1. Let me point those of you who may care to my first riff on William Gaddis’s J R, which I wrote about half way into the book, and which will likely provide more context than I’m prepared to offer here. Also, there might be spoilers ahead.
2. The end of J R is heartbreaking. We find some of our principal characters—Bast, Gibbs, and JR—in nebulous spaces, their plans and dreams and hopes crumbling or smoking or fizzing out or jettisoned (pick your verb as I’m too lazy or unequipped).
3. The final face-to-face scene between Bast and JR, the one that begins with them riding in a limousine and ends with Bast’s psycho breakdown—heartbreaking. Little JR, we realize, is most motivated by his intense need for human connection, his desire for family, perhaps, or place, at least. Bast’s rejection of JR—really a rejection of contemporary consumer culture—is almost horrific, even more so because the reader (this reader, anyway) so readily identifies with Bast and JR simultaneously.
4. Here’s Gaddis on his character JR (from The Paris Review interview):
The boy himself is a total invention, completely sui generis. The reason he is eleven is because he is in this prepubescent age where he is amoral, with a clear conscience, dealing with people who are immoral, unscrupulous; they realize what scruples are, but push them aside, whereas his good cheer and greed he considers perfectly normal. He thinks this is what you’re supposed to do; he is not going to wait around; he is in a hurry, as you should be in America—get on with it, get going. He is very scrupulous about obeying the letter of the law and then (never making the distinction) evading the spirit of the law at every possible turn. He is in these ways an innocent and is well-meaning, a sincere hypocrite. With Bast, he does think he’s helping him out.
5. And again:
INTERVIEWER
Which is the novel you care most for?
GADDIS
I think that I care most for JR because I’m awfully fond of the boy himself.
6. In that same interview, Gaddis contends that JR is motivated by “good-natured greed,” which is probably true (see above re: letter vs. spirit). Despite his predatory capitalism, his willingness to strip company employees of basic safety nets, JR remains sympathetic.
7. Why is JR a sympathetic character? He’s just a child, one who lives in a world without adult supervision let alone love and care. In a touching scene that telegraphs the bizarre black humor that runs through the novel, JR suggests that the Eskimos on display at a museum are the work of a taxidermist: That is, said Eskimos were once, like, alive, and are now on display. Amy Joubert, his social studies teacher (and the object of Gibbs’s and possibly Bast’s affection) is moved to both pity and terror by JR’s confusion, and clutches him to her breast.
8. While we’re on Eskimos, which is to say Native Americans, which is to say, perhaps, Indians: The Indian plot in JR fascinates; it recapitulates a bloody, awful past, pointing to the brutal way the quote unquote invisible hand of the market might sweep entire people away and then come back (in a cheap costume) to offer modernity at a price.
9. Ethnic minorities in general find themselves displaced in JR, or at least displaced in the language of JR (and is there a novel that is more language than JR, if such a statement might be permitted to exist (at least metaphorically)? No, I don’t think there is, or at least I don’t know of one). The casual racism of 1%ers like Zona Selk and Cates is ugly and bitter, but the PR man Davidoff is somehow worse—he sees race as something to use, to manipulate, to control.
10. And, of course, JR’s infamous “Alsaka Report,” a connection to Manifest Destiny, to the valuation of our ecosystem in the most base and short-sighted terms (there’s a perhaps overlooked streak of environmentalism to JR):
11. Sci-fi elements to JR: The Frigicom process, which promises to freeze noise. The Teletravel transmission process.
12. At the end of JR, we learn that poor diCephalis is lost in Teletravel transmission.
13. I couldn’t help but be reminded—repeatedly—of David Foster Wallace’s work during JR (diCephalis stuck in Teletravel recalls poor Orin in the giant glassjar at the end of Infinite Jest). In general, the loose threads of JR recall Wallace’s loose threads (other way round, I know).
14. The phone motif alone might have led me to compare Wallace to Gaddis—but there’s also all that, y’know, thematic unity.
15. And clearly, too, style. I’m sure that longtime readers of Gaddis have likely made the comparisons already, but throughout his work, Wallace repeatedly uses chapters or sections that comprise only dialogue. A good example is §19 of The Pale King (which I riffed on a bit this summer), a conversation between three IRS agents stuck in an elevator. In some ways, the scene, set only a few years after the publication of JR feels like a strange little sequel, or an echo of a shadow of a chapter of a sequel (or maybe not—just riffing here). Wallace’s concerns about civics, ethics, and compassion seem more straightforward than Gaddis’s angry vision of a desacralized world, a world where symphonies must be chopped into three minute segments to allow for commercial interruptions (or, rather, that symphonies must interrupt commercials). Wallace is obviously writing after the victory of Pop Art, of populism, of the slow sprawling stripmalling of America . . . but I’ve riffed off track (there is no track).
16. ” . . . I mean they never lose these banks don’t, I mean where we’re getting screwed . . . ” — JR laments on page 653 of my Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition.
17. The above quote as the briefest illustration that, published in 1975, JR is more relevant than ever.
18. To wit, Gaddis again, again from The Paris Review interview, commenting on hollow, false values:
. . . I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern.
19. Gaddis’s take on the “art” of capitalism: design mock ups for a potential logo for the JR Family of Companies:
20. JR is one of the most prescient novels I’ve ever read—and not just in its illustration of the the chaos at the intersection of corporatism, Wall Street, government, and military, but also in its handling and treatment of education. Gaddis is way ahead of an ugly curve, showing us an educational system largely disinterested in intellectual, aesthetic, or even athletic development. Instead we get a storehouse for children, reliant on programmed lessons delivered via technology and assessment by standardized testing. It’s ugly and it’s more real than ever now.
21. And here’s Gibb’s railing against it, in a way, in (what’s likely a half-drunken or at least hung-over) rant to his students:
Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from the outside. In fact it’s the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . .
(That’s from page 20 of my Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, by the bye).
22. There are no happy families in JR. Just broken families.
23. I said this at the top of the riff, but again–-heartbreaking.
24. This is probably a direction out of this riff—to resuscitate the emotional dimension of the novel, which is too easily overlooked, perhaps, because Gaddis’s manipulations (and all novelists manipulate their audience) require so much active participation from the reader. JR is without exposition, without the overt imposition of the novelist telling us how to feel: instead there’s a thickness to it, a building of buzz and clatter, yes, but music under all that noise: even a kernel of love (and hope!) under the heavy folds of anger.
25. Very highly recommended.
In a 1934 radio interview, Gertrude Stein talks American football:
INTERVIEWER: You saw the Yale-Dartmouth game a week ago Saturday didn’t you? Did you understand that in the American way or the football way or how?
STEIN: IN the American way. The thing that interested me was that the Modern American in his movements and his actions in a football game so resembled the red Indian dance and it proves that the physical country that made the one made the other and that the red Indian is still with us. They just put their heads down solemnly together and then double over, while on the sidelines the substitutes move in a jiggly way just like Indians. Then they all get down on all fours just like Indians.
INTERVIEWER: But those jiggles are just warming-up exercises.
STEIN: It doesn’t make any difference what they are doing it for, they are just doing it, like the way the Indian jiggles in the Indian dance and then there is that little brown ball they all bend down and worship.
INTERVIEWER: But the ideas in that is to get the ball across the goal line.
STEIN: But don’t you suppose I know that, and don’t you suppose the Indians had just as much reason and enjoyed their dancing just as much?
Love this passage from William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. Mocking “hipsterism” has been around forever (or at least 50 years):
And by now they were at the door of the Viareggio, a small Italian bar of nepotistic honesty before it was discovered by exotics. Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused for having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was normality, all afloat here on sodden pools of depravity calculated only to manifest the pricelessness of what they were throwing away, the three sexes in two colors, a group of people all mentally and physically the wrong size.
More from William Gaddis’s 1986 Paris Review interview:
INTERVIEWER
Is JR’s story something you extrapolated from life only, or did you rely on sociologies devoted to how the corporate world works upon social values, human qualities, and relationships in American culture?
GADDIS
The boy himself is a total invention, completely sui generis. The reason he is eleven is because he is in this prepubescent age where he is amoral, with a clear conscience, dealing with people who are immoral, unscrupulous; they realize what scruples are, but push them aside, whereas his good cheer and greed he considers perfectly normal. He thinks this is what you’re supposed to do; he is not going to wait around; he is in a hurry, as you should be in America—get on with it, get going. He is very scrupulous about obeying the letter of the law and then (never making the distinction) evading the spirit of the law at every possible turn. He is in these ways an innocent and is well-meaning, a sincere hypocrite. With Bast, he does think he’s helping him out. As for the corporate world, I do read the newspapers, clip things, ideas, articles, and just use them as fodder. But all that hardly requires a text in sociology. And this may be the place to make a further point. I’m frequently seen in the conservative press as being out there on the barricades shouting: Down with capitalism! I do see it in the end as really the most workable system we’ve produced. So what we’re talking about is not the system itself, but its abuses, I don’t mean criminal but the abundant abuses just within the letter of the law. The essential question is whether it can survive these abuses given free rein and whether these abuses are inherent in the system itself. I should think it is perfectly clear in my work—calling attention, satirizing these abuses—that our best hope lies in bringing things under better and more equitable control, cutting back the temptations to unmitigated greed and bemused dishonesty . . . in other words that these abuses the system has fostered are not essential, but running out of moral or ethical control can certainly threaten its survival.
Click Mort makes surreal, charming, disarming sculptures that synthesize pre-existing figures into strange new forms. Largely self-taught, Click works out of his home in his native L.A., where he lovingly decapitates and recapitates antique statuettes. Click’s sculptures were featured in a solo exhibit earlier this year in L.A.’s La Luz de Jesus gallery and are currently on display at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas. Click was kind enough to talk to me in detail about his work over a series of emails around Thanksgiving. Check out Click’s website to see more of his fantastical stuff.
Biblioklept: I love your sculptures. They’re disconcerting and surreal but also charming. They’re bizarre and clever, but not whimsical. Can you tell us about how you make them?
Click Mort: Thanks. I’m especially happy to hear them described as “not whimsical.” As for how they’re made, I should probably backtrack a bit since the porcelain pieces I’m doing now weren’t the actual starting point. The first things I tried recapitating were resin figurines from the 99 Cent Store: cute kid couples strolling hand-in-hand, adorable angel-tots, etc.. They were pleasantly awful on their own merits, but when I saw some particularly crappy plastic barnyard animals in the toy section that were roughly the same scale, the gears started turning. Those first head-swaps were pretty crude: I’d just hack off both heads mid-neck with a jeweler’s saw, attach the non-native head with some sculpting resin, and paint over the seam. Voila … Angel-tot with a pig’s head (or angel-pig with a tot’s body, depending on how you look at things).
After a few years of working with cheap resin figures, I kind of burnt out on them. My technique had developed to the point where the swaps were reasonably undetectable, but the available subject matter — tots, tots, and … tots — had gotten monotonous. Also, the figures gave off a really horrible smell when sawed; I strongly suspected they were made of something creepy like melamine. At that point, I decided to try doing the same thing with porcelain figures.
Right … so now I can answer your actual question. Once a suitable head and body match have been found (and describing that process would add a few more paragraphs to an already inhumanely long and dull answer) the first job is to remove all the unwanted material. A jeweler’s saw — or any cutting implement whose description doesn’t include the words “diamond-edged” — won’t even mar the finish on porcelain. I use a high-speed Dremel with some sort of diamond-dust edged cutting tool attachment. Assuming we’re talking about a human body getting an animal head, everything from the collar up has to go on the body figure. This includes hair, headgear, ribbons, or whatever connecting the head and body. If any of these drape over a collar or lapel, those parts have to go too. For the heads, the amount that gets hacked off depends on the animal. On a quadruped, because of the different angle the spine intersects the skull relative to a biped, almost everything behind the ears and under the jawline has to be removed and then re-sculpted after the head has been attached to the body.
In order to get a really good bond between the head and body, I fill the upper torso with sculpting resin and sink an aluminum rod into it. A length of rod is left protruding up, and the head—which also gets stuffed with resin—is then positioned on it. After that, all the missing areas have to be sculpted back on. Finally, whatever painting is needed to cover the recreated areas and blend them into the original parts gets done.
And however tedious that was to read, the actual process is several thousand times more so.
Biblioklept: I liked reading about the process, but I suppose when we do something all the time, it seems tedious to us. Your process fascinates me, because the images of your figures don’t show any “seams” — your figures look like little mass produced statues from an alternate dimension. There’s a surreal synthesis at play in your work, not just in the actual combination of, say, a dog’s head on human body, but also in the tone of the work. Your pieces strike me as both creepy and tender at the same time. I’m curious how you know if a piece “works” — when are you satisfied with your figures?
CM: That mass-produced quality is something I really try not to lose when putting together the figures. There’s something inherently familiar and low-key about mass-produced objects, and I like the idea of art that doesn’t scream for attention but just sort of sits there mumbling to itself. The down side to this is it sometimes works against the figures getting noticed at all. In the few gallery shows they’ve been in, it seemed a lot of people never looked at them from closer than a few feet away. Maybe they thought someone had just lined up a bunch of old lady tschotske crap as some sort of conceptual piece.
As for the figures working as much on a tonal as objective level, yeah, that’s becoming more and more the case. Or at least my intention. On the early pieces, I was getting figures that I thought were awful to begin with and simply trying to change the nature of their awfulness. Over the course of hundreds of hours on eBay looking for working materials, I started noticing how great some of these cheap figurines were in their own right, particularly the stuff made in Japan in the fifties and sixties. At that point, I really started paying less attention to what kind of head would seem funniest on a piece and focusing more on how the shape and expression of the new head would fit into what was already a wonderful figure. It became more about trying to maintain the geometry of the whole thing while shifting the mood.
“Creepy and tender” is as good a description as I’ve heard. I guess the tenderness is a product of my real affection for the original figures showing through. And while I don’t consider the finished pieces particularly creepy, a lot of people have described them that way. As near as I can figure, it’s because the heads I like to use almost always have sort of neutral expressions, and that lack of expression is unsettling to us on some fundamental level.
And to a great degree, when a piece “works” is determined almost as soon as I have the original figure in hand. The only finished pieces I’ve been unhappy with are ones where as soon as I unpackaged a figure bought online, I hated it but followed through with a head-swap anyway rather than just eat the cost of the figure. Usually though, if I like the original piece, I’m going to be happy with the finished figure. It might be a week or a year for the right head to show up, but I’ll know when it does. And from there, it’s only a matter of taking the time (and typically, this is something like ten to twenty hours) to bring the two together.
Biblioklept: There’s a clear appreciation or even adoration of kitsch in your work, but there’s also this level to it where you’re literally grafting two tchotchkes to each other in a way that transcends kitsch (I don’t know if that description is clear or valid). What I like about your work is that it doesn’t rely solely on an ironic aesthetic shared by both artist and audience, but that’s nevertheless part of the experience. What is it about the awful that attracts us?
CM: I wouldn’t describe my composite pieces as transcending their components, but that’s probably an extension of my regard for the original, unaltered figures. I mean, obviously I don’t think they’re sacrosanct or whatever or I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. Still, if there were only one — rather than thousands — of a given figure, I’d absolutely leave it alone. The same holds true for figures I think are already so wonderfully bizarre that anything I could possibly do to them would only diminish their oddity.
I guess I consider what I do as just condensing what I like about these things: taking the most expressive elements of each and putting that all in one figure in a way that enhances (but doesn’t necessarily transcend) what was already going on to some degree in the original.
It’s really hard to say what perceptions I share with whatever audience my work has. Originally, the only place that would carry them was a little boutique retail store, and now the figures have gotten into a couple of gallery group shows. In both instances, I almost never know who’s bought them, so there’s no opportunity for any sort of dialogue. For me, there’s no irony whatsoever at work in these things, but I’m pretty much literal to the point of dullness and don’t really see them as operating on any level other than the apparent. All I’m trying to do is get objectively incongruent elements and make them visually and aesthetically congruent.
But that’s just my take on them. I can be a didactic goon about a lot of stuff, but it would really be pointless to try and dictate what anyone else is or isn’t seeing in these pieces. And while there’s a definite attraction to awfulness, I don’t perceive these figures as awful. Alien, yeah. Absolutely. Which is pretty funny, given that they were originally produced as innocuous home garni and now something like a Norman Rockwell figurine is about as familiar as one of those lumpy Paleolithic Venus figures.
Biblioklept: A few of your pieces reference authors (Didion, Hemingway), but it’s not necessarily a recurring theme. How did these authors find their way into your titles? What do you enjoy reading?
CM: Titling the pieces is probably my least favorite part of the process. Usually, I just slap on whatever gibberish pops into my head and that’s that. The two figures you’ve posted are the only ones with literary references and, oddly enough, refer to one author who knocks me out and one I think is flat-out terrible (and I don’t think Didion is terrible).
As for what I read, it’s sort of a weird grab bag of stuff. Rather than trying to categorize my likes, I just grabbed the pile currently on the nightstand. Here’s what was there:
Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects
Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction
Zippy Goes to School (The titular Zippy is a chimp, not the better-known pinhead.)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Keep trying to read this but invariably drop it in favor of something like Zippy Goes to School)
Tank Warfare: A History of Tanks in Battle
Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo: The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films
And there’s other stuff I like and have been reading and rereading for decades: Saki and Flannery O’Connor are two particular faves.
Biblioklept: You’ve mentioned that you don’t have an art school background. I’ll concede up front that this is one of those questions that interviewers aren’t supposed to ask, but I’d really like to know—what artists move you?
CM: Not to flip the interview, but why aren’t you supposed to ask stuff like that? It seems like a reasonable question.
Besides lacking an art school background, I’ve got a pretty skimpy art foreground. I’ve just never paid all that much attention to visual art. There are a few artists who for whatever reason caught my attention like Mark Ryden, Basil Wolverton, and Norman Saunders, but that’s about it. Oh, and Norman Rockwell, whose paintings are as wonderful as the figures inspired by them aren’t. And oddly enough, I seem much more moved by sounds than sights. It’s probably just a matter of how my neuro-wiring is laid out.
Biblioklept: I don’t know where I got the idea that you weren’t supposed to ask the interviewee questions like “What artists do you like?” or “What books do you read?” — maybe my high school journalism teacher? Not sure. I guess it just seems lazy on my part. But the questions are asked in good faith, I think.
You bring up music—I know you played guitar for The Cramps in the early eighties—do you have any musical projects underway now?
CM: Nope. While I still spend a fair amount of time banging on guitars, the interest and/or enthusiasm for any sort of group effort just isn’t there. I mean, I guess I could go the digital recording route, but rock and roll — and that’s all I really care about — has always been a real immediate, physical kind of thing to me. Anything other than playing with a clutch of similarly-minded goofballs just seems kinda clinical.
Biblioklept: What are you working on now? What projects do you have on the horizon?
CM: I’ve attached pictures of the figures currently in progress. This seemed kinder than subjecting your readers to the equivalent two thousand words.
As for events outside the “studio” (which is my apartment’s kitchen and breakfast nook), about a dozen pieces will be in a show opening December 4 at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas. Also, La Luz de Jesus here in L.A. will have a clutch of them on hand through December. And my website will have an ongoing influx — and hopefully, outflux — of new figures.
Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?
CM: Not recently, but yeah, I’ve lifted a volume or two. For a big stretch of my adult life I was a junky, and like most junkies had a terrifically flexible — and convenient — sense of morality. I used to steal books from used bookstores under the theory they were already used, so if I read them and then took them back, no one was really out anything.
And I usually did return them, but as often as not it was to sell the store their own book.
When I finally cleaned up, I felt like a crumb for having done this. All the same, I wasn’t about to risk some hothead filing charges if I told them I was sorry about what I’d done and wanted to settle up. Instead, I just went back to the various stores involved and, over time, bought all the books I’d sold them and those just read and returned. To me that seemed to square things, but this could be just more convenient moral reckoning. Beats me.
Adam Novy’s debut novel The Avian Gospels is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in ages. It’s a surreal dystopian magical romance set against the backdrop of political and cultural repression, violent rebellion, torture, family, and birds. Lots and lots of birds. (Read my review).
Adam was kind enough to talk to me about his work over a month-long series of email exchanges; the interview presented below reveals much of his generous, creative energy.
Adam currently teaches writing at Scripps College, Pasadena City College, Long Beach City College and Orange Coast College.
The Avian Gospels is available now from Hobart.
Biblioklept: I have a lot I want to ask you about what’s in your novel, but I have to start by asking about the physical book itself. The Avian Gospels is a lovely little two volume pocket-sized monograph—textured oxblood covers, gilded pages with line numbers, inset bookmarks. Visually, it recalls a Gideon bible, I guess, only not, I don’t know, chintzy. Where did the design idea come from?
Adam Novy: My editor at Hobart, Aaron Burch, had the idea of making the book look like a Bible. He’s an excellent designer and does a wonderful job with Hobart. Some boheemith press in New York City should really snap him up.
Biblioklept: How did the idea for The Avian Gospels come about? When did you start drafting the book? How long did it take to write?
AN: After 9/11, there was a moment where I felt like all Americans were on the same team. Now I wonder if we’ll ever feel that way again. Pardon me for living in the moment, but this country is just so completely fucked. This sensation of being American swiftly curdled into panic, but by then, the coordinates of my work had all been changed. I wanted to find a voice with room for both the historical and the intimate, which led me to a kind of first-person plural officialese. It ended up creating this echo-chamber effect where the personal and political identities of each character were different, and nobody could quite be who they were supposed to be, or wanted to be.
It took months of screwing around to figure this out, and most of it, of course, was accidental. The Lord of the Rings was on TV a lot at the time, and sometimes I thought I wanted to sound like Gandalf if Gandalf was full of shit and, like, a genocider who felt sorry for himself, but still was Gandalf, all mystical and officious, bossing everyone around. I understood the characters right away, except for Jane, who was always hard to deal with. She gets in arguments a lot and she’s usually right. I think I have hard time writing characters who are right. I myself am never right, so I had trouble relating to her. Of course, now she’s my second-favorite character in the book, after Mike.
I started the book in spring of 2002 and finished it in fall of 2005. In 2006, I found an agent and Hobart took the book in 2008. I went through five apartments, three different cities, three computers, one personal trainer and three therapists in that time. And nine adjunct faculty positions.
Biblioklept: It’s interesting that you mention the LOTR movies as a kind of ambient influence, because they were pretty ubiquitous in the last decade—and there’s so much of the last decade’s zeitgeist in your book: torture, despotism, political and cultural repression, the plight of a refugee class, the idea of “green zones,” etc. You foreground these themes by crafting Gospels as a kind of dystopian novel with elements of magical realism, but it’s also very much a novel about family, and even a love story. (By sheer coincidence I watched the restored edit of Metropolis in the same time frame that I was reading Gospels, and saw so many echoes there). How conscious were you of genre conventions? I’m curious because your book sometimes blends genre tropes, sometimes blurs them, and sometimes straight-up explodes them . . .
AN: The book is quite deliberately a mash-up. I think it’s normal in conversation to try out different ways of seeing things—a fussy way of saying this might be “experiment with different hermeneutics.” For example, one might reference the NBA, The Wire, Shakespeare and Dazed and Confused in a discussion about Obama. I wanted the book to enact this kind of embeddedness, this flailing for a context that makes sense, and I wanted the narrator to sound as though its vernacular was ornate and obsolete, like it trafficked in a pleasure that justified itself as satisfaction while remaining an inadequate moral lens. That’s why I write violence like I do: I want it to be horrifying and beautiful. Unfortunately, violence is cool. I’m not immune—I always watch Kill Bill and Scarface when they’re on cable. It’s disturbing. Everyone knows that torture doesn’t work as an intelligence-gathering method, but our country did it anyway because it simply couldn’t stop. It was a kind of jacking off, the only kind that certain political parties seem to approve of.
Whenever we write about power, we should always defend the powerless, even if they’re just as bad as those in power. I think I saw that in Cioran, and did you know Cioran was a Nazi sympathizer? I just read that Gertrude Stein was, too. I don’t know what kind of paradigm can reckon with this world.
Biblioklept: I had no idea about Stein or Cioran’s Nazi sympathies, but I guess many artists and writers and intellectuals were attracted to the power of fascism, particularly in the modernists’ day (I suppose Ezra Pound and GB Shaw stand out as easy examples, and Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party). Although in our own age, I suppose we also see intellectuals and writers support terrible causes—I think of Christopher Hitchens’s aggressive support of the Iraq War and Bush administration’s policies, for, example.
I don’t want to drop spoilers, but your novel traces an arc that shows how those who are powerless might, given power, recapitulate the aggressive violence that they themselves were once subjected to. In turn, you also reveal how characters who seemed to occupy a clear power position (I’m thinking of Mike here, specifically) are perhaps doomed as well to a life without agency. I found my sympathies shift dramatically throughout the novel. How important are sympathetic characters?
AN: Every writer, including me, wants the reader to cathect to their book with their whole heart. I want my readers to utterly and helplessly engrossed. But sympathy is a means to an end and not the end itself. Technically speaking, it’s just not that hard to accomplish. It’s a skill, like dribbling in basketball is a skill, but it’s not the whole game.
In The Avian Gospels, the character named Mike Giggs is seen in only one scenario—exerting power in the manner of his father—for the first two hundred pages, so he comes off like a jerk until he encounters someone who actually loves him: Chico the band leader. Suddenly, Mike discovers a love of life, a sensitivity and a feeling of camaraderie for his fellows. Not only is he is capable of compassion, he is governed by it. This leaves him ruined in certain ways, but allows him to discover who he can be, and makes him (hopefully) sympathetic.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the book, the character named Zvominir, who was whimperingly sweet for longer than Mike was mean, is meaner than Mike. Novels are fantasies of powerlessness and power—among the zillion other things they are—and I feel like we should at least be conscious of what’s happening to our minds as we are reading. How we deal with power is a serious moral question; counting how many times that we go awwww is not. We have cats on the internet for that. Still, Chad Harbach was probably right when he said that the books that get the best reception are simply “affable.” In desperate times, a nation of New York critic types are turning to . . . Mitt Romney? Or like, Cheever without the psychosexual guilt?
I don’t mean to single out Chad Harbach, whose work I haven’t read, except for his piece on Grantland about the Brewers, which I liked. But what he said is accurate. These days, people seem to feel that art should be uplifting, like art owes it to them, in a customer-service type-way. Have you been to Kinko’s, or excuse me, FedEx Office, lately? It is not a happy place. Novels used to to give the reader the truth in ways no other social narratives would. I’m pretty sure I’m not just being sentimental. There used to be a social lie which said the world was making progress and ascending, but this reversed like fifteen years ago and now we all feel doomed. We need books to tell us how we got here, not to lie about how meaningful our journeys are or however we say it these days. Of course our lives are meaningful, but such a narrow focus on making folks feel better is superficial and disempowering. Our emptiness and dread are trying to tell us something.
Biblioklept: I think you point toward a distinction between art and entertainment here. We want entertainment to comfort us, to ease our worries. In contrast, art challenges us with what we don’t want to see, or can’t see, or can’t see that we can’t see. And yeah, there’s a kind of “literature of comfort” out there, books that simply reconfirm the tropes and tricks and forms of “literary fiction” — so that, even if the protagonists suffer, that suffering is is part and parcel of some greater telos — and not just in terms of the plot, but also in the structure of the novel itself. (Lee Siegel called this camp “Nice Writing” a decade ago, pointing to its “violent affability,” its “deadly sweetness”).
At the risk of asking one of those questions an interviewer is never supposed to ask (but, hey, I really want to know the answer and I think our readers would too), what books move you as a reader?
AN: I think I’m moved by pretty standard stuff. The Portrait of a Lady. Charlotte’s Web. To My Twenties, by Kenneth Koch. On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, by Keats. Places to Look For Your Mind, by Lorrie Moore. Testimony of Pilot and Return to Return by Barry Hannah. Antony and Cleopatra. Stone Arabia, by Dana Spiotta, which is the best new book I’ve read in 2011. Chopin in Winter by Stuart Dybek. The last paragraph of CivilWarLand In Bad Decline. The scene in American Tabloid where Ward steals the pension fund books. The Widow Aphrodissia by Marguerite Yourcenar. There must be fifty different scenes in Buffy that make me cry, and five in Battlestar Galactica. Certain scenes in Lost. This is such a conventional list, I feel like I need to start a fight. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS SUCKS AND YOU ARE ALL A BUNCH OF SAPS. I should also say I’m moved by spectacles of massive human folly. The image of Slim Pickens riding the bomb and waving his hat in Dr. Strangelove and the scene where Kramer and his intern throw the ball of oil out the window are somehow very moving to me.
Biblioklept: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street movement—The Avian Gospels taps into and explores this idea of civil unrest, of disenfranchised voices, of a paramilitary state coping with a populist uprising. You’ve indicated that your novel is in some ways a response to 9/11, but it also seems predictive of the fallout we’re seeing a decade after the fact.
AN: A massive, indescribable injustice was inflicted on our world by the likes of Goldman Sachs and we seem to have no recourse. Law enforcement could not possibly care less, and seeing how they cleared Zucotti Park, they seem jealous of the impunity of Wall Street. In his review of Ron Suskind’s book, Ezra Klein suggests that Washington just did not have the will to pass a stimulus that was big enough. Slavoj Žižek is right when he says this moment is a challenge to our imagination. I think that what happened at Penn State may be a better lens for the recession than Occupy Wall Street. A massive patriarchal network mobilized their resources to preserve an ongoing atrocity. No one will admit that they were wrong, especially the figurehead, Joe Paterno. The community just does not seem to give a shit. They keep telling out-of-towners we don’t get it and rioted in self-pity. I guess this is just how power acts.
Biblioklept: What’s next? What are you working on now?
AN: I’m writing a novel about the life and times of Medusa. It’s called The Gore and the Splatter.
Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?
AN: I think the only book I ever stole was an anthology of world literature, which had a really coherent definition of French symbolist poetry. I can’t find this book now, so someone probably stole it from me. Serves me right.
From The Paris Review interview, William Gibson on on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House—
INTERVIEWER
The Victorians invented science fiction.
GIBSON
I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.
But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They’d traveled fifteen miles an hour, and when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you’re looking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called “railway spine.”
Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.
The AV Club interviews comix creator Daniel Clowes. (Read our review of Clowes’s hilarious and acerbic book Wilson)From the interview—
The A.V. Club: People often ask musicians if they listen to their old albums or filmmakers if they watch their old movies, but do you reread your old comics?
Dan Clowes: I try not to. [Laughs.] It usually doesn’t lead to anything good. The only way I can ever experience them really is if I completely forgot what they were about. Once I send it off to the printer, I try to never look at the work again, if I can help it. Usually when I put together a book like this Death–Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That’s when I’m faced with the actual work. When I’m working, I’m too close to it. I’m sort of inside, and I can’t see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it’s jarring.
The AV Club interviews Kate Beaton, she of Hark! A Vagrant. Here, she talks a bit about A Game of Thrones—
AVC: You were a history major. Do you still read history for fun?
KB: I do, yeah. I pick up books every now and then. The only problem is, I pick up books and I don’t read them, because if I do reading, it’s for a comic. But I will. I will probably pick up the second half of John A. Macdonald’s biography, which comes out this year. [Laughs.] Because I think he’s a fascinating guy. [Macdonald was the first prime minister of Canada. —ed.] I read so much, but it’s always for comics, and there’s not much time in between to just settle down and start reading something for yourself. Recently, I started reading that Game Of Thrones that everybody was reading. It’s kind of a quick and fun read. And that was really nice, because I made time to read something that wasn’t for comics. Reading history for fun will turn my brain into, “How do you make this into a comic?” and then it turns into work. [Laughs.] There’s dangerous waters there.
AVC: I’d love to see the Kate Beaton take on A Game Of Thrones. And that’s at least somewhat less polarizing than politics. You do a lot of literary strips—would you ever consider one about contemporary literature?
KB: [Laughs.] Oh, no. No. I like doing literature that’s popular, that a lot of people have read or know about, so Game Of Thrones does fit into there. I did do a couple drawings and put them on Twitter, and they get good reactions. But I feel like, for a while, everybody was doing Game Of Thrones something or other, so I just sort of stayed out of there. And besides, you could hardly do a comic about that without spoiling it, because someone new dies every chapter. [Laughs.] It’s likeGame Of Massacres. And you wouldn’t want to ruin that for anybody.
From a 1982 NYT profile of Don DeLillo. DeLillo talks Pynchon, Gaddis, and reader responsibility.
THE writer to whom Mr. DeLillo has most often been likened and for whom he has great respect is Thomas Pynchon. ”Somebody quoted Norman Mailer as saying that he wasn’t a better writer because his contemporaries weren’t better,” he says. ”I don’t know whether he really said that or not, but the point I want to make is that no one in Pynchon’s generation can make that statement. If we’re not as good as we should be it’s not because there isn’t a standard. And I think Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set the standard. He’s raised the stakes.”
Mr. DeLillo also praises William Gaddis for extending the possibilities of the novel by taking huge risks and making great demands on his readers. Yet many readers complain about the abstruseness of much contemporary writing.
”A lot of characters,” Mr. DeLillo says, ”have become pure act. The whole point in certain kinds of modern writing is that characters simply do what they do. There isn’t a great deal of thought or sentiment or literary history tied up in the actions of characters. Randomness is always hard to absorb.”
Mr. DeLillo believes that it is vital that readers make the effort. ”The best reader,” he says, ”is one who is most open to human possibility, to understanding the great range of plausibility in human actions. It’s not true that modern life is too fantastic to be written about successfully. It’s that the most successful work is so demanding.” It is, he adds, as though our better writers ”feel that the novel’s vitality requires risks not only by them but by readers as well. Maybe it’s not writers alone who keep the novel alive but a more serious kind of reader.”
Raymond Carver talks about the political scope (or lack thereof) in his writing in a 1987 interview—
A writer ought to speak about things that are important to him. As you know, I’ve taught in universities, in fact for some fifteen years. I had time there for other work, and I never wrote a single story about university life because it’s an experience that left no mark on my emotional life. I tend to go back to the time and the people I knew well when I was younger and who made a very strong impression on me . . . Some of my recent stories deal with executives. (For example, that one in The New Yorker, “Whoever Was Using This Bed,” where the people discuss things the characters in my earlier stories would never discuss). He’s a businessman, and so on. But most of the people in my stories are poor and bewildered, that’s true. The economy, that’s important . . . I don’t feel I’m a political writer and yet I’ve been attacked by right-wing critics in the U.S.A. who blame me for not painting a more smiling picture of America, for not being optimistic enough, for writing stories about the people who don’t succeed. But these lives are as valid as those of the go-getters. Yes, I take unemployment, money problems, and marital problems as givens in life. People worry about their rent, their children, their home life. That’s basic. That’s how 80-90 percent, or God knows how many people live. I write stories about a submerged population, people who don’t always have someone to speak for them. I’m sort of a witness, and, besides, that’s the life I myself lived for a long time. I don’t see myself as a spokesman but as a witness to these lives. I’m a writer.
Biblioklept 