Q: This summer, The New Yorker included a story of yours ("I Can Speak!") in their "20 Writers for the 21st Century" issue. In terms of sheer intrusion, has this citation made your telephone ring at hours that are normally reserved for sleeping?
My telephone has always rung at hours normally reserved for sleeping, since I try to reserve approximately eighteen hours a day for sleeping. Surprisingly, however, what actually happened was that suddenly my phone stopped ringing altogether, almost as if it had been disconnected. I checked into this and found that the phones of the other 19 "Writers for the 21st Century" had also stopped ringing altogether. We immediately suspected New Yorker editor Bill Buford. After some investigation (which required us all to stop writing, therefore pushing back some very important 21st Century writing, which now, it appears, may have to become 22nd Century writing) we found that Bill had, in fact, disconnected our phones, thinking, rather sweetly and naively, that phones would become outmoded in the 21st Century and wanting to save us the embarrassment of using an outmoded means of communication. He worries about us, his quaintly unhip writers, who can often be found writing our 21st Century fiction while wearing distinctly 1980s clothing. So we all agreed to a compromise, wherein he would restore our phone service, as long as we promised to only use our phones while wearing some Buford-supplied 21st Century clothing, which is why, as I type this, having just made a phone call, I am wearing a sort of greenly glowing bonnet and a cellophane blazer.
Q: Who do you suppose your readership is? Do you write with a particular audience in mind, or is most of the stuff just the end result of a process that, at the end of the day, is meant for your own amusement? I am thinking specifically here of the shit list bit in the "400-Pound CEO," i.e. "Tim, my boss, has an actual shit list. Freeda generated it and enhanced it with a graphic of an angry piece of feces stamping its feet." You had to be cracking up when you wrote that one.
I write via the method known as Neurotic Catholic Internalization, in which the writer tries to imagine himself as his 4th grade nun, looking askance at himself while tapping a heavy wooden ruler into his/her palm. As you might imagine, this leads to a lot of revision! Other times, I imagine I am writing for Ernest Hemingway, but we always quarrel, especially when he says things like "theme parks are not pleasant" or "why not put some lions in there?" In summary then, I try, as we say in academia, to make my fiction a "site of contestation" between the euphoric Kerouac-loving me, who would like nothing better than to hitchhike across the country, blissfully noting the colors of barns and so on, and the neurotic, self-loathing me, who trudges along behind, correcting syntax and noting, in a party-pooping sort of way, that that barn, in fact, is not a barn, but a grain silo.
Q: When you're walking around the Borders bookstore in the Carousel Mall, do you ever sneak over to the SAU section of the racks, and sort of check to see if someone is reading your book? And if you have seen someone checking your work out in public, what is that feeling like? That is to say, you must see people walking around with issues of The New Yorker tucked away under their arms, issues that contain stories by you. Do you ever want to grab passersby and direct them to flip over to your story?
In my naive, distant, early days, like three years ago, when the book first came out, I tried this a couple of times, and found it so dispiriting and embarrassing that I quit. Because usually what you find is one copy of your pathetically thin little volume that is the sum total of everything you've done and know, and that little book is surrounded by so many, thicker, better, books, and there's nobody in the aisle anyway, while a few feet away there's like 97 people in the CD area, spending money like mad. So now what I'll typically do is take that one little thin volume and put it over in the CD section, right in there with, say, the Dave Matthews, in the hopes that I'll pick up a stray. I've also tried making a sort of trail of CDs, ala Hansel and Gretel, leading directly from the CD section to my book, to which I will have previously taped a big DayGlo exclamation point. Also, I have some friends in bio-research and we're working on something with pherenomes--you basically rub this cream into the cover of the book and if you can get somebody to pick it up, they get sexually aroused, which seems to increase sales. Not that I'm interested in sales. No, I find that crass. From my point of view, I am perfectly open to just distributing the pheremone cream directly, for free, so that people could rub it into themselves and get sexually aroused without involving my book at all, but you know how the culture is, it's just all about, you know, money, money, money.
Q: Teaching. Lord. How true is that old, "Teachers learn more from their students than vice versa" chestnut? Furthermore, you are teaching creative writing. How can one possibly teach someone to write well? Can it be done?
I teach in the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program, where we typically get around 100 applicants for fiction. In the end, we pick 6 -- which means we are working with amazing young writers, who were amazing before they got here and will continue to be amazing no matter what we do to them. We do these intense exercises, like make them stay up all night writing sonnets, or not feeding them until they can do an exact imitation of Barry Hannah, that sort of thing.
The truth is, when you put that many talented people in one place, cool things happen. We have students in the Best New American Voices anthology, winning The Atlantic's Student Fiction contest, publishing all over the place -- we have students who've worked in Hollywood, lived in a kibbutz, lived in Rwanda during the troubles, students who speak 6 languages...in other words, it's a great place to be, whether you're a teacher or a writer. These are students who would make incredible progress if you just put them out on an island somewhere. Well, an island with word processors. My point is, I wouldn't say we're teaching as much as we're facilitating -- giving them the resources to do, a little faster and maybe less painfully, what they would've done anyway. And I do learn a lot -- these students are amazing people, funny and sweet and smart -- much funnier and sweeter and smarter than I was at that age, which gives me a chance at a sort of joyful second young-adulthood, and they humor me, my students, by not continually pointing out how much older and less attractive I am than them.
Q: I maintain that you are not, in fact, a humor writer, but are instead a writer of literary fiction who also happens to be extraordinarily funny. How important is humor to your work? Does your nagging interior voice ever tell you to knock off the shenanigans and make with the melodrama?
Well, I love being funny when I can pull it off. To me, humor is distilled joy, a kind of super-intelligence. The giddiness I feel when I read, say, Gogol, is akin to what I feel when I walk into some dazzlingly weird real-life situation. You feel: God, what variety, how strange we are, how embarrassing this being human is.
The other thing humor can do is destabilize our faith in conceptual thought. Being shown how crass and odd and hypocritical we can be, we are more prone to humility, maybe? And if there was ever a country that needed a little dose of humility, it's us, if for no other reason than that we're so damn rich. So I like to think of myself as the zitty, depressed, wry kid who sits in the corner at the family party, pointing out in his nasally voice what a big liar Uncle Ned is for lecturing Cousin Phil on honesty, when we all know perfectly well that Uncle Ned has a stolen set of golfclubs in his trunk. It's not that Uncle Ned doesn't have good qualities, it's just that, at this particular moment, he needs to be flayed a bit.
Q: After reading the new piece in McSweeney's, especially the fourth part about the persevering test monkeys, I found it almost impossible to look at the boss anymore without wanting to hurl feces at him. Are all these stories--the ones about crumbling theme parks, haunted water slides, lonelyhearts driving schools, and poor, drugged-up monkeys--simply clever little satires about the American business world? Besides the beuracracy of academia, have you had much truck with office environments? If not, then how do you know so much about this kind of thing?
I've definitely worked in some offices. I worked for 8 yrs for a small environmental office in Rochester, NY, where I was a lowly peon, who was daily reminded of his peonhood by the office higher-ups, who were, from a national perspectives, peons themselves, only they didn't know it. But I had babies at home and no other options, and am naturally pretty passive anyway, so I sucked it up. And before that I worked for a pharmaceutical company, where my job was to summarize animal studies for FDA reports. The animals were all kept downstairs, so when I went out to my car at the end of the day, there they were -- Basset hounds with those Queen Anne collars, silent trembling bunnies. And pretty soon I started to sense a connection between our big 20th century genocidal outrages and these corporate environments -- the way language was used to mask unpleasant truths, the way difficult, painful decisions were rationalized by using phrases like "continuing to enjoy servicing the reasonable expectations of our stockholders ",or "our goal of becoming the most progressive and efficient supplier of blah blah blah." And I found myself trying to look for the roots of Auschwitz at hand -- that is, it seemed to me that whatever was in human beings that made them murder one another didn't mysteriously just arise -- it is with us always, dormant, and must manifest itself in small ways, every day.
Q: A lot of your writing is cinematic in scope. Have you ever considered writing for film? You could adapt "Bounty," toss in Leo DiCaprio, and you'd be in the fat house for the rest of your days. Has anybody from the film world been smart enough to notice?
Ben Stiller has an option on the story CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and David O. Russell had, for a year or so, an option on Bounty, although he gave up on it finally. I don't have much interest in writing for film. I really like books. I go see a movie and no matter how great it is or how affected I am at the time, an hour or so later I'm back the way I was. Whereas even a book I don't love can change the way I see things forever. So I doubt I'd be very good at writing screenplays, and life is short.
Q: Pastoralia. Can't wait to get my grubby little hands all over it. Is it another story collection, or is it a novel? If it is a collection of short stories, can you reveal which pieces will be included? Is there a common theme running through this book, as there was in CWLIBD?
Pastoralia will be out in May of 2000, with Riverhead Books. It's a collection of stories : "Winky," "Sea Oak," "The End of FIRPO in the World," "The Barber's Unhappiness," and a new novella-length piece called "Pastoralia." I always find it hard to talk about theme, because I think that if you can articulate it easily, you probably shouldn't have written the book. Stylistically it's a little wilder and more varied than CWLIBD, I think.
Q: Your characters take quite a beating. Some are hacked to bits by unhinged Vietnam vets, others are hauled off to the hoosegow for life, others still are swept away by roaring cataracts of cold, foamy death. And then there are those poor monkeys. What gives? Why put your characters through all that hoo-ah? Do you have a God complex or something?
The real answer is, I don't know why they come out that way. They just do. But then again, consider Little Red Riding Hood. It wouldn't be much of a story if it went: "Once upon a time her mother sent Little Red Riding Hood to bring some food to her grandmother. She told the little girl to stay on the path, and not to talk to strangers, especially not to wolves, but as it turned out, there were no wolves on that path anyway, so everything went pretty well." My point is, there has to be a wolf, and the wolf has to behave wolfishly.
Q: How far are the Orange going in the NCAA tournament? Do you actually follow basketball? The last time I was in the Carrier Dome (this past October), I saw the football team lose to Michigan. Then we all went downtown to a place called "The Blue Tusk." The beer was good, but there were too many hippie-dippy types about.
Well, one of those hippy-dippy types was probably me, pal.
Q: That last bit wasn't a question. One last thing: influences. I am forever passing along your book to friends, and just before one of them decides to read it, he/she asks, "What's this guy like?" So, what is this guy like? What was the seminal story that made you think, "I should be doing that, and not tossing pygmies in grocery store parking lots"? What story made you have to become a writer?
Hot Ice by Stuart Dybek. I mean, I wanted to be a writer before that one, but had no idea how to go about it. I'd never read a story that was from my world. That one was. Dybek went to the same high school as my father (St Rita's in Chicago) and I knew the part of town described etc etc. Plus it's such a beautiful story. Absolutely undeniable. Dybek is a master.
There are two ways to answer a question about influence, I think. One is to put yourself in the most flattering lineage, regardless of whether those people actually influenced you or not. In this paradigm, I would list Gogol, Dickens, the Marx Bros, & Vonnegut. I love all these people but had only read, at the time I wrote CivilWarLand, The Overcoat, A Christmas Carol, and Slaughterhouse Five, and seen, maybe, A Night at the Opera. I was a geophysics major at the Colorado School of Mines, which didn't have an English Dept, so had never read systematically. Since then I've done some catching up.
The second way is to really look at who formed you, the real basis for your asthetic. In this paradigm I would list Dybek, Monty Python, Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, Hemingway, Isaac Babel, Tobias Wolff, Dr Seuss, & Raymond Carver. These people's work I knew and loved before I started writing CivilWarLand.
Another big influence was two years I spent in Sumatra working in the oilfields. I'd never been out of the States before that and it was a real eye-opener. Especially the coming home. Because I saw for the first time that we live in a citadel of wealth, and that our wealth relative to the rest of the world is what distinguishes us as a nation, for better or worse....
