grammar after a few pages and will anticipate the development of the prose the way one anticipates lines in traditional poetry. In Three Blondes and Death I eased off a little on the rigid grammar, not to repeat myself. Each of my books is different although, I think, they all are mine.» - Mick O'Grady

Debra Di Blasi - Angry, inventive, iconoclastic, both literally and figuratively graphic, zone where literature, art and conceptual performance meet

Debra Di Blasi, What the Body Requires: a symphonic novel (Jaded Ibis Press, 2009)

"Police lieutenant Massimo Benevento is desperate to escape his ill-fitting occupation and the gloomy Italian suburb he patrols. When a beautiful American painter moves into the tower of a local villa, Massimo imagines her as his pathway to freedom. But she has come to kill her husband, a handsome musician she believes has run off to Europe with another woman. The husband's uncanny resemblance to Massimo creates a plot thick with sexual hijinks and erotic intrigue. An engaging cast of misfits, unforgettable settings, and sumptuous writing propel What the Body Requires to a contemporary literary classic. With illustrations by Debra Di Blasi."

"...highly ambitious and of the deepest seriousness... with an evocative prose and an exotic, vividly imagined landscape. The consistency with which the writing invests everyday actions and objects with an almost erotic fervor is truly extraordinary" - R. M. Berry

"In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love's multiple ironies." - The New York Times Book Review

"In her 2009 novel, Debra Di Blasi aims to indulge. As the title suggests, this is a work focused on the flesh. The sensual Italian landscape of the setting is as much a character as the people who populate its olive groves and medieval villas. Against this exotic backdrop, Di Blasi slowly unveils her mistress, an American artist married to a gorgeous violinist. Flitting back and forth through time and setting, she teases the reader with growing suspense.
Though Di Blasi is coy with her plot twists, she's not gun-shy. Death makes an appearance in the first paragraph. The word clitoris debuts on page two. Di Blasi is right to call this a "symphonic novel." The selling aspect is the melody of the words.
At times the plot is tough to follow, but the story here is secondary to style. The short sections, with their irregular punctuation and almost stream-of-consciousness structure, are more like poetry than prose. Reality and thought are often difficult to distinguish. Throughout the novel, Di Blasi plays with contrasts: the thin lines separating life and death, shadow and light, love and hate.
Di Blasi's writing takes on a sensual cadence. The rhythm and texture are erotic in ways very removed from the usual paperback romance. Her entrancing descriptions are both tactile and cerebral. Sure, chandeliers are pretty, but Di Blasi can spin a scene with such erotic tension that a hand through the lamp crystals becomes the sexiest thing in the world.
That tone fits the protagonist. Madeline is a hyper-sexual being. A male voice behind her at the post office can make her genitals quiver - and Di Blasi doesn't pass up any opportunity to describe genitalia going hard or slippery, as the case may be. Madeline is married to Gustavo, a physically stunning creature with equally stunning musical talent. But even before the reader knows his specific sin, Gustavo is cast as a traitor. This is why Madeline is the out-of-place American in a small Italian town - she's come to Europe to kill her husband.
But Madeline's bitterness hasn't dulled her affections. She's a magnetic presence, and there are other men in her life: the Italian police lieutenant who admires her from afar until a mysterious death brings them together, the American neighbor, the detective who is also the middleman for murder. Just as Di Blasi is adept with description, she's also a pro at ratcheting up tension, pulling in loose threads and bringing her characters to a bloody climax.
Yet for all the poetry, Madeline is kind of a narcissistic, possessive slut. She's preoccupied with beauty. It's unclear if her passion for Gustavo is just the product of her overactive libido or true love. With so few redeeming qualities, she can be hard to feel sorry for her when her lover betrays her. Even her neighbors call her la madonna della morte.
For all Madeline's faults, though, the book that tells her story remains a worthy indulgence." - Carolyn Szczepanski
Debra Di Blasi, The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions (Fiction Colletive 2, 2007)

"These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fearless emotional intensity. Tragic, lyrical, hilarious, and politically controversial, they exist in a world where fact is as strange as fiction, and fiction is often disguised as fact. At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jiri Cech? A businessman, vampire, and artist from the former Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although loathsome, only heighten his allure? Or something greater or smaller than the sum of these parts? This astonishing collection challenges the stylistic and thematic boundaries of traditional literature, questioning what it means to be human-and awake-in the post-millenium."

"In [this] book, Di Blasi's frustration with storytelling is palpable. Her previous works were too often nonshocking things, full of "edgy" sexual situations that didn't titillate or offend, psychiatric explorations charting nothing uncharted, characters so obvious they might as well have been named Important Rich Man or Unhappy Couple. With The Jiri Chronicles one gets the sense that Di Blasi saw the divide between what she wanted to do and what she'd achieved and said something like the hell with it, taking a torch to old ways of writing stories, and the result is by far the most interesting thing she's done. A fiction in three parts, The Jiri Chronicles starts off with "Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight" a series of engaging family reminiscences that may be real or fiction but are above all genuine. The second section, "Hyperfictions," gradually incorporates photos and textual disorder as the narrative segues from family reminiscence to an exploration of relationships gone wrong. Finally, "The Jiri Chronicles" arrives and spends the rest of the book in an explosion of photos, text boxes, footnotes, drawings, weird asides, margin notes, fake (?) ads and corporate memos, transcripts, bluebottle flies, and other uncategorizable weirdness in a story (or something like a story) about Jiri Cech, a Czech poet or businessman or some other undefined thing, whom the narrator presents as an object of repulsion but who was clearly, at some point in the past, something like a lover. The book is crammed so full of extratextual stuff that it's like the narrator is trying to distract herself from the ugliness of the tale she set out to tell, and the constant diversions reveal a mind writhing in pain both modern and older than any other. It's a huge step for Di Blasi, and a welcome one." - Tim Feeney

"Agitated, angry, inventive, iconoclastic, both literally and figuratively graphic, the real Jiri Cech would both revere and rape Emily Dickinson, then bottle all the blue flies she ever imagined and make a balm to annoint the body of his beloved. Or at least the object of his desire. Here is a series of tales, in varying keys, of intoxication and revenge, intoxication with whatever seduces, revenge for being seduced. An oblique memoir of family, an investigation of a mother's misplaced life, flirtation with self-advertisement in the manner of supermarket tabloids, and above all the Chronicles of Jiri Cech, seducer supreme, rogue chauvinist, lover and enemy. Beware, reader, you're in for a sumptuous, hypertextual, hypercharged ride. Hyperion himself would smile."
– David Hamilton

"Debra Di Blasi's The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions is chaotic, brilliant and, like Jirí Cêch himself, possibly quite mad. With frenetic energy, Di Blasi mixes personal narrative with ad copy, traditional fiction with newspaper clippings, email messages, reportage, collage, and scholarship. The resulting concoction is consistently surprising, challenging, invigorating, and, most surprisingly of all, often deeply moving. Di Blasi has a mind unlike anyone else writing fiction today, and this is her finest work yet." – Kevin Prufer

"In Di Blasi's visual rhapsody, time passing is us killing and betraying each other; time stalled is our obsessive concern with the head of the spear. All our furies-fathers, the way roots rot, the puzzle of cross words, fathers-dance on the head of a pin, till we can't help but laugh. Rage, cradled in Di Blasi's brilliant hands, grows gorgeous. Mothers and trees from photos fade, and we enjoy an exquisite lack of orgasm, sobriety... and bears." – Kass Fleisher

"Debra Di Blasi writes in a gray zone where literature, art and conceptual performance meet. Her prose reads like poetry or comes with scrapbook visuals. Her social comment channels Duchamp and his surreal cousins... Yet in this intellectual funhouse, you have the same concerns that drive most writers: memory, family, love, sex. Death and decay hover closely. The engine that drives her new book is how people create their own identities. Call it the fictions and myths of real life. Among other things, Di Blasi suggests, we must wonder how our own fictions extend and compare to the 'big lies' that seem to permeate our social and political cultures." – Steve Paul
Debra Di Blasi, Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press, 1999)

"This collection of short stories with a subversive undercurrent applies a sardonic, almost farcical spin to familiar genres such as the journalistic interview, the pedagogical homage, and the romance novel. Prayers of an Accidental Nature resonates with a diversity of voices that are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, and always human."

"Sex doesn't equal love – or does it? If it doesn't, then why do we expend so much energy on merging our bodies with others' while we so rarely connect in spirit? If it does, then why isn't sex enough to bind two people together against the world's insistence on ripping them apart? Such questions are among the chief preoccupations of Prayers of an Accidental Nature, Debra Di Blasi's arresting second book of fiction. Her characters struggle with the dichotomy of body and soul, the clash between the urges of the flesh and the desires of the heart and the inequalities of class, ethnicity, sex and age that magnify these conflicts. In "An Interview With My Husband," an American woman marries a younger man from Argentina. Their lovemaking is perfect, they are in love – surely this will last a lifetime? A year later, she finds herself on a rooftop, begging him not to leave her. In "Where All Things Converge," an extraordinary beauty gives up sex when it fails to bring her love; the lonely heroine of "Blind" recalls a past love even as she realizes that the passing of youth and beauty will now rob her, too, of sex. The pull of the flesh can't be denied: at times, sex may be only a surrogate for love, but it can be as essential to that emotion as oxygen is to life. In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love's multiple ironies." – Zofia Smardz

"One of the hallmarks of genuine art is that it appears artless. The art is hidden. You have to ask: How was that done?
Debra Di Blasi's stories in Prayers of an Accidental Nature often feign a kind of homespun plainness that masks sophisticated art. Sometimes Di Blasi-who teaches writing at the Kansas City Art Institute-begins a story on a quiet note with a recitation of mundane details. The next thing you know, she hits you with a gust of passion or a visionary insight, unexpected but a natural offshoot of the ground work.
The unknowability of others and oneself, the essential loneliness of everyone, the way life and love often are founded on illusions, the distance between men and women, native and foreigners-these are among Di Blasi's themes. Many of her characters are tormented by a sense that they don't "fit in." Lovers try to complete themselves through another human being only to discover a new sense of emptiness.
Metamorphosis is the driving principal of her stories-the strange alchemy that makes people fall in and out of love, the stages of aging, loss of attractiveness and desire, the ultimate transformation, death.
Di Blasi's stories often begin at the point where love is on the wane. In "An Interview With My Husband," an older woman questions her Argentine lover, who's about to move out, accelerating the end of their relationship by her interrogation.
In "Blind" a woman faces not just the end of an affair but also the realization that she's no longer young and beautiful, that she will never find love again. A discussion about impressionist painters, about seeing and not seeing, light and darkness, is artfully woven into the tale.
A schizophrenic narrator compares her sister-"a professional ex-wife: -to a tarantula in "The Season's Condition." The story ends with a mediation on extinction-an example of the way Di Blasi uses fantastic conceits to illuminate powerful, authentic conceptions.
Strange transformations take place in "I Am Telling You Lies." A couple's love, sustained by the extravagant lies a friend tells them, fades when he disappears from their lives. Another homely character, encouraged by his praise of her beauty, becomes beautiful-with the help of cosmetic surgery. We build our lives on dreams and falsehoods, according to this vision. Some transfigure and empower us, some destroy us.
Anyone who went to an old-fashioned school will be able to relate to "An Obscure Geography," a lovely, potent, sad, uplifting story about evil and lost innocence. Mrs. Patterson-a strict, guilt-tormented teacher-stands before the map mounted above the blackboard and introduces her students to the world beyond their small town. A demonic, disruptive boy joins the class and a Tom Sawyer-like yarn turns into a supernatural, Gothic tale. After the death of their long-suffering teacher, the students bring flowers to her grave and a small miracle occurs.
"Because we did not know much about giving eulogies, we stood there in awkward silence, watching rose petals wilt beneath the hot August sun. Finally Tommy Purkepyle cleared his throat and said, OThe capital of Alaska is Juneau.' We stared at him. Then we understood.
"Nicky Foster, who'd grown 3 inches over the summer, said in his new deep voice, OThe Amazon River is 3,915 miles long.' One by one we stepped forward and rattled off state capitals , foreign cities, mountain ranges, rivers and lakes and seas and oceans, some of us stating facts we didn't know we'd learned."
Di Blasi writes in many voices. The title story, for instance, has a dinner party setting, a cast of decadent bluebloods and an edgy, ironic tone. Still, the story reaches into metaphysical realms.
Erotic, earthy, humorous, sometimes shocking, always engaging, Prayers of an Accidental Nature will stay with you long after the last page has been turned." - Kansas City Star

"The self-indulgent narrators of these dozen clever, passionate stories find their lives stalled by sexual possessiveness, mistrust and jealousy. Women afraid of getting older cling to younger lovers, and often the gap is made wider by cultural differences: young South American men leave insecure gringas once steamy romance turns into just so much hot water. In the witty and engaging "I Am Telling You Lies," a married couple befriend an ordinary-looking student from Bolivia with a penchant for telling fibs. In "An Interview with My Husband," a vulnerable wife questions her younger, Argentinean husband's fidelity. To get at the truth, she resorts to game playing while correcting his grammar. "Pavlov's Smile" details another cross-cultural triangle, with an American woman juggling two men from Argentina. The author veers from familiar terrain in the dark fable "An Obscure Geography," wherein a victimized eighth-grade teacher gets back at her obnoxious young tormentor. The title story, a polished, witty satire in the style of Wharton or James, features a blue-blooded young man and his unconventional girlfriend as they meet his snobbish relatives, who inevitably thwart the young couple's plan to wed. Though the collection is uneven, with short pieces like "Where All Things Converge" and "Our Perversions" seeming more like erotic tone poems than fully realized fictions, Di Blasi's themes of sexual obsession, physical beauty and lost love ignite this notable effort to define the perils of intimacy." - Publishers Weekly

"This is a most depressing group of short stories, populated by self-obsessed, self-loathing characters. Di Blasi (Drought & Say What You Like, New Directions, 1997) begins with "The Season's Collection," a story told by a recently released psychiatric patient who rants against her sister/caregiver when she can keep her thoughts on track. In "Interview with My Husband," a couple uses the conceit of an interview because they don't have enough of a relationship to sustain them through the process of breaking up. A very short story, "Chairman of the Board," presents the thoughts of a dying man who was too important to stop for red lights. And there are more like this. Save your money." - Debbie Bogenschutz

"Twelve stories, mostly depicting life among intellectually and emotionally overwrought young people in present-day America. Almost all the characters who roam these pages suffer from some intense malaise, real or imagined, that prevents them from discerning any purpose in their own lives-and keeps them from communicating as much to the reader. Domestic life is usually futile: the schizophrenic narrator of "The Season's Condition," for example, drives her sister to distraction with her delusions, while the wife of "An Interview With My Husband" is obsessed with losing her younger Argentinian husband to another woman. Erotic life is largely as unsatisfying. The nearly blind art scholar of "Blind"compensates for her failed marriage with a succession of pointless love affairs; the beautiful narrator of "Where All Things Converge" dedicates herself to a life of celibacy after losing her faith in God; and the clueless intellectuals of "Our Perversions" attempt, without much success, to find an ontological significance in their sex ("We have our desire. We name it, then move into it so that it cannot move into us and make us who we are not: a man and a woman hiding from unquenchable desire"). The mendacity of the rich is also a common theme. The fable "An Obscure Geography," for instance, tells of the ultimate revenge of a troubled schoolteacher who loses her job at the hands of a wealthy, bratty student, while the title story relates the history of a young, rich, Wasp-y banker who falls disastrously in love with a free-spirited woman ("half Peruvian or Bolivian-we cannot remember which") who scandalizes his family. Apprentice work of some depth but no great originality. Di Blasi shows a talent for narration, but most of her central dichotomies (sex vs. love, money vs. freedom, etc.) are obvious, annoying, and very old-hat." - Kirkus Reviews

Debra Di Blasi, Drought (New Directions, 1997)

"In Drought, Di Blasi dissects a young couple's relationship on a failing cattle ranch, allowing us to see all the subcutaneous mental and physical violence they endure."

"Drought opens on "House" in June heat. It takes up barely half the page. Turn the page. There is "Woman," Willa, on verso, and on recto, an evaporating pond "Drowning in air." It is a film of a novella, stringing scene after scene with titled chapters, each filling less than a page and heaving sighs of white space.
The book is shaped to call attention to reading as an act of seeing. Similarly, DiBlasi's prose technique reminds the reader that she is looking, staring, at private moments. She moves the reader's eyes from "a wooden table" to "a misshapen tube of oil paint" to the woman's body, where "a brown strand of hair falls from her chignon onto her white neck where tiny beads of sweat gather, slide away, then gather again." With equal precision and objectivity, she describes the precise layout of the house, the milky eyes of a dead calf fetus, the couple in their bed, and the erection in the man's pants as he reads a romance novel, Tropical Heat, in the cab of his pickup truck.
Drought accumulates the images that tell the story of a man and a woman from June to September as a drought ravages their cattle ranch. In many ways, the story is an ordinary one. Plenty of people wait for rain and lose their farms. Still more couples argue. What's interesting about Drought is how it sustains the tension between the generic elements of tragedy and its precise manifestation in the mundane details of everyday life." - Monique Dufour

"Although previously published in literary journals, these two short novellas mark DiBlasi's book debut. Both are composed of short, poetic sections-a handful of self-reflective questions, a single imagistic sentence, a few lines of dialogue-that explore pained and failed relationships. "Drought" takes place on a small Kansas farm that has been decimated by a season of debilitating weather. Here, DiBlasi correlates the insufferable heat and decay with the crisis of a young married couple. "Say What You Like," the shorter and better of the two, details the tribulations of an affection-starved woman and her insouciant lover. In its own disjunctive way, "Say What You Like" is fictional documentation of how and why couples form-and break up. Both DiBlasi's style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer. But there are drawbacks: she allows understanding but never empathy, and the specific pathologies of her characters are mostly clichd, the kind of thing a close watcher of our culture knows to expect. Her characters' histories are fraught with abuses that could have come from the back reels of daytime TV shows, and this weakens the power of her otherwise exceptional work." - Publishers Weekly

"Di Blasi... is young, brash, hard-nosed, and talented.... Her minimalist style, in Drought & Say What You Like, is brilliantly detailed, like the eye of a camera looking outward at carefully chosen elements of the landscape that make an impression of the whole." — Voices in Italian Americana

"A stunning piece of writing... spare and lean, sexy, psychologically charged and extremely visual.... A compelling journey into [Di Blasi's] own heart of darkness." — Neon, Nevada Council for the Arts Magazine

"Let’s begin where it all began; that is, with your childhood. (Don’t worry – I’m not going to charge you for this session!) I have read that you grew up on a cattle farm in Missouri, located in what you’ve described as one of the poorest counties in the State of Missouri. Your novella Drought, and many of the stories in your collection Prayers of an Accidental Nature – “An Obscure Geography” comes immediately to mind – are set in impoverished rural towns where verbal and physical abuse between people (especially between couples), and even death, seem to be everyday occurrences. How have your experiences growing up in such an environment shaped your writing? Do you see a connection between domestic violence and the atrocities that are now happening around the world in Iraq, Darfur, Israel/Lebanon, etc.?
- Uh-oh. You began with sociology and politics, so the meat of this entire interview’s gonna be me bitching about one thing or another. You have been warned.
I was born a poor white child...
Seriously: I was born a poor white child in a poor white county. But there is poverty and then there is POVERTY. The former is manageable, if you have caring, intelligent, hard-working parents. The latter can be disastrous. Thankfully, our poverty was the former sort. When I was four my father bought a large cattle farm, an act that made him land rich and dirt poor, as they say in my neck o’ the woods. The cattle market vacillated to the extent that we would go from feast to famine in the space of a year. We had no plumbing, and the old house was painfully cold in winter, scorching hot in summer. My clothes were hand-me-downs from my older sister who often received her hand-me-downs from the daughter of a family friend. I received my first new school dress in fourth grade. We finally built a new, plumbed house when I was 16, and I thought I had finally arrived.
In hindsight (and by brutally editing memory) I had an idyllic childhood because my mother was loving, intelligent and groovy, my father an amazingly hard worker, and the farm was nearly a thousand acres of fecund pastures with a creek winding through hundreds of acres of untouched woods. Our clothes were always clean and the house was usually tidy, even with five kids tearing about. We ate incredibly well: fresh vegetables from a huge summer garden and the choicest Angus beef. (Imagine being bored with prime rib by the age of 12!) Such a vast variety of animals, tame and wild, roamed those rolling acres. At one time we had 18 dogs, countless cats, a bird, four horses, hundreds of cattle and pigs, and fish. I even had a pet pig that was housebroken, and crickets imported from Japan in the days when Japanese imports were cheap. I wanted a monkey (incredibly, you could buy squirrel monkeys out of the back of comic books) but my mother drew a finite line on that one.
My parents were liberal with love, responsibility, education and politics, and thought it vital that we understand current events and our place in the scheme of things. My mother’s mantra: “No one else is better than you, and you’re no better than anyone else.” Thus, by the time I witnessed the abject poverty of other children I was already programmed for an intense empathy that, frankly, most of my friends were not. My empathy also arose from my own paucity and feeling at times ashamed or worried that my own lack would be discovered and I’d be abased like the other children.
It’s still difficult to believe the cruelties the really disadvantaged kids suffered in addition to their hunger, abuse and existential indignities. These were children who were not sufficiently fed, bathed or clothed, who were emotionally, physically and sometimes sexually abused by their relatives, who found it difficult to concentrate in class and learn because their bellies ached for food and their eyes ached for sleep, who were further belittled by their classmates (and some asinine teachers) because of their plight. To this day I cannot fully comprehend the “salt in the wound” behavior of children and adults. No, wait. I take that back. I’ve seen animals reject or attack one of their own that has a physical disability, is diseased or in an otherwise weakened state. Such behavior is productive in maintaining the general health of a tribe and species, and is quite likely a human instinct, too — though self-awareness should always trump instinct. Ah, self-awareness! The root cause of hominan’s humanity to hominan.
Yes, living with and studying four-legged animals has greatly influenced my view of two-legged animals. Such a small percentage separates us from our hominoid relatives that taxonomies have been revised. When I taught my War Short Stories course at Kansas City Art Institute, I developed a section titled, “Animals and Aggression.” I felt it was important for students to understand the essential function of war, and that “war” can be any battle: sibling against sibling, father against son, tribe against tribe, country against country. I dedicated much of that section on our close relatives, chimpanzees — primarily pan troglodytes who are omnivores and kill their own kind to resolve some conflicts. In the 1970s, chimps of Africa’s Gombe National Forest split into two factions that subsequently engaged in a four-year war against each other. One faction completely wiped out the other in a gruesomely violent genocide. It was during this time that accounts of chimp cannibalism were first witnessed.
“In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” –Tony Montana in Scarface
Because the primary directive of any species is propagation, the one with the most power gets to spread the most seed. Who has the most power? The one with the best resources. What are the best resources? Food, water, and shelter on a basic level. When the basics are met, then an individual’s or country’s “resources” become the accoutrements of plenitude: good health that leads to physical strength and/or beauty, that leads to fame and money that lead to power (not necessarily in that order or combination), that leads to “attractiveness” and thus gene dissemination. (Lest anyone use this as an argument against homosexuality or masturbation: To date, homosexuality has been witnessed in over 450 animal species, and many animals masturbate, like the red deer that masturbates by rubbing its antlers through bushes, often five times a day during rutting season. (Talk about horny! Ha ha ha ha ha!) So, although propagation is the driving force of a species, power in all its manifestations is the means to the end. I’m aware that, even as I write this, I’m trying to make myself more powerful by what I reveal or don’t reveal to you, and through a pretense of expertise.
To generalize: Children who belittle less fortunate children are trying to draw attention to and maintain their own power. Men who feel powerless in society because of poverty or low social/employment status kick their dogs and beat their wives. Women who feel homely or insignificant spread malicious gossip about women who are powerfully attractive or attractively powerful. First world countries try to hang on to their wealthy economies by invading oil-rich countries. Insurgencies rise to gain power against those already in power. There are power struggles at the heart of all relationships, at the heart of all wars.
The Israeli-Hezbollah conflict is too complex and deeply nuanced in its historical origins for me to deconstruct here or elsewhere, and I’m certainly no expert in Middle East politics. But this war, too, is essentially about power: who has it, who wants it, who’s afraid of losing it, ad naseam. Hezbollah, and most Arab nations, want Israel destroyed. The State of Israel is a result of Jews destroyed in World War II — a nearly complete genocide, I might add, that some survivors believe would not have happened if the European Jews would have fought the Nazis instead of passively walking — or chuffing off, to paraphrase Sylvia Plath— to their deaths. Thus, I suspect, Israel’s currently strong military and aggressive “pre-emptive defensiveness” if I may warp a new phrase. No one wins, of course, because the only win is a win-win, and that takes not only symbiosis but an awareness of symbiosis, of one’s own, society’s, and planet’s place in the convoluted web of existence.
Footnote: Unlike pan troglodytes, bonobo chimps use sex to resolve all conflicts, between young and old, male and male, male and female, female and female. As primatologist Frans de Waal suggests in his book The Ape and the Sushi Master, there’s hope for humans yet. Ooga! Ooga!
We at Mad Hatters’ Review are delighted to be featuring an outstanding (and, to the best of my knowledge, exclusive) audio excerpt from “Personal Effects” in this issue. The thing that struck me about the tonality/atmosphere of this unusual aural piece when I first listened to it was that it was more reminiscent of work by underground electronic music artists such as Coil and Bill Laswell than it was of a typical “spoken word” recording; it had – or rather has – a very ethereal, yet at the same time frightening, ambience to it. Could you perhaps tell me a bit more about this recording, and about how you expect listeners will react to it?
- The text version of “Personal Effects” was created in Storyspace, a hypertext software program that allows the writer to create links, thus writing a story that is nonlinear or, as Epsen Aarseth writes, ergodic. I like using this method of composition because there’s a strong 4-D architecture that emerges. The writing becomes, in fact, like designing a building with rooms full of wondrous images, sounds, and scents, wherein one element inspires another that inspires another and often circles back to earlier “rooms,” in this case computer windows. And because I’m a bit synesthetic—sensing each story, film or sound composition as a mutable shape of a specific liquid density and color—the space of hypertext allows me to build outward in many directions.
Like my earlier hypertexts-in-print, “Personal Effects” was subsequently reshaped for the page, a process that entails recreating “links” via font disparity, white space, indentations and sometimes color. When Carol Novak asked me if I would like to adapt “Personal Effects” print version to audio, I was thrilled because the process allowed me to return to creating a 4-D space via sound. The excerpt is designed for headphones so that the sound moves through and around the listener: the listener thus becoming the tree at the center of the tale.
As for ambience: The day I began the story was overcast and windy – gorgeously rife with impending calamity. That density, that peculiar clear dark liquid, set the tone which might be aptly construed as “frightening.” After all, what’s more dreadful than unmitigated regret, or witnessing the death of a loved one? The piece is intensely layered, with sound upon – or under – sound.
Growing up inside nature, you acquire a keen ear for aural nuance: A summer night is not quiet but deafening with insect, bird, amphibian and mammal voices. Plus, the wind through trees and grasses. Plus the indefinable noises and whispers. Indeed, rural sounds are spectral in that they’re so difficult to precisely pinpoint because of the way an insect’s or bird’s call is designed to not only carry but spread out. I learned from animals to tap into my own animal nature, to turn an ear this way or that, cock my head. My own pulse becomes enmeshed in that throbbing wheeze of nature and so the perception of life is one of relationship not disconnection. Digression: The worst thing Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture did to the world – besides a voracious hunger to kill The Other – was to claim and reinforce that humans have dominion over and thus are separate from all other life. It’s bullshit and results in indisputable destruction of the very environment that sustains us.
My sound influences are so broad and varied, it’s really hard to pinpoint whether this excerpt is the result of voice recordings of Laurie Anderson or Sylvia Plath, classical works of Gorecki or Shostakovich, music of Bone Thugs or Brian Eno, et al. And then there’s the often overlooked brilliance of sound designers who work in film. (Sound design is much more than music. It’s the clinking glass, the thumping wood, the wheezing breath. It’s the tick of metal, pop of guns and squeal of rubber.) Recall the sound design of Apocalypse Now, Wings of Desire or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Most viewers are unaware of how much a film’s sound evokes a deep, lasting response in them. If it’s a good film – even if it’s a bad film – I pay close attention to the sound design: what works, what doesn’t. In creating an aural fiction piece, the reader-listeners are creating their own visual “movie” and I’m providing the sound design and soundtrack. The reason the film Drought was so disturbing was not just because of director Lisa Moncure’s brilliant vision but Jim McKee’s stunning sound design. I dated Jim years ago when I lived in San Francisco, and learned quite a lot from him about the nuances of sound. (Among other things.)
In your short story “Blind,” included in Prayers of an Accidental Nature, you describe the way that a myopic girl perceives all things as color and light, much as the Impressionists depicted life in their paintings, while in the novella Drought – which includes a description of the way light refracts off of various objects that is worthy of the nouveau roman writings of a Robbe-Grillet or a Marguerite Duras – the female protagonist is herself a painter. Your own drawings, paintings, and installations have been shown in various museums, and your screenplay for Drought (recipient of the 1999 Cinovation Screenwriting Award) was adapted by director Lisa Moncure, whose short film version itself later went on to win a number of impressive awards. What is the relationship, for you, between visual art, music, and creative/conceptual writing?
- It’s great that you caught Robbe-Grillet’s influence in Drought. I spent the summer of 1980 reading and falling in love with works of avant-garde or experimental writers like Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, Walter Abish’s How German Is It?, William H. Gass’s Heart of the Heart of the Country, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene, and others. I was just one year past my creative writing education that was predominantly poetry, not fiction, thus writing that blurred boundaries attracted and intellectually excited me. And the more of the avant-garde I discovered the less interested I became in traditional fiction writing, i.e., fiction in which the plot takes precedence and does not challenge one’s concept of language and its myriad possibilities. Read closely, and I suspect you can find influences, large or small, of all above-mentioned writers in Drought, which was actually begun in 1980, then put away until 1990 when it was completed in three months. I should add that those early readings gave me permission, so to speak, to begin breaking the unwritten (pardon the pun) rules of fiction writing. If you don’t know what those rules are, check a page of my ironic hypertext Gass Pain or any Top 100 Books list. Though the latter will contain many books I deeply appreciate and revere, like Nabokov’s Lolita and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, it will also illuminate a numbing homogeneity of form – and of course race-gender (i.e., white male).
Shortly after I studied poetry (and journalism, briefly), I took a degree in painting from Kansas City Art Institute. While there I had the good fortune to study with performance-artist/writer/painter/renaissance-man Michael K. Meyers who further validated the dissolution of boundaries between not only genres but artistic disciplines. I created videos and audios, multimedia installations, art books, mixed media sculptures and drawings, and wrote/directed/performed performance art, poetry and short fiction. Of course I painted too, and thus learned the lovely process of abstracting from the abstract, e.g., What is the color and shape of detente? The haptic process of drawing and painting helps you see, not just look. Every writer should study visual art, not only art history but drawing, as Flannery O’Conner once recommended. You don’t really see something until you’ve drawn it a hundred times. You don’t know what a tree really looks like until you’ve studied the veins of a leaf, inside and outside. My sophomore year of painting, we had to choose one object and paint only it for an entire semester. Afterward you understand not only what the object looks like but what it means.
The same can be said of sound, as I hinted at earlier. Did you really listen to that cricket scuttling across a dry leaf? That scrap of cellophane quivering in the wake of a passing truck? That bird mistaking a window for the unobstructed world? I have to credit my musical ear to good genes: My grandmother played piano extremely well, by ear, and I played clarinet for years though never learned to sight read because I also played by ear. (Nice rhyme here.)
The significance of process over product that I learned in art school I’ve now applied to everything I undertake. Every art form is mutable and interconnective and overlapping. We’re a primitive species that still needs to separate things into categories – and then judge: “This is not writing.” “This is bad music.” No. This is. And, so, what does it mean that it is? You can say that chick lit sucks — I do — but that doesn’t answer the bigger question of why chick lit books are currently so popular, why so many women and men choose intellectual vapidity over intellectual challenge. As a reader/listener/viewer/experiencer I’m more interested in questions not verdicts. (Though, of course, you’ll find me indicting just about everyone – myself included – in my own fiction because of the socio-political nature of my writing. Which, in turn, still leaves me to ask questions: “Why did I write that? What influenced it? Who and what am I in which and what culture that I think what I think?”) I suspect there’s a close link between people who hold too tight onto categorization and those who fear death. In their mind, stasis means you’re still living. In my mind — having smelled enough stagnant ponds in my time — stasis means death. Why do so many people become more conservative as they grow older? They are conserving themselves and all they hold dear (money, property, youth) against the inevitable: that fat black corvus corax swooping down, beak gaping, claws sprung. And the more they have to hold dear, the more conservative they become. Digression: Watching my heretofore liberal-minded father go from a socio-politically generous debtor-rancher to a land-rich/pocket-rich Limbaugh-listening, O’Reilly-watching conservative has been one of the more anxiety-filled experiences of my adult life.
I’d now like to talk a bit about The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions, which I found to be a truly indescribable blend between novel, short story collection, extended magazine and/or newspaper article and/or advertisement for products and services which don’t actually exist – but should, or might in some parallel universe much resembling our own –, and socio-political treatise. (Okay, ye marketeers of stolid writing, try to force an all-encompassing genre/label upon that; I dare you!) What was the impetus behind the creation and compilation, if you will, of these disparate-yet-cohesive “chronicles”? When/where/how did the idea strike you for such a multilayered/multimedia work? Who or what (have I hit all of the “W” questions yet?) inspired/influenced this fascinating and complex piece, apart from this enigmatic Jirí Cech fellow (whose CV I happened upon while “Googling” him the other day, by the way, though I’m convinced it wasn’t the real Jirí Cech’s…)?
- The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions contains experiments I wrote between 1998 and 2005. I do not use the term “experiments” glibly. Each story began with specific and sometimes very tight parameters. The first section, “Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight,” contains flash fictions derived from real family photographs, written in 15 minutes or less. “Hyperfictions” contains a wide variety of experiments. As for the Chronicles themselves... Ah, Jirí, Jirí, Jirí!
My statement of intent, A History of the Jirí Chronicles, pretty much says it all, but I’ll summarize. The year was 1998, and it was a fucking good year, or I should say a good fucking year. The Democrats were in The White House and I was driving back and forth to New Mexico to screw this hot Czech guy, and the Big Vagina Brain gave birth to a very fat baby Jirí, halo slightly disassembled.
The Information Deluge was getting wetter, so I assigned my experimental writing students with the task of making meaning out of a deluge of randomly selected information I’d clipped from magazines, newspaper articles and ads. Students blindly selected short paragraphs, images, charts and graphs, then had to weave the clippings into a 10-section fiction. The second rule was to not edit or censor whatever random shit popped into your head while writing: song lyrics, movie dialog, what your mother told you yesterday... Since I always do writing assignments alongside my students, the first story, “Czechoslovakian Rhapsody Sung to the Accompaniment of Piano,” grew from a pile of unrelated print information.
The important thing to note is the fractal, organic quality of The Jirí Chronicles. The more tentacles it sprouts, the more cultural significance it takes on, thus the more tentacles it sprouts, and so on. Once limited to only B/W print fiction, the Chronicles has expanded to 4-color print, video, music and spoken word, visual art, and consumer goods, chronicling not only socio-political issues since 1998 but also technology – particularly the growing democratization of technology and the implications of such. Very early on I directed The Jirí Chronicles toward an aesthestic rather than mathematical experiment in Systems Theory.
My interest in Systems Theory developed long before Jirí was born, after Fritjof Capra’s Turning Point, and the film based on it, Mindwalk. Systems Theory makes perfect sense if you understand bio systems like a pond or forest. The universe consists of systems within systems, all interconnected, which means you cannot alter one system without affecting the others. You cannot fuck up one part and expect the whole to remain unchanged. (Are you listening, George?) It’s true even of corporations and academic institutions. Pay your teacher’s shitty salaries and you will soon discover a decline in your institution’s reputation and enrollment, and an increase in student and teacher attrition rates, which eventually affects the intellectual and therefore economic worth of an entire country, which in turn affects other societies that rely on that country’s economic and intellectual wealth.
Jirí Cêch is an enigma, an intentional and perpetual contradiction, because he represents what we don’t know about every person we meet, every issue we confront. He’s the stereotype that suddenly gets broken by a single comment: “I like poetry but I don’t like intellectual things.” He’s the reminder that we never really know the whole story, and pretending that we do makes us one big dumb fucking asshole. Consequently, it is also about The Lie in contemporary society, where politicians, media monsters, and corporate and religious leaders are able to spin webs of deceit by means of the very technology that allows Jirí Cêch to exist as “flesh-and-blood.”
P.S. There is another famous Jirí Cêch, who’s a physicist, interestingly enough. But maybe he is the real Jirí Cêch. Or maybe I’m lying. Or maybe I’m lying about lying....
I’ve noticed that there are multiple references to various types of insects in certain of your stories. In the novella Drought, for example, you quote from different volumes of Bill Buford’s Bug Book for Beginners (dig the alliteration!), while in the final installment/episode of The Jirí Chronicles you describe bluebottle flies from sources ranging from Jean Henri Fabre’s The Life of a Fly to sites on the World Wide Web (not to mention those apt quotes from William Blake’s “The Fly,” from which I myself borrowed a few lines for my first novel – please consider this the only completely irrelevant and intrusive aside to be uttered during this interview). Does this fascination with creepy-crawlies come from growing up on a farm, where I’m assuming you had plenty of pests to deal with (many of them human, no doubt); or, rather, is it more an extension of your interest in science/nature in general? Please do elaborate on the “science” aspect of your writing as well, if you wish.
- The social habits of insects are fascinating and serve as apt metaphors for humanity. Their diversity of appearance and behavior is endlessly entertaining and often weirdly macabre. For example, there’s a type of hairworm whose larvae inhabits grasshoppers. When a hairworm has grown the size of a grasshopper’s body (uncurled, at least three times longer than its host), it produces a protein that causes the grasshopper to effectively drown itself. Cool, eh? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg — or antennae, as the case may be, haw haw haw.
I’ve never been afraid of snakes or bugs or rodents — quite the opposite — but have a healthy respect for those that can actually harm me, like brown recluse spiders. (I once caught a huge recluse in a jar and added Vitamin E just to see what would happen. NOTE: If your readers are not wondering what did happen then I doubt they will make a very good literary or visual artist.) I find most insects exquisitely beautiful, their intricate design and coloring. Yes, my long-term, first-hand knowledge of so many living species, and hands-on and subsequent textbook research helps me appreciate their importance in the web of life. Maggots, for example — nature’s garbage collectors. I’d seen plenty of animal corpses wriggling with maggots in my youth, but when researching flies for the story “Machine Ghosts” I learned precisely just how marvelously maggots function. Their metamorphosis from egg to adult is truly a wonder! Once recognizing maggots’ beauty, one must then try to ascertain the source and function of human repulsion toward maggots. They signify death, sure, but more likely they signal the possibility of disease or maybe predators attracted to the smell of rot. Is our repulsion primarily innate or cultural, visual or olefactory? After all, Western doctors now (again) recognize the incomparable efficacy of maggots in removing diseased tissue.
I wanted to be a scientific researcher when I was a kid. I had a microscope and was always performing, in hindsight, impossible experiments, like trying to crossbreed different species or figuring out how to measure the speed of the wind by using a thumb joint and cloud lengths (Huh?!?!). But I hated numbers and loved words, so chose the latter. Now, the good thing about writing fiction is that you must do your research in order to have a sufficient palette from which to paint your narrative. Nearly all of my later stories are the result of wanting to research a particular topic, then developing a narrative based on that research.
Live long enough and work hard enough and you learn that there’s always a way to do what you enjoy, no matter how limited your resources or, in my case, aptitude.
Dimitri Anastasopoulos, in an essay which recently appeared at the innovative fiction blog Now What (August 10), made an impassioned and cogent defense of fiction writing – as opposed to what in this country, at least, is termed “non-fiction” writing – as a genre that engages the reader’s critical thinking skills, rather than simply providing him or her with “factual” information about so-called “real life.” There appears to be a growing perception in the United States that fiction on the whole is no longer as relevant as it was in a more “innocent” time, a time before Bush and 9/11 (though perhaps this perception stretches back even further); it is certainly impossible for us writers to ignore the fact that fiction does not sell as well as memoirs/biographies do these days. As a visual artist, a shrewd satirist, and an astute intellectual (if I may), what do see the role of the [innovative] fiction writer today as being, and why should any of us want to plunk down our hard-earned cash to read such fiction? What, in other words, does innovative fiction writing have to say about the world that isn’t already being said “better” by journalists, politicians, historians, or…by Daniel Brown??
- First of all, let’s clarify some things:
Journalism: The most important thing I learned in journalism school: “There’s no such thing as objective reporting.” Fox TV proves this most/too obviously. A reporter’s writing is always going to be a result of the writer’s, editor’s, publisher’s, society’s prejudices: What is included or omitted casts a slant on the “facts.” When a journalist writes an “objective” article on a court case and describes the judge’s eyes as “cold blue” and the defendant’s smile as “warm and engaging” it’s obvious whose side we’re supposed to take.
Historical Nonfiction: Lest we ever, ever forget: “History is written by the victor.” And the loser’s version is just as distorted.
Creative Nonfiction: Memoirs are the equivalent of Reality TV: Neither is real. They’re one writer’s or producer’s take on events, manipulated through editing to convey a particular message. That message may be, “My mother was mean to me!” or “Hollywood has-beens will do anything on camera to recapture celebrity status.” Show me a writer who can recount verbatim every conversation s/he’s had and I’ll show you a liar (or a one-in-a-billion savant). Likewise, biographers can’t convey the reality of a person’s life, especially when that person is dead, but also when they’re alive and subject to the same recall hazards of the memoirist.
So how does a reader combat the fiction inside nonfiction, inside life — the slanted news reports, lying politicians, duplicitous CEOs, fraudulent despots and pundits and pedagogues, the delusional, rationalizing, oblivious Self? Know language — what Descartes should have said, because there is no way of knowing oneself or one’s world without knowing language. We are language. Everyday we create and recreate our world with words, spoken or thought, and everyday our world is [re]created for us by someone else’s words, spoken or printed. Talk about power! Language is power. And powerful language is made by understanding the nuances of words and how those nuances affect one’s thinking.
Innovative writers are as interested in telling the story of language as in mere storytelling, and reading language’s story is as close to reading humanity’s story as you’ll ever get because a “factual” account will rarely raise the shade umbrella over the burning bear. That’s why I created my War Short Stories course right after 9/11, predicting that we’d go to war within the year and knowing that the news my students would watch or read, and the history classes they’d take, would not, could not convey the physical/emotional/spiritual microcosm of a person inside the macrocosm of war. Skilled fiction writers sculpt words into holistic sounds, images, meanings that shift readers toward a personally profound understanding of the world – particularly the context in which the person exists yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Innovative fiction contains a self-reflexivity, sometimes self-referentiality of the writing and its many associations that shape innovative fiction – which, by the way, may not resemble “fiction” at all. Therefore, reading a work by an innovative fiction writer is as different from reading a mainstream fiction writer as viewing a Thomas Kinkade painting is from viewing a Matthew Barney artwork. The reader must become aware of fiction’s interior and exterior space; that is, the “story” that takes shape inside the reader’s head, and the “story” of the reader becoming conscious of the shape inside her/his head, and the story of what that shape implies about the reader’s language, and language in general, and its myriad functions in contemporary society.
Here’s another example, again using architecture as metaphor: You, the reader, are walking through a building, trying to figure out how the architectural elements relate to each other: the hallways, windows, columns, walls, floors, stairways, doorways... what emotional and intellectual message the architect is trying to send you. But as long as you’re trapped inside the building, you’ll never figure out that YOU ARE THE ARCHITECT. You, the reader, built that building yourself; the writer provided the blueprints. And now you must ask yourself: Who am I, what is my cultural context, that I translated these blueprints into this structure, this narrative, this meaning? The reader gains spectacular insight into her/his own thought processes and thus life. The more complex the blueprint, the more insight. Think Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye versus a lean-to.
And Dmitri is absolutely correct about critical thinking skills – the most important skills a person can possess because of their elasticity in any situation. A good arts education will emphasize critical thinking over technical craft. Though some writers like Kass Fleisher and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha have enlisted innovative approaches toward nonfiction, today most memoirs, biographies and histories are written with the middle-brow in mind (transl. $ell! $ell! $ell!). Whenever you’re taking about contemporary tastes in literature you can never omit the [preferably black-ink] bottom-line in publishing. The industry forms public tastes as much as and perhaps more than they conform to it. And one should remember that most mainstream agents and editors are not great writers or scholars; they may have gone into the business because they loved literature but they stay because they love money more. They’re dedicated to what they do, and what they do is business not art. By contrast, those who run or work for small presses certainly aren’t in it for the money.
The more important question in all of this is, Why “reality” books and TV? I’ve been dedicating a great deal of time lately to watching reality shows to get a grip on the phenomenon (Ahem: guilty pleasure.) As a result, I’ve become addicted to Project Runway, the fashion design reality show. Why? Because it’s primarily about problem-solving. Project Runway contestants must solve problems regarding aesthetic form and function – basic but critical art school curriculum. Throughout the show I catch myself asking: What would I make? How would I behave? What would I say? (Though I’m less interested in the interpersonal interactions, sometimes the language is hilarious because of broader connotations: “What happened to André?”—Tim Gunn. “You’re either in or you’re out.” — Heidi Klumm.)
Whether the problem is how to reach Dubai without killing your partner (The Amazing Race) or how to share your octogenarian playboy with two other boobalicious blondes (The Girls Next Door; I’d wager that the majority of viewers are female not male), people watch to learn, even if they believe they’re only being entertained. Humans are tool-makers, reasoners, and it seems to me that memoirs and reality shows are essentially about reaching a solution to a problem, regardless of whether the problem is real or invented. They say humans and other animals dream to problem-solve. Maybe watching reality TV or reading nonfiction is just dreaming while eating a big bowl of ice cream, but reading innovative fiction is churning the ice cream, making the bowl and then watching yourself eat and dream about eating and dreaming.
Writing and reading innovative fiction is a blast, unless you’re intellectually lazy like, say, 80% of Americans. It’s the literary equivalent of a difficult Sudoku or The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, except fiction has the ability to profoundly enlighten us, make us infinitely smarter, wiser, richer, powerful, with flatter stomachs, bigger tits and longer dicks. (Jirí forced me to add the last part.)
Please comment, if you would, on how you perceive the role – specifically – of female writers of innovative fiction; a few examples, off the top of my head, would include the likes of Aimee Bender, Kathryn Davis, Lydia Davis (no relation, of course), Gina Frangello, Carole Maso, Susan Steinberg, Jeanette Winterson, and Lidia Yuknavitch… Which women writers have influenced your own writing the most? Can you recommend any innovative books by women writers that may have eluded some/many/most of our “must-read” radars/lists for one reason or another?
- I suspect that if you interviewed all of the innovative female writers you’d find at least one similarity: A kind of rebelliousness in the way they live now, or in their youth in my case, since my life’s now comparatively tame. A rebelliousness against one arbitrary assumption or another. The title of Carol Maso’s collection of essays, Break Every Rule, sums it up, as does her writing. Perhaps we have an ability to shamelessly explore who and what we are, why we are, making no excuses but rather simply investigating the context in which we exist. It’s not that we’re fearless, but that we know plowing through the fear will make us freer once we come out the other side. I’d love to survey female innovative writers to find out how frank they are about sex, how many have had multiple partners, how many are bisexual or lesbian. Since sex is the biggest taboo in our hypocritical society, it seems that sexual tyranny would be the first fence that these women would try to scale.
The most disturbing thing I see in young female writers is the sugar-and-spice syndrome. They’ll write these gawd-awful stories about angels and butterflies – I kid you not – while in reality they’re recovering from meth-amphetamine addiction, or got kicked out of the house because their parents found out they were lesbian, or got pregnant at fifteen, or were sexually abused by their father/uncle/brother/grandfather/otherman. They write what they believe is expected of them, as female writers, as females. The father is mortified that his son is a virgin at 18; the mother is mortified her daughter is not a virgin at 18.
Butterfly fiction is a microcosm for the malignant condition of societies everywhere: It’s Miss Manners, Paul the Epistolary, First Lady Syndrome, and Rush Limbaugh’s three-divorces/”feminazi”/oxycontin/erectile-dysfunction amalgamation. It’s the clitoridectomy, the sexual abstinence contract, the dowry, the current U.S slave trade . It’s the veil, the chador, the burqa. It’s Manolo Blahniks and pantyhose. It’s snuff films, “Hunting for Bambi,” real or fake. It’s me every time I bite my tongue when I know I should be flapping it, or me obsequiously repeating, “I’m sorry” or “Thank you.” It’s me, now, curtailing my use of the words fuck, shit, cock, cunt, bitch, dick... and censoring sentiments that would be construed as offensive if spoken by a woman.
Gertude Stein is one of the most important fiction writers, ever. Each piece of her writing swells into a living body – three-dimensional and in motion. If you understand cubism, you realize she was at least as successful at literary cubism as Picasso was at painting cubism. Stein influenced many male writers later lauded for their originality — and cocks (I’m making up for lost column inches). Other dead female writers I deeply respect are Kathy Acker, Marguerite Duras, Virginia Wolfe, Nathalie Sarraute, Emily Dickinson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Off the top of my head, I like experiments in form by Cris Mazza, Margaret Atwood, Susan Daitch, Lidia Yuknavitch, Laurie Anderson, Andra Neiburga, Taeko Kono, Shelly Jackson, Tony Morrison, and all of the contemporary women writers you named, plus many poets, plus many other fiction writers that escape me now and to whom I will have to apologize. But, truth be told, I’ve found far fewer women writers willing to take literary risks than men, and I’m certain it all goes back to the sugar-and-spice syndrome – and editors less willing to publish provocative writing by women.
And what of minority writers (in America), and/or those not tied to a university program (i.e. writers without MFA degrees, or without degrees in anything at all other than Life)? Where do they fit into all of this? Or do they? Your co-conspirator in literary crime, the inimitable, indefatigable Jirí Cech, is – interestingly enough – both a man (a real man, I might add, in every sense of the word) and a minority who claims that he is “part German, Jew, and North American Indian” on his mother’s side and “English, Scotch, and Welsh” on his father’s side, though his native home is Czechoslovakia, and his adopted home New York, U.S.A. Have you ever asked Mr. Cech how he feels about inhabiting his own skin – that is, about how he perceives his role as minority poet, musician, and capitalist multimedia artist? How do you view his role? Please don’t offer me a cashew; I’ve just eaten, thank you.
- Know why inbreeding is bad? Because the progeny is likely to have genetic defects.
Thank god there are writers outside of the academy! I think about the many interesting lives I’ve lived, and then I meet a writer who went from high school, to BA, to MFA, sometimes to PhD, and to Professor, with no breaks in-between. It’s the equivalent of the MBA attaining a corporate management job right out of college. AND THEN YOU DIE. Makes me what to put them out of their misery now, to spare them the horror of their midlife crisis when it’s too late to experiment without looking somewhat pathetic. Besides, by then you’re too certain of your mortality and thus far too circumspect to throw caution to the wind. And one misconception about teaching is that you have more time to create your own work. If you’re a dedicated teacher, this is bullshit. My most productive writing years (before 2002, when I quit teaching) were when I worked low-level clerical jobs. They’re routine and consistent: You go home at five and leave your work behind, your head clear.
Academic regurgitation in creative writing is when information/cultural and aesthetic values are determined by people whose information/values came from people whose information/values came from people whose... I never wanted to be a “pedagogue” (though I love teaching and am good at it) and, therefore, have not, even when I taught full-time. I am first a writer. As such, I wanted to experience as much of the world and people as possible: copious amounts of sex, drugs booze (I’ve been a recovering alcoholic for 17 years and recovering coke addict for 20) and rock&roll (& classical, rap, jazz, techno, pop...)... hanging out with a Mafia hit man and his wife, a Moroccan socialist in Paris, beautiful crazy young men from South America, a drug dealer, a con man, music producers, actors... living in a magnificent penthouse in Florence and a concrete shanty in Switzerland... working in high-level corporate jobs and waiting tables... Listening, really listening to cab drivers and store clerks and mechanics and motorcycle gang members and thieves and homeless women and men, and the dying... burying friends. If you locked me in a room for the rest of my life I’d have more than enough wild, wonderful and tragic experiences to inspire me. But don’t. I’ll just break the lock.
There still aren’t enough non-academics writing fiction, particularly non-white. Rap and hiphop are important because they’re narratives from a culture that rarely gets heard otherwise. I want to read more serious literature from the unwritten masses: the poor black urban and poor white rural, vice versa; the sons and daughters of illegal immigrants whose fathers come home smelling of corporate pig shit; the women and men of suburbia who know they’ve died and gone to hell. And I want to hear their voices, not voices contrived from the mid-Atlantic. Contrary to the publishing, TV, and film industries, the United States isn’t just New York and Los Angeles. I get sick and tired of the same old shit that’s such a fantasy when you really look at U.S. demographics. We must ask ourselves: Who are we that we don’t really want to know what’s really going on in places and lives we cannot even imagine and so don’t. Ignorance is bad enough; willful ignorance is the only evil I’m willing to legitimize.
Do you consider every novel or short story collection you write as a kind of autonomous entity, or do you see them all as making up a part of a larger project? Can you see a discernible pattern or progression between the your first-ever novel or short story and your later work or works? What would you say has changed the most since you first started writing? the least?
- Well, The Jirí Chronicles is one vast interconnected project that now contains over 400 individual works. Otherwise, any connections are the result of the writing having the same, slowly evolving author with the same, slowly evolving vocabulary, interests, and knowledge base. Most of the stories published in Prayers of an Accidental Nature were written before Drought & Say What You Like and are rather conventional, though you can witness me pushing boundaries in a few of them. “Our Perversions” comes to mind, since I was trying to let what I’d been reading on quantum physics influence the story’s composition.
My work evolved because I finally figured out that I’d devoured, digested and shat more good world literature that most I knew in the “business” and so stopped listening to creative writing teachers whose writing had gotten stuck in whatever era they first recognized their mortality; lit journals whose transom editors tended to be grad students twenty years my junior; literary agents and publishing house editors who spent more than half their time reading shit, and reviewers who are irrelevant unless they’re able to creatively and intelligently dissect the writing. The lives of these folks are held together by rules, and I have never been very good at adhering to rules, especially when their purpose is to maintain a status quo based on bigotry, ignorance, fear and other chimp behavior.
My curiosity has changed not at all over the years; in fact, it’s blossomed. The more I read and learn in the sciences, history, linguistics, technologies, ad infinitum, the more questions I have. And for me, writing has always been about questions not answers. Hell, living is about questions, about exploring unnamed territories. Some very dangerous territories, indeed. I’m lucky to be alive after all the shit I’ve done. Really.
... IN CONCLUSION: I cannot see myself quitting writing, but I can see myself quitting publishing my writing, at least by conventional means. The latter is such a bore, such an energy and creative drain. Especially when you have to educate so many editors, agents, publishers and readers — including purportedly innovative ones — on what it is you’re doing and why it is important.
If the world collapses, I’ll go to my father’s farm and live in the dying woods until I, too, die and am fodder for lovely maggots and whatever other life remains." - Interview with Marc Lowe