when

Admission is free.

Rick Moody–Black Clock contributor (Issues 1, 2, 4, and 9) and award-winning author of Black Veil, Demonology, The Diviners, Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, and Right Livelihoods–reads from his new novel The Four Fingers of Death.

“The book is entertaining and often poignant, probing the limits of technology, consciousness, and language in the face of grief.” — The New Yorker

“The Four Fingers of Death reads [...] like a 700-page Kurt Vonnegut book.” — Time Out New York

Since that decision, however, Evenson has garnered a wealth of awards and critical success, including an O. Henry Award for his short story “Two Brothers” and International Horror Guild Awards for The Wavering Knife and The Open Curtain.  Known as a writer who defies easy classification, he has received equal recognition from both literary and genre presses.  And the payback just keeps coming: Evenson’s latest novel, Last Days, won the 2010 ALA/RUSA Prize for Best Horror Novel; his work has been adapted into a variety of other media–most recently a stage version of Father of Lies; to date, his writing has appeared in four of twelve issues of Black Clock; and he currently serves as both a professor and director of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

Evenson’s work, though consistently divisive and occasionally iconoclastic, demands to be read.  An aura of mystery, in the oldest sense, permeates his writing, fueled by symbolism that seems to function outside rationality and violence that is incomprehensibly rational.  Characters with innocuously simple names enact atavistically simple motivations as they drift through uncertain, but curiously familiar, settings.  “The Munich Window” features one of the most despicable yet irresistible narrators seen since Nabokov, and Last Days takes readers on a harrowing trek through an underground world of obsession and self-mutilation.  In a recent review of short story collection Fugue States, Steve D. Owen called Evenson “the contemporary inheritor of the newest irrealist tradition” for the epistemological incertitude that permeates his writing.  Recently, Black Clock was able to chat with Evenson and explore the methods and motivations behind his work.

BLACK CLOCK: Your novel, Father of Lies, recently received a stage adaptation by director Jose Zayas.  How was that experience for you?

BRIAN EVENSON: It’s always amazing for me when someone adapts my work in one form or another, just because it creates possibilities for it that I maybe didn’t see.  There’re things a play can do that aren’t really possible in a work of fiction.  I’m afraid I haven’t seen Jose’s adaptation yet because the only days it was up were when I was out of the country, but I’ve heard only good things about the performance from friends who saw it.  I’m very excited to watch it on DVD: I’ve heard he’s done some very interesting things with darkness and staging and with the intimacy of the performance.  But I’m always for adaptations.  When Zak Sally adapted a story of mine into a comic, for instance, it was really great.  The other kinds of adaptations I’ve had, ranging from electronic music to radio plays to an experimental opera, I’ve been really happy about.

When you’re writing, do you ever picture what it would be like if it were adapted into a different medium?  The visual aspects of it?

I think a lot of my work is very visual, so I do have a pretty clear visual sense of what’s going on with a story.  But I don’t think I ever sit down and think, “Oh, this would make a great movie, this would make a great this or that.”  There have been four or five short films made based on my stories, and it’s sometimes really interesting to see how different the visual ideas the director has are from the ideas that I had in writing the story. But I’ve also been very happy with those adaptations as well.  I think that it just expands the work.  Obviously there’s a lot of openness in my work.  There’s an attempt on my part to make a space that people can enter into and make their own.

That’s an interesting concept.  Do you want to talk about that for a little bit?

I think there are different ways to think about writing.  One thing that I try to do is think about writing as something that serves as a catalyst, that connects to the reader, and the reader ends up completing the story in some ways, filling it in.  As a result I think there’s a lot of ambiguity and openness in my work.  Even though there are strong visual components, it’s work that demands active participation on the part of the reader.

Does that ambiguity arise from your particular approach to writing?  Do you sit down and say “I’m going to write such-and-such a story” or do you try to leave it more open for yourself as well?

Any time I have a clear idea where a story’s going before I’m close to the end, I usually don’t finish it, just because I get bored with it.  So yes, I think part of the process for me is trying to do something that feels at least a little bit new to me as I’m writing it.  I want a story that’s holding my interest, or a moment along the way that surprises me,  or that I don’t know where it came from, that seems to have tapped into something that I don’t really understand completely.  As a reader, I’m really interested in work that upsets the easy definitions I have for how a story should work.  I like fiction that does things that I can’t predict, but that does them so artfully that they seem natural and necessary at the same time as they seem surprising.  So I think that as a writer what I’m trying to do is get to a place where the story is something the reader is really involved in, but sometimes caught off guard by, or turned over by, or disrupted by in some way or another.

Earlier, you put this concept together of creating a space that the reader can enter into.  I’ve noticed that in a lot of your recent work especially there is a lot of imagery involving geometric, enclosed spaces.  Is that part of why that imagery recurs in your writing?

I think it might be partly that.  I’ve always been interested in the notion of enclosed spaces and characters that are put in a position of trauma, or put in a position where they don’t quite understand what’s going on around them.  I like the notion of being trapped, and the notion of being in a space that one either does or doesn’t understand very well but that one has to deal with.  I think those are things that always come up in my work.  I think part of it is the influence of Beckett.  I really love what he does in his work in terms of the almost geometrical quality of the descriptions, and how you have in something like The Lost Ones a very careful description of a space and of a cylinder.  But you also have that in a lot of his work.  In something like Company, you have these moments where the descriptions seem almost geometrical.  For me, I’m not really sure where that’s coming from or what that’s about exactly.  It may be partly that my mother is an architect.  I think it’s really an interest in spaces and the way in which we function in relation to spaces.  It’s partly an interest in dwelling, and houses, and things like that, but it’s also an interest in how many spaces just feel constricted and restrained.

If you had it completely figured out, I’m sure it wouldn’t be as interesting for either you or the reader.

I’m sure that’s right.  Gaston Bachelard has a book called The Poetics of Space in which he talks about the relationship of spaces, and my interest may be partly coming from that and from phenomenology as well.

Other than philosophy and Beckett, do you have any other influences outside of prose fiction?  Beckett wrote some prose but he was also a playwright.

Well, a lot of the Beckett work I’m really interested in is the prose: I think he does some amazing things in his novels.  But I came to his plays first.  And someone like Thomas Bernard is similar—someone who is as well known for his plays as for his fiction, but does really interesting things in both.  He’s really interesting to me both as a playwright and as a fiction writer.  Same with Friedrich Dürrenmatt.  And I read a lot of contemporary poetry, the poetry of my colleagues at Brown of course but also a great many others, ranging from well-known poets like Ashbery and Creeley to lesser known people.  I don’t know if the influences are as direct there, but I’m very interested in language and the way in which language can be manipulated, and poetry’s taught me a lot about that.  And film has been a huge influence as well.

Any specific films?

When I was quite a bit younger, I saw Blue Velvet, the David Lynch film, and that was really unlike anything else I’d ever seen.  It really blew wide open the notion for me of what was possible with film.  Since then, I’ve come across a lot of other films that I’m interested in in different ways.  But that one was a film that I came to very young, and it was pretty important.

And that also has that famous scene where Kyle Machlachlan’s character’s hiding in the closet; there’s that entrapment there as well.

Yeah, that definitely has that.  That particular scene I think is pretty amazing.  Fritz Lang’s M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse were two other films I watched early on and have watched repeatedly.  They’re very important to me as well.  Michael Haneke’s films too.

I wanted to ask you about the controversy that surrounded your first published book, Altmann’s Tongue.  It was a pretty major controversy that altered your life in a lot of ways.  Do you think it’s helped shape the writer you’ve become since then?

Yes.  Just to give people a sense of the controversy, my first book was published while I was a professor at Brigham Young University, which is a Mormon school.  At this point I’m an ex-Mormon, but at the time I was Mormon.  There was a student there who was not one of my students who sent an anonymous note to a Mormon Church leader saying that my book Altmann’s Tongue was evil, and that it should be banned and that anyone who had written it shouldn’t be allowed to teach at BYU.  The university called me on the carpet and asked me to explain the book, and I did my best to do so.  Then as time went on it became clear that they just wanted me to stop writing.  And then the anonymous letter was released to the press and it became a pretty major controversy.  At the time it was really irritating and traumatic, because it was my first job out of graduate school, I’d been at the school not very long when this happened, probably about a year if that. I really had to start the process of deciding if I was going to stay, and, if I was going to stay, if I was going to stop writing.  Because they said to me directly that they didn’t want me to continue with writing the work I was doing.  But then I found a job at Oklahoma State, and left, and have gone on from there to have a very productive university career.  At the time it was hard, because I was supporting a young family, trying to figure out what to do, but in retrospect what it did for me, which I think was very important, was that it made me realize that people really would respond strongly to what I did, either positively or negatively.  So I got the sense very early on that what I did as a writer mattered.  I think most writers go through their career without necessarily feeling that, at least to the extent I did.  It made me think very carefully about every word, it made me really conscious about what I was doing, and ultimately I think it was a kind of gift.  To begin as a writer really feeling like what I was doing mattered and would have consequences.

That’s a great take on it.

(laughs) Yeah, it’s something that over time I’ve come to feel more and more.  It’s partly because as time goes on, the trauma associated with that whole experience has faded a lot.

At the time, when you were writing Altmann’s Tongue, did you have any notion that it would be considered at all dangerous or evil?

I was a little surprised by that, partly because when I interviewed for the job I’d mentioned Altmann’s Tongue and explained what I was doing.  The interview committee had said to me, “Well, is there sex in the book?”  And I’d said, “No, there’s not actually much sex at all in the book.”  And they said, “Well, as long as it’s just violence it’ll be okay.”  So I went into the experience thinking that I’d checked and made sure that I was doing something that could at least be considered acceptable.  So it did catch me a little bit off-guard.  And in terms of violence, there are all sorts of books that are quite a bit more violent than Altmann’s Tongue.  But the violence in Altmann’s Tongue is very deliberately done in such a way as to be unsettling.  It’s not movie violence.  One thing I was interested in doing was trying to restore a sense of violence as something that disrupts the social order and destroys the individuals that practice it, violence as something truly disturbing.  And in that sense, I think that the response I got to the book from the Mormon community showed me that in fact I’d succeeded in doing that, that I’d made violence threatening again, rather than something that you could just say “Oh, if it’s just violent, it’s no big deal.”

Is that something that you’re still working on in your writing?

I don’t think it’s something I’m working on as much at this point, at least not primarily.  There have been moments since Altmann’s Tongue where I’ve been interested in exploring issues of violence, and I think there’s a thread of violence that runs through my work, but the stuff I’m more interested in at this point is trauma, and the psychology of trauma, and how people respond to difficult situations.  It’s closely related, but there’s a little difference in emphasis and, consequently, a little more psychological depth.

To shift gears a little bit, you’ve recently written a few books in established franchises under the name B.K. Evenson.  Because you’re publishing under a different name, even though it is another form of your actual name, it seems as though you want to keep it separate from your other work.  What’s the distinction you’re trying to create between that and your other fiction?

It’s not that I want to keep it utterly separate; I just want a slight distinction.  I didn’t use a pseudonym, I just used my initials and last name, and I think it’s because when I started doing these things—I’ve done three things now: one is an Aliens book based on the movie Aliens, I did a short story for the video game Halo, and I just published last week Dead Space: Martyr, which is based on the video game Dead Space—it was partly that at first I thought, “Well, there are going to be people who are interested in these books who aren’t interested as much in my other fiction and vice versa, so I’ll put them all under the name B.K. Evenson so that if they liked the Dead Space book they can find the other things like it.”  But the thing that I found when I was writing them was that even they’re probably not quite as complicated as much of my literary fiction (partly because I’m working with a pre-existing property, there are certain rules that they want me to follow), the themes and the ideas that are dealt with in those three pieces are really very much part of my universe.  So there are scenes in Dead Space: Martyr that are pretty directly connected to what I’m doing.  It just happens that there are also twisted and reanimated dead.  It’s a different take.  It’s very similar; I’m not ashamed of those books, but I also think that they’re not necessarily the things I’m going to be remembered for, if I’m remembered at all.  At the same time, I spent a lot of time trying to make the Dead Space novel the best video game novel out there.

When you were writing those books, you said that it’s simpler in some ways.  Is it sort of a relief to be able to work within an already established universe, or are you itching to get back to your more personal projects?

One of the reasons I’ve started doing these is because while the school year’s going on—I’m the Chair of the Creative Writing Program at Brown right now—it’s sometimes pretty hard for me to find the time to do sustained writing.  If I’ve started something, it works really well; otherwise, it’s pretty difficult.  But with these books, the people I work with want me to do an outline first, so I do an outline that ends up being fifteen or twenty pages.  So I have a kind of structure that I can work with.  And they’re also really fun to write, and I can give myself permission to think of it as something that I’m doing for fun, that doesn’t seem like work.  So they’re books that I can write when school’s going on and when I have all these other administrative things that are taking up my time.

I’ve read before that you had an, uh, memorable experience of the first Alien movie when you were younger.  Are you also a fan of the Halo and Dead Space universes, or is that more something that you saw as a good fit for your style of writing and your ideas?

The Aliens book really did fit incredibly well.  The first movie in particular something I grew up with.  I remember the first time I watched it, and there are moments in that movie I think are still really amazing. I’d played Halo, and was interested in it, and had an idea for something I could do which would be somewhat different than what other people had done with Halo stuff in the past.  So that became interesting to me, to think about how can you take this pre-existing thing and move it in a new direction.  I do this with genre in my more literary work as well.  Some of my work responds to genre, whether it’s horror or something else, in a very direct way.  And then with the Dead Space game, I think it’s an amazingly horrifying game, and really fun to play, and I’d played it in advance of being asked to write the novel.  It seemed like a really natural fit: I could immediately see ways in which I could find a space for myself within the format of the Dead Space world.  And the other thing I loved about Dead Space is that there’s this weird religious component to it, and that seemed like a good fit for some of the things I do.  Religious strangeness is never too far away from my work.  Like how Last Days is grounded in this notion of a crazy religious cult.

This may sound like a bit of a left-field question, but in Japan in the 1920’s, and then later in postwar Japan, there was an art movement known as Erotic Grotesque Nonsense.  That specific movement is pretty contained in that area of the world, but I think I can detect a similar interplay between the erotic, the grotesque, and the absurd/nonsensical in some of your work.  For instance, in “Eye” from Altmann’s Tongue and in “Invisible Box,” which was featured in Black Clock 7 and is included in Fugue State as well.  Do you see those three elements working together in your writing in any way?

The grotesque is always there, I think.  In almost everything I do, the grotesque is present.  The erotic is there in some pieces, and not in others.  Obviously “Invisible Box” is playing around with that pretty directly, and “Eye” is doing it as well, in two very different ways.  The thing about “Invisible Box” is that you start in a space that seems like it’s funny, and then it gets stranger and stranger.  I don’t know the Erotic Grotesque Nonsense movement from Japan, so it’s hard for me to know how to respond directly to that, but at the same time I am really fascinated by someone like Hans Bellmer, who does stuff with doll parts and erotic drawings that are also very, very strange.  So yeah, I think there is some presence there.

A lot of your work can be described with “sub-” words: subconscious, although I know you don’t really agree with the concept; subversive; subjective; subterranean; finally, subdermal is a great descriptor for many of your stories.  There isn’t exactly a question here, but can you talk about some aspects of your writing that occur below the surface?

I mentioned before that when I’m actually working on a story if I know where it’s going and have a sense of how it’s going to play out, I’m not that interested in it.  When a story’s working really well, I become very connected to the process of thinking about the language of the story, in the sense that I allow my conscious mind to be distracted by the language of the story and the way in which the language is working.  And that opens something else up, and allows certain things to organize themselves or certain things to happen that wouldn’t necessarily happen otherwise.  As you’ve mentioned, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the word “subconscious.”  It’s not that I don’t believe that there’s something that exists below the conscious mind, it’s just that I question the formal way in which we think about it.  It’s partly that that word, “subconscious,” culturally has so much baggage that goes along with it.  But at the same time, I really do feel that good writing for me is something that accesses something that exists that is very hard to get at in other ways.  Outside of artistic media, it’s very hard to get at.  For me, when a story’s really working well, something is going on with the language, and the rhythm, and the sound of the piece, as well as the way in which different regimes of meaning are crosscutting, that ends up connecting to the reader on a subdermal or subterranean—whatever you want to call it—level, that kind of plugs into you in a different way than information does.  And that’s what I’m interested in: thinking about writing as something that’s intensive or affective, as something that is short-circuiting some of the things that are seen as the norm for us in terms of our day-to-day confrontation with language.

Is that part of the reason that you draw influences from the horror genre?

Probably, yeah.  I think it’s partly just that horror is so interested in mood, and creating a certain kind of mood.  It’s a very curious genre.  Horror for me is really defined by creating a certain kind of mood.  And that mood, also, when it’s done at its best, ties into basic fears that we have and explores things that we generally leave covered up.  My work has always had one foot in literature and one foot in horror, and it’s really interested not in being in one camp or the other, but in straddling and trying to use as many different sorts of things as I can to create an effect for the reader that’s intensive in the same way that experience is intensive.  I think that fiction can be experiential.  You feel, when you read a story that’s intense and very good, that you’ve actually experienced something.  Good fiction should be able to have that effect, should be able to increase your heart rate, should be able to make you feel like you’ve lived through something.

You’ve been a frequent contributor to Black Clock.  What is it about the magazine that draws you back?

There are several things.  One is the design of the magazine:  I think it’s incredibly nice-looking, very beautifully done.  I also think that Steve Erickson, the editor, has made great choices and has good taste.  So I always feel like I’m in exceptionally good company when I’m in Black Clock.  One of the appeals for me is knowing, even if I don’t know for sure who’s going to be in the issue, that I’m going to like the work that’s there, and that I’m going to respect the aesthetic that’s been used to assemble the work.  It’s that, as much as anything.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
an MFA candidate at CalArts

I was in the bookstore last night.  Not the indie bookstore that also sells used records–the chain bookstore that also sells lattes.  I should have known better.  Of all the places people go to make themselves feel bad–the gym, home for Christmas, swimsuit shopping, whatever–the chain bookstore, to me, is the worst.  Viewing the shelves filled with political screed, chick lit, and coffee table trophies is an efficient way to a) ruin the nice feeling that comes after a productive day, and b) convert the blah feeling that comes after a nonproductive day into a serious downward spiral.  Is this true just for me, or do other writers experience this?  Granted, it’s easy to make me feel bad.  Like Bridget Jones, I already feel like an idiot most of the time.  (The difference between me and Bridge, though, is that she gets to say “I feel like an idiot” to a sexy, successful lawyer who wants to take her… out for dinner and a movie.  Also, Bridge has a fun career in television.  But I digress.)  Writers who are at peace with what they do, even if they labor in obscurity, may not agree with me about the deleterious effects of a trip to Borders or Barnes & Noble.  But if their self esteem soars after a trip to the big box bookstore, they are probably either famous, possessed of a healthy body image, capable of writing brilliant first drafts, or some combination of the above.  They sound like lovely people.  But I’m not talking about healthy self esteem this week; I’m talking about masochism.

The chain bookstore makes me–and probably you, and probably every writer you know–feel bad because, it seems, every idiot with a word processor and spellcheck can publish a book.  Every idiot, that is, except us.  But more importantly, this big fancy bookstore presents a weird paradox.  On the one hand, we all know, if we read the news online once in a while, that the publishing industry is in steep decline.  Sales are down and shrinking, publishing houses–even the big ones–can’t stay in the black, and if an arty little tome happens to make it to print, Lord knows what compromising acts the publisher had to do to finance it.  (Probably sign with Joe the Plumber.)  People don’t buy books–not the good ones; people don’t read books–again, not the good ones, unless Oprah tells them to; and it’s not long before books make like dinosaurs and retreat underground where they will wait millions of years until humans unearth them and use them as fuel.  But how is one to believe in this doomsday narrative when strolling through several huge, carpeted, air-conditioned levels of retail space, filled with thousands, if not millions of books?

But then one tries to find the poetry section.  At my local Barnes & Noble, poetry occupied one measly section of shelf in a tumbleweed-strewn corner of the store.  There was the requisite Emily Dickinson and the Robert Frost, but most of the section was a mix of pseudo-Norton Anthologies and utter trash–Great Poems of the English Language, 1000 Poems to Read to Children, Poems for World Peace, How Many White Male Poets Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?, Vampire Poetry Through the Ages, Pastor Bob’s Christian Inspirational Poems for Young Girls.  If shelf space is a measure of what people buy–and by extension, obviously, a measure of what people read–only college syllabi or the flimsiest marketing ploys might coerce, or dupe, the unsuspecting consumer into buying a book of poems.

And this state of affair holds true outside the poetry ghetto.  For example: if it’s something thrilling and weird people want, why are The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books topping bestseller lists and not, say, Lucy Corin’s astonishing Everyday Psychokillers?  (For the record, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I loved it.  A good laugh was exactly what I needed that day.)  Yes, I’m ranting.  And yes, I probably would have been better off skipping Barnes & Noble and instead trooping across the street to Pequod’s Pizza, where I could have eaten myself into either oblivion or a better mood.  But it seems that the choices for writers are:  1) crank out some marketable crap, which may in fact get you grocery money, 2) write what sustains you, at which point you may as well put it in a drawer or line your kid’s hamster’s terrarium with it, or 3) day job and quiet desperation, followed by the inevitable shooting spree in the exurbs.

Clearly this is not a new viewpoint I’m proffering here.  But if you want to think about what actually constitutes cultural capital, or the real economics of the purely imaginary, or score any points for the “An English degree is not a fatuous waste of time” side of the debate, you’ll need to take my rant at least semi-seriously.  Really, why should anyone spend time attempting to read, write, produce, discuss, and engage with literature, considering the mulch that passes for books these days?

The problem, as I see it, is that literature is a gentleman’s pursuit–and we no longer have gentlemen.  That is, a class of independently wealthy, well-educated, and erudite men (and yes, historically, letters have been a man’s game) who can afford to invest their time in artifacts which have no commercial value–unless, that is, we look at the university English department.  For instance: one highly-paid woman in my department runs the composition program.  Translation: her program purports (practical outcomes are another matter) to teach students a measurable, practical skill, which they will need in their toolkit in order to succeed the next four years of their lives–how to write papers in college.  Although this professor does respectable and necessary work, is widely published, and oversees a program that ensures every single student who graduates from the university will take at least one course in the English department (their freshman comp course), hers is not regarded as an intellectually or artistically high-status position.  In fact, without her program, the size of the department, and its share of funds, would probably shrink dramatically.

By contrast:  A highly-paid male professor, who oversees a more intellectual aspect of the department, writes books containing arguments about obscure bodies of literature and obscure schools of thought–arguments which can have a real-world effect only in a lit-nerd’s wildest utopian fantasies.  Translation: no practical skills here, but high pay and very high prestige.  I’m making no claims about who works harder or who deserves more respect–both professors work very hard, both on their own research and in their engagements with students.  But the male professor gets a higher payout, both in salary and in prestige.

Which one is the gentleman, and which one is the worker?

I’m not arguing for commercial value as a measure of actual or absolute value, by the way.  If I were, I’d have recommended Stieg Larson over Lucy Corin.  I’m also not faulting or valorizing either professor for teaching and researching what he/she teaches and researches.  I’m also going to step aside from gender questions, because, while I do think there is a gender bias at work, my main point isn’t about gender inequality.  The inequality I want to point out would remain the same whether both professors in this example were female, or both male, or if the higher paid professor were female and the lower paid professor were male.

There is a distinct hierarchy visible here in the kind of literary work that is valued and in how that value is shown.  I wonder, also, if this imbalance doesn’t have some link to the way literary value plays out at Barnes & Noble.  After all, the two situations look like mirror images of each other.  On the university side: work of practical value, which is intended for all students to access or engage in, gets less pay and less prestige, while work of little practical value, intended for a elite few, gets more pay and more prestige.  On the bookstore side: work intended for the elite few–that is, work with what we might call great cultural value–brings in little money, and takes up little shelf space, while work of perhaps lower cultural value dominates the store and brings in the most money.

This is fine for the bookstore.  The bookstore is a business.  It measures value in money, and so in the world of the bookstore, poetry, or erudite fiction, and so on, are less valuable and treated accordingly.  But the university is not a business–at least, it does not purport to be, despite the fact that more and more universities are adopting business practices in order to try and balance their budgets.  The university’s economy is primarily one of cultural capital–prestige, intellectual worth, social cultural value.  These values, by definition, are not supposed to be measured with money.  In fact, they are supposed to defy any attempt at stamping a dollar sign on them.  Intellectual, cultural, social, artistic merit–these things are supposedly priceless.  Yet the university uses money to measure and reward the acquisition, production, and proliferation of cultural capital.  Isn’t this a problematic mash-up of economies?  What it means, in real-world terms, is that a system of cultural and intellectual inequalities–that is, a system that values different kinds of work differently in a prestige economy–replicates and perpetuates those inequalities in a money economy.  It’s fine, I suppose, in the abstract, for different kinds of academic and intellectual work to achieve different levels of status and prestige in the cultural capital arena.  But when these inequalities are reflected financially, it is no longer an abstract problem or a problem in an imaginary economy, and to my way of thinking, it’s no longer fine.

by Jenn Hawe
who lives, writes, and cooks in Chicago

Black Clock

Pronoia (being both the cosmological and moral opposite of paranoia) is “a litter-free weekend of great music focused on community, sustainability, art, spirituality, and education.”  Festivities will be held at Byrd’s Adventure Center in Ozark, AR.  In addition to music, workshops and consciousness-raising events, attendees will be offered all the recreational amenities of the park (zip lines, hiking, kayaking and more), which is located in the Mulberry River Valley within the Ozark National Forest.  For additional information, visit: http://www.myspace.com/pronoiafest.

Resident Anti-Hero’s music has been called “dystopic mythopoesis,” “militantly off-the-grid,” and as presenting “a model, mostly imaginary but grounded in the facts many of us dare not contemplate, for a sustainable and still uniquely American post-civilization experience.”  You can learn more about the Anti-Hero Underground at http://www.residentantihero.com/.

The following interview was conducted via email over the first two weeks of June 2010.

BLACK CLOCK: What are you working on right now?

LEWIS SHINER: The first thing on my to-do list is to finish setting type for a reprint of my novel Glimpses.  What’s happening is, I’m bringing my entire backlist back into print, thanks to the good graces of my publisher, Bill Schafer at Subterranean.  He’s letting me design the covers and set the type for all the books so that I can get exactly what I want.  Black & White and Deserted Cities of the Heart came out last December, and we’ve got Frontera all set to go as well.  We were originally going to save Glimpses for last, as that’s the book that I get the most fan mail about, but then something came up.

Which was an audiobook version, done by Stefan Rudnicki of Skyboat Road Company.  Stefan is another really loyal supporter of my work, an award winning producer, director, and actor who did a wonderful job on my two previous audiobooks (Say Goodbye and an anthology called Missing Persons).  Stefan is determined to get something happening for me in the audiobook market, so we wanted to get a paperback edition out there to support what he’s doing.

So once I get the typeset and the cover finished for Glimpses, I’ll wrap up Frontera and get that off to the printer.  Then I’ll get back to finishing the final draft of a new novel called Dark Tangos.  It’s set in Buenos Aires in 2006 and 2007 and deals with the fact that Argentina has only now gotten around to putting the guys on trial who actually implemented what they called El Proceso back in the 70s—the Dirty War, where they kidnapped, tortured, and murdered an estimated 30,000 people, most of whom were never found.  The protagonist is a guy from the U.S. who gets caught up in all this political stuff because of someone he meets while dancing tango.

Once I get that done, I’ve got a new novel in the planning stages that I’m excited about.  If it works out, it’s going to be huge, like 1000 pages, covering 40 or 50 years, cast of thousands, all that kind of thing.

All of this while working my day job and taking salsa classes and trying to keep up with my friends in email.

I’d be interested to learn more about how you came to be associated with Subterranean.  When and how did that relationship begin?  It also sounds like Subterranean has granted you a level of creative control over your work rare in the publishing industry.  Is that fair to say?  And, if so, how has your experience with them in this regard been different from your past experiences with publishers?

Bill first approached me in the late nineties with the idea of doing a story collection.  It so happened that I had been holding back a batch of stories for just such an occasion, and it was clear that I wasn’t going to get a major conglomerate publisher interested in it.  But I had a very clear idea of what I wanted.  The stories were all mainstream or slipstream, and I wanted a look that reflected that.  I’d also had a number of bad experiences with covers, the most recent, with Say Goodbye, being the worst.  St. Martin’s had agreed that their first cover proof, which I called the “glowing alien hand” cover, was a complete dog, but then they came back with what I called the “Nicaraguan rape victim” cover.  This one was so bad that I threatened to pull the book and return the advance unless they dropped it.  Their third attempt, which had nothing to do with the book except that it had a woman in it, was bad, but at least it wasn’t an outright insult to the readers, so I had to go with it.

Say Goodbye was also my first experience with type design.  They sent me a proof of what their designer had come up with, and I made a counterproposal.  The designer worked up my specs, showed both designs to his boss, and his boss picked mine.

So I told Bill I would love to do a collection, but I had to have absolute control over the cover and typeset.  And, remarkably, he agreed.  He set up me with Gail Cross, his designer, and we worked really closely together.  She totally got into the project, to the extent of building this huge, beautiful sandcastle in her driveway and Photoshopping it into a beach scene that we picked together.  She consulted me on absolutely everything, a dream experience for me.  And the best part was that Bill and Gail were really happy with the results as well.  This was Love in Vain, a book I am still really proud of.  And Bill and Gail and I got to be friends in the process.

The book came out in 2000, as I was working on my next novel, Black & White.  That one took eight years to write, and I have to admit I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder when the time came to market it.  This would have been the summer of 2007.  I made a list of six top agents in New York, and I had a recommendation to each of them from either an important client or a close friend.  When I didn’t get the response I wanted, I took the book to a handful of publishers that I knew well enough to approach without an agent.  That didn’t work out either.

So I went to Bill and asked if he’d take a look, and he loved it.  Because things had turned out well with Love in Vain, I was able to push a little harder and ask to actually design the cover and set the type myself.  Bill made Gail look over my shoulder all the way, and she basically taught me how to do her job—how generous is that?  And I got what I wanted.

The thing about working with Bill—aside from the fact that he’s a tremendously nice guy—is that he is very, very good at what he does.  He knows who his customers are, he knows what they want, and he can predict pretty accurately how much a book is going to sell.  As a result, he’s making a profit while the conglomerate publishers are losing their shirts.  And he’s making much nicer books than they are—sewn spines, cloth covers, beautiful painted dust jacket art.  The difference between working for a company that’s making money and one that’s scrambling in desperation is huge.

Another thing about Bill is that he trusts his own judgment.  That’s pretty rare in New York publishing, where how they feel about a book is tempered by the author’s track record and what everybody else in the company thinks.  Bill, to my everlasting gratitude, likes my work.  He doesn’t care what category it gets filed under, and he can set his print runs to accommodate the size of my audience.

Neither Bill nor I are going to get rich from this deal, but I get great looking books that I’m really proud of, and I think Bill is at least breaking even on me.

Final book design is something I think many (beginning, in particular) writers don’t give much thought to, only to learn too late and rather unpleasantly how important it actually is. The novel is more than just the words on the page, ultimately…

What was the best creative experience you ever had with a major publisher?

Purely in terms of a creative experience, I would have to mention Slam.  My editor at Doubleday was Pat LoBruto, and he and I just clicked.  He totally got the book, and had wonderful suggestions, and we spent some great hours on the phone together.  We’re still friends today.  Unfortunately he was not there during the production stages, where there were lots of problems.  Like, I had to rewrite the flap copy hours after getting out of oral surgery because what they had was unspeakable and they didn’t show it to me until the last minute.  And Chip Kidd—who is an outstanding designer—had a bad day when he did Slam and got the brilliant idea of doing ragged right margins on the right hand pages, and ragged left margins on the left hand pages.  The only problem being that ragged left destroys the paragraphing.  Fortunately one of the editorial assistants smuggled me out a preview of the typeset, and I called my new editor and showed him at least two places in the first ten pages where it was literally impossible to tell who was speaking, to the extent that the meaning of the book was changed.  And he backed down before I had to go to the wall, but it was another of those incidents that took months, if not years, off my life.

So for an overall good experience, I would have to go back to the first time.  Everything with Frontera was simple and straightforward.  It was an SF paperback original, and they had a nice piece of art lying around by Vincent DiFate, a guy who did gorgeous paintings of rockets and planets, and they tweaked the colors so it would look like Mars instead of the Moon, and there was my cover.  It was mostly red and black, which were the hot colors for paperbacks at the time, and I’d always liked DiFate’s work, so I really had nothing to complain about.  My editor was Betsy Mitchell, whom I’d worked with when she was editing at Analog, and we got along well.  She liked the book and didn’t ask for much in the way of changes.  It got good distribution—it was actually in the rack at my local grocery.  It didn’t sell very well, but I don’t think that was in any way the publisher’s fault.

Given the state of the publishing industry, i.e., crumbling (shades of that sandcastle), do you think it’s still possible for young / starting-out writers to have a comparable experience with a big house?

I think so, especially in SF.  It is much, much harder to break in than when I was starting—there are fewer magazines, fewer anthologies, lower circulations, and so on, but you can still get a buzz going as a short story writer, and that creates excitement about your first novel, and editors still love that thrill of breaking a new writer.  The truth is, it’s much easier now to sell a book as a first-timer than as somebody who’s got a bad track record.

In connection with Love in Vain, you mentioned your work in the context of slipstream.  But that is not the only genre in which you work.  How would you describe your relationship to genre?

I seem to be the only person around who doesn’t care about genre.  I know I’ve said this before—I think there’s more in common between any two of my books, regardless of genre, than there is in common between one of my novels and another novel in the same alleged genre.  Which is to say, Frontera, which is nominally “hard” science fiction, is more like Black & White, which is a literary suspense novel, than it is like some other hard SF novel.  Or to put it still another way, if you like Frontera, you’ll probably like one of my other books.

Like most writers, I write the same kind of stuff as I read, and I read Westerns, detective novels, literary novels, whatever.  And I will point out that one of my favorite writers, Jane Smiley, has published a Western (Liddie Newton), a whodunnit (Duplicate Keys), a sitcom (Moo), a couple of historical novels (Greenlanders, Private Life), a Hollywood novel (Ten Days in the Hills), etc.  Don DeLillo has written SF (Ratner’s Star), a spy novel (The Names), a sports novel (End Zone), all of them great books that played by (and with) genre conventions.  I’ll read anything Jane Smiley writes—I don’t care what it’s about.  The things that I look for in a novel—evocative prose, sympathetic characters, stimulating ideas, prickly little splinters of the real world—don’t have to do with genre.

Mr. McSweeney’s, Chip Kidd… surely Slam was one of his earliest assignments?

Kidd was already pretty famous when he did Slam.  I was a fan of his, so I was doubly disappointed by what he did on my book.  I’m not just talking about the typeset, but about the cover as well—here’s a novel about skateboarding and anarchy, with all kinds of visual potential, and he turns in art that makes it look like a postmodern novel of homoerotic love.  But book design is a creative art, and you can’t knock one out of the park every time.

I was lucky to have great cover art for Deserted Cities of the Heart by Bob Hickson—it was commissioned by the Bantam New Fiction line, back when they were going to make me a mainstream star. But the editors and I couldn’t agree on what good writing was—they literally told me that I needed to use “bigger words and longer sentences”—so I got kicked back into the SF ghetto.  I was deliberating going to another publisher entirely, but I had seen the cover art and that made me stay with Bantam, albeit in their new SF hardcover line.

And with Glimpses they got Honi Werner, one of the top cover painters/designers in the world, to do the book, and her art was gorgeous. Again, I was a big fan of hers and she would have been at the top of my list if I’d gotten to pick, and unlike Kidd, she didn’t disappoint.

Your experience seems to me to highlight one of the more fascinating consequences of publishers’ attempts make sense of a marketplace in which the book is not the primary commodity, i.e., publishers no longer rely primarily on the book, with its design, layout, blurbs, and carefully composed author photos, to communicate to the reader that not only is this a book worth reading, but here is a writer worth following.  Publishers, in effect, offer less and expect more of their authors in terms of creating a marketable “brand.”

Obviously, web presence is a major aspect of such branding.  And, like nearly every writer working today, you have a presence on the web (http://www.lewisshiner.com).  But unique on your website is the sheer amount of writing you make available to any visitor for free, via your “Fiction Liberation Front.”  Which is another way of saying that your website is less image and more substance.  What gave you the idea for this project?  How did it actually come about?

By 2007 the handwriting was on the wall—or on the web, if you will.  Print publishing was clearly in trouble, especially as far as short fiction was concerned.  And short fiction had always been a problem for me.  I could sell short SF or fantasy, but I had never cracked the serious mainstream markets.  Mainstream fiction in the U.S. is dominated by graduates of MFA writing workshops who now teach in some other MFA writing program.  You only have to look at the biographies in the back of Best American Short Stories to see what I’m talking about.  If you’re good enough, or lucky enough, or connected enough, or whatever, you might be able to overcome that, but I never did.  And I am not cut out for academia.

So if I wanted to get my stuff out there where people could see it—and I did—I needed to put it online.  The question was, how do I get paid?  I talked to a lot of people, and the only answer anybody could give me was, “get a sponsor.”  I couldn’t stand the idea of having ads for SUVs or network TV shows or Big Macs on my website—even assuming I could land a high-profile sponsor like that—so I just said “to hell with it.”  It’s not like there’s that much money to be made from short fiction anyway.  So I decided to be my own sponsor.  It’s a way of making my day job less onerous, thinking of it that way.

Did you encounter any difficulties along the way in terms of regaining the rights to your work?

There was no problem with getting the rights to my stories—generally magazines only buy first serial rights, which leaves you free to reprint once the thing has been published.  In cases like Subterranean, the online magazine that my publisher runs, where I had a new story last year, I simply link to the site from Fiction Liberation Front.

Novels are a different story, but in my case it was all part of the synergy.  As I was conceiving of FLF, I was also conceiving of bringing my backlist into print (and I had been careful to get the rights back to all my novels as soon as the contracts expired).  Bill at Subterranean had been reading the same studies I had, which all say that giving your book away online only increases sales of the print edition.  Which makes sense—most people don’t want to read an entire novel sitting at the computer, so having the book online really serves as a teaser.  Of course as the Kindle and the Nook and the iPad get more popular, that may change, but so far there is a hardcore audience that still wants a print artifact, and I am part of that audience.  So with each new Subterranean trade paperback, we put the PDF up on Fiction Liberation Front.

I picked the name as a way to grab attention—ditto labeling my introduction a “manifesto.”  And it worked—the bOING bOING website gave me a great plug, and I got a lot of favorable publicity in various blogs.  It upped my street cred with the anarchist community, and still serves as a good hook for talking about my work.

What sort of input or reaction did you receive from other writers?  Did anyone caution you against “giving your work away”?

The only real dissent was that one SF writer called me a “scab” because he thought if we all banded together and insisted that we wouldn’t put our stuff online unless we got paid well for it, we could bring publishing to its knees.  Being the lefty and unionist that I am (I’m a member of the Wobblies), that stung, but I was unable to take his argument seriously.

Probably the biggest impediment was the sheer amount of work involved—all told, 67 short stories, nearly all in both PFD and HTML format, plus nonfiction, screenplays, audio, video, and two novels (so far).  I was afraid that I would run out of steam, and there were periods of several months at a time when I didn’t post anything.  But then somebody I didn’t know would write and say, “Hey, what’s happening with FLF?” or “When are you going to put up some cyberpunk?” and I would go back to work.  Toward the end, which was January and February of this year, with the end in sight, I posted a ton of stuff, with the result that all of my short fiction (except collaborations and one story that I hate) is up there.  And the collaborations are coming.

Assuming that the FLF could be described as an “experiment,” how might you describe the results?

I am really proud of the fact that if somebody wants to read one of my stories, it’s out there.  So the work can stand or fall on its own merits.  It would be nice to be able to make a living writing fiction, but given that that’s not happening, at least my work is available.  There are so many writers who can’t say that.

Despite your association with the science-fiction, slipstream, cyberpunk etc. genres, and aside from forward-looking projects like the FLF, one theme that threads through nearly all your work is history, or, better yet, the present’s compulsion or need to intervene in the past (and vice-versa.)  The plots of both  Glimpses and Deserted Cities Cities of the Heart orbit around characters who can become unanchored in time (Eddie Yates in the latter, Ray Shackleford in the former) and your most recent novel, Black & White, links genealogy to larger patterns in America’s collective life in ways that recall both Faulkner and the Chandler-esque detective novel.  What about history fascinates you? Has your own work as a fiction-writer—someone who “merely” makes up stories—altered your understanding of or attitude towards history? If so, how?

The present is always intervening in the past, isn’t it?  That’s what memory does.  On a personal level, the level of nostalgia, you get a book like Glimpses, in which one character accuses the protagonist of trying to have sex with his own past.  On a cultural level, the level, say, of modern Mayans preserving the myths and cultures of their ancestors, you get a book like Deserted Cities of the Heart.

When I was a kid, history was the art of memorizing dates—which I was lousy at.  So I thought I hated history.  I was in my 30s before I understood that the French Revolution, which had always been in one compartment, happened in the same half-century as the American Revolution, which had always been in this other compartment.  And that the American Revolution had actually helped inspire the French.  And how very similar ideas about democracy had gone down two wildly divergent paths.

It turned out that I loved history when it dealt with connections and characters and concepts, and I ended up learning about history by writing about it.

At one very basic level, history is important to my writing because I don’t have a lot of imagination.  When you steal from history, you get some really fascinating characters, and you get lots of background and plot and scenery.  It’s your job to make these people convincing, but you get a leg up—at least in confidence—because you know they did exist, and there must have been reasons they did what they did.

Plus, you can find the seeds of everything in the modern world by looking at the past.  You can really see this in some of the short stories—”Gold,” which is about Jean Lafitte, and “White City,” about Nikola Tesla, come to mind.  Lafitte was actually an early, self-taught socialist, and Tesla was the prototype for the scientists who think technology can solve everything.  They provide a great armature for talking about greed, or science, or any other facet of the modern world, because once you put those ideas in a different context, like the past, it lets you see them differently.  This decontextualizing is what the best SF does, but I never had the patience or the skills to do that kind of world building.

Your quoting Glimpses reminds me again what a complex relationship that novel has to the American nostalgic mode.  Shackleford’s initial ventures into the past are escapist, in one sense, but, ultimately, he cannot avoid taking responsibility for what he hears on his journeys into the past.  Were these complications ones you set out to explore in writing the novel, or did they only begin to emerge as you began writing and—to use that language again—began to learn about these people and this world?

Glimpses had kind of a funny history.  I started out to write a mainstream novel about a guy whose father died in a diving “accident” in Mexico, basically what is now the “In Transit” chapter of Glimpses.  I worked on it for a year, but I wasn’t getting much of anywhere—there was something missing.  There wasn’t enough story, or enough weirdness, or something, and I was not excited by it.

So I took a break and started writing a quickie short story about a stereo repairman who could conjure up lost albums.  This I was excited about, and I kept backing up and adding more to the beginning of the story, and it kept getting bigger and bigger, and finally I realized I was going to have to account for why this guy needed to do this so bad, and who he was, etc.  I’m not too bright sometimes and it took like two or three days for me to realize, “Hey, what if his father died in a diving ‘accident’ in Mexico?”

At that point it really took off, and when I caught up to the Cozumel section, it was now interesting to me again.

But yeah, from the start of the short story version I knew it was going to end with Ray not getting what he wanted in terms of finding the music.  I knew that it was totally unhealthy to be that obsessed with the past.  On the other hand, I was being obsessive myself, so part of the reason for writing the short story was to talk myself out of my own obsession.

I’m curious: how did you feel about Shackleford, the character, while you were writing Glimpses?  Now that 15 (give or take) years have passed since the novel’s initial publication, and since we have now cycled through revivals of both the ‘70s and the ‘80s*, do you view Shackleford or that novel any differently?

*What is it Pynchon writes in V?  That, as Americans, we seem particularly susceptible to “a great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in”?

“A great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in”… I have that too, but in this case it’s a homesickness for the years you were in high school, which I think is even stronger.  And there was, in fact, something really special about the sixties.  It was one of the only moments in history where the most powerful nations on earth were so prosperous that the national zeitgeist could turn to issues other than basic survival—issues like civil rights and spirituality and art.  Where so many kids had so much money that thousands of bands could spring up across the country.

At the time, I was daring myself to go places I had never been in my fiction before.  I was inspired by a writer named Jonathan Carroll, author of amazing novels like Land of Laughs and After Silence.  There were lots of moments in Carroll’s novels that made me squirm with discomfort—it was the same effect as watching someone break down emotionally in front of a huge crowd of people.  I admired his courage for being able to sacrifice his dignity in the name of honesty, and wondered if I could do that.

To that end I came up with a verbal style for the book that verged on the inarticulate.  I was really going after the cadence of spoken rather than written English.  And I put a lot of intensely personal stuff in there.  I would think of putting something in the book and I would recoil in shame and fear and think, “Oh no, I couldn’t put that in there.”  And I took the very fact that I felt that way as a sign that it had to go in.

There are certainly a lot of differences between Ray and myself—for one thing, Ray is not an artist and not a verbal person.  We have (slightly) different musical tastes.  I was always more of a cynic.  But still, it was very autobiographical, painfully so.

In fact, Glimpses is now my least favorite of my books.  There are a million reasons for that, including the fact that it evokes all these bad memories of my parents.  It evokes my first marriage, which was pretty unhappy at the end.  Lori is largely based on a couple of women, one of whom I had a disastrous love affair with, the other of whom I married and had a disastrous marriage with.  I read the scenes between Ray and Lori now and think, “My god, you idiot, run away.”

And the very things I was trying to achieve now bother me.  I don’t like the style, which seems very obtrusive.  I don’t like the sentimentality.  And while, ultimately, the book makes a point about the dangers of nostalgia, there’s a certain contradiction there, because it makes the point by wallowing in it.  It’s like making a pornographically violent movie to advocate pacifism.  It’s very clear that Ray’s uncontrollable nostalgia is literally killing him by the end of the novel, but I think most readers—and I myself—read those scenes and say, “Okay, let it kill me, I don’t care!  I’m eating soul food with Jimi Hendrix in Harlem!”

Let’s talk a bit more about Black & White, your most recent novel and one for which (I’d wager) you feel a bit more authorial affection.  (Though I feel that Glimpses is also, in part, about the virtues of fandom.)  What motivated you to write Black & White?

I moved to North Carolina in 1996. Within a few weeks of moving here, I got to be friends with the receptionist at the place I was working, Pam Footman.  She was the one who first told me about Hayti.  I immediately recognized that this was a book that needed to be written, and, as usual, I went around looking to see if somebody else had done it so I wouldn’t have to.  No such luck.

The initial stage of a book is like setting up a piece of screen wire in my brain and seeing what gets caught in it.  The story of Hayti is the story of a highway, and that made me think of my Uncle Bob, and his quote about concrete highway embankments being full of dead bodies.  Which led me to a protagonist who was a highway engineer, which led me to memories of my days as an architectural and engineering draftsman, back around 1970.

I get annoyed by some of the books and movies that deal with racism purely as a historical issue.  “Gosh, things sure were nasty back then.  Glad that’s over.”  So it was important to me that the novel not end in the sixties, but show the same racism still going on, just in different ways.  So that meant there had to be a second generation protagonist in the present day.  And that led to the usual father and son issues, but it’s a little different here because Robert, the father, is only ten years older than me.  Michael, the son, is much younger than me.  So that changed the dynamics a good deal.

Anyway, it didn’t take long before the screen wire had enough junk in it that it started looking like a novel.

Could you talk a little more about what was happening / what you were doing / where you were in the decade or so between the publication of Say Goodbye and Black & White?

Mostly I was working on Black & White.  I did a huge amount of research, including skimming through every issue of the Carolina Times, the newspaper that was published in Hayti, between 1964 and 1970.  And I was struggling with the form of the book, and with personal issues, like an ugly divorce.

Plus, I was suffering an attack of this delusion I used to get from time to time that there was some way I could still make a living from writing.  I took time off to write a thriller screenplay called The Next that’s about—wait for it—vampire lawyers.  A natural, right?  Not according to Hollywood.  My protagonist didn’t pack enough fire power and kill enough people to be a real “hero.”

And I went through a phase where I thought I could make Black & White into the first novel of a police procedural series.  I spent a couple of years on that.  But in the end, I don’t like cops, and that proved to be a fatal handicap.

Finally, in 2004, I got laid off from my job at the same time that the screenplay washed out in Hollywood.  I sat down and thought, what would I write if I knew absolutely that it would not get published?  What would I want to write just for its own sake?  And the answer was Black & White, but in its original incarnation, as a literary suspense novel.  It took me five months to find another job, and in that period I got a good running start on a draft of the book that was close to the final form.

There was this perception that Black & White was some sort of “return,” but really, I never left.  I’m just slow.

I want to go back to something you mentioned in your last response, which I think is superb advice for all writers, published and unpublished, seasoned as well as aspiring, traditional, experimental and “popular”: “what would I write if I knew absolutely that it would not get published?  What would I want to write just for its own sake?”  Yes, write that.

If you could unmoor yourself in time and deliver some advice to the young author you were, what might it be?

Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything I could say that would help.  I already understood that I would probably need some skills that I could parlay into a day job.  I could tell myself to give up, that it wasn’t going to work out, but I wouldn’t have listened.  I can’t think of anything I could say that would lead me to anyplace but where I am.

As a kind of belated follow-up to the genre question… and prompted by your mention that Black & White at one time led the life of a police procedural… one of the aspects of your work that has always impressed me is that, while you are definitely a novelist of ideas, you are also not afraid to be a novelist of action as well.  (I’m thinking particularly here of Deserted Cities of the Heart.)  Things happen, there is real, external conflict, there may even be gunfire and explosions, but these elements are just meant to divert the reader until the next “meaningful” (i.e., “literary”) passage.

I don’t think of the action sequences in my books as diversions so much as physical manifestations of the ideas that are in conflict.  In Deserted Cities of the Heart, for example, you’ve got the Fighting 666th, this rogue offshoot of the US Army, you’ve got the Marxist rebels, and you’ve got Eddie as some kind of new age messiah.  How are these ideas going to work themselves out in the real world?  Not by a televised debate, that’s for sure.  If you don’t put Eddie’s ideas to the test in front of live ammo, you’re not being intellectually honest.

Likewise in Black & White, it’s well and good to talk about racism, but it says so much more to be staring down a couple of hundred guys with white hoods and axe handles.  It’s the same debate, but now we’re playing for keeps.  Now you can feel what I’m talking about, not just understand it conceptually.

In that sense, your novels feel very cinematic to me.  Have you been particularly influenced by film?

To me there’s a big difference between the kind of confrontation I was just talking about and your typical car chase in a Hollywood movie, which resolves nothing, reveals nothing, just wastes your time and leaves you right where you were before you started.

I don’t think I’m an especially visual writer.  I try to put myself in the scene, but the details I come away with are as likely to be smells or sounds or physical sensations as they are visual images.

I am probably less of a film fan than anyone I know.  I haven’t been in a movie theater in seven years, go months at a time without even watching a DVD, don’t have cable. On the whole, I’d rather read.  These days my girlfriend and I like to watch movies in Spanish to practice the language, and we’ve seen some great ones, especially from Argentina—El secreto de sus ojos, Hombre mirando al sudeste.  But I hate pretty much everything from Hollywood because it’s so violent and so loud and so predictable.  And that’s just the comedies. [apes Rodney Dangerfield, tugging on his tie]

Back in the early ‘90s I watched some movies with a friend who’s a film student, and he showed me how absolutely everything is telegraphed in advance in a Hollywood movie, by the music, by the characters’ reaction shots, even by the cinematography.  My favorite example is from James Cameron’s Abyss—Cameron is just so Hollywood.  There’s this big moment where the flying saucer is going to come up out of the Abyss.  The camera suddenly pulls back, and here is this tiny guy standing on the edge of the cliff, and you know, beyond any question, that a) the ship is about a second and a half from appearing, and b) it will exactly fit the dimensions of the frame.  No surprises here, everything by the numbers.

Is screenwriting anything you’d be interested in getting into again?

Despite everything I just said, I like writing screenplays.  I like the rigid structure, love that moment when the course of the movie changes at the end of first act.  At one point, when I was still trying to do Black & White as a cop novel, I worked on a screenplay version for a while, just to tighten the structure and figure out the ending.  And it really helped.

So yeah, I’d write a screenplay again, but only if somebody paid me to.  And that’s not likely to happen.  Hollywood and I just don’t see eye to eye.

It’s amazing to me how many aspiring fiction writers seem to give little consideration, as you say, to how ideas will play out in actual interactions and circumstances. Everything is internal to the characters, and, even if the world around them is vivid, it is usually only so in that that world is a reflection of their internal states.

But to turn some attention to states of another sort: of all your novels, Slam seems to me the most grounded in Texas and quintessentially Texan experiences.  Though not a “native Texan,” how important, if at all, was your experience growing up in Dallas in your growth as a writer?

I think it would be hard to find a city with less personality than Dallas.  It was settled in the first place because it was a convenient location to put up a few banks—there’s no natural beauty, and no particular geographic advantage like the port in Houston or the river in Austin.  It’s just a bunch of suburbs, with an architectural style so dull that a friend of mine used to call it “Texas Borax.”  So my stories set in Dallas tend to be about traffic jams and urban sprawl.

I totally agree with you about Slam.  Even though there are regional writers that I love, like Thomas McGuane and Frederick Barthelme, and even though I have dear friends who write books that are very Texan—Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett and Marshall Terry are obvious examples—Slam was the closest I ever got to a real Texas novel.

If the setting is vivid in Slam, it may be because, unlike Dallas, the Texas coast has so much personality. It muscled its way into the book, like it or not.  But you have to remember that I moved constantly as a kid, an average of once a year.  I was 13 when we first moved to Texas, so even though I “identify as a Texan” for want of any other designation, I’m not a “real” Texan.  Whereas somebody like Joe Lansdale is Texas through and through.  I think he takes a coffin full of Texas dirt with him when he travels so he can sleep in his native soil.

Even though I lived in Dallas for 15 years, it was never home.  When you ask me what the word “home” conjures for me, nothing comes to mind.

The ‘80s and early ‘90s seem, in retrospect, to have been a time during which “regionalism” had some literary cachet.  Like, it might actually have been to a writer’s advantage to be from or based in a place neglected or overlooked or dismissed by a good chunk of the rest of the country.  True, this aesthetic could lead writers into a desperate preciousness, but—and Joe R. Lansdale strikes me as a great example—it could also inspire writers to be much less beholden to any of the rules and pieties associated with “literary fiction.”  Has that been lost as literary culture has continued to be more and more concentrated in large, NY-based publishing houses?  I don’t know.  But it does seem more and more difficult for authors to make a case for certain coordinates having a literary presence, Dallas being one of them.  Yet Dallas is wrapped up, and in complicated ways, with Texas and all its mythos.  Go figure.

I am a native Dallasite, and I’ve set multiple pieces of fiction “here,” but I have no illusions about the place.  Though it has its hidden pockets of weirdness, it can never be as fringe as another place also characterized as plastic, vapid and crawling with those people Dr. Thompson dubbed “greedheads”: Los Angeles.  Which leads me to my next question: could you talk a little about your association with Black Clock—which is both very much connected to the L.A. literary community and national in its ambition / scope—and what your experience has been as a contributor to the magazine?  How did you come to be associated?  What is it like to write for the magazine?

Steve Erickson is the reason I’m involved with Black Clock, plain and simple.  He contacted me when he was planning the second issue, the “lost music” issue, and asked for a story because of Glimpses.  I’d been following his work since Days Between Stations made such a huge impact back in the mid-eighties, so I was really flattered that he knew and liked what I was doing.  I pitched him an idea off the top of my head, about the mysteries around Glenn Miller’s death, and he told me to go for it.  I sent him an email when I started to actually write it and realized that it was going to be really long, like 15,000 words (which is what it turned out to be).  He just said, “No problem.  Write it.”  He had a couple of minor suggestions when I turned it in, which were quite sensible, and didn’t freak out about the length, which is way in excess of what the magazine usually publishes.  I got to read proofs, which is important to me, and the magazine itself looked great, so all in all it was pretty much a perfect experience.  You don’t get a lot of those as a writer.

So when I finished Black & White, I wanted to get some literary credibility for it.  Steve offered to print an excerpt in Black Clock (which he did, as “Wonderland” in issue #8), and it was again a really happy experience.  If I wrote more short fiction, I’d be knocking on the door more often, but my ideas tend to be novel-length these days.

For somebody in my situation, to get the support and encouragement of somebody like Steve is huge, and I can’t thank him enough for the help he’s given me.

As a novelist, how would you describe the health of the novel (as a form) right now?  Where do you see the novel going in the next decade?  And where do you expect to be then?

I expect to be sitting here at this desk, writing away—when I’m not at my day job, which I hope I’ve still got.  My books will all be available through Amazon and through Fiction Liberation Front, and if my body’s willing I’ll still go out dancing once or twice a week. It’s not the future of riches and fame I originally saw for myself, but it’s a future I can live with.  And that’s nothing to sneeze at.

I am so out of touch with any kind of literary establishment, I can’t tell you how healthy the novel is right now, let alone what it’s going to be like in ten years.  Certainly memoirs are all the rage right now, though their appeal is lost on me.  People surf the net and watch TV instead of reading. Critics in the New York Times Book Review regularly trot out all the old postmodern clichés about fiction being irrelevant.

But I believe we need narratives to make sense of our lives and our world.  I know I personally start pining for a good novel if I spend too much of my reading-time on research or other non-fiction.  In the last few weeks I’ve bought brand-new novels from Jane Smiley and Lionel Shriver and Ted Mooney (in hardback, from my neighborhood indie bookstore), so that reassures me that at least for now there’s enough supply to meet my demand.

Ten years from now?  I don’t know what form it’ll be delivered in, but yeah, I think the novel will outlive the people who keep eulogizing it.  I know a good number of people in their 20s and 30s who are passionate about literature, and, even if they have to circulate PDFs in email, or whatever the equivalent is in ten years, they will still want it.

As will I.

Lewis Shiner is the author of six novels, including Glimpses, Black & White, and Deserted Cities of the Heart.  His shorter work has appeared in Black Clock, The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, The New York Times, and many other publications, and was recently gathered in Collected Stories from Subterranean Press.

by Joe Milazzo
an Assistant Managing Editor of Black Clock and Director of Community Education and Outreach at The Writer’s Garret in Dallas, whose writing has appeared in Electronic Book Review, Tea Party, In Posse Review, Drunken Boat, Antennae and Black Clock

when

Admission is free.

Black Clock 12 author Monica Carter reads with fellow PEN Emerging Voices fellowship recipients Natashia Deon, Lorene Garrett, Simone Kang, and Bev Magennis this Wednesday at The Hammer Museum.  PEN Emerging Voices is a “literary fellowship program that aims to provide new writers, who lack access, with the tools they will need to launch a professional writing career.  Over the course of one year, each Emerging Voices fellow participates in:  a professional mentorship; hosted Q & A evenings with prominent local authors; a series of Master classes focused on genre; and two public readings.  The fellowship includes a $1,000 stipend. For more information regarding the Emerging Voices Fellowship please visit PEN USA at www.penusa.org.”

All Hammer public programs are free.  Tickets are required, and are available at the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start time. Limit one ticket per person on a first come, first served basis.  Hammer members receive priority seating, subject to availability.  Reservations not accepted, RSVPs not required. Easy parking is available under the museum for $3 after 6:00pm.

when

Black Clock 12 author Katy Petty is reading/performing this dog of a Saturday with The Shone, Senia Moon, Ani Raya-Flores, Jared Woodland, Stephen van Dyck, Captain Alex Machiavelli, “a special guest…and you.”

“Dog Days: A Readings of Sorts…” is “a reading, but it’s also not a reading, it’s a performance, it’s a party, it’s a gun club, it’s a play, it’s a powwow, it’s a street fight, a strip club, a circus tent, a vacation spot, the vatican, church, a bon fire, a rehab clinic…So…come enjoy some shit, have a beer, bring a beer, bring a friend, bring pirates, bring nerve endings, a scalpel, bring your mom, smoke a joint, crack anyone? I think the point is, you don’t have to like literature, you just gotta like good old fashioned fun!”

Cool in general and of particular interest to Henry Miller fans, this site uses Google Maps to chart out Henry Miller’s adventures, from his ramblings in Clichy to Paris to New York, and everywhere in between. Google’s street-view feature allows you to zoom in and take a contemporary stroll through Miller’s old stomping grounds. The site is also updated with academic tidbits, essays, and archival marginalia about Miller and his coterie.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

Unofficially called Print Snot Dead, Nguyen’s project is an oasis in a sea of announcements from across the country of library operation cutbacks and closings due to drastic budget reductions, of bookstores both small and large struggling to survive or shutting their doors, and of articles and editorials bemoaning the death of the printed object which, most recently, is being blamed on the iPad. Which begs the question: What makes Nguyen’s library stand out? Afterall, its intention is on the more humble end of the spectrum; its model of providing a public space where people can read for free is not new and in many communities in danger of extinction; and go into almost any independent bookstore and you’ll stumble upon a section reserved for zines, chapbooks, and other DIY printed matter.

Of course there’s the fact that like placing vintage plastic-framed glasses on the face of Johnny Depp, setting up Nguyen’s space in the newly-renovated Levi’s Workshop revamps the community library’s image from a musty, tan-carpeted, fluorescent-lit glorified waiting room filled with more dust and mean librarians than books you actually want to read, to a place of cool where hip-factor is calculated by geeking-out over a minefield of work vetted by the cultural elite. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the marketing power of a major corporate brand backing the contemporary library. Still, there is more to the project than making what’s old, new again or creating a buzz for Levi’s.

What makes Nguyen’s library exciting is that as much as it applies certain traditional frameworks, it also totally disregards elements that we have come to understand are part and parcel with them. In bringing the library into an art space, Nguyen ignores notions held by a society–which generally still views writing and art as distinct fields–that the library is reserved for “books” not “art” and that the gallery is reserved for “art” not “books.” In presenting work from both visual and literary artists side-by-side in the same space, Nguyen further eschews these distinctions and dares visitors to do the same. In soliciting work that artists are not only creating but excited by and finding or exploring themselves, Nguyen places as much value on sharing uniqueness of mind and passion as on an “original work.” And in presenting the curated works in a library–where everything can and should be handled, read, viewed, explored–Nguyen invites us to abandon the customary reserve of white box gallery culture and actively engage and love the work with unfettered enthusiasm.

Black Clock recently spoke with Nguyen to gain more insight on her library–which opens its doors this Saturday, July 17th in the Levi’s Workshop San Francisco space (aka the old Slanted Door restaurant)– as well as her perspective on art and writing, First Person Magazine, the iPad, Tina Turner, and Celestial Seasonings.

BLACK CLOCK: What inspired your contemporary library and the concept of “Print Snot Dead”?

BETTY NGUYEN: Well, I’ve curated a few “zine libraries” of handmade books, as that format still is popular in the Bay Area and in the United States. And I thought I’d expand the invitation to artists. To kind of bring them back to their punk roots of making zines. And of course, “Print Snot Dead” comes from “Punk Snot Dead.” Punk was a big thing in San Francisco, and I thought of it when I was asked to curate the zine library as part of the Levi’s Workshop here this summer. But the zine library isn’t going to be called “Print Snot Dead”; that was kind of an inside joke.

It’s interesting, as their marketing Levi’s to work with the community, that the creative pinpoint here [in San Francisco] is DIY print. I know in New York, they are setting up a free photo studio. And in New Orleans, a music studio. So, they must have figured the widest audience or most popular medium here to connect with is print media on a DIY level, which I find interesting. It’s kind of a fusion of Beat poet slash letterpress/silkscreen poster art that is kind of still valued when promoting signs here or ads. Like the whole Mission Street art school, seemed like everyone came from sign-making somehow. I guess, because I have a magazine, I have always loved print. I love photography, illustration, stories, relaying, editions. I love holding something in my hands and reading or flipping. I still subscribe to a few things, to support print publications, and I love buying books.

Can you tell us about some of the work in the show?

This artist from Chiapas found me on Facebook and sent me something. It’s totally crazy. I was scared to actually open the package in the mail–it was so suspicious-looking and it was from Mexico. It’s like his diary from many years. I kind of can’t believe he sent it to me. I don’t even know where to send it back, but it’s like, 600 pages with collage inserts, watercolors, and it’s super-musty. I also got a newspaper made from Frank Benson, an artist friend in New York. It’s got no text. Just black-and-white large photos of a couple of concrete windows that have been covered with random nailed in sheets of metal chain link that creeps in from the walls, and everything’s been sprayed white to interlock the materials. It’s super-creepy, the more I look at it. One artist has promised me a pop-up book!

What has been your approach in curating contemporary libraries?

It’s a bit different, as it’s kind of more open than curating an exhibition. It’s more of an open selection of zines from bookstores and my friend who runs the San Francisco Zine Fest, and inviting artists too who have a bit of extra time for me which is nice. There’s no comment that the show is making, yet… which is something I usually tackle. And it’s not something I am developing with an artist. I am kind of open to surprises and versatility of what someone has lurking inside to put into this format. So far, my approach has been to ask, “What is on your mind?” and “Can you put that into a paper form of some kind?” That has been the only premise.

If print’s not dead, what is it?

Good question. I believe that print is now honored. It’s not over, it’s got more value. Like anything couture, or something cooked in the kitchen rather than industrially popped out of a can, print is the tried and true thing that has passed a lot of time, hands, minds, and because the process is longer, the product has more staying power. Print is permanent, until it’s tossed or burned. I like to have books on my shelves as a reference library. Do you know how many bookmarks are in my computer that I’ll probably never go back to? Maybe that’s an organizational thing, but print to me, is delicious. I like to read out loud in a certain voice to my romantic friend, and share things. I like to give away books, and pick them up. You can send a link, but what if you got a card in the mail? Does it have more of a subtext than an emoticon? Each serves a purpose. Print is tangible. It can appeal to the senses. I just got a magazine that has smells on every page. I nerd-out on the paper quality of my new hardback books. When I select ink colors it’s with total pleasure for the magazine-user. I ask myself, “How will this make them feel, blue over red? Does it emulate the qualities of Summer?” I just had this huge discussion with my Art Director about the user-friendliness of our next issue which will be a newspaper. I want it on panels. I want them to flip through it, and feel satisfied, whereas he was looking at it like a poster and stories were cutting into different sections and I found it confusing. There’s an overall rhythm, and emotion that we are trying to communicate. And he looks closely at his dots, and underlines and grids. Whereas, I step back and look at the creative direction of the entire reader’s experience, and how the placement of features works psychologically. You can’t get this by scrolling.

The separation between “art” and “writing”–particularly literary writing–still seems to pervade in American mainstream culture. As a curator, artist, and editor of First Person Magazine, have you also found this to be true?

I actually find this to be totally the opposite. I find that most of my ideas, how I convey them to artists and my audience, and what I am questioning or presenting in my curatorial work is done completely through writing. Visual work almost comes second as concepts become more important in thinking about art and its execution. In fact, I am constantly reading and writing and researching. Literature is a goldmine for reflecting society. It is imperative to inform yourself of the past, and present events to determine what is current and needs to be presented; from this, I think, “Well, how are these perceptions formed?”

I like to read while I write. And because I don’t have a huge artist community in San Francisco, in contrast to New York, I surround myself with interviews and literature books that I rely on for fleshing out ideas. I wrote before I became a curator. In fact, curating is more an intuitive process for me, that I can’t quite write about until almost the end of my gathering process when I am forced to write a press release or in many cases a proposal for a museum. I listen to my instincts first for why a show should examine what’s going on in the world or my own personal world. Writing is a way to share what’s going on inside my head to the galleries and museums. It’s communication guides the exhibition. I think that artists and curators have a deep respect for those who can write well. Art criticism is crucial to discussion and connecting what we do to the whole rest of the world including pop culture, politics, social phenomena. Conflict and debate, archiving…

What have your experiences been in involving literary text in your work?

First Person Magazine began because I write in a slightly different way about art as an experience. I wanted to convey this mainly because most art publications were just sighting the same theorists over and over, and the rhetoric just didn’t justify the only way of digesting or understanding art. There’s now a huge change with blogging. Everyone writes in first person or more casually about art, and even gets a bit tabloid-y about it. I’m not big on the art gossip pages, but I know they’re popular to view. Another way, I work literature is through First Person Magazine‘s taglines. I worked for other magazines, and more often than not, the titles for stories were tacky derivatives of fashionable songs. For each issue of FP, I choose quotes from one book that I am reading to stand in for the taglines that I think add to the story. Our second issue used Richard Brautigan’s quotes, which are funny and very juicy. Our third injected quotes from conversations from a Mike Kelley book that I thought were sexy and kinda dark. And our Summer Issue, due out July 17th, is filled with David Lynch quotes from an interview book. Initially, I was just into incorporating poetry somehow, and now it’s expanded.

I just recently put together a poetry reading as part of a festival I curated, called No Birds Allowed, and I think it was refreshing to invite poets and playwrights into a gallery setting. So, I guess I like to expand the term ‘art’ or ‘artist’ to anyone who is making something that introduces something new. This is why I ask musicians to also contribute and write for First Person Magazine. I put everyone on the same playing field.

I am also working on curating a contemporary library that I hope will tour. Art books, ones that are handmade by poets, are included; I like how resourceful they can be. The art catalogs sometimes get to be trendy… colored paper is in, or newsprint, or this binding, and they’re really expensive, so it is almost competitive. But when you get a literary artist involved, that stuff is just like from a bookbinding class they took or figured out. I love poetry right now. But it’s kind of this under-the-radar thing. I was invited to a poetry reading by a friend of mine, who’s an absolute genius, and was thrilled to re-enter this arena. But when I asked one of my favorite poets and old friends to read at No Birds, he was actually intimidated to read at an art opening. So, he suggested a friend substitute. Which I thought was funny but worked out. I also got a call recently from Jack Walls, Robert Mapplethorpe’s boyfriend in New York, because he found out I liked his work. I absolutely would love to do a show with him. He wrote this poem which took two years to compose on paper in cursive which is so sensual and, I’m thinking because he’s Black, it was just really direct and no frills. The imagery just pierced into your mind like a film you’ve seen over and over. When I say that comment, about his racial background, I just remember seeing Tina Turner on this Hugh Hefner TV show and she said to Hugh–who commented that “Rhythm and Blues” was coming up as the new American music–she responded, “Well, Black people don’t really mess around with words like that. We like to call our music, ‘Grease’ cause it’s dirty and sexy.” And I just thought, that was awesome.

I also wrote for a catalog I published for Cosmic Wonder museum exhibition, and the opening quote is a line from the music composer Arvo Part that seemed like such a beautiful little nugget of truth. So, I feel like poetry can exist in many forms. Come to think of it, I also had a quote from a Celestial Seasonings magnet about the idea of Wonder. So, if you just look around, I think literature pervades everywhere.

How do you think the internet is changing our relationship with print, the printed object, reading, creating, how we share information?

I guess I think it’s funny that everything has to be more real or personable to give it value since the internet gives access to people on a very intimate level. Like when publications show the “inside” of their books or zines, sometimes their fingers or clips are in them to show the actual books. A lot of photography comes into play when communicating a publication as an actual object that exists in reality as a three dimensional form.

I like the idea of the Kindle, because in college I hated lugging around big books or reading in bed. But at the same time, now as an adult, I find reading away from the internet an indulgence that I wouldn’t trade for the world. I am happy that there is more access, and archiving, but also, some things you read on the internet are ephemeral. My friend just posted that Gmail has the right to delete your account for any or no given reason. So, nothing is ever safe except for print if we hang on to things.

As far as creating… Well, I was just thinking that Facebook or blogs are almost this “how many signatures can I get in my yearbook” coolness, or gossip thing. It’s like a bunch of housewives reincarnated in the form of the world, and everyone’s really aware now of Public and Private domains in our lives. Like the Warhol celebrity thing. So many people archive their lives to create new “content” on their pages. A new profile pic, etc.. I’ve been watching this hack chef make recipes on YouTube that are pretty funny. And I guess people gauge how many comments or hits you get as this value of importance. But like, why are there so many fashion bloggers versus art bloggers? Maybe they have more time on their hands to follow other trends while artists are in their studios making work from scratch? And why isn’t a poetry blog as accessible or attractive as a fashion blog? What makes them tick?

My friend David Enos has a blog on Tumblr that is hilarious. My Tumblr community kind of provides me with my daily laugh or smile, but as far as sharing information, there isn’t a lot there to grasp onto. I guess you can look up diseases without consulting a doctor which is kind of cool. But nothing on the internet is fact. Or has to be. It’s like everyone became an expert. The democracy is kind of confusing. And Yelp, I think is totally paid employees or a bit passive aggressive. I guess information just gets shared faster. Like, did a lot of important creative people die this year more than any other, or is it because we have the internet that it becomes more sensationalized?

Thoughts on the iPad?

I really want one for my bookshelf.

It seems that your contemporary library is as much about creating a space for face-to-face community and physical interaction, as much as it is about providing a place for interaction with the printed object. With that said, what are your thoughts on Neen’s Miltos Manetas’ assertion that “real space is usually bad taste”?

A neen is a space. It’s just for people who are tech. They try to imitate life. I think they should use their lexicon to encourage their own system of imagery and language. Kind of like animation. You have this whole other world you can create, and for the most part, those people are trying to show the public, “Look how much we can make fur or water or people look REAL?” Who cares. We can see what’s real. You have the capacity to make a complete fantasy with your tools and you make a dog? I’m not interested. So bad taste, is obviously a funny pisstake. Or maybe they can’t function socially and have to poke fun. I love going into a bookstore and reading for a bit. Because I know once I leave with the book, the only other place I’ll have that same tranquility is on the train.

How do you think the floundering public libraries has/will affect our relationship to reading and sense of community?

I don’t think that public libraries are floundering at all. In fact, with the recession tons more of the public have become members to take full advantage of this loan system that is such a generous thing. It’s rare for the U.S. to offer something still for free to the public, so I think they are thriving. And they are also going online and allowing access to downloadable materials. Public libraries also work with university libraries to loan materials. So, there is a wealth of information that the public is accessing.

Perhaps “floundering” is the wrong word. I’m referring to the massive budget cuts in funding for both public and school libraries, which has forced many to cut hours, close their doors several days a week, or close altogether. And then there’s the closing of all these independent bookstores across the country–thoughts on how that’s changing the landscape?

I haven’t heard of any independent bookstores closing. In fact, there always seems to be one opening here in San Francisco.

Sounds like bookstore heaven. In Los Angeles, Dutton’s, Equator Books, Other Times, A Different Light, Bodhi Tree, and Wilshire Books all closed within the last three years—and those are just the ones off the top of my head. Though San Francisco sounds pretty idyllic, I’m curious to know if you’ve observed the development of any movements or scenes offering an alternative to independent bookstores?

Independent magazines are still starting, and maybe we’re being more resourceful about our finance models, but magazines are producing more events and showing their creative wares and sustainability. First Person Magazine has been invited to over five international publication fairs this year alone.

Where do you see print in ten years?  What about the relationship between “art” and “writing”?

I’ve never been able to project that far in advance for anything. I hope for things and make goals for myself. But I think that people who do print aren’t just about paper and words. What fuels those publications, like First Person Magazine, is our interest in life, culture, art, so we are creating communities and produce projects. I hope the direction of things moves towards partnerships. That our creative energy will be recognized and not just utilized to get “reviews” or “exposure.” As a publisher, I have a lot of creative energy to synergize everything in the magazine to life–into festivals, exhibitions, editions, design. We know what’s good, out there, and next, so we are great consultants with ideas and artists unto ourselves. Gone are the days of the journalist-hack as wannabe or hanger-on. Writers are great observers. Sensitive and full of wild fictions that come from real experiences. Writing and art are symbiotic. They need each other to exist. Artists, critics, and writers love to write about what’s happening, because we do what we do because we think it is important. That sounds egotistical, but it’s not. In my “First Word,” in the upcoming issue [of First Person Magazine,] I talk about creatives being out of love with the ordinary. Writers are the thinkers of our times. And artists manifest our times into memoirs.

Betty Nguyen’s contemporary library opens this Saturday, July 17th, 2010 at 7pm (Levi’s Workshop, 580 Valencia Street, cross street 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103) in conjunction with the launch of First Person Magazine‘s Summer Issue, Discomfort of Sculpture.

by Kyoung Kim
who is currently nomadic

image of Betty Nguyen by David Enos

L.A. has a reputation as a driver’s city.  I know this, because I’ve read it described elsewhere, endlessly, in peoples’ reflections on the place; and also, because of my first experience of L.A., which came through an old girlfriend who once laughed in my face when I asked her if there were any cool bars or coffee shops within ‘walking distance’ of her house. There are certain things that contribute to L.A.’s demarcation in this regard. First of all, the place is huge; it’s an official “mega-city,” with the metropolitan area comprising almost 500 square miles and containing nearly 15 million souls. Whether you were born and raised in Watts or the OC, chances are that, when asked in polite conversation where you’re from, you’ll respond “L.A.” But who would be willing to hoof the distance between these two areas? Public transport is insufficient. As a new transplant, I’ve seen more shuttered subway stops than functioning ones, and the prospect of navigating a bus system in a place where single streets can stretch for 24 miles (Sunset Blvd.), or the famous highway system regularly suffers the daily glut of seven million cars, leaves me anxious and uninspired. Public transport, in order to be successful, has to be fast and easy. In L.A., it is neither of these, which leaves most residents with no option but to hop behind the wheel, and add their presence to the communal cluster of the 110, 5, 10, or 101.

In reality, L.A. is an imminently walkable city, at least within the neighborhood regions that comprise it. Los Angeles is a city, of course, and an immensely large one; but it is also a conglomerate of individual communities, many of which feel like autonomous regions and have much to offer the foot-bound voyager. So how do we find our feet in this great mecca of urban development? Easy. By putting our feet on the ground, and breaking the city down into the neighborhood elements that comprise its body and soul. There’s a lot of history here, and for such a vehicular city, a vibrant street culture, with food vendors, pedestrians, small storefronts, and a rich visual texture of beautiful buildings, graffiti, flora, and vistas to reward the urban spelunker. In this series of essays I will explore the practice of walking L.A., a project that I hope will endear me more to this strange place that inspires such intense reactions of love and hate. A secondary goal will be to root out the variegated strands of literary culture persistent here at the end of our continent. As Henry Miller stated, great literature is born of the streets; yet Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world, has never possessed in the popular imagination a literary heritage comparable to, say, New York. Of course, as with everything here, appearances are deceiving. The great writers of Los Angeles – Chandler, Fante, Bukowski – have all celebrated the city in microcosm, and to read their writings without an awareness of place is to miss half the point. Los Angeles is beautiful and complex, and bears the attention of prolonged study. This fact was made apparent to me continually in the course of my first walk, which centered around the city’s historic Pueblo center.

It was a fantastically beautiful day. This is not strange, noting the locale, but worth mention due to the effervescence the sunshine extracts from the clean white lines of the downtown architecture, interspersed with the oases of public gardens and parks. Los Angeles is a fascinating city architecturally. In the past few decades, attention has been drawn to the fabrication of monolithic wonders, like the Frank Gehry designed Disney Concert Hall. As a city of spectacle, though, L.A. has always been the sight of showy building accomplishment, from the stately halls of public administration to the boutique wonders of homes in the hills. At the center of it all is one of its true stone wonders: Union Station, a New Mission monolith built to much fanfare in 1930 that continues to provide the beginning and end to many West Coast experiences.

If Los Angeles is the Paris of the Americas (and why not?), then Union Station is its Gare Saint-Lazare. This beauteous terminal has been amply represented in cinema and literature, and can serve as a useful representation of the city it serves. Union Station would seem intimidating. After all, it is the downtown transportation hub that links a massive city to its equally massive airport, LAX. Union Station is also an Amtrak and bus terminal, with direct service up and down the West Coast, and east to Texas. It is not intimidating, however; neither its majestic mission facade, rising next to the similarly designed USPS Terminal Annex, nor its generous interior layout. I parked my motorcycle across the street (one must, of course, drive to walk here), entered through the front doors, and was immediately greeted with a splendor of space: a direct line, defined in polished oak and vaulted ceilings, from the curb, straight through the waiting area, to the terminals and bus station. To the left of the entryway, barred to foot-traffic but eminently viewable, is the old ticket-hall, a huge room with a mighty row of art-deco counters, polished marble floors, and paneled-wood ceilings. Its grandiosity and enforced barrenness inspired thoughts of tragic, sudden departures, a teary movie heroine in shades of celluloid buying the first ticket to nowhere, with everyone wearing hats and smoking cigarettes. Opposite this is a nice-looking bar (too early in the day for me to sample, but I’m sure a welcome retreat for weary travelers) and a breezeway that leads to a garden and shuttered restaurant. The gardens that bookend this main area are massive and lush, the kind of arboreal design indulgence one doesn’t find very much out East. The shuttered restaurant is ghostly and romantic, like an old wedding photo. A sign advertised it as available for filming.

The Pueblo lies roughly across the street from Union Station, a fitting welcome for new visitors to the city. The Pueblo was the center of the first incarnation of L.A., El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula, founded in 1781. I’m not sure when the settlement’s name was shortened to “Los Angeles,” but I imagine it came as a relief to natives whose querents would fall asleep during the answer to the question of “Where are you from?” The Pueblo area later became the site of the city’s first Chinatown; hence the references to “New Chinatown,” in regard to the current district. The history of L.A.’s Chinatown, and its reason for relocation, are detailed at the Chinese-American Museum, right off the main Pueblo plaza. Apparently, the original Chinatown was leveled and the residents forcibly removed for the construction of the Union Station I so eulogize in the preceding paragraph.

From my perspective, the two most interesting landmarks on the Pueblo Plaza are La Placita and the Avila Adobe. La Placita was L.A.’s first established church, in 1814, and still provides a full range of services. I walked into the little chapel, where a golden icon was on display behind the altar, and a group of elderly folk were knelt at various pews in quiet prayer and reflection. At the opposite end was an impressive depiction of the crucified Christ, enclosed in a glass coffin and surrounded by a heap of flowers. A couple of people waited in line to pay homage and perform silent reflection. It takes an advanced cynic not to respect the spirit of such a place; such disconnect is out of my reach.

Across the Plaza from La Placita is Olvera Street. This narrow passage, lined with souvenir and trinket shops, is the home of many historic buildings, including the Avila Adobe, built in 1821, and recognized as L.A.’s oldest surviving residence. The place is fairly palatial, with several large rooms surrounding a contained garden; it was constructed by one of the first settlers to make their fortune in ranching, and was later used as the U.S. Army headquarters during the Mexican-American War. Olvera St., with its shaded, brick-paved confines, empties out onto E. Cesar Chavez, one of modern downtown’s main thoroughfares. The contrast between the quiet, adobe lined lanes of the Plaza and the traffic signals and exhaust of the City of Commuters is profound, but a necessary reminder of the L.A.’s depth and complexity. In the words of Emerson, “Do I contradict myself? Well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.” So it can be that a city centered around a driving culture can reveal so much to the sidewalk wanderer.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles